“... As seen​ by the English-speaking world, the Spanish Civil War was a screen on which certain images could be projected, images of harsh sunlight, moral clarity and sacrifice. It was an emblematic, almost allegorical war and a test case for conscience, a political crisis so thoroughly appropriated that the Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse hardly needed to point out that its contributors were overwhelmingly outsiders: it was the war that was Spanish, not the poetic response ...”

“... The blandness​ of Sally Rooney’s novels, last year’s Conversations with Friends and her new one, Normal People, begins and ends with those oddly non-committal titles. Inside the books her territory is classic – the love relationships of young people – but mapped with an unusual scrupulous smoothness. The characters are brainy, even startlingly so, but she doesn’t exalt their intelligence or flaunt her own ...”

“... The​ title of Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s first novel, a bestseller in their native Holland and the winner of this year’s International Booker Prize, makes it seem like an Italian metaphysical painting, perhaps a de Chirico piazza or colonnade enigmatically bathed in Mediterranean light, when in fact the book is set on a Dutch dairy farm like the one on which its author was raised ...”

“... Every​ now and then a novelist produces a book that has a novelist at its centre, bearing his actual name (the condition affects males disproportionately) and drawing on aspects of his life that are in the public domain, while also exercising the freedom to invent. This isn’t done because of a shortage of real-world material, let alone from self-importance – it’s an investigation into the instability of genre and the shifting nature of literary truth ...”

“... Benjamin Labatut​ ’s When We Cease to Understand the World is a skein of non-fiction stories or narrative essays unified by their subject matter, the mostly 20th-century breakthroughs in physics and chemistry that shook both those disciplines and the wider world. (The judges of last year’s International Booker Prize, who shortlisted the book, must have concluded that the fictional element predominates, though it amounts to embroidery in the gaps between facts ...”

“... During​ the US presidential campaign of 2016 Louis Amis wrote a scabrous satirical story from the point of view of a member of Trump’s team, a daring exercise in fantasy that was revealed as hopelessly timid when the election result was announced. Jenny Offill’s novel Weather is an attempt to grapple with a future that is hard to inhabit imaginatively, the consequences of climate change as they come ever closer, but it too suffers from an abrupt turn in the world outside the book, the advent of an upstart apocalypse ...”

“... There’s​ no better ballast for a fantasy narrative, something solid to keep all the impossible elements grounded (time travel, biodrones), than a numbered bus route: ‘the 88 bus passes by noisily’; ‘the 214 bus from Pratt Street to Old Street’. In Sterling Karat Gold, the Goldsmiths Prize winning novel of 2021, Isabel Waidner showed a shrewd sense of how to balance registers ...”

“... To capture​ the world in a day was one of literary modernism’s defining ventures, with Ulysses setting the standard for exhaustiveness. Restricting the action to a single day is a mild piece of formalism, certainly when compared with some self-imposed contortions, but it disrupts standard novelistic workings just the same. Plot can more or less evaporate, replaced by less strident patterns of significance ...”

“... Not many​ people born in 1929 are still productive, but Dominique Fernandez, winner of the 1982 Goncourt Prize for the novel Dans la main de l’ange, turned 95 a little before his new memoir, Les Trois Femmes de ma vie, appeared – the three women are his grandmother, mother and wife. It wasn’t even the first book he published last year, but followed the novel Un jeune homme simple ...”

“... Hard to imagine​ a brisker, bleaker opening than this one from the title story of Joy Williams’s 2004 collection, Honoured Guest: She had been having a rough time of it and thought about suicide sometimes, but suicide was so corny in the eleventh grade and you had to be careful about this because two of her classmates had committed suicide the year before and between them they left 24 suicide notes and had become just a joke ...”

“... In​  Key Largo Humphrey Bogart’s character tells a child a ‘fairy tale’, incongruously (in this film noir context) passing on the Jewish folk myth that the baby in the womb is all-knowing until at the moment of birth an angel touches its face just above the lip – this explains the philtrum – and wipes its mind clean. The unborn narrator of Ian McEwan’s new novel, Nutshell, isn’t omniscient but has formidable mental powers, able to analyse, synthesise and, necessarily, use language ...”

“... The practice​ of modelling in negative space, making absent volume perform as part of the dynamism of the whole, is a standard technique in visual arts, in sculpture above all, but there is a parallel set of strategies available to writers, even if it doesn’t formally go by that name. When Rayner Heppenstall published Four Absentees, his version of an autobiography, for instance, he chose not to recount his life directly but to project a diffused self-portrait onto four well-known cultural figures who had been his friends (Dylan Thomas, George Orwell, Eric Gill and John Middleton Murry), evoking them first separately and then in some slightly dizzying comparisons: I had seen Murry working, happily absorbed and with real skill, mending fences, sawing up logs (once, too absorbed), laying down barrels of Sauerkraut, cutting up the cabbages with me on a bread-slicing machine ...”

“... The appetite​ for an authoritative portrait of the new South Africa was both catered to and resisted by J.M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning Disgrace, in which a narrative of disintegration and one of reconstruction were superimposed on each other, leaving it to the reader to decide which was the lower layer. (The last page might clinch it.) Twenty years later, Damon Galgut’s The Promise has followed this trajectory, with a Booker-shortlisted family narrative that’s also in two minds about its status as a document of historic social change ...”

“... The Christodora​ of Tim Murphy’s novel is a New York apartment building, ‘handsomely simple’, built on the corner of Avenue B and 9th Street in the 1920s. By the 1980s the area had become known as the East Village, and the building had come down in the world. After a fire it was refurbished and turned into a condominium, in which Steven Traum, an urban planner, bought an apartment, using it as office space while he continued to live on the Upper East Side ...”

“... The essay​ can seem to be the cosy heartland of belles-lettres, a place where nothing urgent is ever said. Recently, though, publishers have seemed willing to take on and even promote this landlocked genre. Notting Hill Editions, which publishes essays exclusively, has established a prize of £20,000 for an unpublished submission of up to 8000 words ...”