Q and A for the FT – What Does it Mean to be a Writer?
Q&A with author Edward Docx ‘What does it mean to be a writer?’ ‘To give precise and enduring expression to the human experience’ Full article here for the FT. Edward Docx was born in England in 1972. He is the eldest of seven children. He read English Literature at Cambridge. His work has won the…
The Guardian Interview
by Anita Sethi For The Guardian: Full article here. When Edward Docx was 13 years old, his grandmother lay on her deathbed at the family home in Greater Manchester and made a startling revelation to his mother, Lila – they weren’t related by blood. Docx’s mum was dumbfounded but, as if that were not enough,…
Review of The Nix by Nathan Hill
Written for The Guardian: The best thing a reviewer can do when faced with a novel of this calibre and breadth is to urge you to read it for yourselves – especially if your taste is for deeply engaged and engaging contemporary American prose fiction of real quality and verve. The Nix is Hill’s debut. He…
Infinite Ground by Martin MacInnes
Written for The Guardian A Borgesian Maybe-Murder Mystery Towards the end of this impressive and finely textured debut, there is a chapter entitled “What Happened to Carlos – Suspicions, Rumours, Links”. This is the only named chapter and it lists a series of variations related to the disappearance of the novel’s missing person –…
A last plea to “Leavers” ahead of The Referendum tomorrow…
Written for Prospect Magazine: By the weekend, this grim and unhappy referendum on our membership of the European Union will have passed from our national life. And what a relief for us all that will be. It has divided us against ourselves and made enemies of friends. We have seen too much of the…
Bob Almighty: Often Times He Could Be Seen Returning
For Prospect Magazine: The first time I came to London on my own, I came to see Bob Dylan. He was playing at the Hammersmith Apollo. I had tickets for three of the shows. I remember freezing in the queues outside. I remember the stampede to get to the front when the bastards finally…
Esperanto: the language that never was
Witten for Prospect Magazine: The Komedia Kvizo had started. Perhaps this would be instructive. I had hoped to get to the heart of the matter straight away. I had hoped to re-examine the biggest question of our times—the European Union referendum—but to come at it from deep within the pan-European hinterlands of Remainia. But instead, the…
All That Man Is by David Szalay Review
For The Guardian: I once had a discussion with my first US editor, an old-school literary titan of 40 years’ experience, on the subject of overt existential angst in the novel. Her main message was that if you’re going to do it, then you’d be better off keeping it Beckettishly short – a view, I…
What has Britain’s Most Commercially Successful Artist been up to?
Written for The New Republic Magazine (USA): Despite being just a short hop across the Thames from the Houses of Parliament, Vauxhall used to be London’s least fashionable borough, an area known only for its outdoor urinals and irredeemably depressed bus station. But this atmosphere is now changing. Damien Hirst, ex-enfant terrible of…
There were Two Oppositions in the Last Parliament
Written for The Guardian: There were two oppositions in the last parliament: Labour and the Liberal Democrats. And, this week more than ever, it is worth saying that only the latter made any difference to the real lives of real people. Why? Because they were in government. But thanks to their brutal contraction and the…
Are we Sleepwalking to Brexit?
Written for Prospect Magazine: The European Union referendum now lies splayed across the political event horizon like a giant jellyfish with which we are all soon going to have to wrestle. History will explain how Nigel Farage, whom I have interviewed for this magazine, tortured the Conservative Party into wasting the nation’s time and…
Beatlebone by Kevin Barry review – a darkly wry trip to Beatle Island
Written for The Guardian: My favourite interview with John Lennon was by “whispering” Bob Harris in 1975. Throughout, Harris is the opposite of incisive, but his warm, respectful, almost innocent presence seems to relax Lennon into being unusually open and collusive; sure, the acerbic wit and that compulsive self-awareness are there as always, but in the last few…
The Batman of Obscenity
Written for The Guardian: Myles Jackman is on a mission to change Britain’s obscenity laws. For him, it’s more than a job, it’s a moral calling… 1. Tiger Porn One evening in the late autumn of 2008, Andrew Holland returned from holiday to discover that the front door to his home in…
Formula One: the limit of human skill
Written for Prospect Magazine: The greatest sporting spectacle that I have ever witnessed live took place on a day of freezing rain, bitter winds and unimaginable mud in Leicestershire in April 1993. I had come seventy miles across the Pennines with my brother and a friend to camp for the weekend in a wind-ravaged…
The Mark and the Void – Paul Murray’s take on the Celtic Tiger
Written for The Guardian: This is it, at last: a fine work of fiction set in the present day that kicks all those asses that so urgently need to be kicked. Twenty pages in and I wanted to tour the nation’s nine remaining bookshops with Murray and shout from the back: “That’s what I’m…
Q & A with The Guardian
This Q & A first appeared here in The Guardian: How did you come to write The Devil’s Garden? Some years ago, I stayed on a river station on the Amazon with some very odd people. Later, in one of the river towns, a woman told me a story about an anthropologist who disappeared…
Forget the ‘Ajockalypse’, this was ArmaCleggon
For Prospect Magazine: Hell yeah, we were pumped up. And so we came at last to Sheffield Hallam, the constituency of Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime Minister, a national media seeking answers. How many red lines were needed to draw a U-turn? On which party would he bestow the still-glittering orangey-gold crown? The Tories might do…
The Field of the Cloth of Gold by Magnus Mills review – Britain in miniature
For The Guardian: This allegorical story of territory – alluding to the Roman invasion, the Vikings and Christianity – is a singular meditation on history, immigration and fellowship… Magnus Mills has a reputation for great originality. His first novel, The Restraint of Beasts, in which two men erect high-tensile fences across a bog, set the tone and…
Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman review – sublime and ridiculous
For The Guardian: The Sandman author’s new collection veers from masterful prose to embarrassing poetry… This is a new collection of 23 short stories and poems that will delight Gaiman’s army of fans. But what about new readers? Almost alone in the universe, I found his last novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane,…
Before, During, After review by Richard Bausch – precisely piloted psychology
For The Guardian: This is an accomplished and, at times, harrowing novel full of the kind of psychological power and exactitude that first-rate fiction does so well. I found myself wincing half the time, whispering, wishing, willing the characters to take other courses. For those unfamiliar with Richard Bausch, he has long been celebrated in America as a practised…
Leonard Cohen is John Donne to Bob Dylan’s Shakespeare
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…
Perfidia by James Ellroy review – crime fiction on a transcendental scale
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…
Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? review – Dave Eggers’s accomplished hostage drama
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…
A Replacement Life review – Boris Fishman tells tall tales in a fine debut
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…
Munich Airport by Greg Baxter review – good, old-fashioned existential angst
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…
In the Approaches review – Nicola Barker spawns wild chaos
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…
The Lonely Rationalist: Nick Clegg Interview
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…
Glow by Ned Beauman review – a new drug hits London
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,…