Our Cheating Hearts by Kate Figes
17 May 2013 02:24:06
Kate Figes is a family mediator and prolific author on "the big questions around love and commitment", who now asks if long-lasting monogamy is possible in an age when we all live longer, and when many of us have so much money and personal freedom, and are bombarded with images and assertions about other people's sex lives all the time. Expectations about what we should get out of life generally, and sex in particular, have risen, she says, to the point where extramarital affairs don't simply lo... Read Full Story
Tales of the Jazz Age/ All the Sad Young Men by F Scott Fitzgerald
14 May 2013 03:48:57
These frustrations provided material for one of the stories in the collection, "The Lees of Happiness", which features a writer who meets a sorry end before he has had the chance to write his masterpiece. He leaves behind only "passably amusing stories, a bit out of date now, but doubtless the sort that would then have whiled away a dreary half hour in a dental office". Misgivings about his work also led Fitzgerald to add a series of self-deprecating prefaces to the collection – making light of ... Read Full Story
Big Brother by Lionel Shriver
14 May 2013 03:46:43
As the writer who burst into our lives and minds with one of the most shatteringly dark novels ever written about parenthood, Lionel Shriver has, rightly, become famous for her peculiarly uncompromising brand of emotional noir. But her subsequent novels, while still sharing that unique, hard-boiled directness, have also been threaded through with a deep humanity, humour and tenderness for which she never quite – not critically anyway – seems to garner sufficient credit. Maybe it's her own fault.... Read Full Story
Lost, Stolen or Shredded by Rick Gekoski
14 May 2013 03:43:52
In this highly entertaining book, the author and bibliophile Rick Gekoski goes in search of some of the great missing works of art and literature, using a mixture of careful detective work and some erudite speculation. His choice of subjects is an eclectic one, ranging from the familiar (Byron's scandalous memoirs and Graham Sutherland's unflattering and subsequently destroyed Churchill portrait) to the unexpected. A particularly engaging vignette is that of Mark Hofmann, a book dealer-cum-forge... Read Full Story
After Tomorrow by Gillian Cross
12 May 2013 03:41:52
There is a wonderfully symbolic scene in which useless bank notes catch light on a bonfire and are blown away, spreading destruction wherever they land. Cross's focus, however, is less on the big picture than on the individuals caught up in this social catastrophe.
Matt tells the story. His family have already lost a father and a grandfather to the raiders. Matt's mother soldiers on, remarries and grows vegetables to eat and barter with. But they are branded as "scadgers" – hoarders – and the f... Read Full Story
A Man in Love by Karl Ove Knausgaard
12 May 2013 03:40:04
The events that make up much of A Man in Love – the second part of the sequence – are outlined early in the first, A Death in the Family. Karl Ove Knausgaard leaves his wife, moves to Stockholm, falls in love with Linda and quickly has three children. In A Death in the Family, this is a straight story, a linear narrative; but in A Man in Love the story folds in on itself, passes through doors into the past and through portals into the future. It is a wholly fluid narrative structure, one that al... Read Full Story
This Boy by Alan Johnson
12 May 2013 03:37:45
One often hears it alleged that all politicians these days come from upper-middle-class backgrounds and are out of touch with the so-called real world. Up to a point, Lord Copper, but on the Labour side at least you don't have to scratch very hard to come up with politicians whose working-class credentials are impeccable. John Prescott started his working life as a steward on an ocean-going passenger liner. Jack Straw was one of five children of divorced parents brought up on a council estate in... Read Full Story
Ignorance by Michèle Roberts
08 May 2013 04:10:25
"People who don't know who they are can't speak," reflects Jeanne Nérin, one of the four female narrators of this multi-generational tale set, for the most part, in a couple of nearby towns in Vichy France. The characters are ignorant in all sorts of ways – their lives are cramped by Catholicism, by parochialism, by the passiveness and submission instilled in them as girls, and perhaps above all by poverty – but this lack of self-knowledge is crucial. It's only when Jeanne realises its absence t... Read Full Story
Masters of the Word by William J Bernstein
08 May 2013 04:08:50
Here's a new definition of "the sweep of history". Bernstein begins in 2300BC with Sargon, all-conquering ruler of lands from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, and ends with Twitter. It's a long, often fascinating journey. His thesis is simple, sometimes too simple. He believes the word sets people free, and so is democracy's trump card. Once Sumerian had become the first syntactically complex language, it could bind vast empires, like the one Sargon built. Once enough ancient Greeks became... Read Full Story
The Cabala by Thornton Wilder
08 May 2013 04:06:59
Hailed by Time as "one of the most delectable myths that ever issued from the hills of Rome", Thornton Wilder's 1926 debut novel probes the inscrutable mystery of the ancient, fabulous wealth that confers a kind of immortality on its custodians, allowing their natures to form without concession or compromise to life beyond their privileged enclave. Part lapdog, part emissary for this vestigial pantheon, he presents them as capricious and ridiculous, powerful and vulnerable: Mademoiselle de Mortf... Read Full Story
Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley
02 May 2013 02:46:24
Clever Girl begins in the early 1960s, when the narrator Stella (born in 1956, like Hadley herself) is a child living in Bristol with her single mother, and ends in 2006, when she is a married woman of 50 with three children, reconnecting to her past. In her childhood and youth, she remembers, "so many things that seem quaint now were current and powerful … shame, and secrecy, and the fear that other people would worm their way into your weaknesses". In the details as well as the events of Stell... Read Full Story
Essays, 1929-1934 by Wilhelm Reich
02 May 2013 02:42:12
called the violence "the most revolutionary day in Austrian history", and refers to the "generation of 1927 … a generation whose adult political consciousness was defined in terms of the events of 15 July". The 30-year-old psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, whom Sigmund Freud then considered his heir apparent, witnessed the shootings. He was forced to hide behind a tree to dodge the bullets. That evening he joined the medical corps of the Austrian Communist party, hoping to help the wounded.
When Rei... Read Full Story
