Suicide

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

In the face of unendurable pain that must be endured and unimaginable loss that must be imagined, jokes should not be resisted or turned away. Miriam Toews, describing the day that her father ended his life, remembers him assessing the outfit – torn jeans and a green hoodie – that she had been wearing for a fortnight. ‘Did you have much trouble deciding what to wear?’ he asked as he left his ham sandwich uneaten at a family lunch. Afterwards, he made his way to the railway tracks. A dozen years later, Miriam’s older sister Marjorie died by suicide in the same manner the day before her 52nd birthday. Toews

These legendary lives need the clutter cleared away from them occasionally. Lawrence Durrell and his brother Gerald turned their family’s prewar escape to an untouched Corfu into a myth that supplied millions of fantasies. It still bore retelling and extravagant expansion recently, if the success of ITV’s series The Durrells is any sign. (One indication of that pleasant teatime diversion’s accuracy: the actor playing Larry, Josh O’Connor, is 6ft 2in. Larry himself was a whole foot shorter.) How Louisa Durrell, struggling with life in Britain after returning from India, went in a bundle with her children to a Greek island of cheap Venetian mansions, heat and innocent adventure is always

Fifty years ago, the blasted bodies of three unmarried siblings, members of the Luxton family, were discovered at a Devon dairy farm, set in a lush stretch between the ‘lavender haze’ of Exmoor and Dartmoor. The youngest member of the family, Alan, was 55. He lay in his pyjamas and work boots on the cobbles in the farmyard. Robbie, 65, with cuts to his face, and Frances, 68, clad in a nightgown rucked up to her waist, were found together in the garden. All the doors to the primitive thatched family farmhouse were locked from inside. The ‘tragic trio’, as they were described by the tabloid press, were the last

Quizzed about pop by the teen music magazine Smash Hits in 1987, the year of her third consecutive electoral victory, Margaret Thatcher singled out ‘Telstar’, a chart-topper from a quarter of a century earlier, for special praise. She pronounced it ‘a lovely song… I absolutely loved that. The Tornados, yes.’ As a whizzily futuristic sounding instrumental ode to a transatlantic communications satellite, and only the second British recording to top the American Billboard charts, its charm for Thatcher was perhaps as much political as musical. That it was the work of an independent producer might also have appealed to her love of freewheeling, self-reliant private enterprise. Roger George ‘Joe’ Meek

One Friday evening in a half-ruined, half-rebuilt city, where smart tourists dine out in restaurants next to refugees in makeshift shelters, a woman walks the streets. In torn clothes and slippers ‘worn ragged’, she hands out leaflets. On every piece of paper the same words are written: ‘Has anyone seen my daughter?’ On the same evening, in the same coastal city, which is ‘half obscured by skyscrapers’, another woman walks the streets with a different purpose, seeking to spend time away from her co-workers on a business trip. As she cradles her pregnant stomach, she watches as a female figure climbs over a clifftop railing and jumps, leaving behind a

Robyn Davidson never set out to become a writer. ‘It did not form my identity,’ she tells us early on in her memoir Unfinished Woman. ‘In my own mind I had simply pulled another rabbit out of a hat. As I had done all my life with everything.’ The rabbit, in this case, is the ability to capture an exciting and complex life with insight and humour. When she decided to leave the underworld, she was sexually assaulted at knifepoint Born in 1950 on a cattle station in Queensland, Australia, Davidson was the second daughter of a handsome war hero from a privileged background. Home was a place full of

It was only eight lines into O Brother that I realised I was in the hands of a good writer. John Niven’s landline phone has rung. His partner hands it to him. ‘I take the phone from her as she watches me in the intense, quizzical way we monitor people who are about to receive Very Bad News.’ I can’t recall a writer noticing that before (I presume a few have), but we have noticed it ourselves. And the narrative masterstroke is that now the reader is looking at the page in an intense, quizzical way, for we want to know what the Very Bad News is. The VBN is

Sometimes a novel’s means are so strange, however compelling its final effect on the reader, that a straightforward account of it will be most helpful. I’ve read, or part-read, this novel three times now. On the first reading I gave up, shaking my head. On the second I got to the end, but thought it absurdly wilful, self-absorbed and idiosyncratic to the point of whimsy. The third reading – something, after all, must have drawn me back – exerted an appalling power, and I emerged shaken, troubled, but also consoled. Take your pick. This is a book that is going to divide people, and one that can look very different

