Byron Rogers
When TV presenters write history books it is the mistakes you treasure most, as when David Dimbleby blithely pronounced that Augustine had introduced Christianity to Britain (Christianity being over 200 years old in Britain, with Welsh bishops, before Augustine came). But Andrew Marr’s A History of the World (Macmillan, £25) is different. It is a distinguished work of history in its own right. The TV series wasn’t up to much, but the book is wonderful, and better than H.G. Wells’s The Outline of History. It made me wonder what else is deliberately hidden away to advance the careers of those prattling public faces that appear on our screens. All we need now is Simon Cowell’s concordance to the Gododdin.
Allan Massie
Simon Mawer’s novel of the French Resistance, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (Little, Brown, £16.99) is enviably good. The picture of wartime Paris is chilling — a city where no one can be trusted and everyone has something to fear. There is also a charming love story and a bleak ending.
In a year when another long novel has won the Booker, here are three short ones that pleased me. Pleasure may not actually be the right word to apply to Jérôme Ferrari’s novella, Where I Left My Soul (MacLehose, £12), but this examination of the corrosive effect of torture as practised by officers of the French army during the Algerian war is brilliantly and movingly done. The book, a prize-winner in France, has received less attention here than it deserves.
Ron Rash is the best American novelist I have come upon in a long time. The Cove (Canongate, £14.99) is set in redneck country in the Appalachians during the 1914-18 war. It is grim, intense and dramatic. Comparison with Faulkner is inescapable, and Rash is good enough not to make that far-fetched.
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