“Imagine carrying a glass, full to the brim, around for thirty-six weeks without spilling a drop. Caution, care, a contrived and fragile serenity.” This is Douglas Petersen’s description of the second pregnancy of his wife Connie. Having endured the heart-breaking loss of a daughter first time around, it is easy to see how this phrase Read More
Siri Hustvedt’s latest novel, The Blazing World, unspools itself messily in the mind of the reader. A tangle of testimonies, it purports to be an academic’s attempt to reconstruct the life of ‘Harriet Burden’, a minor New York artist and widow of Felix Lord, a wealthy art dealer. Lord and Burden – therein lies the Read More
As the first fifty or so pages of Joshua Ferris’ third novel flow easily through the neurotic first person narration of Paul O’Rourke, a dentist consumed with equal parts disdain and longing for normal social interaction, you might suddenly realise, nothing has happened yet. Yet this first section is an absolute delight, bursting with inventive Read More
An unnamed lawyer messes up his professional and by extension private life in New York, and so takes up a job offer in Dubai to escape from it, a venture that ultimately fails. The Dog reads like one gigantic, long-winded anecdote, a fact not helped by its excessive use of brackets (sometimes amounting up to Read More
Offred, in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian The Handmaid’s Tale, passes the execution Wall one day and sees dangling corpses marked with the letter ‘J’ in red: ‘It doesn’t mean Jewish, those would be yellow stars […] So the J isn’t for Jew.’ Howard Jacobson has now built an entire fictional world on this word beginning with Read More
Revivals of First World War literature have been in plentiful supply throughout 2014, though few are as conceptually charged as Trevor Royle’s latest offering. From the “doldrums” of the Kailyard – the rural arcadia that had become intrinsically linked with the nation’s written word – Royle’s introductory essay alleges that war sparked an identifiably Scottish Read More
Butterflies in November is a sweet, kooky novel. In it, the unnamed narrator, who can translate between Icelandic and “11 other languages” is rejected by her lover, divorced by her husband; she also wins two lotteries, and drives around Iceland’s ring road in November. This is a novel invested in the interplay between reading, living, Read More
“The nation holds it breath, awaiting the cataclysm. Nothing happens. The nation breathes out in anti-climax. They go back to what passes for normal. Around here they’re more normal still…it’s the riverside cacophony that insulates them”. So begins the Second World War in Articles of Faith, no more than “distant tremors” from “that vague entity” Read More
This collection of fourteen short stories from Rodge Glass is refreshingly acerbic, inventive and cynical. Although most of the stories have been published previously, and separately, they have been brought together here very effectively, and are supplemented with selected poetry and artwork, as well as a handful of new stories. All of the stories follow Read More
“Suburban noir” is a growing sub-genre in American crime fiction, fuelled by the success of TV series such as Desperate Housewives and Breaking Bad. And When She Was Good makes a welcome contribution to this trend, though an uneven one. In the afterword to the novel, Laura Lippman claims that she wanted Heloise Lewis, the Read More