Category: Fiction

In her preface to this reprint of her first novel, which was originally published in 1930, Kay Boyle writes that “the meaning of the book may perhaps be that there is always in life the necessity to choose,” which isn’t my favorite moral: I mean, yes, but sometimes the choice you get to make is…

Villa Bunker, a novella made of 133 numbered sections (ranging in length from a sentence to several pages each) is weird and interesting and pretty great to have read right after Martha Ronk’s Transfer of Qualities—I felt there were moments when these two books complemented one another interestingly. Ronk’s book was concerned, in large part,…

If you’re looking for a novel that’s plot-driven or character driven, Every Day Is for the Thief (which was originally published in Nigeria in 2007, by Cassava Republic Press) is probably not the book for you. This is an episodic novel, a novel of vignettes and moments, a novel where the city of Lagos (which…

In his Translator’s Afterword, Vincent Kling describes The System of Vienna as a “parody-tribute to the art of autobiography as construct,” which is a good way of putting it (109). The book starts with the story of the narrator’s birth, as told to him by his mother: the language of it makes you aware of…

Two Serpents Rise is set in the same world as Three Parts Dead, but doesn’t follow the same characters: it isn’t even set in the same city. While Three Parts Dead centered on the city of Alt Coulumb, an old city still powered by an old god, Two Serpents Rise is set in Dresediel Lex,…

Three Parts Dead is set in a world where gods exist, and where the power of a god can power a city. That’s literal in the case of Alt Coulumb, where the power of the fire-god Kos fuels the steam furnaces that heat the city and make its trains run. In this world, gods gain…

In this mystery, set in London in 1875, Charles Lenox, member of Parliament, is yet again drawn back to detective work: at the start of the book his former protégé, Lord Dallington, asks him to go to a meeting with a potential client in his stead. (Dallington is too ill to go himself, and the…

The Daylight Gate, which uses the basic circumstances of a 1612 witch trial in Lancashire as its starting point (“but with necessary speculations and inventions,” as Winterson puts it in the introduction) is much more bleak and gruesome than I tend to like my fiction. There are rapes; there is torture; there is a severed…

The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches is the sixth mystery by Alan Bradley featuring Flavia de Luce, a precocious eleven-year-old fond of chemistry and crime-solving, but it’s a bit less of a mystery than the others. There is a death, practically at the start of the book (a stranger gives Flavia a message to pass…

In 1985 in the alternate England in which The Eyre Affair takes place, time travel is possible, the Crimean War has been going on for 131 years, Wales is independent, and classic English literature is a very big deal. Our heroine, Thursday Next, is a LiteraTec (Literary Detective): a special agent whose department investigates manuscript…