Fiction

Tuesday

Peter Carty

Haunting images: The Shadow of the Object, by Chloe Aridjis, reviewed

What marks out Chloe Aridjis as a novelist is her ability to create atmospheres and ambiences. These often have hints of the uncanny, but rather than making her writing unsettling they give it an appealing intimacy. Her fourth novel begins as the narrator Flora visits her parents in Mexico City. Without warning, the family’s Alsatian leaps up and savages her hand. In hospital, she suffers from insomnia and wanders from her room to encounter ‘a mysterious figure’ at the end of a corridor. This turns out to be Wilhelmina, an elderly German patient with pneumonia, who befriends Flora. Wilhelmina collects antique toys and instruments, and Flora becomes fascinated by a

Peter Parker

An outpouring of jaunty black comedy

In 2005 Xandra Bingley published Bertie, May and Mrs Fish, an extraordinarily lively and enjoyable memoir of her childhood on a Cotswold farm during the second world war. Much of the writing was glancing rather than straightforward, its narrative not strictly chronological, while its title hinted at something not fully explained in the text. Dispensing altogether with conventional punctuation, the book contained not a single comma or quotation mark, using instead ellipses. This was brilliantly imitative of both the clipped speech of its upper-class characters, particularly when facing disasters large and small, and the hell-for-leather pace of lives spent galloping on horseback across the Gloucestershire countryside.  Bursts of words tumble

Tuesday

Lee Langley

A dying fall: The Last Movement, by Robert Seethaler, reviewed

Robert Seethaler is known for celebrating the unsung: commonplace characters – peasants, labourers or shop assistants – who draw us into their quiet lives. But the protagonist in The Last Movement is a celebrated historical figure: Gustav Mahler. For those in search of biographical information, as W.H. Auden put it, a shilling life will give you all the facts. Today we’d go online. How will Seethaler, a distinguished miniaturist, deal with an icon? We meet the composer in 1911 aboard the SS Amerika on his final journey across the Atlantic, homebound and dying. A respectful ship’s boy brings him a tray of tea as he sits on the sundeck, wrapped

Maria Albano

‘A lost generation’: My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, by Deborah Levy, reviewed

In a 2013 interview, Deborah Levy said: ‘Modernism is the soft typewriter of the womb that made me.’ But what made Modernism? My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein is Levy’s attempt to answer the question. In this novel, an unnamed narrator from London moves to Paris to write an ‘essay’ on Stein, the American patron of the avant-garde. There she meets Eva, an enigmatic illustrator whose blue eyes make everyone go ‘Awww’, and Fanny, a fashionable finance consultant with a thriving sex life. As the three search for Eva’s missing cat (originally called It and renamed Bob by Fanny), the narrator chases after Stein’s many trails but struggles to

Tuesday

Annie Walton Doyle

Motherless friends: Kin, by Tayari Jones, reviewed

Set in the American South during the Jim Crow era, Tayari Jones’s Kin follows the parallel lives of Annie and Vernice. The ‘cradle friends’ are both motherless, Annie having been abandoned and ‘Niecy’ orphaned, leaving them with a painful ‘wound’. They are as vulnerable as ‘unshucked, naked peas’. Though they are trauma-bonded, the ways in which they approach their lives differ hugely. As her mother is still somewhere out there, Annie becomes fixated on finding her and ‘trying to climb back in her womb’. She’s unable to move forward until she arrives at a resolution. Tracking her mother down becomes ‘the point of her whole life’ – much to Niecy’s

Daniel Rey

Singing of arms and the man: Son of Nobody, by Yann Martel, reviewed

Yann Martel, the author of Beatrice and Virgil and Life of Pi, typically explores competing storylines, narrative reliability and the nature of truth. His new novel, Son of Nobody, pursues these themes in a first-person account written by a scholar who discovers a Greek epic. The narrator is a Canadian called Harlow Donne – a PhD student at a middling university. Offered an ‘unbelievable opportunity’ to spend a year at Oxford, he leaves home, his wobbly marriage and his young daughter. His doctoral supervisor repeats his habitual plea: ‘Just find something to say.’ He does. From ‘hints and scraps’ found at the Bodleian Library and the Ashmolean Museum, Donne stitches

