Still Life Elisabeth Luard
29 Jun 2013 00:58:25
First published in 1998, Still Life tells the backstory of Elisabeth Luard's classic European Peasant Cooking (1986). She describes the culinary road‑trip she took in 1985 with her husband, Nicholas, the author and co‑owner of Private Eye. Starting at Munich they travelled through Austria and what was then Yugoslavia (in Croatia the food "was limited to sauerkraut with sausage or sausage with sauerkraut"), Greece ("Greeks go out for company rather than gastronomy"), Turkey, and then back via Rom... Read Full Story
Karl Marx by Jonathan Sperber
28 Jun 2013 01:06:22
Typical Marx: Romantic, charismatic, cosmopolitan, and at once able to combine the workers' revolution with protestations of uxoriousness. But also disingenuous, since it wabiographys during one of these absences that Marx managed to impregnate the family maid, Helene Demuth. Such are the personal and intellectual complexities that Jonathan Sperber pursues through 600 pages of tightly argued text in this profoundly important biography of "The Moor".
In contrast to Francis Wheen's raucous accoun... Read Full Story
The Frontman by Harry Browne
27 Jun 2013 11:22:41
Besides, if you were born into this remote margin of Europe and yearned for the limelight, it helped to have an eye-catching cause and a mania for self-promotion. Rather as the Irish in general were forced by internal circumstance to become an international people, so men like Bono and Geldof could use their nationality to leap on to the world stage.
Bono belongs to the new, cool, post-political Ireland; but by turning back to the old, hungry, strife-torn nation, now rebaptised as Africa, he co... Read Full Story
The Adjacent by Christopher Priest
27 Jun 2013 11:12:42
It opens with a freelance photographer called Tibor Tarent, travelling back home from Turkey after his doctor wife Melanie has been killed by insurgents near the emergency clinic where she was working. The (we assume) near-future world through which he travels – generally in a giant armoured personnel carrier called a Mebsher – is not as we recognise it. Climate change has rendered vast areas of the world uninhabitable and England – which is now part of the Islamic Republic of Great Britain (IRG... Read Full Story
Men from the Ministry by Simon Thurley
21 Jun 2013 03:42:19
It's an odd title for a book about the preservation of ancient monuments, but there's a political point to it. Civil servants have always been the butts of ridicule – wasn't there a radio comedy series many years ago called The Men from the Ministry, with Richard Murdoch and Deryck Guyler? – but were never so seriously disparaged as they became with the advent of Thatcherism. It was in the early Thatcher years that the old Directorate of Ancient Monuments and Historic Buildings, part of the Depa... Read Full Story
We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo
21 Jun 2013 03:39:27
I was at a Caine prize seminar a few years back and the discussion was on the state of the new fiction coming out of Africa. One of the panellists, in passing, accused the new writers of "performing Africa" for the world. To perform Africa, the distinguished panellist explained, is to inundate one's writing with images and symbols and allusions that evoke, to borrow a phrase from Aristotle, pity and fear, but not in a real tragic sense, more in a CNN, western-media-coverage-of-Africa, poverty-po... Read Full Story
Semantic Polarities and Psychopathologies in the Family
21 Jun 2013 03:33:32
Some weeks ago the British Psychological Society finally found the courage to signal their disquiet with psychiatry's predominantly biomedical model of mental distress, the notion that being mentally ill, whether depressed, obsessive, phobic, anorexic or schizophrenic, is essentially a biological issue, to be treated with a range of expensively promoted pharmaceutical products.
The problem for those who suspect that this model is crude, drastic or just plain wrong, is to offer a convincing alte... Read Full Story
Apple Tree Yard by Louise Doughty
19 Jun 2013 00:37:18
Apple Tree Yard, Louise Doughty's seventh novel, shares with her previous books a preoccupation with the "what if" territory of ordinary life, those unthinkable events that divide a life into "before" and "after". Her last novel, the Costa award-shortlisted Whatever You Love, explored the killing of a child and a mother's desire for revenge. In Apple Tree Yard, she gives us the aftermath of an affair, but what begins as a familiar scenario twists away unexpectedly into a story of violent assault... Read Full Story
Jacob's Folly by Rebecca Miller
19 Jun 2013 00:36:01
Jacob's Folly is an intriguing jewel of a novel about temptation and desire. It follows the life and reincarnation of a Jewish pedlar, Jacob Cerf. We meet Jacob at the point of his reincarnation in present-day New York, where he immediately falls in lust with 21-year-old Masha Edelman, who wants to be an actress. His chances of wooing her are limited because he realises, to his horror, that he has been reincarnated not, as he had originally hoped, as an angel, but as a fly. He has returned to Ea... Read Full Story
Stuff Matters by Mark Miodownik
19 Jun 2013 00:34:36
They dismantled and burned their fort. Then they dug a large hole into which they dumped their most precious metal items: 763,840 2in nails, 85,128 medium nails and 25,088 large nails. "These had held the fort together and would have been as useful as leaving a cache of weapons, so the Roman troops buried them," writes Mark Miodownik, professor of materials and society at University College London. All other steel items were taken south: weapons, armour – and the soldiers' razors, which "allowed... Read Full Story
The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Simon Mawer
17 Jun 2013 05:01:05
Though Simon Mawer's latest novel shares its wartime setting with its Booker-shortlisted predecessor, The Glass Room, it's a different animal, swapping the elegant historical sweep of that book for something more streamlined and tautly paced. This is much more of traditional thriller, albeit an intelligent one. We're in Eric Ambler territory here, though William Boyd's Restless also comes to mind.
Marian Sutro is a smart, composed young woman of French and English parentage who is recruited by ... Read Full Story
Marble Season by Gilbert Hernández
17 Jun 2013 04:59:59
Hernández is the creator of Love and Rockets, a pioneering, genre-bending cartoon which he began writing with his brothers, Jaime and Mario, in the early 80s. Among the stories in Love and Rockets was Palomar, a magic realist saga which he finally completed in 1996 (the action takes place in a fictional South American village which modern technology has yet to reach). But Marble Season, his first full-length novel, could not be more different. It's semi-autobiographical, realist and excludes adu... Read Full Story
