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Book reviews: 47 of the best novels of 2022

New releases include The Singularities by John Banville and Saha by Cho Nam-Joo

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1. The Singularities by John Banville

2. saha by cho nam-joo (trans. jamie chang), 3. bournville by jonathan coe.

• 4. Molly & the Captain by Anthony Quinn

5. Darling by India Knight

6. the passenger by cormac mccarthy, 7. demon copperhead by barbara kingsolver, 8. liberation day by george saunders, 9. lucy by the sea by elizabeth strout, 10. the romantic by william boyd, 11. the marriage portrait by maggie o’farrell, 12. carrie soto is back by taylor jenkins reid, 13. lessons by ian mcewan, 14. the ink black heart by robert galbraith, 15. haven by emma donoghue, 16. trust by hernan diaz, 17. the last white man by mohsin hamid, 18. a hunger by ross raisin, 19. acts of service by lillian fishman, 20. the twilight world by werner herzog, 21. the exhibitionist by charlotte mendelson, 22. vladimir by julia may jonas, 23. to paradise by hanya yanagihara, 24. joan by katherine j. chen, 25. the house of fortune by jessie burton, 26. the seaplane on final approach by rebecca rukeyser, 27. the young accomplice by benjamin wood, 28. the sidekick by benjamin markovits, 29. nonfiction: a novel by julie myerson, 30. you have a friend in 10a by maggie shipstead, 31. very cold people by sarah manguso, 32. trespasses by louise kennedy, 33. elizabeth finch by julian barnes, 34. the candy house by jennifer egan, 35. companion piece by ali smith, 36. young mungo by douglas stuart, 37. sell us the rope by stephen may, 38. french braid by anne tyler, 39. good intentions by kasim ali, 40. the school for good mothers by jessamine chan, 41. pure colour by sheila heti, 42. a previous life by edmund white, 43. a class of their own by matt knott, 44. our country friends by gary shteyngart, 45. scary monsters by michelle de kretser, 46. free love by tessa hadley, 47. the fell by sarah moss.

As the author of three trilogies, John Banville is “no stranger to using recurring characters”, said Ian Critchley in Literary Review . But The Singularities takes this to extremes: so stuffed is it with “old Banville protagonists” that it is close to being a “literary greatest-hits collection”. The setting is Arden House – the crumbling Irish country house from Banville’s 2009 work The Infinities . Various characters from that work are joined by William Jaybey (from The Newton Letter ) and Freddie Montgomery (from The Book of Evidence ), among others. One doesn’t begrudge Banville his “game with his readers”: The Singularities is a “pleasure to read”.

With its “assembly of characters” and country house setting, this novel seems to have the “makings of a whodunnit”, said Tom Ball in The Times . But “no one dies”, or even falls out; and, in fact, little of consequence happens. Fortunately, “you don’t read Banville for his taut plots”. You read him because, every few pages, there’s a sentence “so perfectly contrived it stops you for a moment, achingly, like a beautiful stranger passing in the street”.

Knopf 320pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

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The South Korean writer Cho Nam-Joo is best known for her 2016 novel Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 , said Ellen Peirson-Hagger in The i Paper . A story of “everyday sexism”, it sold more than a million copies in South Korea and sparked a national conversation about the status of women. Cho’s latest novel, Saha , is “just as political” – though this time the focus is on class. Set in a dystopian future, the novel follows a disparate group of characters who live in some dilapidated buildings on the outskirts of “Town”, a fiercely hierarchical “privatised city-nation” where all aspects of life are tightly controlled. Offering a powerful critique of “plutocracy, systemic inequality” and “gendered violence”, the novel is “utterly captivating”.

Cho’s dystopia is “not particularly original”, and her plotting can be “surprisingly loose”, said Mia Levitin in The Daily Telegraph . But the novel’s characterisation is “touching” – and its themes are certainly powerful. At a time of rising global inequality – South Korea’s economy is dominated by “mega-corporations” – this is a book that “resonates widely”.

Scribner 240pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

“Few contemporary writers can make a success of the state-of-the-nation novel,” said Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman . But one who can is Jonathan Coe. His latest charts 75 years of British history, following the lives of a single family, headed by matriarch Mary Lamb, who live on the outskirts of Birmingham, near the Bournville factory. Coe covers so much ground in just 350 pages by alighting only on key moments: VE Day in 1945; the Queen’s coronation; the 1966 World Cup; the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. The result is a “piercing” satire on Englishness that is “designed to make you think by making you laugh”. This is a warm and comforting book, said Melissa Katsoulis in The Times – like a “mug of hot chocolate”.

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The final section, set during Covid-19, is very moving, said J.S. Barnes in Literary Review . But much of this novel is “flat and formulaic”. The use of hindsight is clunky: when Mary visits The Mousetrap in 1953, she thinks: “I imagine it will be closing before very long.” It feels like a “procession through well-worn territory”, rather than something designed to “excite or entertain”.

Viking 368pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

4. Molly & the Captain by Anthony Quinn

Anthony Quinn is a “fine prose stylist, able to evoke the past with vivid immediacy”, said Alex Preston in The Observer . His ninth novel is a sweeping epic that consists of three interlinked sections. In the 1780s, Laura Merrymount – daughter of the Gainsborough-esque portraitist William Merrymount – strives to escape from her father’s shadow and become a painter herself. In Chelsea a century later, we meet the young artist Paul Stransom and his sister Maggie – who abandoned her own dreams of becoming an artist to care for their dying mother. And finally, in 1980s Kentish Town another artist, Nell Cantrip, suddenly acquires late-career fame. Marked by its “intricate”, immaculate plotting, this novel is a “rollicking read”.

I found the plotting a bit predictable, and the characterisation heavy-handed, said Imogen Hermes Gowar in The Guardian . But the book has interesting things to say “about women’s work and talent, and the life cycle of art”; and it is deftly put together by a writer who delights in the “granular details of an era”, while also understanding its broad sweep.

Abacus 432pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

India Knight’s new book is a “contemporary reimagining” of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love , said Christina Patterson in The Sunday Times . Updating “such a beloved novel” certainly isn’t easy – but Knight has pulled off the task with aplomb. In her version, the four Radlett children – Linda, Louisa, Jassy and Robin – are not the progeny of an English lord, but of an ageing and reclusive rock star. Desperate to protect his children from “modern life”, he has purchased a “vast Norfolk estate” – and it’s there that we first encounter Linda and her siblings, through the eyes of their cousin Franny. The narrative tracks their passage to adulthood, and their romantic entanglements – centred on “Linda’s pursuit of love”.

Darling works because, as in Mitford’s original, the details are so “bang on”, said Emma Beddington in The Spectator . Sometimes, Knight artfully tweaks them: she replaces hunting with swimming, and gives her adult characters jobs (Linda runs a café in Dalston). Mitford “diehards can rest easy: your blood vessels are safe with this faithful, fiercely funny homage”.

Fig Tree 288pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

Cormac McCarthy’s first novel in 16 years explores “the very boundaries of human understanding”, said Nicholas Mancusi in Time . Investigating a plane crash in the Gulf of Mexico, diver Bobby Western discovers that one passenger is missing; soon he is being harassed by government agents. But the pretence that this is a thriller doesn’t last long: chapters in which Bobby discusses the meaning of life alternate with ones in which his maths genius sister Alice experiences schizophrenic hallucinations. It’s a deeply weird book, held together by “chuckle-out-loud” humour. A companion novel, Stella Maris , focusing on Alice, does little to explain it – but together they are “staggering”.

Sorry, said James Walton in The Times , but I can’t remember a recent novel so wildly indifferent to what its readers might enjoy, or even understand. The conversations that make up the bulk of it, ranging from nuclear physics to Kennedy’s assassination, are a complete ragbag. McCarthy’s gift for description and dialogue remains undiminished, but there’s no escaping the sense that The Passenger is “a big old mess”.

Picador 400pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel is a retelling of David Copperfield , transposed to the “valleys of southwest Virginia at the height of America’s opioid crisis”, said James Riding in The Times . Demon Copperhead, the “rambunctious hero”, is “born in a trailer to a teenage single mother”, and grows up in a world of neglectful child protection services and dubious guardians. The characters are all recognisable from the Dickens novel – but appear in new guises: “Steerforth becomes Fast Forward, a pill-popping quarterback; Uriah Heep is U-Haul, a football coach’s errand boy”. Daring and entertaining, Demon Copperhead is “shockingly successful” – “like Dickens directed by the Coen brothers”.

It’s a promising premise, not least because in its extreme inequality, post-industrial America resembles Victorian England, said Jessa Crispin in The Daily Telegraph . Yet while Kingsolver closely cleaves to the story of the original, she “breaks the most important rule of working in the Dickensian mode”: the need to “show the reader a good time”. Hers is a retelling “beset by earnestness” – and as a result it falls flat.

Faber 560pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

Besides being a Booker Prize winner with his only novel, Lincoln in the Bardo , George Saunders is “routinely hailed as the world’s best short story writer”, said James Walton in The Daily Telegraph . The American’s dazzling new collection – his first since 2013’s Tenth of December – shows why he garners such acclaim. As is customary in a Saunders collection, quite a few of the tales are “deeply strange”: in the title story, three people are kept permanently “pinioned to a wall”, enacting scenes from American history; another story is set in a theme park that has never received any visitors. Around half the tales, however, explore “recognisable social and political dilemmas”: two employees clashing at work; a mother’s despair about the state of America after her son is pushed over by a tramp. And whether Saunders is engaging with contemporary reality, or “taking us somewhere else entirely”, he never forgets that the most important duty of a writer is to make his work “winningly readable”.

Tenth of December was a “marvellous” collection, but unfortunately Liberation Day doesn’t hit the same heights, said Charles Finch in the Los Angeles Times . Although “the standard of Saunders’ writing remains astronomically high”, there are times here when he seems almost on auto-pilot, reprising themes and situations he has previously explored. It’s true that if you’ve read Saunders before, then parts of Liberation Day will sound “like self-parody”, said John Self in The Times . But then again, “it’s churlish to knock a true original for repeating himself”. When he’s at his best, Saunders’ “oblique, farcical, tragic” view of the world still has the ability to “take the top of your head off”.

Bloomsbury 256pp £18.99; The Week bookshop £14.99

“Elizabeth Strout is writing masterpieces at a pace you might not suspect from their spaciousness and steady beauty,” said Alexandra Harris in The Guardian . Lucy by the Sea is the third sequel to her acclaimed bestseller My Name is Lucy Barton . It takes place early during the pandemic, when Lucy and her ex-husband, William, leave New York for a friend’s empty beach house in Maine – for “just a few weeks”, he says. It is “a study of a later-life reunion between a man and woman who married in their 20s”. It isn’t “a tender tale”, as William isn’t an easy man to like, but it is “as fine a pandemic novel as one could hope for”.

Over the course of three Lucy Barton books, Strout has “created one of the most quizzical characters in modern fiction”, said Claire Allfree in The Times . Still, even this “avid fan” found herself wondering whether this instalment is “surplus to requirements”. This, sadly, is a novel that “mistakes simplistic observation for subtle insight, bathos for pathos”, and Lucy herself is “downright annoying”. I disagree entirely, said Julie Myerson in The Observer . Lucy by the Sea is a wonderful evocation of lockdown life. It is “her most nuanced – and intensely moving – Lucy Barton novel yet”.

