Book Reviews Archive

It’s the early nineties, and the city of Sarajevo is under siege by the Bosnian Serb forces. Three characters make their way through the chaos and destruction of the city streets: Kenan, on a journey across town to collect drinkable water for his family; Dragan, held up on his way to work, afraid to cross an intersection covered by a Serb sniper; and Arrow, a Sarajevan sniper struggling to maintain her independence. In the background to all of their lives is the music of the unnamed cellist of the title, who goes out into the street each day for twenty-two days, to play one adagio for each of the victims of a recent shelling. (more…)

The Lebanese author Amin Maalouf has built his career both in fiction—Samarkand, Leo Africanus, Balthasar’s Odyssey, etc.—and history, including The Crusades Through Arab Eyes.

In Origins, prompted by the discovery of a trunk containing the correspondence and notebooks of his late grandfather, Maalouf turns his research skills towards his own family background, and the result is an engrossing story of the changing shapes of families and nations during the early years of the last century. (more…)

Andrew Davidson’s debut novel, The Gargoyle, begins with a car accident that leaves its narrator, an unnamed, cocaine-addled pornographer, hospitalised with disfiguring burns. While he’s recovering in the hospital he’s visited by the mysterious Marianne Engel, who greets him with the enigmatic words, “You’ve been burned… again,” and proceeds to soothe him with tales of previous lives and lost loves.

The Gargoyle has drawn comparisons to authors including Vladimir Nabokov and Umberto Eco… but does it deserve them? (more…)

When Charles Boyle first wrote this novella, a charming story of infidelity and cricket, told with the kind of sparkling prose that reminds us just how much fun reading can be, he so despaired of getting it published that he formed his own publishing house, CB Editions, in order to get it into print. Not wanting to seem megalomaniacal (after all, the publishing house is already named after him), he chose a pseudonym for the novel… and has been explaining Jennie Walker to journalists ever since.

Soon after the original publication, Bloomsbury bought the rights, and have now released their own edition. (more…)

In his debut collection of short stories, Vietnam-born author Nam Le attempts to prove that an ethnic writer needn’t be constrained to writing about their background and experiences. There’s a world out there to write about, he argues, and he goes on to explore it, one continent at a time.

Unfortunately, the stories in The Boat serve as a reminder of the importance of writing about what you know, and of the dangers of a formal writing education. (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

David Benioff’s new novel, City of Thieves, tells the story of two young men—one in his teens and one just out of them—who are arrested during the siege of Leningrad and given a stark ultimatum: find a dozen eggs for the Colonel’s daughter’s wedding cake, or be shot. As they begin to search the ruined, starving city on their impossible quest, City of Thieves unfolds into an involving and well-told adventure, that suffers only from a distracting and unnecessary framing device.

David Benioff can write. There is proof on almost every page of City of Thieves, passages I want to show to my clients or bookmark for future use as examples. There’s no empty description here; everything is shown in terms of how it relates to the things around it, and to the story. See how he reminds us of his characters’ precarious physical state, not by bludgeoning us with repeated, shoehorned references, but by bringing it up where it’s relevant, and where we can see how it influences the story:

We ran for the stairway door, abandoning our firefighting tools, racing down the dark stairwell. We were fools, of course. A slip on one of those concrete steps, with no fat or muscle to cushion the fall, meant a broken bone, and a broken bone meant death.

This is much, much better than just peppering the text with synonyms for “skinny”. And as Lev and Kolya walk around the city, we see not just what they see, but how they see it and the impression it makes on them. Read the full review >>

Rome can be a dangerous city to write about. There’s so much culture and raw information tied up in the city’s streets, buildings, and monuments, that it’s easy for a writer to get distracted from the job in hand. In The Creator’s Map, author Emilio Calderón has trouble setting aside the guidebook and concentrating on the story. Read the full review >>

What marks out a new detective series? There’s the era, of course, with historical crime fiction becoming ever more popular. Then there’s the character of the detective, whether an alcoholic Ethiopian tramp in a Roman suburb or a forensic anthropologist in Canada, and then there’s the nature of the crimes to be investigated.

Finally, there are the tools of justice; crime stories don’t always have to end with the amateur sleuth peering over the bridge into the torrents below (where a top hat can be seen being tossed to and fro in the foam), or handing their prey over to an obliging if misguided constable. For example, in The Widow’s Secret, Brian Thompson has created Bella Wallis, a nineteenth-century sleuth who settles her quarries’ hash by ruining their reputations through thinly veiled caricatures in sensation novels. (more…)

Does literary humour exist as a genre these days? The modern comic novel seems rather lost. True, there are those insipid, gender-based affairs, in which women shop and worry about their weight, while men have trouble expressing their emotions until the last chapter. And there are all those pre-assembled parodies that follow successful novels like seagulls after a trawler, and are traditionally presented as unwanted Christmas gifts to unwanted relatives. Add the Dilbert collections and those little novelty boxes full of tat (“Zen garden in a matchbox!”) that appear every Christmas, and that’s the store humour buyer’s budget all used up. Humour as a literary—rather than cynically commercial—genre seems non-existent.

So I was interested to read A Year in the Province by Christopher Marsh. It’s a send-up of the expatriate memoir genre, a bit like those old Bill Forsyth role-reversal comedies, in which Andalucian Jesús Sánchez Ventura moves his family to Belfast in an attempt to engage with miserable, foul-weathered consumerism. (more…)

While the love of a favourite author can sustain a reader’s interest through a more in-depth biography (for example, I wouldn’t give up my copy of Ian MacNiven’s 800-page monster on Lawrence Durrell for the world), it’s not really practical to read one of these for every author who takes your interest. You can get some information from Wikipedia but—potential inaccuracies aside—there’s only so much detail you can get from a web page (and you can’t read them in the bath, or on the beach). Enter the new Brief Lives, a series of bite-sized author biographies from Hesperus Press… (more…)

Many of the manuscripts that cross my desk are written in the present tense, which isn’t necessarily a good thing. The present has a lot of pitfalls, especially for new writers. It’s a bit tricky and unnatural, so while it can be used to good effect in a brief passage, over the course of an entire novel it can be tiring. It’s also hard to get the grammar right, especially when you start bringing in things like the past perfect. Finally, it’s often seen as an early danger sign of amateurish prose.

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I find myself advising the writers to drop the story back into the past tense.

It was interesting, then, to read Blackmoor, published last month. It’s the debut novel from young British author and UEA graduate Edward Hogan, and substantial pasages are written in the present tense. (more…)

A couple of months ago, somebody shoved something called Monocle under my nose. Some kind of style magazine, it didn’t really interest me until I found its tiny books section. (Sadly, I mean a tiny section about books.)

One of the titles mentioned was The White Room, from the new independent publisher, CB editions. It was unusual to see a small press book mentioned in a glossy magazine (or anywhere else, for that matter), and so I looked online and started to find out more about them. What I discovered was very interesting…

More about CB editions in a future post; for now I want to talk about one of their books, Days and Nights in W12 by Jack Robinson (more…)

Peanuts is something you come back to. You revisit it in progressive stages, as you would an elderly relative; when you’re a child, they’re just a warm, friendly hug and the biscuits. When you’re a teenager they’re somebody who complicates family gatherings and about whom things are said in the kitchen, and then later they become an incredibly fascinating person with a unique life and a hundred stories…which you’ll never hear, because they’ve just passed away. (more…)