Punters who were persuaded to buy Damage, Josephine Hart’s first, best-selling novel, because its striking black-and-white cover made it look like a box of chocolates were unlikely to have been disappointed. It was impossible not to devour the book in a single evening and, after you had finished it, you were left with a strong […]
Almost hidden in this characteristically dense proliferation of images, Michael Ondaatje has a vision of pre-war British explorers, now landlocked in Hammersmith and Shepherd’s Bush, making the anxious journey to Kensington Gore as guest lecturers to the Royal Geographical Society. By convention, their expeditionary accounts give no hint of emotion; by convention, the Society memorialises […]
Consider Hugh Trevor-Roper’s description in The Mind of Adolf Hitler of the European cultural order we would have grown up with if the Panzers had prevailed in 1945: ‘The hundred million self-confident German masters were to be brutally installed…and secured in power by a monopoly of technical civilisation and the slave labour of a dwindling […]
Michael Frayn’s new novel, his first for 16 years, asks some almost unaskable questions. Anyone who reads Donne’s Songs and Sonnets will recognise the authentic smell of warm, used linen; but who has stopped to consider what it would really have been like to spend a night with the poet? Poetry – and even fiction […]
Let’s hope that Edward St Aubyn’s accomplished first novel is not a roman-à-clef. When we first encounter his hero, failed doctor David Melrose, he is using the early hours of the morning to water his Provençal garden, taking care to massacre as many ants as he can with the jet from his hosepipe. His wealthy […]
Peter Everett’s 1960s novel, Negatives, was innovatory and gripping, intelligent and strange. I have been conscious of a space where he should have been in our fictional landscape, an emptiness, ever since. Now he is back, and his new novel is also technically brilliant, fiercely intelligent and moving. It tells the story of the Second […]
It is 1978, eight years after Phoebe O’Connor’s elder sister Faith died mysteriously in Italy while travelling in Europe. Phoebe is eighteen, just graduated from high school in San Francisco and desperate to be exactly like her sister. Jennifer Egan’s first novel, The Invisible Circus, charts Phoebe’s emotional journey, from childhood to womanhood, through the […]
Henry Miller will probably be remembered as the only major writer of the twentieth century who had absolutely nothing to say. He wrote as a compulsive talker talks: because he liked the sound of his own voice. As far as Miller was concerned, it didn’t matter what he said. What he enjoyed was fixing the […]
Eating a hundred golden pippins in a single afternoon was the act of self-indulgence and dubious taste to which Jonathan Swift attributed the madness of his latest years. Sexing the Cherry is ripe with Swiftian tropes, from the Brobdingnagian heroine who makes men seem like Lilliputians, to the setting of the tale-within-a-tale on a flying […]
In 1770, the court of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria-Hungary was held spellbound by the first demonstration of the Turk, a revolutionary automaton which could not only play chess against a human opponent, but usually won. Soon afterwards, however, the machine’s creator, Wolfgang von Kempelen, became strangely reluctant to exhibit it, and the Turk was […]
The cliché ‘eagerly awaited’ seems appropriate for The Welsh Girl, by Peter Ho Davies, a debut which finally appears four years after its author’s inclusion on the Granta ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ roster. It is set in 1944, in a North Wales village so quietly traditional that many locals speak English only haltingly. The […]
Veins of hostility and menace run through Gerard Donovan’s fiction. Whether one thinks of the baker digging his own grave in the Booker long-listed Schopenhauer’s Telescope, a novel animated by dialogue that reads like a litany of human barbarism, or the paranoid Sunless in the author’s second outing, Dr Salt, the lives of Donovan’s characters […]
Lawrence, the protagonist of Matthew Kneale’s new novel, is a charming seven-year-old. He is alert and interested in the sort of things we like little boys to be interested in – ancient Romans, soldiers, astronomy. He natters on, in his perky, off-beat first-person voice, about everything from his own domestic details to the biography of […]
Darkmans is a very strange novel; and, I should admit upfront, a very hard one to review. I began this book in a state of contemptuous irritation, and ended it with a sneaking feeling that the author might be a genius. I read the first 100 pages thinking that the author was as lazy and […]
At first glance this book looks like a heartbreaking work of staggering worthiness. A prefacing note explains that all the author’s proceeds are going to Sudanese refugees, and the novel comes garlanded with a quote from a human rights organisation. When did you last read a novel endorsed by the International Crisis Group? Whatever you […]
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Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm