Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams review – a smart and breezy debut

This article is more than 7 years old

A Londoner’s low self-esteem leads to a series of ill-advised flings in an amusing first novel

Anthony Cummins
Tuesday 16 April 2019

You can’t help but suspect that literary fiction short-changes readers when it comes to portraying black Britons. A novel such as Diana Evans’s Ordinary People, about middle-class midlife marital crises, felt radical mainly because the alternatives tend to be gritty or nothing: a choice between, say, Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City, about estate kids caught up in riots, or John Lanchester’s south London panorama Capital, without a black British character in sight.

 

Review

Audition by Katie Kitamura review – an evasive experiment

This article is more than 10 months old

This tricksy novel from the author of A Separation takes its cue from Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy – but what starts as intrigue soon starts to feel like time-wasting

Susan Choi and Katie Kitamura among authors longlisted for Women’s prize for fiction

Katie Kitamura: ‘I still feel incapable of processing what’s happening’

Anthony Cummins

Monday 14 April 2025

Katie Kitamura’s most recent books, A Separation (2017) and Intimacies (2021) – each narrated by an unnamed woman upping sticks for Europe in the wake of emotional upheaval – were among several American novels to take inspiration from the coolly analytical style of Rachel Cusk’s Outlinetrilogy. Kitamura’s new novel, Audition, centred on marital strife between an actor and an art critic in New York, likewise deploys that Outline-patented register of philosophical meditation, this time to unsettling and even unfathomable purpose – which is another way of saying I just didn’t get it.

 

Mick Herron

Interview

Mick Herron: ‘I’m interested in incompetence, things going wrong’

This article is more than 3 years old

The Slow Horses author on the ‘virtue of limitations’ and drawing life lessons from The Wind in the Willows

Anthony Cummins

Saturday 9 July 2022

Mick Herron, 58, is the author of 19 books, most recently Bad Actors, the eighth novel in his Jackson Lamb series about a group of demoted MI5 agents. In 2013, he won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger for the second instalment, Dead Lions, which Herron’s original publisher rejected on account of the poor sales of the first book, Slow Horses, now an Apple TV+ drama starring Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas. He is on the shortlist (for a fifth time) of the Theakston Old Peculier crime novel of the year award (announced 23 July), for Slough House, the seventh in the series, out in paperback. Herron met me in Oxford, where he has lived ever since leaving Newcastle to study English in 1981.

 

BOOK OF THE DAY / FICTION IN TRANSLATION

Review

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor review – intense and inventive

Ten of the best new books in translation

This article is more than 5 years old

A murder mystery set in horror and squalor, this English-language debut signals the rise of a Mexican star

Anthony Cummins
Tuesday 25 February 2020

Astructurally inventive murder mystery set in a lawless Mexican village rife with superstition, Fernanda Melchor’s formidable English-language debut takes the form of eight torrential paragraphs ranging from one to 64 pages long.

BOOK OF THE DAY /  FICTION IN TRANSLATION

Review 

Crossing by Pajtim Statovci review – duplicity, double identity and horror

Ten of the best new books in translation

This article is more than 6 years old

Two boys flee Albania in Statovci’s complex and gruelling follow-up to My Cat Yugoslavia

Anthony Cummins
Tuesday 7 May 2019

“Nobody has to remain the person they were born; we can put ourselves together like a jigsaw,” says Bujar, the androgynous Albanian narrator of Crossing, the second novel by Finnish-Kosovan writer Pajtim Statovci, acclaimed for his debut My Cat Yugoslavia.

 

BOOK OF THE DAY

Review

Vernon Subutex 3 by Virginie Despentes review – perfectly over-the-top end to Parisian potboiler

Ten of the best new books in translation

This article is more than 5 years old

The concluding part to an extraordinary pulpy trilogy features rehab workers, cocaine fiends and much violence

Anthony Cummins

Tue 7 Jul 2020 

Virginie Despentes made her debut with 1992’s Baise-moi (Fuck Me), about a killing spree carried out by two women turning the tables on male violence. Despentes directed the controversial film adaptation, which is probably what she’s still best known for, although she has written several other novels, as well as the nonfiction King Kong Theory, on her experience of rape and brief period as a sex worker.

 

BOOK OF THE WEEK

Review

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner review – double dealing in deepest France

Longlisted for this year’s Booker prize, Kushner’s cleverly paced tale of espionage, narrated by a ‘wild and boastful’ agent provocateur, juggles a killer plot with anarchy, agriculture and prehistory, making for her most entertaining novel yet

Anthony Cummins

25 August 2024

Radical politics, mixed-up heroines and the threat of violence are staple ingredients in the fiction of Rachel Kushner, who began to be spoken of as one of the century’s great American novelists with her second book, The Flamethrowers (2013), about a biker in the art world of 70s New York and Italy during the “years of lead”. But even though her third novel, The Mars Room, set among women serving life in a California prison, was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2018, I’m not convinced she’s truly on the radar of most readers this side of the Atlantic, where we’re warier of the vast, chiselled, ideas-packed tales ambitious American writers are less likely to shy away from.

 

‘The spectre of environmental catastrophe’: Dickie builds an underground bunker in post-crash Ireland. 

Review

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray review – master of the generation game

Murray’s brilliant new novel, about a rural Irish clan, is pure pleasure and posits the author as Dublin’s answer to Jonathan Franzen

Anthony Cummins

Sunday 4 June 2023

Booker prize reveals ‘original and thrilling’ 2023 longlist

Irish author Paul Murray made his debut in 2003 (An Evening of Long Goodbyes) but didn’t find wider attention until his second book, 2010’s boarding school comedy Skippy Dies. Next came The Mark and the Void (2015), a post-crash metafiction involving a writer by the name of Paul. His brilliant new novel lays a plausible claim to Murray being Dublin’s answer to Jonathan Franzen. A 650-page slab of compulsive high-grade entertainment, The Bee Sting is a sharply written family soap opera that oozes pathos while being very funny to boot.