Naomi Fry

Telex from Cuba, Rachel Kushner’s first novel, was set in the American colony in Oriente Province in the years leading up to the revolution. It described a place in which many had very little and a few had a great deal: indentured plantation workers and Castro’s rebels but also anxious American housewives, dissatisfied middle-managers and the vulnerable children of mining and...

The central character in Great House, Nicole Krauss’s new novel, is an antique writing desk, which the book’s various narrators describe as ‘tremendous’, ‘hulking’, a ‘grotesque, threatening monster’ and ‘a Trojan horse’, among other menacing epithets. ‘To call it a desk is to say too little,’ one of them explains....