The National, October 2017 “Its concept never quite convinces”. “A novel that somehow succeeds despite itself.” “There is no real plot to speak of”. Looking back at The National’s reviews of novels in the running […]
The Observer, October 2017 Language has rules, but there’s no umpire: this is the starting point for Sam Leith’s guide to correct or, more precisely, standard English usage. He goes on to explore how […]
The National, October 2017 Jennifer Egan is standing in the New York home where she has watched her family grow up. A Victorian house in a once-neglected Brooklyn neighbourhood, it is now in a desirable […]
The Observer, September 2017 In the perfectly paced, middle-aged, middle-class drama that completes Jeffrey Eugenides’s first collection of short stories, a famous physics professor “watches his life implode” after an ill-advised one-night stand with a […]
The Observer, September 2017 It’s one of the defining – and in hindsight humiliating – images of the 20th century: Neville Chamberlain stepping off the plane from Munich in September 1938 clutching a paper signed […]