Fiction

If Robert Irwin had not existed, then Dan Brown, or better still Umberto Eco, would surely have had to invent him. In his Memoirs of a Dervish, the roller-blading, pinball-playing polymath reported: ‘It was in my first year in Oxford that I decided that I wanted to become a Muslim saint.’ Irwin, who died in 2024, first pursued that esoteric life goal in a Sufi monastery in Algeria. He returned to become not just a vastly erudite scholar of Arab Muslim culture but a madcap maverick of a novelist as well. As a writer, he loved paradox, surprise and reversal. When in 2006 he controversially dismantled the flawed thesis and

Joanna Kavenna is very serious about games. Her novels have a certain playful quality, even her debut Inglorious, where the humour and allusions are Mittel-european. More markedly ludic are her Lewis Carroll-esque fantasy about quantum physics, A Field Guide to Getting Lost and the Philip K. Dickish tech-dystopia of Zed. In Seven, however, it’s not just the style but the subject. As if to make clear that games are neither childish nor mere distractions, there is a pointed reference to Johan Huizinga’s study Homo Ludens¸ published on the eve of the second world war. The narrator here is working for a formidable philosopher in Oslo, whose current project is entitled

Gerald Murnane’s Landscape with Landscape opens with a splendidly disgruntled preface. The book is a collection of six longish stories and was originally published in 1985, when it was panned by a reviewer. ‘Some writers may claim not to be affected by reviews or even not to read them,’ he observes in his preface: ‘I make no such claim.’ And he explains how this brutal notice (‘I call to mind easily some of the nastiest passages’) led to poor sales and the disappearance of the collection, his fourth book. There is some comedy in this alongside the spiky pathos. Murnane is about as close to review-proof as any writer can

We often forget to ascribe agency to modern Tibet. Politically, it seems to lie mute in the behemoth shadow of China. Culturally, we encounter it more as the backdrop to journeys of self-discovery than a producer of modern culture in its own right. But the villages of the Tibetan plateau are defiantly cosmopolitan in Ning Ken’s novel, the first by this important Chinese writer to be translated into English. Sardonic and erudite, it’s the only major literary treatment of Sino-Tibetan relations to appear in English in decades. The author belongs to the generation of such era-defining Chinese novelists as Mo Yan and Yan Lianke, publishing his first fiction in the

Back in the 1980s and 1990s everyone read John Irving, or so it seemed. You had to have a copy of A Prayer for Owen Meany, The World According to Garp, The Hotel New Hampshire and The Cider House Rules. After a while even the most obtuse reader realised that a novel by John Irving was very likely to contain elements that had appeared in other John Irving novels. In fact, a friend of mine invented John Irving Bingo: cross off a box every time one of the following is mentioned: an orphanage; bears; Vienna; sex that is in some kind of way weird; and sudden acts of violence, usually

The fourth novel in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s spooky supernatural series differs from the others in that it is a standalone and doesn’t involve previous characters. Gone, too, are the multiple narrators; and there is only the briefest mention of a new star in the sky – which in the other three books coincided with all sorts of inexplicable occurrences. But it is no less compelling. This is the story of an arrogant young Norwegian, Kristian Hadeland, who arrives in London in 1985 to study photography at a prestigious art college. Though enthusiastic about his subject, he finds it hard to accept the constructive criticism of his lecturers. He is single-minded

Love Divine, the debut novella by Ysenda Maxtone Graham, is set in the leafy, fictional parish of Lamley Green and weaves together a tableau of stories about the community. The title comes from the hymn ‘Come Down, O Love Divine’; but beneath this bourgeois Church of England world of round-robins and milky tea is a satirical portrait of a parish with a dark underbelly. Maxtone Graham perfectly captures hypocritical English chit-chat, and the polyphony of perspectives works well. The central thread concerns Lucy Fanthorpe, 54, who is hit by the sudden death of her beloved husband Nick and the gradual realisation that he might have been having an affair. One