“Where do we come from? Where are we going?” Walter Kempowski’s final novel is encapsulated in these two questions. They sing an existential refrain throughout the entire text, like the chorus of a song. Faced with an uncertain future, Kempowski’s characters try to cling to fragments of the lives they once knew. A fractured, modernist Read More
This is not a read for the faint-hearted for two main reasons: the ghastly topic, and the sheer length of this melancholy novel. Five-hundred-and-sixty pages long, it tackles the difficult subjects of experimentation on and euthanasia of children in Austria during its annexation by Germany. Based on fact, this story is largely set in Am Read More
Every story begins in mystery. When we first sit down to read, the characters are strangers to us; events are yet to unfold. The weight of the unread pages rests comfortably in our hand: a promise of things to come. Few stories end with as many mysteries as they begin with, and fewer still with Read More
Paul Auster Faber & Faber; Hbk; £20 For an author whose work has always been concerned, above all else, with the idea that “the world is so unpredictable,” it seems no small irony that Paul Auster’s fiction has remained so rigidly formulaic over the entirety of his career. For years, anyone even remotely familiar with Read More
Mike McCormack (Canongate, 2016), pbk, £8.99 Gail Low
The ancient saying – ‘time and tide wait for no man’ – provides a poignant way to sum up Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13, a modern-day novel set in rural England. It is a novel that lures the reader in, with an opening scene detailing a search party for a missing thirteen-year-old girl, before beginning its Read More
With Autumn, Ali Smith has written a work of such layered ingenuity that I’ve placed a bet on it to win the Booker. Smith, who has an enviable awards pedigree to her name – winner of the Whitbread, Baileys, Costa and Goldsmiths prizes and twice previously Booker-nominated, is one of those rare authors whose published Read More
Zadie Smith is no stranger to a literary award shortlist, but her fifth novel, Swing Time, is a particularly intriguing nominee for this year’s Man Booker Prize. Skilfully tackling complex issues of race, class and identity, Swing Time firstly gives us an honest and engaging insight into these subjects through the eyes of a seven-year-old Read More
“And if the hare was made of myths then so too was the land at which she scratched.” Elmet is a contemporary novel, set in rural Yorkshire, yet it seems to take us to a different time and a different world. The reference to Ted Hughes’ poetry collection (Remains of Elmet) in the title of Read More
Kamila Shamsie’s seventh novel is a modern-day retelling of Sophocles’ Antigone. Though most of her novels have been decidedly international in flavour, Home Fire is a wholly British Greek tragedy. The complexities of incest and the law of god have been traded for the complexities of morality and the rule of state. A novel of Read More