Stephen Amidon
The Spirit of Grim Grin
The Man Within My Head: Graham Greene, My Father and Me
By Pico Iyer
Bloomsbury 242pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
With the possible exception of Ernest Hemingway, no twentieth-century novelist casts a greater spell over the imaginations of aspiring male writers than Graham Greene. Working without allegiance to a specific ideology, nation or woman, he gave us stories that seamlessly melded thematic profundity with thriller-like adventure plots. Whether they admitted it or not, writers as diverse as Paul Theroux and John le Carré developed in Greene’s long shadow.
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
'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
In Ali Smith's "Summer", 'the coronavirus pandemic has arrived. Lockdown happens too. There are allusions to Black Lives Matter, to online abuse and radicalisation, to things so recently news that it feels shocking to find them in a novel.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/seasons-heatings
'Stevenson told W E Henley, the model for Long John Silver, it was "going to shoot up and become a star". Alas, it fizzled out like a cheap firework, as many of his projects had a tendency to do.'
Alan Taylor looks at the greatest novels never written.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-fight-to-finish