Hanif Kureishi's 1990 novel comes to the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon

Hanif Kureishi, who was left tetraplegic by a fall in Rome in 2022, has "spoken movingly" about the sustenance he has drawn from the prospect of this RSC staging of his debut novel, "The Buddha of Suburbia" (1990), a coming-of-age tale set in 1970s London.

So it's a relief and a pleasure, said Dominic Cavendish in The Telegraph, to be able to report that director Emma Rice, who also adapted the book, "has nailed it", creating a funny, engrossing evening that you'll leave feeling on a "rare high".  

Studded with comic sex scenes and the pop music of the period, it is a "glorious" production, said Clive Davis in The Times. I found the novel's prose "laborious at times", but this staging is "preternaturally light and nimble", combining as it does the "knowing satire of the original with an extraordinarily fluid theatrical language".

For a fairly short novel, "The Buddha of Suburbia" is a "big and unwieldy thing", said Louis Chilton in The Independent. An incident-packed, "orgiastic odyssey", it follows Karim, a mixed-race bisexual teenager, from suburban Bromley to the London stage, and on to "druggy excess" in New York.

This production, for which Kureishi is credited as co-adaptor, has a "playful, kaleidoscopic quality", said Sarah Hemming in the FT. The costumes and choreography revel in the period setting. And the superb cast bring great "warmth, pain and humanity" to their characters – led by Dee Ahluwalia, who's "outstanding" as Karim: funny, vulnerable and charismatic. Yet the "episodic nature of the piece does begin to tell: it feels busy, overstuffed and starts to sag towards the end".

Even with a running time of almost three hours, Rice doesn't manage to pack everything in, said Dominic Maxwell in The Sunday Times. Admirers of the book may miss key aspects of the story about Charlie, Karim's punk friend.

They may also find the edgy energy of the novel somewhat dissipated, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. But what's left is a lovable play, filled with deadpan humour and joyful theatricality. "Angela Carter hailed Kureishi's novel for its humour and heart: this show comes with bundles of both."

by Orlando Whitfield

In 2020, the American art dealer Inigo Philbrick was arrested by the FBI on the Pacific island of Vanuatu "and brought to Manhattan in handcuffs", said Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. The 33-year-old was "wanted for his part in one of the biggest art frauds in history": through a complicated series of scams, including forging legal documents and "double-dealing priceless works of art", he was accused of duping art investors out of around $86 million. Philbrick pleaded guilty and was sentenced to seven years in prison; he served just four and was released earlier this year. Now, Philbrick's former friend and business partner, Orlando Whitfield, has written a "compulsively readable" memoir, which charts his rise and fall in "thrilling detail".

The pair became friends in the late 2000s when both were studying art history at Goldsmiths College, London, said Georgina Adam in Literary Review. Both came from privileged arty backgrounds: Whitfield's dad had run Christie's; Philbrick's was head of a museum in Connecticut. While still undergraduates, they set up their own dealership – I & O Fine Art – and Whitfield recounts many "amusing anecdotes" from this time, including their unsuccessful attempt to "prise a Banksy off a wall and sell it". Philbrick rapidly ascended to the "upper echelons of the art world", befriending powerful figures such as Jay Jopling and Sir Norman Rosenthal.

While Whitfield was involved in his early dealings, the pair increasingly drifted apart: "I came to feel like a parvenu around him, a Nick Carraway to his Jay Gatsby," Whitfield recalls. By the time the "edifice came crashing down in 2018", when Philbrick sold a Rudolf Stingel portrait of Picasso "not once but three times", they were barely on speaking terms.

All this is a "fascinating story", said Susie Goldsbrough in The Times. So it's a shame that Whitfield tells it so ineptly. "Majestically self-regarding" and lacking in self-awareness, he offers only limited insights into the "murky" art world, and nor does he reveal much about the motivations of his "high-life loving" friend, for whom he was clearly always a "useful idiot".

I found the book engaging and full of "telling moments", said Philip Hook in The Telegraph – such as when a Goldman Sachs trader admiringly lists practices common in the art world (acting on inside information, artificially inflating prices) which are forbidden on the trading floor. As for Philbrick's motivations, he himself put it best. When a judge asked him why he committed his crimes, he simply replied: "For money, your honour."

Writer known as the "dean of American postmodernists"

Paul Auster, who has died aged 77, was a prolific novelist and memoirist whose work – with its fractured narratives, unreliable narrators and deconstructions of identity – could seem "primed for analysis" by students of literary theory, said The New York Times. A leading figure in the New York literary scene, he was described as the "dean of American postmodernists", and the "most meta of American meta-fictional writers".

But his books were still highly readable, said The Times, and there was something dazzling, and dizzying, about the way he oscillated "between highbrow and lowbrow". As one reviewer observed: "If the avant-garde gestures bore you, a gunshot will soon ring out, or some unfortunate will have his brains bashed in with a baseball bat."

Paul Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1947. His father, Samuel, was a remote and distant figure; his mother, Queenie, realised on her honeymoon that she regretted marrying Samuel. Only years later did Paul discover that when his father was six, he'd heard his mother shoot his father dead. Paul found refuge from the strains at home in his passions: baseball and reading. The latter was fuelled by an uncle going abroad, and leaving boxes full of books at their house. But the formative event of his childhood took place at summer camp, when he was 14. He and some other children were in the woods when a storm broke out. As they crawled under a wire fence to get back, lightning struck and killed the boy just ahead of him. It left him with the sense that random events can alter everything in an instant, that we face "endless forking paths".

"We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence," he told The New York Times in 1995. "Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second. People who don't like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that's how life is."

He studied literature at Columbia University, and then moved with his soon-to-be first wife, the writer Lydia Davis, to Paris, where he scraped a living by translating French literature, and started to publish his own work in literary journals. They returned to New York in the mid-1970s with just nine dollars to their name; their son Daniel was born in 1977. Auster published a few volumes of poetry, which he said had "no public life at all". He tried, and failed, to make money from a baseball card game he'd devised; and his marriage collapsed. His father's death saved his life, he said: a small legacy enabled him to write his first prose book, "The Invention of Solitude". It examined his relationship with his father, and in it he expressed the hope that he'd be a better father to his own son.

This came to seem yet more poignant, said The Telegraph, when it emerged, years later, that he was estranged from Daniel, who'd become a drug addict. Daniel died of an overdose in 2022, awaiting trial for manslaughter over the death of his baby daughter, who had ingested heroin and fentanyl in his care. Auster said he would have gone off the rails himself, had it not been for his second wife, the novelist Siri Hustvedt, with whom he had a daughter, Sophie.

His first novel, "City of Glass", a postmodern take on a detective story featuring a character called Paul Auster, was rejected by 17 publishers, but ultimately became the first volume in his hugely acclaimed New York Trilogy. He wrote nearly 40 books in all, drafting them in longhand, then typing them up on a typewriter; and in the 1990s, he branched out into screenplays, including "Smoke", set in his own neighbourhood of Brooklyn and starring Harvey Keitel. Although he sold well in the US, he was even more popular in Europe; in France, he had "rock star" status. His brooding, saturnine looks may have helped in that, though friends said that these belied his natural warmth, wit and generosity.