Some books don’t travel well through time. They are of an era, an age. Perhaps those that do – Austen or Conrad, for example – are signs of greatness, of ‘classic’ literature. What, then, might one say about a book that has not travelled well, that is stylistically convoluted and at times feels remarkably self-indulgent? […]
Sarah Perry can write. On the back cover of “After Me Comes The Flood” Sophie Hannah is quoted as saying “If she doesn’t win the Booker Prize one day, I’ll be amazed”. I’m inclined to agree. There are perhaps some characteristics shared between the protagonists of “After Me” and her other two novels “Melmoth” and […]
I really like Mary Jean Chan’s “Flèche” – even though, based on my track record of how I respond to a reasonably large proportion of modern verse, I shouldn’t… Why is that? Two main reasons, both normally bête noires. The first is the significant experimentation in form (especially how the pieces appear on the page) […]
I confess to being uncertain as to what kind of book Éric Vuillard’s “The Order of the Day” actually is… Although I found it on one of Waterstone’s fiction tables, it relates events leading up to the Austrian Anschluss of 1938 and thus the foothills of the Second World War, and does so with what […]
My occasional penchant for modern Japanese ‘magic realism’ novels is something of a double-edged sword. Why do I say that? Having read virtually everything Haruki Murakami has read, I find the bar for such novels is set pretty high, so when something like Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s “Before the coffee gets cold” comes along, there is perhaps […]
