Cancelled: Biff, Chip and Kipper book pulped by Oxford publishers in racism row
OUP said it commissioned an independent review of the Biff and Chip books after receiving complaints about their content. The publisher said: “The book was taken out…
Maud Martha review: an American classic finally lands in the UK – seven decades late
How to begin talking about Gwendolyn Brooks? She was one of the major American poets of the 20th century. She was a writer of great power and…
Read an exclusive new Marilyn Monroe short story by Joyce Carol Oates
I was the very first Playboy centerfold—in December 1953. Hugh Hefner had seen pictures of me, he had to have me as his first centerfold—guaranteeing success for…
Recluse, prophet, madman: who is the real Cormac McCarthy?
The 88-year-old American writer Cormac McCarthy will return later this year with not one but two novels, in perhaps the highest-profile comeback since David Bowie broke a…
A Tidy Ending by Joanna Cannon review: a serial killer thriller that’s too neat for its own good
Heightened thriller plots frequently rub shoulders with compassionate portraits of ordinary lives in the work of Joanna Cannon. But while her bestselling debut, The Trouble with Goats…
Bill Nighy: ‘I procrastinate at an Olympic level’
“There is a way of looking at my life and my career as just one long exercise in displacement activity,” sighs Bill Nighy. Growing up, he didn’t…
Bill Nighy: ‘I procrastinate at an Olympic level’
“There is a way of looking at my life and my career as just one long exercise in displacement activity,” sighs Bill Nighy. Growing up, he didn’t…
‘There’s a lot of bad behaviour’: on the set of Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends
Under a covered terrace in the heat-blasted garden of a seaside Croatian villa, a tense conversation is taking place between a husband and a wife over a…
‘There’s a lot of bad behaviour’: on the set of Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends
Under a covered terrace in the heat-blasted garden of a seaside Croatian villa, a tense conversation is taking place between a husband and a wife over a…
Sea of Tranquility review: Emily St John Mandel’s time-travel mess is no Station Eleven
Three people, separated by centuries, experience the same, haunting phenomenon. They are each simultaneously in three places at once, hearing and seeing and feeling the same things….
People Person review: Queenie author Candice Carty-Williams returns with an uplifting crime caper
Poor Dimple. The hapless heroine of Candice Carty-Williams’s new novel bears a certain resemblance to Queenie, the eponymous protagonist of her 2019 hit debut, which scooped book…
People Person review: Queenie author Candice Carty-Williams returns with an uplifting crime caper
Poor Dimple. The hapless heroine of Candice Carty-Williams’s new novel bears a certain resemblance to Queenie, the eponymous protagonist of her 2019 hit debut, which scooped book…
The Candy House review: Jennifer Egan’s Goon Squad are back in a mindboggling dystopia
Jennifer Egan tends to write two sorts of novels – mind-bogglingly clever books about metaphysics, such as her 2011 Pulitzer-winner A Visit from the Goon Squad, or…
The Candy House review: Jennifer Egan’s Goon Squad are back in a mindboggling dystopia
Jennifer Egan tends to write two sorts of novels – mind-bogglingly clever books about metaphysics, such as her 2011 Pulitzer-winner A Visit from the Goon Squad, or…
Daisy Hildyard’s Emergency shows Yorkshire as it really is
Daily Hildyard’s new work of fiction, her second, after Hunters in the Snow (2013), is advertised as a reinvention of the “pastoral novel for the climate change…
Don Winslow’s City on Fire is an Iliad for 1980s mobsters
Few novelists convey as much of a sense of really knowing how the world works as Don Winslow. His epic Cartel trilogy, one of the finest achievements…
Sara Baume’s Seven Steeples captures the truth about being in love
Sara Baume’s Seven Steeples is a tale told through absence. Her third novel – Baume’s debut, Spill Simmer Falter Wither, won the prestigious Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize…
Why ‘misogynist’ Kingsley Amis is too good to cancel
He loathed experimental fiction (he would have been furious, but unsurprised, that the centenary of Ulysses has overshadowed his own), prompting his son Martin Amis to express…
Nina Stibbe is one of our funniest novelists – it’s time to take her seriously
Nina Stibbe is the hero of finding your voice. For 30 years, certain she was meant to be a writer, she struggled to write a novel. Then…
Poguemahone review: Patrick McCabe’s hippie satire is like Flann O’Brien on drugs
Poguemahone (Gaelic for “kiss my a—”) is a 600-page novel driven by events real and imagined in a shared house in Kilburn in 1974, involving a bunch…
This mad Irish road-trip is one of the best novels of 2022 so far
No-one listens to the radio or goes on a road-trip forever; you escape in the knowledge that the world will recapture you when you’re done. The duo…
The Trees by Percival Everett review: zombie horror, detective story and Tom Sharpe-esque farce
Mainstream British publishers, belatedly alert to the fact that people of colour write books, have been vowing noisily to get more of them on to their lists…
Devil House by John Darnielle review: has true crime lost its moral compass?
The “true crime” genre, formerly beneath the notice of the chattering classes except for the odd highbrow specimen such as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, has recently…
Anita Brookner wouldn’t be impressed by Julian Barnes’s adoring novel about her
Before her death in 2016, Anita Brookner would go for lunch with Julian Barnes nearly every year. The novelists had much in common. Both were outsiders: she…
From scientist to celebrity chef: read this funny 1960s fable
Chemistry, believes Elizabeth Zott, is all about change. This remarkable protagonist, a pioneering scientist-turned-celebrity chef in early 1960s America, wants to change the world through her research….