Madwomen in the Attic
A novelistic exploration of Miss Havisham before Dickens got hold of her irresistibly recalls Jean Rhys’s brilliant work in the classic prequel genre.
Dispatches from the Island
Jonathan Franzen inextricably links writing to survival, to that which sustains life and keeps boredom and demise at bay.
THE END OF DAYS
Barbara Kingsolver presents a story of American rural life in which ecological concern is balanced with a fine feeling for the texture of actual lives.
Island Sickness
Long divided, Argentines finally found national unity under the leadership of the continent’s most murderous regime and its campaign to retake the Malvinas.
The Inside Man
An unorthodox, non-doctrinaire leftist, Gore Vidal tended to make would-be political allies uncomfortable and was not an easy individual with whom to make common cause.
NAUGHTY BUT NICE
Jane Austen inherited a tradition in which the novel was expected to teach good behaviour. But that was not what interested her. Her fictions are less moral examples than celebrations of wit and intelligence.
ADDLED BY BOOKS
Enrique Vila-Matas plays some complex games with literature and characters yet any threat of heaviness is redeemed by his assured comic touch and fine sense of the ridiculous.
THE MAGIC’S GONE
JK Rowling’s new adult novel has more characters than are good for it. It’s also a little difficult to care too much about them.
THE HOUSE OF CARDS
László Krasznahorkai’s novels are balanced between a precarious inertia and total collapse. The animating tension of his work resides not, as is the case in more conventional novels, in questions of who did what or what happens next, but in the question of what such a total collapse might look like, given the pervading sense of its inevitability.
Belonging And Becoming
It would seem that it was in Beckett that he found the literary model for a kind of narrative based on a deconstruction of received knowledge, on doubt as an instrument of style that could be inserted into an historical reconstruction, and, indeed, for a defence of the individual person and an openness to a visionary spirituality.