Chris Mitchell Lonely Planet: the world famous travel guidebook company which has scores of writers in the field at any one time and scores more desperately trying to get a job with this coveted organisation. So the logic behind Lonely Planet Unpacked is sound – given that LP has a veritable travel anecdote treasure trove […]
Bill Bryson – Mother Tongue
Chris Mitchell Mother Tongue is one of Bill Bryson’s earlier books and a superbly manageable and amusing treatise on the English language – where it came from, what it’s doing and where it’s going. It’s the sort of complex subject that needs the lightness of Bryson’s touch to give an obviously affectionate and enthusiastic overview […]
Damien Wilkins – Chemistry
Dorothy Johnson The title of Damien Wilkins’ novel refers to substances, pills and potions but also to the reactions people set off within each other, and the possibility that they might result in unimaginable consequences. The book concerns a family deeply immersed in the world of medicines and chemicals, as pharmacists, doctors and addicts, and […]
Alan Gurney – The Race To The White Continent
Chris Mitchell This is one book not to be judged by its cover. It features a photo of Shackleton’s ship Endurance, even though the venerable explorer barely gets a mention in Gurney’s book, and even then only at the end. As the title suggests, The Race To The White Continent is more concerned with the […]
Andrey Kurkov – Death And The Penguin
Stephen Mitchelmore This book is a page-turner. The simplicity and overt plainness of the prose combine with the perverse congeniality of the foreground subject matter to make one carry on, ignoring worldly concerns. And while the plot is complex it is also strangely unimportant, compared, that is, to the foreground. Viktor, a 39-year-old journalist, lives […]
Alan Moore – The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Chris Mitchell Take several classic 19th century literary characters – Allen Quatermain from "King Solomon’s Mines", Captain Nemo from "20,000 Leagues Under The Sea", The Invisible Man, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, among others – bring them together as an ego-ridden but intriguing outfit under the auspices of the British Secret Service, set them within […]
Doris Lessing – The Sweetest Dream
Edmund Hardy Our sweetest dreams are, apparently, ideological. Those seductive systems of thought which attract people who want to save the world on their own terms, but who end up mired in disillusion or pedantry. There’s prime potential for grim humour when people play at being revolutionaries, and Lessing is well-placed to crack the jokes: […]
Michel Houellebecq – Atomised
Kevin Walsh Michel Houellebecq is one of those authors who inspire hugely conflicting reactions. Some hail him as a literary giant in the European tradition, deftly weaving philosophy, history, and science into his bleak, challenging narratives, asking those questions that other more commercially-minded authors shy away from. Others think him hollow, pretentious, showily didactic and […]
David Lodge – Thinks…
Kevin Walsh David Lodge’s latest novel, Thinks…, sees him return to familiar territory. Set in the fictitious University of Gloucester, it tells of Ralph Messenger, womanising cognitive scientist, who sets out to bed Helen Reed, a recently-widowed novelist who arrives on campus to teach a summer writing course. Written from three viewpoints – Ralph’s dictaphone […]
Pamela Stephenson – Billy
Kevin Walsh Pamela Stephenson faced a real challenge in the writing of this book: the viewpoint. She came to public attention as the peroxide-blonde Australian comedienne in ‘Not The 9 O’ Clock News,’ famous for its off-the-wall sketches. So should it be a funny woman’s take on the funny man’s rise to fame? But she’s […]
Lou Reed – Pass Thru Fire: Collected Lyrics
Edmund Hardy Lou Reed is the craggy man in black leather, a permanent member of rock’s avant-garde without trying. Popular in all his guises, as Velvet Underground punk progenitor, as Seventies glam decadent, or as Nineties eagle-eyed chronicler. Or maybe just as the guy who wrote the original ‘Perfect Day’. But a book of song […]
Cees Nooteboom – All Souls’ Day
Stephen Mitchelmore "The shortcut does not allow one to arrive someplace more directly (more quickly), but rather to lose the way that ought to lead there." Maurice Blanchot How does one deal with trauma? It’s a common question. Arthur Daane, roving documentary cameraman and protagonist of Cees Nooteboom’s latest novel, asks it too. He thinks […]
Tim Parks – A Season With Verona
