Amanda Craig
Poles Apart
It is strange to think that Rose Tremain is always more concerned with outsiders than insiders. To those familiar only with her best-selling, prize-winning novels like Restoration, Music & Silence and most recently The Colour, she has acquired a lustrous Establishment sheen as the respectable face of historical fiction. Yet just as impressive, and interesting, are the fictions set in modern times. Tremain has explored the minds of batty old Marxists, property developers in France, transsexuals in America and a teenaged boy in love with a very much older woman. It is these works that have pushed her to develop most, although they are probably less commercially successful.
Lev, in The Road Home, is not therefore such a big change of direction, though he embodies what is surely one of the pressing problems of our time. Marina Lewycka has written two splendidly funny novels about immigrants, and a couple of years
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'The trouble seems to be that we are not asked to read this author, reading being a thing of the past. We are asked to decode him.'
From the archive, Derek Mahon peruses the early short fiction of Thomas Pynchon.
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'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
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Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553