Apple Tree Yard by Louise Doughty
18 Jun 2013 20:30:18
Apple Tree Yard, Louise Doughty's seventh novel, shares with her previous books a preoccupation with the "what if" territory of ordinary life, those unthinkable events that divide a life into "before" and "after". Her last novel, the Costa award-shortlisted Whatever You Love, explored the killing of a child and a mother's desire for revenge. In Apple Tree Yard, she gives us the aftermath of an affair, but what begins as a familiar scenario twists away unexpectedly into a story of violent assault ...
Jacob's Folly by Rebecca Miller
18 Jun 2013 20:30:01
Jacob's Folly is an intriguing jewel of a novel about temptation and desire. It follows the life and reincarnation of a Jewish pedlar, Jacob Cerf. We meet Jacob at the point of his reincarnation in present-day New York, where he immediately falls in lust with 21-year-old Masha Edelman, who wants to be an actress. His chances of wooing her are limited because he realises, to his horror, that he has been reincarnated not, as he had originally hoped, as an angel, but as a fly. He has returned to Ea ...
Stuff Matters by Mark Miodownik
18 Jun 2013 20:30:36
They dismantled and burned their fort. Then they dug a large hole into which they dumped their most precious metal items: 763,840 2in nails, 85,128 medium nails and 25,088 large nails. "These had held the fort together and would have been as useful as leaving a cache of weapons, so the Roman troops buried them," writes Mark Miodownik, professor of materials and society at University College London. All other steel items were taken south: weapons, armour – and the soldiers' razors, which "allow ...
The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Simon Mawer
17 Jun 2013 01:30:05
Though Simon Mawer's latest novel shares its wartime setting with its Booker-shortlisted predecessor, The Glass Room, it's a different animal, swapping the elegant historical sweep of that book for something more streamlined and tautly paced. This is much more of traditional thriller, albeit an intelligent one. We're in Eric Ambler territory here, though William Boyd's Restless also comes to mind. Marian Sutro is a smart, composed young woman of French and English parentage who is recruited b ...
Marble Season by Gilbert Hernández
17 Jun 2013 00:30:59
Hernández is the creator of Love and Rockets, a pioneering, genre-bending cartoon which he began writing with his brothers, Jaime and Mario, in the early 80s. Among the stories in Love and Rockets was Palomar, a magic realist saga which he finally completed in 1996 (the action takes place in a fictional South American village which modern technology has yet to reach). But Marble Season, his first full-length novel, could not be more different. It's semi-autobiographical, realist and excludes ad ...
The Quarry by Iain Banks
17 Jun 2013 00:30:59
The Quarry is a novel about disease, about "fucking cancer", as it's repeatedly described. It's a novel held up against the dying of the light, a fierce howl into the void that, in the image of the titular quarry, threatens to engulf the characters on every page. Reading this book, one is hit again and again with the fact – tragic and astonishing in equal measure – that Banks didn't know he was dying until he'd almost finished the first draft, that the cancer that was the subject matter of h ...
Joyland by Stephen King
13 Jun 2013 23:30:15
Stephen King's new novel comes in a retro-pulp cover, under the shoutline, "Who dares enter the funhouse of fear?" It's published by Hard Case Crime, whose policy is to reprint classic hardboiled fiction by writers such as Lawrence Block, Donald E Westlake and James M Cain alongside original neo-hardboiled from stars with names like Jonny Porkpie. If it isn't quite the stripped‑down tale of crime we associate with Westlake or Block, Joyland is endearingly compact – perhaps a quarter the leng ...
Night of Triumph by Peter Bradshaw
13 Jun 2013 23:30:23
From Alan Bennett to Sue Townsend to Peter Morgan, artistic attempts have been made to fathom her inner workings. In his novella, Peter Bradshaw proposes a reason why the Queen seems so grimly disengaged. What if she once, when young, broke free of protocol and encountered her future subjects as they really were? And what if the sight so alarmed and appalled her she fled back to her palace for good? Bradshaw, who is the Guardian's film critic, takes as his starting point the documented episod ...
The North by Paul Morley
13 Jun 2013 23:30:08
Morley's book, however, fails to record that this great musical tradition suffered a steep decline. Three decades later, I myself stood on the stage of the Free Trade Hall clad in red blazer and grey shorts, singing shamelessly chauvinistic songs as a member of the school choir on Speech Day. The chauvinism, I now recognise, was an attempt by my Irish immigrant community to ingratiate itself with mainstream English culture. Within a few square miles of my home, a band of Salford men and women en ...
Damn His Blood by Peter Moore
11 Jun 2013 22:30:19
"Murder," said Thomas de Quincey in his famous essay on the subject, "may be laid hold of by its moral handle (as it generally is in the pulpit and at the Old Bailey), and that, I confess, is its weak side; or it may also be treated aesthetically, as the Germans call it – that is, in relation to good taste." De Quincey was having his fun and so should be allowed his joke, but, of course, when it comes to murder, the moral and the aesthetic are intertwined – that is, when enough time has elap ...
Letters From the Palazzo Barbaro by Henry James
11 Jun 2013 22:30:09
In his preface to The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James describes looking out over the Venetian waterscape during the "fruitless fidget of composition, as if to see whether, out in the blue channel, the ship of some right suggestion, of some better phrase ... mightn't come into sight". His many spells in Venice were to provide him with more than a shapely phrase. This collection of his letters sent from the Palazzo Barbaro – his regular haunt on the southern end of the Grand Canal – abounds in ...
Things That Are by Amy Leach
11 Jun 2013 22:30:26
Leach begins with lilies and dickers marvellously onward through the cosmos, ranging from little to large, spinning exotic stories about the multiple feathered and freckled inhabitants of the Earth. Her roving eye might settle on portly, industrious beavers, "warm and dry in their oily parkas" and once categorised erroneously by a pope as fish, or else on Mars's moon Phobos, meaning "panic", which apparently resembles "a potato that has experienced one terrible, and many average, concussions". ...