Simon Demetriou

2025 felt a bit uneven as far as literary fiction went, with a number of big-name writers and novels failing to live up to their billing. But as the year drew ...

I look forward to my annual Jack Reacher novel, especially as they always come out around the time of year that back in the cultural golden age of the nineties ...

There’s a brilliant moment in the BBC comedy Upstart Crow when Shakespeare – played by David Mitchell – defends his work as a comic writer by saying, ‘If you do your ...

Claire-Louise Bennett’s last novel, Checkout 19, was one of the best things I read in 2022. In 2025, Bennett is back with another novel that plays with the slipperiness, vitality and insufficiency ...

In yet another mark of my lack of sophistication, I have to confess to only ever having read two Pynchon novels. And what’s worse, they’re his two shortest. ...

When I found Oyinkan Braithwaite’s debut, My Sister, The Serial Killer, on my father-in-law’s shelf, I knew a couple of pages in that I was reading something special, ...

People don’t read Charles Lamb enough anymore, which is a terrible shame because he is utterly brilliant in so many ways. Perhaps above all, though, we should read him ...

Leave it to me to encounter a writer that virtually every child and the majority of parents and teachers have already been reading for decades when he decides to publish ...

Phoebe Greenwood is by no means the first novelist to write a war satire, nor the first to specifically lampoon the way in which journalists and those who publish and ...

I am not on social media, so Tart is my first exposure to Slutty Cheff, the pseudonymous Instagram minor-celebrity whose posts about being a woman on the London restaurant scene ...

By Simon Demetriou There are so many situations where jargon can be off-putting. Thankfully, thriller novels about military intelligence are not one of these. Indeed, you want your novelist to ...

Xenobe Purvis’ timely and exquisite little debut manages to deftly carry off its titular pun: this is a novel about five sisters who, it is claimed, turn into dogs – a ...

If one can believe the OED – and I refuse to countenance a world where this is not a given – then the frequency with which the word ‘autofiction’ crops up in ...

I like books that are funny. I like books that treat flawed characters tenderly. I like books about parents and children. I like books about human absurdity and folly. I ...

There is a line midway through Vera, or Faith, when the novel’s eponymous protagonist reflects that her family situation has become ‘worse than the time Daddy had gotten into ...

In a recent review, I talked about how fictional secrets ought, if possible, to be kept rationally and meaningfully, but that often this isn’t the case. The ‘but’ you ...

By Simon Demetriou Ideally, I would sit down to write a review the day after I finished reading a book, having had time to ruminate and plan, and for impressions ...

Secrets in stories, whether on page or screen, are tricky things. Everyone knows that in real life, people keep secrets irrationally, not to say stupidly, and that’s just how ...

It takes some guts to write a novel in which your narrator and central character is a comedian, for the simple reason that to pull the character off, you need ...

‘You weren’t supposed to suddenly get a new family at eleven o’clock on a Saturday after you’d sold out of eggs.’ So much of Kevin Wilson’s ...

Of the many ways in which I unintentionally broadcast my lack of coolness to the world, the one we’ll talk about this week is my blind and rabid excitement ...

There are a lot of people who, typically as a result of their own ignorance, tend to dismiss philosophy as navel-gazing solipsism. The immediately flippant counter to these people is ...

George Eliot describes marriage as both a ‘bourne’ and ‘a great beginning’ at the end of Middlemarch, in which we see examples of marriages as both endings and beginnings. Kate ...

‘What would you write if you had to write your obituary? Today, right now.’ Avid readers of this column (I’ve always wanted to write this, but don’t worry; ...