The Hired Man by Aminatta Forna
22 Apr 2013 01:53:50
Aminatta Forna made her name with her memoir The Devil That Danced on the Water, which documents the circumstances surrounding the death of her father, a Sierra Leonean politician who was hanged on charges of treason in 1975. In The Hired Man she returns to her speciality theme of the psychology of civil conflict, but in a different setting – the small, aptly named, Croatian town of Gost, a place ravaged by the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. The book's narrator is Duro Kolak, an introspective handy... Read Full Story
The Architect's Home by Peter Gossel
22 Apr 2013 01:50:08
They can choose, as The Architect's Home describes, to make demands of themselves they would find harder to impose on others. Arne Korsmo, in Oslo, wanting a wide column-free living space, made his house five times more expensive than otherwise similar houses he had designed next door. Jan Benthem, in Almere, Holland, created tiny 2m x 2m bedrooms furnished only with narrow bunks. But mostly they don't need be so self-punitive: it's more that they can get the details just as they want them, and ... Read Full Story
A Delicate Truth by John le Carré
22 Apr 2013 01:48:16
It's exactly 50 years since a young Foreign Office official, and sometime spy, named David Cornwell woke up to find his alter ego, John le Carré, internationally famous with the publication of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Macmillan was PM; the cold war with the Soviet Union as dark and bleak as ever. In 1963, the novel of espionage seemed the perfect instrument for examining the soul of a post-imperial society.
Then came George Smiley's finest hour, a sequence of novels that elevated the ... Read Full Story
Who is Ozymandias? And Other Puzzles in Poetry by John Fuller
20 Apr 2013 03:27:58
This is, in some ways, an extremely infuriating book, one rather removed from the populist promises of the title (compare the oeuvre of the author's near-contemporary John Sutherland, at least four of whose books, to my recollection, use the word "puzzle" or "puzzles" in their subtitles). You may, for instance, have been haunted, as you were meant to be, by Wallace Stevens's line: "The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream." The back‑cover blurb strongly implies that within this book you will... Read Full Story
Best of Young British Novelists 4, edited by John Freeman
20 Apr 2013 03:26:28
The 1983 list is the most famous: it included Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, William Boyd, Maggie Gee, Kazuo Ishiguro, Adam Mars-Jones, Ian McEwan, Shiva Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift, Rose Tremain and AN Wilson. But the 1993 sample was not much less convincing: the panel spotted Iain Banks, Louis de Bernières, Tibor Fischer, Esther Freud, Alan Hollinghurst, AL Kennedy, Hanif Kureishi, Candia McWilliam, Lawrence Norfolk, Ben Okri, Caryl Phillips, Will Self, Helen Simpson and Jea... Read Full Story
The Invention of the Land of Israel by Shlomo Sand
20 Apr 2013 03:25:19
The "Land of Israel" is barely mentioned in the Old Testament: the more common expression is the Land of Canaan. When it is mentioned, it does not include Jerusalem, Hebron, or Bethlehem. Biblical "Israel" is only northern Israel (Samaria) and there never was a united kingdom including both ancient Judea and Samaria.
Even had such a kingdom ever existed and been promised by God to the Jews, it is hardly a clinching argument for claiming statehood after more than 2,000 years. It is an irony of h... Read Full Story
A Man in Love by Karl Ove Knausgaard
18 Apr 2013 02:35:48
A Man in Love is the second of the six large volumes; the first, A Death in the Family, was published last year. That title (Mein Kampf in German) is often seen as a dark kind of provocation in itself: the size and scale of the undertaking is another. In the latter case, the author has taken Proust as his model, and it is interesting to note that while length in Proust is viewed as a challenge, it isn't construed as provocative. On the contrary, the length not just of A la Recherche du Temps Per... Read Full Story
The Last Sane Man by Tanya Harrod
18 Apr 2013 02:33:07
Although he described himself as three-quarters homosexual, Cardew married the artist Mariel Russell in 1933. They had three sons – Seth, Cornelius and Ennis. In 1939, he started work on a derelict inn that he converted into the Wenford Bridge Pottery. In 1942, he went to work in the Gold Coast, in Ghana, where he built and managed the Achimota pottery, designed for a handcraft-based industry to combat the dreary "corrugated iron" surroundings of colonial Africa, and allow the Africans to be ind... Read Full Story
The Undivided Past by David Cannadine
18 Apr 2013 02:32:11
David Cannadine's elegantly written and stimulating book is a useful reminder that some historians have been willing servants to political projects of all kinds. Just as medieval kings had their chronicler-propagandists and African chiefs had their praise-poets, so, in a more democratic age, Gove and Putin have their nationalist historians. And, it must be added, their opponents of all stripes, socialist, feminist and beyond, have also had their bards and academic cheerleaders.
But these are ac... Read Full Story
Homecoming by Susie Steiner
17 Apr 2013 03:23:38
Max, their eldest son, is supposed to be taking over the farm, but he's barely coping with the responsibilities he's already got: a newly pregnant wife who's learnt to close down her emotions, "not in a petulant way, but just practical, so the nerve endings aren't exposed. Like insulation tape around a wire." Down south, running a garden centre, supposedly shirking his familial duty, is Max's brother, Bartholomew, but he, too, feels "laden with obligation" – to his parents, their farm, the bank,... Read Full Story
Who is Ozymandias? John Fuller
17 Apr 2013 03:18:57
This is, in some ways, an extremely infuriating book, one rather removed from the populist promises of the title (compare the oeuvre of the author's near-contemporary John Sutherland, at least four of whose books, to my recollection, use the word "puzzle" or "puzzles" in their subtitles). You may, for instance, have been haunted, as you were meant to be, by Wallace Stevens's line: "The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream." The back‑cover blurb strongly implies that within this book you will... Read Full Story
How Do We Fix This Mess? by Robert Peston
15 Apr 2013 03:30:52
Contrary to the endless bleating from coalition ministers about "Gordon Brown's debt" and "the mess that Labour left us", Peston is clear where the blame lies. It was the bankers, stupid. Plus the fact that for many years we in the rich world have been living beyond our means, our lifestyles funded by surpluses from countries such as China and the oil producers that kept their savings in British banks until the fateful day – 9 August 2007 – when the bond markets ceased to function.
For page aft... Read Full Story
