LITERARY FICTION By Claire Allfree For The Daily Mail Published: 22:03 BST, 15 April 2021 | Updated: 22:03 BST, 15 April 2021 LEAN FALL STAND by Jon McGregor (Fourth Estate £14.99, 288 pp) LEAN FALL STAND by Jon McGregor (Fourth Estate £14.99, 288 pp) Jon McGregor’s latest has the most thrilling beginning I’ve read in … Read more
MY PHANTOMS by Gwendoline Riley (Granta £12.99, 208 pp) MY PHANTOMS by Gwendoline Riley (Granta £12.99, 208 pp) You don’t read Gwendoline Riley to be cheered up, but even by her standards, My Phantoms is bleak. It’s a portrait of a mother/daughter relationship, although narrator Bridget, the daughter in the equation, is scarcely more forthcoming … Read more
In Jane Austen’s Footsteps With Gyles Brandreth Rating: This Is My House Rating: Life wasn’t so different a couple of hundred years ago. Sunseekers rushed to the beach on the first warm day in spring — and because bathing costumes hadn’t been invented, they all went skinny-dipping. There were riots on the streets of Bristol, … Read more
In Jane Austen’s Footsteps With Gyles Brandreth Rating: This Is My House Rating: Life wasn’t so different a couple of hundred years ago. Sunseekers rushed to the beach on the first warm day in spring — and because bathing costumes hadn’t been invented, they all went skinny-dipping. There were riots on the streets of Bristol, … Read more
LITERARY FICTION By Claire Allfree For The Daily Mail Published: 22:02 GMT, 25 March 2021 | Updated: 22:54 GMT, 25 March 2021 A LONELY MAN by Chris Power (Faber £14.99, 320 pp) A LONELY MAN by Chris Power (Faber £14.99, 320 pp) Well-constructed spy stories about lost and lonely men are a rarity these days. … Read more
‘Pride & Prejudice – just a bunch of people going to each other’s houses’: People reveal their favourite damning critiques of classic literature Chloe Ellen from Glasgow, racked up 33,000 retweets on thread of book reviews Posting on Twitter, shared a hilarious one star critique of Pride and Prejudice Others quickly contributed the amusing literary … Read more
Amid the recent publicity blitz for his latest novel, Kazuo Ishiguro voiced fears that so-called ‘cancel culture’ had made younger novelists afraid to take imaginative risks
Edward St Aubyn’s first novel since Dunbar, his reimagining of King Lear, begins deep in the Sussex countryside, where biologist Francis is charged with the rewilding of a grand estate.
LITERARY FICTION By Anthony Cummins For The Daily Mail Published: 22:00 GMT, 25 February 2021 | Updated: 22:00 GMT, 25 February 2021 ACTS OF DESPERATION by Megan Nolan ACTS OF DESPERATION by Megan Nolan (Cape £14.99, 288 pp) (Cape £14.99, 288 pp) Should we be worried that so many exciting new female novelists write about … Read more
History The Crichel Boys by Simon Fenwick (Constable £25, 368 pp) Holed up in a freezing Army camp in the far north of Scotland in 1941, the shivering and lonely young music critic Desmond Shawe-Taylor dreamed up the idea of living down South with like-minded friends after the war. He envisaged a pretty house with … Read more