Category Fiction

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Ican Klíma obituary

Czech novelist and playwright whose work was banned under communism

Ivan Klíma, who has died aged 94, carried into the third decade of the 21st century his memories of four years in a Nazi concentration camp. That childhood, from 10 to 14, was spent in the “model” camp at Terezín, where Jews died from malnutrition rather than extermination.

It left an indelible stamp on the Czech writer’s mind and work as it taught him that “life can be snapped like a piece of string”. As did his four decades of struggle with the repressive communist regime that blighted Czech culture until the Velvet Revolution of 1989, led by his friend and fellow-dissident Vaclav Havel.

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The Devil Book by Asta Olivia Nordenhof review – a Danish series that burns with purpose

This incandescent novel takes in lockdown, the devil, bad investments, erotic thrills and the deadly fire on the Scandinavian Star ferry

At about 2am on the night of 7 April 1990, a fire broke out on board the MS Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry operating between Oslo and Frederikshavn. Inadequate staff training coupled with jammed fire doors aiding the spread of the fire and the subsequent release of deadly hydrogen cyanide gas from burning laminates resulted in the deaths of 159 people. The disaster was initially blamed on one of the passengers – a lorry driver and convicted arsonist. The fact that this suspect was also one of the fire’s casualties and thus unable to refute the charges against him was almost certainly part of the reason why the truth about the tragedy took so long to come to light. In 2020, a six-hour documentary revealed that the fire had most likely been started deliberately as part of an insurance fraud.

In the first volume of Asta Olivia Nordenhof’s Scandinavian Star sequence, Money to Burn, an unnamed narrator is travelling on a bus through Copenhagen when she finds her attention drawn to an elderly man on the street outside. As the bus moves away, she has the “eerie sense” that she is carrying a part of him with her. Compelled to travel the same route again in search of him, the narrator finds herself in a landscape that is at once alien and deeply familiar. She introduces us to Maggie and Kurt, a couple whose feelings for each other are struggling to survive the pressures of their conflicted pasts. In that book’s final pages, we learn that the root of Kurt’s disaffection might possibly be found in the shattering effects of a bad investment made on his behalf by a man known as T.

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‘Jilly Cooper was the absolute queen’: writers pay tribute to the beloved author

The writer was an astute observer of English class – and a champion of complicated female heroines

• Jilly Cooper, author of Rivals and Riders, dies aged 88
• Share your memories of Jilly Cooper

Jilly Cooper was a genuinely merry soul, with a gimlet eye and a determination to see the best in absolutely everything; even when her life was difficult, she brightened every room with her spaniel hair. What fun she had and shared with us, and what a wonderful legacy she left.

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The Elements by John Boyne review – intertwined tales of trauma

Four novellas about damaged people weighed down by the crimes they have suffered draw you efficiently in, but the cumulative effect is numbing

Twelve-year-old Freya is visiting her self-absorbed mother in Cornwall when she meets the 14-year-old twins. “The only thing better than knowing a secret,” they tell her, “is having one of your own.” In the weeks that follow, they will rape her, then bury her alive, a mix of anxiety and annoyance flitting across their faces as they eventually release her from her makeshift coffin.

This might have stood as the shocking centrepiece of a novel, but it’s just one of many terrible events in The Elements, which collects four novellas – published separately between 2023 and 2025 – in which characters negotiate past trauma and try to find peace in the present.

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One of Us by Elizabeth Day review – the inner lives of Tory MPs

Driven by a whodunnit-ish plot, this state-of-the-nation sequel to The Party features a family at the centre of British political life

Elizabeth Day is the right person to write a state-of-the-nation novel about our society at a point when so many are convinced it’s failing. She herself has made a successful franchise out of failure with her How to Fail podcast. She understands failure and she understands that it may be too tempting to luxuriate in it, rather than seeing how quickly it can turn into success and back again.

Day began her career with thoughtful, intimate novels about the fault lines of family life. Scissors, Paper, Stone and Home Fires were old-fashioned, heartfelt works about how cruelty trickles down the generations and how lives can be tentatively remade. Then she more ambitiously embraced the thriller genre on the one hand and a larger social canvas on the other. This has presented dangers: her last novel, Magpie, risked sacrificing characterisation altogether for the sake of a grand midway reveal; before that, The Party was so plot-driven and backstory-laden that it lacked the fine-grained intimacy of her earlier works. One of Us is a sequel to The Party, but it’s a much stronger, more distinctive novel, better read as a standalone work. Here she has returned to the intimate family dynamics at which she excels, combined with a brilliantly propulsive, almost whodunnit-ish plot and an astute analysis of power. Because the family in question is now at the heart of British political life.

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Debut author Colwill Brown wins BBC short story award for ‘heartbreaking’ tale – read an extract here

Brown’s story of a teenage life ‘critically damaged in a moment’ was the ‘unanimous’ pick for the £15,000 prize
• Read an extract from the story below

Doncaster-born writer Colwill Brown has won this year’s BBC national short story award for a “heartbreaking” entry about shame and the long-term effects of trauma, told in South Yorkshire dialect.

