Sam Leith

Stories of a Century

The Facts Behind The Helsinki Roccamatios and Other Stories

By

Canongate 240pp order from our bookshop

YANN MARTEL’S NEW book isn’t, strictly, a new book. Nor, strictly, was Self the new book before that. In fact, his most recent book is Life of Pi. But, in the way of these things, you can be sure that if you are a Canadian unknown, published by a smallish firm in Scotland, and you win the Booker Prize and global love and admiration, two things are going to happen. The first is that you are going to be so busy promoting Life of Pi and fielding global love and admiration that you’re going to find it hard to settle down to work on your next book. The second is that anyone with rights to your work is going to set about filling the gap by republishing your neglected backlist, in reverse order, as fast as ever they can.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'Half-way through The Conquest of Water I felt as if I had been subjected to the literary equivalent of excessive c… ,
    • 'Volume five, then, but still no end in sight. Sandbrook is clearly enjoying himself so much he can’t bear the seri… ,
    • 'By the end of the book something so weighty, stylish and impressive has been built up that one feels far nearer to… ,
    • 'Her ensuing psychotic episode is described so convincingly ... that the reader will wonder if Dobrakovová did not… ,
    • 'The perspectives complement and contest one another, amounting to a glorious, atmospheric set of ventriloquisms.'… ,
    • RT : I reviewed The Testaments for . I will not be taking any questions at this time. ,
    • 'The Testaments is, first and foremost, a manual of resistance ... a type of resistance that is organised, articula… ,
    Follow Us