Category Archives: Fiction

Chilean author, campaigner and escapee Luis Sepúlveda dies aged 70 of Covid-19

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Dramatic career took in escapes from Pinochet’s regime in the 70s, sailing with Greenpeace and writing books including The Old Man Who Read Love Stories

The celebrated Chilean author Luis Sepúlveda, who was exiled by the dictator Augusto Pinochet in the 1980s, has died from Covid-19.

Best known for his 1992 novel The Old Man Who Read Love Stories and 1996’s The Story of a Seagull and The Cat Who Taught Her To Fly, Sepúlveda died in hospital on Thursday. He first began showing symptoms from coronavirus on 25 February, after returning to his home in Spain from a festival in Portugal. On 1 March, it was confirmed that Sepúlveda was the first case of Covid-19 in the Asturias region, where he had lived for 20 years.

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Don’t panic: the best books to help us survive a crisis

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Joe Moran looks at books on how to keep calm in times of adversity - and take joy where we find it

The coronavirus has put life on hold. In this time of fractured human contact and fear of the unknown, we need to read authors who will embolden us for the hard season ahead, while also offering a calming sense of perspective.

Eula Biss’s book-length essay On Immunity does the trick. She begins with the story of Achilles, whose mother dipped him in the river Styx only to leave the vulnerable spot on his heel where she held him. The story’s moral, in Biss’s words, is that “immunity is a myth … and no mortal can ever be made invulnerable”. And yet she admits that she found this message hard to accept after the birth of her son in 2009 – especially when, shortly afterwards, the swine flu epidemic began. Biss explores how hard it is for even the most clear-eyed of us not to succumb to panic and dread.

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Making a killing: what can novels teach us about getting away with murder?

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From Agatha Christie to Gillian Flynn, readers love an untraceable method or a villain who wins. Author Peter Swanson says there are eight examples of the perfect murder

Is there such a thing as a perfect murder? In real life, the answer is probably yes, though how would we know about it? Perfection demands that the murder be unsolvable, maybe even unrecorded – a victim disappearing off the face of the earth, a body never found, a killer never caught. In our world of forensic science and DNA evidence, the perfect murder must be as rare as a reclusive celebrity.

But we have fiction, and this is where we find an abundance of perfect murder attempts. I say attempts because the allure of most detective fiction hinges on the existence of an investigator – a Holmes, a Poirot, a Lisbeth Salander – who is smarter than the smartest of criminals. The perfect murder – like a perfect sonnet or a perfect roast chicken – is an ideal that can be approached but never entirely reached. Detectives, and storytelling tradition, get in the way.

When I set out to write a book in which a bookseller publishes a blog about his favourite fictional murders, only to find out that someone else is using the list as a blueprint for real crimes, I knew that part of the process of writing was going to be a whole lot of reading. So I set out to find a definitive list of perfect crimes and came up with a final tally of eight (or rather, my narrator Malcolm Kershaw did).

Christie's use of thallium as a fatal poison in The Pale Horse caused a brief uptick in the toxin’s presence in real-life crime

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Fever dreams: did author Dean Koontz really predict coronavirus?

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From ‘Wuhan-400’, the deadly virus invented by Dean Koontz in 1981, to the plague unleashed in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, novelists have long been fascinated by pandemics

According to an online conspiracy theory, the American author Dean Koontz predicted the coronavirus outbreak in 1981. His novel The Eyes of Darkness made reference to a killer virus called “Wuhan-400” – eerily predicting the Chinese city where Covid-19 would emerge. But the similarities end there: Wuhan-400 is described as having a “kill‑rate” of 100%, developed in labs outside the city as the “perfect” biological weapon. An account with more similarities, also credited by some as predicting coronavirus, is found in the 2011 film Contagion, about a global pandemic that jumps from animals to humans and spreads arbitrarily around the globe.

But when it comes to our suffering, we want something more than arbitrariness. We want it to mean something. This is evident in our stories about illness and disease, from contemporary science fiction all the way back to Homer’s Iliad. Even malign actors are more reassuring than blind happenstance. Angry gods are better than no gods at all.

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House of horror: the poisonous power of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’

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It has inspired TV, stage, film – and now two new art shows. Kathryn Hughes strips back the layers of this classic tale to understand its enduring appeal

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman created feminist fireworks the moment it appeared in the January 1892 edition of the New England Magazine. The short story takes the form of a secret diary written by a young married woman who is suffering from a “temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency”. Actually, the diagnosis has been made by her husband, who also happens to be “a physician of high standing”. In line with fashionable medical practice, “John” has prescribed a radical rest cure that involves separating the narrator from her small baby and confining her to the top-floor nursery of a rented country house: “I … am absolutely forbidden to ‘work’ until I am well again.”

