Category Fiction

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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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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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