Fiction

Basil Peyton-Crumbe is a multi-millionaire landowner. An embattled man known to all, even his dogs, as ‘Banger’, he claims to have despatched at least 41,000 pheasants with the cheap old 12-bore he’s had since childhood. Shooting pheasants, he believes, is ‘an exquisite accomplishment’, as complex as writing a sonata or designing a cathedral. On the first page of this bloodthirsty novel, Banger’s trusty old gun explodes in his hands and blows half his head off. No one seems particularly upset. Not his half-brother William, who succeeds to the estate, and certainly not his Springer Spaniel, Jam. Dismissing his dying employer as ‘a selfish oaf’, ‘fat arse’ and ‘grouchy old bastard’, 

The novels of Jane Austen have much in common with traditional detective fiction. It is an affinity that P. D. James has herself explored, notably in her essay ‘Emma Considered as a Detective Story’, which she included as an appendix to her memoir, Time to Be in Earnest. Both types of fiction operate within enclosed and carefully structured worlds; both depend for their plots on a threat to the established order; and both conclude with tidy resolutions that contain an implicit promise that a happy, orderly existence now lies ahead. Death Comes to Pemberley combines these two traditions in a whodunnit set mainly at Mr Darcy’s stately home in Derbyshire,

Emily ‘Fido’ Faithfull, a stout, plain, clever Victorian, founder-member of the feminist Langham Place group, manager of the ground-breaking Victoria Press which extends employment possibilities for women, has her story lightly fictionalised in The Sealed Letter. The action starts with the return from a posting to Malta of Fido’s erstwhile best friend, Helen Codrington, a naval wife with a yellow-whiskered colonel in tow. Helen needs an alibi and a trysting-place; the apparently guileless Fido and her drawing-room sofa will do nicely. Before Malta, Fido had lived with Helen and her older, straitlaced husband Harry. Fido’s asthma had been the pretext for Helen to leave the marital chamber and curl up

Penelope Lively’s new novel traces the consequences of a London street mugging. As the culprit sprints away with a handbag, the victim, Charlotte, a retired widow, falls and cracks her hip. Her daughter, Rose, personal assistant to the once-eminent historian Lord Peters, is meant to be in Manchester to help her employer give a talk on Walpole. When Rose bails out, Peters turns to his own daughter, Marion, an interior designer in hock to the bank. At the pre-talk lunch, she has the good fortune, so it seems, to meet a venture capitalist, who offers her a gig doing up luxury flats. Less fortunate is her married lover, Jeremy, whose

Jonathan Franzen. David Foster Wallace. Jeffrey Eugenides. Giant, slow-moving, serious writers, notching up about a novel per decade, all with their sights set on The Big One, The Beast, The Great American Novel. Wallace pulled it off, undoubtedly, with Infinite Jest in 1996, before ending it all by suicide in 2008 — a tragic loss. Franzen laid claim to fame — and earned himself the cover of Time magazine — with The Corrections (2001) and Freedom (2010). And now Eugenides, after The Virgin Suicides (1993) and Middlesex (2002), makes another attempt at literary immortality with The Marriage Plot. And fair play to him, he throws absolutely everything at it. In

In the 26 years since the publication of her highly acclaimed first novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson has proved herself a writer of startling invention, originality and style. Her combination of the magical and the earthy, the rapturous and the matter-of-fact, is unique. It is a strange and felicitous gift, as if the best of Gabriel Garcia Marquez was combined with the best of Alan Bennett. At her finest, (in which category I’d put The Passion, Sexing the Cherry and Lighthousekeeping) there is no one to match her. The title of this memoir comes from the mouth of Mrs Winterson of Accrington, Lancs, the author’s adoptive