LITERARY BENT – Writing at its best

This is arguably Graham Greene’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Greene and http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5180/the-art-of-fiction-no-3-graham-greene) masterpiece, although my personal favourite is The End of the Affair. In a poor, remote section of Southern Mexico, the paramilitary group, the Red Shirts, have taken control. God has been outlawed, and the priests have been systematically hunted down and killed. Now, the last priest is on […]

Andrew Miller’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Miller_(novelist) and http://literature.britishcouncil.org/andrew-miller) extraordinary first novel, Ingenious Pain (1997), concerns the curious defect that seems to be the source of Dr. James Dyer’s ‘genius’ for the knife. It is his inability, since birth, to feel physical pain. Drive a pin through his hand, tear off a thumbnail, break his leg, flog him raw: he feels

A Guest of Honour (1970) is a long, spacious, comprehensive work of fiction. It has all the lineaments of a traditional story. It is leisurely and detailed. There is something Olympian, something magnificently confident in the way in which the writer goes about her work. Her calm certainty camouflages the ease with which she handles

Bradley Pearson, an unsuccessful novelist in his late fifties, has finally left his dull office job as an Inspector of Taxes. Bradley hopes to retire to the country, but predatory friends and relations dash his hopes of a peaceful retirement. He is tormented by his melancholic sister, who has decided to come to live with him;

Edith Pearlman (http://www.edithpearlman.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Pearlman) writes intelligent, perceptive, funny and  beautiful stories. She is the author of three previous collections, Vaquita,  Love Among the Greats and How to Fall.  Her themes are the predicaments — odd, wry, funny and painful — of human life. Her characters are sophisticated, literate, relatively affluent and often musical. They travel, they read, they go to

Inimitable, Jim Crace (http://www.jim-crace.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crace) stands on his own ground among living English novelists. Immune to trends, guided by his own singular star, he has sown and grown an 11-volume shelf of finely crafted, intensely atmospheric books. Each novel fashions a unique climate, landscape and mood, a far cry from everyday realism though nothing to