Cancel the Apocalypse by Andrew Simms
01 Mar 2013 16:53:08
Perhaps this is down to the incremental, drily pragmatic nature of democratic politics; perhaps it's just reflective of capitalism being capitalism, so that anything hostile to its interests is quickly neutralised. Whichever it is, while inequality is widening, glaciers are still melting and what passes for British debate about it seems laughable. On a bad day, it can seem as if the entirety of politics now rotates around a quarterly event: the release of the provisional figure for economic grow... Read Full Story
Exodus by Lars Iyer
01 Mar 2013 16:52:02
Exodus is the third book in Lars Iyer's trilogy – following Spurious (2011) and Dogma (2012) – in which he records the ravings and rantings of W and the narrator, Lars, two professional philosophers whose travels through Europe and America to various academic conferences have finally brought them home to England. Lars the narrator is half-Danish, half-Indian, and a former warehouse storeman, while W is a little bit Irish, a little bit Jewish, and a world-class bullshitter. Together they are perh... Read Full Story
Together by Richard Sennett
28 Feb 2013 11:34:46
There's a nice quote on the back of this book from a review by Jenny Turner which goes: "I like Richard Sennett in the way some people like Bob Dylan … He has such style and heart." As I said, nice. But those three dots elide these words from the original review: "I know that he writes a lot and that his stuff is uneven, but when he's good he's just so brilliant, and even when he's less brilliant …" You can see why the publishers skipped that bit, but it does give more of the story: which is tha... Read Full Story
The review of amazing book the Childhood of Jesus by JM Coetzee
28 Feb 2013 11:30:38
Since Coetzee won the Nobel prize in 2003, his books have mostly taken the form of sly semi-autobiographical fragments. His last novel, Summertime (2009), was a series of self-lacerating biographical sketches concerning the South African novelist John Coetzee, "a little man, an unimportant little man", who closely resembles the author in some respects but not others (being dead, for example, unlike his real-life namesake). By contrast, The Childhood of Jesus represents a return to the allegorica... Read Full Story
The Goddess Chronicle by Natsuo Kirino
28 Feb 2013 11:24:50
This theme – the subjugated position of women in society – forms the core of The Goddess Chronicle, a retelling of the myth of Japan's creation and the latest in Canongate's Myths series. Sixteen-year-old Namima and her elder sister Kamikuu live on a teardrop-shaped paradisal island far off the south-east coast of Yamato, the old name for Japan. Like many of Kirino's female characters, Namima yearns to break free of her place in a restrictive and hierarchical society. She violates her community'... Read Full Story
The Romantic Economist by William Nicolson
26 Feb 2013 13:13:00
Right at the end of The Romantic Economist – non-spoiler alert! – the author William Nicolson starts referring in the third person to "William Nicolson", the protagonist of the last 190-odd pages. It was an unsettling moment. I had imagined that I was reading a straightforward personal reminiscence; "a memoir with an economic twist" is how Nicolson describes it early on. Now my brain frazzled with the idea that the book was an altogether more postmodern exercise. "What the hell is going on?" I s... Read Full Story
The Innocents by Francesca Segal
26 Feb 2013 13:10:51
Childhood sweethearts Adam and Rachel are getting married. Adam's under pressure because his father died when he was a child and his mother just wants to see him settled. Meanwhile, Rachel's family have already taken Adam in as if he were their own son. He works for his future father-in-law's business. He acts as a chauffeur and dogsbody for Rachel's mother and grandmother. He's already the perfect Jewish husband, with his whole life mapped out.
Except for one thing. Rachel has a ridiculously a... Read Full Story
Gone to the Forest by Katie Kitamura
26 Feb 2013 13:03:27
Gone to the Forest is set in a nameless country convulsing with the birth pangs of anti-colonial revolution. Having claimed a vast tract of land 40 years ago, one of the first white settlers is preparing to hand it down to his only son, Tom. Cold and domineering, the old man has made life-long fetishes of his power over the land and his power over women. After growing up "under the weight of this man", Tom is timid, unworldly and a disappointment to his father. Unconcerned with power, he loves t... Read Full Story
Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O'Farrell
22 Feb 2013 19:08:50
The novel opens in the summer of 1976 which, as its title suggests, experienced a heatwave of legendary proportions. In the third month of the drought that stifles London, encrusting it with red-backed aphids and fuelling acts of insanity, Robert Riordan goes out to get his morning paper, as he has done for over 30 years, while Gretta Riordan bakes bread and the couple's three adult children pursue seemingly ordinary lives elsewhere. But today, Robert is home later than usual. Gretta "calls her ... Read Full Story
The Pike Lucy Hughes-Hallett
22 Feb 2013 19:07:34
Reaching Trieste, they came under fire. Miraglia brought the plane in low over the marina. D'Annunzio dropped bombs on the Austrian submarines and pamphlets (he'd written them himself) into the piazzas. Turning back, they realised one of the bombs had got stuck. "See if you can push it so it falls out," Miraglia wrote in d'Annunzio's notebook. "But don't twist it." He must have managed it somehow, because they landed safely back in Venice. D'Annunzio "had embarked on his new life as national her... Read Full Story
New book Nature's Oracle written by Ullica Segerstrale
22 Feb 2013 19:05:56
As a young man, WD Hamilton (born 1936) was fascinated by heroic death. Where did it come from, this courage to sacrifice all? And as a budding naturalist, he pondered self-sacrifice in the rest of the natural world. Other species do not have to ignore knowledge of mortality to risk everything, but the reproductive puzzle persists. A vervet monkey's alarm call to warn of a predator triggers escape for others, but increases its own chances of becoming lunch. A bee that stings an intruder to the h... Read Full Story
Consumed written by Harry Wallop
19 Feb 2013 17:41:24
It might be obvious, but buying a "fabulously British" Jack Wills polo shirt in Southwold immediately marks you out as different from the bling-obsessed young mum who frequents a retail park to buy a bright pink Paul's Boutique purse. Or so you might think. Actually, argues journalist and consumer broadcaster Wallop, these are both decisions based on similar ideas of class aspiration, and Consumed is his entertaining attempt to understand how we define ourselves through our consumer choices. He ... Read Full Story
