Book Reviews Archives - Page 3 of 13

Christopher Brookmyre – All Fun and Games Until Someone Loses an Eye

“…
Unlike most people, Jane Flemming, the protagonist of Scottish author Christopher Brookmyre’s novel All Fun and Games Until Someone Loses an Eye, can pinpoint the exact turn of events that transformed her life. A drunken, awkward, and most importantly unprotected bout of unsatisfying sex with her Catholic boyfriend Tom… ”

George Monbiot – The Age of Consent

“…Monbiot, best known to the reading public for his campaigns against global warming, was aiming far beyond “green issues” with this 2003 projected manifesto for the future of the planet. His objective with the book was nothing if not audacious….”

Amos Tutuola – The Palm-Wine Drinkard

“…The Palm-Wine Drinkard is unlike almost anything else in print. Nebulous comparisons might be made with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Kafka’s inconclusive parables or Alice in Wonderland, but things behave very differently from even these european gargoyles in Tutuola’s twilight world….”

David Baker – It’s Mawdsley

“…The central concept/main gimmick of It’s Mawdsley is essentially how a book would read if written by the kind of person who would never write a book, a stream of consciousness from someone who is barely conscious…”

Athol Fugard – Tsotsi

“…Tsotsi, is a compelling and brutal tale that follows the life of the story’s eponymous protagonist. Set in Sophiatown, Fugard uses the oppression of the apartheid regime as a backdrop for the novel’s main setting: deep-rooted racism, the abject poverty of the black community, brooding violence…”

Chris Abani – Becoming Abigail

“…In the UK right now, there is a real taste for true-life biographies about child abuse. Every bookshop has a section dedicated to small volumes with titles like “Please Daddy No”and “A Child Called It”. It’s redolent of Alan Partridge: “I’d like to understand man’s inhumanity to man… and then make a programme about it.” On the face of it, Chris Abani’s novella Becoming Abigail should fit right in there. It is ostensibly about the traumas and abuses suffered by a young Nigerian girl caught up in the skin trade…”

Shirley Hazzard – People in Glass Houses

“…If there’s one quality that defines Shirley Hazzard’s People in Glass Houses, it’s subtlety. This collection of eight short stories is a masterpiece of observation which clearly demonstrates the author’s perceptive wit… Set in the 1950s, amidst the corridors and offices of the newly-created monolithic and meandering bureaucracy of “the Organization” – an American-based concern intent on ‘inflicting improvement’ the world over…”

Neil Smith – Bang Crunch

“… It has become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy that the publishing industry can’t sell debut short story collections… Because the major publishing houses don’t publish much short fiction – and rarely back it with a marketing campaign when they do – the public quite rightly tends to assume that these short story collections aren’t worth reading. If they were then they’d be making more of a fuss of them, right?…”

Ross Macdonald – The Barbarous Coast

“…Punctuated by a sharp, dark wit, and twisting subtly through an untold number of well-plotted revelations, this novel shows why Macdonald was considered the natural successor to the likes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. It also makes for a damned good read…”

Tom Hodgkinson – How To Be Idle

“…Not only is How to be Idle thoroughly entertaining, it should resonate with anyone, except the most puritanical workaholic bores, who has ever questioned how our lives have become to be dominated by work, time, and the need to be constantly doing something, or feeling guilty for being inactive…”

Martin Amis – House Of Meetings

“…Any new Martin Amis book always comes with plenty of baggage, and House Of Meetings is no exception. As his first full-length fiction since 2003’s Yellow Dog, it comes complete with high expectations and the ugly face of his previous achievements leering over its shoulder. You can almost hear the critics sharpening their knives even before it hits the shelves…”

Joseph M Marshal III – Hundred in the Hand

“…For decades the story of the American West has been told from the point of view of the white settlers, the ‘cowboys’ in all those childhood games of Cowboys and Indians. This novel sets out to redress that balance: it’s set in the American West, but it’s told from the point of view of the Lakota people, and is written by a surviving Lakota member…”

Arthur Nersesian – The Swing Voter of Staten Island

“…Arthur Nersesian’s The Fuck-Up, in addition to having one of the best slacker-lit titles ever to have been put down on paper, has garnered something of a cult following since its publication in 1997, and rightly so… In comparison, The Swing Voter Of Staten Island is a big disappointment…”

Sarfraz Manzoor – Greetings From Bury Park: Race, Religion and Rock ‘n Roll

“…A young Pakistani-Muslim reared in Britain, Sarfraz Manzoor, once tried to convince his Pakistani-raised father, Muhammed Manzoor, about the wisdom of the young Manzoor spending a summer in the United States. “Why do you want to go to America anyway? Americans are unclean, immoral, look at how little their girls wear,” his father asked. And then Manzoor, whimsy not quite disguising hormonal honesty, notes “I did not want to confess that was one of the reasons why I was desperate to visit…”

Russell Hoban – My Tango With Barbara Strozzi

“…Centre stage is given to a depiction of Barbara Strozzi herself, the seventeenth century Venetian singer and composer of the book’s title, but surrounding her is the paraphernalia of Hoban’s story. There are glass eyes, a baseball bat, the HMS Victory, an astrological constellation and a 24-hour pizza restaurant. And, of course, the basic steps to learn the tango…”

Steve Dupont – Therein Lies The Problem

“… the plot sounds like a collaboration between George Orwell and Roald Dahl, but the large cast of curious characters gives the novel a tone that’s more in keeping with Kurt Vonnegut or Philip K Dick. They sometimes tread a fine line between caricature and outright fantasy, but once you buy into the slightly strange world that Dupont has crafted he takes you on a rollercoaster ride quite unlike anything else in modern fiction… “

Sir Oswald Mosley: Blackshirt – Stephen Dorril

“… Mosley is inexorably entwined with the story of twentieth century politics as a whole, mirroring the highs and the lows, ricocheting from the machinations of high society to the violent desperation of the underclass, and taking in every major Parliamentary player in between… ”

Austin Grossman: Soon I Will Be Invincible

“… While there are surface similarities between Soon I Will Be Invincible and that TV show, however, the tone of the novel quickly shifts towards the more fantastical end of the spectrum. Grossman makes no attempt to explain the world that he describes – a world where superheroes, and supervillians, exist as a widely accepted everyday reality – but instead he takes this death-defying, spandex-wearing ball and runs with it… “

Douglas Coupland: The Gum Thief

“…Relating the relatively humdrum tale of two ‘associates’ in a Staples stationary superstore, it often sounds like a soap opera rather than the latest offering from one of contemporary literature’s most intriguing voices. The Gum Thief’s relatively mundane surface hides an intriguing study of the epistolary form – and a commentary on the nature of the novel itself. “