Book Reviews

First published 1904.  Methuen, paperback, 2005, translated by Michael Frayn, 1978 (revised to 1990), pp 152 (main text pp 67). Chekhov called this play a comedy, but the original producer, Stanislavsky, insisted that it was a tragedy [p xxii]. ...

First published 1968.  Pan, paperback, 1977, pp 222, c.75,000 words. This is a collection of fourteen short stories, loosely connected by the need for the protagonist(s) to escape from a bad situation.  Some are set on a future Earth, but...

First published 2021.  Picador, paperback, 2022, pp 412, c.70,000 words. This is quite a short book, despite being spread over 412 pages: 70,472 words to be exact, according to the pointless data given at the end of the text.  A lot of pages...

First published 2016.  4th Estate, paperback, 2017, pp 440, c.150,000 words. du Sautoy is a professor of Mathematics at Oxford University as well as Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science and has presented several television programmes,...

First published 1974.  Penguin, paperback, 1976, pp 288, c.110,000 words. Condon was a hugely successful writer, and quite a few films have been made from his books, notably at least two versions of The Manchurian Candidate.  His books are...

First published 2020.  David Fickling, paperback, 2021, pp 212, c.40,000 words. Nurse says that this is a question that has been asked from the dawn of time, and today there is no standard definition.  The book is an attempt to lay out an...

First published 1980.  Penguin, paperback, 1981, pp 251, c.85,000 words. Amis is of course well known for writing comic novels, so I assumed this was going to be another, particularly given the cover blurb.  It does have its comic elements,...

First published 2010.  Corsair, paperback, 2011, pp 336, c.80,000 words. Nice title, but what does it mean?  I had visions of someone powerful who had become upset and has sent his goons round to teach the miscreant a lesson.  Wrong. ...

First published 2021.  Hodder, paperback, 2022, pp 290, c.100,000 words. When I first saw the title of this book I had no trouble naming considerably more than nine metals.  In the story it is explained that this new comet-born substance is...

First published 2018.  Sceptre, paperback, 2019, pp 182, c. 45,000 words. What is this book about?  Don’t expect to learn any physics from it.  It’s a philosophical meditation on how the study of physical phenomena have revealed incredible...