A Journey Around My Room by Xavier de Maistre
08 Jun 2013 04:01:07
The first time I encountered this book, many years ago, I confused its author with Joseph de Maistre, one of the more terrifying philosophers and political thinkers of the last two hundred years, who held that the world was a murderous place in which all creation strove to destroy the rest of it, mankind included. His favourite public servant was the executioner. So I experienced some cognitive dissonance, as they say, when I started reading what appeared to be a very droll, sophisticated and ch... Read Full Story
Dear Lumpy by Roger Mortimer and Louise Mortimer
06 Jun 2013 02:09:24
On the heels of its success comes Mortimer's letters to his daughter Louise. Anyone familiar with the earlier volume will know exactly what to expect. This is more of the same. Everyone has a nickname – the helpful dramatis personae at the front serves to remind the reader, for instance, that Loopy is Louise's father-in-law, Cringer is a fox terrier and Nidnod is Roger's wife, chiefly distinguished in his affectionate but slighting account for dipping her nut too deep in the Martini bucket and t... Read Full Story
Noble Conflict by Malorie Blackman
06 Jun 2013 02:07:24
One of Malorie Blackman's strengths as a writer for young adults is her directness and conviction: she takes big themes and gets stuck in. With Pig-Heart Boy it was transplants and animal rights; with Boys Don't Cry it was teenage fathers; most famously, with the Carnegie-shortlisted Noughts & Crosses series, it was racism. With Noble Conflict, Blackman turns her attention to the individual and the state, to the beautiful fictions we believe and the ugly truth behind them. "We stopped thinking f... Read Full Story
Finches of Mars by Brian Aldiss
06 Jun 2013 02:06:09
So what sort of a swan song does Finches of Mars represent? The short answer is: an odd one, although the oddness isn't immediately obvious from its premise, that familiar SF trope of Martian colonisation. In the novel's near-future, six huge towers have been built on the surface of Mars to house Chinese, Western, "Russ-Eastern" "Singa-Thai", "Scand" and "Sud-Am" colonies. Meanwhile Earth is disintegrating into conflict and collapse. "War on earth is continuous," one character notes. "It rumbles... Read Full Story
The Devil and the River by RJ Ellory
04 Jun 2013 03:47:05
The Devil and the River is Ellory's first novel since the "sock puppet" scandal hit last autumn. It's set in the 1970s, in the small town of Whytesburg, Mississippi, and follows the discovery of the corpse of a 16-year-old girl who disappeared 20 years earlier. Nancy Denton went for a walk in the woods in 1954 with the man she loved, a 31-year-old war veteran, and was never seen again. It was assumed that she was a runaway, but a fierce storm disturbs the riverbank in 1974 and her face emerges. ... Read Full Story
Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan
04 Jun 2013 03:45:32
From this you might imagine a spy novel, but Serena's mission for MI5, as it turns out, is to recruit some pliant, rightish writers to counter to the perceived leftish journalism and commentary of the 70s. There is a strong sense that Britain is heading for international irrelevance and economic disaster. With a nod towards Encounter magazine's CIA funding, in McEwan's tale, money is available to fund the sort of writers, including novelists, who will provide a more traditional account of Britis... Read Full Story
The Last Train to Zona Verde by Paul Theroux
04 Jun 2013 03:42:51
Not surprisingly, Theroux has not rushed back to Africa. Indeed, it has taken him a decade to arrange this return, in which he sets off to mirror his original journey with one that instead heads north from Cape Town up the continent's western edge. The purpose is to take a valedictory trip "to the violated Eden of our origins", he says, and to assess just what the 21st century has done to Africa, a land that the author has loved since he was a young peace corps teacher in Malawi.
Theroux's aim ... Read Full Story
Consolations of the Forest by Sylvain Tesson
02 Jun 2013 03:35:12
Between February and July 2010, Sylvain Tesson lived alone in a remote Siberian cabin on the shore of Baikal, the world's biggest freshwater lake. He had six shopping trolleys' worth of pasta; enough vodka to get regularly drunk; a stack of books that included volumes by Nietzsche, Sade, Camus and Shakespeare; mountaineering equipment, and not much else. "Freedom is always available," reads one of the epigraphs that start the book. "One need only pay the price for it." It's hard to imagine a mor... Read Full Story
The Public Woman by Joan Smith
02 Jun 2013 03:33:07
Books that you might call post-feminist abound at the moment. Joan Smith, a respected heavy-hitter in the feminist arena, and a better writer than most, starts The Public Woman, her latest, by deploring the glorification of celebrity glamour-girls (well, not really girls, though they doubtless wish they were) and the sexualisation of under-age fashion. But the strong and important core of her indignation is the way that young women, and not just vulnerable immigrants, are grossly exploited sexua... Read Full Story
The Last Train to Zona Verde by Paul Theroux
02 Jun 2013 03:31:23
Not surprisingly, Theroux has not rushed back to Africa. Indeed, it has taken him a decade to arrange this return, in which he sets off to mirror his original journey with one that instead heads north from Cape Town up the continent's western edge. The purpose is to take a valedictory trip "to the violated Eden of our origins", he says, and to assess just what the 21st century has done to Africa, a land that the author has loved since he was a young peace corps teacher in Malawi.
Theroux's aim ... Read Full Story
Italo Calvino Letters 1941-1985
31 May 2013 14:33:15
For much of his life, Calvino worked for the leftist publishing house of Einaudi, based in Turin. Founded in 1933, Einaudi was the most commercially successful publisher in Italy, its white-spined paperbacks a staple of every cultivated Italian home. The director, Giulio Einaudi, had an imposingly aristocratic manner and a reputation for frivolity, but his staff were handpicked for their stringent moral seriousness.
The bulk of the correspondence in this collection concerns Calvino's tireless w... Read Full Story
The Aftermath by Rhidian Brook
31 May 2013 14:30:45
Colonel Lewis Morgan arrives in this world of shattered buildings and broken spirits charged with overseeing the reconstruction in the British zone. He has an idealistic, forgiving nature, seeing the Germans as a people crushed first by Hitler, then by the allied pounding of their cities. When he requisitions a fine home on the banks of the Elbe, he allows its owner, former architect Herr Lubert, and his daughter to remain in residence. It is a decision that baffles most and shocks some, not lea... Read Full Story
