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The third novel in the author's Morning Star series considers how the extreme can engulf the everyday. THE THIRD REALM, by Karl Ove Knausgaard. Translated by Martin Aitken. The latest [...]

Let Me Tell You What I Mean Joan Didion 4th Estate, 192pp. 12.99 [pounds sterling] Joan Didion--the author of three memoirs, two political travelogues, five novels, and now, with Let [...]

''The Singularities'' is an ambitiously referential work that confronts some of humanity's greatest challenges. THE SINGULARITIES, by John Banville The Irish novelist John Banville writes prose of such luscious elegance [...]

THE ABSOLUTEBy Daniel GuebelTranslated by Jessica Sequeira Daniel Guebel's novel -- his 15th, though the first to appear in English -- is a quixotic enterprise concerned with a quixotic enterprise [...]

A Companion to Literary Biography Edited by Richard Bradford Wiley-Blackwell, 600pp, 120 [pounds sterling] Can You Ever Forgive Me? Memoirs of a Literary Forger Lee Israel Simon & Schuster, 144pp. [...]

Not Far From Brideshead: Oxford Between the Wars Daisy Dunn Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 304pp, 20 [pounds sterling] Daisy Dunn describes her new book, a follow-up to inventive biographies of Catullus [...]

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Nicolas Pasternak Slater Oxford World's Classics, 544pp. 16.99 [pounds sterling] Crime and Punishment: a New Translation Translated by Michael R Katz Liveright, [...]

Three Rooms Jo Hamya Jonathan Cape, 170pp. 12.99 [pounds sterling] Wild Pets Amber Medland Faber # Faber, 416pp. 14.99 [pounds sterling] Every first novelist with even quasi-autobiographical leanings is obliged [...]

Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020 Salman Rushdie Jonathan Cape, 356pp. 20 [pounds sterling] I don't really want to go back to fact,' Salman Rushdie said in a Paris Review interview [...]

Toby Hennessy, the 28-year-old PR guy at the heart of Tana French's new novel, is a strong believer in things cohering--a story, a memory, a human personality. At one point, [...]

Klara and the Sun Kazuo Ishiguro Faber & Faber, 320pp, 20 [pounds sterling] Towards the end of his Nobel lecture, delivered in Stockholm in December 2017, Kazuo Ishiguro advised that [...]

The Silence Don DeLillo Picador, 128pp, 14.99[pounds sterling] Viewed retrospectively, from the endpoint --or something like it--of his career as a published novelist, the early work of Don DeLillo resembles [...]

Bewilderment Richard Powers Hutchinson Heinemann, 288pp, 18.99 [pounds sterling] Is Richard Powers trolling Sally Rooney? In reality, you'd have to say no. But it can appear, when placing their last [...]

Intimacies Katie Kitamura Jonathan Cape 230pp, 14.99 [pounds sterling] The one thing you can say for sure about Katie Kitamura's wonderfully sly new novel--the follow-up to her 2017 breakthrough A [...]

HIGH DIVE JONATHAN LEE Knopf MARGARET THATCHER, though a prodigious consumer of economics textbooks and briefing documents, and a frequent spouter of Bible passages, has been widely considered deaf to [...]

The Prose Factory: Literary Life in England Since 1918 DJ Taylor Chatto & Windus, 501pp, 25 £ The two leading English book reviewers who emerged in the late 1980s resembled […]

Sheila Heti Eat Me: the Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin (Knopf, $24.95) by Kenny Shopsin and Carolynn Carreno may look like just a cookbook but it's secretly an experimental [...]

Vladimir Nabokov professed to hate most forms of criticism but he owed, and owes, a great deal to critics. When he arrived in the US in 1940, having spent time [...]

Faulks on Fiction Sebastian Faulks BBC Books, 384pp, £20 We Had It So Good Linda Grant Virago, 352pp, £14.99 There have been all kinds of demands made on the novel, [...]

Letters Saul Bellow, edited by Benjamin Taylor Penguin, 571pp, £30 'Of course I am not a Freudian,' Saul Bellow wrote to Philip Roth in 1974. 'For one fierce interval I [...]

E M Forster: a New Life Wendy Moffat Bloomsbury, 416pp. £25 This is for the most part a magnificent biography, in which the author of A Room with a View, [...]

Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights Salman Rushdie Jonathan Cape, 180pp, 18.99 £ A Strangeness in My Mind Orhan Pamuk. Translated by Ekin Oklap Faber & Faber, 999pp. 20 [...]

A Spool of Blue Thread Anne Tyler Chatto & Windus, $68pp, 18.99 £ In today's fractious literary culture, there can be no genre with fewer advocates--or worse PR--than the saga. [...]

