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. (Keep reading …)

Although it’s sometimes necessary to whisk a character in and out of a story without drawing too much attention to him, it’s generally worth remembering that a forgettable character can be a wasted opportunity. One book that really shows how much can be achieved with minor characters is The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. (Keep reading …)

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. (Keep reading …)

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? (Keep reading …)

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. (Keep reading …)

When I was a boy, dreaming my first dreams of writing and publication, it was generally known that one turned for further information to the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, that august publication that lists publishers, agents, etc., along with juicy advice on everything from taxes to how to prepare your manuscript. It’s been around for years—over a century, in fact—and back in the day, everybody seemed to know that this was the place you went to if you wanted to get yourself informed.

Sure, there were those dodgy “Authors: publish your book!” ads in the pages of literary and writing magazines, and we were warned about vanity publishing, but there wasn’t the level of misinformation then that there is now; because, for really powerful misinformation, we had to wait for the Internet to arrive. (Keep reading …)

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. (Keep reading …)

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 …)