With his swashbuckling gait, ominous associations and garrulous demeanour, the magpie is the dandified razor boy of our avifauna and provokes ambivalent feelings (the ‘pie’ part signifies many a mixture). His pilfering reputation has inspired work from Rossini to the prog-rock band Marillion, and in lab tests he’s one of the few creatures brainy enough to recognise his own image in a mirror – even some Marillion fans can’t do that. But it’s hard to see how this corvid could be truly lovable. The artist and poet Frieda Hughes, however, fell for a little foundling Pica pica back in May 2007 when she was refurbishing her ramshackle new home. He

Grief leads us down some strange roads. Few, though, can be as peculiar as those charted by Paul Stanbridge in his auto-fictional My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is. This singular and striking book follows a narrator (the extent to which this figure overlaps with Stanbridge is kept teasingly obscure) mourning the suicide of his brother, an isolated, eccentric mathematician. Yet, while it contains passages of raw tribute, it is a self-consciously tricksy narrative. Stanbridge circles around his brother’s death via some of history’s more overgrown byways, such as ‘Clever Hans’, the mathematical horse, locked-in syndrome and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s enthusiastic onanism. There’s a suggestion of Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Flights to

Seán Hewitt, born in 1990, realised that he was gay at a very early age. ‘A kind, large woman’ who was babysitting him told him that it was wrong. ‘I was perhaps only six or seven at the time, but she knew. I knew it too. It was as if she had peered into the deep, secret part of my soul and seen what I was hiding.’ Alongside the precocious knowledge came desperate attempts to conceal the truth. Hewitt adopted alien ways of being: ‘I regulated myself; I policed myself.’ As an adolescent, he spread rumours about his exploits with girls. He even watched heterosexual porn on the sitting room

David Shields is an American author who has decided to collate many of the questions he’s been asked in interviews and reprint them – without any of his answers – under themes of Childhood, Art, Envy, Capitalism etc. The idea is that the questions put to him are just as revealing as his responses. This is a gimmick, but not merely that. To map how others interrogate us is an original idea. It follows that the best way of testing whether this works for the length of a book, even one as short as this, would be for the book to be reviewed by someone who had no prior knowledge

Angus Mooney is dead. Freshly murdered, he’s appalled to find himself in an Afterworld, having always rejected the possibility of life after death. Moreover, he can observe his murderer getting on increasingly well with his innocent widow. Mooney’s Afterworld is a deeply unsatisfactory mixture of computerised bureaucracy and urban chaos. In a landscape undreamed of by Dante, his guide is no cicerone but a woman with a welcoming bed and good contacts in Management, who knows her way around the local drinking spots. The Australian novelist Steve Toltz specialises in the blackest of comedy. His first novel, A Fraction of the Whole, was shortlisted for the Booker in 2008. Here

When I was 14 my father took me to a bookmaker’s and encouraged me to place a bet. He wanted to show me the futility of gambling, I think. Big mistake. I picked a horse called Maroof at 66/1 in the Queen Elizabeth II stakes at Ascot. My father put on 50p each way. Maroof romped to victory, no problem. ‘I think I’ve just ruined your character,’ said my father, not entirely joking, as he handed over the winnings. He had. I’ll forever associate betting with that triumph – the rush of joy I felt jumping up and down on the cruddy red carpet surrounded by Irish drunks and cigarette

These aren’t diaries in the sense that Chips Channon kept diaries, or Samuel Pepys. They aren’t diaries at all, beyond the fact that each entry records an event and has a date and place attached. If a diary is a conversation with yourself, A Carnival of Snackery is a conversation with a crowd, because the observations it contains were written as material for David Sedaris’s shows. The entries, which begin in 2003 and continue to Christmas 2020, are therefore, as Sedaris admits, over-polished, and what we hear on the page is a spoken rather than a written voice. There are many other voices besides, because the book is a record

What does it mean to be a body in this world? It’s the question animating Brandon Taylor’s Filthy Animals. Our fleshy bodies and fragile minds complicate our experience of other people and isolate us from one another. As with Real Life, Taylor’s first novel, this short story collection displays his talent for rendering the precise inflection of a relationship while exploring the drama of the body. In ‘Potluck’, Lionel, a gay, black graduate student who has recently tried to commit suicide, meets Sophie and her partner Charles. Always ‘arriving at the moment just as it was ending and everyone was moving on’, Lionel connects with Charles and they sleep together.

Leave or remain? That’s the question hanging like a cartoon sledgehammer over Lionel Shriver’s 17th novel. Although she makes merry with the parallels, her subject isn’t Brexit. It’s how long a person should choose to live. Should we allow ourselves to shamble, with gentle optimism, into decades when mental and physical decay are statistical probabilities? Or should we Take Back Control, and off ourselves before revolted strangers are required to wash our private parts at great cost to our struggling NHS? The characters Shriver charges with assessing the options are Cyril and Kay Wilkinson. We meet them in their early fifties as they return home after Kay’s father’s funeral. Slugging