A stinging dissection of wealth, class and the media, Natasha Brown’s satire begins with a man named Jake gazing at a gold bar he has found at a farm in West Yorkshire.... Read more »
In his opening paragraph, Philip Hensher declares that a novel not only “tells a good story” but is a good story in itself. We could extend that neat formula to include this... Read more »
Frazer and Caitlin have been emotionally entwined since schooldays. Now in their mid-20s, and parents of a five-year-old, they live in a grotty flat in a Scottish new town – the faded... Read more »
When I Give You My Silence was published in Spanish in 2023 its author, the Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, rightly predicted that it would be his final novel. He died... Read more »
‘But after all, writing is nothing more than a guided dream,” wrote Jorge Luis Borges. Dreams and dreaming are fertile concerns for Rosalind Belben, too. Her fourth book, originally published in 1979... Read more »
The world of Sky City never quite settles beneath your feet. The action of Jacqueline Crooks’s second novel unfolds in a recognisable 1990s London, yet everything seems subtly untethered from reality: a... Read more »
The Salt King by by Natasha Pulley (Gollancz, £22)The latest from the author of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street blends an apocalyptic end-of-the-world tale with folk horror and two slowly developing love... Read more »
In 2009, the tech billionaire Peter Thiel published an essay with the portentous title The Education of a Libertarian, in which he announced: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”... Read more »
A memoir chronicling the comic and broadcaster John Robins’s life in alcohol and his subsequent path to sobriety, Thirst is structured around the drinks that changed his life. There’s the bottle of... Read more »