International fiction
Origin by Dan Brown
I’ve just finished reading the final chapters of Origin and feel deeply satiated. It’s been four years since Inferno, four years since I last experienced the unique sense of suspense, intrigue and downright awe that I only feel when…
The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa
A bestseller in Japan and now internationally, The Travelling Cat Chronicles (translated by Murakami translator Philip Gabriel) takes us on the road with Nana and his owner Satoru. Taken in by Satoru as a stray, Nana can’t understand why after…
Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan
Jennifer Egan’s wonderful new novel Manhattan Beach begins in Brooklyn during the Great Depression, where smooth union bagman Eddie Kerrigan is struggling to keep his family above water. Eddie moves easily among men of power: tipping his hat at the…
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie
Imagine living in a world where every act you undertake is politicised, against your will. For some readers, this will be a reality. Kamila Shamsie’s latest novel, Home Fire, depicts this very phenomenon. It tells the story of the…
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…