illustration of a church leader Feb 10, 2012

Alex Preston’s ‘The Revelations’

AN Wilson on a tale of City slickers seduced by a promise of spiritual awakening

Book cover Feb 10, 2012

Finals countdown

A bittersweet hymn to the high jinks of student days, Ben Masters’ ‘Noughties’ is a caustic, street-smart novel for our times

Book cover Feb 10, 2012

Faith and freedom

Set in the 1980s, Ayad Akhtar’s coming-of-age debut novel ‘American Dervish’ is a bleak tale about the Muslim immigrant experience in the US

Book cover Feb 10, 2012

Roman rehab

An introverted Italian teenager learns the value of empathy when his estranged sister takes refuge in his hiding place in Niccolò Ammaniti’s ‘Me and You’

Book cover Feb 10, 2012

Horrors unseen

Madeleine Thien’s ‘Dogs at the Perimeter’ offers a gripping child’s-eye view of the Cambodian genocide

Book cover Feb 10, 2012

Reinvention beckons

‘Alys, Always’ by Harriet Lane is for anyone who has coveted the richness of other people’s lives

Book cover Feb 10, 2012

Cairo’s underside

An exiled private investigator from Sudan navigates a world caught between eastern and western ideals in Parker Bilal’s ‘The Golden Scales’

Book cover Feb 10, 2012

Deadly plunge

In MR Hall’s ‘The Flight’ – the fourth outing of the Jenny Cooper series – the coroner gets tangled up with big business as she probes the crash of an A380

Grass illustration Feb 3, 2012

A land overlooked

Jon McGregor’s new piece, ‘This Isn’t the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You’, is a collection of short stories that explores a little-known region of England

Alliance Japanese brides at San Francisco Bay’s Angel Island immigration station in 1920 Feb 3, 2012

Picture of happiness

Julie Otsuka’s ‘The Buddha in the Attic’ recounts the experiences of the 20,000 Japanese brides betrothed to photographs

Highlights