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“... In​ his essay ‘The Guilty Vicarage’, W.H. Auden wrote that the detective’s job is ‘to restore the state of grace in which the aesthetic and the ethical are as one’. Death Takes Me stands in opposition to this formula. Cristina Rivera Garza’s decision to challenge the neatness of the detective story has its roots in the murder in July 1990 of her sister, Liliana, the subject of her Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, Liliana’s Invincible Summer (2023 ...”

“... page the chronological parameters are drawn: It is 1971, and the home that has been provided for Sarah Pollexfen for so long is still a provision that is necessary. She and a one-time maid, Patty, and Tom – illegitimate son of the Rollestons’ last butler – are left at Carriglas, The place that was once magical for her. And then, flagged in reminiscent ...”

“... have been hard for Choi to hit on the title of her novel, which has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Flashlights turn up repeatedly. There’s the one Serk carries on the beach the night he disappears; the one used many years later in a séance when Louisa, having graduated from university, is sharing a quadruple bunk room in London; the one thrust ...”

“... son of Sir Norman Braose.’ We meet Sir Norman kissing little Alex, who is Nan’s girl, and Sarah says: ‘Say hello to Aunt Emma, Alex.’ Emma tells little Alex she is going to stay at Nayles, ‘a marvellous house with an old family name’, where Emma used to stay when she was a little girl ‘because mummy and daddy were abroad’. It is a good ...”

“... of Cardinal Newman might have been another matter’). Edward, in turn, has an affair with Sarah Devlin, a sharp-tongued Catholic girl from a nearby village, while fulminating against Irish disloyalty and growing more and more eccentric – violently so, in the end. But the plotting is less important than the large-scale set pieces, such as a ...”

“... to works in prose: Ros Barber’s The Marlowe Papers took the Desmond Elliott Prize in 2013 and Sarah Crossan’s One (about conjoined twins) carried off the Carnegie in 2016. These are good omens for The Long Take, which has been long-listed for the Man Booker this year. The Long Take is not just a verse novel, it’s a ...”

“... Have you ever tried to write a Victorian novel? Here’s a beginning, with apologies to Sarah Waters and Michel Faber (and a nod to George MacDonald Fraser): London, 1860. November. A pea-souper billowing up from the flotsam bobbing in the Thames. The gas lamps already blearing. Good things of day begin to drowse ...”

“... bullied and then promoted to high office at Radley, I at Shrewsbury. We both had sisters called Sarah who were sent to school in Dorset. We both spent our school holidays with popular aunts and uncles in the West Country, where we were both fired with a passion for hopeless football teams: he for Torquay United, I for Plymouth Argyle. We both, even, had ...”

“... Macmillan’s fellow MP Bob Boothby and demanded a divorce, claiming that her youngest daughter, Sarah, was Boothby’s child. From being regarded as a jolly sort, keen on golf and a dab hand at opening fêtes, Dorothy suddenly revealed unsuspected Wagnerian depths of passion, saying to Boothby: ‘Why did you ever wake me? I never want to see any of my ...”

“... hardback and discussed it at a book group and even stole a placard of its very pretty cover from a Booker Prize party I snuck into; NW I read in a proof passed around the LRB office, and I tried out my thoughts on her experimental turn with colleagues in the same tentative way that she played with numbered paragraphs and their juxtaposition. This is just my ...”

“... of a century – it is clear she has entered into erotic conjugation with a Norseman. She won the Booker Prize for Possession (1990) and tried for it again with The Children’s Book (2009). Her last work of fiction was Medusa’s Ankles (2021), a selection of stories that stands for the whole.I have read it all, beginning with Babel Tower (1996), back when I ...”

“... values and sexual difference are necessarily in harmony. A dissenting view (argued in Sarah Schulman’s The Ties that Bind) is that the family, irrespective of class, is where sexual minorities learn about their worth, or lack of it. Some families manage a welcome (the writer Tom Wakefield, son of a Staffordshire coal miner, often talked about ...”

“... asked by the hero’s older brother in Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain, worthy winner of the 2020 Booker Prize, and it is just as much the preoccupation of his follow-up, Young Mungo, as shown by the new novel’s dedication: ‘For Alexander and all the gentle sons of Glasgow’. The worlds of the books are continuous – deprived Glasgow and its environs in ...”