Alex Clark

In the face of unendurable pain that must be endured and unimaginable loss that must be imagined, jokes should not be resisted or turned away. Miriam Toews, describing the day that her father ended his life, remembers him assessing the outfit – torn jeans and a green hoodie – that she had been wearing for

There is not going gently into that good night, and then there is teetering into it on spiked-heel boots while strapped into a leather corset in search of clandestine kicks among like-minded fetishists. If it sounds an exhausting and chilly way to spend an evening, well, it is. At least, that’s how it feels to

Hisham Matar’s third novel is, among its many other virtues, a paean to reading widely; to imagining literature as not, in the narrator Khaled’s words, ‘a field of demarcations’, but as a great river that connects and animates ‘the entire human event’. Reading is how Khaled – exiled from Libya when his part in the

Two plays guide the reader through Tom Lake, Ann Patchett’s ninth novel: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, the story of ordinary lives in a small New Hampshire community in the early years of the 20th century, which, with its radically stripped-back staging, sets time and place in the context of all time and place, and enjoins

Shy concludes Max Porter’s informal trilogy of short, poetic novels powered by pain and polyphony. First, in 2015, came Grief is the Thing with Feathers, in which a widowed Ted Hughes scholar is both shocked and comforted by the arrival of a croaking, crouching crow. Then, four years later, Lanny, which followed a young boy

Fifteen years ago, A.M. Homes published The Mistress’s Daughter, an explosive, painful account of how she met her birth mother, Ellen, who had placed her for adoption as a baby when, as a very young woman, she became pregnant in the course of an affair with an older, married man. Perhaps the most memorable scene

Readers familiar with Sheila Heti’s work, most notably How Should a Person Be? and Motherhood, in which she examines both the possibility and implications of choosing one’s life and dealing with the consequences, will be familiar with her apparent capriciousness. Her prose — freewheeling, elliptical, a tangle of jokiness and jeopardy — seems to capture

Claire Keegan’s tiny, cataclysmic novel takes us into the heart of small-town Ireland a few decades ago, creating a world that feels in certain respects dead and buried but whose legacy the country is still processing. This is Ireland before the boom and bust of the Celtic Tiger; before the insidious, everyday power of the

A great writer must be prepared to risk ridiculousness — not ridicule, although that may follow, but the possibility that the work will collapse into some or other version of nonsense. If it doesn’t, though, it is precisely the elements that flirt with disaster that will likely make it both superficially distinctive and artistically substantial.

Micah Mortimer, the strikingly unproactive protagonist of Anne Tyler’s 23rd novel, is a man of such unswerving routine that his rare moments of whimsy — slipping into a foreign accent on Mondays when the week turns to floor-cleaning and ‘zee dreaded moppink’ — come to seem like unfathomable caprice. Indulging a sudden hankering for a

The new novel by the author of the 2016 Booker shortlisted Eileen is at once a jumble of influences — Oblomov by way of Tama Janowitz and Elizabeth Wurtzl, Bartleby with a touch of Bright Lights, Big City, a lunatic psychiatrist who melds Ayn Rand and William Burroughs — and unnervingly original. It takes guts,

Samantha Harvey is much rated by critics and those readers who have discovered her books, but deserving of a far wider audience than she has hitherto gained — so much so that just before Gaby Wood’s appointment as literary director of the Booker Prize Foundation, the critic wrote a lengthy exploration of Harvey’s prodigious qualities,

Walking out of one’s own life — unpredictably, perhaps even without premeditation and certainly without anything approaching a plan — is a common staple of fantasy, and therefore fiction. But why, when we spend so much of the rest of the time fretting about losing what we have and hatching plans to safeguard it? In

Medea’s continuing hold over spinners of tall tales from Euripides to Chaucer to Pasolini needs little explanation; she’s an archetype with everything going for her. As a fratricide and murderer of her own children, among assorted other acts of blood lust, her acts of brutality are so transgressive and symbolic that they offer themselves up

It’s 2008 in Manhattan, and there’s still a brief window for the Goldman bankers to swill their ’82 Petrus before the crash, for the masters of the universe and social X-rays first sighted in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities to launch another hostile takeover or push a lettuce leaf around a $25,000-a-table benefit dinner-plate.

After a curtain-twitching cul-de-sac, a Preston shopping precinct, and the Church of the Latter-Day Saints brought to Lancashire, Jenn Ashworth ups sticks for the seaside in her fourth novel. Set in the determinedly genteel resort of Grange-over-Sands, just across the bay from Morecambe on the Cumbrian coast, Fell is a disturbing, precisely rendered tale of

As its title suggests, Julie Myerson’s tenth novel is about stoppage: the kind that happens when one suffers a loss so absolute and cataclysmic that there seems no possible way forward; when the future seems not merely unthinkably disrupted but also irrelevant. For the majority of people lucky enough to live out their days beyond