Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

Fleur Macdonald

Shelf Life: Tara Palmer-Tompkinson

As well as being a keen pianist (she practices daily for 90 minutes), Tara Palmer-Tompkinson can also read. In this week’s Shelf Life, T P-T tells us exactly what she’d do if she didn’t find Sidney Sheldon on someone’s bookshelf and why Santa Sebag Montefiore is a godsend for most men. Tara’s latest novel Infidelity is out now. 1) As a child, what did you read under the covers? Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin. And then later, Princess Daisy by Judith Krantz.   2) Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one? Touching the Void by Joe Simpson because it was such a spiritual adventure of man

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Call publishers to Leveson

The Leveson inquiry was convened to ‘examine the culture, practices and ethics of the media’. Most of the inquiry’s time has been devoted to newspapers, particularly tabloid newspapers. To date, no publishers have been called to give evidence, although they may yet be. I very much hope that they are, because a new book published by Faber, Aftermath by Rachel Cusk, raises questions about publishers’ ethics and privacy law. Aftermath is Cusk’s account of the end of her 10-year marriage. It is extremely frank, sparing little of her erstwhile husband’s privacy or that of her children, over whom the warring parents have been fighting. Extracts from the book have been run in the

Matthew Richardson

The cruel sea

The early years of the twentieth century hold an irresistible draw for the modern imagination. The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan takes us back to 1914, the world poised on the precipice of the modern age, with a plot and characters that are of the pre-modern era. A ship is stricken and, in a rescue bid, lifeboats are hurriedly deployed. At the last minute, Grace Winter manages to secure a berth on one. She finds herself adrift with thirty-nine fellow passengers. Rumours of distress signals stoke hope of potential rescue. But this is a technological dark age; they are at the mercy of the sea and each other. It is a

Roshi Fernando

The joys of motherhood

In between feeds, I read to my babies. I like to read. It is the thing I do — I like to read more than I like to write or eat or sleep. Reading has been my go to method for getting through every-day life since I was bout three. My cutting-edge English teacher mother borrowed a book from the University of London library when I was two, which told her how to teach very young children to read. Mum made flashcards and pinned them up around the house: breadbin, door, shoes, floor, Dad. I read the TV pages. I read cartoons, like Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird (she

Monday

David Blackburn

Jewish identity and experience at Jewish Book Week

There are two notable diamond jubilees this year: the obvious one and Jewish Book Week (JWB). The festival opened last weekend and will run at Kings Place in London until Sunday evening, when David Aaronovitch and Umberto Eco will end proceedings with a discussion about the latter’s novel, The Prague Cemetery. JBW is a celebration of literature; but, as one might expect, Jewish identity is central to most events. Yesterday afternoon saw Dennis Marks and Michael Hofmann debating the life and work of Joseph Roth — one of that band of writers (Kafka, Mann and Zweig) who described southern and eastern Europe during and after the collapse of the Hapsburg empire.

Austen Saunders

Discovering poetry: Dryden’s earthy translation of Lucretius

If cat-eyed, then a Pallas is their love; If freckled, she’s a party-coloured dove; If little, then she’s life and soul all o’er; An Amazon, the large two-handed whore. She stammers; oh, what grace in lisping lies! If she says nothing, to be sure she’s wise. If shrill, and with a voice to drown a quire, Sharp-witted she must be, and full of fire; The lean, consumptive wench, with coughs decayed, Is called a pretty, tight, and slender maid; The o’ergrown, a goodly Ceres is exprest, A bed-fellow for Bacchus at the least; Flat-nose the name of Satyr never misses, And hanging blobber lips but pout for kisses. The task

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages | 20 February 2012

Colm Tóibín has a new book out this Thursday, New Ways to Kill Your Mother — a collection of essays examining how writers and their families relate to each other. Tóibín introduced the essays in Saturday’s Guardian, and was interviewed by the Times’ Erica Wagner (£): ‘As with his memoir, in which what is left out is as vital as what is put in, these essays are remarkable for looking at the personal, familial relationships of writers while always, somehow, allowing them the freedom to be artists. Tóibín will not discuss his personal life. When I remark that he has always resisted dealing with homosexuality in his work, he says quickly: “I’m resisting

