Category Fiction

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‘I took literary revenge against the people who stole my youth’: Romanian author Mircea Cărtărescu

As the first part of his acclaimed Blinding trilogy is released in the UK, the novelist talks about communism, Vladimir Nabokov – and those Nobel rumours

In 2014, when he was travelling around the US on a book tour, Mircea Cărtărescu was able to fulfil the dream of a lifetime: a tour of Vladimir Nabokov’s butterfly collection. Cărtărescu is a great admirer of the Russian-American author, and shares with him a literary career that bridges the western and eastern cultural spheres – as well as a history of being mooted as the next Nobel literature laureate but never having won it.

Above all, the Romanian poet and novelist shares Nabokov’s fascination with butterflies. As a child, he harboured dreams of becoming a lepidopterist. On a visit to Harvard, Cărtărescu was allowed access to Nabokov’s former office and marvelled at specimens the St Petersburg-born author had collected. “His most important scientific work was about butterflies’ sexual organs, and I saw these very tiny vials with them in,” he whispers in awe. “It’s like an image from a poem or a story. It was absolutely fantastic.”

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Bog People: A Working-Class Anthology of Folk Horror review – dark tales with a sting

This collection of macabre stories set across England explores class, hierarchy and the enduring nature of inequality

Folk horror may have had a dramatic resurgence in recent years, but it has always been the backbone of much of our national storytelling. A new anthology of 10 stories set across England, Bog People, brings together some of the most accomplished names in the genre.

In her introduction, editor Hollie Starling describes an ancient ritual in a Devon village: the rich throw heated pennies from their windows, watching those in need burn their fingers. Folk horror by its nature is inherently connected to class and hierarchy. Reverence for tradition is a double-edged sword – or a burning-hot coin.

The rain stops, the sun shows, another night comes dark and flowing with energy. I don’t sleep; I feel my way through the landscape, the trees that reach and catch my shirt sleeves, holding on to me, saving me from slipping on mossy roots, the unfriendly gorse keeping me at a distance, saying don’t step here, stopping me from tearing my feet on its throne of thorns. Stars alive, alight, I wish you could see them…

First light fattened like a dying star and formed the signature of an industrial town already at toil predawn, its factory stacks belching the new day black, the mills dyeing the forked-tongue river sterile inside that Hellmouth north of Halifax where paternal cotton kings had housed their workers in spoked rows of blind back-to-backs quick to tilt and rot.

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A Particularly Nasty Case by Adam Kay audiobook review – a wayward doctor turns detective

Andy Serkis revels in his narration of the first murder mystery from the author of This Is Going to Hurt, which showcases Kay’s signature pitch-black humour

Dr Eitan Rose is stark naked in a gay sauna when he is called upon to perform CPR on an elderly man and fellow patron who is having a heart attack. When arriving paramedics ask Eitan for his details, he declines to give his real name, instead giving them the name of his work supervisor and nemesis, Douglas Moran. Eitan is a hard-partying consultant rheumatologist who has just returned to work after several months off following a mental health crisis, and who uses liquid cocaine secreted into a nasal inhaler to get through the working day.

When Moran dies in unexpected circumstances, Eitan suspects foul play and sets about finding the culprit. Soon he is performing illicit postmortems and impersonating a police detective so he can cross-examine a suspect. But when he tries to blow the whistle, his colleagues and the police decline to take his claims seriously. Eitan may work among medical professionals, but they are not above stigmatising a colleague diagnosed with bipolar disorder and taking his outlandish claims as evidence of his instability.

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The Matchbox Girl by Alice Jolly review – horror, humanity and Dr Asperger

The reader grapples with fascism and complicity through the eyes of a mute autistic girl being treated during the second world war

As I started reading Alice Jolly’s new novel, whose narrator is a mute autistic girl in wartime Vienna, I realised that I was resisting its very premise. I am generally sceptical about books that use child narrators to add poignancy to dark plots, or novels that use nazism as a means of introducing moral jeopardy to their characters’ journeys. And yet by the end Jolly had won me over. This is a book that walks a tightrope between sentimentality and honesty, between realism and imagination, and creates something spirited and memorable as it does so.

We meet our fierce narrator, Adelheid Brunner, when she is brought into a children’s hospital by her grandmother, who cannot cope with the little girl’s fixations. Adelheid is obsessed with the matchboxes of the title, which she is constantly studying, ordering and occasionally discarding. In the hospital, she finds that she and her fellow child inmates are the object of obsessive study in turn by their doctors – sometimes understood, sometimes valued, and then, tragically, sometimes discarded.

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£15,000 prize launched for writers from refugee and migrant backgrounds

The Footnote x Counterpoints prize is intended to uncover new literary voices whose work reflects the experiences of migration

Footnote Press and Counterpoints Arts have announced a new fiction award celebrating writers from refugee and migrant backgrounds, offering a £15,000 prize and a publishing deal for the winner.

The Footnote x Counterpoints prize for fiction, launching on Thursday, marks the second time the two organisations have collaborated on a prize. In 2023, writers were invited to submit narrative nonfiction, but now the prize will focus on fiction for the first time.

