Books
Daniel Baksi
A small-time heroin dealer harbours idealistic dreams of building a hospital “to help da limmless in Peshawar and Kabul”. This is the premise of The Book of Naseeb, the debut novel from Khaled Nurul Hakim. Perhaps audaciously billed as a “degraded epic”, The Book succeeds in what is an extremely ambitious undertaking, following its unlikely protagonist across the backstreets of London and Birmingham to motorway service-station toilets as he attempts to cash-in on his latest smack haul.That The Book should exist as a novel at all owes itself as much to chance as to Hakim’s dedication. Adapted Read more ...
Claudia Daventry
A year plagued by Coronavirus is surely a time to dust off a seldom-aired poetic form, the Corona of sonnets, which was first dreamed up – officially, anyway – by the Siena Academy. John Donne used the form to illustrate the circularity of existence and our connection with a creator, later expressed – in poetry – in Eliot's "in my end is my beginning".Your basic Corona is seven sonnets long: I’ll say "only" because a step up from this is what’s known as a Heroic Corona - a 15-sonnet marathon in which each sonnet starts with the last line of the previous sonnet until the game is completed with Read more ...
Caroline Maclean: Circles and Squares review - adventurous art, progressive living and a good gossip
Marina Vaizey
There was a moment in the 1930s when it seemed that contemporary art, as practised in Britain, might join the mainstream of the Western avant-garde. Caroline Maclean makes a lively examination of this uneasy decade, centring mostly on the circle of visual artists who lived in Hampstead and Belsize Park, in an account that approaches an artistic and personal concatenation of Carry On.Maclean’s entertaining book presents its serious subject in an easy colloquial style, inviting us into the adventurous art world in Britain (which was then so small that everyone knew everyone) as if into a good Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In retrospect, we will surely see that British battles over the Covid-19 lockdown harboured within them a bitter but half-hidden war of ideas. On one side, the behavioural scientists who first guided policy seemed to depend on a model of human beings as (in Rutger Bregman’s words) “selfish, aggressive and quick to panic”. Early signs, such as the spate of hoarding, served to confirm their stance. Then, after their belated tightening, the lockdown rules held much more firmly than government and its advisers foresaw. For most people, solidarity trumped self-interest. The desire to break loose Read more ...
theartsdesk
At the end of an exhausting day's driving punctuated by disappointments and false leads, the narrator finds herself back at the Israeli town of Nirim where she spends the night. Slipping off early in the morning, she first fills her eyes with the view of Gaza on behalf of her colleagues who grew up there and now live in the West Bank. Driving south, she stops at a cluster of houses that might be a forgotten village.–––––I keep driving, past barren hills that slowly turn into pale yellow sand again, while the traffic diminishes until there are no other cars. Now, the only movement belongs to Read more ...
theartsdesk
The second half of Minor Detail is narrated in the first person by a young Palestinian woman who reads an article about the rape and murder of the captured girl. When she finds out the crime took place exactly 25 years before her birth, she determines to visit the archives to find out as much as she can about the girl and the case as possible – but for that, she needs to travel out of the West Bank. The journey is not far in miles, but as a Palestinian it is not straightforward.–––––I call the author of the article, an Israeli journalist, and try to pass myself off as a self-confident person Read more ...
theartsdesk
The first half of Minor Detail is set in an Israeli military camp in the Negev desert in August 1949, during the conflict celebrated as the War of Independence in Israel and a year after the mass expulsion mourned as the Nakba in Arabic in which around 700,000 Palestinians permanently fled their homes. It follows a senior military officer in charge of reconnaissance. After days of searching among the dunes, his patrol eventually comes across a group of Bedouins at a spring. After the patrol guns down the men and their camels, the commander brings the girl who has survived the slaughter back Read more ...
Jessica Payn
“I was ten and stopped taking off my coat.” This bare beginning marks the opening of Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s startling and lyrical novel, translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison: an introduction to ten-year-old Jas and the dislocated world of metaphor she inhabits. Later, she kidnaps two toads and hides them in a bucket in her bedroom, deeming them talismanic substitutes for her parents: if the toads mate, so will they, and everything will be alright. She picks her nose because it helps her to think, “as though looking for ways out in my thoughts has to be expressed physically.” More Read more ...
Charlie Stone
A century on, the années folles of Paris between the wars do not cease to excite readers and writers of all varieties. Alex George’s latest novel, The Paris Hours, draws on the myriad charms the interwar period has to offer, condensing them into a single day in 1927. We follow his four protagonists on their separate ways through the crisscrossing city streets until they come together in the most dramatic of dénouements. If these four leads are fictional, though, the author reminds us that this is still the Paris of Hemingway, Proust, Ravel, Stein and so many others by littering his narrative Read more ...
James Dowsett
In October 1991, Russian prosecutors gained access to the Communist Party Central Committee’s headquarters in Moscow’s Old Square. The offices had been sealed after President Boris Yeltsin ordered an investigation into the Party for its role in the August coup attempt. Thousands of files had been found shredded to ribbons. But one erstwhile Party employee had succeeded in smuggling out a trove of documents. They contained the secrets of the Soviet Union’s vast financial empire – including details of payments to communist-linked parties abroad – all overseen by the KGB.Catherine Belton is an Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Seven Lies is the debut novel of Elizabeth Kay, who under another name works as a commissioning editor in publishing. For how long will she stay in her day job when her pseudonymous moonlighting has already reaped vast rewards? Her thriller emerges to a drumroll. It has been sold to 25 territories, The Bookseller reports a seven-figure deal, while the TV rights attracted multiple bidders, and there are already plenty of plaudits on Goodreads from influencers vouchsafed advance e-copies.Meanwhile, according to the blurbs that fill the pages where glowing reviews should sit in the paperback Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
One of the masters of both mystery and thriller, Don Winslow’s latest volume is a reading bonanza: a collection of six crime-focused short novels (‘novellas’ feels too fancy for a writer so unpretentious) that riffs off the genre with technical virtuosity, building to a staggering immersion in the possibilities of the form. It’s a hugely enjoyable crash course in the chameleon-like possibilities of crime; a whizz of a read.Winslow is a writer with extraordinary range. He is best known for his epic trilogy on the Mexican drugs war, twenty years in the making, that he concluded this year. The Read more ...