Ferdinand Mount
I’m not sure quite what it is that captivated me about Tim Winton’s novel, Breath (Hamish Hamilton, £14.99). It’s a sort of Huck Finn goes surfing in Australia. A scrawny kid bums along the coast in search of the ultimate wave and falls under the spell of Sando, the mysterious wizard of the surfboard. Not my scene, to put it mildly, but it is queerly compelling and I can still taste the spray.
Mick Imlah’s The Lost Leader (Faber, £9.99) well deserved its Forward Poetry Prize. This irresistible collection swings you through the myths and heroes of Scotland, ancient and modern, with a salty rollick to be savoured alongside other ironical Scotch bards such as Dunbar, and the Byron of Don Juan.
Andrew Taylor
Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (Bloomsbury, £14.99) is a brilliant reconstruction of a classic Victorian crime — the savage murder of a young middle-class boy in his apparently secure family home in the country. Summerscale teases out the truth of what happened and its long consequences, in both fact and fiction.
The Murder Farm (Quercus, £8.99) is Andrea Schenkel’s first novel. Based on a real case, it is set in the 1950s and deals with the murder of a German farmer and his family. It’s a short, dark book that looks unflinchingly at the question of why people kill each other. Unusual, memorable and thought-provoking.
Roger Crowley’s Empires of the Sea (Faber, £20) is the story of the battle for the Mediterranean between the Ottoman empire and a fragile Christian alliance dominated by Hapsburg Spain in the 16th century. It’s a riveting account of a bitterly contested political, ideological and economic conflict whose effects are still with us. Narrative history at its best.
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Hannü
December 20th, 2008 10:01pmDialogues Tibetan Dialogues Han is a travelogue from Tibet as well as a book of conversations with dozens of Tibetans from all walks of life in Tibet on a wide range of subjects - the Dalai Lama, polyandry, sky & water burials, the Muslims, the Han, Tibetan mastiffs, aweto, languages, thangka, Buddhism, independence and more.
Published this year, it is the most democratic and down-to-earth book to have come out of Tibet in decades.
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richard milk
December 7th, 2008 3:35pm'vim, gusto and enthusiasm' mr hensher? that wouldn't be a spot of tautology, would it? please stop the pompous posturing - it almost reads as badly as your books.
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Lisa B.
November 26th, 2008 8:37pmThere's an unsung little book out there, quite politically incorrect and one publishers appear fearful of backing. It's called "Up Dog Street" and seems to be available only on Amazon.com. This little tome seems to be slowly gaining a life and a following of its own and the unique, but timely theme, seems the reason. It's a story about an immigrant who's lived in England most of his life, but he spends his days pining for the tundra left behind and condemning the foibles of democracy We all know a few). The author has a powerful voice (an immigrant to America herself) and conveys the idea that birthplace and lineage mean nothing and that "nurture" is everything. It was a great joy seeing how the protagonist "Carlo" in this story, ultimately finds his English soul, from Sussex nontheless.All Western democracies have a lesson to learn from this story.
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