Some novelists, such as John Updike, consider the novel to be Greene's masterpiece. Then, in 2005, it was chosen by TIME magazine as one of the hundred best English-language novels since 1923 – yet, it hardly rates as one of the better Greene novels – maybe either ‘The End of the Affair’ or ‘Brighton Rock’. Some say ‘The Heart of the Matter’ is better.

Many of the dangers of literature – about which we have long since forgotten – are on show in this little story of seemingly little consequence – a story by Dostoevsky – one of literature’s real bad boys (by all accounts just a frightful human being). So, there’s: 1. the romanticisition of loneliness, isolation and all squalid existences 2. the romanticisition of unhappiness – especially through the glorification of unrequited live…

With a ‘modest rating of 3.8 out of 5 stars’ on Goodreads, readers either ‘love its wild imagination or find its dense lists of historical myths overwhelming’. What some see as ‘a strange, brilliant, and exhausting fever-dream’, including Foucault, who prefaces most editions with a typical Foucault essay, others see it as flat, cold, strange, dull, and utterly irrelevant. It’s kind of both.

The author of ‘The Moustache’ is someone who, despite himself, turns out novel after novel that are original, odd, and so novel, but not ‘novels’. But then, what is a novel. As with a poem, whatever claims to be a poem. So, whatever claims to be a novel. And this is Carrère’s life ‘as a Russian Novel’. Though it is nothing like any Russian novel – those famed for being ‘ Russian novels’ – you’re ever likely to read.

Even as a pastiche of the great 1600s novel ‘Don Quixote’ by Cervantes, Greene’s novel nonetheless matches the feel of that huge book, its scale and tone, charming the reader as though over a thousand pages, as opposed to the few hundred that he wrote. What the New York Times almost dismisses as a ‘quasi novel’, and what is spoken of as one of Greene’s later and minor works, even as one of his more light, even more frivolous books, has every claim to the title ‘novel’ and ‘serious’, as well as entertaining, and all the other terms bandied about so liberally on the backs of every published novel.

Speculative fiction is a catch-all term that includes fantasy, science fiction, science fantasy, supernatural horror, alternate history, magical realism, utopia / dystopia, apocalyptic / post-apocalyptic fiction... and every blend of these and other fictions… and a lot more besides. But what of gothic fiction? Detective fiction? Realist / naturalistic fiction? Speculative fiction doesn’t merely mean fiction that speculates. Because all fiction does.

Could the ultimate measure of a novel, be ‘veracity’? That fiction – prose defined by not being real – must, first and foremost, be real – is one of those quirks of art that make art ‘art’. Fiction that is implausible, or too shallow, or insufficiently sophisticated, that is, for want of a better word, basic, that is lacking the texture and rough angles of the real world, where consequences are vague, effects of causes unlikely, and in which no one has any skin in the game – this is bad fiction.

“John Le Carré new book -- his seventh in thirteen years -- is a thoroughly enjoyable English spy novel about the discovery of a double agent at the highest level of the British Intelligence bureaucracy. It reconfirms the impression that Le Carré belongs to the select company of such spy and detective story writers as Arthur Conan Doyle and Graham Greene in England and Dashiell Hammett, James M.

When an author’s meaning is hard to decipher there may be one of two things going on – it’s poorly written, or it’s very cleverly written. This problem is consequent of the reader wanting to / needing to work things out, and so the author’s effort to obfuscate. The question is – is the obfuscation deliberate or not. But either way – a balance needs to be struck.

Here we have a ‘rich story of the immigrant experience’, one which is a ‘vivid, immersive multigenerational saga about life for Koreans in Japan’, as well as a ‘tale of resilience and poignant emotional conflict’, one which Barack Obama no less accounts ‘a powerful story’. It is a New York Times best seller, receiving great reviews from The New York Times, The Guardian, The Irish Times – describing it as ‘a masterpiece of empathy’ – on the "Best Fiction of 2017" lists from Esquire, the BBC, the Washington Post, named by The New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2017, and thengetting on The New York Times' 100 Best Books of the 21st Century list.

Do we need more historical fiction? More history? Haven’t we got enough? These, and other ridiculous questions, hint at what historical fiction is for. And what it is not for. Does Myers set out to Dick-Turpin-ise King David Hartley, chief of The Cragg Vale Coiners, who runs, briefly and badly, a successful coining business and protection racket? Or is there something more interesting going on here?

Realism One of the great novelists of European critical-realist fiction – Émile Zola – really takes it up a gear when he sits down to write about stuff that never happened, first putting pen to paper in 1871. This really is the great project of our time: telling it like it is – as opposed tom telling it how we wish it was, or in some other way gaslighting your reader.

Reading fiction at all can seem, to some people, an odd thing to do. For it is, if you think about it, an odd thing to do. But then, some people watch tv, some people listen to podcasts, even about things that are not real. And we all look at our phones: isn’t reading a book somehow similar to watching a whole load of TikTok videos one after another?

