The late Mal Peet was a writer of extraordinary gifts. His work was varied, intelligent and challenging, and he strained at convention while telling powerful and moving stories. His estate has been publishing the manuscripts he left behind; it is with sadness that I note that this is probably the final one. Few other authors […]
What is the cost of keeping a secret from someone you love? In Berta Isla, a novel by the celebrated Spanish author Javier Marías, a couple’s minor disloyalties – which they justify as mere ‘parentheses’ or emergency measures in their relationship – breed further betrayals until they find their lives ‘swathed in mist and mystery’. […]
Roberto Saviano’s The Piranhas addresses a simple question: what happens when the older mafiosi go to prison? As the novel shows, the guaglioni – Neapolitan for ‘boys’ – take over and mayhem ensues. The guaglioni are the ‘malleable raw material’ plentifully available in the city’s old neighbourhood of Forcella. They are ‘minors with no criminal […]
It was recently reported that the authorities in Hong Kong have branded Haruki Murakami’s new novel ‘indecent’, prohibiting its sale to minors. Without wishing to be glib about the concerns of those who see this as a sign of creeping illiberalism in the territory, you don’t have to squint too hard to see where they’re […]
This collection of stories forms a Gulag memoir to rival Solzhenitsyn’s, as Solzhenitsyn himself acknowledged. Between 1954 and 1973, after fifteen years spent mainly in the camps of the Kolyma region of northeast Siberia, Varlam Shalamov (1907–82) poured out stories that – once the Khrushchev thaw was halted – he knew might never be published. In 1968 Kolyma Stories was leaked to the West and in 1980
The poet Lavinia Greenlaw’s third novel opens enticingly with a dream-like scenario, a woman fleeing down a long corridor from someone she has recognised as a potential lover, whom she desires and dreads. They have passed through a door together, have exchanged conversation and discovered a shared interest in small objects. Now they are apart, […]
The Essex Serpent, Sarah Perry’s second novel and the prize-winning, bestselling book that made her name, merely flirted with the motifs and machinery of the gothic. With its perspicacious heroine, a seemingly impossible aquatic creature glimpsed in dark water and rural landscape of the bleakest and most minatory sort, it was content just to hint […]
‘This place is full of thieves.’ This is how Momo, the teenage protagonist of Mohammed Hanif’s new novel, describes the refugee camp that he calls home. But it also signals that in the world of the novel’s setting – an unnamed desert somewhere along the Afghanistan–Pakistan border – everyone is complicit in a version of […]
Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of the Confederate States, has rarely got a good press. Critics called him vain, cold, a pedant obsessed with minutiae and, fatally, incapable of compromise. The Richmond Daily Whig declared Davis ‘ready for any quarrel with any and everybody, at any time and at all times’. Yet the […]
In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, the novelist Sally Rooney spoke of her ambivalence about ‘writing entertainment, making decorative aesthetic objects at a time of historical crisis’. This is the perennial dilemma of the politically engaged writer. Rooney’s novels are far from apolitical, but they succeed in part because they adhere to the received […]
One of the more curious effluents of our current ecological crisis is the novel of environmental degradation, and specifically of deforestation. Such works – 2016’s Barkskins, by the Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx, was one overhyped example – stand in somewhat awkward relation to the catastrophe they seek to describe. And not just because books […]
Philip Hensher’s magisterial Penguin Book of the British Short Story was published in two handsome volumes in 2015: spread across some 1,500 pages, it featured ninety writers arranged in chronological order, from Daniel Defoe to Zadie Smith. In among the famous names were several bold and unusual choices, including a few fantastically obscure authors (Marjorie […]
The action films of Geoff Dyer’s youth gave him the impression that the Second World War was largely won by small bands of daredevil heroes carrying out covert do-or-die raids. Cockleshell Heroes, The Guns of Navarone and The Heroes of Telemark are all mainstays of the genre, but the ultimate exemplar is the beloved 1968 […]
In Jonathan Lethem’s short story ‘The King of Sentences’, the narrator is a young New Yorker who works in a bookshop. Dismayed by the stylistic limitations of text messages and graffiti, he cherishes writing that feels as if it’s been carved like a sculpture. He and his girlfriend revere one writer above all, feasting on […]
As often as not, the subtitles now obligatory for all non-fiction books seem calculated as much to irritate through hyperbole, absurdity or prolixity as to inform a potential buyer what the book is about and whether it is worth the trouble of reading. But with Charles Rangeley-Wilson’s Silver Shoals, I am not so much irritated […]
No one has been excluded without good reason from this anthology of the writings of the world’s greatest explorers, past and present: in his sensitive and thought-provoking introduction Benedict Allen has taken a great deal of trouble to explain how he made his choices. To elucidate his own understanding of what exploration is, he quotes […]
A Friday afternoon in Jerusalem… as the sun starts to sink behind the crenellated walls of the old city, bathing the hot rocks, which in Arthur Koestler’s words ‘have seen more holy murder, rape and plunder than any other place’, in a pure, yellow light, I feel that strange sense of loneliness that infects the […]
Short and lively reflections about doctoring by Dr Donald Gould. Qualified in 1942, he saw the days before the NHS and the therapeutic revolution: even if you could afford a doctor, he could prescribe little more than sympathy and hot drinks. Dr Gould is now a writer and broadcaster and has had periods as an […]
Hitler’s Children began as a series of interviews conducted with the children of eight prominent National Socialists, plus two others. ‘I knew that several books had studied the children of concentration camp survivors,’ Posner explains, ‘but . . . I was not aware of any attempt to study the children of the perpetrators.’ And so […]
This book’s unprepossessing title and cover lend it an unfortunate resemblance to the interminable books sometimes written by Labour MPs but more often ‘ghosted’ by their researchers, which have all the charismatic appeal and thrilling unpredictability of an English weather forecast. If they’re not wet, they’re bound to be windy. The prospect of a book […]
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Though Jean-Michel Basquiat was a sensation in his lifetime, it was thirty years after his death that one of his pieces fetched a record price of $110.5 million.
Stephen Smith explores the artist's starry afterlife.
Stephen Smith - Paint Fast, Die Young
Stephen Smith: Paint Fast, Die Young - Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Making of an Icon by Doug Woodham
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15th-century news transmission was a slow business, reliant on horses and ships. As the centuries passed, though, mass newspapers and faster transport sped things up.
John Adamson examines how this evolution changed Europe.
John Adamson - Hold the Front Page
John Adamson: Hold the Front Page - The Great Exchange: Making the News in Early Modern Europe by Joad Raymond Wren
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