Category Fiction

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Post your questions for Richard Osman and Mick Herron

The bestselling authors of The Thursday Murder Club and the Slough House series will take on your questions

Richard Osman and Mick Herron have cracked the code to writing thrillers that captivate audiences. During his stellar career in television, Osman presented the hugely popular gameshows Pointless, which he also created, and Richard Osman’s House of Games. More recently he has illuminated the world of show business with the Guardian’s Marina Hyde on The Rest is Entertainment podcast. Five years ago, he published the first instalment of The Thursday Murder Club, in which four retirees – former spy Elizabeth, psychiatrist Ibrahim, trade union leader Ron and nurse Joyce – pit their wits against assorted murderers and ne’er-do-wells, aided and abetted by canny builder Bogdan and a sometimes reluctant local police force. The fifth in the series, The Impossible Fortune, is out this September – just a few weeks after Helen Mirren, Ben Kingsley, Pierce Brosnan and Celia Imrie played the amateur detectives in the first film adaptation of the series.

The first in Mick Herron’s Slough House series appeared 15 years ago, with an intriguing conceit at its heart: what happens to spies who have messed up on the job? Leading Herron’s group of undercover misfits is Jackson Lamb, whose thoroughly unappealing exterior conceals a steeltrap mind and a strong moral code. The undercover agents made the transition to screen in an award-winning AppleTV+ series Slow Horses, starring Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas and Jack Lowden, with an original theme tune by Herron fan Mick Jagger. Clown Town, the ninth book in the series, is out now, and sees Lamb and his team, including stalwart sidekicks River Cartwright (Lowden) and Catherine Standish, once again battling against the establishment.

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From shocking short stories to a talking foetus: Ian McEwan’s 10 best books – ranked!

As the author’s future-set novel, What We Can Know, hits shelves, we assesses his top 10 works – from chilling short stories to Booker prize-winning satire

Two old friends, composer Clive Linley and newspaper editor Vernon Halliday, meet at the funeral of charismatic Molly Lane, a former lover of both men (along with many other successful men of the time). This sharp 90s satire – the Conservatives have been in power for 17 years – has the misfortune of being McEwan’s only novel to win the Booker prize in his 50-year career, despite being widely considered one of his slightest. But it fizzes along like the champagne that is part of the euthanasia pact hatched by the two men in a plot that even the author conceded was “rather improbable”. New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani was right when she concluded that it was testament to the author’s skill that he had managed “to toss off a minor entertainment with such authority and aplomb” to win the gong he had so long deserved.

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‘I’ve seen so many people go down rabbit holes’: Patricia Lockwood on losing touch with reality

The Priestdaddy author on quitting social media, Maga conspiracies and how her second novel grew out of a period of post-Covid mania

There is a thing Patricia Lockwood does whenever she spots a priest while walking through an airport. The 43-year-old grew up as one of five children of a Catholic priest in the American midwest, an eccentric upbringing documented, famously, in Priestdaddy, her hit memoir of 2017, and a wellspring of comic material that just keeps giving. Priests in the wild amuse and comfort her, a reminder of home and the superiority that comes with niche expertise. “I was recently at St Louis airport and saw a priest,” she says, “high church, not Catholic, because of the width of the collar; that’s the thing they never get right in TV shows. And I gave him a look that was a little bit too intimate. A little bit like: I know.” Sometimes, as she’s passing, she’ll whisper, “encyclical”.

This is Lockwood: elfin, fast-talking, determinedly idiosyncratic, with the uniform irony of a writer who came up through social media and for whom life online is a primary subject. If Priestdaddy documented her unconventional upbringing in more or less conventional comic style, her novels and poems since then have worked in more fragmentary modes that mimic the disjointed experience of processing information in bite-size non sequiturs. In 2021, Lockwood published her first novel, No One Is Talking About This, in which she wrote of the disorienting grief at the death of her infant niece from a rare genetic disorder. In her new novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, she returns to the theme, eliding that grief with her descent into a Covid-induced mania, a terrifying experience leavened with very good jokes. A danger of Lockwood’s writing is that it traps her in a persona that makes sincerity – any statement not hedged and flattened by sarcasm – almost impossible. But Lockwood, it seems to me, has a bouncy energy closer to an Elizabeth Gilbert than a Lauren Oyler or an Ottessa Moshfegh, say, so that no matter how glib her one-liners, you tend to come away from reading her with a general feeling of warmth.

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Review: The Gingerbread Bakery by Laurie Gilmore | Summary |

The Gingerbread Bakery by Laurie Gilmore is story based in Dream Harbor — that small town where everybody knows everybody, and love is all over the place. But something is cookin…let’s find out. If you are fan of Dream Harbor series, and like to get Free Book reviews of The Strawberry Patch Pancake House, you […]

No Friend to This House by Natalie Haynes review – a thrilling take on the Golden Fleece myth

Medea tells her side of the story in a reimagining of the ancient Greek stories that puts women centre stage

The women of myth have been talking – and they’re pointing the finger at us. Myths are “mirrors of us”, writes Natalie Haynes in Pandora’s Jar, her book of essays on the women of Greek mythology. “Which version of a story we choose to tell, which characters we place in the foreground, which ones we allow to fade into the shadows: these reflect both the teller and the reader, as much as they show the characters of the myth.”

