‘Impossible.’ Thus spake Martin Amis at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in October: ‘Very few writers have got anywhere with sex.’ Nominees for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award seem to have viewed this ...

The vast majority of the world’s hungry are farmers. In a world of such ironies, many turn to faith or fate to explain affliction and its consequences. The mothers Martín Caparrós interviews don’t ...

This is the story of two crimes. The first was the bombing by the IRA of two pubs in Guildford in October 1974. Five people were killed, and many others horribly injured. The indiscriminate slaughter ...

Born in 1940, Angela Carter has published eight novels including The Magic Toyshop (1967, John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Several Perceptions (1968, Somerset Maugham Award), Love (1971), The Infernal ...

From Michel Houellebecq’s Islamicised France in Submission to Lionel Shriver’s vision of an autarkic United States in The Mandibles, the political disaster novel is in vogue and one only has to pick ...

The mystery of Agatha Christie's extraordinary appeal is the subject for investigation in this engaging study by Robert Barnard, and by the end of the book you should be a lot clearer about the ...

A curious patchwork of autobiography, cultural history and nature writing, novelist Edward Parnell’s first non-fictional work, Ghostland, explores the haunted places of the British Isles as he ...

Although Sylvia Plath is admired by many literary scholars and even adored by some passionate readers, critics have not been unanimous in their assessment of her art. Irving Howe declared in 1972 that ...

In Days without End, the fourth in a loose series of novels chronicling the McNulty dynasty, Sebastian Barry travels back in time and across the Atlantic to a troubled 19th-century America. The ...

Not another book about the Nazis! The heart sinks further at the first sentence of this 600-page volume: 'This book is the first of three on the history of the Third Reich.' Can there really be ...

Ben Okri, in addition to providing one of the most haunting and evocative titles of this year, has a sure hand with his chosen genre, the short story. Not a word is wasted, not a phrase out of place.

There is not enough fiction in Hollywood and that’s a fact. Not enough Hollywood either, for that matter. Do not let the title of Gore Vidal’s new blockbuster fool you into thinking that it belongs – ...