Lost in allegory: The Wall, by John Lanchester, reviewed
Dystopian fiction continues to throng the bookshelves, for all the world as though we weren’t living in a dystopia already,…
What links fairy tales, Karl Marx, Anne Frank and St Augustine?
Its Booker-longlist nomination meant that Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina (Granta, £16.99) was the comic that everyone has heard of this year,…
The road trip from hell: A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better, by Benjamin Wood, reviewed
A lingeringly strange atmosphere hangs about Benjamin Wood’s third novel, in which the settings and paraphernalia of a new wave…
You deserve a prize if you manage to finish Jim Crace’s latest novel
This remorselessly slow-moving, hazily allegorical drama about ageing and xenophobia is Jim Crace’s 12th book, and the first to appear…
A dense, angry fable
Set partly in a future surveillance society, partly in ancient Carthage and 1970s Ethiopia, partly in contemporary Greece and London…
Unearthly powers
This delightfully good-humoured novel is the sort of genre scramble that doesn’t often work: there’s a bit of 1990s family…
Madness in Manhattan
Life has far more imagination than we do, says the epigraph from Truffaut that opens Salman Rushdie’s 12th novel —…
The cryonics game
Cults, the desert, natural disasters. Artists, bankers, terrorists. Cash machines, food packaging, secret installations. Mediaspeak and scientific jargon. Crowds and…
Foreign body count
China Miéville’s work is invariably clever, inevitably dense and usually interwoven with hard-left political and social concerns, but its author…
The atheist delusion
Dan Rhodes apparently had trouble finding a publisher for this short novel, and it’s possible to envisage a certain amount…
Two serious ladies
‘You understand, Lenú, what happens to people: we have too much stuff inside and it swells us, breaks us.’ The…
Things left undead
In the afterword to this sixth book, Aleksandar Hemon dedicates a word of thanks to his agent for keeping a…
LA runs riot
Ryan Gattis’s novel All Involved is set in South Central Los Angeles in 1992, during the riots that began after…
Dark humour for the dark continent
‘I’ve come back because I love the mess. Anarchy. Madness. Things falling apart.’ The lines belong to Roland Nair, one…
When my enemy’s enemy is still my enemy
‘I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: if you fuck with me, I’ll kill you all.’ When ‘The…