Saturday

Kate Chisholm

The making of the modern metropolis

Why in 1737 did Dr Johnson choose to leave his home in Lichfield in the Midlands and travel to London to make a fresh start as a writer, asks Jerry White in his encyclopaedic portrait of the 18th-century capital. It’s a good question. London was dangerous, it was dirty, you could die of ague in a matter of hours, be robbed, crushed to death by the mob, thrown into jail for unpaid debts, and, no matter whether you were rich, poor or of the middling sort, suffer the scourge of bed bugs through every waking hour. To live comfortably (without domestic cares) you needed to earn enough money to employ

Molly Guinness

Ecoutez bien!

The French make it look easy: small babies sleep through the night, toddlers calmly eat four-course lunches, well-dressed mothers chat on the edge of the playground rather than running around after their children, and they hardly ever shout. Pamela Druckerman left New York for Paris and soon found herself with an English husband and several children. While her daughter was throwing food around a restaurant, French children of the same age would be enjoying the cheese course. Druckerman embarked on a painstaking study of parenting à la française. The result is amusing, helpful and charmingly self-effacing. Druckerman was disappointed when she found out that getting pregnant in Paris does not

Olivia Glazebrook

Winter wonderland | 18 February 2012

Jack and Mabel move to Alaska to try to separate themselves from a tragedy — the loss of their only baby — that has frozen the core of their relationship. They intend to establish a homestead in the wilderness, but it is 1920 and they are middle-aged, friendless and from ‘back east’ — unprepared and ill-equipped for the backbreaking work and unspeakable loneliness of pioneer life. By the middle of their second winter the climate, isolation and sorrow of their situation seem to have got the better of them; at the opening of The Snow Child we find them at the end of their wits and their resources. During a

David Crane

If only …

In the early summer of 1910, a naval officer, bound for the Antarctic, paid a visit to the office of Thomas Marlowe, the editor of the Daily Mail. He had come in search of some badly needed funds for his expedition, but just as he was leaving he paused to ask Marlowe when he thought war with Germany would break out. ‘I can only tell you,’ came the reply, ‘that there is a well-informed belief that Germany will be ready to strike in the summer of 1914 and it is thought that she may do so.’ The officer mulled this over, doing his calculations. ‘The summer of 1914 will suit

Mark Mason

Robot on the loose

In December 2005, a passenger on an early-morning flight from Dallas to Las Vegas fell asleep. Woken by a steward when the plane touched down, the man wearily disembarked and took a connecting flight to San Francisco. It was only there that he realised he’d forgotten an item of hand luggage on the first flight. Despite heroic attempts to retrieve it, the item was never seen again. This is a pity. The item was the head of Philip K. Dick. Not his real head, of course. That had been cremated, along with the rest of the science fiction writer, in 1982, shortly before the release of Blade Runner, the film

James Walton

Many parts of man

In some ways, you’ve got to hand it to Craig Raine. Two years ago, after a distinguished career as a poet and all-round man of letters, he published his first novel — and received a series of reviews that, as Woody Allen once put it, read like a Tibetan Book of the Dead. According to virtually all of them, Heartbreak was fragmented, name-dropping, pretentious, and not really a novel anyway: more a loose collection of thoughts, revealing an alarming obsession with sexual organs. But with The Divine Comedy, Raine responds with almost heroic defiance. If you felt like that about the last book, it seems to shout, try this one

Adam Marsjones

Loves, hates and unfulfilled desires

Montaigne, who more or less invented the discursive essay, had a method which was highly unmethodical: ‘All arguments are alike fertile to me. I take them upon any trifle . . . Let me begin with that likes me best, for all matters are linked one to another.’ Geoff Dyer could say very much the same thing, and it follows that Zona, though nominally a book about Tarkovsky’s maddening 1979 masterpiece Stalker, goes off in any number of directions. There are other ways of describing a circle than setting out to draw all its tangents, but that is Dyer’s preference. If the style of approach hasn’t changed, then the cultural

