Graham greene

The comic novelist Andrew Sean Greer won the Pulitzer Prize for Less, a chronicle of the longings and humiliations of modern life. But now, he suspects, we’d all like an escape. ‘Whatever happened to the charm novel?’ he asks in his new outing, thinking of the lighter works of Nancy Mitford and Graham Greene. Since they are apparently out of fashion, he has decided to write his own. Villa Coco follows a young American archivist, hired to catalogue the antiques in Tuscany of an aged baronessa, known to her friends as ‘Coco’, only to find himself drawn into increasingly absurd adventures instead. He arrives in late summer, with all the American fantasies of Italy in tow: ‘A confection of movies and food... pasta and accordions and Leonardo and cheese.

Religious conversions do not, for the most part, make for good anecdotes. An exception can be found in Patricia Lockwood’s memoir Priestdaddy, which describes the author’s father Greg’s road to Damascus experience in a nuclear submarine off the coast of Norway, where he watched The Exorcist 72 times: That eerie, pea-soup light was pouring down, and all around him men in sailor suits were getting the bejesus scared out of them, and the bejesus flew into my father like a dart into a bull’s eye. It was, Greg boasted, ‘the deepest conversion on record’.

The travel writer Norman Lewis, the son of a Welsh psychic medium, died in Essex in 2003 at the age of 94. In his darkly comic autobiography, Jackdaw Cake, he relates how, in 1937, his mother built a spiritualist church in the north London suburb of Enfield as a sort of Taj Mahal memorial to her late husband (who was a retail pharmacist as well as a psychic). Enfield is not a likely pocket of the paranormal, but the Enfield Beacon of Light is still going strong. During its table-rapping and other spook-dabbling sessions no one is allowed to make jokes about striking a happy medium. Spiritualism is dead serious. Lewis’s humdrum upbringing in Edwardian Enfield – aspidistras, astral-planing – was far removed from the social privilege of most literary travellers.

Barbara Comyns’s reputation rises and falls like a Mexican wave, making her one of the most rediscovered novelists of recent times. She’s credited with anticipating Angela Carter and for being in the vanguard of tackling themes of traumatic dissociation and the realities of childbirth. Yet younger, trendier writers have regularly eclipsed her. Aged 29, Barbara was broke: a single mother who’d weathered affairs, an abortion and a suicide attempt Every fan remembers their first Comyns novel: the visceral jolt of black humour, the suckerpunch of stark horror. Knowing that she drew from life, we have longed for a biography, and hooray, it’s finally here.

This compelling and unnerving collection of stories is Lawrence Osborne’s first, coming in the wake of recent critically acclaimed novels – including The Forgiven, adapted into a film – and earlier works of memoir, essays and travelogue. Born in England, currently residing in Bangkok, Osborne has earned comparisons with Graham Greene for his portraits of flawed white characters in foreign settings, and Patricia Highsmith, thanks to the menacing noir atmosphere. These nine stories, written over the past decade, do not disappoint. Osborne removes his protagonists – English or American, on the young side of middle age – from their native environments and transplants them into exotic, perilous locations.

In a classic paradox of bureaucracy, the Index of Forbidden Books only really hit its stride when its original task became impossible. By the 17th century, Robin Vose relates in his new history of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum – established 1559, venerated and cursed for four centuries as ‘the Index’ – it was broadly accepted that censoring literature, senso stricto, was no longer possible. The ubiquity of printers, the ease of transportation and concealment and the sheer number of new books all made most texts available, most of the time, to those with time and cash to spare. The Index of Forbidden Books couldn’t, practically speaking, forbid.

In the world of books, a modern classic is an altogether more slippery thing than a classic: it must walk a line between freshness and durability; reflect the current age but hope to outlast it. For individual publishers, given many 20th-century writers are still in copyright, a modern classics list will necessarily be partial. However, few such partial lists are as complete as Penguin Modern Classics (PMCs), founded in 1961 four years after Penguin’s general editor A.S.B. Glover said: ‘We don’t want — without outstandingly good reasons — to start any new series such as “Modern Classics”.

Cuba’s gorgeous, crumbling capital has always been a testing ground for writers. That heady combination of revolution, cocktails, sex and unpainted mansions seems somehow to set literary pulses racing. Trollope, Hemingway and Graham Greene all described it with verve, but there’s also plenty of dross. The city certainly charmed me, and, a few years ago, I thought I’d add to the pulp with my own contribution. I started courting London’s Cubans, and even had the ambassador to lunch. But despite some intriguing gossip (e.g. that Che Guevara was no fun at parties, and utterly deadpan), I abandoned the whole idea. It seemed to me that Havana was about to change forever, and that whatever I wrote would be old hat before the ink was dry.

Benjamin Wood’s first novel, The Bellwether Revivals, was published in 2012, picked up good reviews, was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Book Prize and has become a bestseller in France — a promising start to a literary career, in other words. Wood’s new novel The Ecliptic is both an attempt to consolidate the success of his debut and also a meditation, among other things, on how to sustain such a career over decades while producing original and important art. On an island off the coast of Istanbul lies Portmantle, a remote community for painters, writers and musicians.

Duncan Neville is an unlikely hero for a novel. Approaching 50, divorced and the butt of his teenage son Jamie’s utter contempt, Duncan is also the eloquent yet mild-mannered editor of the Francombe Mercury, a local newspaper on its last legs. Francombe too has seen better days, not least since its pier burnt down in 2013 (an event covered fulsomely in the Mercury). While Duncan negotiates a good take-over deal for Mercury staff and their pensions, he’s also trying to prevent the ruined pier from being developed into a sex theme park by his schoolboy nemesis Geoffrey Weedon. The fact that Duncan’s ex-wife Linda is married to Geoffrey’s brother doesn’t help. Thank goodness then for Ellen, a new arrival to Francombe after the jailing of her fraudster husband.

If it’s all right with you, I’d like to launch a campaign please. Right here. You may be wanting me to cut to the chase and just recommend some children’s books, but bear with me. I’m on the case. My campaign is to have pictures in books again. Adult books too, but obviously books for children. There are some wonderful illustrators out there, contemporary ones, for all ages, and the scandalous thing is, they are usually limited to the age range, 0–7. If you want to remind yourself what we’re missing, make for the House of Illustration in London’s King’s Cross; that should do it. Or try Chris Beetles’s annual, brilliant exhibition, The Illustrators, on now at his St James’s gallery.