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Articles by Lee Langley
A matter of life and death: Afternoon Hours of a Hermit, by Patrick Cottrell, reviewed
Afternoon Hours of a Hermit And Other Stories, pp.211, 14.99 Patrick Cottrell’s first novel, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace (2017), had a Korean/American returning to her Milwaukee adoptive parents’ home following news of a tragic family event. Afternoon Hours of a Hermit, the author’s second novel, begins: ‘Five years ago I put on my detective hat and my existential black turtleneck in order to solve the mystery of his suicide.
Together and apart: How to Make a Woman, by Marie Darrieussecq, reviewed
How to Make a Woman Fitzcarraldo, pp.256, 14.99 Two girls in Basque south-west France in the 1980s have been best friends since early childhood. Rose is the good one, studious and kind, with a sweetheart she plans to marry. Solange is the wild child: rebellious, dishonest and pregnant at 15. How to Make a Woman might sound like a Gallic take on Elena Ferrante territory, but it’s much more than that.
The past yields up its secrets: The Red Mouth, by Sheila Armstrong, reviewed
The Red Mouth Bloomsbury, pp.232, 16.99 Sheila Armstrong’s strange and beautiful novel has 12 chapters, each named for a month of the year – though not always the same year or even the same decade. The author plunges us into archaeology, history, geology and complex human relationships. Time is fluid here: we might encounter an obscure neolithic weapon or stumble on a beer can left by a thoughtless 21st-century rambler. Occasionally Irish words dance across the page.
Nagging doubts: Twenty Minutes of Silence, by Hélène Bessette, reviewed
Twenty Minutes of Silence Fitzcarraldo, pp.180, 12.99 One critic memorably described Waiting for Godot as a play in which nothing happens, twice. Twenty Minutes of Silence is a novel in which something happens, repeatedly. Ina luxurious villa in northern France a man lies dead, surrounded by disorder – apparently a robbery gone wrong. When the police arrive, they find he was shot with his own gun and the murder weapon is missing. His wife and 15-year-old son become suspects.
A dying fall: The Last Movement, by Robert Seethaler, reviewed
The Last Movement Canongate, pp.128, 9.99 Robert Seethaler is known for celebrating the unsung: commonplace characters – peasants, labourers or shop assistants – who draw us into their quiet lives. But the protagonist in The Last Movement is a celebrated historical figure: Gustav Mahler. For those in search of biographical information, as W.H. Auden put it, a shilling life will give you all the facts. Today we’d go online. How will Seethaler, a distinguished miniaturist, deal with an icon?
A sinister strangeness: City Like Water, by Dorothy Tse, reviewed
City Like Water Fitzcarraldo, pp.92, 12.99 In Dorothy Tse’s City Like Water the location is never named. Anonymous, mutable, it slips from normal into nightmare, strangeness signalled from the opening lines: ‘In the place I used to live, my rusty top bunk rocked like a boat. Night after night, it carried me off towards a secret crevice.’ This is a novel written out of sorrow and anger: the pain of recalling sweeter times. It’s not the boy narrator who is unreliable; it’s the city itself.
Time for a reckoning: Vigil, by George Saunders, reviewed
Vigil Bloomsbury, pp.172, 18.99 George Saunders is at his most lively in the company of the dead. At ease with ghosts. In the 2022 Booker-winning Lincoln in the Bardo, Abraham Lincoln mourns his young son in a graveyard surrounded by a clamorous crowd of the newly deceased trying to be helpful. Grief, handled with sweet humour. But Saunders has not always been so gentle.
Alice in Nightmareland: The Matchbox Girl, by Alice Jolly, reviewed
The Matchbox Girl Bloomsbury, pp.416, 18.99 Vienna, 25 July 1934 is a significant date in Austria’s history. But in The Matchbox Girl, the big events happen offstage, the world seen entirely through the eyes of its youthful narrator. We focus not on the assassination of Chancellor Dollfuss and a failed Nazi coup, but the children’s hospital, where 12-year-old Adelheid Brunner is waiting to be assessed for admission because she’s mute – designated ‘special’.