Jason Goodwin

Saviours of the sea

The last time we went out for lobster in Lyme Bay we found a dogfish in the creel.  A type of shark that roamed the seas before dinosaurs existed, a dogfish won’t slice your leg off the way a Great White might, but it is very scratchy to hold onto, thanks to its denticles, the teeth that cover its entire body (Speedo, the swimsuit company, is trying to imitate its streamlining qualities). Ours was about two foot long and snappy, with a wide rictus mouth, and it rubbed us raw thrashing about before we dropped it back in the water. While its 400-million- year-old contemporaries are embedded in the Jurassic

Ian Thomson

Bookends: A network of kidney-nappers

Raylan Givens, an ace detective in the Raymond Chandler mould, has encountered just about every shakedown artist and palooka in his native East Kentucky. His creator, Elmore Leonard, is a maestro of American noir; Raylan (Weidenfeld, £18.99), his latest thriller, presents a familiar impasto of choppy, street-savvy slang and hip-jive patter that verges on a kind of poetry. Typically, Raylan charts a murky underworld where criminals are in cahoots with politicians, and where murder is a consequence of this corruption. In his curl-toed cowboy boots, Federal Marshal Givens is summoned to investigate a case of trafficking in human body-parts. A man has been found moribund in a bathtub with his

Friday

David Blackburn

Interview: Saul David’s greatest British generals

Who is Britain’s greatest ever general? The BBC and the National Army Museum put the question to the public at the end of last year. The public declared the Duke of Wellington Britain’s best, together with William Slim. Professor Saul David is not so sure. His latest book, All The King’s Men: The British soldier from the Restoration to Waterloo, sketches the beginnings of a revision of Wellington. I asked him about this rather bold move. ‘I certainly did not set out writing the rather large section [in the book] on Wellington to bash him, but the more detail I got into about his career and how he reacted to

David Blackburn

The art of fiction: Wrongful arrest

A publishing bidding war began the moment that Amanda Knox walked free. Photogenic, sexually adventurous, naive, wrongfully imprisoned — it’s guaranteed to be a blockbuster to match The Count of Montecristo and The Shawshank Redemption, only its contents will be factual. The book was bought last night by Harper Collins for $4 million. First-hand accounts of wrongful imprisonment are quite rare, especially when one considers how much coverage miscarriages of justice receive in the press. The most famous book of the genre is Papillon, published by Henri Charrière in 1969. It was recommended by Kwasi Kwarteng MP in our Bookbenchers feature last year, and I chanced upon a copy (translated from

Thursday

David Blackburn

The turbulent priest | 16 February 2012

The Queen rarely intervenes in public life. It is a mark of the vehemence of the recent attacks on the Church of England that she has leapt to its defence, characterising it as the guardian of people of all faiths and none. The storm of words between secularists and establishmentarians will intensify tomorrow when the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, publishes his defence of faith, We Don’t Do God: The Marginalisation of Public Faith. It’s a strident book , especially as Carey was more ridiculed than revered as a liberal primate. Freddy Gray has interviewed Lord Carey in the latest issue of the Spectator, and Lord Carey summarised his points: ‘What I am getting at is that

Emily Rhodes

Inside Books: Special bookshops

Chances are you’ve already seen this incredible round-up of the ten most beautiful bookshops in the world. This recent post on hip US blog Flavorwire has enjoyed remarkable success, inspiring several articles and a huge amount of praise and discussion in various forums worldwide. Over here in Britain, the Guardian’s article about it received nearly 200 comments. If you’ve not yet looked at the photos, you’re in for a treat. These bookshops are beautiful, breathtaking, almost miraculous places. And the astonishing amount of buzz created around the post reassures me that I’m not alone in thinking this. Evidently, I’m just one of several thousand bookshop-lovers. And these people aren’t the