The Promise by Damon Galgut - review by David Isaacs - Literary …
WEBThe Uncle Charles Principle ‘entails writing about someone much as that someone would choose to be written about’. In his strange, skilful, spellbinding eighth novel, The Promise, the South African author Damon Galgut modifies this principle. Galgut’s third-person narrator swings, like Joyce’s, effortlessly from character to character ...
To Catch a King: Charles II’s Great Escape - Literary Review
WEBBy Charles Spencer. William Collins 314pp £20. On an autumn day in 1680, the 50-year-old Charles II charged Samuel Pepys with an unusual task. Over two three-hour sittings, one on a Sunday evening, the next the following Tuesday morning, the king related to him in great detail his personal recollections of the six weeks he had spent as a ...
Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris - review by Sam Kitchener
WEBSep 1, 2022 · The ‘act of oblivion’ in the title of Robert Harris’s latest novel is in its most straightforward sense the Indemnity and Oblivion Act introduced by Charles’s government. The act granted pardons – with some exceptions – to anyone who committed crimes during the Civil War, or the Interregnum that spanned the years between the ...
Treacle Walker by Alan Garner - review by Felix Taylor - Literary …
WEBA lan Garner is best known for the fantasy novels he wrote in the 1960s, which drew on the oral traditions and enchanted landscapes of the Cheshire village of Alderley Edge. These have made him a much-loved and respected voice in modern literature. His first novel, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, lodged itself strangely in the minds of the children who read it, and although Garner has since ...
Middle England by Jonathan Coe - review by Mark Lawson
WEBThe major creative decision in each instalment of sequential fiction is which old characters to keep and what new ones to introduce. True to the passage of time, Coe kills off one of the known personae, whose funeral appears in the prologue. Happily, Benjamin Trotter, whom Coe has admitted is an alter ego, survives, now in his early fifties ...
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro - review by Julian Barnes
WEBBy Kazuo Ishiguro. Faber 245pp £11.99. Kazuo Ishiguro has been widely praised for his ‘Japanese’ virtues as a writer: delicacy, subtlety, quiet irony, watercolour tones, etc. The fact that he was born in Japan and set his first two novels there makes such ethno-critical diagnosis easier. On the other hand, the listed qualities could just ...
The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That ...
WEBW ith The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman might be said to have invented a completely new genre: true-crime literary criticism, which is not to be confused with truly criminal literary criticism, which, of course, is most literary criticism. The Real Lolita is, by any measure, a unique and very peculiar book.. The sad real-life story of Sally Horner, as recounted by Weinman, goes like this.
The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading
WEBSep 1, 2024 · The answer, of course, lies somewhere in between. Sam Leith, in The Haunted Wood, plots a clear course through the thickets, in what he dubs a study of ‘childhood reading’ rather than of children’s books per se. He employs a (generally) chronological structure, identifying the links that connect the British canon (including one or …
Interview with Angela Carter - review by John Haffenden
WEBBorn in 1940, Angela Carter has published eight novels including The Magic Toyshop (1967, John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Several Perceptions (1968, Somerset Maugham Award), Love (1971), The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), and The Passion of New Eve (1977); two collections of short stories, Fireworks (1974) and The Bloody Chamber (1979, Cheltenham Festival of Literature Award).
The Trees by Percival Everett - review by Houman Barekat
WEBInflux Press 335pp £9.99. Percival Everett’s The Trees is a strange beast. Part police procedural, part black comedy, the novel is both irreverently silly and deadly serious. It begins in the cruelly named one-horse town of Money, Mississippi, where a white man and a black man are found dead. The former has been garrotted and mutilated; his ...