Defoe's little-known 1722 pseudo-history holds startling parallels with our own plague year of COVID-19. Based on his uncle Henry Foe's diaries, a London saddler who remained in the capital during the 1665 outbreak of the Great Plague of London, the novel [...]
"Call him Samuel Bennett." Dylan implores of his reader, echoing surely, "Call me Ishmael," from Melville's Moby Dick, another protagonist whose agency is faded in favour of adventure. This unfinished collection of stories by Dylan Thomas captures a strange young man's [...]
The Map and The Territory is a pastiche in the true sense of the word. Using Wikipedia, maps, quotes, and works of art – and even a fictional version of himself, playing himself – Houellebecq’s fifth novel nearly got him into [...]
Joan Didion, if you are not familiar, is a challenging sort of fiction read. Simply put, she makes her own awkward rules, which for the most part, work perfectly. But don't expect to understand them the first time around. Writing fiction [...]
The day I finished reading this book I rounded a corner at Liberty at the back of Picadilly and nearly ran slap bang into the actor Bill Nighy wrapped in an expensively tight suit and French-tied scarf. He was a lot [...]
Scarlett Thomas has got a fair bit of crap for this book from readers. It doesn’t appear to read as the same hand as the wonderful “The End of Mr. Y”. It’s awkwardly written, and incredibly long. It’s chaotic, and hasn’t [...]
There is a temptation to label this book a “cosy mystery”, given it is about small-town murder. But this study of tightly-coiled female energy between three women, a mother and two sisters from a dysfunctional Old South family, disqualifies it from [...]
Hilary Mantel’s interests, apart from the Tudors, include ghosts and the haunted. She also used to be a social worker. This mix is brought together in a weird semi-autobiographical plot involving four characters and their reactions to a haunted house, and [...]
An unnamed female protagonist talks through her journey to find out what has happened to her father, who lives, and has gone missing, in the far northern wilds of Alaska. Instead of going alone, she’s made the flippant decision to take [...]
Paradise is the confessional of Hannah, an alcoholic whose time-slips and blackouts have made her job as a fruit box saleswoman impossible. She loses her company car and job, and sets about getting drunk yet again. The book opens with Hannah [...]