'Geoff Ryman's new novel is swift, smart and convincing. Air is a wonderful and frightening examination of old and new, and survival on the interface between'. – Greg Bear
'This is a liminal book: its characters are on the threshold of something...
"Headlong, heartsick and footsore…Frisbee sentences that sail, spin, hover, circle and come back to the reader like gifts of gravity and grace…Nobody writes better than Dave Eggers about young men who aspire to be, at the same time, authentic...
In recent years serial killer novels and films have become something of a cliche. It's a genre which has been done to death with only a few works standing above the herd. So Hawksmoor was a very refreshing change. A novel set in London, with two...
This stunning second novel from Desai (Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard) is set in mid-1980s India, on the cusp of the Nepalese movement for an independent state. Jemubhai Popatlal, a retired Cambridge-educated judge, lives in Kalimpong, at the...
Sarah Waters’ fourth novel, The Night Watch, is set in 1940s London, during and after the Second World War, and is an innovative departure from her previous three lesbian Victorian historical fictions. Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999)...
The Book of Evidence is a 1989 novel by the Irish author John Banville. The book is narrated by Freddie Montgomery, a 38 year old scientist, who murders a servant girl during an attempt to steal a painting from a neighbor. Freddie is an aimless...
One part Nietzsche, one part Humbert Humbert, and a soupcon of Milton's Lucifer, Axel Vander, the dizzyingly unreliable narrator of John Banville's masterful new novel, is very old, recently widowed, and the bearer of a fearsome reputation as a...
In a brilliant illumination of the Renaissance mind, acclaimed Irish novelist John Banville re-creates the life of Johannes Kepler and his incredible drive to chart the orbits of the planets and the geometry of the universe. Wars, witchcraft, and...
In the Tripoli of 1979, nine-year-old Sulaiman considers the origins of mulberries. They are, he decides, "the best fruit God has created", and imagines young angels conspiring to plant a crop on earth when they hear that Adam and Eve are being...