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The Artist by Lucy Steeds wins Waterstones book of the year

The debut novel took the top prize while The Café at the Edge of the Woods by Mikey Please was named children’s book of the year

The Artist by Lucy Steeds has been named this year’s Waterstones book of the year.

The novel, which is set in 1920s Provence and blends mystery with a love story, also took home the Waterstones debut fiction prize earlier this year, and was longlisted for the Women’s prize for fiction.

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The School of Night by Karl Ove Knausgård review – can this sprawling epic deliver on its promise?

In the fourth volume of the occult Morning Star cycle, a Faustian pact haunts a misanthropic artist who finds miraculous success

Karl Ove Knausgård’s Morning Star cycle may turn out to be even larger in scope than his six-volume autofictional bestseller, My Struggle. Four books deep, this gargantuan work of supernatural existentialism is an unsettling account of the occult phenomena that attend the appearance in the sky of a bright new star. Mysteries from the first three volumes include: who killed the musicians in the forest? What’s going on with the local wildlife? Why does no one seem to be dying any more? By the end of The School of Night, the most burning question may sound comparatively mundane: who is Kristian Hadeland?

Scattered references appeared in the saga’s first 2,000 pages. Kristian Hadeland was the 67-year-old man buried without mourners by doubting priest Kathrine Reinhardsen in The Morning Star (2021). In The Third Realm (2024), he was the sinister chap hitching a lift with Kathrine’s husband after the unloved man she buried is supposed to have died.

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‘He was just trying to earn a few kopecks’: how newly translated stories reveal Chekhov’s silly side

With daft jokes and experimental wordplay, the first comprehensive translations of his lesser-known stories show Anton Chekhov in a new light

Few writers are as universally admired as Chekhov. As Booker winner George Saunders puts it, “Chekhov – shall I be blunt? – is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.” Novelists from Ann Patchett to Zadie Smith cite him as an inspiration. His plays The Seagull, Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard still pack out theatres internationally. In the past year alone, Andrew Scott wowed audiences in his one-man Vanya for London’s National Theatre and Cate Blanchett took on the role of Arkadina in The Seagull at the Barbican. But how much did you know about his silly side?

Anton Chekhov: Earliest Stories offers the first comprehensive translation in English of the stories, novellas and humoresques that the Russian author wrote in the early 1880s. And it is supremely juvenile in the best way. The reason many of these stories are now appearing in translation for the first time is because, explains editor Rosamund Bartlett, they have never been regarded by commercial publishers as “worthy” of Chekhov’s reputation. They are too childishly comical. During the translation process, she says, “we would just collapse in fits of giggles”.

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‘I knew I was doing something I shouldn’t’: Karl Ove Knausgård on the fallout from My Struggle and the dark side of ambition

The Norwegian author on his autofictional epic, moving to London, and the psychopath at the heart of his new novel

Fifteen years ago, discussing the success of his six-volume autofictional work My Struggle on Norwegian radio, Karl Ove Knausgård said he felt as if he had “actually sold my soul to the devil”. My Struggle had become a runaway success in Norway – a success that would subsequently be repeated across the world – but the project provoked anger in some quarters for its portrayal of friends and family members. This was a work of art that came at a price. Hence, for its creator, its Faustian aspect.

That experience lies at the root of Knausgård’s latest novel, The School of Night, the fourth volume in his Morning Star sequence, in which his typical character studies and fine-grained attention to the minutiae of daily life are married to a compelling supernatural plot involving a mysterious star appearing in the sky and the dead returning to life. Volumes one and three, The Morning Star and The Third Realm, cycled between the same group of interconnected characters, while the second book, The Wolves of Eternity, moved back to the 1980s and told the story of a young Norwegian man and his discovery of a Russian half-sister. Only towards the end of its 800 pages did the novel intersect with the events of The Morning Star. The School of Night, perhaps frustratingly for some, again moves backwards instead of forwards, this time to 1985 London, and follows the art school career of a young Norwegian, Kristian Hadeland, who is pursuing his dream of fame as a photographer. Kristian, events reveal, is someone who will sacrifice anything, and anyone, to succeed. Charting Kristian’s rise and fall is an addictive and eerie reading experience.

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Sophie Hannah: ‘I gave up on Wuthering Heights three times’

The crime writer on actor Frances Farmer’s life-changing story of survival, her favourite self help and discovering Agatha Christie’s alter ego

My earliest reading memory
I was six, and in the lounge in my first home in Manchester. I was sitting cross-legged on the grey carpet, in 1977, when I finished reading whichever of Enid Blyton’s brilliant Secret Seven mysteries contains the mind-blowing (genuinely, for a six-year-old) twist that “Emma Lane” turns out to be a road and not a person.

My favourite book growing up
Up to the age of 12, Blyton’s Secret Seven and Five Find-Outers mysteries; from 12 onwards, it was Agatha Christie. Growing up, I was certain that no other kind of story could ever hope to be as satisfying as the very best mystery story.

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