Book news, reviews and recommendations
I have to admit to picking this up because it’s Swedish. I read it during what seemed to be a period of deep virtual immersion in Scandiland – watching the first series of The Legacy re-watching Borgen and reading Martin Booth’s excellent The Almost Nearly Perfect People squarely aimed at people like me who have
A Summer with Kim Novak by Håkan Nesser (transl. Saskia Vogel): A Swedish period piece Read More »
Just two books worth recommending that I’ve read but not reviewed this month. Thanks are due to Jacqui at JacquiwinesJournals for pointing me in the direction of one of them – Daniela Krien’s Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything, set in 1991 in what was still the GDR during the summer before German reunification. Johannes
Books Read (But Not Reviewed) November 2015 Read More »
Regular readers may have noticed that I’ve taken to reviewing short stories recently but this is my first anthology. Previous reviews have all been of collections by a single author, one whose novels I love. Two things brought me to A Kind of Compass: firstly it’s edited by Belinda McKeon both of whose novels –
A Kind of Compass (Edited by Belinda McKeon): A little cherry picking Read More »
Way back in the mid-‘90s, Jonathan Coe published What a Carve Up!, a wickedly funny satire on Thatcherism in which the Winshaw family had their fingers in a multitude of nasty pies. I was in bookselling at the time and my Penguin rep and good friend, A, gave me a proof, praising it to the
Number 11 by Jonathan Coe: The Winshaws are back… Read More »
Slim publishing pickings in December – a bit of famine after the autumn feast. Not a great month if you’re looking for anything cheerful, either, but an excellent one for fans of fiction in translation beginning with Andrea Canobbio’s Three Light-Years. Cecilia and Claudio share lunch most days in the hospital where they work. Both
Books to Look Out For in December 2015 Read More »
‘Tis the season of ghost stories. Halloween’s long past, I know but Christmas, when lots of us are cosily tucked up at home, offers the perfect opportunity for a few ghostly frissons. Lorna Gibb’s A Ghost’s Story is somewhat different from the more traditional scare-yourself-rigid variety such as Susan Hill’s splendidly terrifying The Woman in
A Ghost’s Story by Lorna Gibb: A matter of punctuation Read More »
I’ve admired Rupert Thomson’s work for some time. His novels are never predictable, always exploring unexpected terrain from the advertising world, satirized in Soft!, to the Medici court in Secrecy‘s seventeenth century Florence. The last one’s my particular favourite. Famously, Davie Bowie’s is The Insult which appeared as one of his 100 Must-Read Books of
Katherine Carlyle by Rupert Thomson: A sense of belonging Read More »
Back in July I was approached to take part in a Twitter initiative to promote diversity in writing under the hashtag #DiverseAuthorDay. This was, of course, long before the announcement of both this year’s Man Booker shortlist, let alone its gay Jamaican winner. You may have seen a few tweets on September 24th, the elected
#DiverseAuthorDay: A reprise Read More »
Sloane Crosley has published two collections of essays including one with the wonderfully peevish title I Was Told There’d be Cake, or at least it sounds peevish to me which may tell you something about how I feel about cake and broken promises. The Clasp is her first novel, a classic comedy of manners in
The Clasp by Sloane Crosley: Growing up is hard to do Read More »
A couple of years ago I read and reviewed Ivan Vladislavić’s Double Negative. It’s his fourth novel but the first to be published in the UK. The Folly is his debut and entirely different from Double Negative. According to the book’s blurb, when it was published in Vladislavić’s native South Africa back in 1993 it
The Folly by Ivan Vladislavić: An apartheid allegory Read More »
You may have dim memories of this particular literary prize. It’s been in abeyance for several years but has just been relaunched with an announcement of the shortlist for this year’s award. Contenders must be writers of literary fiction, non-fiction or poetry, aged thirty-five and under. Past performance suggests that previous judges have had a