The Quarry by Iain Banks
17 Jun 2013 04:58:59
The Quarry is a novel about disease, about "fucking cancer", as it's repeatedly described. It's a novel held up against the dying of the light, a fierce howl into the void that, in the image of the titular quarry, threatens to engulf the characters on every page. Reading this book, one is hit again and again with the fact – tragic and astonishing in equal measure – that Banks didn't know he was dying until he'd almost finished the first draft, that the cancer that was the subject matter of his n... Read Full Story
Joyland by Stephen King
14 Jun 2013 03:09:15
Stephen King's new novel comes in a retro-pulp cover, under the shoutline, "Who dares enter the funhouse of fear?" It's published by Hard Case Crime, whose policy is to reprint classic hardboiled fiction by writers such as Lawrence Block, Donald E Westlake and James M Cain alongside original neo-hardboiled from stars with names like Jonny Porkpie. If it isn't quite the stripped‑down tale of crime we associate with Westlake or Block, Joyland is endearingly compact – perhaps a quarter the length o... Read Full Story
Night of Triumph by Peter Bradshaw
14 Jun 2013 03:08:23
From Alan Bennett to Sue Townsend to Peter Morgan, artistic attempts have been made to fathom her inner workings. In his novella, Peter Bradshaw proposes a reason why the Queen seems so grimly disengaged. What if she once, when young, broke free of protocol and encountered her future subjects as they really were? And what if the sight so alarmed and appalled her she fled back to her palace for good?
Bradshaw, who is the Guardian's film critic, takes as his starting point the documented episode ... Read Full Story
The North by Paul Morley
14 Jun 2013 03:07:08
Morley's book, however, fails to record that this great musical tradition suffered a steep decline. Three decades later, I myself stood on the stage of the Free Trade Hall clad in red blazer and grey shorts, singing shamelessly chauvinistic songs as a member of the school choir on Speech Day. The chauvinism, I now recognise, was an attempt by my Irish immigrant community to ingratiate itself with mainstream English culture. Within a few square miles of my home, a band of Salford men and women en... Read Full Story
Damn His Blood by Peter Moore
12 Jun 2013 02:45:19
"Murder," said Thomas de Quincey in his famous essay on the subject, "may be laid hold of by its moral handle (as it generally is in the pulpit and at the Old Bailey), and that, I confess, is its weak side; or it may also be treated aesthetically, as the Germans call it – that is, in relation to good taste." De Quincey was having his fun and so should be allowed his joke, but, of course, when it comes to murder, the moral and the aesthetic are intertwined – that is, when enough time has elapsed ... Read Full Story
Letters From the Palazzo Barbaro by Henry James
12 Jun 2013 02:44:09
In his preface to The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James describes looking out over the Venetian waterscape during the "fruitless fidget of composition, as if to see whether, out in the blue channel, the ship of some right suggestion, of some better phrase ... mightn't come into sight". His many spells in Venice were to provide him with more than a shapely phrase. This collection of his letters sent from the Palazzo Barbaro – his regular haunt on the southern end of the Grand Canal – abounds in det... Read Full Story
Things That Are by Amy Leach
12 Jun 2013 02:42:26
Leach begins with lilies and dickers marvellously onward through the cosmos, ranging from little to large, spinning exotic stories about the multiple feathered and freckled inhabitants of the Earth. Her roving eye might settle on portly, industrious beavers, "warm and dry in their oily parkas" and once categorised erroneously by a pope as fish, or else on Mars's moon Phobos, meaning "panic", which apparently resembles "a potato that has experienced one terrible, and many average, concussions".
... Read Full Story
Vanished Years by Rupert Everett
09 Jun 2013 23:27:18
Like that other naughty diarist Alan Clark, Everett's intentions are not clear, although his distaste for himself is beguilingly evident. We see him flunk friendships, charity stunts, TV deals and romantic obligations, and all the while something he dubs his "special needs charm" keeps the narrative thread motoring along. There is no hint of regimented structure and the book veers anarchically from short story to anecdote to memoir.
It does not matter, though, with an author who is able to offe... Read Full Story
The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit
09 Jun 2013 23:25:51
This is an account of a descent into Alzheimer's, garlanded with stories that wrench sense from that horrifying business. Prizewinning American author Rebecca Solnit looked after her mother from the time she started losing her house keys until – well, until worse things happened. "Taking care of the elderly," Solnit writes, "comes without the vast literature of advice and encouragement that accompanies other kinds of commitment, notably romantic love and childbearing." The Faraway Nearby include... Read Full Story
Flappers by Judith Mackrell
09 Jun 2013 23:24:27
Despite the absence of jazz in Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of The Great Gatsby, its release is bound to be accompanied by a rash of books about the jazz age, of which Judith Mackrell's Flappers is likely to be one of the better ones. Between the first world war and the great depression, a new breed of woman briefly flourished, rebelling against traditional female roles: the flapper. "In their various attempts to live and die in their own way, the flappers represented a genuinely subversive force,"... Read Full Story
The Trade Secret by Robert Newman
08 Jun 2013 04:16:48
The Levant Company was formed by Elizabeth I in 1581, a full 19 years before the East India Company. By the final years of Queen Bess's reign (when The Trade Secret opens) the company controlled all of England's increasingly lucrative trade with Turkey and the Levant, running profitable lines in textiles, arms, munitions, currants and, according to some (Newman among them), Christian slaves. By the time James I came to power, the company was dictating foreign policy, keeping him out of wars with... Read Full Story
The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner
08 Jun 2013 04:03:20
It begins with two motorcycle races, on different continents and decades, but each one is a point of ignition for the rest of the book. The first is in turn-of-the-century Alexandria, where a teenage boy, libidinous and hungry for initiation into the adult world, sees a motorbike for the first time. When he watches the object of his affections mount this contraption and embrace its rider – "man and bike and Marie making an obscene double-humped centaur's profile" – he feels both sexual betrayal ... Read Full Story
