After a problematic start, Andrei Makine is getting better with every new book. His earlier setbacks were partly due to the snobbery of the French, who did not believe that a Russian could write better than they could in their own language. When...
Mantel won the Booker Prize twice: the first was for her 2009 novel Wolf Hall, a fictional account of Thomas Cromwell's rise to power in the court of Henry VIII, and the second was for its 2012 sequel Bring Up the Bodies. The third instalment of the...
Best remembered for his sensational bestselling novels of the 1930s, James M. Cain may well be one of the most important, yet still misunderstood, of American authors. Among other writers and for certain critics, his reputation and singularity are...
Award-winning author Sylvain Neuvel explores an immigration dystopia in The Test
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Britain, the not-too-distant future.
Idir is sitting the British Citizenship Test.
He wants his family to belong.
Twenty-five questions to...
An expatriate professor, Vega, returns from exile in Canada to El Salvador for his mother’s funeral. A sensitive idealist and an aggrieved motor mouth, he sits at a bar with the author, Castellanos Moya, from five to seven in the evening, telling...
A novel set in Dublin in the mid-1980s — a city in the grip of recession and a heroin epidemic. Narrated by Declan, the only boy of a tight-knit writing group at Trinity College, it tells of their fascination with the formidably talented but...
Kseniya Melnik's Snow in May introduces a cast of characters bound by their relationship to the port town of Magadan in Russia's Far East, a former gateway for prisoners assigned to Stalin’s forced-labor camps. Comprised of a surprising mix of...
Andrew Durbin’s Mature Themes is a hybrid text of poetry, art criticism, and memoir focused on the subject of disingenuity — and what constitutes "personal experience" both online and IRL when to "go deep" in a culture of so many unreliable...
Aliens of Affection marks new territory for Padgett Powell, picking up where his first collection of stories, Typical, left off. Although his characters continue to revolt against the received instructions of modern American living-refusing to be...
McGahern's command of the short story places him among the finest practitioners of the form, in a lineage that runs from Chekhov through Joyce and the Anglo-American masters. When the collection was first published in 1992, the Sunday Times said...