Kate Kellaway
Was it an Accident?
Margaret Atwood is one of the most brilliant and unpredictable novelists alive. She is always putting her past behind her: her novels share no family likeness. It is strange to recall her early books, such as Surfacing and The Edible Woman. They were slender and graceful – and very much a young writer’s work. But Atwood has gone on to greater things. Now even her style is impossible to second-guess: The Robber Bride (1993) was fast and loose; Alias Grace (1997) – short-listed for the Booker Prize – was more literary, decorous, researched. The two had only one thing in common: they were compulsive reads.
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
This 'jaunty narrative raises fundamental questions about the role of popular history. Should this just be a matter of telling tales, as the general public often seems to think?'
@DrLRoach weighs up Charles Spencer's account of the White Ship Disaster.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/wholl-take-the-helm
'Amis clearly belongs to the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do school of pedagogy. More or less everything he says is demonstrably contradicted by elements of his own work, be they here or elsewhere.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/never-without-a-hitch
'The bar is set high at the outset, and readers are primed to wonder if Mikhail can make his case.'
Does Alan Mikhail's new life of the Sultan Selim I really overturn 'shibboleths that have held sway for a millennium'? Caroline Finkel investigates.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-of-the-universe-3