Considerations of culture and bias have been central to the recent wave of mythic retellings focused on women, from Madeline Miller’s Circe and Pat Barker’s Iliad trilogy to Haynes’s own triad of novels set within the classical Greek world (The Children of Jocasta, A Thousand Ships and Stone Blind). This latest is a reimagining of the myth of Jason and the Golden Fleece and, true to form, it centres the women.

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The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai review – a dazzling epic

Longlisted for the Booker, this capacious story of love, work and family set between India and the US is both dizzyingly vast and insistently miniature

On a trip to see his grandparents in the Indian city of Allahabad, journalist Sunny Bhatia flicks through the morning papers, and is immediately at sea: what can the convoluted sentences before him – “TTIM files complaint against MSL at JM Rastra. MP(LTTK) holds GL Mukti strike to blame for Vasudev debacle. BORS reverberates in KLM(U) case” – possibly mean? His bewilderment at an India he cannot decode is, equally problematically, mirrored by the incomprehension he experiences in New York, where he occupies a junior role at the Associated Press.

Fortunately, there are other more readily accessible stories: a woman sold at a cattle fair in Rajasthan, and a retired railway clerk in Mysore who has grown his fingernails so long that they reach across the room and oblige his family to attend to his every physical need. They do not mind, the clerk tells Sunny when he interviews him over the phone, because they understand his determination to do something that nobody else has done: “The point is not about having longer fingernails than anyone; what is important is that I am firing up the younger generation to be ambitious. If I can do it, I tell them, I who used to have no discipline, then you can also reach your dream of fame.”

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Bunny author Mona Awad: ‘I’m a dark-minded soul’

The author’s blackly comic breakout novel won her awards and tattooed superfans. As she releases a follow-up, she talks about growing up as an outsider – and the best advice she received from Margaret Atwood

Mona Awad was trying on a forest-green, deer-patterned dress when she realised that the psychotically twee characters from her 2019 novel, Bunny, had burrowed back into her psyche.

“I looked in the mirror and thought: This isn’t a dress for me, this is a dress for Cupcake,” she says, referencing one of the antagonists from her breakout book. “I started thinking about her, and the other bunnies,” says the Canadian author, “and I was like: I have to go back.”

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From a new Thomas Pynchon novel to a memoir by Margaret Atwood: the biggest books of the autumn

Essays from Zadie Smith; Wiki founder Jimmy Wales on how to save the internet; a future-set novel by Ian McEwan; a new case for the Slow Horses - plus memoirs from Kamala Harris and Paul McCartney… all among this season’s highlights

Helm by Sarah Hall
Faber, out now
Hall is best known for her glittering short stories: this is the novel she’s been working on for two decades. Set in Cumbria’s Eden valley, it tells the story of the Helm – the only wind in the UK to be given a name – from its creation at the dawn of time up to the current degradation of the climate. It’s a huge, millennia-spanning achievement, spotlighting characters from neolithic shamans to Victorian meteorologists to present-day pilots.

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Slow Horses author Mick Herron: ‘I love doing things that are against the rules’

As the hit thriller returns to our screens, its creator talks about false starts, surprise inspirations – and why he never looks inside Jackson Lamb’s head

It is hard to imagine anyone less like the slovenly, has-been MI5 agent Jackson Lamb than his creator, Mick Herron. “He must come deep out of my subconscious,” the 62-year-old thriller writer jokes, sipping mineral water at a rooftop bar in his home city of Oxford, a world away from London’s Aldersgate where his bestselling Slough House series is set. In a “blue shirt, white tee” (fans will get the reference), he is softly spoken with a hint of a Geordie accent. Herron is often described as the heir to John le Carré and “the best spy novelist of his generation”, according to the New Yorker. Unlike le Carré, he’s not, and never has been, a spy. Mysteriously, though, Wikipedia has given him “an entirely fictitious” birthday. “I got cards. I got a cake,” he says.

For the uninitiated, the novels and award-winning TV series follow a bunch of misfit spooks exiled to Slough House from MI5 for various mishaps and misdemeanours, so far away from the shiny HQ in Regent’s Park that it may as well be in Slough. The joke is that these hapless underdogs (nicknamed “slow horses”), under the grubby reins of Lamb, always triumph over the slicker agents and “the Dogs” at the Park.

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Buckeye by Patrick Ryan review – behind the American dream

This luminous and tender 20th-century saga of wounded souls and small-town secrets has a deep melancholy

I am not the kind of reader who naturally gravitates toward slice-of-life Americana. I’m an enthusiast for the sort of American fiction where cowboys make dolent pronouncements while staring into fires, sure – but less the kind where people are generally nice, and go to places called things like “Fink’s Drugstore” to drink “root beer floats”.

So when Buckeye – the new novel from American author Patrick Ryan, whose collections of short fiction have garnered comparisons to William Faulkner and JD Salinger – clunked obstreperously on to my doorstep, I thought “you’ve got to respect a 440-pager”, and somewhat reluctantly pulled my little socks up for some Norman Rockwell-type business. And you know what? I now think slice-of-life Americana is good, actually.

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