Klara is an AF (an Artificial Friend), a humanoid robot that parents, in this near-future dystopia set in the United States, buy to be company for their children. Klara, though not the most up-to-date model, is quite advanced and has been programmed to have a range of human characteristics and emotions – pity, anxiety, fear, and even possibly love. Klara is purchased to be Josie’s friend. Her duties go little further than being a companion to Josie, a sickly teenager who lives at home with her mother and Melania Housekeeper (a nice touch). When Josie’s condition starts to deteriorate, Klara pleads with The Sun to restore her with its healing powers.

Ishiguro’s imagined future is a grim one, but perhaps not much more grim than our present. It’s a place with a rigid caste system in which the “raised” are the elite, a place where the homeless still sleep in doorways and pollution still obscures the sun, and a place where children do almost everything through their “rectangles”. But Ishiguro’s main preoccupation here isn’t social commentary. It’s more to do with what distinguishes human beings in a world of increasingly clever and sentient machines. If we can programme a machine to love and to feel pity, what makes a human a human? Maybe it isn’t the capacity to love that makes us unique, but the ability to inspire love in others …

Klara and The Sun, written in that deceptively simple, crystal-clear prose familiar to anyone who knows Ishiguro’s novels, is unsettling and captivating. I’m not sure that it’s the masterpiece that many reviewers have said it is, but it’s certainly as thought-provoking as anything I’ve read for a long time.

The painters from the so-called School of London have been getting a lot of expert biographical attention in recent years. William Feaver’s hefty two-volume life of Lucian Freud was completed not long ago and now we have 800+ pages from Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan devoted to Francis Bacon. Francis Bacon: Revelations fills an important gap, sitting as it does between the gossipy, somewhat lurid accounts of Bacon’s life written in the past by friends, acquaintances, and hangers-on, and the more academic accounts of his work by art historians.

No biography, even one this painstaking and thorough, can capture completely an artist or a man as complex as Bacon. Inevitably questions remain, most particularly for me around the circumstances, starting in the 1940s, that propelled Bacon, almost entirely self-taught as an artist, from an interior designer of no real accomplishment to one of the greatest painters of the 20th century. No doubt Bacon benefited from the support of powerful patrons and fellow painters like Graham Sutherland, but what remains mysterious and remarkable (at least for me) is how Bacon’s extraordinary and singular artistic vision appeared to grow and flourish in such unpromising soil in the 1930s and 1940s.

Stevens and Swan previously wrote a much-lauded and prize winning biography of De Kooning (which I haven’t read). Francis Bacon: Revelations only enhances their reputations. Achieving the right balance between work and life is always difficult, but is especially so with an artist like Bacon who lived long enough to become something of an art celebrity and whose life and relationships attracted perhaps excessively salacious attention in the years immediately after his death. Stevens and Swan put the focus where it belongs – on those brilliant paintings. Bacon’s life – the troubled and sickly childhood, the masochistic personal relationships, and the wide circle of friends and sycophants – is here in all its color, as it should be, but it never obscures (and often illuminates) the genius behind the works. Having said that, I ended the book feeling that Bacon’s complex and troubled personality had eluded his biographers, just as it had almost everyone who knew him or thought they knew him. That’s not intended to be a criticism of what I think is a superb biography. It’s merely a reflection of how well Bacon hid from others and from himself.

I don’t tend to read the copy written on a book’s cover flap. Now I remember why. Having finished The Art of Falling, I flipped to the cover to read that Danielle McLaughlin’s debut novel “reveals profound truths about love, power, and the secrets that define us.” That’s just silly and pretentious. The novel does nothing of the kind. It’s a competent enough novel written by an author at the beginning of her career, who in all likelihood is embarrassed by such inflated claims.

The novel tells the story of a curator and her relationship with a famous artist’s surviving family. As she negotiates the acquisition of the artist’s studio, questions arise about who owns a celebrated sculpture. In the background, the curator faces domestic upheaval – a cheating husband, a truculent teenage daughter, and the arrival on the scene of a former lover. That sounds promising, doesn’t it? While there’s no denying McLaughlin’s ambition as she explores ideas about the permanence and ownership of artworks and notions of faithfulness and betrayal, the whole thing never comes together or fulfills its promise for the simple reason that it’s difficult to care for any of the characters or their particular stories.

Fourteen months into the pandemic, Manhattan is showing few signs of recovering its vibrancy. The office workers who used to crowd the sidewalks of Midtown are still working from home. It doesn’t look like they’re returning any time soon. Everyone I talk to gives me the same message: we’ll go back part-time later this year or in 2022, but we’ll never re-occupy our offices in the ways we did before. Time will tell, but for now it feels like a city stuck in a never-ending Sunday morning.

I used to complain about the crowds in galleries and museums. Yesterday, in my first visit for more than a year, MOMA felt like my private museum. If you have longed to study in solitude your favorite Rothko, Pollock or de Kooning, now is your moment. I was alone so long in the room devoted to Matisse’s The Swimming Pool that the motion-sensitive lights switched off.

The purpose of my visit was to see the Alexander Calder exhibition, Modern from the start. Spread over the sculpture garden and some interior galleries, the show includes a number of pieces loaned from other institutions and rarely seen. Calder’s magic was to make sculpture, traditionally that most solid and immutable of art forms, seem fragile, delicate, and impermanent. It’s hard to imagine a genius and a vision better suited to these difficult times.

