The Silver Book by Olivia Laing
Hamish Hamilton, £20
256pp
The writer Olivia Laing is a wonderful cultural critic who has written several excellent books about artists and writers, including a particularly good one on Virginia Woolf. Yet this second novel, set in 1970s Italy, is a disappointment.
Following the love affair between a London waif, Nicholas, and Danilo Donati, the visionary costume designer, on the set of two classic Italian films - Pasolini's controversial anti fascist final work Salo, and Fellini's Casanova - it takes cinema and its capacity to summon fantasy and desire as its primary subject. Yet while Laing's sentences are lush and intoxicating, the novel falls fatally under its own spell, as though infatuated with its own ability to summon beauty out of nothing.
The final pages, which centre on Pasolini's appalling death, yank the story into Italy's current right wing resurgence - a crude denouement to a novel that feels as artificial as any one of Donati's wondrous sets.
One Aladdin Two Lamps is available now from the Mail Bookshop
One Aladdin, Two Lamps by Jeanette Winterson
Jonathan Cape, £18.99
272pp
"The message of the [Arabian] Nights, regardless of what story we are reading, is the sovereignty of the imagination," writes Jeanette Winterson in this cartwheeling ride through memoir, fiction and politics. "The people who come off badly are those who can't see past their own representation of reality." By which she means true freedom lies in our ability to fashion stories both out of the world around us and our very selves.
Using as a framework the Arabian Nights itself - the greatest metaphor for storytelling as a survival tactic - the Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit author riffs on Trump, feminism and her own much storied life in a restless shapeshifting treatise on art, transformation and the current moment. Yet the application of her argument to AI is both glib and alarming. "This isn't the end of the human," she writes approvingly. "Unless you think being human begins and ends with biology."
Archipelago of the Sun is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Archipelago of the Sun by Yoko Tawada
Granta, £12.99
224pp
Archipelago of the Sun is the ostensibly concluding instalment to a trilogy about Hiruko who has embarked on a journey across the seas with a group of fellow travellers in search of her apparently obliterated homeland of Japan.
Various strange and mysterious encounters and events take place en route, prompting much naval gazing about the nature of identity, borders, language, migration and home itself. Readers who are tantalised by this premise are firmly advised to read the preceding volumes first. Still, whether you enjoy Tawada's writing depends on whether you care for her particular brand of cute, quirky Japanese whimsy. I don't particularly.