Anthony Cummins

Hmm. Of the 30-plus characters in this novel, not one is both black and British. Odd, since it’s set in 2007-8, in south London. An early passage shows us a Polish builder listening to a ‘crowd of black kids’ on the Northern Line: ‘You never—’ ‘He never—’ ‘Batty man—’ And that’s it: six words in 650 pages. Capital, a metropolitan panorama that takes in the dawn of what we call ‘the current climate’, is wonderful — warm, funny, smart — but you do feel John Lanchester might be afraid to fall flat on his face with a fuddy-duddy faux pas. So no black Britons or (equally weirdly) teenagers of any colour, unless you count a Senegalese football star whose job stops him doing anything teenagey.

An early sentence in this collection of stories, first published between 1979 and the current issue of Granta, runs thus: We were in the late stages now, about 45 minutes out, and I was thinking it could still change, some rude blend of weather might yet transform the land, producing texture and dimension, leaps of green light, those waverings and rays, and the near consciousness we always seem to find in zones of overgrown terrain. [The speaker is a tourist in the back of a taxi on his way to an airport in the Caribbean.] It’s not hard to see why the Atlantic critic B. R.

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 wife kicks him out when she spots a text on his mobile from Marion, cancelling a tryst on account of having to head north.

An ex-farmer whose brother has died fighting in Iraq is the man at the centre of Graham Swift’s new book, a state-of-the-nation novel on a small canvas. An ex-farmer whose brother has died fighting in Iraq is the man at the centre of Graham Swift’s new book, a state-of-the-nation novel on a small canvas. Jack runs a caravan park on the Isle of Wight, having sold his centuries-old Devon farm to a banker in need of a bolt-hole. His parents are dead, and more than a decade has passed since he’s last been in touch with Tom, nine years his junior. Now Tom’s gone too, blown up by an IED, and Jack’s preparing to return to Devon for the funeral; it’s the first time he’ll have been back since selling up.

Julie Myerson’s eighth novel is told by a woman who roams the City of London after an unspecified apocalypse (no power, bad weather). Julie Myerson’s eighth novel is told by a woman who roams the City of London after an unspecified apocalypse (no power, bad weather). The Monument is rubble, Tower Bridge has ‘long gone’ and scavengers are chopping fingers off frozen bodies to snatch rings. Our narrator can’t remember much — two thirds of the book pass before we find out her name is Izzy — but a couple of randy fellow vagrants claim to know her, and some children say she’s their mum. By the time one of them ‘lifts off the ground and comes flying through the air’ — and vanishes — we’re not sure what to believe.

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.