Fiction

Great House is an ambitious novel, if it’s a novel at all. Great House is an ambitious novel, if it’s a novel at all. It’s an exploration of regret, longing, loss, and of how Jews attempt to cope with the destruction that characterises their history. The title refers to the Book of Kings: ‘All the houses of Jerusalem, even every great house, he burned with fire’. If, as one of Krauss’ spokesmen puts it, ‘every Jewish memory were put together, every last holy fragment joined up again as one’, would the Great House be built again? The book divides into two sets of linked sections, the halves mirroring each other

Annie Proulx (pronounced ‘Pru’) began her writing career — quite late, in her fifties — as E.A. Proulx, to baffle misogynist editors; then she was E. Annie Proulx, until she dropped the E and became simply Annie the Proulx. Annie Proulx (pronounced ‘Pru’) began her writing career — quite late, in her fifties — as E.A. Proulx, to baffle misogynist editors; then she was E. Annie Proulx, until she dropped the E and became simply Annie the Proulx. (Her father’s ancestors, who left Anjou for Canada in the 17th century, were called Prou or Preault; her mother’s arrived in New England soon after the Mayflower.) Her fiction tends to be

Cedilla picks up where Adam Mars-Jones’s previous novel Pilcrow (2008) left off. Cedilla picks up where Adam Mars-Jones’s previous novel Pilcrow (2008) left off. That book described the early life of John Cromer, a boy whose joints are fused by arthritis. Most of it saw him bed-bound, whether at home in Bucks, at hospital, or boarding at a school for the disabled, where, sizing up the bulges in his classmates’ trousers, he wowed his dormitory with an unrivalled ability to talk filth after dark. The new book gets out more. Over the course of the 1960s, John has corrective surgery (painfully botched), passes his driving test, flies to India for

If this novel is ever published with a scratch-and-sniff cover — which incidentally, I think it might be successful enough to warrant — this is what it would smell of: cheap petrol, lust, the ripe, acidic scent of decaying corpse, cat litter, $2,000 suits, Cristal champagne, decaying encyclopaedia, corruption, fumes from the power plant, betrayal, sausage. If this novel is ever published with a scratch-and-sniff cover — which incidentally, I think it might be successful enough to warrant — this is what it would smell of: cheap petrol, lust, the ripe, acidic scent of decaying corpse, cat litter, $2,000 suits, Cristal champagne, decaying encyclopaedia, corruption, fumes from the power plant,

It has been said that the world of story- telling contains two fundamental plots — a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. Here we have two journeys, and one unexpected visitor, from three debut novelists who show great promise. In the first, the stranger arriving in town is the eponymous Mr Chartwell, the large and ‘strikingly hideous’ black dog that is the embodiment of Winston Churchill’s depression, who turns up on the doorstep of Esther Hammerhans one morning in July 1964. Esther, a library clerk in the House of Commons, has advertised a room to let, and Mr Chartwell is the sole respondent. He is in

Javier Marias’s elegant new volume is a collection of ghost stories, but its alluring dust jacket, illustrating the first tale, shows us a sunny midsummer image of a woman in a bikini admiring herself on a beach. Javier Marias’s elegant new volume is a collection of ghost stories, but its alluring dust jacket, illustrating the first tale, shows us a sunny midsummer image of a woman in a bikini admiring herself on a beach. All is not as pleasant as at first it seems, of course, and we soon enter his characteristically darker world of voyeurism, jealousy, revenge, doppelgängers and crime passionel. But the tone throughout the volume is playful