Books
India Lewis
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been a collective examination of its past, with Nobel Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich at the helm. Young Heroes of the Soviet Union looks back at the USSR through the lens of the personal, much like recent memoirs East West Street and The Hare with Amber Eyes. Like these accounts, Halberstadt’s book focuses, at least in part, on the tragic history of the Jews in Europe. It works well in that Halberstadt relates the story to himself throughout – not so frequently as to feel heavy-handed, but often enough so as not to lose himself as the Read more ...
Gaby Frost
Deft and funny prose, in a feather-light translation by Ted Goossen, is the signature of Hiromi Kawakami's latest collection People From My Neighbourhood, a series of surreal and playful short stories offering a glimpse at the most curious and intriguing of all beings: neighbours.It’s like a dream woven from the fragments of a world seen from a window. Each story is just three or four pages long. Sometimes the chapter titles only make sense in the final line of the story, and even then, we ask: why that detail? There are themes which link individual stories: gambling brings together the Read more ...
India Lewis
It is no surprise, given her Cambridge Intellectual literary style, that Ali Smith’s Summer is multi-layered, referential, and filled with cameos from giants in the fields of art and science. It is arguably the best of the four novels in her Seasonal Quartet, pulling through the threads from the previous three, without opting for easy conclusions or tying all the ends together neatly. Summer is also not as challenging as some of her texts can be, which (admittedly) is a bit of a relief.Summer begins with Grace (former actress), her ex-husband and new partner who live next door, and her Read more ...
Lydia Bunt
“Never Let Me Go meets free, two-day shipping.” This is how Mary South describes “Keith Prime”, the first story in her debut collection. Undoubtedly, Kazuo Ishiguro springs to mind in the bizarrely personable world of the clinical organ farm, but South stretches the theme. She introduces the poignant figure of a fully-grown, childlike person with no language capabilities. Elsewhere in her debut collection, we run up against vicious pre-teen internet trolls, OAPs with a hankering for phone sex and the wavering figure of online celebrity, revealed to be a piecemeal mess in person.South’s Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Vast wealth and equally vast fraud are part of the plot in The Glass Hotel, Emily St John Mandel’s irresistible fifth novel, but much stranger things are at play here – ghosts, parallel universes, the threads that connect us. Vincent, an impoverished bartender in a remote hotel on Vancouver Island, leaves her job to enter a new life in the “kingdom of money” with Jonathan Alkaitis, an immensely rich, much older New York financier. But she has an unsettling sense of other versions of her life being lived without her. “None of these scenarios seemed less real than the life she’d landed in.”In Read more ...
David Nice
Things fell apart; the Centre Right could not hold. Anne Applebaum knows it from the inside. A Reaganite with whom I imagine a civilized conversation would have been possible even in former times married to a Polish politician, now MEP, Radek Sikorski, whose many good deeds speak louder than his views, Applebaum has produced a concise, lucid and very readable summary of how it all went wrong. She reminds us of key happenings in the unhappy chronology while summoning up a range of figures on the scene, now so-called populists and including erstwhile friends, to root it all in the specific.The Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
A life in art, a life in looking; a life in writing, a life in reading; a life fuelled by passionate emotions, personal attachments and religious turmoil. There are a few artists whose lives are so intertwined with their work that their biography as well as their art achieves a kind of mythic status, but outstanding among them is the Dutchman Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890). Despite the fact he only lived for forty years and was a fully practising artist for only seven of those, looking at Van Gogh is a ceaseless endeavour.Even more remarkably, major contributions to the appreciation of Van Gogh Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“Jenny Diski lies here. But tells the truth over there.” That was Diski’s response to daughter’s Choe’s observation that if she were buried – a friend had just offered her a spot in a plot she’d bought amid the grandeur of Highgate Cemetery – she’d need a headstone. Cremation and the music would have to be “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”, Diski said. In the event, after two years of living with inoperable cancer (she was defiantly not “fighting, losing, winning or bearing” the illness) she chose Tom Waits’ version of “Somewhere” from West Side Story as the velvet curtain closed. A beautiful song Read more ...
Olivia Fletcher
Fate: commonly understood to mean the opposite of chance or, more narrowly speaking, a theological concept. Often synonymous with predetermination – an idea which might be used to justify a set of unfortunate or fortuitous events, whether you are religious or not – it gives a shape for Jorge Consiglio’s novel Tres Monedas. A poet and an academic, Consiglio wrote this novel over the course of a ‘single scorching summer’ in his hometown of Buenos Aires. It is a book that moves toward a vista of overlapping concepts, saturated by the desire to transcend the rigidity of circumstance. Translated Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Luis Sagasti attends closely to the silence that precedes, pauses, and follows music in this mesmeric collage of stories inspired by the sounds that humans – and animals, and stars – create. Like many authors before him, the Argentinian novelist and curator is also a bit obsessed by Bach’s Goldberg Variations, especially as played by the maverick Canadian genius Glenn Gould. Well, Luis – snap. The last pre-lockdown Goldbergs I heard live fizzed into the Devon twilight a year ago during the Dartington Festival, in a blistering, furiously-paced performance by pianist Joanna MacGregor that Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
You feel at times, while reading the collection Blue in Chicago, that Bette Howland might have missed her vocation. In another life, Howland – until recently almost completely lost to literary history – could have made a name for herself as a distinctly unnerving judge; one feared by criminals and lawyers alike. She has a terrifying talent for the damning sum-up.Exhibit A (on her cousin and her uncle): “After seven years of a sacrificially expensive university education, Gary will be earning about the same money as Rudy – a city of Chicago patrolman, a 'pig,' who had to be trundled through Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The journalistic addiction-memoir is a crowded genre these days: Details editor Dan Perez chronicles his massive intake of Vicodin and other opioids in As Needed for Pain; New York Times columnist Eilene Zimmerman pieces together her husband’s drug addiction in Smacked, and now Terri White, editor-in-chief of Empire magazine and former editor of Time Out New York, shares with us her benders, blackouts and hospitalisations, somehow combined with an impressive career path, in the vivid, painful Coming Undone.Born in Derbyshire to a teenage mum “with the best bum in the village”, her childhood Read more ...