Leo Robson is the lead fiction reviewer for the New Statesman.
Catholic and rational, profound and comic, Scottish and international: the novelist squared circle after circle.
By the 1860s Dostoevsky had been orphaned, imprisoned, conscripted and widowed. Lumbered with debts and immersed in the nihilism of St Petersburg, he set about developing the “psychological account of a crime”.
The debut novelist on how he tackled the marital chaos and unsavoury opinions of a modernist poet in his Goldsmiths Prize-shortlisted novel Playing Possum.
Kevin Davey’s Goldsmiths Prize-shortlisted novel evokes an atmosphere of curated chaos.
Everywhere the author looks, he finds his own opinions reflected back at him.
It seems little more than an exercise in googling, an attempt to sell the listicle as literature.
Nicola Barker's novel creates a sort of wellness republic, like a year-round Burning Man.
The great French writer loathed corruption, but he didn’t much like people power either.
The footballer Zinedine Zidane is granted a recurring role, alongside David Lynch and Gerhard Richter.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness tells the story of a middle-aged hermaphrodite, or hijra.
