The Plum Queen is a long, retrospective, self-consciously literary novel about Lenore Harris, an elderly widow in 1984 who finally writes the story of the three great loves that shaped and erased her: Phoebe Eberhardt, her wealthy childhood friend and first love; Greta Filipowicz, her artist lover in postwar New York; and Howard Harris, her […]
Life of M is a thinly fictionalized, essay-like portrait of a famous actress called M, filtered through a narrator who claims she wants to write M’s autobiography but ends up writing something closer to a cold philosophical possession. It wants to be a study of celebrity, childhood, acting, objectification, art, motherhood, illness, privacy, sexual representation, […]
Dishonest Days is a huge, fractured conspiracy novel about pharmaceutical damage, emerald smuggling, queer desire, corporate laundering, AIDS panic, art sabotage, activist mythmaking, podcasts, fugitives, and the long afterlife of crimes that nobody ever quite exposes cleanly. It wants to be a political thriller, a noir, a dossier novel, a queer epic, a corporate-corruption investigation, […]
We Chase Shadows is a sequel-machine mystery that turns murder, trauma, organized crime, loneliness, marriage, grief, revenge, and global counterfeit-pharmaceutical rackets into one long string of quips. It wants to be charming, fast, warm, clever, international, and emotionally generous. Mostly, it is a baggy comic thriller that is so busy being pleased with its own […]
In One Brief Moment All Eternity is a fictionalised account of Gustave Flaubert’s life, constructed through an omniscient narrative and a chorus of approximately thirty female and non-human voices. The novel combines literary biography, feminist revisionism, historical fiction, magical realism and reflections on the relationship between writers and their creations. Its central conceit is that […]
The Enigmas is an over-engineered time-slip Second World War novel that piles Bletchley Park, women doctors, inherited female trauma, magical memory, mother-daughter guilt, queer wartime secrecy, codebreaking, and alternate history into one very familiar package. It wants to be moving, intricate, feminist, romantic, and clever about “enigmas,” but it is mostly a relentlessly tidy machine. […]
Parliament is a fragmented immigrant-family grief novel that tries to make broken chronology, sensory repetition, and low-punctuation lyricism stand in for actual dramatic shape. It follows Loyola, or Loy, a Sri Lankan-British writer drifting in Berlin after the death of his mother, Rani, and after the collapse of his relationship with Katrine. Intercut with his […]
Henry Goodwolf is a fake-medieval monster-hunting novel that wants to be a bawdy monastic chronicle, a locked-island murder mystery, a bestiary parody, a dark comedy about masculinity, and a metafictional anti-romance about heroic legend. It is also much too pleased with that combination. The book is narrated by Brother Achardus, a painfully scrupulous Benedictine monk […]
The novel begins in June 2015 with Sophie, a thirty-something woman living in London, attending a barbecue for her father’s seventieth birthday. Sophie is educated, bookish and politically liberal, works at the underfunded EJS Centre helping refugees and struggling families, and has almost no interest in football. Her long-running joke with her uncle Keith is […]
The Dakoo is a South Asian and Chinese immigrant Western set in California in the 1880s, after the railways have been hammered into the land by migrant labourers whose bodies, hopes, and futures have been broken in the process. It is a revenge story, a family story, a love story, and a land story. Its […]