"Over the past fifty years, fiction in English has never looked more various. Books bulkier than Victorian three-deckers appear alongside works of minimalist brevity, and experiments with form have produced everything from verse novels to Twitter-thread narratives. This is truly a golden age. But what unites this kaleidoscopic array of genres and styles? Celebrated writer and critic Peter Kemp shows how modern writers are obsessed with the past. In...

Frightening, heartbreaking, and exquisitely calibrated, John le Carre's new novel opens with the gruesome murder of the young and beautiful Tessa Quayle near northern Kenya's Lake Turkana, the birthplace of mankind. Her putative African lover and traveling companion, a doctor with one of the aid agencies, has vanished from the scene of the crime. Tessa's much older husband, Justin, a career diplomat at the British High Commission in Nairobi, sets...

Rex Fortescue, the boss of a financial empire, was sipping tea in his office, when he suffered a painful and sudden death. When the police checked the victim's pockets, they found grain. Miss Marple knows one of the servants in Rex Fortescue's house and comes to help solve the mystery. She soon starts to suspect that she is dealing with a case of crime by rhyme ...