D.J. Taylor

Rebarbative relatives abound: The Palm House, by Gwendoline Riley, reviewed

Like its predecessor My Phantoms (2021), Gwendoline Riley’s new novel is stuffed to the gills with the sort of people she has come to specialise in – who, once assembled, supply a kind of casebook of rebarbativeness. To begin with there are the terrible men: – the thespian, Lawrence, for example, who says things like ‘cheery-bye’ and whose decrepit bathroom has ‘a Miss Havisham aspect’; or Chris, the lairy Irish stand-up, by whom, as a besotted teenager, the heroine Laura Miller is cheerlessly seduced. Then there are the terrible old absconding mums, here represented by the Pernod-swigging Mrs Miller, who, having installed Laura and herself in her own mother’s establishment,

Monday

Andrew Rosenheim

Tradecraft secrets: a choice of crime fiction

If it takes one to know one, this may explain why spy fiction is enjoying such a renaissance, since among the best new titles are those written by former intelligence operatives. I.S. Berry and David McCloskey are both former CIA officers who happily acknowledge how much their novels rely on their past careers. Equally impressive is the work of ex-MI6 officer James Wolff, whose use of a pseudonym puts him at a comparative disadvantage when it comes to promoting his books, but whose Spies and Other Gods (Baskerville, £20) places him in the top tier of today’s spy writers. A young ex-academic, Aphra McQueen, is sent by a parliamentary oversight

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Looking back in anguish: Good Good Loving, by Yvvette Edwards, reviewed

Ellen is at the end of her life and is frankly waiting to die while her extended family surrounds her, discussing her shortcomings: It felt very unfair to be so completely mentally alert while she was lying there on her hospital bed trying to await a peaceful passing. Her hearing was perfectly intact, and as a consequence she was forced to endure the never-ending discussions about the mass of her failings. This is the first novel from Yvvette Edwards for a decade. Her debut, A Cupboard Full of Coats (2011), longlisted for the Booker, was inspired by a friend showing her a newspaper cutting about her former partner being convicted

Tuesday

Leyla Sanai

Tales of quiet intensity: The News from Dublin, by Colm Toibin, reviewed

Colm Toibin is a master of understatement, his work characterised by great emotional intelligence coupled with redoubtable restraint. This is his third anthology of stories, following Mothers and Sons (2006) and The Empty Family (2010). He fills the gaps between words – what he doesn’t say – with as much meaning as the prose. Familiar themes emerge. There is the Irish diaspora in the US (as in Brooklyn and Long Island); the Catalan Pyrenees (the setting for ‘The Long Winter’ in Mothers and Sons); and Argentina (as in the novel The Story of the Night). Feelings of exile and being an outsider are aroused, while Catholicism still taps on the

Annie Walton Doyle

Two Tokyo misfits: Hooked, by Asako Yuzuki, reviewed

Following the enormous success of Butter’s English translation in 2024, it seemed inevitable that another of Asako Yuzuki’s novels would surface in the UK. Nairu pachi no joshikai (The Nile Perch Women’s Club), published in 2014, has now become Hooked. Billed as a literary thriller about female friendship, loneliness and obsession, it is a deeply strange, unsettling read. The novel follows Eriko, a high-flying project manager, and Shoko, a slacker housewife blogger, who both struggle with life – or, rather, with the behaviour expected of Japanese women. Both have achieved a level of acceptance socially (Eriko in her career, Shoko in her relationship), but they find the pursuit of ‘gal

Philip Clark

James Baldwin – dogged by painful uncertainties throughout life

James Baldwin, like many American novelists before him, F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos included, spent his formative years flitting restlessly between New York and Europe – New York being a source of fascination but also of creative burnout. He completed his first novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain (1953), not in Harlem, where he grew up and set the book, but in a Swiss chalet owned by the family of his then boyfriend, Lucien Happersberger. As he lived and worked in Loèche-les-Bains, Baldwin reasoned that the village children who shouted ‘neger’ at him did not mean to be unkind. They were simply curious and could never have

Stuart Jeffries

Dark family secrets: Repetition, by Vigdis Hjorth, reviewed

‘Back then, of course, I didn’t know my parents were locked into an impossibility even greater than mine. That I was living in a crime scene.’ So writes the narrator 48 years after the strange events that unfold in this bitter, brief, shattering novel. But what was the crime? Is the narrator the victim? Is her controlling mother’s hysteria over perfectly normal adolescent exploits explained by the fact that the father had abused his daughter? Is the narrator in truth Vigdis Hjorth? And is this book then the Norwegian novelist’s harrowing memoir? Is autofiction really fact in a cunning mask? Is all fiction waiting to be decoded into reality? Like