Viking 304pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

William Boyd’s 17th novel – his first set in the 19th century – is an “old-fashioned bildungsroman” that follows its “hero, Cashel Greville Ross, through a long and peripatetic life”, said Lucy Atkins in The Sunday Times .

After growing up in Ireland and Oxford, Cashel “impulsively joins the army” and finds himself “facing the French bayonets at the Battle of Waterloo”. He subsequently “hangs out” with Byron and Shelley in Italy, spends time in east India and New England, and becomes an opium addict, an author and a diplomat. Although the authorial winks can be groan-inducing – “Shelley can barely swim”, a friend of the poet declares – it is a “masterclass” in narrative construction and its ending is “genuinely poignant”.

Boyd is “as magically readable as ever”, said Jake Kerridge in The Daily Telegraph . But amid the non-stop action and “endless verbal anachronisms”, Cashel never quite emerges as a fully rounded character. Compared with Boyd’s previous “whole life novels”, such as Any Human Heart and Sweet Caress , The Romantic feels “glaringly synthetic”.

Viking 464pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

Maggie O’Farrell’s last novel, the brilliant Hamnet , “fleshed out” the lives of Shakespeare’s children, said Elizabeth Lowry in The Daily Telegraph . Her latest brings another neglected historical figure into the light – the noblewoman Lucrezia de’ Medici. In 1560, a 16-year-old Lucrezia left Florence to begin her married life with Alfonso d’Este, heir to the Duke of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio. “Within a year, she was dead”; it was rumoured Alfonso had killed her. Taking these “suggestive details” as inspiration (as Robert Browning did in his famous poem My Last Duchess ), O’Farrell “constructs a convincing human drama”.

O’Farrell is a master of visual description, said Claire Allfree in The Times . A tiger moves “like honey dripping from a spoon”; through a window, the sound of sobbing drifts upwards “like smoke”. Yet the “headily perfumed” prose proves oddly dulling: rather than “springing forth messily alive”, Lucrezia seems “trapped beneath the weight” of the “relentless” description. Although it sets out to bring Lucrezia back to life, it ends up being a “bloodless book”.

Tinder Press 438pp £25; The Week Bookshop £19.99

Taylor Jenkins Reid is a TikTok phenomenon, said Marianka Swain in The Daily Telegraph . Thanks in part to BookTok – the social media app’s books community – her novels about glamorous women finding fame and fortune have sold in their millions. Continuing with that “winning strategy”, her latest centres on a “hotshot American tennis pro”.

Carrie Soto is a former world No. 1, who has won a record 20 grand slams. Now in her late 30s, she mounts an “unlikely comeback”, prompted by the emergence of a new star, Londoner Nicki Chan. This is a “compulsive, soapy page-turner” with “more substance than the average beach read”. In short, it’s an “ace” of an “escapist romp”.

Jenkins Reid has a “nose for a cultural moment”, said Susie Goldsbrough in The Times . And so this book’s appearance so soon after the retirement of Serena Williams – clearly an inspiration for Carrie – is “coincidental but not surprising”. Don’t expect “psychological depth”; “fundamentally, this is a sports story”, with whole chapters devoted to single matches. But it’s certainly very “fun to read”.

Hutchinson Heinemann 384pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Ian McEwan’s novels are often “lean, controlled enquiries” into specific historical moments, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The New Statesman : 1950s Germany in The Innocent ; the Thatcherite 1980s in A Child in Time . But his 18th is very different – “baggier and more protean” than any of its predecessors. It’s also, “to my mind, McEwan’s best novel in 20 years”. His protagonist, Roland Baines, is a baby boomer who bears a strong resemblance to his creator, were his creator “not a hugely successful novelist”. Roland spends his childhood in Libya, then “attends a state-run boarding school” in England. And like McEwan, he discovers as an adult that he has a long-lost brother. Yet his life is notable for its lack of direction: he “scratches out a living as a hotel lounge pianist, an occasional tennis coach and a hack”. Humble and wise, Lessons is “an intimate but sprawling story about an ordinary man’s reckoning with existence”.

As is often the case for McEwan’s protagonists, Roland’s life “hinges” on a single traumatic episode, said Edmund Gordon in the TLS . Aged 14, he begins an affair with his piano teacher, Miss Cornell – a relationship which, while he “isn’t exactly a reluctant participant”, nonetheless wounds him. A second trauma follows in his 30s, when Roland’s German-born wife, Alissa, abandons him and their baby son to pursue her ambition of becoming a novelist, said Peter Kemp in The Sunday Times . While Roland is left a single parent, Alissa – somewhat implausibly – becomes “Germany’s greatest writer”. As the decades pass, the “social and domestic cavalcade of Roland’s life” plays out against the backdrop of “momentous global happenings” – from 9/11 to the Covid lockdowns. A “vividly detailed lifetime chronicle”, Lessons is a “tour de force”.

Yet it has its problems, said Claire Lowdon in The Spectator . This is a novel full of dropped storylines and non sequiturs, and McEwan can’t resist those “overbearing news bulletins” that have peppered his recent work (“The Profumo affair was only a year away” etc.). Still, Lessons is consistently enjoyable, and there’s something to be said for the “novelty” of reading a McEwan novel that feels more like “a Jonathan Franzen”. At the age of 74, his desire to try new things is impressive. “Despite the rambling and the rushed patches, here is a whole, unruly life between the covers of a single book: a literary feat of undeniable majesty.”

Cape 496pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

This new crime novel by J.K. Rowling, using her Robert Galbraith pseudonym, has Cormoran Strike, her Afghan-War-veteran-turned-private detective, getting to grips with the world of online trolls, said Joan Smith in The Sunday Times .

Strike and his partner Robin are called to investigate the stabbing to death of a woman named Edie. She was the co-creator of a YouTube cartoon featuring “ghoulish” characters cavorting in a cemetery, and the finger of suspicion falls on a gamer known as “Anomie”, who had subjected Edie to a “torrent of lurid accusation” after claiming that she’d ripped off his ideas.

While the novel works as a “superlative piece of crime fiction”, its subject matter also feels highly pointed: Rowling has herself faced accusations of plagiarism, and she has been subjected to savage online abuse for arguing that aspects of trans ideology lead to the “erasure of the word ‘woman’”.

Sphere 1,024pp £25; The Week Bookshop £19.99

Emma Donoghue’s latest novel is set in early 7th century Ireland, and centres on a trio of monks who build a monastic community on a tiny island, said Ron Charles in The Washington Post . The men set out in their “precarious boat” after their leader Artt – a “legendary holy man” – has a “vision of an island in the western sea”. When they reach a “large rock” covered in “birds, guano and little else”, Artt is convinced it’s the place from his dream – and resolves that he and his companions will never leave. Haven may sound like a work that “few readers have been praying for”, but it proves “transporting, sometimes unsettling and eventually shocking”.

There are some “striking formal similarities” between this novel and Donoghue’s 2010 bestseller Room , inspired by the Josef Fritzl case, said Paraic O’Donnell in The Guardian . Both are works of “radical minimalism”, about people who “struggle to preserve their humanity in utter isolation”. Although Haven is “created in a muted palette”, this is a work of impressive “narrative sustenance” – and is “crowded with quietly beautiful details”.

Picador 272pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Hernan Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated first novel, In the Distance, centred on a “penniless young Swedish immigrant” in California, said Jonathan Lee in The Guardian . His second concerns a “character at the other end of the economic scale” – a “Gatsby-like tycoon in 1920s New York” named Andrew Bevel. Rather than tell Bevel’s story straight, Diaz embeds it in four “interconnected narratives”: a fictionalised novel based on Bevel’s life; Bevel’s unfinished autobiography; a memoir by his ghostwriter; and fragments from his wife’s “long-withheld diary”. It sounds tricksy, but it’s surprisingly readable – like a “brilliantly twisted mix” of Borges and J.M. Coetzee, with “a dash” of Italo Calvino.

The “knotty ingenuity” of this novel makes it deserving of its place on this year’s Booker longlist, said Lucy Scholes in The Daily Telegraph . It is “destined to be known as one of the great puzzle-box novels”. I doubt that, said John Self in The Times . Parts are “original and surprising”, but overall it’s “well behaved and dull”, and consumed by its own cleverness. Like the tycoon at its centre, it’s “all smart, no heart”.

Picador 416pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Mohsin Hamid’s fifth novel begins with a transformation, said Alex Preston in The Observer : Anders wakes up one morning to find his skin has changed from white to black. This metamorphosis is not explained; instead, the focus is on its impact on the people around Anders. When he goes out, he feels “vaguely menaced”; his boss tells him he’d have killed himself had it happened to him. But then Anders finds that similar transfor­mations are taking place across the US, until eventually there is “just one white man left”. Written in “incantatory” sentences, The Last White Man is a “strange, beautiful allegorical tale”.

Mysterious transformations can be “fertile terrain” for fiction, said Houman Barekat in The Times : one thinks, most obviously, of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. But while that work resists easy interpretation, Hamid’s aims are all too obvious: this is “yet another liberal parable” about the “psychic underpinnings of racial prejudice”. Ultimately, it’s a book that says more about the “publishing industry’s anxious scrabble for topicality” than about “the human condition”.

Hamish Hamilton 192pp £12.99; The Week Bookshop £9.99

Most books billed as telling us “what it means to be human” really do no such thing, said John Self in The Observer . Ross Raisin’s A Hunger is an exception. The tale of a London “sous chef in her mid-50s”, this is the fourth novel by this talented writer – and it is his most “ambitious” yet, encompassing “work and family, desires and appetites, responsibility and identity”.

Raisin has always excelled at portraying working lives, said Alexandra Harris in The Guardian : Waterline , his second novel, centred on a Clyde shipbuilder; A Natural , his third, was about a lower league footballer. Here, he captures the rhythms of kitchen life so skilfully that it “makes one realise the degree to which work is still under-charted territory in literary fiction”. Yet the novel is about much more than cooking: Patrick, Anita’s husband of 30 years, has recently developed early-onset dementia, forcing her to combine the stresses of her job with a new role as a carer “changing incontinence pads”. The result is a “deeply thought out and beautifully unshowy” novel about the “conflicting demands of work and care”.

I wasn’t impressed, said Claire Lowdon in The Sunday Times . Although Raisin’s gifts for “startling descriptive prose” are evident – notably in a bravura opening set in a walk-in fridge – the novel overall is let down by “wooden dialogue”, characters who don’t seem real, and a clumsy structure in which Anita’s present-day travails are juxtaposed with “rushed and skimpy” scenes from her early life. It may not be perfect, but this is a deft exploration of “the guilt that accompanies female ambition”, said Amber Medland in the FT . Daring in what it sets out to achieve, A Hunger is equally “impressive in its execution”.

