autofiction

A rebellious childhood: Lowest Common Denominator, by Pirkko Saisio, reviewed

2 August 2025 9:00 am

In droll, sardonic, dialogue-driven scenes, Saisio transports us to her youth in Cold War Finland and her longing to become a writer

A long goodbye to Berlin

15 June 2024 9:00 am

Christopher Isherwood’s experiences as a young man in Weimar Germany would be reworked in his autofiction for the rest of his life

Communing with the dead

27 August 2022 9:00 am

Grief leads us down some strange roads. Few, though, can be as peculiar as those charted by Paul Stanbridge in…

A mysterious muse

6 November 2021 9:00 am

If you were to glance only briefly at the title of the Irish poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s prose debut you…

Mothers and daughters

12 June 2021 9:00 am

A new novel by Esther Freud — her ninth — raises the perennial but always fascinating question about the use…

Return to the lost city

26 August 2017 9:00 am

During a press interview in Bombay about his latest book, the author-narrator of Friend of My Youth feels ‘a surge…