Leo Robson

Nicola Barker’s​ latest novel, TonyInterruptor, is a reaction to, and reflection on, a moment of creative crisis. While writing H(A)PPY (2017), Barker has said, she stopped sleeping for nine or ten months. On completing the book she was convinced that her relationship with the novel form was over: ‘I felt everything falling away around me, the entire construct of my life, my...

During​ a four or five-year period at the turn of the millennium, I went to the cinema around six hundred times – or, I should say, I saw around six hundred films at the cinema, since many of the visits were for double, triple and occasionally quadruple bills. I wasn’t a film critic or festival programmer or even an aspiring director. I was just an adolescent schoolboy and, in my...

There’s​ a scene in Paul Murray’s novel Skippy Dies (2010) in which a science teacher called Mr Farley talks about the word ‘amphibian’. He says that it refers to an organism able to survive both on land and in water, and that it comes from the Greek for ‘double life’. Though you would be hard-pressed to draw a clean analogy, Murray surely qualifies as an...

The title​ of Aleksandar Hemon’s new novel suggests a conflict of priorities: an impulse to totalise and a fondness for variety, a love of clarity paired with a penchant for clutter. The aspiring saga builder pauses, mid-set piece, to insist he’s actually a spry postmodernist. Only one of these authorial personae was evident in Hemon’s early work. Born in Sarajevo to a...

No American novelist​ has devoted as much energy as Percival Everett to the proper noun, its powers as engine, instrument and index. Towards the end of Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (first published in 2013), a story about storytelling in which nobody is called Percival Everett or Virgil Russell, one of the narrators gives a list of 516 gerunds that encompass the whole of human...