A literary Russian doll: The Tower, by Thea Lenarduzzi, reviewed
The Tower Fitzcarraldo Editions, pp.248, 14.99 A girl in a tower. The words trigger instant curiosity. Who is she? Who locked her away, and why? Was it punishment, or sequestration to keep her safe? Thea Lenarduzzi’s The Tower is a literary Russian doll, one story concealed within another, blurring identities, blocking memory. A far from reliable narrator – ‘let’s call her T’ – steers us between fiction and real life while the author herself occasionally amends the telling.
A Greyhound ride through an unsettled America
There were years when, like many others, I dreamed of crossing America coast to coast, riding the Greyhound bus. It was the thing to do – a rite of passage. For those who never made it, all is not lost: Joanna Pocock has done it for us. Twice. In 2006, fending off depression after her third miscarriage and the death of her sister, Pocock took the Greyhound from Detroit to Los Angeles, “running away from loss”.
A Greyhound ride through an unsettled America
There were years when, like many others, I dreamed of crossing America coast to coast, riding the Greyhound bus. It was the thing to do – a rite of passage. For those who never made it, all is not lost: Joanna Pocock has done it for us. Twice. In 2006, fending off depression after her third miscarriage and the death of her sister, Pocock took the Greyhound from Detroit to Los Angeles, “running away from loss”.
A road trip like no other – crossing America by Greyhound bus | The Spectator Australia
Greyhound Fitzcarraldo Editions, pp.396, 14.99 There were years when, like many others, I dreamed of crossing America coast to coast, riding the Greyhound bus. It was the thing to do – a rite of passage. For those who never made it, all is not lost: Joanna Pocock has done it for us. Twice. In 2006, fending off depression after her third miscarriage and the death of her sister, Pocock took the Greyhound from Detroit to Los Angeles, ‘running away from loss’.
Consorting with the enemy: The Propagandist, by Cécile Desprairies, reviewed
The Propagandist Swift Press, pp.192, 14.99 As a young child in the mid-1960s, Cécile Desprairies listened hour after hour to her mother Lucie dreamily recalling the 1940s, dwelling on a past peopled by undefined heroes and ‘the bastards’ who murdered them. Names were rarely mentioned or hastily passed over. In the fashionable Paris apartment there were daily gatherings – her mother, aunt, cousin and grandmother twittering like birds, obsessed with fashion and cosmetics.
Guadalupe Nettel seeks the fantastic that lurks in everyday life
Borders have always played an important part in Mexican literature. Not only geographical/political frontiers but the more porous boundaries between past and present, the living and the dead. Between what is real and what is not. Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz and Juan Rulfo were all drawn to this shifting, unreliable territory. Time moves on and new talents emerge.
Adrift in strange lands: The Accidentals, by Guadalupe Nettel, reviewed
The Accidentals Fitzcarraldo Editions, pp.128, 12.99 Borders have always played an important part in Mexican literature. Not only geographical/political frontiers but the more porous boundaries between past and present, the living and the dead. Between what is real and what is not. Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz and Juan Rulfo were all drawn to this shifting, unreliable territory.
The final act of Thomas Pynchon
Whisper it, very quietly, but the now 87-year-old author Thomas Pynchon is having something of a moment in 2025. Not only has his 1990 novel Vineland supposedly served as the loose inspiration for the eagerly awaited new Paul Thomas Anderson-Leonardo DiCaprio collaboration One Battle After Another,but the near-impossible has been announced: Pynchon will publish a new novel, entitled Shadow Ticket,around the time of the movie’s release.
Richard Overy questions the morality of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
At 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber called Enola Gay dropped “Little Boy” over Hiroshima. The thermal radiation from the atom bomb was 900 times more searing than the sun. An estimated 118,661 civilians died, horribly. Survivors staggered about with their skin in shreds, their intestines hanging out and their blacked and bleeding faces grotesquely disfigured.
Hope springs eternal in Robert Seethaler's latest novel
Call it a mosaic. Here it all is — the pathos of a botched first date, a birth, a death, a feud, a stumble into love. The Café With No Name deals with the small dramas of everyday life. The setting is Vienna — not the elegant city of Schönbrunn but the Karmelitermarkt, one of the poorest districts, debris from Allied bombs still filling the basements in 1966. Robert Simon has worked in the market for seven years, shifting crates of swedes, restacking firewood, cleaning the floor at the fishmonger.
