Ever Since We Small opens in Bihar, India in 1899. Jayanti dreams of a woman offering her bracelets. Within days, her husband becomes sick and dies. Widowhood is not an option and... Read more »
There is a long tradition of stories about artists that are also about the question of how to represent life in art; novels about artists with toxic female friendships are more unusual.... Read more »
The time loop story, in which characters repeatedly relive the same span of time, has become synonymous with the 1993 film Groundhog Day, but the idea has much older roots. In PD... Read more »
Circular Motion Alex Foster (Grove)Alex Foster’s novel treats climate catastrophe through high-concept satire. A new technology of super-fast pods revolutionises travel: launched into low orbit from spring-loaded podiums, they fly west and... Read more »
There aren’t many giants of 20th-century literature still writing, but 2025 saw the first novel in 12 years from American great Thomas Pynchon, now in his late 80s: Shadow Ticket (Jonathan Cape) is a typically... Read more »
British-Ukrainian writer Marina Lewycka has posthumously been named the winner of the Vintage Bollinger prize, a winner-of-winners award marking the 25th anniversary of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction. The... Read more »
We Do Not PartHan Kang, translated by e yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris (Hamish Hamilton)The Korean 2024 Nobel laureate combines the strangeness of The Vegetarian and the political history in Human Acts... Read more »
The Ferryman and His Wife by Frode Grytten, translated by Alison McCullough (Serpent’s Tail, £12.99)On the last day of his life – how does he know? He just does – Norwegian ferryman... Read more »
“I had become a living cliche: the cantankerous bookseller,” the narrator declares a third of the way through John Tottenham’s debut novel. “No book or movie that included a scene set in... Read more »