Amnesia Peter Carey Faber Ft Faber, 384pp. 18.99 £ 'Amnesia seemed to be a condition of patriotism,' wrote the Australian-born, New York-dwelling Robert Hughes in the opening pages of The […]

The Girl Next Door Ruth Rendell Hutchinson, 282pp. 18.99 £ An Event in Autumn Henning Mankell; translated by Laurie Thompson Harvill Seeker, 176pp. 9.99 £ The Two-Penny Bar Georges Simenon; […]

The Children Act Ian McEwan Jonathan Cape, 224pp. 16.99 £ The Zone of Interest Martin Amis Jonathan Cape, 311pp. 18.99 £ An author in his book must be like God [...]

The Zhivago Affair: the Kremlin, the CIA and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book Peter Finn and Petra Couvee Harvill Seeker, 350pp. 20 £ The Host Dangerous Book: the Battle […]

The Antinomies of Realism Fredric Jameson Verso, 432pp. 20 £ The Lives of the Novel: a History Thomas G Pavel Princeton University Press, 360pp. 24.55 £ The Novel: a Biography […]

Boyhood Island (My Struggle: 3) Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Don Bartlett Harvill Seeker, 490pp. 17.99 £ Some time in the late 1890s, Kate Perugini, the daughter of Charles Dickens, […]

There is a series of postcards by the Dutch cartoonist Joost Swarte which applies the alarmist tone usually reserved for smoking to scenes of people reading. A sunbathing woman is […]

My relationship with Philip Roth has been shorter than most of his readers' but probably more intense. For much of my childhood, I learned about American literature through American cinema. [...]

Solo William Boyd Jonathan Cape, 336pp, £18.99 Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy Helen Fielding Jonathan Cape, 400pp, £18.99 When, in a new foreword to her novel The Chronicles of […]

My Face for the World to See Alfred Hayes NYRB Classics, 135pp, £7,99 Beautiful Ruins Jess Walter Viking, 340pp, £8.99 The best-known single insight about Hollywood in a work of [...]

Both Flesh and Not: Essays David Foster Wallace Hamish Hamilton, 336pp, [pounds sterling]20 When it comes to advising their executors, even the most posterity-minded writers can fall short of being [...]

Back to Blood Tom Wolfe Jonathan Cape,720pp, £20 At the tail end of the last millennium (if you accept, for conversation's sake, that the millennia met at the stroke of [...]

NW Zadie Smith Hamish Hamilton, 304pp, £18.99 The title of Zadie Smith's new novel suggests a greater degree of particularity than we have come to expect from the author of [...]

Sweet Tooth Ian McEwan Jonathan Cape, 336pp, £18.99 Ian McEwan, though he has travelled far from the themes of First Love, Last Rites (1975) and In Between the Sheets (1978), [...]

Lionel Asbo: State of England Martin Amis Jonathan Cape, 288pp, £ 18.99 Although he is nowadays associated with American rhythms and American women and American real estate, and has a [...]

Scenes from Early Life Philip Hensher Fourth Estate, 32opp, £ 18.99 Philip Hensher's new novel takes the form of a memoir of Bangladesh in the 197os, a time when both [...]

Absolution Patrick Flanery Atlantic Books, 400pp, £ 12.99 No Time Like the Present Nadine Gordimer Bloomsbury, 432pp, £ 18.99 The South African novel under apartheid was a relatively straightforward thing, [...]

The Marriage Plot Jeffrey Eugenides Fourth Estate,406pp,[ponds sterling]20 Nobody is going to accuse Jeffrey Eugenides's new novel, his first since Middlesex (2002), of being insufficiently clever. It is a big [...]

The Sense of an Ending Julian Barnes Jonathan Cape, 16opp, £12.99 Martin Amis likes to quote Julian Barnes as saying that novelists write 'around' their themes rather than 'on' them. [...]

The Stranger's Child Alan Hollinghurst Picador, 576pp, £ 20 If 2004 was the 'Year of Henry James', as David Lodge has argued, 2011 is shaping up to be the Year [...]

Foreign Bodies Cynthia Ozick Atlantic Books, 272pp, £16.99 Perhaps the cruellest fate you could visit on any new novel would be to stand it next to Henry James's much-loved and [...]

King of the Badgers Philip Hensher Fourth Estate, 436pp, £18.99 Untold Story Monica Ali Doubleday, 345pp, £16.99 Philip Hensher's greatest attribute, after his energy and fluency, is his steady head; [...]

Today David Miller Atlantic Books, 176pp, [pounds sterling]12.99 David Miller, writing his first novel, gets off to a shaky start. He gives us three epigraphs to tell us what Today [...]

Quichotte Salman Rushdie Jonathan Cape, 416pp. 20 [pounds sterling] Salman Rushdie's new novel is the latest instalment of what might be called his American sequence, inaugurated 20 years ago, with [...]

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet David Mitchell Sceptre, 480pp, £18.99 The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of his friend Marilyn Monroe Andrew O'Hagan Faber & [...]

William Golding: the Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies John Carey Faber & Faber, 592pp, £25 Of the two names on the thick spine of this book, one connotes--to [...]