The latest addition to my website is Helen Oyeyemi‘s Mr Fox. This is a modern updating on the Bluebeard legend. St John Fox is a 1930s US writer whose novels features unpleasant things done to women. Mary Foxe, who is entirely a figment of his imagination, berates him for his treatment of the women. Oyeyemi, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Steven Hall‘s The Raw Shark Texts. I found it a rather contrived novel that did not really work for me. It tells the story of a young Englishman, Eric Sanderson, who has had something of a breakdown – eleven times – since the accidental death in Greece of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Lawrence Durrell‘s Tunc. This is the first of a two-part series and tells of a young inventor, Felix Charlock, who invents something that seems like a spy bug but also involves storing data in a computer and analysing it, all with a slight science fiction touch. He is … Read more
Doris Lessing, the Persian-born novelist, brought up in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) died this morning. She is best-known for her novel The Golden Notebook but wrote many first-class novels during her long career. We had listened to her on an old Desert Island Discs just a couple of weeks ago (you can download/listen to it … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Lawrence Durrell‘s The Dark Labyrinth, originally published as Cefalù. It tells the story of a group of English people on a cruise in the Mediterranean and, in particular, their visit to a (fictional) labyrinth at (the fictitious) Cefalù. We start with one of their number – a poet … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Adam Foulds‘ The Quickening Maze. This a story about the poet John Clare and, to a much lesser degree, the poet Alfred Tennyson. Clare spent much of his adult life in asylums. This one tells of his time in an asylum in Essex, managed by Matthew Allen. Also … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Lawrence Durrell‘s The Black Book. This was Durrell’s first novel, written when he was twenty-two and published in France when he was twenty-four (it was considered too obscene to be published unexpurgated in England). It has some of the hallmarks of a first novel by a twenty-two year … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ross Raisin‘s God’s Own Country (US: Out Backward). It is a story told by Sam Marsdyke, a solitary eighteen-year old who lives on a farm on the North Yorkshire Moors, with his parents, a grumpy father and an unhappy mother. Sam is a (probably) unreliable narrator. He was … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Joanna Kavenna‘s . This is a novel about childbirth. There are four separate but linked stories about childbirth. The first is set in 1865 and is about Ignaz Semmelweis who discovered the link between infection and the death of women in childbirth. He went mad and, in this … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jim Crace‘s Harvest. Crace has said that this is his final novel. It is an excellent novel, telling the story of an unnamed (not only by the author but by the characters) village somewhere in England, at the time of the enclosure of the common land. At the … Read more