If The Creator’s Map demonstrated the expat writer’s pitfall—the risk of going away to another country, only to come back with a story overladen with guidebook trivia—in Fieldwork, Mischa Berlinksi makes a better job of it. There’s no leaden trivia here, but rather a lively and engrossing tale about friction between anthropologists and missionaries in Thailand.

It’s held together by the mystery surrounding Martiya van der Leun, whose journey to Thailand began with the intention of studying a remote tribe, but led to her being incarcerated in a Thai jail for murder. (Keep reading …)

Beginning your novel with a hungover protagonist, who’s staring blearily around and trying to handle the pain while he’s getting his bearings, is one of the great literary clichés, and as a rule it’s best avoided.

Then again, when the hangover is accompanied by amnesia so complete that he can’t remember a murder taking place, and when the obligatory stumble to the bathroom results in the discovery of his wife’s corpse, exceptions can be made. So begins Janek Mitter’s day, and The Mind’s Eye, an Inspector Van Veeteren novel by Håkan Nesser. (Keep reading …)

In the weeks since the Booker longlist was announced, book bloggers have been throwing their other challenges aside and getting to work reviewing the nominees. Here’s the longlist, with links to some of the reviews that have already appeared on the Blogosphere: (Keep reading …)

Well, the site still needs a nip here and a tuck there, but I think that the new design is starting to take shape. Essentially, what started out as a business site with a blog has become a blog / magazine site which also offers a service. So, why the changes? (Keep reading …)

While brief biographies have their place, sometimes there’s no substitute for the brick, the breeze-block examination of an author’s life and work. I’ve been through Ian MacNiven’s biography of Lawrence Durrell twice, and I’ve been meaning to repurchase and reread Ted Morgan’s Maugham: A Biography for a while now. This summer, Jonathan Cape have added to the goldmine of big biographies with Semi Invisible Man: the life of Norman Lewis, by the writer (and sometime editor of Lewis’ work), Julian Evans. (Keep reading …)