ecothriller

It’s a charged word, terrorism. It’s unsettling, challenging, alarming. And this is something that Daniel Goldhaber’s propulsive eco-thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline smartly acknowledges. Even on the eve of a radical act of violent protest – the destruction of two sections of Texas’s oil infrastructure – some of the environmental activists behind the plan are reluctant to use the term. Rowan (Kristine Froseth), a 22-year-old from Portland, Oregon, prefers to think of herself as a “revolutionary” or “gamechanger”. Other…

In a somewhat more nerdy and blokeish literary culture, Ned Beauman would probably be more famous. It’s easy to imagine the four precision-engineered, shaggy-dog thriller-comedies that he published between 2010 and 2017 going down a treat in, say, the 60s or 70s. But in the 2020s, the vast majority of literary fiction is, as we are frequently reminded, bought (and, increasingly, written) by women; and there is something fundamentally boyish about Beauman’s novels that puts him, I suspect, out of step with prevailing…