Jonathan Cape 464pp £18.99; The Week bookshop £14.99

Lillian Fishman’s debut is one of the most “searching and enthralling” novels about sex I’ve read in years, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The New Statesman . “Eve is a 28-year-old barista from Brooklyn in a long-term relationship with Romi, a paediatrician.” Although Eve considers herself a lesbian, she has fantasies about sleeping with a “wild number of people”. When she posts nude pictures of herself online, they catch the attention of an artist called Olivia – who proves to be acting on behalf of a “tall, wealthy man in his 30s” named Nathan, who makes Eve his sexual “toy”. “Part erotic Bildungsroman, part melancholy comedy of manners”, Acts of Service is “startlingly accomplished”.

Well, I found it thoroughly tedious, said Jessa Crispin in The Times – less a novel than a crude allegory. Nathan is “basically Christian Grey from Fifty Shades rendered in marginally better prose”. Fishman’s reflections on the corrupting effects of “patriarchy” and “capitalism” have been far better expressed elsewhere. Overhyped and unoriginal, this is a disappointing addition to the “library of endless want”.

Europa Editions 224pp £12.99; The Week Bookshop £9.99

For 29 years after the end of the Second World War, a Japanese soldier named Hiroo Onoda held out on a small island in the Philippines, believing his comrades were still fighting, said Anthony Gardner in The Mail on Sunday . Now the great film director Werner Herzog, who befriended Onoda in 1997, has written an imaginative reconstruction of his experiences. Steeped in the atmosphere of the jungle, it’s an “enthralling” novel that explores the nature of time and warfare with great mastery.

Onoda’s single-minded intransigence makes him an archetypal Herzog hero, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph , and this “Hemingwayesque” novella is highly cinematic, with short chapters and vivid scene-setting. But its refined prose gives it a sculptural quality too: its descriptions of the natural world are radiant. Herzog manages to inhabit the soldier’s mind, and to create a “visionary” narrative, said Peter Carty in The i Paper. Moral issues – Onoda killed a number of islanders – are somewhat sidelined, but this beautifully crafted book is a “literary jewel” nevertheless.

Bodley Head 144pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

Charlotte Mendelson’s “riotous, prize-winning novels” tend to be about messy, dysfunctional families, said Leyla Sanai in The Spectator . Her fifth centres on a “monstrous” artist named Ray Hanrahan and his downtrodden wife, Lucia. Narcissistic, abusive and controlling, Ray has “quashed” Lucia’s own artistic ambitions for decades, forcing her to minister to his needs and look after their (now grown-up) children.

With an “ostentatious private view” of his work about to open, he has summoned friends and family to their north London house. The result is a “glorious ride” of a novel – one in which “Mendelson observes the minutiae of human behaviour like a comic anthropologist”.

There is a lot going on in this novel – “at times, too much” – but the overall “effect is exhilarating”, said Susie Mesure in The Times . Moving between perspectives, Mendelson cranks the drama up to a “fiery climax”. There’s a “hint of HBO’s Succession ” in this tale of a “family in thrall to a despotic patriarch”, said Madeleine Feeny in The Daily Telegraph . Mingling “eroticism, absurdity and pathos”, it’s “electric”.

Mantle 336pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

At first glance, this debut novel seems to be yet another post-#MeToo book “dissecting sexual trauma and queasy power dynamics”, said Laura Hackett in The Sunday Times . At a US liberal arts college, John, a senior English professor, finds himself accused of sexual impropriety by “seven students with whom he has had affairs”. But rather than adopt their perspective, the novel is narrated by John’s wife – who is anything but sympathetic towards them. She laments the fact that young women today seem to have “lost all agency”, and admits to having “enjoyed the space” that her husband’s infidelities provided. With its bracing take on sexual politics, Vladimir is an “astonishing debut”.

In its second half, the novel becomes primarily about “female appetite”, as the narrator develops an obsessive crush on a “gorgeous new junior professor”, said Lucy Atkins in The Guardian . May Jones’s “quietly captivating” voice dazzles until the end, when the novel is let down by a “heavy-handed denouement”. Still, in its willingness to tackle “complex”, provocative themes, this is “an engrossing and clever debut”.

Picador 256pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

Hanya Yanagihara’s latest novel is the “keenly awaited” follow up to A Little Life , her “devastating story of irreparable human damage”, said David Sexton in The Sunday Times . It consists of three sections all set in the same New York building and taking place, respectively, in 1893, 1993 and 2093.

Part one re-imagines 19th century New York as a “liberal breakaway nation in which gay marriage is normal”. Part two, set in the “time of Aids”, focuses on a wealthy white lawyer and his young Hawaiian lover. Part three envisages an America that has been ravaged by “successive waves of viruses, every few years from 2020”. While a “less bludgeoningly powerful” work than A Little Life , it’s still “highly affecting”.

This is in many ways a “wantonly strange” work, said Claire Allfree in The Times : the convoluted narrative can be “frustratingly opaque”, and there’s a complete absence of humour. Yet there’s no denying Yanagihara’s skill at immersing us in the “emotional world of her characters”. For all its flaws, To Paradise is “frequently magnificent”.

Picador 720pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

The story of Joan of Arc – a 15th-century peasant girl from northeast France who became a national heroine – has been told many times before, said Marianka Swain in The Daily Telegraph . But in her second novel, the American writer Katherine J. Chen offers a “fresh and utterly enthralling take”. Her Joan is not a religious icon – “gone are the visions” – but primarily a “woman of action”: she’s a child of remarkable physical gifts who, through a series of “serendipitous events”, becomes a key ally of the dauphin (later King Charles VII), helping to lead his armies against the English. “Vivid, visceral and boldly immediate”, the novel has already earned comparisons with Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy.

At once a “mystic, martyr and war hero”, Joan is a largely “incomprehensible” figure today, said Jess Walter in The New York Times . Chen, however, has a “lively stab” at making her seem relevant – in part by imagining her as an “abused child” who uses her anger to become an “avenging warrior”. “Rich” and “visceral” in its descriptions, Joan is “stirring stuff”.

Hodder & Stoughton 368pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

In 2014, Jessie Burton’s debut novel The Miniaturist – about 18-year-old Nella Oortman’s coming of age in 17th century Amsterdam – became a global bestseller, said Gwendolyn Smith in The i Paper . Now Burton is back, with a “beguiling, tender sequel”, set 18 years later. Nella, now 37, is a widow (The Miniaturist climaxed with her husband’s execution for sodomy), who still lives in the “same grand address on Amsterdam’s Herengracht canal”. A “cold, austere place” in the previous book, the house is now suffused with “warmth and familiarity” – though it still “thrums with secrets”. “Wise and fabulously immersive”, this book, if anything, surpasses its predecessor.

I disagree, said Claire Allfree in The Daily Telegraph . Burton remains a “lovely writer”, who can craft “startlingly sculptural” sentences. But “where The Miniaturist was alive with spooky mystery”, this book lacks an “animating spirit”: characters, events and even the language seem contrived. “In seeking to bring more life to the characters in The Miniaturist, The House of Fortune somehow diminishes them instead.”

Picador 400pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Set in the Alaskan wilderness, Rebecca Rukeyser’s “wistful and sardonic” first novel is part adventure story, part coming-of-age tale, said The Irish Times . Seventeen-year-old Mira is working for the summer at a guest house run by a married couple, Stu and Maureen, alongside two other girls and a troubled chef. Much of her time is spent fantasising sexually about a boy she met the year before. Rukeyser’s descriptive prose is assured and elegant, and the story becomes increasingly tense, as Stu’s predatory behaviour towards the girls becomes apparent.

Mira’s adolescent yearning is well captured in this quirky, wry debut, said Siobhan Murphy in The Times . Rukeyser provides a “deftly juggled” mixture of merciless judgement and gentle compassion for her characters’ failings. There’s also plenty of comedy, said Cal Revely-Calder in The Sunday Telegraph, though the story becomes more “mature and melancholy” as it progresses. The Seaplane on Final Approach is about how “desire ruins everything”. And when the finale arrives, it is “catastrophic” – but it also provides “lengthy, gruesome fun”.

Granta 288pp £12.99; The Week Bookshop £9.99

“Few people outside the literary world” have heard of 41-year-old novelist Benjamin Wood, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times . That’s a shame, because he’s “wonderful”. Already the author of “three richly layered novels”, he has now written a fourth, The Young Accomplice , which is “his most original yet”. Set in the 1950s, it centres on Arthur and Florence Mayhood, “childless architects in their 30s” who, inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright, dream of creating a communal-living project on their Surrey farm. To help them realise this ambition, they invite a pair of borstal leavers – brother and sister Charlie and Joyce Savigear – to live with them; unsurprisingly, things go wrong.

Compared with Wood’s previous novels, which blended “storytelling punch with literary sensibility”, this book at times feels muted, said John Self in The Times . Wood spends a lot of time in his characters’ heads; you wish for a bit more action. Still, there are compensations: the characters feel like “real people”, who you miss when they’re gone. This is a book that “digs its claws into you and sticks there”.

Viking 368pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Benjamin Markovits’s latest novel is a “compelling account of relative failure”, said Joseph Owen in Literary Review . Brian, the narrator, is a “big fat slow” Jewish kid from Austin, Texas, who becomes childhood friends with Marcus Hayes, his high school’s basketball star. Marcus is black, and from a broken home – for a while he lives with Brian’s family – but in adulthood, when Marcus becomes an “NBA superstar”, Brian is merely a “semi-successful” sportswriter. The novel convincingly portrays Brian’s “inhibited world-view”, which is “tainted by jealousy” of his friend. The result is a “bleak, amusing, ultimately absorbing read”.

This is a novel with the “topography of a classic American story”, said Stuart Evers in The Spectator : “sport as a metaphor for the fracture of the US; friendship as a microcosm of race relations”. It feels a little dated – a bit “male and white” – and the “detailed descriptions of basketball” could put some people off. In the final act, though, when Markovits unveils “his A-game”, the novel “ignites into something compelling and emotionally resonant”.

Faber 361pp £18.99; The Week Bookshop £14.99

In 2009, the novelist Julie Myerson found herself at the centre of a media storm after publishing a non-fiction account of her eldest son’s addiction to marijuana, said Hephzibah Anderson in The Observer . The episode, she has said, drove her to a “kind of breakdown”, and she has never directly addressed it in her writing. Except that now, in a way, she has. This, her 11th novel – entitled Nonfiction – is all about “teenage drug addiction”. The narrator is a once “happily married” writer, who is looking back on her attempts to save her heroin-addicted daughter “from self-destruction”. Given her own backstory, Myerson is risking a lot with such a novel – but “the results are nothing less than incandescent”.

The title is confusing, and deliberately so, said Alex Peake-Tomkinson in The Spectator . This is Myerson’s “squarest attempt so far at autobiographical fiction”. Yet in other ways, it seems a typical work: she has always explored “her worst fears in her novels”. Although I hope she will “look beyond her own life” in future, I found this a “satisfyingly propulsive” read.

