Category Fiction

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My Name Is Emilia del Valle by Isabel Allende audiobook review – portrait of a fiercely independent young woman

Sent from San Francisco to report on the war in late-19th century Chile, a young writer embarks on a journey of self-discovery in this tale of love, loss and liberation

Set in the late 19th century and inspired by the Chilean civil war which ravaged the country in 1891, Isabel Allende’s historical drama tells of a young woman born illegitimately in San Francisco’s Mission District. Emilia del Valle’s surname comes from her Chilean father, an aristocrat who seduced her mother when she was a novice nun and left before their child was born. Emilia owes her fiercely independent spirit to her liberal-minded stepfather Francisco Claro, whom she calls Papo, who encourages his stepdaughter to think for herself.

In her late teens, Emilia writes a series of successful pulp fiction novels under the male pen name Brandon J Price. By the age of 23, she is a columnist at San Francisco’s Daily Examiner; still writing as a man, she longs to do more serious work. Eventually, she is commissioned to travel to Chile, where the father she has never met lives, to cover the war. She is accompanied by a seasoned war reporter, Eric Whelan, with whom she begins a relationship, though the pair part company as they each go in search of their own stories.

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Venetian Vespers by John Banville review – a haunting honeymoon

This brooding tale of an Englishman’s downfall in fin-de-siècle Venice is memorably eerie – but it’s hard to care about such a pompous protagonist

Many years ago, a sober-minded friend warned me off going to Venice for the first time with my then partner. He muttered ominous things about the Venice wobble and the Venice curse. I went anyway and I have to say he had a point. It was autumn and there was something deeply uncanny about the city: fog-bound canals, labyrinthine alleyways, a general sense of decay. If my minibreak had belonged to a literary genre, it wouldn’t have been romance so much as cosmic horror.

Fiction, of course, should have prepared me. Couples have been coming unstuck in Venice since Othello and Desdemona. There are the Baxters in Daphne du Maurier’s short story Don’t Look Now, the basis for Nicolas Roeg’s unforgettably creepy film; Mary and Colin in The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan – the city’s not named in the novel, but it’s clearly the setting. And while the love affair in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice exists only in Von Aschenbach’s mind, the city is still his undoing. To Von Aschenbach and the others, we can now add the name of the unfortunate Evelyn Dolman, the protagonist of John Banville’s new novel, Venetian Vespers. Evelyn is a hack writer from England who has recently married an American heiress called Laura Rensselaer. Their plans to honeymoon in Venice have been delayed by the unexpected death of Laura’s father, the industrialist T Willard Rensselaer. In the wintry early months of 1900, they finally arrive and take up residence in the sinister Palazzo Dioscuri, a stone’s throw from St Mark’s. Dioscuri means the Twins – Castor and Pollux – and it will be a pair of twins who set in motion Evelyn’s inexorable but unforeseeable downfall.

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As a Booker prize judge I helped whittle 153 books down to a shortlist of six. Here’s why you should read them | Chris Power

Ben Markovits, David Szalay, Kiran Desai, Andrew Miller, Susan Choi and Katie Kitamura’s books will all take you on enthralling journeys

The Booker prize is both a serious and celebratory undertaking. It should be, anyway, for those who care about literature, and I’ve certainly found it to be so since I began reading this year’s submissions on a stormy Devon beach on New Year’s Eve (fun, but subsequently I relied on the books, not ambient conditions, to provide the drama).

Now the shortlist is decided, I and my fellow judges – our chair, Roddy Doyle, who won the prize in 1993, the novelists Ayòbámi Adébáyò and Kiley Reid (both previous longlistees), and the actor, producer and publisher Sarah Jessica Parker – struggle to believe 153 books have become just six, and that our monthly meetings to discuss form, content and font size are at an end.

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‘Brilliantly human’: Kiran Desai and David Szalay make Booker prize shortlist

No debut novels are among the six finalists, with established authors including Ben Markovits and previously shortlisted Andrew Miller in the running

No debuts appear on this year’s Booker prize shortlist, which is dominated by established authors including previous winner Kiran Desai and previously shortlisted writers David Szalay and Andrew Miller.

Ben Markovits, Susan Choi and Katie Kitamura are also on the list, which was announced at an event at the Southbank Centre in central London on Tuesday evening.

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Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood review – long Covid from the inside

The cult author’s autofictional follow-up to No One Is Talking About This is the story of a breakdown

It sounds like the setup to a joke: a viral author and a global virus walk into a novel. The punchline is long Covid, an illness that defies narrative – dissolves it. Patricia Lockwood’s new autofiction, Will There Ever Be Another You, is the product of that cruel dissolution. “I wrote it insane, and edited it sane,” she explained in a recent interview. The madness is the method. But must you know the mind before you can know the madness?

Lockwood is the literary Frankenchild of Dorothy Parker and Flannery O’Connor: a heretical wit fused with gothic strangeness, vintage quippery rewired for the digital age. She’s the kind of writer who inspires parasocial devotion and copycat haircuts. Even her cats are internet-famous. The sacred text of Lockwood lore is Priestdaddy, her glorious 2017 memoir, which introduced readers to the American author’s trouser-resistant father, an ordained Catholic priest who blew his daughter’s college fund on a vintage guitar.

“What are you working on?” people kept asking me. Little stories, I would evade, and leave it at that, because if to write about being ill was self-indulgent, what followed was that the most self-indulgent thing of all was to be ill. But I was determined to do it. I was going to write a masterpiece about being confused.

