This article is taken from the April 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
Gwendoline Riley in the last ten years has gone from cult figure to literary superpower. In her early career — begun precociously aged 23 — she was adored by the cool kids, and this insider-outsider status seemed to suit her well. Her stark titles — Cold Water, Sick Notes — exemplified both her chilly unsentimentality in stories of young women’s lives and her desire to make every word do its work.
It was only with her fifth novel, First Love (2017), that she became unignorable. It didn’t quite gobble up prizes, but it was shortlisted for everything — Riley’s fare is unlikely to delight everyone on a prize committee. It, and its follow-up My Phantoms (2021), focused on a tricky mother-daughter relationship, with an absent dad in the background, poised in character somewhere between knave and fool.
If Riley’s new novel The Palm House breaks with tradition, it does so only intermittently (and not just in being her first novel not to have a two-word title). The story opens in 2017, when dust from the Sahara Desert was blown to the UK, giving London a “dark yellow sky” and an apocalyptic glow. Here, narrator Laura Miller chews the fat with her friend Edmund Putnam.
Putnam is leaving the magazine Sequence where he has worked for 25 years. Like many of Riley’s men, he is fundamentally a loafer and wisecracker — a man of 49 with no plans. “As well as living had he not spent a good proportion of those years reading, thinking, watching films? Had none of that given him an inkling of how to face life? Some model for elegant survival?”
This first quarter of the book is made up mainly of Riley’s speciality: dialogue at once arch and naturalistic, heavy in italics. Putnam recalls an old friend who used to get “very beady with the FT. Sucking on his cig like this. And peering. Like some ghastly old lag, ransacking the plans of a bank vault.” When Riley does this, we remember not only the character, but the precise mode of expression — the “peering”, the “ghastly old lag”.
Later the same old friend is remembered with “legs crossed, wrist bent back. Like Harold Pinter or something.” Literary comparisons are de rigueur for Riley’s characters, who grew up feeding on the modernists.
Secondary characters are just as meticulously presented. Another staffer at Sequence tells Putnam, “I always say they’ll have to carry me out feet-first!”, and the exclamation mark tells us this is a repeated catchphrase, an imitation of sparkiness from a dullard. Putnam and Laura’s relationship deepens with every hit of dialogue, until she can acknowledge the opacity that his smart chat disguises. “I used to feel, at these times, talking to him, as if I were trying to climb a steep sand dune, whilst he stood on the crest.”
But then we are taken away from Putnam and into Laura’s family life and holidays with her mother and grandmother. Again we get pinpoint characterisation: her grandmother likes to “lift her gin and tonic and tinkle the ice, as if she were on one of those TV travel shows”. The section builds to broad comedy as the three generations of women go shoe shopping, only to have their choices insulted by locals (“Your shoes they are shit”).
When we are whisked away again, the reader may begin to wonder why. Yet the third section is the best of all, featuring Laura’s teenage obsession with a stand-up comedian named Chris Patrick, whose shtick — the comedy of suffering — makes him sound like a vaudeville E.M. Cioran.
Laura and a friend are seduced, at first artistically and then physically. They become groupies, which leads to an excruciating scene where Laura “went with him into his bedroom when he said we should do that. He walked behind me with his hands on my shoulders, making a sort of choo-choo noise.”
After sex — or rape, as Laura seems to be underage — there’s an exchange which epitomises Riley’s mastery of dark comedy. After steering Laura to the train station to get rid of her, Chris Patrick embraces her. “Over the top of my head, he said, ‘You’ll probably get a bit of thrush tomorrow,’ and then, stepping back, ‘You can get cream for that at Boots … ’”
In later parts, characters return — Putnam, mother — and, just when we think one Riley regular is absent, she opens a section with the ominous words: “As for my father — ” And these sections continue to deliver the line-by-line goods: Alan Bennett-ish quips in “she was a pioneering lesbian!”; a woman impersonating her husband’s sleep apnoea sounds “like a frightened Hoover”.
So why did I feel that The Palm House is the first of Riley’s novels not to represent an advance on previous work? It’s because the disparate parts don’t quite merge into a whole. We can see how some sections are amongst the best things Riley has written, yet they don’t seem to feed into the others. Still, even if there’s a lack of coherence, The Palm House on almost any page will give you more delight than most other novels published this year.
Lisa Tuttle is less well-known in this country than she might be, but her status in genres of fiction — horror, fantasy, science fiction — is high, and now she has a crack at mainstream embrace with a reissue of her 2004 novella My Death. (The name shows a brilliant ear for title.)
The book is one of those whose genre is best described as slipstream (a term Tuttle’s former husband Christopher Priest liked to use of his own books). That is, it appears to be set in our ordinary world, but changes will be revealed. The narrator, like the author, is an American writer living in Scotland, who one day has a coup de foudre in Edinburgh’s National Gallery: she sees a painting by W.E. Logan of a woman named Helen Ralston.
This sends our woman down a rabbit hole, and, as she learns more about Ralston — an artist in her own right — she determines to write her biography. Tuttle plugs in little morsels of verisimilitude: Ralston’s books were published by Virago, the narrator tells us, so we go looking for them ourselves. Most excitingly of all, she learns that Ralston is still alive, in her nineties, and she goes to visit her.
When Ralston greets the narrator with, “I know who you are. I was wondering when you’d finally get here,” we sense the floor slipping away, and we’re into an uncertain world. As Ralston talks through her life, the narrator wonders why certain correspondences appear, and why does the young man in one photograph look so much like her own late husband?
To say more would spoil it, but My Death is a book that drives us on with plot, then overturns us at the end — and even keeps some powder in its casing for a smarter still coda. That something so smooth can knot so quickly is a tribute to Tuttle’s skill in making us keen to be convinced: the essence of storytelling.
Lore Segal died in 2024 at the age of 96. An Austrian Jew, she was born in 1928, a year before Anne Frank, and was on the first Kindertransport to England in 1938, where she lived with foster parents before moving permanently to America.
Her friend Vivian Gornick says Segal’s response to everything was “How interesting!”: when the ten-year-old was told she was leaving Austria, she felt an icy chill “just below my chest, where my insides had been” — but she also thought, “Oh, I’m going to England!”
This irrepressible spirit is everywhere in Segal’s writing, not least in the last book she published in her lifetime, Ladies’ Lunch (2023), a collection of stories about a group of eighty- and ninety-something Manhattanites, meeting monthly for conversation. Now, posthumously, we have a sequel: Still Talking, which features the last stories Segal wrote.
The sketches here are short, occasionally slight, but full of Segal’s empathy and wit. The ladies are avatars of Segal and her own friends. In one story, they discuss “forgetting as an Olympic sport”, competing to be the worst at remembering things and determined not to be consoled by one another’s forgetfulness. Sometimes they meet in person, sometimes by Zoom. “Zoom hides more than our wrinkles. Much to be said for Zoom.”
Some things never change with age, such as fretting about one’s children or whether to ask the doctor what’s next or “the fear that we will be found out to be a jackass”. In “Death of the Water Bug”, one character nervously shares a carefully-tended short story with the others, only to have it pointed out that Shakespeare once made the same point in two lines that she took pages to express.
But growing old also provides a sense of perspective. “Learn to think ‘it doesn’t matter’,” suggests one friend. “It’s surprising how many things that applies to.” The book has that lightness of touch that often distinguishes late work, from Graham Greene to Saul Bellow: only the essence matters now.
Segal is still interested in everything, closing the book with her own translation of a poem by Theodore Kramer. “There are no happy endings,” says one of the ladies. Well, this might be one.