Corsair 288pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Maggie Shipstead’s “thrilling” historical epic, Great Circle , not only earned her a place on last year’s Booker shortlist, but also “proved a huge hit with readers”, said Lucy Scholes in the Financial Times . So it’s “savvy” of her publisher to bring out this collection of her short stories, written over the past 13 years. The tales vary widely in tone and setting – they transport us “from the catacombs of Paris, via an Olympic Village, to a guano island in the middle of the Pacific” – but taken together, they forcefully illustrate the “remarkable scope of Shipstead’s imagination and talent”.

While one or two of these stories seem a bit “too self-conscious”, most are superb, said Lizzy Harding in The New York Times . In the “sure standout”, “La Moretta”, a young couple’s honeymoon in Romania “transforms into folk horror à la The Wicker Man ”. Shipstead has an “unnerving ability to capture a character’s inner life in a few choice phrases”, said Stephanie Merritt in The Observer . “It’s a rare writer who can create a world as convincingly over a few pages as in a 600-page novel.”

Doubleday 288pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

This “creepy coming-of-age tale” unfolds like a “darker version of Roald Dahl’s Matilda ”, except with “no Miss Honey coming to the rescue”, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Observer . Set in an “icy” Massachusetts town in the 1980s, it is narrated by Ruthie, an only child whose family is “on the edge of poverty”. Ruthie is an assiduous cataloguer of “everything she sees” – her mother’s lumpy body, her awkward dinners with richer school friends – but she doesn’t always understand the significance of what she sees. Marked by its “pitiless, minutely observed prose”, Very Cold People is a work that “will stay with me for a very long time”.

Manguso is especially good at evoking the “constraints and cruelties” of Ruthie’s home life, said Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times . So successfully does she portray “boring old daily pain” that it almost seems redundant when “more dramatic plot-turns arrive” towards the end of the book. Very Cold People is at its best simply as a “compendium of the insults of a deprived childhood: a thousand cuts exquisitely observed and survived”.

Picador 208pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

The Irish writer Louise Kennedy only began writing aged 47, but her rise has been meteoric, said Madeleine Feeny in The Spectator . The End of the World is a Cul de Sac, her debut short story collection, was “fought over” by nine publishers. And now, with this first novel, she has written what promises to be another hit. Plot-wise, Trespasses doesn’t break new ground, said Kevin Power in The Guardian: set near Belfast in 1975, it’s about a young Catholic primary school teacher who falls in love with a posh Protestant barrister. What distinguishes it is its “sense of utter conviction”. This is a story “told with such compulsive attention to the textures of its world that every page feels like a moral and intellectual event”.

Kennedy is a superbly visual writer, and her “idiomatic dialogue gives her prose real verve”, said Hephzibah Anderson in The Observer : the protagonist’s mother, catching sight of Helen Mirren on a chat show, describes her as a “dirty article”. Combining “unflinching authenticity” with a “flair for detail”, this is a “deftly calibrated” and ultimately “devastating” novel.

Bloomsbury 320pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

Julian Barnes’s latest is that “old-fashioned thing, a novel of ideas”, said John Self in The Times . It is narrated by Neil, a former actor, but is really all about Elizabeth Finch, the “lecturer on a course on culture and civilisation that Neil took decades earlier”. Finch, who is “probably inspired” by Barnes’s friend, the late novelist Anita Brookner, is remembered as an inspirational teacher, someone “who obliged us – simply by example – to seek and find within ourselves a centre of seriousness”. Neil recalls their sort-of friendship – they occasionally met for lunch – and describes his quest, in the present day, to find out more about Finch in the wake of her death. Very much a “thinky” novel, Elizabeth Finch may be “rather less fun” than most of Barnes’s books, but it “offers plenty to chew on”.

“Part of the challenge of rendering a brilliantly inspirational teacher is making them sufficiently brilliant and inspirational,” said Sameer Rahim in The Daily Telegraph . Despite Neil’s insistence on Finch’s originality, “what she actually says tends to fall flat”. “She told me that love is all there is. It’s the only thing that matters,” a classmate of Neil recalls. The novel is further let down by its baffling middle section, which consists of Neil’s “stolid student essay” on the fourth century Roman emperor Julian the Apostate, whom Finch regarded as a kindred spirit, said Sam Byers in The Guardian .

It all adds up to a “work stubbornly determined to deny us its pleasures”. I disagree, said Peter Kemp in The Sunday Times . As a teacher, Finch “blazes with vividness”, and Neil’s essay is a “bravura exercise in nimbly handled erudition”. Elizabeth Finch “celebrates the cast of mind” – subtle, sceptical and ironic – that “Barnes most prizes”.

Jonathan Cape 192pp £16.99; The Week bookshop £13.99

Jennifer Egan’s new novel is a “sibling novel” to A Visit From the Goon Squad, her bestselling 2010 novel about rock music, “Gen-X nostalgia” and the “digitalisation of everything”, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times . Consisting of interrelated short stories which zigzag about in time, it resembles its predecessor in structure – and features many of the same characters. But at its centre is a new figure: the “Mark Zuckerberg-like” Bix Bouton, whose company, Mandala, has created an “implausible” device known as Own Your Unconscious, which lets users upload their own and other people’s memories, and “watch them all like movies”.

The sci-fi aspects of the book are neither new nor “particularly fully realised”, said Andrew Billen in The Times : memory uploads have been tackled better elsewhere. But this is essentially a book of short stories, and most of them are excellent and “brain-stretching”. What “really astounds is the visual brilliance of Egan’s writing across these disparate tales”. She won a Pulitzer for A Visit From the Goon Squad; I hope this book “wins another”.

Corsaid 352pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

Ali Smith’s first novel since her “extraordinary Seasonal Quartet ” has a fitting title, said Alex Preston in The Observer , as it “springs from the same source as its predecessors”. Like them, it was “written and published swiftly”, to cram in recent events. It’s 2021, and Sandy, an artist, is “struggling through lockdown”. Her father is in hospital following a heart attack – and she “only has his dog for company”. Smith skilfully evokes the grim monotony of pandemic life, said Catherine Taylor in the FT – from the “regularity of testing” to “the exhaustion of medical staff”.

Much of the plot concerns Sandy’s “renewed acquaintance” with an old university friend Martina, who gets in touch to tell her about her recent interrogation by UK border police, said Philip Hensher in The Daily Telegraph . This leads to Sandy meeting Martina’s twin daughters, Eden and Lea, who are full of “millennial” rage and entitlement. Covering a “lot of contemporary ground”, Companion Piece offers an entertaining portrait of the “world we live in, by the most beguiling and likeable of novelistic intelligences”.

Hamish Hamilton 400pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Douglas Stuart’s debut, Shuggie Bain – the winner of the 2020 Booker Prize – was a “bleak autobiographical novel about a young boy caring for his alcoholic mother in 1980s Glasgow”, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times . His follow-up is “cut from the same cloth”.

Fifteen-year-old Mungo lives with his mother and two older siblings in Glasgow’s East End. “His brother, Hamish, is a Faginesque Protestant gang leader; his sister, Jodie, is a do-gooding fallen angel; and their mother, Mo-Maw, is a woman ruined by alcohol.” As the novel opens, Mungo is shooed off by his mother on a fishing trip with two menacing strangers from her Alcoholics Anonymous group, who promise to teach him “masculine pursuits”.

Interspersed with this “gruesome excursion” are chapters set a few months earlier, detailing Mungo’s first love affair, with a Catholic neighbour called James. Although this “alternating timeline” feels forced at times, this is still a “richly abundant” work packed with fine writing and “colourful characters”.

It may be felt – with some justification – that Stuart has written the same book twice, said Nikhil Krishnan in The Daily Telegraph . Yet he “makes small differences count”. Because Mungo is older than Shuggie, he is able to see in his sexuality “not just a source of difference and alienation, but a possible route to escape and emancipation”. And Stuart widens his focus beyond family life, taking in the “Jets and Sharks world” of Glasgow’s sectarian politics.

Like its predecessor, this “bear hug of a new novel” has a “yeasty whiff of the autobiographical” about it, said Hillary Kelly in the Los Angeles Times . If you adored Shuggie Bain , this book “will please you on every page”.

Picador 400pp £16.99; The Week bookshop £13.99

Joseph Stalin “never spoke or wrote” about the two months he spent in London in the spring of 1907, attending the 5th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, said Alasdair Lees in The Daily Telegraph . Into this “psychological aperture” steps Stephan May, whose sixth novel is an “openly confected” retelling of those “few overlooked weeks”.

It begins with a 29-year-old Stalin – then known by his nickname, Koba – landing at Harwich, fresh from “a campaign of terror and banditry” in his native Georgia. In London, he stays in a dosshouse in Stepney, while better-off attendees – including Lenin – lodge in Bloomsbury. May’s Stalin is a “figure of fascinating contradictions” – an “idealist and a thug” – and the novel a “captivating thought experiment”.

Sadly, it often falls “disappointingly flat”, said Simon Baker in Literary Review . There are “samey descriptions” of London’s “awful” pubs, and May makes too much use of summary. Despite having the makings of an “exciting political thriller”, the novel isn’t convincing enough for May’s story to really grow.

Sandstone 288pp £8.99; The Week Bookshop £6.99

Anne Tyler virtually created the “family novel” genre, but has “strayed into more diverse territory recently”, said Melissa Katsoulis in The Times . Fans will be delighted by the 80-year-old’s 24th novel, which marks a return to type. Set, almost inevitably, in Baltimore, it’s a multi-generational saga spanning six decades, about a “comfortingly average” family. Mercy and Robin Garrett “enjoy a smoothly conventional life” running a hardware store and raising their three children. But theirs is a family in which “certain things must never be said”, and as the decades pass, this creates division. French Braid is “Tyler at her most Tyler-ish: pleasant and inoffensive, yet surprisingly deep and moving”.

Near its end, the novel does take an unexpected turn, said Anthony Cummins in The Observer . Its final chapters are set during Covid – a topic Tyler suggested she’d never write about. Typically, however, she emphasises not the pandemic’s harrowing side, but its “potential to occasion reunion and reconnection”. This book may fall short of her best work – but “at this point any Tyler book is a gift”.

Chatto & Windus 256pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

This “eagerly awaited” debut is being hailed as “part of a wave of novels by young men of colour exploring race, romance and mental health problems”, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times . Nur, a 25-year-old online journalist from Birmingham who regularly suffers panic attacks, has been with Yasmina for four years. But he has yet to tell his Pakistani parents about the relationship: Yasmina’s family is Sudanese, and Nur has never got over his “mother’s disgust when she saw him hanging out with a black girl at school”.

On the surface a “poignant romance” about the barriers standing in the way of two young lovers, Good Intentions gradually reveals itself to be a deeper novel – about how an obsession with vulnerability can “make you forget your responsibility to others”.

Ali’s characters are “well-drawn”, and “what a tonic” to have a book about race in Britain set outside the capital, said Siobhan Murphy in The Times . Unfortunately, though, the unnecessarily complex structure necessitates a lot of darting “between points on the timeline” – and this, alas makes the novel rather “confusing”.

4th Estate 352pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

Jessamine Chan’s “crafty and spellbinding” debut is set in a terrifyingly plausible dystopian America, said Molly Young in The New York Times . Frida Liu is a 39-year-old single mother with an 18-month-old daughter and a stressful job. One day, in a “spell of insomnia-induced irrationality”, she leaves her daughter unattended at home while running a work errand.

