Author: Andres Kabel

That Ian McEwan is a master literary craftsman, I have never doubted, and I’ve marvelled at many of his novels, in different voices and registers. From the moment I saw that his latest outing, What We Can Know, tackles the pursuit of an academic in dystopian 2119 England of a lost, apparently wonderful 2014 poem, I longed the read it. And to be fair, What We Can Know is smoothly written, artfully constructed, and fascinating in its worldbuilding. McEwan has hypothesized a semi-calamitous future with the diligence that only he can. The future academic burrows into the stored digital life of the long-dead poet and others at a party where the feted (but lost) poem was read in honour of his wife, and the plot is handled assuredly enough. The author’s voice is solid and assertive, almost academic, suiting his plot. Yet What We Can Know runs aground (at least to this reader) on shoals familiar to anyone reading literary titans tackling genre fiction: they’re just not adept at the unfamiliar genres. This novel is half science fiction, and the author’s worldbuilding holds intellectual interest rather than unfolding in a compelling manner; we read and nod, but we are not swept up. And the novel is half a thriller, with a plot that is executed stolidly but without flair; I guessed the climax (with its typically McEwan-style abrupt ending) early on. The net result is What We Can Know is worth reading—for who can resist Ian McEwan?—but never sparks into life.

Australian crime fiction maestro Garry Disher has made many fans throughout his 60-book career but his latest series, featuring country policeman Hirsch, stuck in a dusty quiet town in rural South Australia, might not win him new ones, for it is decidedly low key. Mischance Creek, the fifth in the series, offers an especially sedate first half, as Hirsch alternates routine firearm checks with helping a foreign woman investigating the strange death and disappearance of her parents seven years earlier. Disher creates with loving care the setting of a region beset with an unusually savage Australian drought but the pace is a steady acceleration of seemingly humdrum minor crimes intermingled with Hirsch’s itchy life. Then, just as the reader wonders how Mischance Creek slots into the rural crime fiction genre, with the plotting precision of a master, Disher revs up the action into an onslaught of connecting strands, into a classic battle for justice against mysterious monsters. The final quarter of Mischance Creek is a tour de force and a reminder to all Disher’s fans: let us hope Hirsch returns again and again.

Even as Mick Herron modestly basks in his escalating fame arising from his Jackson Lamb/Slow Horses spy thriller novels, the world is beginning to discover his prior thriller series featuring unconventional, stubborn British private investigator Zoë Boehm. Published over 2003-2009, this series is as stylishly, almost poetically written as the Slow Horses one, but it exudes a very different vibe. Where the spy series, now nine books deep, is kinetic, intelligent, and almost comical, the Zoë Boehm books are altogether more serious, if at all times possessing Herron’s dry wit. Down Cemetery Road opens with a cloistered suburban woman investigating the disappearance of a neighboring child, whereupon Zoë enters the tale to steamroll toward a violent finale. The Last Voice You Hear finds Zoë investigating a woman killed in a train accident and discovering a recurring perpetrator. In Why We Die, a psychopathic band of brothers implodes and hunts for a widow while Zoë rocks into action. And in Smoke and Whispers, Zoë’s body is found in a river, summoning the hero of the first book to come looking for answers. All four instalments are impeccably plotted and rich with detail and nuance. A pleasure to imbibe, the entire series comes recommended for any discerning reader of thrillers.

Number nine in the splendid Slow Horses/Jackson Lamb series of spy thriller, Clown Town see brilliant author Mick Herron in full flight. When River Cartwright, the much assailed and endlessly enthusiastic “real” spook amongst Lamb’s misbegotten crew, discovers that a book is missing from his deceased spook grandfather’s library, he cannot imagine that he has unearthed an old buried secret that threatens Diana Taverner, First Desk at the Park. Events escalate until casualties threaten and then Clown Town shifts gear, as Lamb shifts from scurrilous recluse to once-master-spy avenger. A set piece of violence midway through the book is magnificent, as is the shock denouement. Another genre highlight, Clown Town is a must-read in 2025 (but make sure you tackle the previous eight first).

Why do Irish novelists strike so effectively at the heart, managing to be both unsentimental and timelessly true to heartbreak and joy? Claire Keegan’s 2022 masterpiece, Small Things Like These (see my review), affected me as few recent novels have, and I did not expect, as I began to read Niall Willams’s Time of the Child, to tap into deep emotions as strongly. This is especially true as Williams is a starkly different stylist to Keegan. Time of the Child commences with a seemingly rambling, person-by-person tour of the small town of Faha as Christmas approaches in 1962, the swirling introduction centered around older Doctor Jack Troy and his bookish, stay-at-home daughter Ronnie. And then a baby lands on their doorstep, a baby seemingly inevitably destined to be snapped up into the retrograde Irish orphanage system. The novel takes some time to settle into the tale of Jack, Ronnie, the baby, and yes, Faha (for the town is, yes, a character). Williams’s style is Irish-raconteur, full of sly asides, jammed with affection … the novel becomes a yarn building up with tension as a time of reckoning about the baby approaches. In lesser hands, Time of the Child would be a limping domestic drama; under the grace of Niall Williams’s pen, it is a triumph, surely a 2025 highlight.