Halfway through Roddy Doyle’s brilliant new novel, the ten-year-old narrator describes a photograph of George Best in action, for Manchester United against Arsenal: he is jumping for a cross with Pat Crerand and against Frank McLintock, and as Paddy Clarke observes, manages to look graceful even in mid-air. I have this picture. I have the […]
This is the curiously elusive story of Catherine Hammond. From the genteel spa-town of her earliest memories, she glides through 500-odd picaresque pages, until, having come full-circle, she ends up back in Aquae-Regis. In the interim, on a timescale that runs from the 1930s to the 1980s, Catherine encounters Experience. She feels the warmth of […]
‘I wonder how it is for you, Harold,’ said the young President Kennedy to Harold Macmillan at their Bermuda summit in 1961. ‘If I don’t have a woman for three days, I get terrible headaches.’ There we have it, the characteristic voice of the young American playboy who brought us that dizzily Dionysian spasm that […]
Spinoza, according to Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, is ‘the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers’. As a natural consequence of his ethical supremacy, Russell adds, Spinoza ‘was considered, during his lifetime and for a century after his death, a man of appalling wickedness’. Born into the Hispanic Jewish community in Amsterdam […]
The problem with this novel, published to coincide with Amis’s seventieth birthday, is the Russian girl of the title. For a start she is Russian. In Russia, Amis says, everything is political and therefore this is, I suppose, a political novel – the Cold Warrior’s response to detente and the Gorbachev years. The message seems […]
The Way You Tell Them is subtitled A Yarn for the Nineties, and there you have it: this is a futuristic novel (poet Alan Brownjohn’s first) about alternative comedy. It is nice to know that everybody worries about global warming, or whether Gorby can hang on, or the prospect of a fourth term for Mrs […]
The National Library of Latvia rears up like a ziggurat on the western bank of the River Daugava as it hastens through Riga towards the Baltic Sea. The building was devised in the decade and a half following the collapse of the Soviet Union, out of the ruins of which the modern democratic state of […]
Turkey imprisons more journalists and writers than any other nation, so it is not surprising that it features in these pages so often. The books of two dissidents written behind bars have recently been published in English translation. Ahmet Altan (LR, April 2018) is well known in literary circles and as an advocate for the […]
Rosie Price’s debut novel is a complex examination of agency and sexual assault. At university, Kate becomes friends with Max Rippon and his family. The Rippons adore Kate and she is quickly included in every part of their lives, but this relationship is ruptured when Max’s cousin, Lewis, rapes her at a party. Kate suffers […]
A pregnant woman living with her boyfriend in a seemingly idyllic community called Miden opens the door one day to a young girl. The girl comes into her home, is offered a cup of tea and accuses the woman’s boyfriend – the girl’s university professor – of having raped her. As they wait for the […]
Will Wiles’s Plume begins with an explosion in east London that is felt by its protagonist, Jack Bick, as he sits in a Monday meeting and waits for the ripple to hit his phone. Bick is a journalist who writes profiles and an alcoholic, and the novel tracks a few days in his life as […]
On 20 April 1912, a 64-year-old writer and retired theatre manager named Abraham Stoker died quietly at his home in St George’s Square, London. The Times was one of the few major newspapers to carry an obituary. It’s a modest piece, buried on page fifteen, and you have to wade through accounts of Stoker’s sporting […]
Being a grown-up is all too often a serious business: rarely do we allow ourselves a moment to review life through childlike eyes. Finnish writer Selja Ahava grapples with this in her second novel, which opens with the thoughts of a girl trying to piece together why a shard of ice that fell from a […]
A work by an Irish writer in which two men wait for someone important who never turns up, passing the time in discussion of meals, aches and death, is hardly unfamiliar territory. The resemblance between Charlie Redmond and Maurice (‘Moss’) Hearne, the ‘mildly natty, mildly decrepit’ double act at the centre of Kevin Barry’s third novel […]
In The Chibok Girls (2016), Helon Habila recalled an encounter with a Nigerian soldier at a military checkpoint just outside Chibok, in the north of the country. He presented his Virginia driving licence to the soldier, who laughingly greeted him as ‘Professor Americana’ before waving him through. Habila has made his name with novels steeped […]
Yasunari Kawabata, one of Japan’s best-loved writers, was the first from the country to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Every Japanese can quote the opening sentence of Kawabata’s most famous novel, Snow Country: ‘The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.’ Dandelions was his last book, which he began writing […]
Australia’s long-term Nobel Laureate-in-waiting, Gerald Murnane is little known in the English-speaking world beyond his home country. He was published by Faber in the 1980s along with his countryman Peter Carey, but he attracted fewer sales and was quietly dropped. For my money Murnane is by far the better writer and British readers now have […]
Where the Danube bends at Tulcea, near the Black Sea in eastern Romania, the river divides. The main body continues along the north of the Delta towards the Black Sea, entering it near Chilia. Several miles southeast of Tulcea, the narrower section, now calling itself the Old Danube, again divides, this time into the Sulina […]
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When @djbduncan notices the text for a literary jigsaw puzzle had been written by a former colleague, his head spins. A wild surmise. Are jigsaws REF-able?
Dennis Duncan - The W Factor
Dennis Duncan: The W Factor
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In an effort to scold drinkers, Victorian temperance societies furiously marked every drinking establishment with a red X on city maps. It was a spectacular case of propaganda backfiring.
@foxtosser explores the history of drink maps
Edward Brooke-Hitching - From Beer Street to Gin Lane
Edward Brooke-Hitching: From Beer Street to Gin Lane - Drink Maps in Victorian Britain by Kris Butler
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How did a workers’ insurance agent who died of tuberculosis at the age of forty become a global literary icon?
@MortenHoiJensen on Kafka's metamorphosis
Morten Høi Jensen - Paranoid Humanoid
Morten Høi Jensen: Paranoid Humanoid - Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka by Karolina Watroba; Kafka: Making o...
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