Reviews
Book review: The Old Ways: A Journey
THIS volume completes a rough trilogy – Mountains Of The Mind, The Wild Places and now The Old Ways – and confirms Robert Macfarlane’s reputation as one of the most eloquent and observant of contemporary writers about nature; although a new term is increasingly necessary.
Book review: Just Send Me Word by Orlando Figes
Love and the Gulag: A remarkable tale of devotion comes to light after more than 50 years
Book review: Skios by Michale Frayn
ONE of the most endearing things about Michael Frayn is his addiction to farce. He may be the playwright of nuclear physics (Copenhagen), a familial memoirist of delicacy (My Father’s Fortune) and a translator of Chekhov and Tolstoy, but he likes nothing better than love triangles, misunderstandings and dropped trousers.
Book reviews: The Cookbook Library | A People’s History of London | Afghanistan
Michael Kerrigan looks at the week’s new literary releases
Book reviews: Sic | The Art of Fielding | The Address Book | My Beautiful Game
William Leith looks at this week’s paperback releases
Book review: Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady, by Kate Summerscale
A Victorian woman’s place is in the divorce courts when a scandalous diary comes to light
Book review: RU by Kim Thuy
KIM Thuy is Vietnamese and writes in French. Her family belonged to the Saigon upper-bourgeoisie who had done well when Indo-China was part of the French empire.
Book review: Autumn Laing by Alex Miller
An old woman’s memories evoke an entire continent of art in an epic of Australia
Book review: Farther Away by Jonathan Franzen
The author of The Corrections is in a petulant mood throughout this sad collection of essays
Book review: Ignorance by Michele Roberts
MICHELE Roberts’s feminist credentials go back a long way and cover many different subjects, from superb historical fiction on the Brontës and Wordsworth’s French mistress, to more contemporary, experimental novels about life in 1970s London.
Book review: Ramshackle, by Elizabeth Reeder
LITERARY chins have, for a while now, wagged about Chicago-born Elizabeth Reeder, a teacher on the much-admired University of Glasgow Creative Writing Programme, and now based in Scotland.
Book review: The Deadman’s Pedal, by Alan Warner
IT LOOKS, at the outset of his seventh novel, as if Alan Warner is going to follow Donna Tartt, Alan Hollinghurst, Naomi Alderman and countless others down that well-trodden path back to Brideshead: callow, curious boy is transformed by exposure to exhilaratingly depraved toffs.
Book review: Why Spencer Perceval Had To Die, by Andro Linklater
SPENCER Perceval, although he is hardly a household name, occupies a unique and unfortunate position in British history: he is the only Prime Minister to have been assassinated. If that piece of trivia is pub-quiz obscure, then the name of his murderer (John Bellingham) is certainly worth more than a bonus point.
Book review: Dark Dawn, by Matt McGuire
THERE’S no messing with Matt McGuire and the blunt, hard-nosed opener to his debut crime novel: “It was January. It was raining. The kid was dead.”
Book review: Opposed Positions by Gwendoline Riley
THE references to literary greats may be flattering but Gwendoline Riley’s distinctive style puts her beyond compare, says Stuart Kelly
Book review: Curiosity by Philip Ball
WHAT do we mean by curiosity? What do we mean by the terms scientific thinking or scientific method? How have these things changed over the centuries, and what should we even be curious about? Is anything off limits?
Book review: Remembering Che by Aleida March
THE heroes of Cuba’s Rebel Army had their needs too. In this memoir, Aleida March, widow of Che Guevara, recounts her relationship with the revolutionary icons.
Book review: Reality, Reality by Jackie Kay
WHAT’S most pleasing in this story collection by one of Scotland’s most celebrated writers is the quality of exuberance.
Interview: Hilary Mantel, author of Bring Up The Bodies
Man Booker winner Hilary Mantel tells David Robinson the secret of twisting long-dead characters into her readers’ minds
Books in brief: Anglo-Saxon Art | The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After | Photography
Michael Kerrigan offers his view on recent books
Book review: If You’re Reading This, I’m Already Dead
Andrew Nicoll enchants with the story of a circus acrobat who impersonates a monarch
Interview: Sara Sheridan, author of Brighton Belle
Sara Sheridan tells Susan Mansfield about her new ‘cosy noir’ sleuth and why, for a historical novelist, the 1950s is a gift that keeps on giving
Book review: Sweet Revenge
GERTRUDE Stein said that the problem of her hometown, Oakland, was that “there is no there there”. I’ve always felt the same applies to Simon Cowell.
