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We Travelled: Essays and Poems by David Hare Faber & Faber, 304pp, 14.99 [pounds sterling] The playwright and film-maker David Hare called his first collection of journalism Writing Left-Handed. Yet [...]

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 [...]

Burntcoat by Sarah Hall Faber & Faber, 240pp, 12.99 [pounds sterling] Sarah Hall's latest novel--her first in six years, following a pair of lauded short story collections--is a tale of [...]

Souvenir by Michael Bracewell White Rabbit, 128pp, 14.99 [pounds sterling] Michael Bracewell's latest book is an elating elegy, a portrait of the years 1979-86 in the form of glimpses, or [...]

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 [...]

Borges and Me: An Encounter by Jay Parini Canongate, 320pp. 14.99 [pounds sterling] Jay Parini's genial fictionalised travelogue describes a road trip from St Andrews to Inverness and back again, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Two Girls, Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill Penguin, 308pp. 9.99[pounds sterling] Mary Gaitskill's pin-sharp first novel, published in 1991 and now deservingly reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic, is [...]

In Youth is Pleasure by Denton Welch Penguin Classics, 192pp. 9.99 [pounds sterling] Denton Welch, an English painter and aesthete who took up writing after a cycling accident, was a [...]

The Coward by Jarred McGinnis Canongate, 320pp. 16.99 [pounds sterling] Jarred McGinnis, an American short story writer and former academic researcher in artificial intelligence, describes over 59 brisk chapters his [...]

Varying Degrees of Success by David Lodge Harvill Seeker, 224pp. 25 [pounds sterling] The third volume of David Lodge's autobiography, in tone and length almost a coda to its chunky [...]

The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock by Edward White WW Norton, 400pp. 22.99 [pounds sterling] Robin Wood opened the first book in English on Alfred Hitchcock by asking why we [...]

The Road to the City by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by Frances Frenaye Daunt Books, 99pp. 8.99 [pounds sterling] The revival of the Italian author Natalia Ginzburg, who died in 1991, [...]

by Jon McGregor 4th Estate, z88pp, [pounds sterling]14.99 Jon McGregor's potent and consistently surprising new novel, his successor to Reservoir 13--winner of the Costa Novel Award and shortlisted for the [...]

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, [...]

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 […]

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 [...]

Freedom Jonathan Franzen Fourth Estate, 570pp, £20 When Jonathan Franzen decided to call his 2006 memoir The Discomfort Zone, it was a case of wordplay trumping truth, for 'discomfort' is [...]

The Cockroach Ian McEwan Jonathan Cape, 100pp, 7.99 [pounds sterling] Ian McEwan's new novella, written at a clip and published in time for the latest Brexit deadline, starts by inverting [...]

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, [...]

Cari Mora Thomas Harris William Heinemann, 336pp. 20 [pounds sterling] With Red Dragon (1981) and The Silence of the Lambs (1988), Thomas Harris set the bar for modern suspense writing, [...]

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. [...]

My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley Granta, 208pp, 12.99 [pounds sterling] Gwendoline Riley, the author of five previous novels, notably First Love (2017), a portrait of a volatile relationship, now presents [...]

Byline: Leo Robson The Mariner's Prayer Was Joseph Conrad right to think that everyone was getting him wrong? In March, 1893, John Galsworthy-a product of Harrow and Oxford who had [...]

Byline: Leo Robson The title of Francois Ozon's new film--his 16th in less than two decades--is heavier, more nuance-laden, than it first appears. In the past, Ozon's titles have been [...]

In his 1960 essay 'Beyond the Bounds of the Basic Rule', the American psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut considered the discipline of psychoanalytic biography. This was a practice indulged by Freud himself, [...]

A Small Revolution in Germany Philip Hensher Fourth Estate, 336pp. 14.99 [pounds sterling] Philip Hensher's writing has always trailed the vices of its extraordinary virtues. But in his recent work, [...]

On Stephen Sondheim's 85th birthday, he will be revered as the genius of musical theatre. But his failures are just as fascinating as his successes Of all the tributes bestowed [...]

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 […]

Robin Robertson has won this year's Goldsmiths Prize, in association with the New Statesman, for his verse novel The Long Take. The chair of judges, Adam Mars-Jones, praises a powerful [...]

The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis Martha C Nussbaum Oxford University Press, 250pp, 18.99 [pounds sterling] Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over the World William [...]

Broadsword Calling Danny Boy: On Where Eagles Dare Geoff Dyer Penguin, 123pp. 7.99 [pounds sterling] Of the two descriptions that Geoff Dyer provides near the end of his very typical [...]

Sharp: the Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion Michelle Dean Fleet, 384pp. 20 [pounds sterling] Despite its assertive subtitle and mostly chronological march of chapters, Michelle Dean's [...]

Byline: Leo Robson Doings and Undoings How great was the novelist Henry Green? One night in the spring of 1955, the actress Elaine Dundy was leaving a party in New [...]

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 [...]