GEOFF BOTTOMS relishes a profoundly human portrait of a family as it evolves across 55 years in Sheffield
Crime fiction
Reviews of Good Neighbours by Sarah Langan, The Basel Killings by Hansjorg Schneider, The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix and The Crooked Shore by Martin Edwards
PAUL DONOVAN applauds an excellently crafted new musical that explores the life and death of Ruth Ellis
PAUL DONOVAN is tickled by the excruciating take-downs of one of the funniest, wittiest, political writers around.
RON JACOBS points out, via a transcription of Kissinger’s secret recordings, that Trump could never have existed without Nixon and Kissinger
ELLIS RAE is persuaded that the advantages of the ‘talking cure’ are superior to the treatment of mental illness with drugs
JOHN GREEN, MICHAL BONCZA and BELLA KATZ review The Good Boy, Broken English, and Don't Be Prey
SUBURBS in US fiction are often sinister places, but few more so than that at the centre of Sarah Langan’s Good Neighbours (Titan, £8.99).
Maple Street is an aspirational satellite of Long Island, and the Wilde family don’t fit in there and know it. Their accents strike their new neighbours as plebeian, their habits unsettling and their children undisciplined.
But that might not be enough on its own to cause a season of spiralling mayhem if it wasn’t for the sinkhole that opens up in the neighbourhood one dry summer.
Similar stories
Timeloop murder, trad family MomBomb, Sicilian crime pages and Craven praise
A heatwave, a crimewave, and weird bollocks in Aberdeen, Indiana horror, and the end of the American Dream
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
IAN SINCLAIR draws attention to the powerful role that literature plays in foreseeing the way humanity will deal with climate crisis