Leeches, by David Albahari
Not so long ago Serbia was the pariah of Europe. The wars that accompanied the break-up of Yugoslavia were shocking in the degree of hatred and brutality between different ethnic groups who had lived in uneasy peace with one another for most of the century. The separatist ambitions of Slovenia, Croatia and other regions were opposed by the centralist regime in the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, Belgrade. The result was isolation for Serbia, introversion and a siege mentality that were fertile ground for nationalist and extremist groups.
There are long memories of injustice and oppression in this area where armies and cultures have frequently clashed, and ethnic pride runs deep. From being the most powerful kingdom of south-eastern Europe, Serbia became a part of the Ottoman, then the Austro-Hungarian empire, ending up as a truncated province in the “South Slav Federation”. As in other parts of Europe, the Jewish population was badly treated. Prohibited from most forms of employment, money-lending was their principal occupation. The Serbs of Belgrade were more cruelly imaginative. Jews were restricted to the trade in leeches – valued for their medicinal applications, but indicative of the common view of Jews as parasites. Jews (and other “undesirables”) were persecuted during the Nazi occupation, but Serbs were targeted even more by the collaborationist Croat regime. While not excusing the violence of the 1990s, this puts the conflict in a larger perspective – one where both Jews and Serbs have suffered. Perhaps the author is comparing and contrasting the response of these groups to persecution…
A second look at The Black Lung Captain, by Chris Wooding
Slag is master of his domain. Veteran of many campaigns he’s a tough old boot and has never been defeated. He takes advantage of every weakness and has seen off every invader, every enemy. He’s not unscathed though and bears the honorable scars of his long life of warfare. Harkins is his latest, bitterest enemy. A timid fighter pilot who fears and hates Slag, stalks him, tries to trap him, a mean and nasty man. Slag likes to sleep on his head.
Success. Harkins is seen off and retreats to sleep in his fighter instead of in his quarters on the Ketty Jay. But Slag isn’t satisfied. Retreat isn’t victory, and Slag needs victory. He has to go on the offensive, leave the safe world of ventilation tunnels and take the fight to Harkins. In the bravest thing he’s ever done Slag ventures off the ship for the first time in his life, crosses the airfield and climbs into the fighter, there to sleep, recover from the trauma and plan his assault.
Nine Inches, by Bateman
After being left on the subs bench for six years while Bateman worked on the Mystery Man series and copious other projects, Dan Starkey is once again called up to the big leagues in Nine Inches. During the intervening period, Starkey had spent much of the time living the high life that came with his acquisition of Belfast Confidential [the crusading news/vacuous celebrity magazine] and being generally faithful his long-suffering wife Patricia, but of course this good fortune didn’t last. Once again down on his luck and out on his ear, Starkey has turned his back on journalism and established himself as offering “a boutique bespoke service for important people with difficult problems.” Well, established in the sense that he has at least rented premises anyway.
Starkey’s first client turns out to be Jack Caramac, noted/irritating Belfast talk radio personality and his one-time journalistic compatriot. Jack’s four-year-old son had been kidnapped, held for approximately an hour, and then returned with a note in his pocket urging Jack to “Shut the f**k up.” Unfortunately for Starkey, there are more than a few people who might want Jack Caramac to shut up and, as his investigation progresses, he finds himself having to fend off more butchers, barmaids, paramilitaries, teen thugs and glamorous politicians than you can shake an artificial limb at.
Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer
We all have food memories. We recall helping a parent or grandparent in the kitchen, meeting a good friend for dinner, giving thanks over a big meal. We typically look back on these events as moments created in time among people and not as a series of actions leading to food being presented on the table. In Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer attempts to tell the story of how animals make their way to our plates, thus acknowledging the importance of food in our lives and memories.
Foer, who wrote Everything is Illuminated in 2002 and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close in 2005, does an admirable job of remaining (mostly) objective while investigating the details of factory farming in the U.S. The reality is that to explore raising animals as food in the U.S. is to study factory farming because they are nearly one in the same. “99 percent of all animals eaten in [the United States] come from ‘factory farms,’” states Foer.
