A dynamic, beautifully written debut that moves effortlessly between ultra-contemporary London, the wilds of a remote Scottish island, and a fantastic reality that underpins them both.
With this punchy debut, Felicia Yap has hit on a winning formula from the very start. This is a book that will keep you guessing to the very end. It’s going to be massive.
The ocean’s a zone where you can be completely free; or vanish utterly. It’s against this elemental force that Claire Fuller has set her powerful second novel. Like all the best stories, Swimming Lessons has secrets hidden in every nook.
The Wolf Road was one of my stand-out reads of 2016. It could be a classic adventure story of the West, except that it takes place in a post-apocalyptic America that might almost have come to be.
I don't know if the black-magic-noir-black-comedy genre was ever a thing but it is now. And that's a lot of black to pack into a single genre. Poison City is Paul Crilley's adult fiction debut and it's a cracker.
There are a million stories of rugged men who take to the wilderness and there descend into madness. In Our Endless Numbered Days the survivalist male obsessive chooses to take his eight-year-old daughter with him.
The Loney uses the mainstays of gothic horror – a wild, ancient landscape, a face at the window, a crumbling house filled with mysteries – to speak about our search for meaning in an incoherent world.
Joseph Stalin referred to writers and artists as engineers of the human soul. I can't think of a novelist more suited to that description than Neal Stephenson.
I'm currently writing a novel set in the near future. It imagines the consequences of those endless breadcrumb trails we're currently leaving behind us as we navigate our data-driven world.
In the final accounting a novel is only a series of stated facts that aren't true. In Dept. of Speculation, Jenny Offill takes this truth to its formal extreme.
I couldn't resist reading this. I assume its creators, though they're from Spain, must have come across one of my Norwegian, British or American relatives at some point.
