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“... by a Hindu mystic in a Scottish city where surgeons’ knives are used too readily and callously. Randolph Stow’s The Suburbs of Hell deals with ‘juicy murders’ committed in a Suffolk seaside town peopled by retired gentry and genial fishermen. All three are sufficiently intelligent and sensitive to make the reader feel, almost guiltily, that the ...”

“... writers isn’t with the supernatural itself so much as with naturalising or domesticating it. Randolph Stow plays a Borgesian sort of game, letting the story of marvels like the green children or the wild man of the sea interpenetrate with the ordinary lives of a family in Suffolk. Geoffrey Household’s narrator makes himself a bow and arrows in a ...”

“... Elizabeth Harrower, the painter Brett Whitely and Cynthia Nolan, as well as supportive letters to Randolph Stow, his modest and neglected peer. There are moments, too, in his long relationship with Viking’s Ben Huebsch, but the brightest example, the most sustained retraction of the claws, is reserved for Philip Garland, the brain-damaged son of his ...”