International fiction
The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst
Spanning 70 years, Alan Hollinghurst’s long-awaited new novel begins with a group of friends at Oxford during World War II and follows the ensemble over the years and generations. The book is divided into four parts, set in four distinct…
A Life of Adventure and Delight by Akhil Sharma
Akhil Sharma’s A Life of Adventure and Delight is a collection of brilliant short stories, all of which have been published in The New Yorker – an incredible accomplishment.
Sharma’s skill lies in his acute characterisation. Not only is he…
The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott
This review is going to be difficult to write, because The Ninth Hour is so masterful, so charming, so delightful, it’s going to be hard to do it justice. I want to gush, but gushing is clumsy and knock-kneed, and…
NK3 by Michael Tolkin
Present-day Los Angeles already feels pretty post-apocalyptic. In NK3 Michael Tolkin takes the inequality, violence, misogyny and horror of contemporary Beverley Hills, Culver City and Skid Row and melds it with our worst North Korean-related fears.
Four years after the…
Friend of My Youth by Amit Chaudhuri
This loving, gentle book evokes the chaotic colours and sounds of Bombay through the eyes of an expatriate writer, returning to his childhood home. Weaving through time at an eddying pace, Amit Chaudhuri describes his childhood friend Ramu in criss-crossing…
The Furthest Station by Ben Aaronovitch
Ben Aaronovitch’s series of PC Grant novels are urban fantasies that somehow manage to combine the jaunty ‘ello, ‘ello, ‘ello of a traditional British police procedural with the rich mythology and history of the city of London. The newest instalment…
Provenance by Ann Leckie
The nervous foster-daughter of a high-ranking politician sells everything she owns to break a notorious thief out of prison, hoping to win favour with her ambitious mother and humiliate her conniving brother. But has Ingray liberated the correct person? And…
The Most Dangerous Place on Earth by Lindsey Lee Johnson
With her electric debut novel, Lindsey Lee Johnson has skilfully teased out the everyday dramas that exist in ‘The Most Dangerous Place on Earth’: high school. Set in one of the world’s wealthiest communities – Mill Valley, California – Johnson’s…
The Growing Season by Helen Sedgwick
In The Growing Season, the world is much like it is now, with one major difference. For three generations the FullLife baby pouch has enabled anyone, regardless of age or gender, to affordably and safely grow their own baby…
The World of Tomorrow by Brendan Matthews
Brendan Mathews chose 1939 as his setting because this year in history is echoed in the present. America was in an economic slump, there was a refugee crisis and fascism was a rising trend, worldwide. I thought about this many…
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