“Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly,” begins Elena Ferrante’s new novel, her first since the global sensation of the Neapolitan quartet.…
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Like Ottessa Moshfegh’s first novel Eileen (2015), Death in Her Hands plays with the conventions of noir. Vesta Gul, a recently widowed 72-year-old, lives in a secluded lake cabin in…
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‘Posterity, take notice!’ is an exhortation that appears twenty-three times in the posthumously published diary of Roland Bouley, a provincial bookseller and frustrated novelist. The only person taking notice, however, is…
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Home, as James Baldwin wrote, is perhaps ‘not a place but simply an irrevocable condition’. Sarah M. Broom’s National Book Award-winning memoir The Yellow House is a sweeping social…
In Lily King’s portrait of the artist as a young woman, Casey is a 31-year-old aspiring author living in late-1990s Massachusetts. She waits tables at an upscale restaurant to pay the…
After muddling through the Middle English of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales at school, it was with a measure of trepidation that I embarked on Matthew Kneale’s Pilgrims, which also follows a…