Brown was announced as the winner of the £15,000 award, run in collaboration with Cambridge University, at a ceremony held at BBC Broadcasting House on Tuesday evening.

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Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon review – his first novel in 12 years tunes into rising fascism in the US

The 88-year-old’s jaunty whodunnit, set during the prohibition era, features clowns, Nazis and a missing cheese heiress

Everything is connected in Shadow Ticket, Thomas Pynchon’s fleet-footed noir fiction about a lindy-hopping detective in prohibition-era Wisconsin. The homemade bomb connects to the runaway cheese heiress, the cheese heiress to the federal agents, and the feds to the pro‑Nazi leagues at the bowling lanes outside town. Early-30s Milwaukee, in turn, is connected to powder-keg central Europe, where paramilitary groups have pitched camp on the Hungaro-Croatian border and guest speakers wax lyrical about “our immense fascist future”. Most likely it connects to the current moment as well, albeit wryly and slyly, with a nonchalant swing. That’s the implied final move of this merry dance of a book: the point where the past links its hands with the present.

Shadow Ticket is a Pynchon novel – the 88-year-old’s first in 12 years; his ninth overall – and so it naturally connects to the man’s back catalogue, too, and its abiding fascination with conspiracy, chaos and the churn of American pop culture. Specifically it relates back to his two previous works – Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge – in that the story comes tailored as a dime-store whodunnit, complete with red herrings, plot twists and reams of hard-boiled dialogue. But classifications, like people, are never entirely to be trusted. Pynchon inhabits the genre like a hermit crab inside a mollusc shell, periodically peeking out from the gloom to remind us that he’s there.

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Half Light by Mahesh Rao review – a tale of forbidden love in India

A love affair between two men in Darjeeling comes to a violent end in this unfocused tale of heartbreak, secrecy – and the separate lives they return to in Mumbai

Mahesh Rao’s third novel tells the story of two young men, Neville and Pavan, as their paths cross and recross in the years preceding India’s 2018 decriminalisation of homosexuality. It is a rather melancholy tale, in which the sky is always grey and the mood is always despondent, where secrecy and shame are the prevailing emotions, and violence is never far away. As gay men in pre-2018 India, Neville and Pavan exist in an in-between world. There are dating apps and hookups galore, but there is also open hostility and the threat of prosecution. Tempering this bleakness is Rao’s pleasingly wry humour and sharply satirical eye, which he casts over this period of cultural flux. The narrative is split into two sections – Darjeeling in 2014 and Mumbai in 2018 – proceeding in short chapters that alternate between Neville’s and Pavan’s points of view.

The story begins as a landslide blocks the routes to and from the Golden Peaks Hotel, a subpar establishment in the hills of Darjeeling where Pavan works and where Neville, along with his haughty mother Audrey and servile family friend Lorna, is a guest. With little else to do, and emboldened by the novel circumstances, the two men strike up a furtive romance. “[Pavan’s] sense of the world being held in suspension had continued to grow. The hotel was cut off. Rations were low. Routines had changed. There seemed to be a fated quality about his encounter with Neville.”

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‘She wrote the best first line – and the most chilling stories’: Stephen King on the dark brilliance of Daphne du Maurier

From Rebecca to The Birds and scores of creepy short stories, Du Maurier was queen of the uncanny, writes the US horror maestro

‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” It’s one of the most well-known first lines ever written in a novel. Certainly the most memorable; I used it myself as an epigram in my novel Bag of Bones. Daphne du Maurier also wrote what may be the best first line in a tale of the uncanny and outre. Her classic story The Birds opens with this: “On December the third the wind changed overnight and it was winter.” Short, chilly and to the point. It could almost be a weather report.

It works so well at the outset of the gripping tale that follows, in which every species of bird attacks humankind, because it’s flat, declarative and realistic. Du Maurier can gin up horror when she wants – see The Doll, The Blue Lenses and the shocking final two pages of Don’t Look Now – but knows that what’s wanted here to instil belief (and suspense) is a tone that’s closer to reportage than narration.

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‘There was comedy at all times’: Andrew O’Hagan on 15 years of funny, frank and champagne-fuelled friendship with Edna O’Brien

In the last decades of her life, the two novelists became close friends. He recalls their intense bond, their last trip to Ireland and her memories of being romanced by Richard Burton

I first met Edna O’Brien on a mild spring evening in 2009. There had been a party to celebrate the 70th birthday of Seamus Heaney and I was running late, so I put up my hand for a taxi and a rumbling black cab drew to a halt. The door swung open and Edna stepped on to the pavement like Ophelia out of the weedy brook. She was a vision in black velvet and volumised hair. She paid at the window, clearly irked after some altercation with the driver, and when she turned she immediately took my hand and offered a Joycean, or possibly a Glaswegian, effusion.

“I fucking hate the English. Do you?”

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