Written for The Guardian: The first time I thought consciously about Leonard Cohen’s death was in 2002. I was listening to his 2001 album Ten New Songs while crawling my way through the writing of a novel in which each chapter took its title from one of the poems in The Songs and Sonnets of John Donne. I remember hearing…
Written for The Guardian: In his latest novel, the ‘demon dog of American crime fiction’ has created an awe-inspiring vision of social, moral and human chaos in wartime LA… There is a little-known Austrian documentary about James Ellroy entitled The Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction, in which the Los Angeles author can be seen…
For The Guardian A doubting Thomas kidnaps and interrogates significant people in his life in Dave Eggers’s ambitious, dialogue-only novel Dave Eggers is a one-man essay in the value and virtue of a life in writing in the 21st century. This is his third published novel in three years. And yet his work never drops below…
For The Guardian: The story of the impact of a woman’s suicide through anorexia on her brother and her father I was always going to like this novel. It is about Russia and Russian-ness and America and American-ness, about the relationship between the generations, history, atonement, fact, fiction, biography, literature and the process of writing…
For The Guardian: The story of the impact of a woman’s suicide through anorexia on her brother and her father… In his 1967 novel, Gargoyles, the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard has the following passage: “Why suicide? We search for reasons, causes, and so on … We follow the course of the life he has now so…
For The Guardian: This ‘romantic comedy’ set on the Sussex coast is dazzling… when Barker remembers to let the reader in on the fun I loved this book. I hated this book. I was amazed by it. I was bored by it. I thought it beautiful, skilful, profound. I thought it clumsy, callow, silly. I…
For Prospect Magazine I sit down opposite the Deputy Prime Minister just as the Prime Minister calls. We’re on a Great Western train from Bristol to London. Outside, the English afternoon is passing by in a blur of Betjeman and Brunel. We have cups of tea. Over the fields are massed a flotilla of Boris…
For The Guardian: The Man Booker-nominated author is overwhelmed by his own tortuous plot… I once had a wise old American editor who believed that the secret to becoming a great novelist lay in learning the lesson that a brilliant facility with language is beside the point. This advice was near-impossible to digest – not least,…
For The Guardian: The story of two flawed-but-good men in a world of government corruption and cock-up – pure pleasure John Le Carré is one of a handful of writers whose every book I buy. And I always read them. Even better, I sometimes go on flights or car journeys with his…
For the Guardian: Ex-marine Phil Klay inhabits more than a dozen different voices in these compelling short stories of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan One of the many things I learned in reading this book was that during the Iraq war the mines were often laid in “daisy chains”. Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles (MRAPs)…
For The Guardian: An engaging story of love and imprisonment in Peru is let down by its narrator Donna Tartt recently described the process of writing a novel as like “painting a large mural with a brush the size of an eyelash”. My own favourite is that it’s like trying to fill a swimming pool with…