Category: Fiction

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…

Near the start of this book, Charles Lenox, detective turned politician, gets a letter from his late mother’s cousin (who he knows as Uncle Frederick) asking him to come visit him at his country estate. Charles isn’t planning to go, but then he’s invited to give the opening speech for the upcoming session of Parliament,…

Whose Body? is the first of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, and the first Dorothy L. Sayers book I’ve read: I suspect I will read more. Lord Peter Wimsey is an aristocrat/amateur detective who collects rare books: when this novel opens he’s on his way to a book sale but gets sidetracked when he hears…

“Isabel often thinks of Amsterdam, though she has never been there, and probably never will go”: this is the first sentence of Glaciers, and pretty representative of the whole book’s tone: it’s a story about longing, partly for romance and connection, partly for the past (real or imagined), partly for a life rooted in and…

Ariel Manto is in the slightly weird position of being a PhD student without anyone to supervise her work: she’s writing a thesis on thought experiments, but her supervisor, who is one of the few people in the world to have done research on Thomas E. Lumas, a (fictional) nineteenth-century writer who is also one…

In the reading group guide in the back of a different edition of this book, Maria Semple says this: “When I decided to write a novel, I had just finished rereading The House of Mirth and was in the middle of rereading Anna Karenina. I realized my favorite kind of story involves strong, singular women…

“If you ever plan to hang around train stations in the middle of the night, you should always make sure you can hear your own footsteps, and, if you are at all musical, you should try to work out which notes you make as you walk, as it stops you from being lonely, not that…

There are two stories, or maybe you could call them novellas, in Smut: the first, which I liked better, is the longer of the pair, at 93 pages; the other is 59 pages. Both stories are, to a large extent, about secrets, or about things people think are secret that aren’t secret after all, and…