The New Path to Prosperity by Andrew Simms
19 Mar 2013 02:10:02
Simms's main thesis is that the relentless pursuit of economic growth – measured in terms of an increase in a country's gross domestic product – is environmentally damaging and based on a shibboleth of mainstream, "neoliberal" economists. In a developed economy with a relatively stable population, such as Britain, growth no longer generates improvements in wellbeing and life expectancy, but continues to exert pressure on natural resources and fuels global warming. A few establishment figures hav... Read Full Story
Heartbreak Hotel by Deborah Moggach
18 Mar 2013 16:43:44
In Deborah Moggach's 2004 novel, These Foolish Things, a young man runs a ramshackle hotel filled with a gaggle of pensioners. Here, the ages are reversed and the location shifted from India to Wales, but the rest of the conceit remains similar. Buffy, the elderly former actor and rake from Moggach's 1994 novel, The Ex-Wives, inherits a rickety B&B in the Welsh village of Knockton. Because nobody wants to stay in crap B&Bs any more, Buffy starts "Courses for Divorces", to teach newly single peop... Read Full Story
Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell
15 Mar 2013 13:36:58
Rutherford Birchard Hayes, the 19th president of the United States of America, wakes up reincarnated as a horse. He can't understand anything, and at first mistakes the sound of his own heart for a broken stable clock, striking "upwards of twelve times, of twenty, more gongs than there were hours in a day". Already his sense of himself as human is mixed up with the perceptual world of the horse. Things will get worse. Eleven of the other horses stabled in the barn used to be US presidents too.
... Read Full Story
Mod: A Very British Style by Richard Weight
15 Mar 2013 13:33:08
As an adolescent growing up in the far-flung suburbs of Manchester, I was consumed by my first taste of what Mod had left behind, and it changed me for ever: the initial rites included a poleaxed listen to the Who's My Generation (which, even in 1984, sounded like musical gunpowder), my first and only pair of two‑tone tonic trousers, and a dreamed-about trip to Carnaby Street, or what remained of it. But what my friends and I were doing had almost nothing to do with Mod's rarefied beginnings, cr... Read Full Story
The Light and the Dark by Mikhail Shishkin
15 Mar 2013 13:31:57
The Light and the Dark, translated by Andrew Bromfield, is, superficially, a series of letters between a man and a woman. The man, Vovka, Volodya or Volodenka, is fighting a distant, brutal war; the woman, Sasha or Sashenka, writes from the home front. Her engaging tales of childhood, love and work give the novel what narrative drive it has, a series of poignant snapshots of life in a Soviet city that are anything but random.
Vovka's letters also recall the past, but often he is mired in the un... Read Full Story
Carol Birch reviews The Last Runaway
13 Mar 2013 12:10:03
From here, Honor moves on to live in a Quaker settlement near Oberlin with Grace's fiance and his widowed sister-in-law, Abigail. Here she feels like an outsider. Everything in Ohio seems transient, people fleeing north and heading west as pioneers. Everything is compared to Dorset and found wanting: the trees crowd in on her, the weather is extreme, the food tedious.
Chevalier immerses herself in period and place, and a wealth of domestic detail is deftly conveyed. Her research, as always, is ... Read Full Story
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
13 Mar 2013 12:04:52
Kate Atkinson's new novel is a marvel, a great big confidence trick – but one that invites the reader to take part in the deception. In fact, it is impossible to ignore it. Every time you attempt to lose yourself in the story of Ursula Todd, a child born in affluent and comparatively happy circumstances on 11 February 1910, it simply stops. If this sounds like the quick route to a short book, don't worry: the narrative starts again – and again and again – but each time it takes a different cours... Read Full Story
Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw
13 Mar 2013 12:02:52
Shanghai values are the values of a new age. Nobody wants to change the world – they only want to get out of it what they can, whatever it takes. With her "good fake" designer bags, stolen ID and forged early life in Guangdong, Phoebe's transformation is the most extreme. Before Gary became a Taiwanese pop star, he was just a poor kid from rural Malaysia with a bullying stepfather. Yinghui's drive masks a shameful family secret and a broken heart that has never quite healed. In Shanghai you can ... Read Full Story
The Infatuations by Javier Marías
11 Mar 2013 15:24:00
This is where Javier Marías, one of Spain's greatest contemporary writers, steps into the picture. The son of a victim of Franco's dictatorship, Marías is a characteristically European version of the literary man. He works as a distinguished translator, has a column in El País, and runs his own publishing house. He is also the author of two short story collections and 13 novels whose lyrical, conversational, and even errant, style has sponsored widespread literary admiration. There's an irony he... Read Full Story
Black Vodka by Deborah Levy
11 Mar 2013 15:22:59
In "Shining a Light" a young woman explores Prague with a group of Serbs she befriends at an open-air film screening in a park. The loss of her baggage at the airport is slowly juxtaposed against that of her companions: their country, their homes, their family and friends.
Of the 10 stories, the two of significant length are the title story and "Stardust Nation". The former is the tale of an ad man with a hunchback; a modern-day Quasimodo in a suit who sees himself as "lost property, someone wa... Read Full Story
On Writing by AL Kennedy
11 Mar 2013 15:22:08
As many people want to create fiction, it sometimes appears, as to read it. For them, the news from AL Kennedy's On Writing is mixed. On the one hand, Kennedy makes it clear that she feels blessed to have her job. She has a relentless but glamorous schedule: in the period covered by these blogs (first written for the Guardian) and essays, she appears at festivals; she is bombarded with commissions; she teaches; she performs a one-woman show; she writes a new novel, delivering it as usual to one ... Read Full Story
Vow Wendy Plump
10 Mar 2013 04:02:44
Plump front-loads the big reveal, the better to garner reader sympathy, which tends to drop a notch every time the author confesses to another of her own four affairs – the first when her marriage was barely a year old. Granted, this mother-of-two scores points for honesty. After all, the whole reason for the memoir is to try to explain what drives so many people to seek, perhaps repeatedly, the adrenal rush of a new sexual partner in defiance of a lifelong commitment. The puzzle merits solving.... Read Full Story
