Book reviews: Black Rock | Drood | The Nearly-Weds | The Victorians: Britain Through the Paintings of the Age | A View from the Foothills: The Diaries of Chris Mullin

Published on Saturday 28 March 2009 10:26

Black Rock by Amanda Smyth is published by Serpent's Tail, priced £10.99.

Amanda Smyth's debut novel is an intricately told tale about the search for belonging and love. It follows the story of Celia, a young girl who lives with her aunt in Tobago. Her daily life is haunted by the existence of Aunt Tassi's second husband, Roman, and the mystery of her own father's identity.

The day after her 16th birthday, the torment and struggle finally crashes down on her.

Escaping the village where she grew up and everything she has ever known, she bravely leaves Black Rock for the island of Trinidad to find work with a doctor and his family.

Smyth's beautifully vivid descriptions of lush plantations, glistening horizons and wide, open bays draw you into Celia's journey.

Gripping throughout, we watch her grow from a blinkered child to a young woman with new-found sexuality and desires. Twisting and turning its way from one conclusion to the next, Celia's physical and mental journeys are exhausting.

A stunning and moving portrayal of life for young women in the Caribbean during the 1950s.

9/10 Review By Laura Temple

Drood by Dan Simmons is published by Quercus Books, priced 14.99.

This fictional imagining of a fraught and bitter friendship between Wilkie Collins', author of The Woman In White, and the inimitable Charles Dickens, looks set to be a bestseller. Simmons' latest novel is reportedly being turned into a film by Pan's Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro.

In this sizeable tome, the initially friendly and professionally collaborating pair find themselves involved in a manhunt through the underworld of Victorian London.

As the chase becomes increasingly complicated, readers are forced to ask whether this is just a wild goose chase.

Simmons has constructed an exquisitely articulate treatise on paranoia. Blurred realities and misapprehensions brought about by arrogance, envy, madness, mind-control and drug-use push the literary giants towards seemingly unintelligible horrors.

8/10 Review By Review by Dean Haigh

The Nearly-Weds by Jane Costello is published by Simon and Schuster, priced 6.99.

Zoe is devastated when she is stood-up on her wedding day, so she jumps on a plane to start a new life as a nanny in America. However, she is in for a greater challenge than making sure her charges are in bed on time. The children's widowed father Ryan is rude, self-centred and uncooperative, yet at the same time she finds him incredibly attractive.

After a series of clashes and embarrassing incidents, Ryan and Zoe learn to accept one another and heal their scars, but even he can't stop Zoe from reconsidering the life and man she left behind.

A light-hearted look at getting over the ex, this fun book is filled with larger than life, albeit stereotypical characters, as well as many cringe-worthy comic moments.

7/10 Review by Rebecca Taylor

The Victorians: Britain Through the Paintings of the Age by Jeremy Paxman is published by BBC Books, priced 25.

Jeremy Paxman's book of the BBC TV series is a thoroughly readable tour of Victorian paintings and the society that created them.

The Newsnight presenter argues that collectively the paintings of the era are undervalued and our attitudes to them need reassessing.

At the time, many works provoked a level of popular interest unheard of today, with tens of thousands flocking to galleries to see new works, and individual paintings needing police guards.

Some artists, like their literary equivalents, captured the poverty and misery of those left behind by industrial change. Others found inspiration in the positive, such as the new leisure pursuits open to the middle class.

For many of the works it is their social context, rather than their aesthetic qualities, that makes them interesting and Paxman is a compelling narrator of those stories.

The paintings themselves are presented in immaculate quality. However, not all of those mentioned feature.

7/10 Review by Jack Doyle

A View from the Foothills: The Diaries of Chris Mullin is published by Profile, priced 20.

Amazed to be offered a humble ministerial post by Tony Blair ("The Man") in 1999 after years on the backbenches, Chris Mullin initially adopted a 'Mr Bean of Westminster' role as dreary tasks and various putdowns were inflicted on him, not to mention the ghastly speeches provided for him by civil servants who thought him weak on detail.

But hang in through the first 150 pages or so, beyond tales of first boss John Prescott at his most boorish – forgetting one day even to wear matching shoes – and all that detail about part-privatisation of air traffic control; the second half of the book offers an intriguing glimpse of the soul of New Labour.

Slowly, Mullin, on the backbench parliamentary committee – meeting weekly with the Prime Minister in the build-up to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan – realises nobody has the muscle to resist a premier resolved on war. Maybe they were too fearful of their seats to do so.

This isn't as rich a read as the Alan Clark diaries, possibly because the Commons lacks the depth of characters of 20 years ago, and because it lacks Clark's wicked upper-class malice. But it is probably the most candid view of New Labour from the inside we will ever get.

8/10 Review by Jeremy Gates