Books
Marina Vaizey
Essay collections are happily mainstream now, from Zadie Smith to Oliver Sacks, with more and more bits and bobs coming from unexpected quarters. These patchwork quilts from remarkable writers can be significant, nowhere more so than with those from Ursula K Le Guin that are collected here as her “Selected Non-Fiction”.Le Guin died in January, aged 88, and this latest selection was especially chosen for a British readership, comprising reprinted speeches and short essays from 1972 to 2014. All are underlined and anchored by her paradoxical and hard-won success which, however, never soothed Read more ...
Liz Thomson
In our era of 24/7 news, downloadable from anywhere in the world at the touch of an app, it's hard to remember that not so very long ago the agenda was set by the BBC - the Home Service as Radio 4 was then called, and BBC TV, just the one channel, which broadcast news at a handful of fixed points during the evening. Outside broadcasts, "OBs", were slow, labour-intensive and expensive. Politicians were respected. So too journalists.That was the BBC that a new-minted history graduate named John Tusa joined in 1960, beginning his graduate traineeship at Bush House in what was then known as BBC Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
London Rules – explicitly cover your arse – is the fifth in the most remarkable and mesmerising series of novels, set mostly and explicitly in London, to have appeared in years. It is hypnotically fascinating, absolutely contemporary, cynical and hopeful.The style is utterly Herron’s own: a series of elegant vignettes, a few short paragraphs, covering just a few days of mad and often deluded action. He fields a large cast of characters, from Jackson Lamb, the omniscient, obese, flatulent, greedy mess of an experienced, now disgraced MI5 spy, and his crew of much younger men and women who have Read more ...
Katherine Waters
"I've been known to stroke concrete," writes self-professed geek Roma Agrawal – and from the very beginning of her memoir-cum-introduction to structural engineering, Built, where she describes her awe as a toddler at the glass and steel canyon of Manhattan, the structural is personal.The book is divided by materials, elements and concepts – “Sky”, “Clean”, “Rock”, “Force”, and “Clay” are all chapter titles – and each hones in on a particular structure by weaving together the stories of the people who built them, the social and historical context in which they were conceived and built, and the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Joe Dunthorne's debut novel Submarine (2008) burrowed plausibly inside the head of a teenager worrying about sex and his parents’ marriage. Richard Ayaode latched onto its quizzical appeal in his film adaptation. Dunthorne’s longer and more ambitious second novel Wild Abandon (2011) set up camp in a hippy commune in which social conventions were quirkily upended. It was a happy setting for an author intrigued by the perpetual weirdness of human behaviour. There has been quite a wait for The Adulterants, a contemporary tour of several of the deadly sins, but it's been worth it.The first two Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Usually extracts in newspapers should stimulate the appetite of the reader to get with it; this is a rare moment when the glimpses afforded to Afua Hirsch’s Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging have peculiarly maligned a complex and amply researched investigation into questions of race, identity, politics, geography and history.First impressions were of a personal and rather self-indulgent memoir by a mixed-race young woman. Afua Hirsch, now in her mid-30s, was brought up in comfortable circumstances in Wimbledon. There are plenty of mentions of strawberry and cream, of tennis and leafy Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
From his debut Metroland, right up to the Man Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending, the prospect of a road not taken has haunted the mild and mediocre narrators of Julian Barnes’s novels. Like Tony Webster in The Sense of an Ending, “average at life; average at truth; morally average”, they tend to prefer, or at least settle for, a comfy seat in the stalls as life’s high dramas unfold in front of them. True, the novels often shatter this detachment and, with gentle ruthlessness, wreck their hard-won equipoise. Yet The Only Story, although it initially slips into the well-woven tweed of the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
A macchiato may never taste the same again. If you’ve ever wondered about the politics and history behind your cup of designer coffee, The Monk of Mokha will answer all your questions, and more.This is the prolific Dave Eggers’s third semi-biographical work: What is the What tells the story of one of Sudan’s “lost boys” and his journey to America; Zeitoun is the dramatic story of a Syrian American survivor of hurricane Katrina. In both of these works of reportage, Eggers gets close to his subjects and exposes trauma, injustice and prejudice. And both are page-turners, just as many of his Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Part travelogue and part broad analysis of the current and future challenges facing the EU, the premise of Bruno Maçães’s new book The Dawn of Eurasia is to “use travel to provide an injection of reality of political, economic and historical analyses.”The central plank of Maçães’s argument is that China and Russia will in the near future be recognised as playing pivotal roles in the way “people, goods, energy, money and knowledge” flow. These flows cross a space he terms “Eurasia” characterised less as a geographic entity than a conceptual space governed by political, economic, and to a far Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Metaphor, metonymy, simile and synecdoche, anyone? FR Leavis, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Derrida, Frank Kermode? If any of this, and more, turns you on, this lengthy memoir will be irresistible. It is almost a day-by-day account of 15 years of the family and professional life of one of the anglophone world’s leading academics, critics and authors, who now has some 30 volumes of novels, literary criticism, and plays for stage and television behind him.It is the narrative of a somebody, but at times almost risibly reminiscent of George Pooter in The Diary of a Nobody. We are treated to a rundown Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Readers familiar with Nick Coleman’s 2012 memoir The Train in the Night will know before embarking on this book that the author suffered the worst possible fate for a music journalist: deafness, a problem (Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss) which began in 2007, had improved somewhat by 2010, declined catastrophically, then partially returned in his “good ear” before a severe sinus infection in 2015 wreaked further havoc.In the period when he was granted some respite, Coleman binged - he calls it harvesting - listening obsessively to particular singers and songs, “frantically stashing Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
With a clownish bully currently installed in the White House, the 2017 Man Booker Prize aptly went to a novel that showed a President who commanded true courage and nobility – Abraham Lincoln – as he grappled with the mysteries of life and death, love and loss, in the wake of his son’s passing. Markie Robson-Scott saluted the “magnificently inventive” Lincoln in the Bardo, one of clutch of stand-out novels that explored power and its abuse in another year of deranged global politics.Unjustly ignored by prize juries, Colm Tóibín returned to mythical Greece to re-tell the tragedy of the Read more ...