Author: Andres Kabel

So it surges to an end. What is forecast to be bundled into a long novel titled The Elements, to be published in September, a quartet of four novellas (see my review of Water; my review of Earth; my review of Fire), concludes with Air. Whereas the first three novellas tackled increasingly grim tales of sexual abuse, Air seems to offer the balm of resolution. Incorporating characters from all the prior novellas, the plot of Air commences with little drama: a father sits next to his teenage son on a plane heading to an unspecified meeting overseas, a journey the father must use to redeem himself and unite with his boy. As ever, Boyne has superb control of his material and the first half of the novel is a slow, hypnotic burn that peels away the abuses of the past. The author’s measured, calibrated style is on full display and the second half of Air is a wondrous journey leaping from the past to the future, a fitting and triumphant conclusion to a riveting series.

Australian author Malcolm Knox is nothing if not daring, and The First Friend is dramatically audacious, tackling as it does one of the evildoers of the Twentieth Century, Stalin’s secret police chief, Lavrentiy Beria. Knox uses the time-honored device of narrating The First Friend through the eyes of Beria’s fictional childhood friend, Vasil Murtov. Set in 1938, just before Beria’s ascendancy to the near top of Stalin’s pyramid, it follows Murtov as he ferries Beria around and provides a foil for the megalomaniac sadist’s ego, all the while desperate to protect his family. The plot hinges on a proposed grand Black Sea visit by the dictator and the reader knows from the start that all will go wrong and blood will flow. Savagely satirical and laced with wit so sharp one shifts from laughter to horror and back, the novel is, as such satires tend to be, full of wordy dialogue and readily identifiable as an outsider’s spoof, so it only barely renders Murtov’s fate as tragic. I think the novel’s closest relative is Armando Iannucci’s 2017 satirical film The Death of Stalin. Viewed as such, and especially if you know little about Stalin’s horrific reign, The First Friend is a crackling, adventurous riot.

The eleventh novel of Tanzanian-born, British-domiciled writer Abdulrazak Gumah, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature four years ago, Theft is a sashaying coming-of-age story set in the aftermath of the African revolution that created Tanzania in the 1960s, a revolution that we barely glimpse as backdrop. Actually, we witness three children become teenagers, then adults: handsome and clever Karim, abandoned (initially at least) by his mother, who ends up shuttling between birthplace island Zanzibar and the nation’s capital, Dar es Salaam; Fauzia, an intelligent but anxious girl who falls for Karim; and, as the fulcrum of the novel, Badar, a destitute servant boy who ends up under Karim’s wing. The intertwined dramas of these three, woven around complicated family stories, contain plenty of narrative meat for a rousing literary melodrama, and the African backdrop with its various milieus is fascinating, but the novel is somehow leached of drama. Perhaps it’s the author’s easygoing storytelling style, which makes for quick reading, that dials down Theft, but the end result is an intriguing read that never ignites.

Word of mouth acclaims the lyricism of Tasmanian author Robbie Arnott’s fiction, especially in relation to the natural world. Dusk is my entry point into his oeuvre and I admit I’m smitten. The storyline seems deceptively simplistic: knockabout twins hear about a bounty on a fearsome, rogue puma, and they ride into the mysterious highlands in pursuit of a chance of money. What they encounter, when shaped by a superb novelist like Arnott, is both stunning natural beauty and wildness, and the best and worst of humanity. The author’s luminescent, rhythmic prose (redolent in parts of Cormac McCarthy without his clipped phrasing) lights up every page, and his heartfelt dissection of the characters of the twins, plus a surefooted, twisty plot, drive the reader through a read that only occasionally founders on excessive explanatory rumination. The climax is brilliant, just brilliant. Dusk represents wilderness-centered storytelling at its best.

One of the most thoughtful and capable novelists of recent times, intent on exploring all manner of aspects of humanity, John Boyne had embarked on a quartet of novellas organized around modern issues of abuse and misogyny, The first, Water, was riveting, the second, Earth, proved to be darker, less involving, but still thoughtful. The third novella, Fire, establishes its baseline plot in Boyne’s customary surefooted way: Gilda, a renowned skin graft surgeon presents a privileged life of high earnings, prestigious house, fancy car, but underneath she leads a terrible, second life, a life perhaps instilled by a dark, dark childhood. The theme is clear: behind the presence of evil, nature or nurture? No plot spoilers here, but this novella’s subject matter is pitch black and although the author’s stylish prose and consummate grasp of timing renders a quick, exciting read, Fire does not have the grip of the earlier two. With all the best will in the world, I was unable to find my way into the character of Gilda, with the result that a certain emptiness reigns at the end. Fire: compelling but distanced, a vital read nonetheless.

Not having read novelist Kristin Hannah before, I came to The Women because its subject matter, the experience of female combat nurses (in an era when combat nurses were overwhelmingly male) in the Vietnam War, struck me as instructive not only historically but for our present times. Let me be direct: The Women is a novel in two parts. The first half, covering the two-year combat experience of “Frankie” McGrath, a callow upper-class Californian, in two of the Vietnam combat hospitals, one of them in the territory eventually overrun during the 1968 Tet offensive, is thrilling and moving. This half is superbly, graphically written, depicting unadorned the horror of that war and indeed all wars. On the basis of that fifty percent, I recommend The Women wholeheartedly. The second half, recounting a Vietnam veteran’s postwar travails in a home country suddenly against the war (as it should have been), full of tragedies, mistreatment, PTSD, and female comradeship, could have been written by a different author, for it lurches rather than flows and falls into near-romance-category simplification. The author’s plotting holds up to the climax, so the overall read is enjoyable, but at the end, I found myself wishing for a different, much deeper and much more resonant postscript half. By all means, buy and recommend The Women, for this is an important tale; you may find yourself more attuned than I to the author’s late stylistics and emotionality.

Upon hearing that John le Carré, spy novelist maestro, has a novelist son writing an additional, ninth volume in the George Smiley canon, what is a sensible reaction? I suggest to you most readers would be as skeptical as I was. Yet it only took a few pages of Karla’s Choice to make me gasp with astonishment. Nick Harkaway seems to have stepped right away from his prior seven novels and imbibed his father’s genius. On the page, Harkaway reads like, sounds like, and feels like John le Carré, to an amazing and gratefully received extent. For Karla’s Choice is brilliant. Set at the height of the Cold War in 1963, it stars, of course, George Smiley, rotund, mild-mannered super spy, who has resigned to restore his marriage. Summoned for a quick temporary job when a Soviet killer sent to assassinate a Hungarian emigre in London defects, he plunges in. An intricate game of intricate spying ensues, behind which sits Smiley’s nemesis, and the book’s plot roars along with great gusto. Best of all, Harkaway’s prose is pitch perfect, that rolling deluge of rhythmic, complex paragraphs. That the grand master’s son should produce the best spy novel of 2025 startles me, but don’t take my word for it, run to buy Karla’s Choice.