In 2018 Daisy Johnson was the youngest writer ever to be shortlisted for the Booker prize, for her debut novel Everything Under, a gender-fluid reimagining of the Oedipus myth involving canal boat communities... Read more »
A gynaecological examination is a good analogy for the kind of painful self-inspection at which Queenie Jenkins excels. The heroine of Candice Carty-Williams’s 2019 debut Queenie memorably begins that novel with a medical... Read more »
Maurice Gee won over young New Zealand readers 40 years ago with his Halfmen of O trilogy (1982–85)—a Kiwi Narnia where the magical world lies on the other side of an abandoned... Read more »
Father Alberto and the Flying Girl by Timothy X Atack review – a fable of medieval madness | Fiction
In 1474, in a fictional location in southern Europe, Father Alberto arrives from Jormel Abbey, where he has failed in his ambition to become a manuscript illuminator at their renowned scriptorium. He... Read more »
Midway through his firecracker of a debut, 2020’s The Young Team, Graeme Armstrong hurls the reader into an exuberant account of a rave, from protagonist Azzy’s pre-party pharmaceutical prep, through the resulting... Read more »
American writer Ben Lerner has won this year’s Orwell prize for political fiction for Transcription, a novel exploring technology and memory. In nonfiction, the prize went to Karen Bartlett for The Escape... Read more »
Birth. “A detaching, a loosening of something, then the pain of it.” A small, curled and crinkled creature is wrested from that pain. But then, instead of the long-awaited cry of a... Read more »
The plot of A Little Bit Bad sounds like the setup for a joke: “Like, this white lady lusting after her hot Chicano roofer?” Perdita Jungfrau, the narrator, is describing her own... Read more »
At 33, the French writer Édouard Louis has already seen all seven of his slim novels translated into English. In his breakout debut, The End of Eddy (2017), and again in Change... Read more »