fiction Archives - Catholic Herald

fiction

Rich and strange, whether pastiche or homage

December 03, 2021

Lily: A Tale of Revenge by Rose Tremain Chatto & Windus, £18.99, 288 pages ________ Rose Tremain is a prolific and prize-winning author, the recipient of the Whitbread and the Orange Prize for Fiction, shortlisted for the Costa and Booker. She is also an unpredictable one. Her work ranges across time from the Restoration to

Stilted but endearing

October 14, 2021

Silverviewby John le Carré Penguin Viking, £20.00, 208 pages ________ Posthumous novels are rarely a good idea. A great writer’s literary executors find a discarded, unfinished manuscript in the bottom drawer, polish it up a bit and send it out into the world hoping to make some money before anybody notices that the book isn’t

A readable yarn but none too credible

October 02, 2021

Matrix by Lauren Groff William Heinemann, £16.99, 272 pages __________ The 12th-century poet we know as Marie de France was, scholars argue, the greatest writer of short fiction before Boccaccio and Chaucer. Her lais – tantalisingly short romances written in octosyllabic couplets – are thought to rival the best that those great men had to