Gilman was writing out of her own agonising experience: five years earlier, and felled by postnatal depression following the birth of her daughter, she had been sent for treatment to America’s leading expert in women’s mental health, Dr Silas Weir Mitchell. His punishing regime for depressed middle-class female patients involved strict bed rest with no reading, writing, painting and, if it could be managed, thinking. His theory was grounded in the pervasive belief that if modern girls stopped wanting things – education, the vote but, above all, “work” – they would become happy, which is to say docile, again. Mitchell instructed Gilman to live as domestic a life as possible “and never to touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live”. Gilman wrote later of her treatment, which felt more like a prison sentence, “I … came perilously close to losing my mind.”

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Happy ever after: why writers are falling out of love with marriage

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From Sally Rooney and Ottessa Moshfegh to the author of this year’s hit debut, Kiley Reid, a new generation of novelists is turning the marriage plot on its head

Greta Gerwig’s film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 classic Little Women begins with an adult Jo March entering the smoke-filled, man-filled offices of a New York publisher in hopes of selling a story. “If the main character’s a girl make sure she’s married by the end,” the editor decrees. “Or dead, either way.”

Alcott herself never married and thought that Jo “should have remained a literary spinster”. But after publication of the first volume of the book, covering the March sisters’ childhood, Alcott was flooded with letters from fans demanding to know whom the little women had married. In rebellion, Alcott “made a funny match” for Jo, forgoing the obvious choice of Laurie in favour of Professor Bhaer, a middle-aged German, “neither rich nor great, young nor handsome, in no respect what is called fascinating, imposing, or brilliant”.

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Milan Kundera’s Czech citizenship restored after 40 years

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The Unbearable Lightness of Being’s author has lived in France since fleeing communism in 1975, and has previously questioned ‘the notion of home’

After more than 40 years in exile, Milan Kundera, the Czech-born author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, has been given back the citizenship of his homeland.

Petr Drulák, the Czech Republic’s ambassador to France, told public television he visited the 90-year-old author in his Paris apartment last Thursday to hand deliver his citizenship certificate.

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Who is the real Dice Man? The elusive writer behind the disturbing cult novel

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A search for the mysterious author of a counterculture classic led to someone else entirely. Or did it? By Emmanuel Carrère

Toward the end of the 1960s, Luke Rhinehart worked as a psychoanalyst in New York and was bored stiff. He lived in a pretty apartment with a nice view. He practised yoga, read books on Zen, dreamed vaguely of joining a commune but did not dare. As a therapist, he was resolutely nondirective. If a patient who still had not lost his virginity was plagued by sadistic impulses and said on Rhinehart’s couch that he would like to rape and kill a little girl, his professional ethics obliged him to repeat with a calm voice: “You’d like to rape and kill a little girl?” No judgment. But what he wanted to say was: “Well, go ahead, then! If what really turns you on is raping and killing a little girl, then stop boring me with this fantasy. Do it!”

He checked himself before coming out with such monstrosities, but they obsessed him more and more. His own fantasies were nothing extreme – not enough to get him sent to prison – but like everyone else, he stopped himself going through with them. What Luke would have liked, for example, was to sleep with Arlene, the wife of his colleague Jake Ecstein, who lived across the landing. But as a faithful husband, he let the idea simmer away in the back of his mind.

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Booker winners Bernardine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood on breaking the rules

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The judges staged a ‘joyful mutiny’ to name the pair joint winners of the literary prize. And that’s not all that unites them

It was clear that things were not going to plan when, just half an hour before the guests began to arrive, the judges of this year’s Booker prize had yet to make a decision. Five hours after they had begun their deliberations, they finally emerged in a state of “joyful mutiny” to announce that they had decided to break with convention, throw out the rule book and anoint two winners rather than the usual one.

By happy coincidence, Bernardine Evaristo is the same age that Margaret Atwood was when, in 2000, she first won the Booker prize with The Blind Assassin. “And I’m happy that we’ve both got curly hair,” quipped Atwood as they took to the stage arm in arm. They talk about it again the following morning, comparing notes about hair etiquette and handy products for curls. “People used to review my hair back in the day,” says Atwood.

