Culture Wars reviews contemporary fiction along with regular feature coverage of fiction festivals such as Jewish Book Week and prizes like the Orange Prize and Man Booker.

Browse books by title with CW new books archive feature.

Meatloaf

Chalcot Crescent, by Fay Weldon (Corvus)

Just imagine; people simply get bored of consumerism, vandalism, of all isms in general. The good times when we bought all manner of unnecessary things with borrowed money were merely a blip on our otherwise toilsome shared existence; the recession was a return to the norm, rather than a rough patch. 

Stripping the Establishment

Bad Penny Blues, by Cathi Unsworth (Serpent's Tail)

It would be easy to regard this novel as simply a walk down memory lane - albeit a scary one – with no contemporary relevance. This would be wrong. Unsworth has given us a template for writing about today’s political underbelly.

Fanfare for the common man

Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate)

Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell looks like a murderer, and doesn’t mind too much that people speculate in whispers about his violent past. But in Mantel’s telling, Cromwell is no cynical bully. He get things done because he believes in them, or at least, as in the case of the king’s divorce and remarriage, because he believes they serve a greater purpose.

Lurking in the corners

The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters (Virago)

What makes Waters’ historical novels unusual is the way in which progress and modernity are the unspoken assumptions which lie at their heart. As a female novelist benefitting from the historical gains of feminism and gay liberation, she is apparently under little illusion that the contemporary world is the preferred one to inhabit.

Navel-gazing in India

A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta, by Paul Theroux (Hamish Hamilton)

Theroux fills his novel with inexplicably apoplectic hotel managers, moustachioed police chiefs and clandestine meetings in overgrown cemeteries. Rife with cliché in just the right way, A Dead Hand will please fans of the detective thriller. Its characters are two-dimensional, but with a rollicking story to follow, who cares?

Ordinary village folk

The Heretic's Daughter, by Kathleen Kent (Pan)

The striking clarity with which Sarah explains her story also provides a balanced and unromanticised version of the early American justice system and sheds light over its true situation amidst fear and unjustified mass superstitious panic under the pretence of religious ideology.

Ghosts at the kitchen table

Her Fearful Symmetry, by Audrey Niffenegger (Jonathan Cape)

It’s all rather a macabre jumble of plot lines; for even the apparently sane characters are grossly exaggerated, like Martin who suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder, so tapes up his windows to keep out the light, and yet implausibly leaves his flat door open.

Modern man made flesh

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher Or The Murder at Road Hill House, by Kate Summerscale (Bloomsbury)

Secrets are something the characters both make for themselves and construct themselves around, they form the fulcrum for their engagement with the world, allowing them to have both private and public parts. The content of these secrets frequently goes unrecorded and untold.

Respect and respectability

The Scandal of the Season, by Sophie Gee (Vintage 2008)

Gee’s novel certainly recreates the atmospheric conditions of the historical period, including the insecurity of women and their dependence on the male instigated moral constraints brought about by marriage. Their very respectability, in fact, rests on the acquisition of an eligible bachelor to secure their status as respectable individuals in a male dominated society.

Quiet at home - Orange Prize Winner, 2009

Home, by Marilynne Robinson (Virago Press)

The novel is a powerful demonstration of all those forces that frustrate our personal progression.

Cold and oppressive yet strangely comforting

Chronicle in Stone, by Ismail Kadare (Canongate 2007)

Overall, the charm of this book lies in the innocent, imaginative playfulness of the young narrator, and the unselfconsciousness of his voice. Whether it was the best book published in English in the whole world in 2005 remains an open question.

Waiting for the pregnant widow

In anticipation of The Pregnant Widow, by Martin Amis (forthcoming from Jonathan Cape)

Speaking in Manchester, Amis likened the relationship between reader and author to that of lovers, and so to expand on the analogy, if Amis were to be our lover: he would be lush, indulgent, too demanding of our attention in his stripling desire to delight.

Trouble in paradise

Black Rock, by Amanda Smyth (Serpent’s Tail)

Some might find Celia’s misfortune a little too relentless for one child to manage, but there is a refreshing lack of self-indulgent dwelling on said circumstances; writing the narrative as though through the eyes of a child was the best thing Smyth could have done.

Amazing words

The Quickening Maze, by Adam Foulds (Jonathan Cape)

Adam Foulds’ new novel recounts the life, loves and madness of John Clare, poster-boy poet of romantic environmentalists and it-once-was Englanders. Can we bracket him so easily and read him as nothing more than a lament for a natural world destroyed in front of his eyes? Or does his life and poetry tell us something more important about civilisation than it does about nature?

Kak kak kak

Harare North, by Brian Chikwava (Jonathan Cape)

It is striking how tenaciously he clings to the ideas instilled in him, refusing to believe the horrors that are reported about the actions of Mugabe’s party.