Books
Boyd Tonkin
As a photographer, Teju Cole has a penchant for the scuffed and distressed surfaces, materials and tools that form rectilinear patterns on construction sites. Opposite a shot of scaffolding, ladders and shadows – all favourite motifs – on the island of Bali, he writes a sort-of manifesto for the method of this book. “I do not love the travel pages,” he, somewhat superfluously, declares. Rather, he turns his lens (he uses manual cameras, which carry the old-fashioned risk of a ruined roll of film) on the margins, the edges, the corners, especially of urban life: “the substratum of the visible Read more ...
Lisa Jewell
I started writing my first novel in 1995. I was 27 and I’d just come out of a dark, dark marriage to a controlling man who’d kept me more or less locked away from the world. I had no front door key, no phone, was not allowed to see my friends or my family. If I displeased him I was subjected to week-long silences and constant criticism. I finally broke away from the marriage early that same year and desperately wanted to purge the experience by writing about it. I was a few paragraphs into a fictionalised account of the events when I suddenly recoiled. I wasn’t ready. It was too personal. Too Read more ...
Liz Thomson
For more than three decades I reported on the publishing industry as a business journalist. The books, the deals, the authors and the publishers, plus the bookshops that sold then. When I started out in 1984, Waterstone’s was new and exciting, forcing the innumerable independents that had long been the backbone of the trade to raise their game. At Foyles, Christina still presided over a store – just the one – that was modelled on an Albanian department store. Something called the Net Book Agreement fixed the price of books, which were not yet sold in supermarkets.When the NBA collapsed in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Peter Høeg is still overwhelmingly known for a novel published a quarter of a century ago. Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow featured a half-Inuit woman whose suspicion over a young neighbour’s death in Copenhagen lures her from Denmark back to Greenland. There was a film made in English by Bille August starring Julia Ormond, but Høeg, who is now 60, has hardly flooded the market since. The Susan Effect is only his fifth novel since 1992.Miss Smilla was a globe-trotting precursor to Nordic noir, softening us all up for the amped-up stories of skulduggery in the senior echelons of the Danish Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Five thousand miles away from her native Lake District, I first understood the eerie magnetism of Sarah Hall’s fiction. As a regional judge for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, I’d travelled to join the jury’s deliberations in Sri Lanka. I was keen for Hall’s debut novel, Haweswater, to prevail but unsure what my fellow-judges – both from the Subcontinent – would make of this local drama set in a bleak English backwater. Hall’s hardscrabble uplands scarcely resemble Wordsworth’s. Yet under a gnarled bodhi tree on a hotel lawn in Kandy, with the highland rainforest behind us and the sacred lake Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Hospital Club’s annual h.Club100 awards celebrate the most influential and innovative people working in the UK’s creative industries, with nominations from the worlds of film and fashion, art, advertising, theatre, music, television and more. This year they are teaming up with theartsdesk.com – the home of online arts journalism in the UK – to add a brand new award to the line-up.The Young Reviewer Award is aimed at bold, thoughtful young writers aged 18-30 who are serious about a career in arts journalism. It will be presented to the author of the best review of any art-form that we Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Readers have been committed fans since 1992, when the sometime crime reporter Michael Connelly turned novelist. Connelly’s best-known sequence has featured, over three decades now, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) detective Hieronymus Bosch, also known as “Harry” – Vietnam veteran, haunted by the past, and a man of the utmost original integrity – in gritty police procedurals lifted high above the ordinary by mesmerising and believable characters and a passion for the southern California setting.In 2005 the cast of the series was amplified by the Lincoln Lawyer, Mickey Haller, a low- Read more ...
Liz Thomson
I was 10 in 1967 though I remember much about the year, indeed about the era, not least the release of Sgt Pepper and the first live global satellite broadcast, when the Beatles sang “All You Need is Love”, and all the great transatlantic hits, including of course Scott Mackenzie’s “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)”. Soon would begin my obsession with the 1960s – Joan Baez was the gateway drug, an album from my sister’s collection my route to learning guitar and her voice and music my entree to Bob Dylan and to the folk and folk-rock that enthrals me still and to Read more ...
Anthony Quinn
I am intrigued by those writers who plan their novels with the bristling rigour of a military strategist, drilling their characters like counters on a model battlefield. And impressed that they seem in absolute control of the direction their story is going to take. One novelist friend told me he always has the final line of his book written before he even starts.I am not, alas, that kind of writer. I plot and scheme, of course, but it hardly ever comes out the way I’ve sketched in my head. The late William Trevor said of his writing: “If I didn’t believe it was a mystery, the whole thing Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Talk about survival: St Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad, now again St Petersburg, all the same city, has it nailed down. It was founded through the mad enthusiasm, intelligence, determination and just off-the-scale energy of Peter the Great in 1703, built on the bodies of around 30,000 labourers (not the 300,000 that later rumours have suggested) at the whim of an Emperor. You can visit his original wooden cabin there today; the nobles he ordered, on pain of forfeiting titles and wealth, to come and live in his new city had to build in stone.It has been at times the capital of Russia. Its Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s 25 years since Chris Patten lost his seat as Conservative MP for Bath. The 1992 election was called by an embattled prime minister, bruised by the Maastricht Treaty (remember “the bastards”?). Neil Kinnock had been expected to win, Labour ahead in the polls until the last. Party chairman Patten orchestrated the campaign so perhaps the exigencies of the role left little time to attend to his own constituency. In any event, to those disappointed that the Tory order was not overturned, Patten’s defeat was a cheering moment in a grim night.He felt “sick at the humiliation” but a consolation Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Reading the Rocks has a provocative subtitle, “How Victorian Geologists Discovered the Secret of Life”, indicating the role of geology in paving the way to an understanding of the evolution of our planet as a changing physical entity that was to eventually support ever-evolving forms of life: but this is not so much revealtion of a secret, more a history. In a series of short pithy chapters, we are treated to a fascinating cast of characters who invented a new subject, both academic and practical, with enthusiasm and almost overwhelming energy, embracing those on the other side of the Channel Read more ...