Neighbours hear the toddler crying, and alert the police. Frida is sentenced to a year in an “experimental rehab facility”, where women are moulded into better mothers by practising their parenting skills on AI dolls. The school continually berates Frida for her actions: her kisses, instructors tell her, “lack a fiery core of maternal love”.

It’s no surprise that this book has been “making waves” in the US, said Madeleine Feeny in The Daily Telegraph : “questions of how we define and evaluate motherhood pervade contemporary culture”. Beautifully lucid and elegantly written, this is a “must-read” novel, said India Knight in The Sunday Times – “a Handmaid’s Tale for the 21st century”.

Hutchinson Heinemann 336pp £12.99; The Week Bookshop £9.99

The Canadian writer Sheila Heti’s latest is “an original”, said Anne Enright in The Guardian . It’s a short novel about grief in which plot often gives way to “mystical” digressions that are “earnest, funny and sweet” – “a bit mad”, but in a good way.

Mira, a solitary woman in midlife, falls in love with Annie, a fellow student at their school for art criticism. Then Mira’s father dies, and his spirit joins her own inside a leaf, where they converse about “art, God, love and the transmigration of souls”, before Mira returns to “the pursuit of love”, her faith in “family and tradition” strengthened.

Billed as “a philosopher of modern experience”, Heti is known for her auto-fictional novels such as How Should a Person Be? (2010). Pure Colour is more like a fable, said Mia Levitin in the FT , in which God is an artist, and this world is his “first draft”, now “heating up in advance of its destruction”. Sadly, the book’s “meditations on grief” left me cold, and I found the prose “clunky” and “perilously close to kitsch”, with a naive, fairy-tale quality ill-suited to a story about middle age.

Harvill Secker 224pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, Edmund White’s novels “forever enlarged what gay writing might do”, said Neil Bartlett in The Guardian . His latest book – “his 30th, by my count” – is an “elegant, filthy” work that “crackles with a heartfelt insistence that the old and hungry” still have much to tell us about “the dynamics of sex”.

In the year 2050, a married couple in a remote Swiss chalet decide to entertain each other by recounting their “previous sexual careers”. Constance, in her early 30s, is an “African-American orphan”, while Ruggero, her husband, is an elderly bisexual Sicilian aristocrat who is “legendarily well-connected (not to mention well hung)”.

As you’d expect, this novel is “elegantly written”, and contains many “arresting images”, said Peter Parker in The Spectator – but it’s fairly “preposterous”. The leap forward in time is merely a device allowing Ruggero to reminisce about his affair 30 years earlier with the now-forgotten writer Edmund White, then old and infirm: a “fat, famous slug”, he calls him. It is, however, all very entertaining.

Bloomsbury 288pp £18.99; The Week Bookshop £14.99

Unsure what to do after graduating, Matt Knott alighted on tutoring as an “easy way to make money”, said Georgia Beaufort in The Daily Telegraph . He duly joined an agency that specialised in finding “study buddies” for the children of the super-rich. With his “Cambridge degree and his floppy hair”, Knott proved a big success – and in this “very funny memoir”, he recounts his three years in the job.

His first assignment was in a house in Mayfair, where each day he sat in a “holding pool” of tutors waiting to see if he’d be picked to help a five-year-old with his homework. Other families were considerably friendlier: half servant, half family member, Knott accompanied his charges on various exotic holidays.

This amusing book sheds light on a ridiculous world of “butlers in very tight trousers” and “helicopter trips from Tuscan villas to smart restaurants in Rome”, said Roland White in the Daily Mail . In this milieu, five-year-olds eat lobster tempura for supper, and “PJs” stands for private jets instead of pyjamas. With his pleasing turn of phrase (these days he works as a screenwriter), Knott is a witty, observant guide.

Trapeze 336pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Gary Shteyngart’s fifth novel is set during the far-off-seeming “early days” of the Covid pandemic, said Claire Lowdon in The Sunday Times . Sasha Senderovsky, a successful Russian-born US novelist (like his creator), has retreated to his large house in upstate New York, accompanied by a group of friends. Their plan is to ride out lockdown together but, predictably, things go wrong.

Various housemates fall out with one another; “plenty of partner-swapping” occurs. If the basic conceit owes a lot to Chekhov, the novel’s boisterous, madcap comedy owes at least as much to A Midsummer Night’s Dream . Shteyngart has brilliantly captured the “almost maniacal aliveness” of the early pandemic. If anyone writes a funnier lockdown novel, “I will eat my face mask”.

There’s so much going on in this somewhat “messy” novel that at times it’s exhausting to read, said John Self in The Times . A “little more stillness” would have been welcome. Still, it exhibits Shteyngart’s trademark “feverish energy” – and the result is “often funny” and “sometimes moving”.

Allen & Unwin 336pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

“Michelle de Kretser’s slyly intelligent sixth novel pairs two first-person narratives,” said Anthony Cummins in The Observer . One is set in “dystopian near-future Melbourne” and follows Lyle, an immigrant who works for a sinister government agency created to deport immigrants. The other is set in 1981, and follows Lili, a 22-year-old Australian, during a carefree sojourn in the south of France. The link between the two narratives is mysterious – and even the order you read them in is “up to you”, on account of the book’s “reversible, Kindle-defying two-way design”.

The publisher has been “fastidious” in cooperating with de Kretser’s conceit, said Sam Leith in The Daily Telegraph : there are two front covers, two copyright pages, two sets of acknowledgements, and so on. “It’s sort of magnificent, and it’s also sort of gimmicky” – and it left me unsure if I was actually reading a novel, or simply two novellas yoked together. Perhaps, though, it doesn’t really matter. Filled with “apt quick literary brushstrokes and the gleam of humour”, both halves are equally “terrific”.

Allen & Unwin 320pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

Tessa Hadley is justly lauded for “elevating the domestic novel to literary fiction” in her stories about the “shifting geometries” of middle-class families, said Mia Levitin in the FT . Free Love , her eighth novel, “adds a Sixties twist to Anna Karenina ”. Set in 1967, it centres on 40-year-old Phyllis Fischer, a well-off suburban housewife married to Roger, a senior civil servant. One summer night, twenty-something Nicky – the son of a family friend – comes to supper. He and Phyllis steal an “illicit kiss” – and embark on an affair. Leaving home without a forwarding address, Phyllis swaps her cosy life with Roger for “then-bohemian Ladbroke Grove” (where Nicky occupies a squalid bedsit). Hadley’s style is as “sumptuous” as ever, and her characterisations are superb. While this isn’t perhaps her best novel, its publication is a “cause for celebration”.

Hadley has been criticised for the “narrowness of her social concerns – her incorrigible preoccupation with Cecilias, Harriets and Rolands”, said James Marriott in The Times . So it’s gratifying that in this “beautiful and exciting” novel, she contrasts the bourgeois world with the “supremely undomesticated” 1960s counterculture.

Yet there’s a problem, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times : Hadley is far more at home among herbaceous borders than in the “pot-smoking” milieu of Nicky and his friends. Her depictions of the Swinging Sixties rarely rise above cliché – and “when she tries to capture the life of a black nurse whom Phyllis befriends, the writing becomes laboured”. You sense Hadley “itching to get back to the bourgeois suburbs” – and as this disappointing novel progressed, I wished I was back there with her.

Jonathan Cape 320pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99

Sarah Moss’s 2009 debut novel, Cold Earth , imagined an out-of-control virus, said Hephzibah Anderson in The Observer . She returns to similar terrain with her latest novel – only this time with less need for invention. Set in November 2020, The Fell centres on Kate, a forty-something single mum, who “finally snaps” during a two-week quarantine period, and goes for a solitary walk in the Peak District. It’s “destined to be an ill-fated expedition”: the night draws in, Kate doesn’t return – and her absence is noticed by her teenage son Matt. With its vivid sense of “accumulating dread”, this is an “intense time capsule of a tale”.

Moss moves “gracefully” between various perspectives, said Sarah Ditum in The Times : that of Alice, an elderly neighbour; and Rob, a member of the mountain rescue team. Elegantly written and concise, The Fell is a “close-to-perfect” novel. Even though Moss has said it was written fast, the prose here feels “precision-tooled”, said Roger Cox in The Scotsman . Remarkably, in only 180 pages, she has captured “all of lockdown life”.

Picador 180pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

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"It has been more about engaging digitally with readers, not only in the UK but also with many of our readers around the world. It has been interesting to think about how to publish stories digitally before putting them in the paper. We could also try new digital initiatives such as when our crime reviewer spent an hour online discussing the best crime novels to read now, which worked well. We’ll keep things like this."

Studemann said that he was struggling to fit the books in his property and is keen to start using the FT office again. "We will start going back to the office soon in Bracken House [in the City of London] so I’m asking publicists to start sending review copies there from 1st May."

At the Guardian , Liese Spencer, joint head of books/editor of Review , said: "In terms of Review , we down-paged quite significantly in April 2020 but then up-paged again and have stayed at the same size magazine (28pp) since then. Elsewhere in print, online and in Guardian Live events we've produced a similar quantity of coverage to usual. Review is closing later this year, at which point our print coverage will be migrating to the culture section of the new Saturday magazine, where it will get comparable space to what we currently have in Review , if not more. Details of the new magazine will be announced in a few months' time, when we will also be looking to refresh and relaunch some of our online books coverage."

The Evening Standard and Stylist are both publications which have traditionally relied on commuters and so were forced to adapt fast. Katie Law, books editor at the Standard , revealed how the coverage had changed. “Our coverage has been affected, mainly because the Standard appeals to commuters and they have been decimated by the pandemic. So the physical newspaper is much smaller than it was, so now the strategy is digital-first. We’ve moved most the books coverage to online-only so we’ve been working with a slightly different formula. We used to publish a page of book reviews every Thursday, but now we publish a book review almost every day so it gives us more flexibility.

“We’ve seen that most people are reading reviews on their mobile phone and there are particular subjects which do particularly well online that we wouldn't have thought of before, such as books on mental health, so we may be repackaging how we present the reviews such as ‘10 of the best books on stress’ because you know what people are searching for. Though we still need to balance that with literary integrity.

"There’s also a question of manpower. There were a lot of redundancies at the Standard in October. At the moment I usually publish four book reviews a week and we have certain new ideas which we’re excited about and we can have the click-through to buy, which we’re doing with Bookshop.org. We’re keeping this [online] format for the moment."

Francesca Brown, contributing books editor to Stylist, revealed how the publication had adapted its offering to online: “Books content in the magazine has been affected by a lack of print issue, which we’re currently producing monthly, with other weekly issues on the Stylist app. Moving onto the app platform means that a regular franchise such as ‘Book Wars’ doesn't work as well and so is on hold for the moment, but books remain pivotal in other areas. We always cover big titles of the week in Stylist and authors and new releases play a huge role in our features section.

