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Pariah Genius: John Deakin and the Soho Court around Francis Bacon by Iain Sinclair Cheerio Publishing, [pounds sterling]19.99, pp. 325 During the various lockdowns I found myself wondering how Iain [...]

How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto Picador, [pounds sterling]16.99, pp. 298 This is the kind of comic novel I greatly admire, because it makes me feel so [...]

Bridge by Lauren Beukes Michael Joseph, [pounds sterling]18.99, pp. 432 Lauren Beukes is a writer who puts cerebral propositions into breakneck thrillers: structural misogyny in The Shining Girls; the flipside [...]

Brooklyn Crime Novel by Jonathan Lethem Atlantic, [pounds sterling]20, pp. 384 Would readers approaching this novel (although novel might not be precisely the right word) without any indication as to [...]

Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman Sceptre, [pounds sterling]20, pp. 294 Ned Beauman's novels are like strange attractors for words with the letter 'Z'. They zip, zing, fizz, dazzle and sizzle. [...]

Dr. No by Percival Everett Infux Press, [pounds sterling]9.99, pp. 278 Perhaps Percival Everett's The Trees, shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year, made readers realise what an astonishing writer [...]

Multiple Joyce: 100 Short Essays About James Joyce's Cultural Legacy by David Collard Sagging Meniscus, [pounds sterling]19.99, pp. 358 I do not think I am alone in confessing that I [...]

It seemed like a preposterous proposition. For decades, Iain Sinclair has been an assiduous psychogeographer of London, an eldritch cartographer mapping ley lines between Hawksmoor churches and Ripper tours, skulking [...]

Pessoa: An Experimental Life by Richard Zenith Allen Lane, [pounds sterling]40, pp. 1,055 This is an ingenious and infuriating book about an ingenious and infuriating writer. I first encountered Fernando [...]

How to Survive Everything by Ewan Morrison Contraband, [pounds sterling]9.99, pp. 358 Ewan Morrison is an intellectually nimble writer with a penchant for provocation. His work has included the novels, [...]

Cowboy Graves: Three Novellas by Roberto Bolaho, translated by Natasha Wimmer Picador, [pounds sterling]8.99, pp. 196 This might seem an odd confession, but the work of Roberto Bolafio gives me [...]

Earwig by B. Catling Coronet, 20 [pounds sterling], pp. 152 Genuinely surrealist novels are as rare as hen's teeth. They are a different form from the magic realist, the absurdist, [...]

A Small Revolution in Germany by Philip Hensher Fourth Estate, 14.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 324 This is a very nuanced and subtle novel by Philip Hensher, which manages the highwire [...]

Will by Will Self Penguin Viking, 14.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 400 Well, it was always going to be called Will. More than once in this terrifying, terrific book, Will Self [...]

Seven Types of Atheism by John Gray Allen Lane, 20 [pounds sterling], pp.182 G. K. Chesterton, in one of his wise and gracious apothegms, once wrote that 'When Man ceases [...]

Devil's Day by Andrew Michael Hurley John Murray, 12.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 296 Andrew Michael Hurley's The Loney was one of the surprise stand-outs of last year, and a worthy [...]

Hark by Sam Lipsyte Granta, 12.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 284 This is an ebullient, irreverent and deeply serious novel in the noble tradition of Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis (especially Babbitt [...]

The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed, 1600-1900 by T.M. Devine Allen Lane, 25 [pounds sterling], pp. 464 There is a degree of irony in the opening chapter of [...]

The Un-Discovered Islands: An Archipelago of Myths and Mysteries, Phantoms and Fakes by Malachy Tallack, illustrated by Katie Scott Polygon Books, 14.99 £, pp. 144 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Un-Discovered Islands [...]

Addlands by Tom Bullough Granta, 14.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 304, ISBN 9781783781645 There have been a number of attempts to graft the style of the so-called new nature writing onto [...]

You Don't Have to Live Like This by Benjamin Markovits Faber, 14.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 392, ISBN 9780571313402 Spectator Bookshop, 12.99 [pounds sterling] In the opening sentence of this subtle [...]

The Illuminations by Andrew O'Hagan Faber, 17.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 294, ISBN 9780571273645 Spectator Bookshop, 15.99 The illuminations of Andrew O'Hagan's fifth novel are both metaphysical and mundane. In the [...]

Essayism Brian Dillon Fitzcarraldo Editions, 228pp. 10.99 [pounds sterling] It is somewhat unseemly for a critic to confess that their immediate reaction to a book is one of unremitting envy. [...]

Torpor by Chris Kraus Tuskar Rock, 8.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 292 In many ways this is a very old-fashioned novel. Jerome is 53, and a lacklustre professor at Columbia; his [...]

Phone Will Self Viking, 617pp, 18.99 [pound sterling] All novels have their own internal metonyms. In Phone, the conclusion of Will Self's trilogy that began with Umbrella and continued with [...]

Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood Allen Lane, 14.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 336 This is one of the most remarkable, hilarious, jaw-droppingly candid and affecting memoirs I have read for some time [...]

The Last Days of New Paris by China Mieville Picador, 14.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 224 At the start of this novella the protagonist, Thibaut, is ambushed by Wehrmacht soldiers between [...]

A Line Made by Walking by Sara Baume Heinemann, 12.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 312 This is an extraordinarily compelling novel for one in which nothing really happens but everything changes. [...]

Scotland: A Literary Guide For Travellers by Garry MacKenzie I.B. Tauris, 16.99 £, pp. 272 There is an immediate problem for anyone producing a guide to places in Scotland with [...]

Shakespeare's Binding Language by John Kerrigan Oxford University Press 35 £, pp. 622, ISBN 9780198757580 Given this year's 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, there was always going to be a [...]

Robert Lowell in Love by Jeffrey Meyers Massachusetts U.P., 33.95 £, pp. 264, ISBN 9781625341860 The conceit of this book--the author's third on Robert Lowell--is strong, although its execution is [...]

The Gap of Time: The Winter's Tale Retold by Jeanette Winterson Hogarth, 16.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 288, ISBN 9781781090299 Spectator Bookshop, 14.99 [pounds sterling] It is fair to say that [...]