On reading the whole of Zola’s Rougon-Macquart Novel Series (1871-1893) – fifteen of them this year – it has become apparent that some are nowhere near as good as others. Leaving aside his other works of fiction – including the excellent but non-RM ‘Thérèse Raquin’, this is my top 20: 1 – Nana (1880) 2 – The Ladies’ Paradise (1883)

This is the twentieth and final novel of his Rougon-Macquart series – all showing how heredity and environment can be used to explain how members of one family come to a sticky end over the course of the Second Empire: 1851-1870. However, what it became instead is a defining critique of the newly realised bourgeois class, characterised by the obsessive accumulation of stuff, of wealth, especially property, the neurotic building up of inherited equity, including all other aspects of material wealth, in order to acquire social position defined almost exclusively by this same accumulation.

Angélique – the protagonist for this novel – is a fairy tale type character with all the depth of a children’s fairy story – but this doesn’t lend itself to Zola’s naturalistic and scientific approach: how doe you write a late nineteenth century realistic novel about a character living out the life of a medieval story book? As with ‘The Sin of Abbé Mouret of thirteen years before, Zola struggles with characters with no real purchase on the real world: the wheels come off when his psychology goes ‘off road’.

In this the fifth novel in the Rougon-Macquart series, Zola focuses on the church and the clash of celibacy and sexuality, how unnatural it is: how the church perverts sexuality and what it means to be a physical human being. However, Zola nonetheless has a thoroughly catholic view of sexuality and virginity, or purity and goodness, and gets bogged down in this, much to a modern reader’s bemusement – though this soon turns to frustration – did anyone ever really obsesses about this stuff in such a shallow way?

With the Rougons back once more in their ancestral home of rural Provence, they can truly be their bourgeois best: small minded, underhand, selfish, corrupt and fatally flawed. Though there are more infamous bourgeois beasts in Zola – such as Octave Mouret in the he tenth novel ‘Pot-Bouille’ or ‘Pot Luck’ and the eleventh novel ‘The Ladies' Paradise’ – it is those in Zola’s Plassans – based on his home town in the rural and sun scorched Midi – Aix-en-Provence – who seem to be the most contemptible.

These ‘searing, evocative stories’ are said to be ‘as graceful and subtle as Chekhov’. They are certainly unusual and full of sentences that will give the reader pause. I guess this is what passes as thought-provoking – something which fiction that you read for plot doesn’t make you do – that is think. What ‘good writing’ – the clearest of easily read limpid prose – can eschew – getting the reader stuck, making him uncomfortable, or getting her to question her preconceptions, ways of reading / looking at the world/ herself… changing how we think.

A pretty damning review: “For a book with such promise, Yesteryear is a real lesson in not allowing a fun premise to get in the way of a good story.” But when we consider novels in terms of what’s missing, we are necessarily spoilt for choice. Because when a novelist writes a novel they are choosing, and choosing is excluding, and necessarily, omitting a lot more than is included.

What does it take to be a Pulitzer-winning novel? From Harper Lee’s ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ in 1961, John Cheever’s stories in 1979, Philip Roth’s ‘The Ghost Writer’, John Kennedy Toole’s ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’, John Updike’s ‘Rabbit Is Rich’, Marilynne Robinson’s ‘Housekeeping’, Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple’ to Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’(a pretty good period in the 1980s), and back to Philip Roth again in the 1990s, for ‘Operation Shylock’ and ‘Sabbath's Theatre’ and ‘American Pastoral’, as well as Carol Shields’ ‘The Stone Diaries’ and Richard Ford’s ‘Independence Day’; latterly Don DeLillo’s ‘Underworld’, Michael Cunningham ‘s ‘The Hours’, Jonathan Franzen’s ‘The Corrections’, Edward P.

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Why do we read science fiction? Why do we read anything? It’s hard to know at times. When you pick up a book such as this – which is so overwhelmingly silly,. Surely, it can only have a charm for those of us who read it in our distant childhoods. Is science fiction just for kids? There is the notion that Sci-Fi is the great "literature of ideas” of the 20th century – Big Brother, the feelies< Handmaids and all that – where big ideas are explored in all their complex human, technological, and social ramifications.

Some writer’s are just such pleasant company. So erudite and what once was called wise – but might better be called subtle. Or sensitive. Or aware. Such as the incomparable W G Sebald. Who, it turns out, bears comparison to Parks, when he sets off on a trek, and bringing you, the reader, with him, regales you with such a riveting account of anything at all – but with Parks it’s one pretty intense, pretty odd, pretty fascinating story – just how did Garibaldi do it – what we know he did – but that was, beforehand, and whilst he was attempting it, a seemingly impossible feat – the improbable defeat the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, with his rag tag army of men committed to the cause.

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How do master storytellers approach the act of walking in their writing? What are the subtle yet important differences between crafting a non-fiction travelogue and weaving walking into a fictional na...

