We learn about the murder of the Chopra clan’s shifty, crude, charismatic patriarch Laxman in the opening pages of The Complex. Twenty-five years have passed, but the stain on this once-respectable Punjabi family... Read more »
When Emmanuel Carrère’s mother, Hélène, died in 2023, at the age of 94, President Macron spoke at her memorial. She had been “perpetual secretary” of the Académie Française, in effect its head, and... Read more »
Something is happening to literary time. In the last fortnight I’ve read new or forthcoming novels about a mirror universe where history runs backwards (The Understory, Chloe Benjamin), an agency that offers... Read more »
Can Nothing Save Us? by Irvine Welsh review – US family saga is a late-career triumph | Irvine Welsh
“Why expect unconditional love from somebody you’ve brought into a fucked, dying planet, who then has to sit around and watch you screw it up even more?” So muses twentysomething college dropout Luke Ayrton... Read more »
It’s the year 2049 and Daniel Connelly is 75 years old. Eccentric and lonely after decades of self-imposed isolation, his existence is “spartan”, a “relentless searching, a yearning for pieces that fit... Read more »
The debut novel by Claire Lynch, which won the Nero Gold prize for fiction last month, unfolds across two timelines as it tells of family secrets and a bitter divorce. The first... Read more »
The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz is famously credited with the line: “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” In contemporary European literature, a book these days is... Read more »
Australian author Madeleine Gray’s award-winning debut novel Green Dot was a smart, funny tale of a doomed office affair. Her new novel, Chosen Family, is a smart, funny tale of a complicated,... Read more »
Andalucía is famous for its variety: high alpine mountains and snow-capped peaks, river plains and rolling olive groves, sun-baked coastlines and arid deserts. It is the perfect setting for Neil Rollinson’s debut... Read more »