Fiction

Toby Lloyd’s slow burn of a debut novel is in the tradition of the pentagonal family saga, a subgenre that might include Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Add to this formula the elements of religious mysticism, ethnicity (in this case Jewishness), and an exploration of the ethics around using family as material for literature, and you should have a truly combustible mix.The five members of the Rosenthal clan are as different and conflicted as Franzen’s Lamberts. Mother Hannah is a…

Anne Enright, Kate Grenville and Isabella Hammad are among the writers longlisted for this year’s Women’s prize for fiction.Debut novelists make up half of the 16-strong longlist. Booker-shortlisted British author Chetna Maroo has made the list for her first novel Western Lane, which explores grief, sisterhood and sport, while American writer Maya Binyam was chosen for Hangman, about a man who returns to his unnamed home nation to find his dying brother.Quick GuideWomen's prize for fiction longlist 2024ShowHangman by Maya…

Twenty years after his death, the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño continues to cast a spell, thanks to the wild metaphorical reach of his tumbling sentences, his implausibly encyclopaedic grasp of global affairs and the seductive sense that 20th-century history is a nightmarish riddle to which only literature is the solution. The Savage Detectives and 2666, his best-known books, are at bottom mysteries involving vanished authors – a conceit shared by two new novels conceivably written under his influence.Winner of the Prix…

Three years after Denis Villeneuve left us in the middle of the desert and the story, we’re finally back to the Duniverse. The French-Canadian auteur gambled with the first Dune, adapting only half of Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi tome; Part Two picks up where the first film left off, with Timothée Chalamet’s high-born Paul Atreides stranded on the desert planet Arrakis, attempting to ingratiate himself to the indigenous Fremen while the fate of the universe on his shoulders – if you believe the prophecies.Like the book,…

There are many interesting games going on in Julius Taranto’s How I Won a Nobel Prize, a novel about art and politics that seeks to skewer the prim puritans of radical wokery and the sweaty dinosaurs of the right. Part of the joke is that it is written very clearly in the style of, and in deep engagement with, a canon that literary America is doing its best to forget: Roth, Bellow and Updike are the obvious models. What’s more, as if snubbing his nose at those who will be looking for reasons to take offence, Taranto, a…

Born in 2000 in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, Chukwuebuka Ibeh is the product of a well-deserved American MFA studentship, the ultimate finishing school for new authors who want to attain – as Ibeh does with this first novel – a blend of the particular and the universal, glossing traditional storytelling with a literary finesse that adds style without scaring the horses.Blessings is the poignant tale of a talented and sensitive Nigerian boy, Obiefuna, who is caught by his conservative father in a clinch with another young man.…

Suzie Miller’s 2022 play Prima Facie was one of those rare theatre events that garner headlines beyond the arts pages. A 90-minute, one-woman tour de force performed by Jodie Comer in her first major stage role, it was a hit in the West End and on Broadway, won multiple awards, and has prompted efforts within the legal profession to address the issues raised by the story. Now Miller, a former lawyer, has expanded the drama into novel form, with mixed results.Prima Facie is a story of two halves, narrated in a breathless,…

If there’s another blockbuster this year that matches the visual impact of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two, I’ll eat my desert boots. The second Dune instalment is jaw-on-the-floor spectacular. It elegantly weaves together top-tier special effects and arresting cinematography; it layers muscle, sinew and savagery on to the bones of Part One. It’s an inhospitable, brutal kind of beauty that Villeneuve has created – there’s not enough lip balm in the universe to make a visit to the sandblasted wilderness planet of Arrakis…

“Translators are like ninjas,” the Israeli author Etgar Keret wrote in 2017. “If you notice them, they’re no good.” The literary translation community must have felt delighted at this upgrade to their image: no longer dictionary dorks, but lithe, black-clad assassins! The thrilling story of ninja translators is yet to be told, but Jennifer Croft, an eminent translator whose English version of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights won the International Booker prize in 2018, has put her own spin on the profession with this ambitious,…

In the spring of 1876, just before the centennial of the United States, the Scottish-born Alexander Graham Bell patented an apparatus for “transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically … causing electrical undulations”. A century and a half later, there is an argument to be made that Bell’s device is one of the most transformative inventions in human history.Yet the 29-year-old Bell we meet in Sarah Marsh’s engaging first novel is a man whose passion for invention was very much secondary to his other great project:…