Sayaka Murata’s strange new world
Her latest novel, Vanishing World, is a surprisingly fearful book, one which conflates biological essentialism with what is good and…
ByFiction reviews
Discover the best contemporary literature with the New Statesman’s expert reviews. From debut novels to short stories and literary veterans, get inspired here.
The romantasy infatuation
The best-selling genre in publishing combines magical worlds, steamy sex and unfortunate prose.
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Fang Fang’s acts of resistance
The Chinese author’s controversial novels are powerful narratives of patriarchal violence.
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Edward St Aubyn’s comedy of horrors
The Patrick Melrose novels and his other works are clearly by the same writer – but produce wildly different results.
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Solvej Balle’s day without end
In this Danish novel, a woman stuck in a repeating time loop is forced to consider the very fundamentals of…
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Samuel Beckett’s art of reduction
In The Unnamable, the writer’s prose was stripped to the bone – and the bone itself boiled white.
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Katie Kitamura’s study of social dynamics
The novelist coolly examines how we interact with each other in a deeply unsettling story of reversals and doubles.
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I Want to Go Home But I’m Already There is a document of hellish times
In her debut novel, Roisin Lanigan’s caustic social commentary of renting in London is undercut by supernatural horror.
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Abdulrazak Gurnah’s lessons in humanity
Theft, the Nobel Prize winner’s new novel, is full of wisdom and free of judgement.
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In Twist, Colum McCann examines what connects us
His thrilling new novel traces the mysterious cables stretching across our ocean beds.
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Kazuo Ishiguro’s everyday dystopia
Never Let Me Go was once dismissed by critics for its “dear-diary” prose, but 20 years later the novelist’s masterwork…
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Inside the media circus
Natasha Brown’s Universality is a wincing satire of journalism, publishing and cancel culture.
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Curtis Sittenfeld’s ordinary lives
The stories in her zeitgeisty collection Show Don’t Tell are dated by their cultural references, but their astute observations are…
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s triumphant return
Dream Count, the Nigerian writer’s first novel in more than a decade, is a powerful exploration of misogyny, masculinity and…
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Eimear McBride’s literature of desire
The Irish author’s exhilarating fourth novel, The City Changes Its Face, proves there is nobody writing sex like her.
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The death of the British Catholic novel
Catholicism gave English literature something it needs to rediscover.
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Han Kang’s radical empathy
As with all the Nobel Prize-winning South Korean writer’s stories, We Do Not Part rejects escapism to reach into the…
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How we misread The Great Gatsby
The greatness of F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel lies in its details. But they are often overlooked.
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Yukio Mishima’s lifelong death wish
The Japanese writer and nationalist, a darling of the US far right, was haunted by the aesthetics of self-destruction.
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Elsa Morante’s wild, compelling fiction
This vivid story of class and family by the rediscovered Italian novelist was where Elena Ferrante “discovered what literature can…
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