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Posts tagged "Fiction"

I Married You for Happiness by Lily Tuck – review

An elegant novel about the anatomy of a marriage dwells more on art – and maths – than emotionThis novel is an elegant vigil – a long night's journey into day. A wife, Nina, sits with her husband, Philip, who has died of a heart attack. She waits...

Granta 118: Exit Strategies – review

Granta's latest collection explores the delights and horrors of entanglement and extricationHow do we move on when we lose what we love? How do we leave behind what we no longer love? What is the price of exiting and how far should we go to escape? Wha...

What We Talk About … by Nathan Englander

Nathan Englander returns to the short story form with a collection of unflinching talesNathan Englander's acclaimed first collection of stories, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (1999), was a serio-comic take on the clash of flesh and spirit, viewed ...

Eric Brown’s SF and fantasy choice – reviews

Tuf Voyaging by George RR Martin, Empire State by Adam Christopher, Hell Train by Christopher Fowler and The Devil's Elixir by Raymond KhouryTuf Voyaging by George RR Martin (Gollancz, £8.99)Martin began his writing career with a series of lyrical, r...

This Isn’t the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You by Jon McGregor

An audacious collection of short stories in which events come out of left fieldI was at a literary festival recently when an audience member asked the panel if they thought the short story would make a comeback in this country. I was surprised at the t...

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill

Week one: the storytellerThis is a ghost story, so we start with the storyteller. Literary critics rarely use this last term, preferring to talk of the "narrator". But when it comes to hauntings this traditional description is fitting. Arthur Kipps is ...

The Defence of the Book

To mark National Libraries Day, the novelist adds an extra scene to his 1998 satire England, England in which he imagines what happens when the 'National Coalition' closes every library down(As Sir Jack Pitman's project for a replica version of Englan...

Jacqueline Rose: a life in writing

'Victimhood is something that happens but when you turn it into an identity you're psychically and politically finished'One day, Jacqueline Rose came across a troubling passage in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. The narrator, Marcel, lies besid...

My father the superhero

A first marathon attempt at 58 years old wasn't enough. He had to run the entire distance wearing a cape. Then again, Michael Cox has never done things by halves"DO YOU WANT TO WATCH ME RUN AROUND THE FIELD?" said my dad (who is in the top 10 loudest m...

Mockingbird by Kathryn Erskine

Asperger's syndrome is dealt with sensitively in a 10-year-old's storyTen-year-old Caitlin Smith is doubly bereaved. Two years ago her mother died of cancer; now her beloved older brother Devon has been randomly murdered in a shooting at their American...

Rare Earth by Paul Mason

The first novel from Newsnight's economics editor is an enjoyable romp through ChinaIt's a conspiracy theorist's dream. One nation holds most of the planet's supply of "rare earths", the metals and alloys key to building many of the developed...

The White Lie by Andrea Gillies – review

A moving page-turner about the unreliability of personal historySome years ago, journalist Andrea Gillies was struggling to write a novel. The enemy of her promise was a full-time job; she was caring for her mother-in-law, who had Alzheimer's. The...

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