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Hilary Mantel championed emerging writers – a new prize in her memory will help them get published

Judged by Maggie O’Farrell, Ben Miles and Chigozie Obioma, the Hilary Mantel prize for fiction will recognise emerging talent, and pay tribute to the Wolf Hall author’s legacy

A few months after Hilary Mantel died in September 2022, the novelist Maggie O’Farrell was browsing in a bookshop. Stopping at a table of new novels, she noticed a couple with Mantel’s endorsement on the cover, which, she tells me, she generally regards as instantly justifying the book’s price. This time, though, “I suddenly thought there aren’t going to be many more of these. It was such a sad moment. We’re not going to get another Mantel book, and we’re also not going to get to know about the books that she read and loved.”

To many readers who gobbled up Mantel’s books – 17 of them, including the novel Beyond Black, and the Wolf Hall trilogy, which won two Booker prizes – it’s extraordinary that she found time or energy for anything beside the mammoth research that her vast historical enterprises entailed, not to mention her enthusiastic and detailed involvement in their various adaptations. But Mantel was an engaged and enthusiastic supporter of other writers, especially those in the crucial early stages of their careers. Perhaps she never forgot how long it took her to see the first novel she wrote, A Place of Greater Safety, finally emerge in print in 1992.

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Nick Harkaway: ‘I loathed Charles Dickens – it nearly turned me off reading for ever’

The author on his secret theories about Tolkien, the most perfect and terrifying Moomin book, and how his father, John le Carré, inspired him

My earliest reading memory
I read The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien at seven, in my bedroom in the deep west of Cornwall. I secretly believed that Rivendell was based on that house, which it clearly wasn’t.

My favourite book growing up
Impossible. I’m inconstant, so it was whatever I was reading at the time. Let’s say Finn Family Moomintroll, which is the most perfect of Tove Jansson’s lovely (and occasionally frankly terrifying) Moomin books.

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Clown Town by Mick Herron review – more fun and games with the Slow Horses

The ninth novel in the Slough House series, this tale of IRA infiltration is a perfect mix of one-liners, plot twists and real-world-tinged intrigue

Trigger warning: the new Slough House novel shares its name, I assume accidentally, with a particularly bleak soft-play centre on London’s North Circular Road in which sticky under-fives circulate through an infernal apparatus wailing and stabbing each other with plastic forks while the grownups sit at plastic tables drinking horrible coffee and waiting for death. Just a glimpse at the dust jacket sent me back a decade to that environment of grubbiness, boredom and mild peril. It’s not that big a leap, mind. There’s something of the knockabout quality of a soft-play centre in Mick Herron’s fictional world: all fun and games until someone loses an eye.

That said, as far as I know, none of the injuries in the real-world Clown Town will have been occasioned by the victim being held down so the front wheel of a Land Rover Defender can be driven over their head – which is the attention-grabbing scene with which Herron opens this latest instalment. As often, Herron’s plot takes off from real-world events: the Stakeknife scandal – in which it turned out that MI5 had been protecting a murderously vicious IRA enforcer as an intelligence asset – appears here in the story of Pitchfork, whose signature “nutting” technique of killing during the Troubles was running over people’s heads.

What you see when you see a blank page is much what you hear when you hear white noise; it’s the early shifting into gear of something not ready to happen – an echo of what you feel when you walk past sights the eyes are blind to; bus queues, whitewashed shopfronts, adverts pasted to lamp-posts, or a four-storey block on Aldersgate Street in the London borough of Finsbury, where the premises gracing the pavement include a Chinese restaurant with ever-lowered shutters and a faded menu taped to its window; a down-at-heel newsagent’s where pallets of off-brand cola cans block the aisle; and, between the two, a weathered black door with a dusty milk bottle welded to its step, and an air of neglect suggesting that it never opens, never closes.

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Review: The Academy by Elin Hilderbrand – Spoilers

The Academy by Elin Hilderbrand & Shelby Cunningham is an interesting read about an school which has just skyrocketed in the rankings but the students are in a state of amaze. Why? Is something wrong? Let’s find out…. “It’s a normal day at Tiffin Academy and amidst the happiness of friends reuniting, taking pics and […]

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan review – the limits of liberalism

A century from now, a literature scholar pieces together a picture of our times in a novel that quietly compels us to consider the moral consequences of global catastrophe

The sheer Englishness of Ian McEwan’s fiction may not be fully visible to his English readers. But it is clearly, and amusingly, visible to at least this Irish reader. It isn’t just McEwan’s elegiac, indeed patriotic, attentiveness to English landscapes – to the wildflowers and hedgerows and crags, to the “infinite shingle” of Chesil Beach, to the Chilterns turkey oak in the first paragraph of Enduring Love. Nor is it merely the ferocious home counties middle-classness of his later novels, in which every significant character is at the very least a neurosurgeon or a high court judge, everyone is conversant with Proust, Bach and Wordsworth, and members of the lower orders tend to appear as worrying upstarts from a world in which nobody plonks out the Goldberg Variations on the family baby grand. No, McEwan’s Englishness has most to do with his scrupulously rational, but occasionally and endearingly purblind, liberal morality: England’s most admirable, and most irritating, gift to politics and art.

These thoughts were provoked by a brief passage in McEwan’s future-set new novel that describes the “Inundation” of Britain after a Russian warhead goes off accidentally in the middle of the Atlantic, causing a tsunami that, combined with rising sea levels, wipes out everything but a Europe-wide archipelago of mountain peaks. In these entertainingly nihilistic pages, the fate of that other major chunk of the British Isles is not mentioned. Presumably Ireland, with its dearth of high peaks, fared badly as Europe drowned. But from McEwan’s future history, you’d never know it. I began to think of What We Can Know as another of McEwan’s deeply English stories. It has, I thought, the familiar partialities of vision. Has Brexit, endlessly backstopped by those pesky six counties, taught English liberals nothing?

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