Maria Albano is a writer based in Cambridge
George Saunders’s luminous new novella Vigil begins with a fall of a kind – lower-key, sinless and very funny: “What a lovely home I found myself plummeting toward, acquiring, as I fell, arms, hands, legs, feet, all of which, as usual, became more substantial with each passing second.” With the fallen narrator landing headfirst, ass
From our UK edition
Every Christmas, I throw off my doctoral gown, slap the monographs, the Collected Works and the many-volume Letters back onto their library shelves and uncloister my bibliomania for a seasonal stint at the local bookshop. What pulls people like me into bookselling – even if only for a month during the holiday seasons – is
From our UK edition
This terse, unsparing novel can be summed up thus: after nearly a decade’s absence, the successful designer Gabriele Bilancini returns home to suburban Rome, where he wrestles with an identity crisis. His family and friends – his intimates before he moved to Milan and raced up the social ladder – feel like shameful reminders of
Buckeye is a fine illustration of how drawing-room tensions can fester and become matters of historical significance.
From our UK edition
‘Summer was the season of strangeness,’ muses Temperance, the barmaid at Little Nettlebed’s only alehouse. ‘People behaved peculiarly then.’ Temperance’s aside anchors the dramatic irony at the heart of Xenobe Purvis’s debut novel The Hounding, set in an 18th-century Oxfordshire village in the grip of a drought. In the villagers’ eyes, through which much of
For all its flaws, The Emperor of Gladness is ultimately a worthwhile novel with a big heart
The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt reviewed