Ever since he wrote ‘The Moustache’ (1988), a profoundly good and original work of fiction, he’s been banging out non-fiction titles: ‘I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick’ (2005), ‘The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception’ (2002), ‘My Life as a Russian Novel (2010), which I’ve yet to read, ‘Other Lives But Mine’ (2012), ‘Limonov’ (2015), ‘The Kingdom: A Novel’(2017) – though not a novel – and now this – an account of the November 2015 Paris attacks, known as V13 in France because they took place on Friday (vendredi) the 13th.

The eighth novel in the 'Rougon-Macquart' series, deals with widowed protagonist Hélène Grandjean who ekes out a sheltered existence with her sickly daughter in bourgeois area of Paris, and then falls in love. It’s an odd novel, but not odd enough to save it. It’s as though Zola is trying to do something that he doesn’t quite pull off, making Paris itself a main character in the novel, though a Paris that the protagonist doesn’t know.

A curious little book that could be brilliant, but rather falls flat. Barnes never gets the balance right between biography, criticism and fiction – who is the novel’s protagonist? We don’t get quite enough of him. So really, the only interesting bits are where we delve into the writing of Flaubert – which might make the reader wonder – why waste my time here, when I could re-read ‘Madame Bovary’, one of the greatest ever novels, or ‘Sentimental Education’ – not far behind – or ‘Salammbô’, one of the most unusual things ever written – or even – where this book delves the most – one of the greatest short stories ever written – ‘A Simple Heart’.

This is the eighteenth of Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle, but follows on from The Kill, which was published almost twenty years before, continuing to follow the exploits of Saccard, the amoral business man, who values money absolutely. Here we have financial speculation, the frenzy of the stock market, greed, and corruption in Second Empire France. And it’s not that different to financial speculation, greed, and corruption of today.

After reading 13 of Zola’s twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart, my top ten keeps changing – though the top 5 are remaining pretty solid. But there’s a new entry at number 6: ‘The Kill’, which like ‘The Beast Within’ has the melodrama needed to make an exhaustive study of some backwater of Third Empire France, or a three page description of a cheese stall in Les Hallè, or a description of a cutting along the Le Havre train line, or of the upper floor of an apartment block on one of the new boulevards, or a six page description of the exotic plants in a hothouse… into the page turning beast that Zola can produce, time and time again – as epitomised by his 1867 ‘Thérèse Raquin’.

Often, when we assess reading we are assessing writing. Rather than taking issue with this, and changing the way we assess reading, making into a test of knowledge (do you remember what the word X means / how it is used), if we just accept this as the way it has to be, and follow the logic to its conclusion, then, when we ‘teach reading’, we are really teaching children how to ‘write’ about texts.

Zola complains that his novel has been ‘mis-read’. Readers do that. What’s interesting here is Zola’s anger, his frustration, and his insistence that he’s doing science. Then he ‘suspends the experiment’. Luckily for us, he decides to stay the course: the experiment continues in the subsequent 18 novels of the Rougon-Macquart Cycle for which he is now rightly famous.

On re-reading this modern dystopian classic, and on recently re-reading Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’, I found myself wondering: what should a good dystopian novel do? Speak to the anxieties of the time – very much as Atwood’s does here: genetic engineering, the dangers of advancing technology, scientific hubris, the excessive pride, overconfidence, and arrogance often displayed in scientific pursuits, with researchers overestimating their competence and disregard limitations and potential downsides, what’s called "playing God", which is a problem when you’re not God.

Mississippi State’s rise in reading scores - often called the "Mississippi Miracle" - built form the Literacy-Based Promotion Act (2013) - transformed state wide education so that, from ranking 49th nationally in fourth-grade reading, it is now in the top 10 - with the highest rate of improvement nationally for students from poorer backgrounds: this has been attributed to long-term systemic changes, evidence-based reading instruction (the "Science of Reading" which emphasises phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension), deploying literacy coaches, early intervention & screening, regular progress reports, high accountability and early identification of struggling readers, as well as standardised implementation of policies.

“Project Follow Through was the most extensive educational experiment ever conducted. Beginning in 1968 under the sponsorship of the federal government, it was charged with determining the best way of teaching at-risk children from kindergarten through grade 3. Over 200,000 children in 178 communities were included in the study, and 22 different models of instruction were compared. The communities that implemented the different approaches spanned the full range of demographic variables (geographic distribution and community size), ethnic composition (white, black, Hispanic, Native American) and poverty level (economically disadvantaged and economically advantaged).

The Kill is the only the second novel in Émile Zola's 20-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart, dealing with the loose sexual morality and the lust for money of the extremely wealthy Nouveau riche, a group and a feature that Zola felt defined the Second French Empire – a fundamentally corrupted society, despite its undoubted energy, momentum and liberality. But now, Zola is writing about it after it has come to an ignominious end in 1870.