Gene Hackman, from the archives: ‘Never trust anyone - you never know who your friends are’
This piece first ran in the Telegraph on May 16, 1975, and has been republished following the death of Gene Hackman, aged 95 Nova, or new star, according to the encyclopaedia, is a star which is suddenly perceived, having previously been invisible. A Nova becomes visible because its outer envelope is blown off by some immense explosion, revealing its brilliance.
Hope springs eternal: The Café with No Name, by Robert Seethaler, reviewed
The Café With No Name Canongate, pp.220, 16.99 Call it a mosaic. Here it all is – the pathos of a botched first date, a birth, a death, a feud, a stumble into love. The Café With No Name deals with the small dramas of everyday life. The setting is Vienna – not the elegant city of Schönbrunn but the Karmelitermarkt, one of the poorest districts, debris from Allied bombs still filling the basements in 1966.
Panning for music gold: The Catchers, by Xan Brooks, reviewed
The Catchers Salt, pp.272, 10.99 They were known as song catchers: New York-based chancers with recording equipment packed in the back of the van, heading south in search of hill country music that could make the record company (and, relatively, the recorder) rich. The singer would get a flat fee of $30. Among themselves, over a beer, the catchers called it panning for gold, diving for pearls, trapping fireflies in a jar.
Did Britain gain anything from the 1942 Bruneval raid?
These days we use radar to help us park our cars, but during the early years of World War Two it was white hot technology and a closely guarded military secret. First used to detect aircraft in 1935, within a few years it had helped win the Battle of Britain and sink the Bismarck. It was so secret that work on it was forbidden even to physicists of genius who had fled the Nazis.
The rich inner lives of Elizabeth Strout's characters
There was a time when Elizabeth Strout’s fans had to wait a few years for the next book; but Tell Me Everything follows fast on her two previous novels — part of what she has termed a “marathon” of writing in her sixties. It has been an extraordinary creative flowering: a diverting pleasure for admirers of her psychological perceptiveness and her ability to transport us instantly to Crosby, her fictional town in contemporary Maine.
Nothing is ever quite as it seems in Olga Tokarczuk's latest novel
Nothing is ever quite as it seems in the world of Olga Tokarczuk. Her latest novel starts with an epigraph taken from Fernando Pessoa: “The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.” Wild deer were murder suspects in her surreal and beautiful 2018 novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. This time nature itself plays a significant role.
Can I find community in Brighton?
Brighton, England Recently I lost my mother, my job and nearly my wife in quick succession (she was diagnosed with breast cancer). My son now needles me by asking what I do all day. “Son, I have seen things you wouldn’t believe. I have dark thoughts.” That is what I want to say, but I don’t have the courage. It is hard to explain to an eleven-year-old that the black dog can be as demanding as any full-time employer. Besides he wouldn’t get the Blade Runner reference.
Mysteries and misogyny: The Empusium, by Olga Tokarczuk, reviewed
The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story Fitzcarraldo Editions, pp.336, 12.99 Nothing is ever quite as it seems in the world of Olga Tokarczuk. Her latest novel starts with an epigraph taken from Fernando Pessoa: ‘The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.’ Wild deer were murder suspects in her surreal and beautiful 2018 novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.
The rise of BlueAnon
Someone call the disinformation police! Left-wing conspiracy theories and attempts to manipulate the media are spiraling out of control ahead of the 2024 election. From tall tales about former president Donald Trump staging his own assassination attempt to the lower-stakes speculation that Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance is wearing guyliner, “BlueAnon” has reemerged in a big way.
Runaway lovers: The Heart in Winter, by Kevin Barry, reviewed
The Heart in Winter Canongate, pp.224, 16.99 Watching Kevin Barry’s progress over the years has been a pleasure. His first novel, City of Bohane, flamboyant with tribal vernacular and savagery, was followed by Beatlebone, a beguiling surreal odyssey, and then Night Boat to Tangier, where two tired old crims wait and talk their way through the dark hours.
The magic of Charleston’s Gin Joint
There are few greater joys in life than to wander the streets of Charleston in the evening, the light and shadow of the holy city and the sea salt in the air guiding you near the haunted past, toward cobblestones and the maze of the French Quarter.