“Daily email Stylist Loves regularly features must-read book picks, stylist.co.uk produces regular book news and release round-ups and, crucially, we’re also launching the online Stylist Literary Festival in June because of the huge appetite for books from Stylist’s audience. We’re supporting it with a big cover feature in our 31st May issue.”

Many publications attempted to pivot coverage to be more relevant and helpful during lockdown. Sunday Times literary editor Andrew Holgate ( pictured left ) said that the section tried to help the industry “by creating a list, which we updated regularly and republished during the second lockdown, of places where people could still buy books”.

He revealed how the mass rescheduling of publication dates led to a drought of titles before an influx. “During the first lockdown, we were faced with a significant lack of books during April and May, and then a crush of titles in June, which was a problem for coverage. We compensated by creating tailored books content... But it was tricky trying to give a fair hearing to the rush of books then suddenly published in June.”

The Press Association adopted a similar approach to tailoring books content beyond the publishing schedule to explore more classic reads. Hannah Stephenson, books editor at PA Media, said: “Our weekly reviews of ‘new books to read in lockdown’ have done really well for our digital customers over the year. We have also been producing round-ups of classic must-reads, which have been very popular. They have a bit of longevity and suggest that people have been using lockdown to catch up on the classics they have always meant to read.”

Freelances reported reduced space for much of lockdown. "The climate has definitely changed for books coverage, and for freelance book reviewers, in recent years,” said a freelance journalist, who preferred to remain anonymous. “Some of this predates the pandemic. I think the general trend, as print struggles, is for a decrease in advertising and therefore in budget and in page space, and arts coverage is often first for the chop." They noted how the Independent previously ran in-depth online reviews and now only features a monthly round-up.

“This has been exacerbated, I think, by the pandemic and further loss of ad revenue and therefore also cuts to freelance budget and number of pages in arts and books sections," the freelance added. "As editors have had to make tough calls over what to prioritise, I've had reviews cut in length, or dropped completely, both things which could also happen in pre-pandemic times, but which seem to be more frequent over the last year, at least in my experience writing for one Sunday newspaper. I've heard of sections shrinking, while the Mail on Sunday 's Event magazine has folded altogether, with arts coverage being absorbed into the main paper."

Journalist and author Catherine Taylor ( pictured right ), experienced a loss of income last spring, like many freelances, due to reduced coverage and events. “Many book pages used in-house staff rather than freelances to write reviews, which led to a six-month hiatus for me from one paper for which I review regularly, and an end to being commissioned from another," she told The Bookseller . "The downturn has meant that there have also been redundancies on the books pages of the Guardian and at the TLS , losing specialist knowledge and experience.”

However, she believes that the emergency funding also boosted some smaller publications. “Some smaller and larger orginasations have benefited from cultural recovery and emergency funding. Brixton Review of Books , the non-profit literary quarterly I co-run, obtained some Arts Council funding last summer, so that we could continue to print four issues a year."

Despite the challenges of lockdown, the situation enabled many publicists more flair for ingenuity around digital innovation. Helen McCusker, book publicist and co-founder of Bookollective, told The Bookseller : “Publicists had to get creative with their promotional activities, turning their focus to virtual events, book blog tours and online media. A positive has been that a captive audience of book buyers have been at home, often online, ready to interact and purchase new titles. As with any challenge, it’s what you make of it. There have been promotional opportunities available for those choosing to embrace change and be creative.”

Book-related podcasts have also enjoyed a boom, with people having more time to listen while working from home, including Daisy Buchanan's "Your Booked", while Graham Norton has recently launched his own podcast on books with Audible. Alice Azania-Jarvis, who hosts “The Sunday Salon”, said: “From a podcasting perspective it has been a year of growth. I’ve seen a jump in listeners, which isn’t really surprising given how much time we’ve been spending alone.”

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Sarah Vaughan: ‘Other writers ask if I’ve got a crystal ball. Actually, I just read the news’

As she publishes a thriller about a trolled MP, and Netflix adapts her bestseller Anatomy of a Scandal, the former journalist talks about power, privilege and her unnervingly prescient novels

S arah Vaughan has Boris Johnson to thank, at least in part, for the genesis of her bestselling thriller Anatomy of a Scandal . The former Guardian reporter was on call on a Sunday in November 2004, the day after Johnson had been sacked from the Conservative frontbench because he’d lied about having an affair with Petronella Wyatt, and Johnson had telephoned her about the story.

“It was the fact he had no compunction in lying that struck me,” says Vaughan. “There was a lot of flummery and flannel; lots of chuntering and ‘all chaps together’-ness about it. He was writing a lot for the Telegraph so there was a definite sense that we were hacks together who wouldn’t stitch each other up – but yes, he confirmed the story was true and didn’t seem to express any remorse. It was the first time I was aware of a public figure admitting to lying and not seeming to be bothered by it.”

Then, in October 2014, the footballer Ched Evans was released after serving a prison sentence for rape – he was later found not guilty on appeal – and “ Allison Pearson wrote a column in the Telegraph where she quoted girls from a local beauticians saying that when this 19-year-old girl who was picked up in a pizza parlour went back to his Premier Inn, she wasn’t expecting to have a game of Scrabble,” says Vaughan. “And I just thought about how women judge each other.”

The two observations came together, and Vaughan’s story of James Whitehouse, an Old Etonian, Oxford-educated minister who is accused of raping the parliamentary aide he’s been having an affair with, was born. The novel, her third, was published in 2018 and became an instant bestseller. A screen adaptation, starring Rupert Friend as James, Sienna Miller as his wife, Sophie, Michelle Dockery as prosecuting barrister Kate and Naomi Scott as the aide, will be on Netflix in April.

“To me, Anatomy is really about entitlement and the scandal of entitlement,” says Vaughan. With her journalistic hat still on, she carefully stresses that Johnson is “not in any way James”. “I obviously don’t think he’s guilty of any sort of sexual offence. It was his approach to the truth that interested me. As Theresa May put it in the Commons recently , either he ‘didn’t read the rules, or [he] didn’t understand them, or [he] didn’t think they applied to him’.” Or, as James puts it in Anatomy of a Scandal: “I told the truth, near enough. Or the truth as I saw it.”

Anatomy, with its exploration of consent and privilege, felt uncannily timely when it was published four years ago. Vaughan’s forthcoming novel, Reputation, might be even more so. It opens with a body at the bottom of the stairs – that of a tabloid journalist – and goes on to explore how MP Emma Webster ended up standing over the corpse. Webster is a Labour backbencher and single mother who is relentlessly trolled when she starts a campaign against revenge porn. She tries to keep the worst of it from her teenage daughter, Flora. But Flora has social problems of her own, and Emma – the name a nod to John Webster’s revenge tragedy about reputation, The Duchess of Malfi – finds her life spiralling out of control. What is she, and what is Flora, without their reputations?

Vaughan details, chillingly, the steps Emma takes to keep herself safe. The bottle of water on the desk in her constituency in case of an acid attack. The chair placed just so to deflect potential attackers. The bag-checks for knives; the abusive tweets; the anonymous texts; the terror of cycling home at night alone.

The germ of the novel was an article Vaughan read about Labour MP Jess Phillips, who’d said she had multiple extra locks on her front door and a panic room in her constituency office. At around the same time, Anna Soubry was also being abused over her anti-Brexit stance , and Luciana Berger was receiving a stream of antisemitic attacks .

“I just remember thinking, ‘God, what must it be like to live like that?’ The level of threat that you’re being exposed to is so extreme: how would that alter your thinking, how would you react, under that level of pressure?” says Vaughan. “At the same time, my daughter would have been 13 and I was aware that children are exposed to social media bullying as well; that the abuse you see on Twitter happens in a different form on Snapchat or Instagram Stories. So I thought there was something to be written about that.”

Just after she finished her novel, the MP David Amess was killed while holding a constituents’ surgery at a church hall in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex. “The whole issue of MPs’ security in their constituencies then became really heightened,” she says. “There have been lots of DMs I’ve received from other authors saying, ‘Have you got a crystal ball?’ I think it’s just spending too long on Twitter every day, reading the news, listening avidly to Radio 4 when I’m cooking.”

It’s also down to her years as a journalist. Having studied English at Oxford – where she met boys who, like James in Anatomy, “behaved as if, of course, they were going to get firsts, and that the world was theirs for the taking” – she spent a year waiting tables in Devon and trying to gain work experience on newspapers, ending up with a Press Association traineeship in 1996. “It was a real baptism of fire,” she says, with stories ranging from the Aldwych bus bomb to doorstepping Julia Carling over her husband Will’s supposed affair with Princess Diana.

She started at the Guardian in 1997 (using her real name, Sarah Hall), spending 11 years there as a news reporter, then political correspondent . She covered the Soham murders and the arraignment of Ian Huntley – she interviewed him when he was the school caretaker and got into an argument with him ; the abduction and murder of Sarah Payne and Roy Whiting’s trial; the opening of the inquest into Stephen Lawrence’s murder. Later, there was the resignation of Peter Mandelson, the “sexed-up” dossier during the Iraq war, Tony Blair under pressure – and of course Johnson’s sacking.

Vaughan left the Guardian in 2008, taking voluntary redundancy after having her second baby. She freelanced for various places, and began writing her first novel the week she turned 40, when her youngest started primary school. The Art of Baking Blind, about five amateur bakers in a competition, was published in 2014, and The Farm at the Edge of the World followed two years later. Darkness and difficult situations feature in both those books too – but Anatomy was definitely a venture into deeper waters.

“My first book is about the impossibility of perfection, and why we bake, and motherhood really. I came up with the idea for Anatomy as my second book, but I was told that it was too big a jump to write a book about baking and then a book about consent, so I came up with The Farm,” Vaughan says. “But The Art of Baking Blind is also about coercive control, and sexual assault, and The Farm has depression, suicide, the near death of a baby – I threw a lot of dark things into my first two books, so I was probably always going to go in a darker direction.”

Simon & Schuster paid a seven-figure sum for Reputation and another novel, and the former was recently optioned for screen by the same team who have made Anatomy of a Scandal. Vaughan is adamant she wouldn’t have been able to write either without having worked as a journalist, learning how a court case works, seeing “privilege work in Westminster, observing power imbalances and entitlement and how that all plays.”

“Having worked in that environment, and listened to the news avidly for the past quarter of a century, I’m attuned to the doublespeak, the slipperiness and the moral ambiguity – or vacuum – of such characters,” she says. “I wanted Emma to be hugely sympathetic but James, in Anatomy, isn’t. Working in the lobby, and also reporting on trials, has meant I’ve seen characters with big egos continue to assert their power, and I’ve questioned why they would put themselves in this position when they have so far to fall.”

Reputation is a key theme for Vaughan. Her fourth novel, Little Disasters, in which a paediatrician is forced to confront the truth when her friend brings her baby into A&E with injuries that don’t make sense, looks at it on a more domestic stage. “They’re all about judgment and control and power,” Vaughan says. “I do think there are huge double standards still in the way that women are perceived compared to men. You only have to look at Meghan and Harry. Or even Carrie Johnson – she’s clearly getting it in the neck and is going to be the scapegoat for Boris’s behaviour for some people.”