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Backlash after Booker awards prize to two authors

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Decision to make first black female winner, Bernardine Evaristo, share £50,000 prize with Margaret Atwood causes controversy

The Booker prize judges’ decision to break the rules and jointly award the prize to Margaret Atwood and Bernadine Evaristo has been criticised, with detractors pointing out that the first black woman ever to win Britain’s most prestigious literary award has had to share it – while receiving half the usual money.

Chair of the judges Peter Florence shocked the literary world on Monday night when he revealed that the jury had decided – unanimously, he said – to flout rules, which have been in place since 1992, that the Booker “may not be divided or withheld”. After more than five hours of deliberation, he announced that this year’s £50,000 award would be split between Atwood’s follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, and Evaristo’s polyphonic novel Girl, Woman, Other. Told in the voices of 12 different characters, mostly black women, Evaristo has said that the novel, her eighth, stems from the fact that “we black British women know that if we don’t write ourselves into literature, no one else will”.

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‘My ties to England have loosened’: John le Carré on Britain, Boris and Brexit

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At 87, le Carré is publishing his 25th novel. He talks to John Banville about our ‘dismal statesmanship’ and what he learned from his time as a spy

I have always admired John le Carré. Not always without envy – so many bestsellers! – but in wonderment at the fact that the work of an artist of such high literary accomplishment should have achieved such wide appeal among readers. That le Carré, otherwise David Cornwell, has chosen to set his novels almost exclusively in the world of espionage has allowed certain critics to dismiss him as essentially unserious, a mere entertainer. But with at least two of his books, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and A Perfect Spy (1986), he has written masterpieces that will endure.

Which other writer could have produced novels of such consistent quality over a career spanning almost 60 years, since Call for the Dead in 1961, to his latest, Agent Running in the Field, which he is about to publish at the age of 87. And while he has hinted that this is to be his final book, I am prepared to bet that he is not done yet. He is just as intellectually vigorous and as politically aware as he has been at any time throughout his long life.

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‘It has saved countless lives’: readers’ picks of the best books this century

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After we published our list of the greatest books since 2000, you sent in your own suggestions – from Chinese sci-fi to a history of music

“London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd (2000) made me fall in love with London all over again. The blood of the city’s history soaked into the clay. Quiet hidden corners, conspiratorial whispers in coffee houses, the dirty Thames and the Great Stink. Invasions, bridges, fires and fog. It’s a very human tale told with the verve of a novelist, the detail of a diarist and the grace of a poet.” – dylan37

“The one novel I’ve read from the century to date that I am sure will stay with me for the rest of my life, for personal as well as for general reasons, is The Hunger Angel by Herta Müller (translated by Philip Boehm in 2012). It was published in German as Atemschaukel in 2009, just before she (deservedly) won the Nobel prize for literature. It’s an extraordinarily dense and poetic work and one that seems to transcend language – so perfectly written that text and idea are fused, yet still overflowing with humanity.” – nilpferd

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Show me the mummy: the undying allure of ancient Egypt

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Paris’s Tutankhamun exhibition is a record-breaking hit – but scarabs, pharaohs and man-eating monsters have been thrilling us for centuries

Paris’s current mania for Tutankhamun should come as no surprise. The Grande Halle de la Villette exhibition of 150 objects found in the tomb of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh is now France’s most-visited exhibition ever, having attracted over 1.3 million visitors. Many of the objects on show – “wonderful things”, in Howard Carter’s words, including mini-coffins, a gilded bed and a calcite vase – have left Egypt for the first time for the Treasures of the Pharaoh exhibition, which will move to London’s Saatchi Gallery in November.

The exhibition’s popularity echoes the wave of “Tut-mania” that swept the west almost 100 years ago when Carter first discovered the boy-king’s tomb. Suddenly everyone seemed interested in Egyptology, evident in the fashions, arts, culture and advertising of the time, and most enduringly in art-deco architecture such as the Chrysler building in New York – especially its distinctive elevator doors – and the Carreras Cigarette Factory in London, with its line of sleek black cats guarding the entrance. US president Herbert Hoover named his dog King Tut, and there were calls for the extension of the London Underground’s Northern Line that linked Tooting and Camden Town to be named Tutancamden.