Thursdays in The Park, by Hilary Boyd
These days, it is harder than ever to judge a book by its cover. It seems that just because a book is written by a female, some publishers feel that they must package it in pastel shades and adorn it with friendly looking fonts and flowers, thus indicating it belongs within the puerile (but commercial) chick lit genre of lightweight love stories even when it doesn’t. Thus, when you pick up a novel with such a cover you can’t be sure if what you are getting is a good book disguised as chick lit and a nice surprise (The Girls Guide To Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank being my favourite example of such a book), or just plain literary fluff.
I want to tell you that Thursdays in the Park is going to offer you a nice surprise despite its flowery cover, lower case titles (ugh) and facile front cover question that asks ‘Does love always come with a sell-by date?’ but sadly I can’t.
A second look at The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi
Monoculture. The environmental plague, the species killer, the profit machine, Galadriel, Shiva. In all the discussion about genetic modification and superfoods the horror of the monoculture and yet worse, if you can imagine it, the sterile monoculture, barely gets a mention. Whether or not gm foods are good, bad or indifferent for their consumers pales into complete irrelevance by comparison with the evils of the genetically-modified, sterile, monoculture. Millions of square miles are already covered with the things, wheat, rice, banana, rubber, you name it it’s out there. Extinction in the name of money.
It’s very hard to see what Bacigalupi can write next after the Windup Girl. Perhaps he should stop now. It has to be the best, most thought-provoking Science Fiction written in decades. No whiff of fantasy, no hint of special powers, it’s a straight extrapolation from today into the not too distant future. Sea level has risen, cities are protected by levees dwarfing the ones round New Orleans, the oil’s run out, populations have soared, poverty and extreme wealth are even more overt, and covert, than now. Life is cheap.
Nerd Do Well, by Simon Pegg
Ever since 2004, when an errant now-ex-boyfriend introduced me to the glory of Spaced, I’ve been a huge fan of Pegg’s work on screens both big and small. Perhaps because of that, I had enormous expectations of Nerd Do Well, his autobiographical chronicle of how a small and comparatively innocent boy turned into the Grandmaster Flash of geekdom.
And with a huge amount of self-mockery and good-natured fun, Pegg describes his momentous rise from his Gloucester-based cradle to a man who is known for his sense of humour, his proud nerdiness, and his impeccable company in the form of Nick Frost and Jessica Hynes.
Afterwards, by Rosamund Lupton
After my enjoyment of Lupton’s Sister, I had to download Afterwards to my Kindle and see if lightning could strike twice. I’m happy to announce that it definitely did.
Grace and her daughter Jenny are trapped in a strange purgatory. Walking around the hospital in which their bodies are dying, they have to try to work out what happened to bring them there. But when Grace’s son, Adam, stands accused of starting the fire that caused all this strife, she knows she has to prove his innocence somehow. Together with Jenny, she begins to dig into the intricacies of their social circle, and soon secrets start pouring out… But which lead to the identity of the would-be killer? And will they survive this ordeal and return to the life they once shared – a perfectly normal life that seems utterly golden in hindsight?
Amanda Kyle Williams
Amanda Kyle Williams has contributed to short story collections and worked as a freelance writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She worked as a house painter, a property manager, a sales rep, a commercial embroiderer, a courier, a VP of manufacturing at a North Georgia textile mill, and owned Latch Key Pets, a pet sitting and dog walking business. She also worked with a PI firm in Atlanta on surveillance operations, and became a court-appointed process server. Her first novel, The Stranger You Seek, was recently published by Headline in the UK.
I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson
Robert Neville is, as far as he’s aware, the last living human in a world overrun by vampires. By day, he finds their hiding places and dispatches them, working towards a more effective method of killing them and looking desperately for a cure. By night, he sits locked in the house he once shared with his wife and daughter and listens to their cries as they try to convince him to come out so they can infect him with the disease that has condemned them all to a moonlit existence.
His days bleed into one another as he tries to understand the condition that swept across the world and turned it into a living hell… Until, one day, a woman appears in a sunlit field. Will she bring relief from the loneliness, or only a new kind of torment?
The Death-Ray, by Daniel Clowes
If gamma radiation turns you into the Hulk and radioactive spider bites turns you into Spider-Man, to say nothing of the hijinks that created Bouncing Boy, then perhaps it is feasible that smoking turns you into the Death-Ray. Well, not YOU per se, but that’s certainly what happened to troubled teenager Andy.