Prescient again, Vaughan tells me this in early February – shortly before Tory peer Michael Ashcroft’s new biography ladles more blame on to Carrie. Fodder for a future novel? “Well I’ve started my new book; all I can say is I’m finding the news agenda as inspiring as ever,” she says.

Reputation by Sarah Vaughan will be published by Simon & Schuster on 3 March. Anatomy of a Scandal will be available on Netflix on 15 April.

This piece was corrected on 16 February. Sarah Vaughan had completed, though not published, Reputation when David Amess was murdered.

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By Jennifer Egan

• Sept. 6, 2012

“Telegraph Avenue,” Michael Chabon’s rich, comic new novel, is a homage to an actual place: the boulevard in Northern California where Oakland — historically an African-American city — aligns with Berkeley, whose bourgeois white inhabitants are, as one character puts it, “liable to invest all their hope of heaven in the taste of an egg laid in the backyard by a heritage-breed chicken.” The novel is equally a tribute to the cinematic style of Quentin Tarantino, whose films its characters study and discuss, and whose preoccupations pepper its pages: kung fu, cinematic allusions and the blaxploitation films of the 1970s; and an interest in African-American characters and experience. Chabon and Tarantino make an unlikely duo; while the latter’s films tend toward gaudy eruptions of violence, Chabon bends Tarantino’s sensibility to a warmhearted novel about fatherhood in which the onstage violence consists of two graphic childbirth scenes and a 15-year-old boy whacking a chubby thug with a wooden sword. A self-help book in the style of Andrei Tarkovsky would be hardly more oxymoronic.

Yet Chabon has made a career of routing big, ambitious projects through popular genres, with superlative results — in “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” he used the history and tropes of comics to render the convulsions of American life during and after World War II; the more recent “Yiddish Policemen’s Union” is a thought experiment, in the form of a ­noirish whodunit, about an alternate Jewish state. The scale of “Telegraph Avenue” is no less ambitious: Chabon sifts through the layers of Oakland’s archaeology, from the Miwok Indians, “dreaming the dream, living fat as bears, piling up their oyster shells,” and the arrival of a black middle class (thanks in part to the Pullman Company, which hired black men as porters in its sleeper cars) to the wildness of the Black Panther days and the summer of 2004, when the novel is set in a technological eddy that makes it feel 10 years earlier.

The father (and son) at the center of “Telegraph Avenue” is one Archy Stallings, a sometime bassist who is African-American and Oakland-raised. With his white best friend, Nat Jaffe, Archy owns a store called Brokeland Records, selling used vinyl on the site of a former barbershop whose old-timers and nostalgics it has inherited. Like many characters in “Telegraph Avenue,” Archy and Nat belong to “a league of solitary men united in their pursuit of the lost glories of a vanished world.” They are holdouts, unplugged and awaiting, in a state of dread, what Archy calls “the great wave of late-modern capitalism.”

Archy also dreads fatherhood. In the novel’s opening pages, Gwen, his pregnant wife, catches Archy cheating on her, setting in motion one of several parenting plots that converge around Archy like a swarm of angry wasps: his own feckless, absentee father, Luther Stallings, a onetime blaxploitation star finally clean after years of drug abuse, arrives in town scheming about a comeback underwritten by his blackmail of a shady local politician over their shared Panther history; Archy’s illegitimate 14-year-old son, Titus, whose existence he’s barely registered, also washes up in Oakland, and falls into a sexual relationship with Nat’s beloved gay teenage son, Julius; and Archy’s surrogate father, an elderly organ player, is crushed to death under his keyboard while trying to heft it for a political gig starring State Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. As if all of that weren’t enough, Gwen, a midwife in business with Nat’s wife, explodes at a racist doctor, causing a chain of repercussions. And Brokeland Records finds itself in the path of the encroaching empire of Gibson Goode, a former N.F.L. star who plans to break ground on a slick new mall (with a music store selling vinyl) two blocks away.

There are pathos and suspense in these tribulations, but the world of “Telegraph Avenue” is safe, symmetrical and fundamentally comic. At times the humor arises from Tarantino-esque exchanges among would-be gangsters; during a stakeout near a doughnut shop, a hoodlum muses: “It’s a longitudinal study. . . . Bear claw is my, what you call, control. . . . If the bear claw’s good, the standardize doughnuts be even better.” The most amusing passages exploit the mash-up of races and cultures in Oakland and Berkeley; on the day of the organ player’s funeral, Archy and Nat are questioned about their fulfillment of the dead man’s musical wishes (he would have wanted a “Chinese” group called the Green Street band):

“I had to go in a different direction. Hired this outfit, Bomp and Circumstance, you know them?”

“The lesbians?”

“They got the set list together, they know how the Chinese do it, the hymns and whatnot.”

“But still . . . lesbians ain’t quite what he asked for, either.”

Much of the wit in “Telegraph Avenue” inheres in Chabon’s astonishing prose. I don’t just mean the showy bits: a ­12-page-long sentence that includes the observations of an escaped parrot, or the lovely, credible scene from Obama’s point of view. I mean the offhand brilliance that happens everywhere: a woman’s sun-tanned shins “shining like bells in a horn section.” Titus’s memories, “a scatter of images caught like butterflies in the grille of his mind.” The interior of the gondola on Gibson Goode’s zeppelin: “On the spectrum of secret lairs, it fell somewhere between mad genius bent on world domination and the disco-loving scion of a minor emirate.” Or Archy, forgiven by his wife in the moment of losing his father figure: “Somewhere in the midst of the continent of shock and grief that was Archy Stallings, a minor principality rejoiced.”

Chabon has always struck me as a joyful writer — his own pleasure and curiosity are part of the reading experience. This time, his curiosity may surpass the reader’s; “Telegraph Avenue” feels over-dense, larded with digressions that hamper the acceleration of its complicated plot. When Gwen first discovers Archy’s infidelity: “ ‘It’s the indignity of it,’ she heard herself telling him, invoking a key concept of her mother’s code of morality with such stone likeness that it chilled her, spiders walked on the back of her neck, you might as well swing the camera around and show Rod Serling standing there behind a potted banana tree in an eerie cloud of cigarette smoke.”

Because a woman in mid-tirade would seem unlikely to pause and imagine herself on camera with Rod Serling, the observation is merely distracting. The same can be said of some of the novel’s abundant asides about musical recordings and theories, and its pileups of pop cultural references, as when Gwen detects in the speaking style of a white lawyer who likes to act black “the discarded materials of rap records, Grady Tate on ‘Sanford and Son,’ a touch of Martin Lawrence and then at the core, something really questionable, maybe Morgan Freeman as Easy Reader on ‘The Electric Company.’ ”

It’s a testament to Archy’s magnetism, and the buoyancy of Chabon’s material, that the plot lifts off despite this extra weight. And when, in its moving final pages, the Internet is fully invoked, the arrival feels hopeful in a way that already seems nostalgic. The teenage boys continue their defunct relationship as made-up characters online, where race, gender and sexual orientation are not burdens, but choices. For Archy and Nat, online commerce offers the chance to reach vinyl-record lovers around the globe who are eager to acquire (as a vintage card seller puts it) “what small piece of everything you had ever lost that, you might come to believe, they would restore to you.”

It isn’t the fetishists who find their ­losses restored in “Telegraph Avenue,” but the alienated fathers and sons: Archy and the father who abandoned him; Archy and the son he abandoned along with his newborn son, whose experience of fatherhood still hangs in the balance. In the end, Chabon’s novel suggests, what has the power to fill the void inside us isn’t artifacts, but paternity. In fact, it may have been Dad who was missing in the first place.

TELEGRAPH AVENUE

By Michael Chabon

468 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99.

Jennifer Egan is the author, most recently, of “A Visit From the Goon Squad.”

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Subscription suddenly £269

Subscription has been £35 and without warning £269 has just been taken out of my account. No email contact only a phone number to complain or cancel the subscription!!! Appalling the Telegraph makes it so awkward to control an account or be contacted. Paypal payment now blocked and will be requesting a refund and cancellation of the service. I'll be back to the odd purchase of the overpriced hard copy version from now on!

Date of experience : 25 May 2024

I'm incredibly frustrated with the Telegraph subscription process. I've just been charged a hefty £269 charge for a yearly subscription! Trying to cancel has been a nightmare. The Telegraph's website doesn't have clear cancellation options, and I never received any notification about the upcoming renewal. This unexpected cost is a major strain on my budget.

Date of experience : 26 May 2024

No refunds after cancellation

Automatic (more expensive!) renewal without notification. Cancelled right away but no refunds. Customer care said this was in their terms & conditions. I believe that's true but it's unbelievably bad that they won't budge and reimburse if you want to cancel, what a scam. At least send out a notification so people know this is coming (and are able to take action)

Date of experience : 22 May 2024

How do I cancel Telegraph subscription

How do I cancel Telegraph subscription? I have wailing on the phone now for ages and not even an indication of how many in the queue. Will this be for ever? What a shocking way to do business. Customer service is easy to do - if you want to which I am assuming from this on going experience that you do not . Still waiting ... Well it is one way to try and make people give up and just carry on subscribing. Still waiting ... The thing is, is there actually anyone on this number - it has been 19 minutes with NO announcement or anything. Do I hang on? Will it be for ever?

The Telegraph Subscription.

The Telegraph Subscription. Scamming little scum bags, I hope Kevin sleeps well a night knowing his no better than ticket warden.

Date of experience : 24 May 2024

Ridiculous initial quote to renew

As others have said, to give an introductory deal of £49 but hike it to £269 on renewal is sharp practice at the very least. On the plus side, when you call they will quickly (after first offering £139!) bring it back to £49 which I feel is a reasonable price. However, I will not renew again on principle if this nonsense continues!

Date of experience : 21 May 2024

Telegraph hyperinflation hits 4900%

Telegraph media sneaked through annual puzzles subscription price increase from £1 to £49 in an email one month before subscription renewal. I don’t see the telegraph reporting the current hyperinflation rate of 4900% !!!

Great magazine! Sleazy business

I got an e-mail from the Telegraph that my subscription rate is going to jump from $20 to $299. Called to cancel. The automated voice for the Telegraph transferred me to live operators. First one told me I had the wrong number. Second one said he could not find any record of my subscription. No way online to cancel. Tried different numbers--no luck. Great magazine! Sleazy business!

Date of experience : 15 May 2024

Criminal price rises and laughable reporting

I've been a subscriber for a few years but two recent incidents have made me cancel for good. 1. The Telegraph ran a piece in Friday 17th May's paper regarding 'lycra louts' and a cyclist doing 52mph in a 20mph zone. Anyone who has ever ridden a bike knows that this is impossible for a human to achieve. The Telegraph is constantly attacking cyclists based on nothing but sheer bigotry. That piece I reported to IPSO based on failings in accuracy. They also love attacking civil servants, again based on no evidence but their own hated. They have descended into local rag levels of journalism, which I no longer wish to fund. 2. I woke up this morning to an email stating that my £29 a year subscription would be rising to TWO HUNDRED AND SIXETY NINE POUNDS. What? That is absolutely criminal. Unfortunately the Telegraph make it very difficult to cancel online. I did however discover that, if you pay by PayPal, you can cancel payments on the PayPal app. You'll get bombarded by the Telegraph for a while to update your payment details, until they massively drop the price. That worked last year, but I'm gone for good. Scam artists.

