Fiction

Many parents wish they could freeze a moment, preserve their children just as they are, but few have Thomas Gainsborough’s miraculous skill to achieve it. He painted his daughters Mary and Margaret – Molly and Peggy – with adoration, pride and sometimes anxiety, capturing, as Peggy, the narrator of The Painter’s Daughters puts it, a “closeness so thick you can feel it, our gaze always steady”.It’s ambitious to draw fiction from such beloved and well-known portraits, but Howes’s fictionalised Molly and Peggy don’t pale in…

What are we going to do about global heating, about mass extinction, about our rivers? What ability do we have to change things, now that power lies mostly in the hands of unaccountable corporations and shameless demagogues? Is there even any point in trying? The narrator of Stone Yard Devotional, who has been working in species conservation, chooses that most seductive solution – despair. She leaves her life and marriage in Sydney and checks into the retreat house of an enclosed convent on the Monaro Plains in New South…

Tommy Orange was in Sweden, promoting a translated edition of his first novel, There There, when inspiration struck for a second time. Orange’s debut was published in 2018 to enormous acclaim: it was selected as one of Barack Obama’s books of the year, listed as a Pulitzer prize finalist and won the American Book award. The pressure to follow that early success must have been immense. But then, visiting a Swedish museum, “I saw this newspaper clipping about my tribe being in Florida in 1875. And I know enough about my…

The International Booker longlist signals a “second ‘boom’ in Latin American fiction”, said judges, with a quarter of the nominated authors being South American.Argentinian poet Selva Almada, Venezuelan writer Rodrigo Blanco Calderón, Brazilian writer Itamar Vieira Junior and Peruvian journalist Gabriela Wiener have all been longlisted for the prize, which recognises the best novels and short story collections from around the world that have been translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland.The first…

Fantasies of walking out of one’s life are always alluring, not least because in reality, they seem at once improbably unrealistic, somewhat shamefully naive and, at bottom, terrifying. We nurture these ideas of stepping out of ourselves in private, aware that they also suggest a certain narcissism; and that they are usually available to those who can choose displacement rather than have it thrust upon them.For Dylan, the 38-year-old Englishwoman who calls time on the New York existence she has built for herself by…

“Men putting on weight is different from women putting on weight.” So says the boyfriend of Rika Machida, a Tokyo-based journalist on the verge of “becoming the first woman to make the editorial desk” at her newspaper, the Shūmei Weekly, and the protagonist of this delicious offering – a bestseller in Japan – from Asako Yuzuki. In taking a cleaver to such comments, Yuzuki exposes the misogynist gristle, resulting in an incisive, at times thrilling novel about fatphobia, the pleasures of consumption and the often murky…

The year 1843 was momentous in the Scottish Church. After years of protest at the right of landowners to confer clerical livings on ministers of their choosing, a third of ministers broke away from the established church to form the Free Church of Scotland. Conscience came at a price. Stripped of their parishes, their manses and their incomes, many of the rebels found themselves penniless.At the same time, Scottish landowners were engaged in the final throes of the Clearances, a century-long endeavour to expel tenants…

If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Rolling Stone may receive an affiliate commission. Quick Answer: Viewers can watch American Fiction online by renting it on Prime Video, streaming it on Apple TV+, or by getting a free trial on Philo. Step into the world of American Fiction, a film that dives deep into the complexities of creativity and cultural identity with unparalleled depth and cinematic grandeur. Adapted from Percival Everett’s novel Erasure,…

‘Taut” is one of the most overused words in book marketing. A novel is nothing if not “irresistibly taut”, “taut and emotionally charged”, or even “bow-string taut and visceral”. It’s become a glib descriptor – the likes of which Kathryn Scanlan would probably detest. Ironically, there’s not a writer today for whom the word is more appropriate.The author has earned a reputation for turning out slim volumes which trouble the boundary between novel and nonfiction. Her award-winning debut, Aug 9 – Fog, draws from a diary…

Gloria Steinem said: “The story of women’s struggle for equality belongs to no single feminist nor to any one organisation but to the collective efforts of all who care about human rights.” The key then, for all of us trying to make the world a better place for women, is not to complain but to act.I am celebrating this International Women’s Day in the same week that my own initiative to promote women’s equality, the Women’s prize for fiction, announced its longlist, and in the same year that we launched the inaugural…