Gill Hornby
The Bawdy Bunch
Mark Haddon’s first novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, was, you remember, a publisher’s dream. Not only did it win pretty much every award going, it also pulled off that remarkable – and highly lucrative – feat of straddling two markets. A charming insight into the mind of a fifteen-year-old with Asperger’s Syndrome, it was a huge hit with both adults and children alike. So the first question to be asked about his second novel is: Can he do it again? One has to read less than a third of A Spot of Bother to answer: He hasn’t even tried.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
It's 'all lively and entertaining but rather too black and white. Her account of British politics and the success of the Brexit campaign verges on the cartoonish.'
@David_Goodhart on Anne Applebaum's 'Twilight on Democracy'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-tale-of-two-parties
'Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, once asked Isaiah Berlin who his ideal dinner guest would be. Without hesitation Berlin exclaimed, ‘William James!’'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-pragmatists-progress
'She digs her images into her story, so that they blow up like psychic land mines when the reader’s perception brushes against them.'
Hilary Mantel reviewing Margaret Atwood: a #BookerPrize double-header from the archive.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-realist-with-wings