Date of experience : 18 May 2024

Sneaky, very sneaky

Just had an email from them saying my subscription’s will auto renew at the end of the month. In fairness it told me it would be £269 😱 in the email. I only paid £29 last year! That’s some price hike!! I went to subscriptions on the telegraph website in order to cancel my subscription and it tells me what I paid last year and that it would be auto-renewed soon. Everything is there (including my bank details) but no mention that the auto-renewal will actually be £269, all it says is “Your new entitlements and price will be active from this date.” So if you’re not paying attention you’d automatically assume that it will be the same price as last year. The other thing that is, of course, missing is the chance to stop the auto-renewal and/or cancel your subscription. This IMO is underhand. I have cancelled my direct debit and will expect a flurry of emails from them because the payment cannot be taken. But I cannot afford £269 just to read the telegraph online and in any case I’ll win back a couple of hours a day NOT reading the paper and commenting on the articles so thanks Telegraph you’ve given me back some time every day.

Staggering number of complaints

Every day I read the headlines in the DT online, particularly the columnists. I have a good belly laugh at most of them. I'm continually gobsmacked that people actually pay to read the articles, when their content can always be accurately inferred from the headlines. All the more astonishing that so many are now complaining here about being ripped off! Well d'oh .....

Date of experience : 08 May 2024

Duplicate Subscription - really?

Found I was paying for a subscription I had cancelled 5 months previously. Turned out it was a duplicate subscription- no idea how this happened, never duplicated a subscription before, yet they automatically assumed this was it. Something stinks seriously about their onboarding process for this to be such a common occurrence. Keep well away!

Date of experience : 14 May 2024

iCloud/Hide My Email COMPUTER GLITCH - Double Subscription

***THIS HAS BEEN EDITED*** I found out that The Telegraph had been charging me double for my subscription for 6 months. Ok, hands up I did not see it for 6months but I was not looking for it as I didn't think I'd need to - but PLEASE check your bank account.. I was told if you have an Apple device it may hidden relay email on which could make a duplicate account. For some reason my account made two exact accounts when I subscribed for the first time. When I asked for them to look into it they said it was a glitch in the system (and was not common - READ DOWN THESE REVIEWS) and I could not have my money back as I had made two accounts and that was Policy. They would not refund me for the 2nd account that was open at the exact same time on the same day. After writing a 1 star review on Trust Pilot (which I have now edited) I was contacted by a senior member of the team (thank you Warren) who looked into the case and I did get a refund for the 2nd account. This does seem to be an iCloud/hide my email glitch - so if you do have that function on your phone - do check your subscription and contact the Telegraph for them to sort out.

Con artists!

I've also had a problem with a massive price hike on a subscription renewal and then trouble getting my money back. My £45 sub was increased to £189 and auto renewed. I called to cancel within days and was told the money would be refunded to my account. However it wasn't and after nearly a year comprising dozens of phone calls and approaching 50 emails to customer service I'm still waiting to get all the money back with £45 still outstanding. Editorially The Telegraph like to see themselves as upholders of values but in their business practice they act like con artists - I would strongly advise against buying anything from them.

Date of experience : 07 May 2024

DO NOT TAKE THEIR 3 MONTH TRIAL

DO NOT TAKE THEIR 3 MONTH TRIAL. You cannot cancel online and they give you the runaround, tell you that its cancelled then you are billed £14.99 again the next month! If you have experienced this, go to your bank and ask them to decline any future payments to them. Then register a dispute over the amount. I have emails showing my requests and screen shots of the cancellation error page.

Date of experience : 02 May 2024

Daily Telegraph Subscription Auto Renewal

Had a digital Daily Telegraph subscription last year for £29.00. Received an email a few weeks ago saying it was going to renew at £269.00. Logged on but absolutely nowhere to cancel the subscription. Gave up in dismay. Today received my credit card statement with a £269.00 charge. Sharp practice of the worst kind. BEWARE They have just lost a reader of over 50 years.

Date of experience : 25 April 2024

Appalling company to deal with!

I received an email stating that my reasonable annual subscription to the Daily Telegraph was to be increased massively. I could only cancel by telephone, but nobody answers! The debit has now gone through against my wishes, and my bank was unable to help. How can they not care about their reputation. Avoid these crooks! Edit: Sorry, "Crooks is far too strong a word! PS I have had an email from Trustpilot asking me to provide my name, telephone number, and TS number (whatever that might be) to send on to the Telegraph. Fair enough, they want to check that I am an actual subscriber. I will gladly provide this information. PSS I quickly received an email from Warren, a senior customer specialist from the Telegraph. He offered to phone and discuss my subscription. I declined, as I plan to start telephoning to cancel this year's subscription well in advance when the time comes. My problem previously was that I left it until three days before to cancel, and then couldn't get anyone to answer the phone, and the subscription was consequently renewed at a vastly increased rate. Why can't we cancel via email?

Date of experience : 04 May 2024

You have broken your contract with me

You have broken your contract with me. I have paid my subscription to you for years, but now apparently have had the puzzles rescinded, just because you can! Bullying tactics. Please don’t have your columnists giving their views on contract breaking, bullying etc whilst working for a paper who seem to have abandoned their moral compass. Come on Telegraph, reset, you don’t need my 1p per day.

Date of experience : 12 April 2024

Signed up for a free trial of the new…

Signed up for a free trial of the new puzzles section and found it to be truly awful - vulgar and garish. Won't be using it and have cancelled forthcoming payment. Now getting my codewords and quick crosswords from the Independent (bargain 12 month newspaper subscription) and the Evening Standard (free on weekdays). Doubt that I will renew my Telegraph subscription next time. End of an era for me.

Date of experience : 16 April 2024

Absolutely appalling customer service.

Absolutely appalling customer service and basically a scam that I wouldn’t expect from a company like this. I can’t actually escape the ‘free’ trial. 4 months later and loads of emails and calls and they keep charging me £24.99 every month. I literally can’t get it to stop! What a scam. Bank can’t help and neither can Telegraph customer services who say I cant cancel by email and must ring. But I can’t get through! Ridiculous.

Date of experience : 21 April 2024

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The Daily Telegraph Big Book of Cryptic Crosswords 16 Paperback – October 1, 2006

• Print length 272 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Pan Books
• Publication date October 1, 2006
• Dimensions 5 x 0.7 x 8 inches
• ISBN-10 0330442813
• ISBN-13 978-0330442817
• See all details

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Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pan Books; Unabridged edition (October 1, 2006)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0330442813
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0330442817
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.4 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5 x 0.7 x 8 inches

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Review: Titanic Hotel Belfast is a boutique masterpiece

This themed hotel expertly steers clear of tackiness and provides an authentic historic experience.

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Anywhere else, a Titanic-themed cocktail would just seem cheesy. But sitting under the cavernous, domed glass ceiling of what was once one of two Harland & Wolff drawing offices, where RMS Titanic was designed, it seems fitting. My pretty Punch Romaine, made with Bacardi Carta Blanca, pinot grigio, lemon, orange and prosecco, was supposedly the last cocktail served on the Titanic the night she sank on April 15, 1912.

It’s one of many links you will find to the doomed liner at Titanic Hotel Belfast. Some are obvious, like the framed Edwardian posters that line the corridor walls advertising passage on a White Star Line ship from seven pounds. Others are harder to find, such as the Villeroy & Boch tiles that line the main bar where we sit for our pre-dinner cocktails, matches for those used in the Titanic swimming pool and first-class bathrooms.

Titanic Hotel Belfast opened in 2017 following a two-year restoration project that included conservators, architects, historians, builders, archaeologists, engineers, researchers, surveyors and geologists to ensure the heritage of this once grand and important building was preserved. Originally built in 1885, the Harland & Wolff headquarters was where most of the world’s largest and most-innovative ships were designed until it closed in 1989. A tour with concierge David Goodwin, who hails from Moree in northern NSW, took this self-confessed Titanic nerd behind the scenes of the famous building.

While these days guests arrive at reception via the large glass-fronted entrance on Queens Road, the original floor-to-ceiling marble lobby is at the rear of the building. Here you’ll find the telephone exchange where the SOS call alerting management to the Titanic sinking first came through. Along the corridor off the lobby is the preserved office of Thomas Andrews, who designed the Titanic and at the top of the heritage staircase nearby is the presentation room – a large, high-ceilinged space where clients were taken to view the plans of ships they had commissioned and from where they could look down on the two drawing offices to watch the draughtsmen hard at work. It’s the best spot to experience the beating heart of the building – the grand drawing rooms designed so an abundance of natural light could stream in through the domed glass ceiling. These days, the presentation room is a great spot to curl up on a leather armchair and read a book.

The guest rooms of Titanic Hotel have impressive double-height ceilings and picture windows. Once mostly offices of Harland & Wolff management, they are unusually large compared with standard-sized European hotel rooms. Chic nautical styling can be found in the 119 rooms with wheelhouse pendant lighting beside the beds, walls punched with rivets and, in the bathroom, black and white tiled floors and exposed under-sink plumbing. The luxe factor is increased by exquisite bed linen, plush carpeting, plump dressing gowns and fluffy, oversized towels.

Be sure to have at least one meal at the hotel’s main restaurant, Wolff Grill, which elevates local produce, offering the likes of lamb rump with beetroot, celeriac purée and whiskey blackberries. Be warned, though: it’s not a menu that caters for fussy tastes or children.

Larger-than-average guest rooms cater to a variety of groups. Choose from family, accessible or interconnecting rooms, if you are travelling with more than the standard number of people.

Wolff Grill offers elevated dining that can be unsuitable for family groups. Choose the glassed box room at the centre of the restaurant – once the chief draughtsman’s office – for special-occasion dining.

Location 10/10

Set in the heart of Titanic Quarter near Titanic Belfast museum (with a state-of-the-art exhibition that brings the Titanic to life via 11 experiences), and walking distance to Belfast’s CBD, it couldn’t be more central.

Verdict 9/10

A hotel that is themed around the Titanic could have veered into the chintzy or gaudy, but this boutique masterpiece is more than just a place to stay, it’s an authentic historic experience.

Rates start from £234 (around $445) a night for a Standard Double Room.

What is the best room to book at Titanic Hotel Belfast?

Unlike in most hotels, it’s not necessarily a suite that offers the best accommodation option. Here, the four premium executive corner rooms have 270-degree views through big box windows.

Where can you book a tour of the Titanic Hotel Belfast?

More coverage.

Book a free tour of the hotel with the concierge when you check in. They can point out all the fascinating little links the building has to the Titanic.

What is the best place to have a drink when staying at Titanic Hotel Belfast?

Visit the cocktail  bar for a Punch Romaine, or try the Jack & Rose with Jack Daniels Tennessee Honey, banana liqueur, lime and sugar, served with a shot of rose liqueur.

Originally published as Review: Titanic Hotel Belfast is a boutique masterpiece

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