‘Old, impotent, fat, feeble… with a tiny penis’: Edmund White’s merciless literary self-portrait
Towards the end of his new novel, the 82-year-old Edmund White tells us that elderly writers tend to repeat themselves. In the context, it’s a remark that…
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich, review: ghosts and cocaine? Just another day in the bookshop
Louise Erdrich’s faith in the power of fiction is so ardent that it doesn’t always do her good. The Sentence is her 17th novel (18th, if you…
The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier, review: this million-selling tale of doppelgangers will leave you in two minds
Stories of alternative lives are on the increase. We regularly see films and novels suggesting how things could be different if a different path had been taken…
Go Back at Once by Robert Aickman review: a trip to a decadent dictatorship with the king of the uncanny
One of the difficulties in reviewing a novel by Robert Aickman is that it’s almost impossible to describe his work to anyone who hasn’t read it before….
Enid Blyton book to get modern makeover with lesson about sexism
The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton’s beloved children’s adventure, is to get a modern makeover with a lesson about sexism. Jacqueline Wilson is writing a new version…
Star publisher Rosie De Courcy: ‘I consoled Nadine Dorries when critics slated her novel’
When she first read Dorries’s The Four Streets, she says she felt a prickling at the back of her neck. “Light a Penny Candle, Maeve’s first novel,…
In the Seeing Hand of Others by Nat Ogle: a reluctant novelist’s gripping debut
To begin with the afterword, Nat Ogle’s debut novel ends with an essay on why writing it may not have been a good idea. Coming from a…
The four best debut novels to read in 2022
CS Lewis’s adage that we read to know we are not alone may have become a banal observation, but being inside a character’s interior struggles while they…
2022’s most exciting new films, TV, books and albums
Nightmare Alley Bradley Cooper plays a fairground conman on the make in Guillermo del Toro’s lustrous, malevolent new adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel. With A+…
To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara review: an awe-inspiring work of imagination
About a third of the way through Hanya Yanagihara’s awe-inspiring new novel, the narrator of the section in question – a Hawaiian boy directly descended from the…
Sterling Karat Gold by Isabel Waidner, review: surrealist satire – with toreadors and spaceships
If the Booker Prize is a guide to what’s happening in fiction now, the Goldsmiths Prize is a braver attempt to discern what’s coming next. As it’s…
The anti-Bilbo Baggins: how Michael Moorcock cast a spell on The Witcher
Elric is also a sort of anti-Bilbo Baggins. Where Tolkien’s Hobbits were essentially a heroic fantasy Mumford and Sons, merrily tugging their waist-coats as they blundered their way…
‘No Tom Cruise!’: Anne Rice’s vendetta against her Interview With the Vampire star
“To accuse me of taking all the homoerotic elements out of the movie, after I made The Crying Game? Me, of all people—why would I do that?,” said…
Richard Osman: Over-70s have ‘disappeared’ from British arts and culture
People over 70 have “disappeared” in British culture, no longer asked their opinions or represented properly on television, the author Richard Osman has said. Osman, whose bestselling…
Dolphin Junction by Mick Herron review: dark, delicious stocking-filler from the Slow Horses author
Like children rummaging for the chocolate bar hidden among the socks and hankies in their Christmas stocking, many readers of this collection of short stories will start…
‘Eradicating the bad stuff’: the unwelcome return of book burning
Bishops have often led the way with British book burning: in 1599 the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London prohibited the publication of various satirical…
Gentleman Overboard: a Hollywood-blacklisted author’s lost masterpiece
The difference between life and death can be no more than a spot of grease. Either it is in the wrong place or you are. One can…
Sunset Swing by Ray Celestin, review: a fitting finale to this hard-boiled, jazzy crime series
Here ends one of the finest achievements of recent crime fiction, Ray Celestin’s City Blues Quartet. The first book, The Axeman’s Jazz, introduced us to black Pinkerton…
A Child in the Snow, Wilton’s Music Hall, review: a self-sabotaging adaptation that robs Gaskell’s ghost story of all its power
The horrors she witnessed have awakened vague, equally traumatising memories of an earlier time when, as an orphaned child she was sent to stay with an elderly…
The Weak Spot by Lucie Elven, review: a beast prowls the woods, in this fable-like satire
There’s something quite sinister about our contemporary pursuit of wellness. It’s the delusional flight from the horror of physical embodiment, as we chug our potions and microdose…
The Impostor by Silvina Ocampo review: meet South America’s queen of the macabre
“There’s something about the scale of the cruelty in political violence from the state that always seems like the blackest magic to me, like they have to…
The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk review: a Nobel-winner’s epic that aims to rival War and Peace
The Books of Jacob arrives with an impeccable pedigree. Finally available in English, the novel was first published in Poland in 2014 and has for some time…
James Patterson interview: ‘Am I entitled to write a black character? Sure I am’
“We go out for dinner and Bill and Hillary hold hands under the table,” he says. “One of the things I love about Clinton is that he…
Go Tell the Bees that I Am Gone by Diana Gabaldon review: Outlander is back – but why sideline the heroine?
Eager viewers of the TV adaptation of Outlander have termed the wait between seasons “Droughtlander”. Well, Diana Gabaldon’s readers are surely gasping: it’s been seven years since…
Somebody Loves You by Mona Arshi review: this gorgeous debut novel is a lesson in sensitivity
Mona Arshi’s first poetry collection, Small Hands, won a Forward Prize in 2015. Her debut novel shares many of its virtues: a crispness of phrase, for instance,…