A silent movie plays and those existential clowns Laurel and Hardy are trading blows in their endless feud. In the real world, things aren’t always black and white. In the technicolour glory of summer’s day in a London park, another cycle of tit-for-tat revenge is about to begin… Award-winning graphic novelist Oscar Zarate’s latest work...
Albert Alla’s debut novel Black Chalk is an unsettling exploration of passion and modern morality in which the sole witness and survivor of a school shooting in the Oxfordshire countryside returns to the scene of the devastation after eight meandering years searching for meaning and reconciliation in big cities and on small islands. He was...
In the 1980s Nina Stibbe wrote letters home to her sister in Leicester describing her trials and triumphs as a nanny in north London to the family of Mary-Kay Wilmers, now editor of the London Review of Books. There’s a cat nobody likes, a visiting dog called Ted Hughes, almost daily suppertime visits from Alan...
I meet Eleanor Catton in the Langham Hotel straight after her Woman’s Hour debut and the day before the Booker shortlist announcement. I have a feeling that her second and most recent novel, The Luminaries, will be on the shortlist and I also have a feeling that she already knows whether it is or not....
Like most kids, Katie was a picky eater. She’d sit at the table in silent protest, hide uneaten toast in her bedroom, listen to parental threats she’d have to eat it for breakfast. But in any life a set of circumstances can collide, and normal behaviour can soon shade into something sinister, something deadly. Lighter...
Adriana Lisboa’s latest novel Crow Blue, her first to be published in the UK, is a lyrical and passionate account of a young girl on a roadtrip from Rio de Janeiro to Colorado in search of family ties. We catch up with her as the spirit of Carnaval sweeps the sleepy Suffolk coast. Author portrait...
Marriage Material is the story of three generations of a Punjabi Sikh family, from the 1960s to the present day, set against the backdrop of their Wolverhampton corner shop. It sets the story of this one family, with its individual secrets and scandals, up against the broader political context of the period. From Conservative MP...
I was the wrong guy in the right place. At least that’s what I thought when I opened the office door and the elderly gentleman asked me if I was Miranda, the private detective. I quickly realised that he was a rich client. Not so much because he was wearing a suit and tie, both...
In Darling Monster, John Julius Norwich collects the letters his mother, the screen actress and society darling Lady Diana Cooper wrote to her only son at school and through his early adulthood. Covering the period 1939 to 1952, the letters take in the first rumblings of World War II – which Lady Diana and her...
He entered the bathroom completely naked, in harsh silence. Only the red washcloth hung from his shoulders, giving his hunched back some colour. I led him to the shower cabinet, trying to steady his slow steps. To support him. There wasn’t room for both of us inside, so I stayed out as he stepped in....
“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Ernest Hemingway (attrib.) ‘Flash fiction’, ‘micro fiction’, ‘sudden fiction’, ‘micro-stories’, ‘postcard fiction’, ‘short shorts’, ‘short short stories’. Whatever name you know it by, small but perfectly formed fiction has a long tradition from Aesop’s Fables, Japanese haiku and Arabian Sufism through Chekhov and Kafka, Borges and Cortázar, H.P. Lovecraft,...
Ginny and Penelope Skinner’s Briony Hatch is a warm and wickedly funny graphic novel about a (temporarily) displaced teen who tries to escape reality by immersing herself in fantasy fiction while her parents’ marriage crumbles and her so-called friends obsess about boys and self-image. Mark Reynolds fires off some questions about the book and the...
