Fiction Reviews Archives - Page 98 of 120

Cover image for A Summer with Kim Novak by Hakan Nesser

A Summer with Kim Novak by Håkan Nesser (transl. Saskia Vogel): A Swedish period piece

2 December 2015 / 4 Comments

I have to admit to picking this up because it’s Swedish. I read it during what seemed to be a period of deep virtual immersion in Scandiland – watching the first series of The Legacy re-watching Borgen and reading Martin Booth’s excellent The Almost Nearly Perfect People squarely aimed at people like me who have […]

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Books Read (But Not Reviewed) November 2015

30 November 2015 / 8 Comments

Just two books worth recommending that I’ve read but not reviewed this month. Thanks are due to Jacqui at JacquiwinesJournals for pointing me in the direction of one of them – Daniela Krien’s Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything, set in 1991 in what was still the GDR during the summer before German reunification. Johannes

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A Kind of Compass (Edited by Belinda McKeon): A little cherry picking

27 November 2015 / 4 Comments

Regular readers may have noticed that I’ve taken to reviewing short stories recently but this is my first anthology. Previous reviews have all been of collections by a single author, one whose novels I love. Two things brought me to A Kind of Compass: firstly it’s edited by Belinda McKeon both of whose novels –

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Number 11 by Jonathan Coe: The Winshaws are back…

25 November 2015 / 8 Comments

Way back in the mid-‘90s, Jonathan Coe published What a Carve Up!, a wickedly funny satire on Thatcherism in which the Winshaw family had their fingers in a multitude of nasty pies. I was in bookselling at the time and my Penguin rep and good friend, A, gave me a proof, praising it to the

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A Ghost’s Story by Lorna Gibb: A matter of punctuation

20 November 2015 / 11 Comments

‘Tis the season of ghost stories. Halloween’s long past, I know but Christmas, when lots of us are cosily tucked up at home, offers the perfect opportunity for a few ghostly frissons. Lorna Gibb’s A Ghost’s Story is somewhat different from the more traditional scare-yourself-rigid variety such as Susan Hill’s splendidly terrifying The Woman in

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Katherine Carlyle by Rupert Thomson: A sense of belonging

18 November 2015 / 14 Comments

I’ve admired Rupert Thomson’s work for some time. His novels are never predictable, always exploring unexpected terrain from the advertising world, satirized in Soft!, to the Medici court in Secrecy‘s seventeenth century Florence. The last one’s my particular favourite. Famously, Davie Bowie’s is The Insult which appeared as one of his 100 Must-Read Books of

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The Clasp by Sloane Crosley: Growing up is hard to do

13 November 2015 / 10 Comments

Sloane Crosley has published two collections of essays including one with the wonderfully peevish title I Was Told There’d be Cake, or at least it sounds peevish to me which may tell you something about how I feel about cake and broken promises. The Clasp is her first novel, a classic comedy of manners in

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The Folly by Ivan Vladislavić: An apartheid allegory

11 November 2015 / 8 Comments

A couple of years ago I read and reviewed Ivan Vladislavić’s Double Negative. It’s his fourth novel but the first to be published in the UK. The Folly is his debut and entirely different from Double Negative. According to the book’s blurb, when it was published in Vladislavić’s native South Africa back in 1993 it

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Cover image for Spill Simmer Falter Wither by Sara Baume

Spill Simmer Falter Wither by Sara Baume: Spring summer autumn winter

6 November 2015 / 17 Comments

The trouble with marketing is its constant use of superlatives – too much hype. We’re all over familiar with ‘dazzling debuts’, ‘stunning achievements’ and the like so that when a book comes along that is truly original, absolutely dazzling, those descriptions ring hollow. Sara Baume’s Spill Simmer Falter Wither comes into that category for me.

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My Mother is a River by Donatella Di Pietrantonio (transl. Franca Scurti Simpson): Calisi Press – ‘Celebrating Italian women writers’

4 November 2015 / 12 Comments

I’m always a little uncomfortable when I get a review copy from a small publisher. I can’t guarantee that I’ll review it unless I think it’s worth recommending and those books cost money, time and effort to post out. It’s easy shrugging off the likes of Penguin Random House but small presses prick my conscience,

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Books Read (But Not Reviewed) in October 2015

2 November 2015 / 11 Comments

Bit of a thin month on the read (but not reviewed) front thanks to the sheer door-stopping size of one of the two books I finished. Philipp Meyer’s The Son was raved about last year – fulsome tweets were legion and it was a Waterstones Book Club choice, although presumably only for thoroughly committed readers

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