“... necessary edge of who we are … a riverrun writer, bringing us back and propelling us forward’. Don DeLillo’s Point Omega is ‘the one that takes the skin away, that sings at the deep raw edge’. I had read dozens of McCann’s blurbs before I’d read any of his novels: I doubted his ability to compose a meaningful sentence. He seems now and then ...”

“... epigraph from Emerson – ‘Every actual state is corrupt’ – and inspired by a thought from Don DeLillo’s Mao II: ‘Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken over that territory.’ A writer, Ben Sachs, gives up words for action, and travels the US ...”

“... made up of two people, the challenge is to discover how, like Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, Don Gately and Hal Incandenza, they might ever be brought together at all.) In 2000, DeWitt published a first novel called The Last Samurai; it sold a hundred thousand copies in English, was translated into ten languages and turns up on various best-cult-classics ...”

“... proliferating in all their chaotic digital, social, financial and emotional variety. In many ways, Don DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis (2003) seems the complement to O’Neill’s Netherland, and is unsuccessful in a complementary way. DeLillo’s main character, too, lives in Manhattan, has a young wife, and works in ...”

“... of the Letters were also originally published by Allen and Unwin and are now with HarperCollins.I don’t want to defend Tolkien or to attack him, but to describe how the strange power of his book casts a spell over readers, as children, as pubescents, as adolescents, as adults, a spell some of them grow out of and others ...”

“... sitting room with the twinkling lights outside.‘You go to bed in the house that keeps you safe, don’t you?’ said Zainu Deen, the father of Zainab Deen, who lived in Flat 115 on the 14th floor with her son, Jeremiah. Everybody said that Zainab had always been independent: she left home at 18 and worked all the hours she could at the Chelsea and ...”