Category Fiction

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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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The Two Roberts by Damian Barr review – lost story of a gay art duo

The lives of Scottish artists Bobby MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun, who found love and fame and lost it all, are vividly reimagined

What if the protagonist of a novel was not a single person but a couple? Damian Barr takes on this challenge, and he’s found a historic couple who make the ideal source material. Working-class Scottish artists Bobby MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun were rarely apart after they met in 1933. They lived and worked together, became famous together and then declined into desperate squalor together – even poorer than when they began.

Barr knows what it’s like to conquer Glasgow from a small, working-class town on its outskirts; he knows what it’s like to find yourself feted for your portraits of the place you’ve left irrevocably behind. His memoir, Maggie and Me, was a hard-hitting yet rambunctious tale of growing up gay near Motherwell under Thatcher, uneasily aware that the woman who pushed his parents deeper into poverty also taught him that the ruthless exercise of his talents offered his escape. He expanded his exploration of how brutality can take hold in his novel You Will Be Safe Here, set in South Africa. Now he returns to Scotland in this moving meditation on art, love and home.

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The Hallmarked Man by Robert Galbraith review – a terrific, tightly plotted romp

With four murder inquiries in play, JK Rowling’s eighth Cormoran Strike novel avoids the page-padding longeurs of previous volumes – but will he finally tell Robin how he feels about her?

In his popular BBC series Just One Thing, the late Michael Mosley made the case for resistance training. Lifting weights, he explained, not only builds stronger muscles, it also boosts the immune system, maintains a healthy heart and improves brain function. Best of all, it can be done in your kitchen, using ordinary domestic items: pints of milk in place of dumbbells, say, or squats wearing a backpack full of books.

Anyone intending to use Robert Galbraith’s Strike novels for this purpose would be advised to seek the advice of a GP. The Hallmarked Man may not be the heftiest of the eight so far – it does not even make it into the top three – but it still clocks in at a cool 912 pages. Galbraith’s tendency to whopperdom has in the past elicited a fair amount of griping from critics, me among them, who argued that judicious pruning would better serve her plots and her charismatic private detective duo, the sweary one-legged army veteran Cormoran Strike and his brave, decent business partner Robin Ellacott. Not that it changed anything. The books remained resolutely huge (as did sales – by 2024, a staggering 20 million books had been sold in over 50 countries). Galbraith, otherwise known as JK Rowling, has never been one to bow to her detractors.

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Vilhelm’s Room by Tove Ditlevsen review – a portrait of catastrophic mental illness

Originally published a year before her death, the Danish author’s final novel is an autofictional suicide note

Tove Ditlevsen’s last novel, Vilhelm’s Room, was originally published in Denmark in 1975. As it begins, the protagonist, Lise Mundus, has just been abandoned by Vilhelm, her husband of 20 years. He’s a celebrity newspaper editor; she’s an acclaimed writer with a history of addiction. From a bed in a psychiatric ward, Lise publishes a lonely hearts ad: “Recently escaped a long, unhappy marriage – aged 51, but youthful in spirit – wonderful son, aged 15 – household literary name – summerhouse – large flat in the city centre – temporarily incapacitated by a nervous breakdown – prefers a motorist.”

The ad is seized upon by Lise’s malicious upstairs neighbour, Mrs Thomsen, who shows it to her young lodger/lover, Kurt, hoping he can financially exploit Lise. Kurt is duly installed in Lise’s home, but finds himself treated there with total indifference. Lise is wholly consumed with memories of Vilhelm and with plans to end her own life. We know she will carry these out; in the opening pages, she is already dead.

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‘They had everything, then nothing’: the prodigies the art world forgot

Robert Colquhoun and Bobby MacBryde were once the golden boys of London’s art scene – photographed in Vogue, filmed by Ken Russell and lauded by Francis Bacon. So why did they vanish into obscurity?

The world is burning. Fascism is rising. Countries are falling. And we’re on the brink of incredible technological change, which will either be the end of everything or a new beginning. So, who needs artists?

An August night in 1944. Robert Colquhoun’s hand shakes as he lights a candle in the blacked-out Notting Hill studio shared with his lover, fellow artist, Robert “Bobby” MacBryde. They are known – from Soho alleys to Bond Street galleries – as the Two Roberts: inseparable, incandescent, often in trouble. Where is Bobby tonight? The Colony Room Club, probably. Safe, Robert hopes. Though never from himself. Bombers prowl the skies above. Who will survive the night? “Fuck it,” Robert mutters, fag dancing on his lip. And he picks up his brush.

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Rebecca F Kuang: ‘A Tale of Two Cities is deeply silly camp – I love it!’

The US writer on being switched on to romance by Sally Rooney, the magic of David Mitchell and the joy of Jean-Paul Sartre

My favourite book growing up
Brian Jacques’s Redwall (and all its sequels). All I wanted was to be a squirrel in the Mossflower Woods!

The books that changed me as a teenager
I read China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station and The City & the City when I was in college. I had been falling out of love with fantasy – I felt too old for Redwall, and I thought I’d outgrown the genre – but Miéville’s work opened the door to the enormous world of adult fantasy literature that grappled with the problems I was now interested in.

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Seascraper by Benjamin Wood review – a story that sings on the page

A young shrimp fisher’s horizons are broadened by the arrival of a stranger in this atmospheric Booker-listed tale

You don’t think you need a novella about a folk-singing shrimp fisher living with his mother on a fictional stretch of isolated coast until you read Benjamin Wood’s Booker-longlisted fifth novel, Seascraper. Wood conjures wonders from this unlikely material in a tale so richly atmospheric you can almost taste the tang of brine and inhale the sea fog.

As unexpected as his previous four books – which range from a campus intrigue (The Bellwether Revivals) to a sensitive study of a Glaswegian painter (The Ecliptic) – Seascraper follows the daily trials of Tom Flett, a “shanker” who scrapes the sand for its yield at low tide with his trusty horse and wagon, risking his life in a job that is simultaneously boring and dangerous. Tom is clearly in the Hardyesque tradition of unworldly young men who tend the land or work with their hands (Gabriel Oak, Jude Fawley), and it’s this that alerts us to his vulnerability to charmers and chancers.

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False War by Carlos Manuel Álvarez review – a new vision of migration

A novel of interlocking stories captures the ordinary lives and interior worlds of Cuban exiles seeking sanctuary in Miami

Carlos Manuel Álvarez’s second novel is a hugely rewarding, polyphonic narrative of migration from Cuba. Through its characters’ rich and eccentric interior worlds, it gives articulation to people whose lives are often reduced to stereotypes and offers a new vision of migration.

False War is comprised mostly of 13 interconnected storylines, which alternate irregularly in short episodes. The stories have different timelines and vary significantly in their portrayals of an array of characters, many from Havana, “a city of many stray sadnesses”.

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