Books
Sebastian Scotney
“There’s a rhythm in the air around Memphis, there always has been,” Carl Perkins once said. "I don't know what it is, but it's magic." The city on the Mississippi lives up to its musical heritage with performance venues aplenty, and a host of museums dealing with its illustrious musical past: there's Elvis Presley's Graceland mansion with all its garish gold lamé costumes, cars and even private jets; Sun Studios is now a museum; and there is a Stax Museum, a Blues Museum and the much-praised Memphis Rock 'n' Soul Museum.Memphis-born music journalist, filmmaker and author Robert Gordon has Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Meg Wolitzer’s 10th novel has been hailed as a breakthrough, a feminist blockbuster, an embodiment of the zeitgeist. (Nicole Kidman has bought the film rights, which goes to show.) But in all her fiction, she deftly explores motherhood, career, misogyny, feminism, the domestic detail within the bigger picture, with a very American, affectionate wit – she’s particularly good at awkward teenagers – though sometimes there’s a feeling of skill at the expense of substance. Wolitzer's previous (too long) book The Interestings deals with the successes and failures over decades of a group of New York Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The journalist Frank Gardner has turned to fiction to illuminate with imagination the world that he knows inside out from years of reporting. His biographical trajectory, from scholar of the Middle East and the Arab world, through BBC correspondent in the region – he was shot by terrorists in Saudi Arabia, which left him confined to a wheelchair – has given rise to a riveting memoir, Blood & Sand, as well as a previous thriller, Crisis.We inhabit his fictional world on the basis that he will portray a riff on reality with nuance and understanding, all the better to escort us through the Read more ...
Katherine Waters
A body can be pushed to the brink, to the point where thoughts flatten to a line of light, and come back from death, but the heart is complex and the damage it wreaks barely controllable. For Grace, Lia and Sky, the three sisters of Sophie Mackintosh’s debut novel The Water Cure, living by a discipline which tames their bodies and emotions to strict rituals is more than a matter of self-control – it is a matter of survival.They’ve been brought up by Mother and King, their father, in a sprawling dilapidated island hotel, away from the mainland where a toxic scourge to which men are Read more ...
Katie Colombus
It was no matter that journalist Daniel Hahn dropped out ill at the 11th hour of this "audience with" event. Author Philip Ardagh's deep knowledge and unflappable demeanour comfortably carried the hour-long talk about the inhabitants of Moominvalley. We heard detail of characters, themes, metaphors, changes from books to the TV cartoons and detail of Tove Jansson and her family, who wrote the original books.We coursed through the journey of a boy who saved his book tokens to buy the novels of Jansson, his favourite author, and eventually came to write a 380-page book about the world of the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
An Irishman who spent more than half a century in London and then Devon, and a prolific writer – nearly 20 novels and novellas, some 20 collections of short stories in varying combinations – William Trevor (1928-2016) is often eulogised as a modern Chekhov. He is invariably characterised as the master of the short story in post-Joycean times, rightly revered, esteemed, admired, awarded. Several of these last 10 stories were published in The New Yorker, where much of his finest work in this form has appeared, while several iterations of his Collected Stories published previously have run to Read more ...
Liz Thomson
To readers of newspapers and magazines, the name Clancy Sigal will be very familiar, probably as a film reviewer. Addicted to writing, and to his old Smith Corona #3 portable typewriter, “Hemingway’s preferred machine”, he was a version of the man who came to dinner. He arrived – inevitably, for this was the early 1950s – off the boat in Dover, intending to spend a weekend exploring before returning to the US. He stayed 30 years.“Kicked out of Paris by the French police for having a cancelled US passport and no visa” – years later, he would discover the FBI had branded him SUBVERSIVE – he Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Mario Vargas Llosa has written a thriller which opens eye-poppingly. Two wives, one staying over with the other, discover in the course of the night that they are in fact bisexual. “Chabela stayed and slept in the bed with Marisa,” it says towards the bottom of page one, “and now Marisa felt the sole of her friend’s foot on her right instep.” One thing leads to another and for the duration of the novel, set in Lima, the two best friends, whose husbands are also best friends, nip off to Miami or the sauna to pleasure each other in quite some detail. The author has plunged his readers into the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Anecdotal story-telling wrapped up in hypnotic prose, Christie Watson’s narrative is a gentle, emotive five-part layered package of reflection and indignation. It is part memoir-autobiography, part history of nursing (Indian, Greek, Byzantine and African from millennia ago, not to mention Florence Nightingale and her revelatory common sense), and underlying all a polemic in persuasive praise of its crucial importance. There is also rage at what is happening to the NHS today, politically, socially and economically, and what it shows about the state of Britain.We are whisked through the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
To suggest an absence is to imply a presence. Philosophers, novelists, dictators, politicians – as well as almost every “ism” you can think of – take the stage in this absorbing, precisely and elegantly written study of various kinds of atheism. All assumptions are up for grabs, everything brought out into the light and questioned.It is a dizzying read, reminding us, among many other things, how the Enlightenment invented racism and provided justifications for colonial empires; that the deaths of ordinary people in the French Revolution were estimated in the hundreds of thousands; and how Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Back in the early Sixties Lucian Freud was living in Clarendon Crescent, a condemned row of houses in Paddington which were gradually being demolished around him. The neighbourhood was uncompromisingly working class and to his glee his neighbours included characters from the seamier side of the criminal world. It was around the time of his fortieth birthday when the wrecking balls drew near and, Bentley-owning but broke and generally neglected by the art world, his work began to develop into what is now known as late Freud. In relative obscurity eking out extravagance from precarity and Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
“Wham bam, thank you, ma’am” might be one response to this polemical, wry, hilarious and affecting series of counterintuitive essays by one of the most original and unexpected thinkers around. Barbara Ehrenreich has described herself as a “myth-buster”, and her many books have challenged in an eminently readable fashion all kinds of assumptions that we automatically take for granted and never query, which may easily not only distort our attitudes but actually damage our behaviour. As this book’s subtitle, “Life, Death and the Illusion of Control” suggests, her subjects here are of the utmost Read more ...