Books & Poetry

The world barely needs another book on the Cuban Missile Crisis, but Dobbs’s hour-by-hour overview is a worthy study of this much-mythologised fortnight. In most accounts, the flashpoint of...

How far are we expected to go for another person? How much should we be willing to sacrifice for a friend? Helen and Nicola are old friends, close but rarely reliant on each other – until...

Anyone from a seaside town knows the slow shuffle of the pensioner – socks in Scholl sandals, Neapolitan ice-creams shielded from beaky gulls. In ‘Revenant’, Tristan Hughes...

‘A Fraction of the Whole’ is marketed as a novel and a half – and it’s about half a novel too long. Toltz constantly tries to be linguistically innovative and the result is...

‘Wolf Totem’ is the account of Chen Zhen’s experiences on the plains of north-central Inner Mongolia, the Olonbulag. Those experiences bear a loose resemblance to those of Jiang...

Among the important things you learn at school is something that has nothing to do with literacy, numeracy, making farting noises on a clarinet or growing etiolated plants on blotting paper. Until...

‘Human Smoke’ purports to be a history of events leading up to World War II. It is, in fact, a pacifist’s manifesto – but one so skewed and bizarre that it prompts a...

Games of Cowboys and Indians have long sunk in the marsh of political incorrectness, but then the brutality behind the white ‘discovery’ of America seems to have been forgotten too....

The plot makes this sound like a routine serial-killer book: working girls start turning up horribly murdered, so our plucky narrator sets out to identify and trap the villain. But these girls are...

After writing about a notorious nineteenth-century murder in ‘The Italian Boy’, Wise has turned her attention to a notorious nineteenth-century slum. The Old Nichol was a Bethnal Green...