Chris Rose At dinner recently with a group of other Brits now resident in Italy and the subject of Tim Parks comes up. "When will that Tim Parks stop writing those books?", "And the way he uses all the people around him to turn into characters, it’s terrible!". Behind the howling complaints and bitter objections, […]
Rachel Seiffert – The Dark Room
Sally-Ann Spencer We have all seen the photos – the terrible photos of skeletal corpses, the frightening pictures of uniformed killers. In The Dark Room, Rachel Seiffert returns to the horror of the Third Reich to reveal these and other, less familiar images. Alongside photos of concentration camps, we see pictures of a kindly mother […]
Dante Alighieri: Inferno – translated by Michael Palma: The Poets’ Dante – edited by Peter S Hawkins and Rachel Jacoff
Stephen Mitchelmore “Translating is only a more intense and more demanding form of what we do whenever we read” – JM Coetzee Coetzee might also have added “whenever we live”. Unless, like the dead, one is perfectly at home in the world, a close reading of one’s environment is required to navigate and negotiate oneself […]
John Crowley – Little, Big
Seán Harnett Little, Big, first published in 1981 and winner of that year’s World Fantasy Award, has recently been re-issued by Orbit as part of its Fantasy Masterworks series. It’s both a welcome decision (the book has been out-of-print for ages) and a brave one: outside a small cabal of devoted fans Little, Big does […]
Philip Pullman – The Amber Spyglass
Seán Harnett Philip Pullman has frequently made the point that as a writer of "children’s" fiction he can tell stories that writers of adult fiction simply wouldn’t get away with. It’s a good point, but not the whole point, and Mr. Pullman is being a little disingenuous when he says it: it would be more […]
Alan Massie – The Evening Of The World
Mark Valentine After a sly introduction in which the narrator purportedly gets a transcript of an ancient manuscript from the hand of a descendant of the character who was Greenmantle in John Buchan’s novel, this unusual and distinctive work next presents a translation of that document. This is said to be from the medieval Latin […]
Peter Vansittart – Hermes In Paris
Mark Valentine Peter Vansittart writes some of the most original, supple, coruscatingly erudite fiction available, usually drawing upon arcane historical eras to enact his unillusioned meditations upon fate and chance. Hermes in Paris, a new novel in his eightieth year, depicts the Hellenic god of magic, messages, thieves and trickery as a jaded dandy in […]
Timothy Clark – Routledge Critical Thinkers: Martin Heidegger
Stephen Mitchelmore The Routledge Critical Thinkers series is turning into something special. Maurice Blanchot by Ulrich Haase and William Large, published last year, is a profound and miraculously lucid guide to the French writer’s work. This year we have Timothy Clark’s introduction to the work of a major influence on Blanchot: the German philosopher Martin […]
Kenji Jasper – Dark
Chris Wiegand There is a fantastic scene in Martin Scorsese’s 1973 masterpiece Mean Streets. In a film packed with memorable moments, one sums up the dilemma faced by the central character perfectly. The scene is brief: Charlie and his girlfriend Teresa ‘escape’ the city (at her request) to take time out and spend the afternoon […]
Laura Hird – Born Free
Dorothy Johnson Although Laura Hird’s Born Free is quite different in style, it is hard not to think “Trainspotting” when reading it thanks to the narrative’s descent into the squalid underbelly of Edinburgh and the abundance of pop culture references. Four family members live in a broiling hell of ongoing resentments and frustrations within a […]
Keith Altham – No More Mr Nice Guy!
Robin Askew At home with Sting. The in-no-way-narcissistic rainforest dwellers’ friend and tantric sex enthusiast is looking for a space in his sitting room to hang a giant self-portrait. Unfortunately, it soon becomes clear that this will not match the decor. Eventually, Mrs Sting, Trudie Styler, suggests that it should go in the bathroom in […]
Bernard MacLaverty – The Anatomy School
Dorothy Johnston Bernard MacLaverty’s The Anatomy School is in many ways a familiar rite of passage story of a schoolboy growing up in Northern Ireland in the Sixties. The central character, Martin, attends a Catholic grammar school to which he’s won a scholarship but has failed his exams and must repeat his final year. Since […]
Angela Bourke – The Burning Of Bridget Cleary
Robin Askew Enjoyed The Blair Witch Project? Then immerse yourself in this engrossing and exhaustively researched true story from late 19th century Ireland. The facts of the case are relatively straightforward: in 1895, 26-year-old Bridget Cleary disappeared from her house in rural Tipperary. Local rumour claimed that she had been taken by fairies to their […]
