Stephanie Cross
THE INFATUATIONS BY JAVIER MARIAS (Hamish Hamilton £18.99)
The only certainties in life are generally held to be death and taxes. But in this metafictional murder mystery by acclaimed Spanish author Javier Marias even the dead can’t be taken for granted.
SECRECY
Entering Florence in 1691, sculptor Gaetano Zummo is jumpy, and the severed heads at the city’s prison are only partly to blame. Years ago Zummo was hounded from his native Sicily by poisonous rumours, but at last his luck seems to have turned: the work
QUESTIONS OF TRAVEL
Growing up in Eighties Sydney, Laura dreams of travel, her imagination fired by her globe-trotting great aunt’s suitcase of souvenirs. On the other side of the Indian Ocean, Sri Lankan Ravi does the same, but his ambitious mother values an education in
Jim Crace, author of Booker-shortlisted Quarantine: 'I'm leaving Craceland'
As the protagonist of Harvest, Jim Crace's 11th (and probably last) novel reflects, you can't tell from a man's work how he might live in private. And so it proves. Crace - warm, hospitable, unfailingly modest and self-confessedly private - inhabits an un
