This book arrived recently, and I’m very much enjoying reading it. It’s a kind of guided tour or survey of the types of fiction that have appeared in the last fifty years (mainly). The subtitle says it all: A reader’s guide to the dazzling diversity of modern fiction.

The author is the fiction reviewer for the Sunday Times, and he has organised the book into the following themes:

• Introduction: Retroland: the prevailing past.

• Ends of empire: the imperial past and its aftermath.

• Scars and silences: the personal past and its aftermath.

• Resurrection writing: the historical past and its afterlife.

• Post-scripts: the literary past and its afterlife.

• Back to the future: the impending past.

From a quick glance through its pages, the book appears to group together novels and novelists into these themes. For example, one of the subjects in the section called Post-scripts is Sherlock Holmes, in which the author details the books written by authors other than Conan Doyle that feature Holmes and Watson.

The underlying idea very much reminds me of The Life of Crime: Detecting the history of mysteries and their creators

by Martin Edwards. That is a similar romp through a huge amount of fiction, in this case crime fiction.

The advantage of such books is that they enable you to see the wood for the trees, and the connections one might otherwise miss. I intend to review this book in due course.