|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Wilbur Smith, big-game man
John Sutherland
Lions feed, falcons fly and eagles soar in Smith's violent, bestselling Afrocentric fiction |
 |
|
Lost in London
Lucy Dallas
Arnaud Cathrine's French novel about everyday Englishness explores a man's willed absence from his own life. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Sideways details
Elizabeth Lowry
David Malouf's male rites of passage, fugitive deflections and instinctive blind gestures. |
|
|
Down the generations
Sarah Curtis
Nina Bawden has delighted a wide readership since 1953. Now Virago has put her on their list of the "best-loved writers of the twentieth century". |
|
|
The figure at the window
Dinah Birch
Fear and pity combine in a new anthology of domestic spirits and the familiar dead. |
|
|
Thomas Pynchon and the myth of invisibility
Sophie Ratcliffe
Pynchon's new novel addresses the experience of being obliterated, and protests against loss – loss of life, loss of plot, but, in particular, the loss of the individual in a mass of capitalist greed. |
|
|
The thwarted fiction of Anna Kavan
Mark Crees
The life of Anna Kavan (1901-1968) was marred by mental breakdown and heroin addiction. Her work, meanwhile, has still to find the wider readership it deserves. |
|
|
Rebus's retirement
Tom Perrin
Ian Rankin's nineteenth novel featuring Detective Inspector John Rebus has a more than usually funereal feel to it. |
|
|
Neverland regained
Mick Imlah
The new sequel to J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, commissioned by Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital, is both more rigorous and more delightful than Geraldine McCaughrean's sponsors had cause to expect. |
|
|
Mr Writer Man
Deborah Friedell
Paul Auster's new homage to Paul Auster is another solipsistic bout of literary cross referencing. "The mainstay of Auster’s literary career is the subject of literary careerism." |
|
|
The man in the big car
James Campbell
In this third instalment of Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe sequence, readers can once again
revel in Frank's company, registering his comic bite into life as it comes at him. |
|
|
Breath was just another weapon
Bharat Tandon
After the "Technicolor knock-about" of his previous novel, Martin Amis returns almost to top form with his restrained story of the Gulag. |
|
|
John le Carré's allegiances
Michael Saler
Le Carré's entertaining new novel marks a return to the lean thrillers of his youth, but remains, as with all his fiction, "aimed at Fear and Trembling". |
|
|
Narratives of the mall
M. John Harrison
His frozen restlessness and significant metaphors are as prevalent as ever, but these days J. G. Ballard seems simultaneously unassuming and cranky. |
|
|
Edge of Armageddon
Siddhartha Deb
William Boyd turns back the clock in his atmospheric new novel |
|
|
