Julian Novitz

At the Edge of the Solid World is a deliberately frustrating novel, as in challenging the assumptions of fiction, it withholds many of its expected pleasures – dramatized action, satisfying narrative closure, the revelation of meaning – and in so doing tears away its common, but illusionary, assurances.

Living at the centre of European politics for ten years, on the knife edge between the medieval and early modern, Thomas Cromwell may have been able to envision a better age to come. A reader of this bruising, brilliant sequence of novels might now be a little more sceptical. The arc of the moral universe is long in Mantel’s trilogy, but it bends more towards irony than justice.

In Vancouver, the third entry in Nick Earls’ series of five linked novellas, the Wisdom Tree, Knut Knutsen, a former…

Steve Toltz’s second novel Quicksand is not a radical departure from his remarkable debut A Fraction of the Whole, at least in terms of style, tone and subject matter. It features a similar range of hyper-verbal characters whose conflicts, schemes and misunderstandings build with a snowball-like momentum, smashing through into new frontiers of awfulness and hilarity.

Readers familiar with the British novelist David Mitchell will find that The Bone Clocks bears many of the hallmarks of his work. It is structurally complex, readable and inventive. Its plot is ambitious in scope, crossing time periods and blurring genre categories. It is also impossible to summarise without making it sound completely ridiculous.

The reviews of A Naked Singularity have compared it to a host of other long novels. Many agree that it is firmly in the tradition of those baggy works of late twentieth century postmodern masters, such as William Gaddis, David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo.

The Luminaries… is not only set in the nineteenth century; it appears to be of the nineteenth century, or as close to it as possible. It has the scope and length of a nineteenth century novel, and its central mysteries are established and explored in a nineteenth century style.