Susie Mesure

No Hungarian rhapsody: Lázár, by Nelio Biedermann, reviewed

Few first novels, let alone literary debuts in translation from German, arrive with quite so many plaudits – or better covers for those who like horses – as the 23-year-old Nelio Biedermann’s Lázár, which sold more than 200,000 copies on its release in Germany and Switzerland last year. ‘A truly great writer steps onto the stage,’ trumpets Daniel Kehlmann, who is no stranger to great writing: his latest novel, The Director, is on the International Booker Prize longlist. To Patti Smith, Biedermann is ‘gifted’. He is also a scion of the eponymous Lázárs, an aristocratic Hungarian family, making this first foray into fiction a personal project. The narrative spans the

Tuesday

Lee Langley

A sinister strangeness: City Like Water, by Dorothy Tse, reviewed

In Dorothy Tse’s City Like Water the location is never named. Anonymous, mutable, it slips from normal into nightmare, strangeness signalled from the opening lines: ‘In the place I used to live, my rusty top bunk rocked like a boat. Night after night, it carried me off towards a secret crevice.’ This is a novel written out of sorrow and anger: the pain of recalling sweeter times. It’s not the boy narrator who is unreliable; it’s the city itself. When, in Invisible Cities, Italo Calvinodescribed Marco Polo’s travels, he named 55 settings – each delineating an aspect of Venice. Tse has acknowledged Calvino as a major influence, and the locus

Oliver Soden

Thoughtful fantasy: Travel Light, by Naomi Mitchison, reviewed

Naomi Mitchison is now renowned for being the author of ‘lost classics’ – famous for being forgotten. She lived to be 101 and wrote nearly as many books. She supported anti-Nazi movements in 1930s Vienna, ran a sexual health centre for women, became an octogenarian campaigner for nuclear disarmament and an ‘adviser and mother of the Bakgatla tribe in Botswana’. Despite two biographies and attempts to revive her masterpiece, The Corn King and the Spring Queen, she remains undervalued – perhaps because of her refusal to settle into one genre and her determination to venture into the territory of historical epic spiced with mythic ritual and dark magic. Travel Light

Wednesday

Alice Jolly

Fractured loyalties: The Tribe, by Michael Arditti, reviewed

Michael Arditti’s impressive and immersive family saga begins in Salonica (now Thessaloniki) in 1911 and follows the fortunes of the wealthy, powerful Carrache family who are part of the Sephardic Jewish community. They have lived in the city for two centuries and employ more than 1,000 people. The father of the family, Jacob, is ‘a well-known liberal’ who ‘would never compel his children to do anything against their will’; but he is outraged by his daughter Esther’s flirtations with socialism. So what will happen when he discovers his son Leon’s relationship with a nightclub singer? He also worries about his other three children: Ruben is reckless, Bella is artistic and

Ian Sansom

Blockchain fantasies: My Bags Are Big, by Tibor Fischer, reviewed

If you long for that far-off time when novels were prepared to be hilariously funny, vulgar, caustic, wildly politically incorrect and highly improbable you are going to love My Bags Are Big. Tibor Fischer has always been happy to write against the pieties of the age, whatever they might be. He has often been compared with Martin Amis, but he’s Amis without the pose. If anything, as he ages, he’s more like a very funny, very British Michel Houellebecq. You get the sense he really means it: he feels it; the rage is for real. His astonishing debut novel Under the Frog (1992) turned postwar Hungary into a carnival of

Susie Mesure

The world destroyed by madness: Howl, by Howard Jacobson, reviewed

Rarely has such a short title worked harder than Howl, which Howard Jacobson takes from Allen Ginsberg’s incantatory 1955 poem. ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,’ Ginsberg wrote, a line that both prefaces Jacobson’s novel and sums up the author’s own angry anguish at the current madness in the corner of the Middle East that both Israelis and Palestinians call home. Make no mistake: Ginsberg’s poem puts the howl into Howard, who has written a characteristically crisp and deeply personal response to Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack – the massacre in the Negev Desert. Jacobson’s proxy is Dr Ferdinand Drexler MBE, the novel’s acerbic first-person

Elisa Segrave

Chasing happiness: The Daffodil Days, by Helen Bain, reviewed

Is there anything more to be said about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath? I didn’t think so, but Helen Bain’s debut novel The Daffodil Days proved me wrong. I did not expect to be absorbed, on the first page, by a woman cleaning a house (Court Green in Devon), the home Plath had just vacated with her two young children for London, where a couple of months later, in February 1963, she would gas herself.               Working backwards from December 1962, the novel describes the last 18 months of Plath’s life, glimpsed through some friends – writers and poets such as Al Alvarez, Bill Merwin and Marvin and Kathy