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Alan Hollinghurst

Alan Hollinghurst’s s new novel, The Sparsholt Affair, will be published in the US next spring. (August 2017)

IN THE REVIEW

Serious, Silly, Charming, & Heartless

Lord Berners, Robert Heber-Percy with his daughter Victoria, and Jennifer Fry in the drawing room at Faringdon, Berkshire, September 1943; photograph by Cecil Beaton

The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me: An Aristocratic Family, a High-Society Scandal and an Extraordinary Legacy

by Sofka Zinovieff
It was an oddity of growing up in the small Berkshire town of Faringdon in the 1950s that Lord Berners’s name was often mentioned. He was, in a way, a part of the landscape. A tall slender tower on a hill at the edge of the town was the goal …

The Victory of Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald, 1986

The Bookshop

by Penelope Fitzgerald

Offshore

by Penelope Fitzgerald, with an introduction by Alan Hollinghurst
Penelope Fitzgerald published her first book, a biography of the artist Edward Burne-Jones, when she was fifty-eight; her first novel appeared when she was sixty. She was, as she said, “an old writer who had never been a young one.”

Grief, Rage, Cognac, and a Computer

Peter Carey, New York City, 2011

The Chemistry of Tears

by Peter Carey
Peter Carey is an astonishing capturer of likenesses—not only in the sense of the portrait (the “good likeness”), but of the teeming similitudes with which a sharp eye and a rich memory discern and describe the world. Simile and metaphor, which are at the heart of poetry, are a less certain presence in prose fiction, in some novelists barely deployed at all, but in Dickens, for instance (with whom Carey is repeatedly compared), they are vital and unresting elements of the novelist’s vision.

A World Cracked Open

Michael Cunningham, New York City, 1999

By Nightfall

by Michael Cunningham
Michael Cunningham’s novels have tended to be airy, open structures, covering large spans of time and space. They are narrative experiments, multivoiced and wide-ranging, with a romantic sense of the adventure of the inner life and a brilliant eye for the details of the everyday world; it is not surprising …

Underground Men

Netherland

by Joseph O’Neill
What is “Netherland,” the strange-but-familiar compound that Joseph O’Neill has made the title of his captivating new novel? At its plainest, perhaps, it’s a singular bit of the Netherlands, the country from which the narrator, Hans van den Broek, arrived in the late 1990s, via London, as an equities analyst …

Passion and Henry James

Henry James: The Mature Master

by Sheldon M. Novick
The writer of a two-part life who calls his first volume Young So-and-So faces a problem of tact and aptness when it comes to the second. Sometimes the life itself provides an elegant answer: Young Melbourne grew into Lord M., Young Thomas Hardy was followed by Thomas Hardy’s Later Years, …

When in Rome

Satyr Square: A Year, a Life in Rome

by Leonard Barkan
The acknowledgments pages in books are very proper as records of indebtedness, but they have other, less candid purposes. In part, of course, they are potted, slightly cryptic narratives of the writer’s heroic struggle. The mumble of humility masks the purr of self-satisfaction. Lists of names may be a covert …