Stuart Kelly

This is an ingenious and infuriating book about an ingenious and infuriating writer. I first encountered Fernando Pessoa in the wonderful and lamented Penguin International Poets series, and what intrigued me was that he was more than one person. There was his poetry, but also sections attributed to his heteronyms, or imaginary alter egos. Stylistically

This might seem an odd confession, but the work of Roberto Bolaño gives me very good bad dreams. When I first read his epic masterpiece 2666 I had three nights of fractured nightmares. This happened with every other book as well — usually dreams about reading a book by Roberto Bolaño, except the words melt

Ewan Morrison is an intellectually nimble writer with a penchant for provocation. His work has included the novels, Distance, Ménage and Swung, which looked at the conditions of desire, normality and love under capitalism, and a hybrid collection of essays, reportage and fiction, Tales From the Mall. This new novel forms the final part of

This is an Exquisite Corpse of a novel — or if you prefer another name for that particular game, Heads, Bodies and Legs, or Combination Man, or perhaps most appositely Consequences. The parlour game involves creating something and then passing along the hidden creation to which another then adds, and The Arrest reads like Jonathan

There is a particular sub-genre of books which are witty and erudite, comic and serious and often of a bibliophilic nature: such novels as Elaine di Rollo’s The Peachgrower’s Almanac, Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen’s The Rabbit Back Literary Society or Brock Clarke’s An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England. The problem with this form

I doubt whether any book would entice me more than a horrible hybrid of crimefiction, speculative fantasy, weird religion and postmodernism. If that makes Jeff Noon’s third outing of the private detective John Nyquist sound like a niche affair I apologise, as it is a rollicking and goose-flesh- inducing novel. Writers such as the late

This is a very nuanced and subtle novel by Philip Hensher, which manages the highwire act of treating its characters with affection and anger at one and the same time. Politically, ethically and emotionally it places the reader in a kind of vertigo by addressing a singular moral question: is it better to be steadfast

This is an ebullient, irreverent and deeply serious novel in the noble tradition of Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis (especially Babbitt and Elmer Gantry) and John Kennedy Toole. Sam Lipsyte certainly hits his prime target — the cultish behaviour around mindfulness, motivational speakers and pallid spiritual beliefs — but one of the joys of the novel

There is a degree of irony in the opening chapter of T.M. Devine’s history, lambasting popular previous depictions of the Clearances and citing ludicrous comparisons to Nazi genocide and the misty-eyed melancholy of John Prebble. Though it does not mention such iconography as Thomas Faed’s painting ‘Last of the Clans’, used for the paperback of

K. Chesterton, in one of his wise and gracious apothegms, once wrote that ‘When Man ceases to worship God he does not worship nothing but worships everything.’ John Gray, one of the most pernickety and carnaptious of contemporary philosophers, presents here a kind of taxonomy of not atheism, per se, but of the vacuums and

Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney was one of the surprise stand-outs of last year, and a worthy winner of the Costa First Book Award. His new novel, Devil’s Day, is equally good, even though its similarities slightly muffle the surprises. Like his debut, it is a work of gooseflesh eeriness. The Loney artfully described the

In many ways this is a very old-fashioned novel. Jerome is 53, and a lacklustre professor at Columbia; his wife, Sylvie, 35, is a former topless dancer and aspiring film-maker. Sylvie has a dog but wants a baby. Together they will cross the former Soviet bloc looking for a child of their own, despite Sylvie

This is one of the most remarkable, hilarious, jaw-droppingly candid and affecting memoirs I have read for some time — not since, perhaps, Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius or Rupert Thomson’s This Party’s Got to Stop. Patricia Lockwood is a poet — dubbed ‘The Smutty-Metaphor Queen of Lawrence, Kansas’ — who, after

At the start of this novella the protagonist, Thibaut, is ambushed by Wehrmacht soldiers between the ninth and tenth arrondissements. That the year in 1950 is not the strangest aspect, as he is rescued by the appearance of the Vélo, a bicycle-like contraption with a queasily organic prow. It is, in fact, a living version

This is an extraordinarily compelling novel for one in which nothing really happens but everything changes. Sara Baume’s narrator is Frankie, a 26-year-old art school graduate, who has fled Dublin to live in her dead grandmother’s rural bungalow. What happened to her ‘started with the smelling of carpet’ in her bedsit; she feels such a

The Un-Discovered Islands could not be more different in substance — though it is similar in style — to Malachy Tallack’s debut, Sixty Degrees North. In that he book he took a revealing pilgrimage around the places which lay, like his home of Shetland, on the 60th parallel, and found a range of concerns about

There is an immediate problem for anyone producing a guide to places in Scotland with literary connections: as Walter Scott wrote in Marmion, ‘Nor hill, nor brook we paced along/ But had its legend or its song.’ Many years ago when the Scottish Borders was marketing itself as the ‘Land of Creativity’ I assembled a