I love Haruki Murakami’s writing. All of it. That would have once made me part of the in-crowd, but not so much these days. I sense a shift among critics about Murakami. The reviews are getting that little bit less adoring than they used to be, and it feels as if it’s becoming safe and fashionable for some reason to knock him. Not so much a volte face, but certainly the beginnings of a shift. It’s hard to know what’s changed. Yes, he can be repetitive, long-winded, and inconsistent, and he has glaring weaknesses such as the depiction of women in his writing, but that’s been the case for many years.

I’ve always admired his short stories especially, so I was eager to read his latest collection of eight tales, First Person Singular. I expected to enjoy it, and I did very much. Having said that, I admit the flaws that infuriate his critics are here in abundance and this is not by any means Murakami on top form. And yet there are passages of lovely writing and that unique, unmistakable voice.

Now in his early 70s, Murakami seems preoccupied here by time passing, by aging and mortality, and by the strange unreliability of memory. Murakami Man in First Person Singular is as puzzled and confounded by life’s big questions as he always was, and remains consoled by the same small comforts; music, mainly jazz and classical, baseball, and reading. Women, as before, seem to beguile and confuse him – failing to show up when they should, confronting him aggressively without warning, committing crimes, or even killing themselves without explanation. First Person Singular is familiar Murakami but never vintage Murakami.

I was well aware after it won the Booker Prize in 2019 that Girl, Woman, Other was a critical and popular success, but I’m not sure I would have read it without my wife’s fulsome recommendation. I’m very pleased I did. It’s a novel with such distinctive and vibrant energy, and quite unlike anything I can recall reading before. It’s a beautiful kaleidoscope of the experiences of black, British women and a cross-section of society whose voices have for so long been largely muted in, or entirely absent from, UK fiction.

I’m probably guilty of nitpicking, but I wonder about the author’s decision to (almost) eliminate punctuation from the novel. It must, in part at least, have been motivated by a desire to allow the many voices to come across distinctly and singularly, but I found it ended up having the opposite effect and muffling the differences between the characters. No matter. It certainly didn’t diminish my enjoyment and clearly didn’t impede the huge commercial success of the novel.

Grief, suffered alone, can mutate into self-pity and misanthropy. When his wife dies of cancer, James Darke, retired teacher, bibliophile, and world-class snob and curmudgeon entombs himself in the family home. Everyone is shut out. Phones and emails go unanswered. Even the letter box in his front door is removed. Sustaining himself on cigars and alcohol, Darke succumbs to a darkness only occasionally illuminated by a bitter humor. Spoiler alert! He comes out the other side of his bereavement, saved by the love of his daughter and grandson.

Plenty of humor can be found in anger and bitterness, and James Darke is undeniably a great comic character. Neither God, science, literature, or alcohol can keep you alive forever, and ultimately everyone needs to work out life’s meaning for themselves. The lucky ones have the love of others to help them through.

Rick Gekoski is a rare book dealer and many years ago published a very funny account of that peculiar trade (Tolkien’s Gown). Darke is his first novel.

Niall Williams isn’t as well known as he deserves to be. His novels attract good reviews consistently and prizes occasionally, but not the same level of critical attention that some of his peers in Ireland, for example Anne Enright, receive. It’s a shame because there are few novelists as good as Williams when it comes to crafting sentences, not to mention deeply affecting stories.

This is Happiness is a tender and gentle account of a way of life in rural Ireland that’s now largely vanished but which I remember vividly from childhood holidays in West Cork and Connemara. Set in 1958 and in a fictional village called Faha, it tells the story of Noel Crowe, a teenager dispatched to his grandparents’ home in a remote part of West Clare after having bolted from a seminary in Dublin. Noel arrives in a rare moment of sunny, warm weather and in days of transformation as the poles are installed that bring electricity to Faha for the first time. As is the way with such things, on the surface little happens to Noel that summer, but the little that does happen is peculiarly life changing, not least the discovery of love and infatuation and the difference between the two.

The pleasure I get from reading stories has little to do with plot. I’m perfectly happy when nothing happens or appears to happen in a novel. The delight for me that comes from reading anything by Williams is partly the tender evocation of places and people I once knew and recognize in these pages, partly the sheer beauty of his prose, and his appreciation of the rhythms and currents running through our lives. Needless to say, he explains it all better than I can. “It struck me that Irish music was a language of its own, accommodating expression of ecstasy and rapture and lightness and fun as well as sadness and darkness and loss, and that in its rhythms and repetitions was the trace history of humanity thereabouts, going round and round“.

I showed up at 8am, appointment card in hand, just as the doors were opening. Everything was efficiency and briskness. Men and women from the National Guard, every one of them solicitous and polite, were there in large numbers to handle the formalities and steer us towards the smiling nurses. By 8:17am I was vaccinated, had my sticker, and was heading back to my car. Ten dollars for parking. When did NYC become so reasonable and easy?

Will anything change now that I have my Covid-19 vaccination? No and yes. No because it will take many months before we see the kinds of numbers being vaccinated that will propel a real change in how I live. Yes because that tiny jab in the arm injected me with something more than a vaccine, a little bit of hope that the end might just be in sight.

More than two years have passed since I read Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall, but its atmosphere of oppression and menace has lingered. Similar eeriness seeps from her newest novel, Summerwater. Set in a remote holiday camp in Scotland, Summerwater is the account of a single rainy day seen through the eyes not only of the visitors but of the animals and birds nearby. No one writes quite like Sarah Moss. She’s wonderful at narrating people’s inner lives – and especially the continuous monologue in their heads – in a way that feels authentic. She’s brilliant, too, at depicting family life, its tensions, alliances, and tiny fractures, and is as sure-footed with children as she is with adults.

Summerwater is a very special novel. Truthful, honest, and unsettling, it seems to me to confirm Moss as one of the most distinctive and talented novelists writing today.