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Toni Morrison: farewell to America’s greatest writer – we all owe her so much | Chigozie Obioma

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Booker nominated author Chigozie Obioma reflects on losing a ‘literary mother’ and her encouragement for generations of black and African writers to come

It was with a heavy heart that I woke up, like many, to the news of the passing of the great African American writer Toni Morrison. As I have mourned and digested the news, my reaction has slowly gone from shock to dismay, then to a sense of inchoate peace.

Related: Toni Morrison: a life in pictures

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My gonzo night at Hunter S Thompson’s cabin – now on Airbnb

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Fuelled by hard drugs and righteous anger, his incendiary prose shook America. Could our writer channel his spirit by spending a night at the typewriter where it all happened?

It is 4.30 on a Thursday morning and I am writing these words on the big red IBM Selectric III that once belonged to Hunter S Thompson. Owl Farm, Thompson’s “fortified compound” in Woody Creek, Colorado, is dark and silent outside. Even the peacocks he raised are sleeping. The only sound anywhere is the warm hum of this electric typewriter and the mechanical rhythm of its key strikes, as clear and certain as gunfire.

In April, Thompson’s widow, Anita, began renting out the writer’s cabin to help support the Hunter S Thompson scholarship for veterans at Columbia University, where both she and Hunter studied. It sits beside the main Thompson home on a 17-hectare estate marked with hoof prints and elk droppings that gradually rises towards a mountain range. A short walk uphill is the spot where Thompson’s ashes were fired into the sky from a 153ft tower in the shape of a “Gonzo fist”, a logo he first adopted during his unsuccessful 1970 campaign to be sheriff of nearby Aspen. Johnny Depp, who played Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, picked up the $3m tab for that elaborate sendoff, which took place shortly after Thompson killed himself in 2005.

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I wrote my first book at 75. At the age of 81 and 10 books later, I’m having the time of my life | Susan Moore Jordan

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I had a rich, happy life as a musician. But remembering the murder of my friend’s parents in 1954 led to a novel

We all enjoy “milestone” birthdays. At 16, we’re old enough to drive. Then soon after we’re old enough to drink (legally). Then we start marking decades, and 50 is a biggie: a half-century. But for me, the greatest milestone birthday of all was when I hit three-quarters of a century. At the age of 75 I wrote and published my first book, and here I am six years later working on book number 11, and loving this new passion I’ve discovered.

What makes this even more remarkable is that for my entire life I had a rich, happy life as a musician (student/teacher/performer/stage director). Music was my discipline from a very young age. Reading was a hobby, and I probably had a vague thought about “writing something someday”.

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Judith Kerr, beloved author of The Tiger Who Came to Tea, dies aged 95

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Writer and illustrator of more than 30 books, including the Mog series based on her pet cats, arrived in England in 1936 as a refugee from the Nazis

Judith Kerr, the author and illustrator whose debut picture book The Tiger Who Came to Tea introduced generations of pre-school children to the joyful chaos of uncontrolled appetites, died at home yesterday at the age of 95 after a short illness, her publisher said on Thursday.

Kerr, who dreamed up the tiger to amuse her two children, only started publishing in her 40s, and lived to see the Tiger reach its millionth sale as she turned 94. To her mild chagrin, it remained her best loved single book: “I’ve got better at drawing, obviously,” she told one interviewer.

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Man Booker International prize: Jokha Alharthi wins for Celestial Bodies

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First female Omani novelist to be translated into English shares £50,000 prize with translator Marilyn Booth – the first time an Arabic book has won

Jokha Alharthi, the first female Omani novelist to be translated into English, has won the Man Booker International prize for her novel Celestial Bodies.

Alharthi, the £50,000 award’s first winner to write in Arabic, shares the prize equally with her translator, American academic Marilyn Booth. Celestial Bodies is set in the Omani village of al-Awafi and follows the stories of three sisters: Mayya, who marries into a rich family after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries for duty; and Khawla, waiting for a man who has emigrated to Canada.

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Top 10 books about Sudan

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Despite 30 years of repression that have hit writers unusually hard, Sudanese literature remains vigorous. Here is some of the best available in English

I was lucky to grow up in Khartoum in a house filled with books, at a time when Sudan’s public libraries flourished. One of the most startling discoveries I made as a child of about 13 was finding a couple of Tayeb Salih’s books on a shelf at home. Until that moment, I thought literature was something that took place elsewhere – in Dickens’s England or the Latin America of Borges, say. But here were stories that described the world right outside our front door. It was a moment of revelation and stirred the idea that it was possible to write.

Related: A Line in the River by Jamal Mahjoub review – Khartoum, city of memory

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