Catnip for culture lovers

Contrasting works from a veteran master of invention and two newer faces who blur fact and fiction

IT’S BEEN NOTED THAT this year’s Booker Prize shortlist is mostly debut novels, but it’s not new for literary awards to abandon foalish newcomers as they learn to stand unaided. When Martin Amis’s first novel won the Somerset Maugham Award, “I told myself … get used to it. And that never happened again.” Or take William Boyd, plucky bestselling, critically acclaimed underdog, regularly garlanded in the 1980s and 90s but whose mantelpiece on the right-hand side is bare.

Boyd, like any four-decade author who hasn’t rationed the output, has had a bumpy old path, with lows including humdrum thrillers like (2009), or the authorised James Bond® novel ™ (2013), which can only have arisen because, as Adam Mars-Jones put it, “Boyd sees himself rather readily as a force of nature, a sort of one-man national park,” or