In critical appraisals of Tony Birch’s fiction, certain adjectives appear again and again. Of the prose: “spare”, “concise”, “uncluttered”; the characters “vivid” and rendered with “compassion”. Perhaps it is true that good novels, …

How strange it is to know someone, perhaps even intimately, yet be utterly blind to them at the same time. But how much of that is a wilful blindness? Laila Lalami, who has built her reputation as a novelist on keenly observing the gaps of understanding …