Books
Liz Thomson
Yiyun Li’s fiction comes garlanded in praise from authors and journals that don’t ladle it out carelessly, so it feels almost churlish to cavil over a memoir written during the course of two years while the author battled serious mental health issues.Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life – a quote from Katherine Mansfield’s personal journal – is not actually a memoir even in the most broad-brush sense of the term. Rather it’s a collection of essays – meditations one might call them – on depression and life and what makes it worth living. Reading this book you wonder, so don’t Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Novelist Jake Arnott has an eye for seedy glamour. The Fatal Tree takes the 1720s underworld - the setting of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, one of the most successful of all time - and adds more sex and a slick story, to make this rivetingly vivid tale. Having established himself as pre-eminent gangland chronicler with the trilogy that began with The Long Firm (1999), he moved onto Seventies glamrock, and Belle Epoque Paris. Here, he has a situation so pungently evocative, it’s as if a character in the background of a Hogarth sketch has come suddenly to life. The Fatal Tree is narrated Read more ...
Filiz Ali
I was 11 years old when my father was killed. A body was found near the border between Turkey and Bulgaria. According to authorities it belonged to my father even though the corpse was decomposed beyond recognition. My mother and his mother were not summoned to identify the body. This tragedy happened in 1948. We still don’t know where he was buried. Therefore he does not have a grave. My mother and I waited for him for years hoping that he might appear one day. My mother died in 1999.Sabahattin Ali was a well-known writer who had already published a volume of poetry, four volumes of short Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The art dealers of today must be thanking their lucky stars that Philip Hook’s remarkable history of their trade stops where it does. For while it serves as an eminently useful if rather specialised reference book, it’s a history pushed along by a ferocious analysis of the art dealing fraternity, the general thrust of which is encapsulated in its no-nonsense title. From unsophisticated third party to plutocrats’ lifestyle consultant, the evolving persona of the art dealer has taken guises ranging from merchant, scholar, connoisseur and ultimately, "purveyor of fantasy". A few notable figures Read more ...
Jasper Rees
On 23 February 1942 at half past four in the afternoon in a secluded Brazilian hilltown called Petrópolis about an hour from Rio, a maid and her husband pushed at the bedroom door of a modest rented house. Despite the late hour, the tenants had not yet stirred. The door swung open to reveal, lying on the bed, a young woman in a cotton dress rolled over on her side, an older supine man wearing a jaunty moustache and a punctilious tie. The woman’s body was still warm.Word of the suicide of the famous writer Stefan Zweig and his wife Lotte hastened as rapidly around the globe as any news could, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Odin the All-Father, “lord of the slain, the gallows god”, has two ravens that “perch on his shoulders and whisper into his ears” as he wanders in disguise around the world. They are Huginn and Muninn, Thought and Memory. Over many centuries, the folk-stories of the northlands have lodged in our memory and shaped our thought. “Winter is coming” runs the doomy refrain of Game of Thrones, haunting the imagination of the millennial millions who have never directly heard of Ragnarok, “the end of all things”, and the big chill of the “Fimbulwinter” that will usher in apocalypse. George RR Martin Read more ...
Peter Forbes
Daniel Levitin makes one reference to Donald Trump in this book (to the latter’s claim to have seen on TV “thousands and thousands” of Muslims in Jersey City cheering when the Twin Towers fell) but he couldn’t have known quite how apposite these words would be on publication: “In the current information age, pseudo-facts masquerade as facts, misinformation can be indistinguishable from true information.”Levitin belongs to a best-selling group of experts – Daniel Kahneman, Gerd Gigerenzer, David Spiegelhalter, and a few more – who want to put us right on the pitfalls of dubious statistics and Read more ...
Michael Scott
The Guardian called Brexit “a rejection of globalisation.” That’s as may be, but the reality is we cannot, however much we might want to, check out of the globalised world in which we live. Globalisation has defined the 20th and 21st century and while the future is uncertain, one thing we can sure about is that it will continue to become ever more inter-connected.The question is: how best to prepare ourselves to make the most of it? This is a newly personal question for me, having become a father for the first time in 2016, with my mind now turning more and more not just to how I think about Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In one of Tessa Hadley’s piercingly smart and subtle tales, a woman whose upwardly-mobile path has taken her from Leeds to Philadelphia works for a firm that manufactures instruments to test the “tensile strength” of materials. You can treat the Hadley short story as that sort of device in itself. Precision engineered and finely calibrated, it stress-tests not only marriages and affairs but memories, desires, even identities, with episodes of crisis and discovery that reveal each fault-line or fracture. The reader marvels at the almost scary exactitude – but relishes the steel-edged finesse. Read more ...
Liz Thomson
In the heat of a Texas summer, Aaron Holland Broussard comes of age. It’s 1952: the two world wars still cast their long shadows and, far away, the Americans are fighting the Russians in a proxy war around the 38th Parallel.Aaron’s a good guy, an only child in a dysfunctional household – father a drinker, probably suffering what today we’d call post-traumatic stress disorder having gone over the top in the Great War, mother who’s been through the mill with all the grim treatments thrown at depressives back then. Aaron looks after his animals and plays his old Gibson, trying all the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
The American poet-critic Randall Jarrell once entitled a collection of essays A Sad Heart at the Supermarket. He might have enjoyed Michel Houellebecq’s poem “Hypermarket - November”. Its forlorn narrator has “stumbled into freezer”, then “collapsed at the cheese counter” where “Two old ladies were carrying sardines./ The first turned to tell her neighbour,/ ‘It’s sad, all the same, for a boy that age’.” For well over than two decades, the veteran enfant terrible of French literature has been swooning in noisy revulsion at the decadence and emptiness of his godless consumer society. Should we Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Elegant literary romance and contemporary jihadism are unlikely bedfellows. Yet British-Pakistani novelist Nadeem Aslam has now written a third novel combining the two. While The Blind Man’s Garden (2013) and The Wasted Vigil (2008) were partially set in Afghanistan, The Golden Legend is set in the fictional city of Zamana, somewhere on the Grand Trunk Road in northern Pakistan. Though vibrantly, bloodily contemporary, Aslam’s Zamana is also a heady, symbolic place, rich with cultural memory of a more loving and tolerant time. Two families are at the centre of the Read more ...