10 February 2010
The Suicide Run William Styron
In late middle age, William Styron was struck by a disabling illness, when everything seemed colourless, futile and empty to him. In fact, as he recalled in Darkness Visisble (1990),… Read more
27 January 2010
Alphabet of the Night Jean-Euphele Milce, translated by Christopher Moncrieff
Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, lies on a marshy bay encircled by mountains. It was founded in 1749 by the colonial French and named after a vessel, Le Prince, which anchored… Read more
11 November 2009
Telling Tales: A History of Literary Hoaxes Melissa Katsoulis
In this diverting, well-written history of deceitful and counterfeit literature through the ages, Telling Tales, Melissa Katsoulis chronicles a variety of fraudsters and fibsters, and their motives for hoodwinking the…Read more
18 February 2009
The Book of Negroes Lawrence Hill
The Book of Negroes, an historical romance, creates an unforgettably vivid picture of the Atlantic slave trade and the philanthropists who sought to oppose it. The novel opens in Africa… Read more
14 January 2009
The Outlander Gil Adamson
The Outlander, by Gil Adamson The Outlander, a strikingly good first novel by the Canadian poet Gil Adamson, is a drama of extremity and isolation set in the Rocky Mountains… Read more
13 February 2008
The Voyage that Never Ends edited by Michael Hoffmann
Ian Thomson reviews a collection of Malcolm Lowry’s poems, letters and fictions Malcolm Lowry was a ferocious malcontent, who free-wheeled towards an early grave with the help of cooking sherry … Read more
7 November 2007
The Slave Ship: A Human History Marcus Rediker
Not long ago, I was invited to lunch at a plantation home in Jamaica. The sound of cocktail-making (a clinking of crushed ice against glass) greeted me at Worthy Park… Read more
1 August 2007
End Games Michael Dibdin
Last March, after an unexpected illness, Michael Dibdin died at his home in Seattle. His death came as a shock to fans everywhere of crime fiction. Dibdin had just turned… Read more
Meandering through the boondocks
28 March 2007
South of the River Blake Morrison
South of the River is a stadium-sized novel of over 500 pages. It has the scope and ambition of an American McNovel — Don DeLillo’s Underworld, say, or The Corrections… Read more
1 March 2007
T.S. Eliot Craig Raine
At a Clapham dinner party recently I was offered marijuana. Nothing unusual in that, only the joint took me to a far continent of anxiety; I had been inhaling skunk,… Read more
8 February 2007
With Vine-Leaves in His Hair Paul Binding
Henrik Ibsen’s fictional world of marital breakdown and sexual hypocrisy in the fjords and farmsteads of Norway spread an unfamiliar polar chill at the end of the 19th century. His… Read more
6 December 2006
Dante’s Inferno: A Verse Translation Sean O’Brien
In 1882, while on a lecture tour of America, Oscar Wilde was surprised to find a copy of The Divine Comedy in a Nebraskan penitentiary. ‘Oh dear, who would have… Read more
Ian Thomson 2 November 2006
A Study in Greene Bernard Bergonzi
OUP, pp.208, 16.99
With almost 30 novels to his name, Graham Greene was a prolific chronicler of human faith and wretchedness. A writer of his stature requires a very good biographer and, at… Read more
3 December 2005
Summer Crossing Truman Capote
Born in New Orleans in 1924, Truman Capote wrote his first fiction at the age of eight. Or so he claimed. Rarely has a writer so elaborated his own legend;… Read more
