Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart review: Shuggie Bain grows up, and comes out
Douglas Stuart’s Booker-winning debut, Shuggie Bain (2020), didn’t earn its well-deserved popularity with the “common reader” by being undemanding. It took its time, didn’t try to explain…
Ali Smith’s Companion Piece is a glorious snapshot of society in 2022
Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet of novels, running from Autumn to Summer, is one of the most interesting enterprises in recent fiction. It was undertaken with an eye…
The Great Passion by James Runcie review: how tragedy inspired Bach’s masterpiece
“Don’t cry for me, I’m going where music is born,” the devout J S Bach supposedly said on his deathbed. But James Runcie’s new novel explores the place…
Colm Tóibín: ‘Ireland only produces Guinness, Viagra – and poets’
Three years ago, Colm Tóibín found himself lying in the very spot where Leopold Bloom once slept. It was not a soothing experience. Pumped full of drugs,…
Mugabe as a horse: Zimbabwe’s Animal Farm might be the strangest book of 2022
The pitch for NoViolet Bulawayo’s second novel is, roughly: Zimbabwe, but with talking animals. Glory opens with the geriatric Father of the Nation – aka the Old…
Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra review: superb, sympathetic satire on talentless writers
Gonzalo Rojas, a Chilean poet in his twenties, has become a stepfather to his girlfriend’s six-year-old son. This, Gonzalo frets, might make him both padrastro (stepfather) and…
Carnegie Medal: Children’s book prize shortlist deals with war, death and racism
Britain’s foremost children’s book prize has unveiled a shortlist that covers war, death and racial oppression, suggesting that fiction can help readers to make sense of events…
Sex, rage and wigs: the baroque’n’roll life of JS Bach
It is, of course, perverse to write a novel about one of the greatest musicians who has ever lived. Johann Sebastian Bach is the voice of God in…
‘He was light, funny – and hated women’: Gary Snyder on his friend Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac is an American monument. And, like many statues these days, he’s looking a little wobbly on his pedestal. For some, the writer – born 100…
The secrets of Schiele’s muses: did the artist sleep with his sister?
In 1904, when Egon Schiele was just 14 years old, his strict stationmaster father broke down a locked door in the family home – in the small…
Got an idea? Here’s how to make it a book
Still smiling? Good. It’s time for typesetting and for the final sense check of your words: the proofread. “In the first place, God made idiots. This was…
The Exhibitionist by Charlotte Mendelson review: Succession for the London art world
Many women artists have worked in a man’s shadow, but how many have sabotaged their own career for their lover? Charlotte Mendelson imagines this scenario in her electric fifth…
The Exhibitionist by Charlotte Mendelson review: Succession for the London art world
Many women artists have worked in a man’s shadow, but how many have sabotaged their own career for their lover? Charlotte Mendelson imagines this scenario in her electric fifth…
How Jack Kerouac’s dreams of being the American Proust were ruined by liquor
In 1946, Kerouac met Neal Cassady, a young ex-convict (“burning shuddering frightful”) and they began making a series of orgiastic, melancholic, beatific road trips across America. Five…
Plotting heists, seducing factory girls: what did Stalin get up to in Stepney?
The man born Josef Djugashvili was once regarded by historians as a “grey blur” before his rise to power; in the words of Trotsky, a “mediocrity”. The…
The Voids by Ryan O’Connor review: Shuggie Bain meets High-Rise
A young Glaswegian alcoholic is living in a derelict high-rise tower. Everyone sane is taking the authorities’ cash and getting out, but our man is too good,…
Cooking and reading are life’s great healers
Two years ago, the Ukrainian food writer, Olia Hercules, published her third cookbook, Summer Kitchens. The title refers to the traditional small buildings in the gardens of…
Mother’s Boy by Howard Jacobson review: a life stranger and funnier than fiction
I should declare an interest: I once had the sheer cheek to ask Howard Jacobson for a quote to go on the front cover of one of…
Booth by Karen Joy Fowler review: how to raise a president-killer
“Sic semper tyrannis!” John Wilkes Booth is said to have yelled when he shot Abraham Lincoln in 1865, proof if nothing else that while America’s spirit of…
Kate Mosse: ‘Brexit has made this a divided and ugly country’
Best thing you’ve ever written? I really feel that An Extra Pair of Hands is the most important thing I’ve written. Truthfully, it took me a long…
‘We’re not the PC police!’: what sensitivity readers really do
But is the use of sensitivity readers really such a radical change in the publishing sphere? Writers have always sought advice on portraying cultures or groups with…
When I was 12, Roald Dahl’s twisted tale went off in my head like a bomb
My mother, also vegetarian, was horrified. What kind of story was that for children? The next day at school, the English teacher – looking defiant rather than…
Marlon James is a genius, but his ‘African Game of Thrones’ is ripe for parody
In 2015, I won a small bet with a publisher that Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings would win the Booker Prize. (He was a…
Roald Dahl’s dark, twisted work transformed my life
I had recently become vegetarian and I knew, with absolute certainty, that Lexington was me. To say the story disturbed me was an understatement; it went off…
The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan review: Handmaid’s Tale for the Squid Game generation
Last year, Rebecca Hogue, a mother whose boyfriend killed her two-year-old son when she was out at work, was found guilty of first-degree murder under Oklahoma’s controversial…