Book Reviews Archive

The second novel by Charles Lambert is dressed up as a thriller set in in Rome - but the real thrill is in his skill with character. ...

Mischa Hiller's debut novel is a powerful, well-written story set against the 1982 massacre in Sabra refugee camp in Lebanon. It's a very satisfying read, any may just turn out to be a sleeper hit for 2010. ...

An African immigrant in Italy is put on trial for murder in Gianrico Carofiglio's debut crime novel. (Now republished with a new cover by Bitter Lemon Press). ...

Roberto Bolaño's 1996 book Nazi Literature in the Americas, now published for the first time in the UK, is a collection of fictional portraits of strange right-wing writers from the 20th century and beyond. ...

An A-Z of Possible Worlds is a collection of twenty-six short stories, each one printed as a separate booklet and collected in a red box. The stories explore aspects of imaginary places, some being direct sociological histories, while others show off their environments through an individual's crisis or a specific event. ...

Knopf in the US and Penguin Classics in the UK have together published an elegant facsimile edition of Vladimir Nabokov's draft for The Original of Laura. But what are we supposed to do with it? ...

The Last Englishman: the double life of Arthur Ransome is a new biography of the Swallows and Amazons author, focussing on the years he spent in Russia during the Soviet revolution. ...

It's often interesting to see the subtleties of marketing between different editions of the same book. From covers to titles to apparent target audience, dramatic changes take place as books move across oceans. David Vann's Legend of a Suicide is an interesting example: in the US, it's a collection of short stories built around a central novella; in its UK edition, published by Penguin, it's a novel. Neither description is inaccurate. ...

War on the Margins, an MA thesis-turned-debut-novel from Libby Cone, explores the Jewish experience of the Nazi occupation of Jersey through a combination of archival documents and fiction. ...

Reviews of Impossible Stories Vols. 1 and 2 by Serbian author Zoran Zivkovic, and published by PS Publishing. Often brilliant and always entertaining, Zivkovic uses the format of story cycles to play with structures and symbols. ...

Ramsey Campbell, Probably, is a 2002 collection of the author's essays, reviews, and various other bits of non-fiction. It's the kind of writing I'd push into the hands of anybody who professes an interest in writers, writing, or reading. ...

Ian MacKenzie's promising, but ultimately flawed, debut novel follows Paul Metzger as he attempts to salvage something from his collapsing relationships with his estranged brother, his ex-wife, and his dying father. This futile existence takes a turn when he gets involved in a street fight, and finds himself being stalked by a violent stranger. ...

In Sum, a compact and attractive new book from Canongate, neuroscientist David Eagleman presents us with forty vignettes that imagine variations on the afterlife. ...

Talk of the Town is the first novel from poet Jacob Polley, a coming-of-age tale set in Carlisle during the summer of 1986, and narrated in vernacular by schoolboy Chris Hearsey. His friend Arthur—never the most stable of kids—has gone missing, and Chris sets out to try and find him. ...

Following an abortion and her break-up with a no-good boyfriend, nightclub singer and mother of two Maria begins receiving death threats. As the situation escalates, she begins to doubt her own sanity, and flees to her childhood home on the coast... Bitter Lemon Press published this fast-moving thriller from Dutch author Saskia Noort. ...

Postscripts is the flagship speculative fiction quarterly from PS Publishing. Issue #18 marks its transition from a magazine to a full-fledged anthology, and is dedicated to new writers. So what does it have to offer? ...

Far North, Marcel Theroux's fourth novel, treads well-worn paths of post-apocalyptic wastelands and the ease with which morality breaks down... but does it add anything new to the mix? ...

Rhyming Life and Death, the latest book from Israeli author Amos Oz, is that gem of the literary world: a novella that takes an idea, explores it with conciseness and wit, and then wraps up before it's outstayed its welcome. ...

The Last Dickens, Matthew Pearl's thriller about a hunt for the missing installments of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, suffers from similar problems to his previous Poe Shadow: an overabundance of background trivia in place of story. ...

In Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel, author Edmund White examines the relationship between the legendary hell-raiser's life and his work, with asides on the impact of Rimbaud's story on White's own life. ...