Chris Power

Iris Hawkins​, the resourceful heroine of Francis Spufford’s fourth novel, Nonesuch, wants ‘to be in the room where the decisions are taken’. No small ask in 1930s Britain. She has followed her father into the City, leaving Watford, if not its vowels, behind. She works as a secretary at the brokerage Cornellis & Blome, typing letters, opening the post, operating the...

In​ his essay ‘The Guilty Vicarage’, W.H. Auden wrote that the detective’s job is ‘to restore the state of grace in which the aesthetic and the ethical are as one’. Death Takes Me stands in opposition to this formula. Cristina Rivera Garza’s decision to challenge the neatness of the detective story has its roots in the murder in July 1990 of her sister,...

Georgi Gospodinov​ was 22 when Bulgarian communism collapsed in early 1990. ‘The end of our training,’ he has written, ‘coincided with the end of that for which we had been trained.’ In his first two novels, Natural Novel (published in Bulgarian in 1999) and The Physics of Sorrow (2011), he describes the disappointments of his generation, suddenly confronted with the...

In​ 1811 Johann Heinrich Ferdinand von Autenrieth, a specialist in forensic medicine, investigated a spate of deaths in the kingdom of Württemberg. He suspected botulism and blamed the housewives of the region, more worried about burst sausage skins than food poisoning, for not cooking their Blutwurst properly. Lucy Ives tells the story at the start of her latest novel, Life Is...

In 1959​, television screens across the United States became portals to other worlds. The Twilight Zone, an anthology series with no narrative links between episodes, showed characters going beyond the limits of normal human experience, encountering extraterrestrials, time travel, evil spirits and magical objects. The world we take for granted, the show suggested, might not be the one in...