Category Fiction

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Heart the Lover by Lily King review – a love story to treasure

A companion novel to the brilliant Writers & Lovers, this delightfully witty tale of college romance matures into midlife poignancy

The university experience is a risky business in fiction. Generally, the feelings are intense, but the stakes are low; it’s all very formative for the individual character, but it can feel a bit trivial to anyone else. In fact, reading an account of someone’s university days is surely only one or two stages removed from having to hear about the dream they had last night.

So my heart initially sank at Heart the Lover’s cover promise that our main character would soon be “swept into an intoxicating world of academic fervour, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games” – good grief, save me from the raucous card games! But obviously the caveat here is what it always is: a good writer will make it matter. I had faith, therefore, that everything would be all right, since Lily King is an exceptionally good writer. Indeed, she could probably write a book-length account of her most recent dream and I would still rush to read it.

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Where to start with: Paul Bailey

The novelist and poet, who died a year ago, left a huge body of work distinguished by its melancholy wit and warmth. These are some of the highlights

Paul Bailey, who died last October aged 87, was best known as a novelist of comic brilliance, wide-ranging empathy – even for the worst of his characters – and a cleverness that was never clinical. His fiction was frequently occupied with the impact of memories on our lives, and usually heavily driven by sharp, syncopated dialogue. But he was also a memoirist, poet and more besides – so here’s a guide to the legacy of books he left behind.

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The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie – a haunting coda to a groundbreaking career

From an afterlife fantasy to a tale of loss in Mumbai, death is a recurring theme in this story collection – an echo of the novelist at his peak

Towards the end of Knife, his 2024 book about the assault at a public event in upstate New York that blinded him in his right eye, Salman Rushdie offers a thought experiment:

Imagine that you knew nothing about me, that you had arrived from another planet, perhaps, and had been given my books to read, and you had never heard my name or been told anything about my life or about the attack on The Satanic Verses in 1989. Then, if you read my books in chronological order, I don’t believe you would find yourself thinking, Something calamitous happened to this writer’s life in 1989. The books are their own journey.

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From White Teeth to Swing Time: Zadie Smith’s best books – ranked!

Twenty-five years on from her dazzling debut, and as a new collection of essays comes out, we assess the British author’s best books

How do you follow a smash hit like White Teeth, which, as everyone now knows, sold for a six-figure sum while the author was still at university, and turned Zadie Smith into a literary superstar and poster girl for multi­culturalism at 24? With a novel about a pot-smoking Chinese‑Jewish autograph hunter, the dangers of fame and the shallowness of pop culture, of course.

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‘They disappeared when the wall came down’: German author Jenny Erpenbeck on the objects that contain vast histories

From the drip catchers of coffee pots to the typewriter she used for her first works, the International Booker prize-winning writer reflects on the hidden significance of everyday items

Drip catcher
The carpet hangers disappeared from the rear courtyards when wall-to-wall carpeting and vacuum cleaners were introduced – when the Persian carpets had been bombed away, when there was no money to buy new ones, when the men who used to carry the rolled-up carpets down the stairs for cleaning had been killed in the war.

The shop where I used to take my tights to get them mended when they had a run in them, back when I was a little girl – a shop called “Run Express” – disappeared when the Wall came down and the west was able to sell its cheap tights in the east.

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The Rest of Our Lives by Benjamin Markovits audiobook review – an American road trip with a twist

A law professor leaves his failing marriage and faltering career and hits the open road in this Booker-shortlisted novel of midlife turmoil

At the start of The Rest of Our Lives, we learn that Tom, a 55-year-old law professor from New York, plans to leave his wife just as soon as he has dropped their youngest child off at college. Tom and Amy have been together for 30 years. He believes theirs to be a “C-minus marriage” which was irreparably ruptured when Amy had an affair 12 years previously. And so, after leaving their daughter Miriam at college in Pittsburgh, he keeps on driving, revisiting old friends and places in search of his departed youth.

Benjamin Markovits’s 12th novel – which has been shortlisted for this year’s Booker prize – could be seen as a companion piece to Miranda July’s celebrated All Fours in its exploration of the dissatisfaction of middle age. Tom is not a reliable narrator of his life, though he is nonetheless a compelling protagonist even in his flagrant moments of self-deception.

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The Rose Field by Philip Pullman – nail-biting conclusion to the Northern Lights series

The Book of Dust trilogy is brought to a complex and fitting end as Lyra battles the Magisterium over her lost imagination

Things are falling apart in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman’s magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a charged and slanted version of our own. Institutions are failing, or reassembling themselves along new and disquieting lines. An unseen force “is destroying the air and the seasons”; at the same time, “money’s going bad, and no one knows why”. Power is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the offices of theocrats, the coffers of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. “Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly”, says merchant Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. “Things we thought were firm and solid are weakening and giving way.”

Just what that something might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that animates The Rose Field, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth left off. This is, by all accounts, Pullman’s concluding foray into the intricately constructed, infinitely beguiling realm he first unveiled 30 years ago, with the publication of Northern Lights. It’s a realm whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the humans look and think and act like us, but are accompanied by daemons, souls in animal form; where the skies are filled with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, buses are caught and tea is drunk, and middle-aged academics carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the spiky and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but older, sadder, more cautious, less certain. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her daemon, Pantalaimon – but it was also, ironically, the trigger which caused him to abandon her in the first place.

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The Land of Sweet Forever by Harper Lee review – newly discovered stories from an American great

If we regard this book as literature, it is an unqualified failure. But these juvenile stories and essays shed fascinating light on the repression of Lee’s early life

When a new book is published by a writer dead for a decade, there is always some suspicion that the bottom of the barrel is being scraped. When the writer is Harper Lee, there is also the unpleasant aftertaste of the release of her second novel, 2015’s Go Set a Watchman, which was promoted as a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, when in fact it was a formless early draft. The publication was also surrounded by controversy over whether the aged Lee, by then seriously disabled, had really consented to its publication.

This new book, The Land of Sweet Forever, is a much more conventional enterprise: a collection of Lee’s unpublished short stories and previously uncollected essays. No deception is being practised here, and if people want to read the lesser scribblings of a favourite author, it is surely a victimless crime. However, like most such books, it has little to offer to those who aren’t diehard fans.

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Lily King: ‘What is life without love?’

The American author discusses our need for fiction in an age of disconnection, the challenges of growing up with 14 step-siblings, and why she’s going ‘all in’ on romance

The cover of Lily King’s new novel, Heart the Lover, features an abstracted face sobbing white tears on a tangerine background. It is an appropriate image, given that so many early readers – from BookTokkers to fellow authors – have reported weeping uncontrollably during the book’s final third.

For King, the reaction was unexpected. “I certainly felt a lot of emotion while I was writing. Not sobbing, more a deeper grief,” she says. But she describes the writing of her sixth novel, which begins with a 1980s college love story then revisits the same characters in middle age, as a joyful experience. “It was really great to just go back to the 1980s and college. It was a relief.”

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