Cressida Connolly is the author of Bad Relations.
Like many bookworms, once or twice a year I am struck down with reading doldrums. Then the stash of paperbacks on my bedside table seems less a collection of future delights than a useless repository of dust. Nothing pleases. This disgruntlement generally passes of its own accord, but sometimes it takes the recommendation of a
‘I only see radiators these days’, announces one of the characters in this novel — ‘You know, people who give out heat and warmth.’ A radiator is a pretty good description of India Knight’s Comfort and Joy (Fig Tree/ Penguin, £14.99), too: a book so kindly and funny and affectionate that you could probably warm
Here is the latest Book End column from this week’s issue of the Spectator: ‘I only see radiators these days’, announces one of the characters in this novel — ‘You know, people who give out heat and warmth.’ A radiator is a pretty good description of India Knight’s Comfort and Joy, too: a book so
This is a book which, along with a packet of extra strong mints, deserves a place in the glove compartment of every car. This is a book which, along with a packet of extra strong mints, deserves a place in the glove compartment of every car. Any motoring trip into the British countryside, any hillside
The Norwegian, Per Petterson, was not well known until his 2003 novel, Out Stealing Horses, became a surprise international bestseller. It deserved the many prizes it garnered: it is a wonderful book, unsettling and minutely observed. Readers may recall that the closing scene of that novel has the young narrator walking with his mother: ‘We
Unless you have spent the last couple of years packed in soil on a boat bound for Whitby, you will have noticed that vampires are back in fashion. It’s an international craze, with Japanese and Swedish films (notably the marvellously quirky Let the Right One In, now being remade in Hollywood) contributing fresh interpretations. The
If you wanted to write about Marilyn Monroe, how would you go about it? The pile of biographies, memoirs and novels about poor, sad Marilyn is already teetering. How could you make something new of her life? Clever Andrew O’Hagan has come up with an answer: by writing as her pet dog. How the hound
This vast novel, well-plotted and gripping throughout, is the first that Sebastian Faulks has set in our time. It is a state of the nation book, and what a state we seem to be in: if Faulks is less kind to the contemporary than he has been to the past, we cannot blame him, for
Lynn Barber’s interviews are one of the main reasons to subscribe to the Observer: on any Sunday when a piece of hers appears, it’s always the first thing to turn to, even — or make that especially — when she’s profiling someone unsympathetic. Not for nothing has she earned the nickname the Demon Barber. On
Chaplin’s Girl, by Miranda Seymour Love Child, by Allegra Huston Virginia Cherrill was an exceptionally pretty young woman when she turned up in Los Angeles in the late 1920s, looking for fun and adventure. Here Charlie Chap- lin spotted her, in the front row at a boxing match, and invited her to star in his
A friend who belongs to an old-fashioned London club tells me that all anecdotes related within its walls are met with one of only three accepted responses: Great Fun, Rather Fun and Shame. Stanley I Presume is rather fun. It would have been great fun if the author was less discreet and less loyal and
The Atmospheric Railway: New and Selected Stories, by Shena Mackay In Waterstones bookshops there are little signs dotted among the fiction shelves, to prompt readers towards new purchases. The signs suggest that if you liked, say, Evelyn Waugh you’d also enjoy Nancy Mitford; or if Ruth Rendell is a favourite you might like to try
Julia Blackburn has written about Goya, about the island of St Helena, about the naturalist Charles Waterton, about a talking pig; and she has turned her attention to other strange and various things besides, but she has never written a dull sentence. It is clear from the first few lines of this book that The
It is a mark of how various are Jane Gardam’s interests that this collection of short stories does not read as a collection at all, but more as a very agreeable hotch-potch. Only place unites them, for several take place in leafy London suburbs, Hampstead, perhaps, or Wimbledon. The stories are unalike in subject, length
The eight short stories which form this collection began life in a multicultural magazine called Metro Eirann, which was set up in 2000 by two Nigerian journalists living in Dublin. Roddy Doyle heard of the magazine, liked the idea, and offered his services. As he says, in his introduction: There’s a love story, a horror
Is there anyone, hearing a story about bigamy, who does not feel a tiny jolt of admiration, even envy, for the wrongdoer? How many of us can say that, if we could suffer no ill consequences, we wouldn’t rather like to have a second household, with different plants in the garden, different curtains, a different
Memoirs about bad or dotty fathers — from J. R. Ackerley’s (and the brilliant companion piece by his secret half-sister, Diana Petre) to Lorna Sage’s to Blake Morrison’s — exert a special fascination. A small subdivision of the form are those accounts featuring not only a father who is mad, bad or dangerous to know,
Mark Haddon’s previous book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, was a bestseller and that golden egg of publishing, a ‘crossover’ book: one which, like Harry Potter, was read by both children and adults. It told the story of a boy with Asperger’s syndrome (a mild form of autism), employing the flat,
Listing page content here Anyone baffled by the conundrum of what to read on the beach this summer need look no further than A Much Married Man. This thoroughly good-natured comedy of manners is perfectly pitched so as to provide something for everyone: witty social observation, convincing glimpses into the worlds of high finance and
The ancient Athenians were mad about it, but the Spartans thought it a waste of time. It flowered in the coffee houses and clubs of 18th-century London, but fell out of favour when the Romantics made it fashionable to prefer solitary communion with nature. Swift thought women improved it and Hume agreed: ‘Women are the