Book news, reviews and recommendations
I’m not sure how well most people know their postie. After long years working at home answering the door to receive bulky parcels of books, I have regular cheery exchanges with mine. I don’t think he’s the type to steam open letters before popping them through the door which is what Québécois writer Denis Thériault’s Bilodo […]
This is not an easy book to write about, nor to read. Short it may be, but it’s dense and its style takes a little getting used to but if you’re prepared to make the effort it pays dividends. Narrated by Anna Brown, a celebrated portrait painter, it begins with a cry of anguish at
All the Days and Nights by Niven Govinden: Attentive reading and its rewards Read More »
This slim, very beautiful novel is a love story, a work of aching nostalgia and a glorious celebration of language. Its gorgeous, colourful jacket suggests something pulsing and tropical but although that was partly what attracted me to it in the first place the writing is infinitely more subtle, shading into more variations of pearlescent
It’s been a little while since I read a novel with a First World War setting. Several popped up here earlier in the year but I think I’ve managed to avoid most of the deluge of books published on it recently. It was the Charles Rennie Mackintosh thread running through Mr Mac and Me rather
Mr Mac and Me by Esther Freud: That’s Charles Rennie Mackintosh to you Read More »
There’s a curiously old-fashioned feel to Sebastian Hampson’s debut. It’s about a naïve gauche young man about to start his art history studies at the Sorbonne and his encounter with an older, sophisticated woman who decides to make something of him. The press release suggests Brief Encounter and there’s certainly a cinematic feel about Hampson’s
The Train to Paris by Sebastian Hampson: More than just a romp Read More »
I have to confess that my heart sank when this novel thudded onto the doormat. I’d been looking forward to it very much but it weighs in at just over 600 pages which for a first novel, or any novel come to that, is quite an undertaking. It’s just the kind of book that appeals
We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas: A richly textured portrait of a marriage Read More »
This is the second American classic I’ve read in a month; the third if we’re counting discrete works rather than volumes. There must be something in the publishing air. This one’s very different from Nella Larsens’s Quicksand and Passing which explore race and identity in the 1920s in a very personal way. Written in 1959,
A Separate Peace by John Knowles: Hard lessons in life Read More »
Unusually for me, I came to Amy Bloom’s writing through her short stories. Her first collection, Come to Me, was published when I was still a bookseller and I was interested by Bloom’s background as a psychotherapist, made much of when I was pitched the book. I think she was still practising then. It seemed
Lucky Us by Amy Bloom: Families and how to survive them Read More »
You’ve probably heard about this book by now. Even John Humphries sounded interested in it when he interviewed Anna Freeman on a Saturday edition of the Today programme and he hardly seems a fiction fan – that’s more Jim Naughtie’s territory. The hook is an eighteenth-century female pugilist – not something I think I’ve ever
The Fair Fight by Anna Freeman: Definitely comes up to scratch Read More »
Last week I reviewed Harlem Renaissance writer Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, promising that I’d write about Passing in a separate post. The novellas were written the late 1920s and have recently been reissued in a single volume. Both explore race and identity but while Quicksand is widely considered to be autobiographical there’s no suggestion that Passing
Passing by Nell Larsen: Race, identity and the need to belong Read More »
You may remember Steven Galloway’s name from a few years back when The Cellist of Sarajevo was published. Beautifully written, it’s a poignant novel which offered readers a glimpse of the life under siege that we’d seen playing out surreally on our TV screens only a few years before. It became a massive bestseller, and
The Confabulist by Steven Galloway: A very clever bit of business Read More »