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…)

I’ve been blogging about books, in one way or another, for a few years now—I think the first book I reviewed, on a long-forgotten website, was Yellow Dog by Martin Amis, which would make it 2003—and lately I’ve been thinking about what kinds of books are best suited to blogging.

I’m not talking about genre, because fantasy bloggers will always want to blog about fantasy novels, and literary folk will always want to blog about Philip Roth. Neither am I thinking about old-versus-new books, which again is down to the blogger’s taste. (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…)

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: (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 >>

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