Book review: Target London
SHORTLY before dawn on 13 June 13, 1944, the crew of a Royal Navy motorboat patrolling the English Channel saw “a bright horizontal moving flame” in the sky above the coast of France.
Book review: The Panopticon
Stuart Kelly hails a novel that gets inside the soul of its troubled heroine
Bookworm: “You mean, I should just cross out Harry Potter and put Sidney Chambers?”
Snippets from the literary world...
Book review: Breakout Nations: In Pursuit Of The Next Economic Miracles, Ruchir Sharma
FUND managers like to portray themselves as big game hunters, eyeing the horizon in search of rare beasts. Since 2008, the beast that everyone has hunting is an emerging market which could deliver a decent economic return while the developed economies of the world bump along with low interest rates and negative growth.
1 commentBookworm: ‘With a few grand exceptions...there are very few theatrical versions of the journalist’
Snippets from the past seven days in the literary world
Book review: Bring me the head of Ryan Giggs
AS THE Old Trafford faithful have had cause to point out every season since 1991, there’s only one Ryan Joseph Giggs, OBE.
Book review: The Secret Life of William Shakespeare
WE know precious little about William Shakespeare the man as opposed to the playwright and poet. Baptisms not births were recorded in the 16th century so we don’t even know his exact birthday.
Book review: Beastly Things
ITALY may be sinking into the financial mire but Venice is still milking the tourists, and corpses continue to float in its canals.
Book review: The Girl Who Fell from the Sky
Simon Mawer’s tense tale of one woman’s war places him among the best writers of the genre
Book review: Marilyn
What is it about Marilyn Monroe? She wasn’t the most beautiful star ever to shine in Hollywood, nor the most outrageously curvaceous. Yet we cannot stop looking at her – from every conceivable angle.
Book review: Pure
I HAD forgotten, if temporarily, just how gifted is Timothy Mo, who imprinted his talent across two decades from the mid-1980s with a series of starry novels – from The Monkey King to Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard – picking up prizes, making the minds of his readers resonate and reel.
Remembering Robert Browning - Victorian Britain’s greatest poet
Robert Browning was Victorian Britain’s greatest poet, argues Stuart Kelly – yet who’s celebrating his bicentenary on Monday?
2 commentsBook review: London Underground | The Marriage Plot | Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
William Leith casts his eye over the latest paperbacks
Book reviews: The Olympic Games and the IOC | The Last Crusade | A History of Ancient Egypt
Michael Kerrigan offers his take on a selection of recent books
Interview: Sarah Fraser, author of The Last Highlander
Sarah Fraser talks to David Robinson about the clan she married into (twice) and her biography of its most famous, and tragic, chief
3 commentsBook review: The Red House
MARK Haddon hit it big with The Curious History Of The Dog In The Night-time, a sharp, funny, deeply moving book that most readers have read and a lot of writers have ripped off. His next novel, A Spot Of Bother, was a less cohesive work that blended steadfastly unpretentious bloke-lit with stranger shades of sadness and gore.
Book review: Resetting the moral compass
‘ON THE Offshore Lights,” writes ML Stedman near the beginning of her extraordinary debut novel The Light Between Oceans, “you can live any story you want to tell yourself, and no-one will say you’re wrong”.
Book review: Jubilee Lines
THIS volume is extremely instructive in showing how Carol Ann Duffy has re-imagined the poet laureateship as a more ambassadorial role.
- Scottish independence: I don’t want ‘separatism’ says Sir Tom Farmer
- Craig Levein insists Scotland will recover from US thrashing
- Call for sleaze inquiry into peer’s expenses
- Rangers administration: End game nears for fallen icon
- Rangers administration: Duff & Phelps ‘hopeful’ that Taxman will agree to CVA
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Weather for Edinburgh
Monday 28 May 2012
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