The book Merivel: A Man of His Time written by Rose Tremain
17 Jul 2013 01:26:46
The buoyancy is even more of a surprise, perhaps, because Merivel's fundamental themes are elegiac. The book's eponymous narrator, Robert Merivel, physician to Charles II, is coming towards the end of his life, as are the book's other two main characters, Merivel's faithful (somewhat undervalued) manservant, Will, and Charles himself. Out of this, Tremain has fashioned a story that, in the most reflective way, feels a bit like a giddy bareback horse ride across the southern part of 17th-century ... Read Full Story
The Property by Rutu Modan
16 Jul 2013 02:36:40
On one level, then, Modan's book is an old-fashioned page turner: just what is it that Regina is hiding, and how has she managed to keep it out of sight for so long? (Unlike most comics, The Property is superbly plotted.) But it's so much more than this. For Modan, nothing is sacred, not even the Holocaust, and her satirical impulses are always at play, whether she is sending up the queasy tourist industry that now relies on its memory ("Personally, I prefer Majdanek to Auschwitz," says a school... Read Full Story
Sane New World Ruby Wax
16 Jul 2013 02:31:00
Ruby Wax was the one who ran around shouting on TV a while back, extracting knicker-drawer secrets from celebrities. She was good at it too, even though the shows were always just as much about her as they were about Imelda's shoe habit or Pamela's top-dressing. But even then, Wax could do nothing to prevent episodes of depression so debilitating she often ended in the Priory. It was the voices that really did it, she says – not psychotic, just the ordinary nag-nag snip-snip internal monologue t... Read Full Story
The End of Night by Paul Bogard
16 Jul 2013 02:29:09
The subject is a fertile one – though predictably the answers prove somewhat melancholy – and Bogard sets about his investigations with an energetic purposiveness and enterprise. The bulk of his research involves locations in the United States, but the American landmass is a large and various one, including a wide variety of terrains. In addition, Bogard hops about the globe, to Paris, to Florence, to the Canaries, to the Isle of Sark, like some benign necromancer seeking darkness where he can f... Read Full Story
Blood Family by Anne Fine
14 Jul 2013 11:24:43
When we first encounter seven-year-old Edward, hero of Blood Family, her superb new novel for young adults, he has no idea what a family is. For he and his mother are prisoners of Bryce Harris, a drunken and violent abuser. Over several years Harris has beaten Edward's mother into catatonic dependence, while Edward is treated with emotional contempt and physical neglect, being made to sleep on the floor of their squalid flat and never going outside.
This dreadful state of affairs is brought to ... Read Full Story
Children of the Jacaranda Tree by Sahar Delijani
14 Jul 2013 11:22:37
At the start of the novel it seems that Delijani has placed too great a pressure on herself to find the language and structure to relate such a terrible tale. The first chapter tells the story of a political prisoner giving birth in Tehran's Evin prison, knowing that her child will soon be taken away from her. The language is too overheated to be convincing, and there are a confusing number of character names mentioned – several women prisoners, their unseen relatives, a male guard. Many of thes... Read Full Story
Airmail Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer
14 Jul 2013 11:21:27
Tranströmer worked as a psychologist in Sweden's public health and prison services. Yet this profession is rarely evident in his writing, except perhaps as a pervasive emotional intelligence. (It does make a couple of off-stage appearances: in "Allegro", as the tiring day from which the narrator recovers by playing Haydn, and in "Loneliness" when he is forced to make a dangerous winter commute.) Airmail reveals how often his approach went against the grain of Swedish literary consensus. In 1967,... Read Full Story
Strange Rebels Christian Caryl
08 Jul 2013 23:35:35
As the Soviet Union unravelled in the 1980s, eastern Europeans returned to the rosary in their thousands. Pravda, the Soviet party daily, condemned sightings of the Madonna in Poland and elsewhere as the work of "wreckers" bent on subverting socialist utopias. (The Ukrainian Mary usually appeared in a glow of orange and blue light – the Ukraine national colours.) The political significance of Marian apparitions was not lost on John Paul II, the Polish-born pope and cold war intransigent who defe... Read Full Story
Flight By Elephant by Andrew Martin
08 Jul 2013 23:34:30
With brilliantly stiff upper-lip chapter titles such as "Grand Tiffins and the Squits: The Commandoes Recuperate at the Dapha, but Mackrell Falls Sick", Andrew Martin's Flight By Elephant is defiantly Boy's Own stuff. Tracking the exploits of Gyles Mackrell, veteran of the Royal Flying Corps turned tea plantation overseer in Assam, this "untold story of the second world war's most daring jungle rescue" sees the 53-year-old battle intolerable leeches, monsoon conditions and starvation in his atte... Read Full Story
Horace and Me by Harry Eyres
08 Jul 2013 23:33:36
Harry grew up to be a professional oenophile, an expert on cabernet sauvignon and the chronicler of Europe's wine dynasties in a series of books and columns in the Spectator and Harpers & Queen. Horry favours plonk, but doesn't refuse the grander tipples proffered by Harry. Horry stuck by Harry during some early professional ups and downs, consoled him when he suffered a "love crisis" in his 30s, and these days sagely counsels him about the "crisis of values" in our disintegrating world.
They g... Read Full Story
Time Present and Time Past by Deirdre Madden
08 Jul 2013 01:57:29
The title of Deirdre Madden's eighth novel for adults could be the title of a number of her previous seven. Since her 1986 debut, Hidden Symptoms, she has been investigating the relation between past and present with understated thoroughness. Her characters suffer their fair share of dramas and crises – often more than their fair share, since another of her subjects is the effect of the Troubles on individual families. But these crises usually take place before the novels begin; Madden's interes... Read Full Story
Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple
08 Jul 2013 01:56:22
Bee's mother is Bernadette Fox, a renowned architect whose work ("She was built green before there was green") once earned her a MacArthur genius grant, but after the birth of her daughter she simply stops. Bernadette's husband, Elgie, has taken a job in Seattle with Microsoft and Bernadette's world has become smaller and smaller. She spends most of her days in an Airstream trailer at the foot of their garden and has even taken to using an online assistant to minimise contact with the outside wo... Read Full Story
