A one-sitting read is typically the domain of the short story – a form that largely depends on a reader’s pure, unbroken attention. But there is something special about the intensity of... Read more »
Sublimation by Isabel J Kim (Picador, £18.99)This debut novel from an award-winning Korean-American short fiction writer is a fantastical reimagining of the immigrant experience. Here, anyone who crosses a border not intending... Read more »
The summer of 1976 calls to my generation of novelists. We don’t remember it, but we remember the textures of daily life in that era, and a heatwave puts daily life under... Read more »
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 »