F RANCIS K ING My novel of the year is Christopher Hope’s
My Mother’s Lover (Atlantic Books, £14.99). Best described as the literary equivalent of a comic-strip history of the colonialism in Africa, it is like one of the great rivers of that continent, carrying everything before it and dazzling the eye with its unrelenting glitter. Many books of far less worth received far more space and praise. Hardly less impressive was The Successor (Canongate, £9.99) by the Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare, a brilliant autopsy on the corpse of Hoxha’s regime. Of non-fiction, Victoria Glendinning’s Leonard Woolf (Simon & Schuster, £25) must have the prize. Woolf tends to be remembered merely as the spouse of a writer far greater than himself. Glendinning’s scrupulously researched and impeccably written account of this wholly admirable man shows that he was much more than just that. Having to persevere, for review in this journal, with Michel Houellebecq’s intellectually swanky but dotty H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (Weidenfeld, £10) made me want to submit an invoice for ten times my usual fee.
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