How AI helps the tech giants
Artificial intelligence (AI) and its related technologies — machine learning and the metaverse — represent a watershed in the evolution of the global economy. Like other such shifts, its emergence is likely to favor certain interests, notably a handful of technology giants, the media and a small cadre of highly skilled programmers. Everyone else faces economic danger, certain to roil domestic and international politics in coming years.
Democrats splurge on ads for tough Senate battle
As we look ahead to a Biden-Trump rematch, the map for Senate remains filled with uncertainty, and the Senate Democrats’ super PAC is making major money moves with the “largest ad reservations in Senate history,” according to the group. Senate Majority PAC’s total ad reservations for the fall currently amount to $239 million, as first reported by the Washington Post. It’s a wise move, as the early bird typically gets the cheaper ad buy rate.
A Best Stunts Oscar is long overdue
It looked like it was finally going to happen. At last night’s Academy Awards, after a fun back-and-forth with Emily Blunt, Ryan Gosling — who stars with her as a stuntman character in this year’s The Fall Guy — said “We’re here to celebrate the stunt community.
Pope Francis’s Ukraine war faux-pas
If you didn’t know any better, you might think that Pope Francis was no longer welcome in Ukraine. His recent interview with a Swiss broadcaster, excerpts of which were released over the weekend, has caused a whirlwind of disappointment and anger in Ukrainian policy circles as well as with some of Ukraine’s staunchest supporters in the West. The subject of derision: whether Ukraine should do a little less fighting and a lot more talking.
How Fani Willis trashed her reputation
Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis might reflect on the proverb, “Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.” She will have ample time to reflect as she watches her career decompose in a Georgia courtroom and state Senate hearing. The old saying is directly on point. The spotlight searches out prominent people and their entourage. If they are caught cheating, they will shrivel under the glare. If they are caught lying under oath, their troubles will be far worse.
Sardonic and elegant: Jessi Jezewska Stevens’s Ghost Pains
Hell, according to Jean-Paul Sartre, is other people. Jessi Jezewska Stevens would nominate parties. Social catastrophe can stem from the invitation: “Email!” she laments. “The way all modern tragedies begin.” She homes in on the space between what a woman thinks and says and does. Her anti-heroines can be relied on to make wrong decisions — men, marriage, nipple-piercing and, of course, parties. The choice invariably ends in failure.
The skull beneath the skin: Ghost Pains, by Jessi Jezewska Stevens, reviewed
Ghost Pains And Other Stories, pp.304, 14.99 Hell, according to Jean-Paul Sartre, is other people. Jessi Jezewska Stevens would nominate parties. Social catastrophe can stem from the invitation: ‘Email!’ she laments. ‘The way all modern tragedies begin.’ She homes in on the space between what a woman thinks and says and does. Her anti-heroines can be relied on to make wrong decisions – men, marriage, nipple-piercing and, of course, parties.
Axios bravely points out Covid hurt Trump’s economy
Axios reporter Emily Peck isn’t afraid to state the obvious out loud and pass it off as inspired. In a hit piece published Thursday, “Why Trump supporters give him a pass on record-high unemployment,” Peck made the case that the economy suffered during Trump’s last months in office due to coronavirus. Huh, who knew a global pandemic and lockdown could cause record unemployment?
Can’t America do better than Biden versus Trump?
For many people, Donald Trump’s victory in Iowa this week will seem incomprehensible. Not only did he win — he did so by a margin that no other Republican has achieved since the state became the first to choose its candidates. This is quite a feat from a man facing , who was also twice impeached — the second time for encouraging his supporters to riot on Capitol Hill.
Trump is everything Haley isn’t
In June 2022, I interviewed Nikki Haley on stage for JW3, a Jewish organization in north London. She was personable, clear, well-briefed and pleasingly normal, with the interesting exception of her Sikh background growing up in small-town South Carolina (she later became a Christian by conversion). Her conservatism seemed strongly felt, coherent and not extreme.
My 100 bottles of wine plan made lots of folks angry
My column from a fortnight ago seeking advice about how to limit my alcohol intake has produced a huge response — and not just from readers. At a dinner last week to commemorate Paul Johnson, a famous historian told me how he manages to be so prolific while still enjoying several glasses every night.
