Review of the 2011 debut novel by Ben Lerner in which a young American goes to Spain on the US…
Canonical fodder about a little boy with a man’s mind, who becomes a fully grown man in a little boy’s…
Traitor? Spy? Loyal American or self-serving amoralist? Howard W Campbell Jr tries to write his own get out of jail…
King Charles, Oliver Cromwell, a vagrant narrator, hedge mazes and dreaded puritans – Jeanette Winterson goes historical fiction on us again…
Hans Erich Nossack’s rare first person account of the 1943 destruction of Hamburg is served with a side of WG…
An interview with author, professor and psychoanalyst Josh Cohen, spy of our inner selves, examiner of the lies we live,…
Is there anything better than the story of a master forger? If there is, I don’t know it. This time…
Things are not what they appear to be, and not even what they appear later to be. Foxes are animals…
Enter the eminently other world of Malte Laurids Brigge – and don’t plan on coming back in one piece. The…
Did we like this novel? What does it mean to like? What is our past, really, if we continue to…
‘They believe what they say in the moment they say it.’ And then the moment is gone, and someone’s stuck with…
The Messiah is coming! His arrival is imminent! That’s the bad news. The good news is his arrival and social…
Feel like making glove?? That’s not a typo. This week we discuss perhaps the best passage in any of Philip…
A novel that says it’s based on Wuthering Heights is taking a risk – because Wuthering Heights is a crazy…
St Matthew is going to poke out your eyes. Or some such. After what seemed like a millennium of exile…
Like a precocious fireballer at top of the prospect rankings … a kid who has shown so much promise and…
Everything’s more or less normal in the little town of N until Piotr Stepanovich and his equally psychopathic sidekick, Nikolai…
From particle physics to market predictions, we thought scientists, right or wrong, traded in the world of facts. What we…
Morbidly obese misery of a writer – and Nobel Laureate (topical) – more than meets his match in the slender…
One man goes against the system he helped create and the results are not encouraging. Koestler fictionalizes the Moscow Show…
A novel that includes displaced persons, new countries, war, Cyprus, the OED, Venice, Blood Libel and Othello – this should…
Fall forward into one of the stranger stories you’ll encounter this year – or any other. Maxi, a young man…
Gauss and Humboldt set off to the same destination in opposite directions and unfortunately this novel was written about it.…
At the end of his days, sitting in his villa outside Rome, the Emperor Hadrian writes a long letter to…
The name Michael Arlen will mean nothing to most readers but Arlen was once the cream of the jazz age…
One of the world’s great authors goes back in time and space – from the Jerusalem of the 1940s to…
Author David Lodge stars as his thinly disguised protagonist, Old Man Bates, who is entering retirement, uselessness, and, worst of…
Can’t seem to shake the memoirs thing . . . This time it’s James Joyce writing about himself as the…
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A history of one aspect of the Nazi genocide is brought to present day Parisian suburbs via a massacre in…
Spare parts make up the engine of this rickety ride from here to there. One solipsistic young man from England…
Medical intern sent by boss to spy on a painter named of Strauch. What the intern finds is the gaping…
Pinneberg is the Little Man; What Now is what everyone is asking at the outset of the Depression, when this…
The real life murder mystery of a CBS reporter is foreground and backdrop for a modern day high school student…
Hartmann and Fibitch arrived in England as refugees on the Kindertransport and then they had had wives and children and…
Monk on the run in 14th Century England has more to worry about than building himself a time machine to…
Tender Asher Lev has a gift – he can draw exceptionally well – and a drive to be an artist.…
Mordecai Richler CC (January 27, 1931 – July 3, 2001) was a Canadian writer. His best known works are The…
In the quiet Jura region of France, a physician goes completely haywire in a series of crimes that are hard…
Important news from Eric!
New Jersey stands in for Algeria, not that Frank Bascombe would have noticed, living the good life and everything’s okay…
Part Two of Ghosh’s ‘Ibis’ Trilogy looks at the run-up to the Opium Wars. From Bombay to Canton, Mauritius to…
Jan and Dirk were inseparable as teenagers, right up till the moment they separated. That didn’t end the friendship, though,…
Elena is friends with Lila, whom hurts Elena in all kinds of ways that Elena finds fascinating, and painful. Slums,…
Part one of Pat Barker’s justly renowned trilogy about WWI (re)introduces us to Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, Dr…
Somebody please hand me a glossary of terrible non-puns from the 1910s, although no post-rationalisation is going to save this…
A sliver of a book unfolds as a triptych, brilliant and beautiful, the subtlest of writing making the greatest of…
Part One of the Doyle’s The Last Roundup charts the raising, rising and falling of Henry Smart, scamp of Dublin,…
A heavyweight tale in featherweight prose. A beautiful story about a boy who slips away into adulthood. A ghost story…
The man who keeps surviving terrorist attacks and the person who is determined to finish him off once and for…
Permanent winter in a desert climate, a dentist with no face, a woman finding material wealth in the midst of…
Is it a novel? Memoirs? A book of geology? Anthopology? Marine Biology? Yes yes yes.
Interview with Todd Hasak-Lowy – author and translator of novels from Hebrew to English, including Dror Burstein’s Netanya – with…
From King David (aka Kid Bethlehem) to Meyer Lansky via Bugsy Siegel, and the many pulled in their wake, a…
A soldier reflects on a just-finished mission to systematically round up and expel those left behind in the small village…
Start a story that never began and won’t end, spreading like chill to everything made of words, the kind of…