fiction
Hugh Barnes
In his mesmerising 2023 novel Brian, Jeremy Cooper told the story of a reclusive middle-aged council worker who is rescued from loneliness by watching nightly screenings at the National Film Theatre (before it was renamed the BFI Southbank a couple of years ago). It was “only in the cinema that he became a person,” the narrator says at one point of the eponymous hero’s celluloid journey. The work of Werner Herzog, Yasujiro Ozu, Agnès Varda and even Clint Eastwood, among others, seems to deepen his experience of living but doesn’t make him any less of an outsider.The same transformative power Read more ...
Claudia Bull
Is this person dead? It’s a wise question to ask yourself when reading George Saunders. In his Booker Prize-winning Lincoln in the Bardo, the answer doesn’t arrive until page three, where the narrator first mentions his confinement in a “sick box”. Not so with his new novel, Vigil, which opens:'What a lovely home I found myself plummeting toward, acquiring, as I fell, arms, hands, legs, feet, all of which, as usual, became more substantial with each passing second.'In life, Jill "Doll" Blaine was a limited woman, capable of directing her love only toward “those precious few with whom she had Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I was not a bad man. Nowhere near it. But they said I was anyway.”Makenna Goodman’s second novel (her first, The Shame, a brilliant exploration of motherhood, came out in 2020) is, on the surface, an account of a cancellation, though there’s nothing straightforwardly black or white about any of it. In fact Goodman seems to shy away from binary thought, which is refreshing, if sometimes confusing.It’s also about love, class, nature and the way we relate to it. It is structured like a six-act play, with monologues by four rather abstract protagonists: Man, Realtor, Helen and Wife. Its Read more ...
theartsdesk
Pop music and politics, fiction and fact, debut novels and posthumous publications: TAD’s reviewers reveal their best reads of 2025.
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The poet Tom Raworth passed away in 2017, leaving an irreconcilable space in the heart of contemporary British poetics. His is verse of swift wit, formal innovation, and biting critique: the weird inheritor of the British Poetry Revival’s serious-mindedness and Frank O’Hara’s sense of fun. Thankfully, this year Cancer (Carcanet, £12.99), a posthumous "lost book" of three sections: "Journal", "Logbook Read more ...
John Carvill
Thomas Pynchon is having a moment. Paul Thomas Anderson’s second Pynchon adaptation, One Battle After Another (loosely based on Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland), is a critical and commercial hit; and his new novel Shadow Ticket is garnering the sort of reviews and attention that generally tend to accrue to authors with much less of an aversion to playing the publicity game. For long-term Pynchon fans, this is heartening. Pynchon has never really gotten the recognition he deserves, compared with what critics would consider the big hitters of post-WWII US fiction. This despite the fact that Read more ...
Helen Tyson
Writing in her diary just over 100 years ago on 19th June 1923, Virginia Woolf wrote: “In this book I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity; I want to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense”.Set on a hot day in London in the middle of June in 1923, Mrs Dalloway might at first appear to be about very little – a middle-aged woman and survivor of the 1918 influenza pandemic, Clarissa Dalloway, wife to a conservative MP, is going to give a party. She buys some flowers; she repairs her green silk dress; she has a Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Many readers and writers think of epistolary novels as old-fashioned, just as letter writing itself can seem a bit quaint nowadays. The genre became popular during the 18th and 19th centuries following the success of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1749) and of later Gothic novels like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).Unsurprisingly, however, it began to fizzle out after the invention of the telephone. In 1984, the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg published her epistolary novel The City and the House (La città e la casa), and the action, such as it is Read more ...
Leila Greening
One Boat, Jonathan Buckley’s 13th novel, captures a series of encounters at the water’s edge: characters converge like trailing filaments on the shoreline, lightly touching, their eventual separation assumed. Through this, Buckley pays profound attention to what otherwise might be inconsequential moments of connection, their soft, contemplative intimacies and banal departures.In the wake of her father’s death, a woman returns to the small Greek town where she mourned her mother nine years earlier. The narratives of her two trips are interwoven, as the events of the second provoke reflections Read more ...
India Lewis
Anglo-Irish author Catherine Airey’s first novel, Confessions, is a puzzle, a game of family secrets played through the generations. Set partly in New York and partly in a small town in Donegal, the book moves back and forth through time and space becoming, in the process, a compulsive read: a fascinating Russian nesting doll of family trauma.There are obvious cliches in the familial "saga" genre, which at times can make the book feel a little artificial, but it’s nonetheless a fascinating, often heartbreaking tale. We open with the traumatic loss of the Cora’s father in the chaos of 9/11. Read more ...
Jack Barron
Jon Fosse talks a lot about thinking. He also thinks – hard – about talking. His prolific and award-winning career in poetry, prose, and drama, might be said, in fact, to unfold a digressive single thought, uttered always in a characteristically reflective and deceptively simple grammar: "thinks" and "says" are the main verbs of this thought, the syntactic centres around which he constructs his gently serious investigations into the life and limits of various verbal worlds.His books – "novel", "novella", or "short story" can seem aptly unjust – make repeated returns to the edges of Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
In Alan Hollinghurst’s first novel, The Swimming Pool Library (1988), set during the summer of 1983, the young gay narrator, William Beckwith, lives in Holland Park. That same year and location furnish the setting of the first part of Hollinghurst’s third novel, his masterpiece, The Line of Beauty (2004), in which the young gay hero, Nick Guest, becomes a lodger – a guest – in the house of a recently elected Tory MP, Gerald Fedden, whose son Toby he’d fancied at Oxford.Nick loses his virginity with a young black man called Leo in the bushes of a communal garden behind the Feddens’ house, Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Anyone who has been on a British train in the last ten years will have been irritated to distraction by the inane and ubiquitous “See it, say it, sorted” announcement that punctuates every journey, but only Jonathan Coe has channelled that annoyance into literary form.A satire on contemporary Britain, an analysis of the political tectonics of the last 40 years, a thoughtful meditation on why writers write – The Proof of My Innocence is all these things, but its starting point is a howl of rage about the fact we can’t just enjoy a quiet train journey any more.Coe operates partly through Read more ...