In keeping with the conventions of the superhero genre – a genre which Daniel Clowes enjoys subverting rather than one which he simply enjoys – The Death-Ray features an unlikely hero with a troubled home life as well as an outlandish origin story. After Andy’s mother dies, he is raised by his father, a famous scientist, and then, following his father’s death, he moves across country to live with his grandparents. Then granny dies too and Andy is left in the care of a grandfather who is rapidly succumbing to dementia and who is himself nearly entirely dependent on his surprisingly alluring Home Help, Dinah. New in town and something of a dweeb [although apparently with a hot girlfriend back in California], Andy has one friend at school – the rather obnoxious Louie.
Under A Monsoon Cloud: An Inspector Ghote Mystery, by H.R.F. Keating
Inspector Ghote and his famed morals are back. This time he is caught between his urge to tell the truth and losing his cherished career as a Bombay policeman.
The first part of the book is setting Ghote to witness a murder , removing him from Bombay to an out of the way police station. There, we and Ghote witness the murder and the initial cover-up, and then Ghote’s walking away, hopeful that he would never have to think about any of it again. But, the dead have a way of sitting up, and Ghote finds himself the subject of a police Inquiry, the outcome of which could put his whole livelihood at risk. His wife, the crackling Protima, features strongly in this story, supporting Ghote and countering his moral compass’s insistence at telling the truth, which would beggar the family.
Solstice at Stonewylde, by Kit Berry
With a level of energy and intensity held throughout the previous books, Kit Berry keeps the powerful drama and tension going throughout her third novel tracking the turbulent events at Stonewylde and the unfolding Stonewylde prophecy.
Yul has been deemed guardian of the Earth Magic, favoured by the Godesse, but at the end of the second novel his life had been lost at the end of the festival. He manages to survive against the odds with the help of some very powerful magic bestowed upon him by Mother Heggy. Read more
A second look at Warrior of Rome: King of Kings, by Harry Sidebottom
When I was little the big treat was the ‘thing on a stick’. Candy-floss, toffee apple, simple ice-lolly, that sort of thing. Nowadays the thing on a stick tends to be savoury, the kebab and the cocktail sausage. The Romans, they invented the thing on a stick and whats more they invented the communal thing on a stick. A wealthy Roman would have a personal thing on a stick, and even have a slave to carry it around for him. That slave would carry a lot of other stuff as well, but the thing on the stick was the essential bit. No-one despaired though, everyone, rich and poor had access to a communal one. Maximus and Calgacus make use of the communal sponges on a stick in the latrines at a brothel in Ephesus. You really wouldn’t want to eat a Roman thing on a stick..
It’s the wealth of this kind of tiny detail that makes this book. When you see the communal public loos in Ephesus you probably think about the advanced design, the running water removing the waste and the lack of privacy but Sidebottom makes you think about the way people lived, their attitudes and prejudices and how they might have behaved.
Scenes from Provincial Life, by J.M. Coetzee
Scenes from Provincial Life brings together for the first time J.M. Coetzee’s trilogy of more-or-less fictionalised memoirs: Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime. A major project published over a 12-year period, the volumes deal with three distinct, formative periods in the young author’s life: his childhood and early teenage years spent in uninspiring 1950s South Africa, his early twenties as a gauche would-be poet masquerading as a computer programmer in 1960s London, and the inauspicious outset of his literary career in the early 1970s, in which we find a bedraggled Coetzee living in suburban obscurity with his father.
Though the three works may have been conceived as a trilogy, they do not link together to form a continuous whole. There is a five-year gap between the periods covered in Boyhood and Youth, and another seven or eight years before the events of Summertime – roughly equivalent to the gaps between their original publication. Indeed, reading them as a continuous work rather than as three distinct pieces of writing presents problems of its own. None of these volumes is autobiography in any conventional way, but Summertime marks a departure from its precursors in content as well as form.
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Simon Kernick
Simon Kernick is one of Britain’s most exciting new thriller writers. He arrived on the crime writing scene with his highly acclaimed debut novel The Business of Dying, the story of a corrupt cop moonlighting as a hitman. However, Simon’s big breakthrough came with his novel Relentless which was selected by Richard and Judy for [...]
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Five copies of John le Carré’s Smiley vs Karla Trilogy to be won
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was one of the big film releases of 2011, and to celebrate its release on DVD we have five copies of John le Carré’s Smiley vs Karla Trilogy to be won – consisting of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People.
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