The dangerous secrets in Michele Mari’s Verdigris
In everyday life — on a garden path, flowerpot or lettuce — I back rapidly away from slugs. I didn’t expect to confront them in literature, but in Michele Mari’s Verdigris they are present in abundance, from the first line: Bisected by a precise blow of the spade, the slug writhed a moment longer: then it moved no more… slimy shame transformed into splendid silvery iridescence So, not a novel for one who shrinks from gastropod mollusks, you would think.
Dangerous secrets: Verdigris, by Michele Mari, reviewed
Verdigris And Other Stories, pp.224, 14.99 In everyday life – on a garden path, flowerpot or lettuce – I back rapidly away from slugs. I didn’t expect to confront them in literature, but in Michele Mari’s Verdigris they are present in abundance, from the first line: Bisected by a precise blow of the spade, the slug writhed a moment longer: then it moved no more… slimy shame transformed into splendid silvery iridescence.
Internet poet Rupi Kaur boycotts White House Diwali celebration for Palestine
Cockburn was surprised to learn the war in Israel has a more global impact than he had previously imagined. The carnage in Gaza is affecting the way that Indian women living in the United States celebrate Diwali, at least according to the Canadian-Indian poet Rupi Kaur. South Asian women are now the latest group with a moral imperative to weigh in on the war.
Greg Jackson imagines an algorithmic universe
When Joseph Conrad sent his narrator into the heart of darkness, Africa was unknown territory. Revisiting the scene now, Greg Jackson dispatches his explorer to an even stranger destination: an algorithmic universe. Jackson, a Granta Best of Young American Novelists in 2017, won prizes with his story collection Prodigals. His debut novel, The Dimensions of a Cave, could hardly be better timed. New fears about AI give it disquieting relevance. Conspiracy theories mingle with deep state corruption.
Heart of Darkness revisited: The Dimensions of a Cave, by Greg Jackson, reviewed
The Dimensions of a Cave Granta, pp.464, 18.99 When Joseph Conrad sent his narrator into the heart of darkness, Africa was unknown territory. Revisiting the scene now, Greg Jackson dispatches his explorer to an even stranger destination: an algorithmic universe. Jackson, a Granta Best of Young American Novelists in 2017, won prizes with his story collection Prodigals. His debut novel, The Dimensions of a Cave, could hardly be better timed.
Why ‘dirty’ coal is vital to a ‘clean’ green future
The Central and Western regions of Pennsylvania are known for their majestic, untamed landscapes. Seen from on high, you’d think the forested wilderness here was yet untouched. Though that’s far from the truth, the area has, for the past few decades, for better and worse, been largely forgotten — except by the people who live, work and play among the lands and waters scarred and poisoned by abandoned deep-coal mines and unreclaimed strip mines.
Anonymous caller: This Plague of Souls, by Mike McCormack, reviewed
This Plague of Souls Canongate, pp.182, 16.99 Mike McCormack is much garlanded. He won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature with his first collection of stories; the Goldsmith’s Prize followed in 2016, along with the Irish Book of the Year Award and the International Dublin Literary Award, for his novel Solar Bones. A book-length, single- sentence analysis of a man’s life, that story sprang off the page with the force of a blow. This Plague of Souls, his fifth novel, is more distanced.
Private obsessions
Michele Mari is one of Italy’s most eminent writers. A prize-winning novelist, poet, translator and academic, he is hardly known to anglophone readers, but that is about to change. You, Bleeding Childhood, a collection of 13 stories written over a period of 30 years, offers a portal into Mari’s surreal, unsettling world: a place of childhood memories, obsessions and a passion for literature and science fiction. Mari inhabits Borges’s labyrinthine territory.
Too close to home
Natsumi lives in a modern flat in Tokyo with her husband and two young sons, her life comfortable but circumscribed by the tedium of household chores.
One government agency is undermining Biden’s cancer moonshot
“I promise you if I’m elected president, you’re going to see the single most important thing that changes America: we’re gonna cure cancer,” then-candidate Joe Biden pledged in 2019. Virtually no one believed him at the time — and his administration is both complicating this promise and allowing China to leapfrog American medical innovation, potentially exposing the most sensitive health data of anyone who relies on Chinese companies for early cancer detection.
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