This is a truly excellent book, one of the best it has been my pleasure to read in the line of duty for years. Joanne Harris achieves everything a novelist should aim for, with no sense of effort or ...

Do we experience life as a continuum or as a series of disconnected shocks and accidents? Alice Munro started writing at a time when novelists, at least, were preoccupied with coherence, with ...

The first novel in Paul Auster’s trilogy has Daniel Quinn, listless widowed mystery writer, receiving a late-night telephone call. The speaker asks for Paul Auster (‘someone he was not’), supposedly a ...

After an excursion to Argentina, the chief exponent of minimalist melancholy has returned to his own ground. Colm Tóibín’s third novel, The Story of the Night, was set in Galtieri country, in the ...

How do the Booker judges choose the best book of the year from the sixty or seventy books they are sent? Their number has been increased from three to five, and literary academics have been less ...

The book is full of remarkable colour gleaned from Conway’s visits to far-flung outposts of the modern trade world. Among the ...

The image links back to Jane Eyre, sequestered behind the curtain at Gateshead with Bewick’s History of British Birds on her ...

Phenomenal Spirits - Two Women by Jacqueline Rose ...

The Portrait Miniature: A New History draws on the collection of around two thousand miniatures at the V&A to trace almost ...

From Denying to Embracing the Inner Lives of Animals, de Waal, who died in 2024, describes the incident with Thai. Thai cared ...

Twenty-six men were raised by Napoleon to the rank of marshal of France; only six fought with him at Waterloo. Jonathan Boff ...

For Western observers in particular, few Japanese institutions have proved so enduringly exotic: the tattoos, the severed ...