Sigrid Nunez’s ninth novel, The Vulnerables, emerges from the words of others. The first line comes not from the narrator herself, but from another work she now barely recalls. From there it’s... Read more »
When The Nix, Nathan Hill’s debut novel, hit the bookshops in 2016, you could almost hear the collective intake of breath. How could any writer produce such a multilayered, time-jumping, character-hopping, consistently... Read more »
Vincent Deary is a clinical and academic specialist in fatigue, in the ways in which we might be mentally and physically spent by life. This book, part memoir of his working practice,... Read more »
Set in Malaysia between 1935 and 1945, Vanessa Chan’s impressive and assured debut offers a little-told perspective on a turbulent period of history. Inspired by her own grandparents’ experiences under British colonial... Read more »
Let the Light Pour In is “an experiment in hope”. For 10 years, the My Name Is Why author had been rising at dawn each day, writing a poem and posting it... Read more »
Jonathan Glover’s new book, on the seemingly intractable nature of the Israel-Palestine conflict, quotes George Orwell on the Spanish civil war: “Everybody believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in... Read more »
You might think, with the completion of the Human Genome Project 20 years ago now, and the discovery of the double helix enjoying its 70th birthday this year, that we actually know how... Read more »
“When you travel as a girl, you don’t learn anything about the world. All you learn is that there’s a way of looking at the world that doesn’t belong to you,” says twentysomething... Read more »
The Irish writer Cathy Sweeney’s short fiction has been widely praised, her prose likened to that of Samuel Beckett and Lydia Davis. Her blistering debut novel, Breakdown, displays an impressive economy of... Read more »