The manosphere’s literary muscle men
Two novels explore the crippling solitude of a pair of ripped English professors
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.
Ian McEwan and fiction’s problem with climate change
In What We Can Know, Britain has sunk beneath the waves – but literature remains buoyant
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RF Kuang’s descent into the abyss
The American author’s sixth novel struggles to satirise chronic illness and pain.
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Art in the wreckage of Gaza
Does satire ever belong in a war-zone?
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The Great Men of history 2.0
Alexander Starritt’s new novel, Drayton and Mackenzie, attempts to cast Big Tech’s leaders as Olympians shaping our age – but…
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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…
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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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