New library in Birmingham
04 Sep 2013 01:58:02
Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager shot by the Taliban for championing the right of girls to an education, is to formally open Europe's largest public library in Birmingham on Tuesday.
The £188m building contains about a million books, access to a vast film and television archive belonging to the British Film Institute and is the new home of the second largest repository of Shakespeare's works in the world.
Malala was attacked by Taliban gunmen on a school bus near her former home in Pak... Read Full Story
Unexploded by Alison MacLeod
04 Sep 2013 01:53:44
Philip is lost in his own fear and imagination and has become convinced that Hitler is going to take over the Brighton Pavilion and install his evil henchmen. This apparently was a real rumour at the time.
This is a reassuringly uncomplicated literary novel, and is deservedly longlisted for the Booker prize. It has a natural ease and absence of artifice. It's meticulously researched without showing off about it. It's full of character studies and psychological insights but doesn't shove them do... Read Full Story
Book The Trader of Saigon by Lucy Cruickshanks
04 Sep 2013 01:50:16
It seems cruel to compare a young first-time novelist like Lucy Cruickshanks with a seasoned professional such as Kate Atkinson's work from last week, but such is the nature of literary prizes.
I can soften the blow slightly by noting that Cruickshanks has plenty of time to go on to better things, and that The Trader of Saigon definitely has its merits. Yet the fact remains that moving from the smooth prose of Life After Life to this novel felt like leaving a rendition by the Berlin Philharmoni... Read Full Story
Carnival by Rawi Hage
01 Sep 2013 23:38:36
Fly, the cool-cat narrator of Rawi Hage's third novel, is a taxi driver living in a house full of books and rats in an unnamed city in Latin America. As he roams town he encounters night owls including a cuckolded husband, a drug lord who makes him his mule, and a pimp who claims to have been a child soldier in Angola. After a shift, he enjoys flirty philosophical debates with his next-door neighbour (and idle crush) Zainab.
These stories are told in a colourful style: Fly thinks of college gir... Read Full Story
Armchair Nation by Joe Moran
01 Sep 2013 23:37:33
Moran, a youthful professor of cultural history, is scholarly but welcoming – as happy to reference Kenneth Williams as Raymond Williams – and has a good ear for the wry detail. There's plenty to smile at. In a sympathetic account of ATV's adored but critically lampooned soap Crossroads, he sums up the dilemma for 1970s quality controllers in a quote from the IBA chairwoman, who described the show as "distressingly popular", then tops it with the Evening Standard's critic Alexander Walker, who w... Read Full Story
Snapper by Brian Kimberling
01 Sep 2013 23:36:34
The novel is a jumble of memories and anecdotes that chart the misadventures of philosophy graduate Nathan, who rather improbably makes his living as a glorified bird-watcher paid to do field research by Indiana University. He painstakingly notes the habits of songbirds and describes his patch of forest with astonishing clarity, yet he remains oblivious to his own chaotic existence.
From Nathan's perspective, Indiana is an enchanting mess of contradictions, "my own lifelong imbroglio", a place ... Read Full Story
Call It Dog by Marli Roode
30 Aug 2013 01:53:49
Call It Dog opens with Jo, a South African-born, London-based journalist who has come home to report on anti-immigrant urban riots, answering the summons of her estranged father, Nico. As she drives to meet him in a remote location, Jo struggles against the painful knowledge, born of bitter experience, that he is bound to let her down. It soon becomes evident that something is badly wrong. Nico is on the run, accused of the murder of Vusi Silongo, a black man who was abducted by special forces f... Read Full Story
Inventing the Enemy by Umberto Eco
30 Aug 2013 01:52:46
This is, of course, not the case; what it shows, rather, is that Eco – as anyone who has read The Name of the Rose would know – is at home in the middle ages. Then again, he is at home in all ages: in the first essay in this collection translated by Richard Dixon, which also gives it its title, he cites, in the course of two pages Priscus of Pnion (5th century AD), Rodolphus Glaber (10th), Liutprand of Cremona (10th), Edgar Bérillon (20th), Felix Fabri (15th), Giuseppe Giusti (19th) and Ian Flem... Read Full Story
MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood
30 Aug 2013 01:51:01
"And there's a sort of houseparty going on, you see? And there are all sorts of people there, like a retired colonel and a famous lady clairvoyant, an angry young man and a flighty young thing – isn't this just a fascinating cast of characters? – but then there's an unexpected snowstorm and they're completely cut off, and then … there's a murder! Yes; a murder. But it turns out one of the guests is a famous amateur detective, and …"
Banks's thoughts came back to me while I was reading Margaret ... Read Full Story
Short stories "must read" in the end of summer
28 Aug 2013 04:04:41
It's not just that her latest collection, Search Party, features a number of characters in transition themselves (a mother with cancer on her way to Lourdes, a sister attending her sister's memorial service, a former cop working as a security guard in a school … ) It's that her stories are so engrossing, so beautifully written, so complete without being long, that you can pick one up, briefly lose yourself in it and then get back to packing up the summer house, or dealing with the school supply ... Read Full Story
No Place to Call Home by Katharine Quarmby
28 Aug 2013 03:45:13
This is nothing new. As Katharine Quarmby shows so clearly, there is a long and horrible history of hatred towards Gypsies and Travellers, from medieval days when they were killed, enslaved and branded in Britain to the slaughter of perhaps half of Europe's Roma in the Holocaust. Their nomadic lifestyle arouses suspicion from settled communities, as remains all too apparent today, although I was amazed to learn that British state officials still wrested gypsy children from their parents in my li... Read Full Story
Burial Rites by Hannah Kent
27 Aug 2013 02:41:22
The murders took place on the night between 13 and 14 March 1828, at Illugastadir, on the Vatnsnes peninsula in northern Iceland. Four months later, Magnúsdóttir, Sigurdsson and Gudmundsdóttir were found guilty in a district court and sentenced to be beheaded, with Gudmundsdóttir's sentence later commuted.
The Húnavatn district, in which they resided, was ill-prepared to hold the prisoners, so as the case progressed – first through the land court in Reykjavík, then the supreme court in Copenhag... Read Full Story
