- Children targeted in exercise drive
- Edinburgh 'best city of the future'
- Passenger numbers down at airports
- Police name death crash teenager
- First-time buyers seize duty bonus
- Grimason backs arms trade treaty
- Restaurant stand-off: man in court
- 'Progress' made in referendum talks
- Leishman backed in councillor bid
- Language pupil wins trip to China
- Scotland 'staving off recession'
- Rapist linked to Jodi Jones murder
- Buyers offering less for homes
- Man dies following car collision
- Police arrest two after house siege
- Wave energy receives £6m boost
- Children's tsar backs uniform calls
- Councillors to launch new party
Reviews
Book review: Furnace, Wayne Price
IN THIS first published collection of short stories, Wayne Price displays a masterful command of a notoriously tricky form. He knows where to come in on his tense, tender little vignettes, and where to leave them, and exactly how much information to provide in between in order to create a pall in the air and a tug at the heart.
Book review: The Buddha In The Attic, Julie Otsuka
JULIE Otsuka’s latest novel is a harrowing portrait of America between the two world wars told through the eyes of a boatload of Japanese mail order brides, from their hope-filled journey to the land of the free to their eventual internment.
Book Review: The Doctor Dissected, Caroline McCracken-Flesher
PROFESSOR McCracken-Flesher is one of the most ingenious – and readable – academics working in the field of Scottish culture, and this volume, subtitled “A Cultural Autopsy Of The Burke And Hare Murders”, shows her skill at teasing out a story and its implications to its best advantage.
Book Review: Amateurs In Eden: The Story Of A Bohemian Marriage, Joanna Hodgkin
ALMOST ten years ago, Virginia Nicholson’s excellent Among The Bohemians exploded the myths about bohemian living in the 1920s and 1930s, especially for women.
Interview: William Boyd, author of Waiting for Sunrise
William Boyd tells David Robinson what drew him to write his new thriller about an actor-turned-spy in 1913 Vienna
Book reviews: The Woman in Black | An Exclusive Love | Before I Go To Sleep
William Leith gives his verdict on the latest paperback releases
Book review: El Narco
JUST what the hell is going on in Mexico? Anyone with half an eye on international news coverage over the last few months will surely have noticed some startling figures coming out of the country previously best known for tourism and tequila.
Book review: The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price, Purveyor of Superior Funerals
THE title of this novel, its cover design and the comment on the back cover might lead readers to pass the story by as nothing but a delightful piece of whimsy.
Book review: The Origins of Sex: The History of the First Sexual Revolution
IMAGINE – this might be a little tricky – that you are a young woman living in Scotland in the 16th century. What would you know about sex? Well, you would know that your sexual life was policed and scrutinised: by family, by neighbours, by the law, by the church.
Book review: The Snow Child
BY chapter five, 50 pages into a debut novel to be relished for all the right reasons, Eowyn Ivey’s fictional world of Alaskan bleakness and wintry bite had me feeling baleful, ready to quit.
Book review: This Beautiful Life
EVERYONE’S done it. Everyone has hit “Send” on an email only to be assailed with second thoughts intense enough to inspire the forceful and repeated application of head to desk, to the tune of, “No, no, no, no!”
Book review: Waiting For Sunrise
WILLIAM Boyd’s First World War novel can’t decide whether to analyse an epoch or tell a ripping yarn, writes Hannah McGill
Book review: Seize The Day - How The Dying Teach Us To Live
THREE-and-a-half years ago I visited the Hospice of the Florida Suncoast, one of the earliest Hospices in North America, and one of the largest.
Book review: A Card From Angela Carter
FANS of the late Angela Carter – who include this reviewer – will welcome this slender tome, which offers a vivid sketch of her life and work via the postcards she sent to her friend, literary executor, and sometime editor, Susannah Clapp.
Book review: Angelmaker
NICK Harkaway’s debut novel, The Gone-Away World, was a deliriously fun book, a roller-coaster of ninjas, pirates, mime artists and bad dreams that seemed to throw every conceivable conceit at the reader.
Book reviews: Retromania | Stop What You’re Doing And Read This! | Pure | Don’t Shoot
William Leith reviews this week’s paperback releases
Book review: The White Lie
IT WAS Freud who first developed the concept of the “family romance” with his Oedipal and Electra theories, but long before him, novelists like George Eliot and the Brontës were exploring family tensions and their impact on individuals’ lives.
Graphic novel review: Dotter Of Her Father’s Eyes
IT IS one of the odd ironies about the rise in respectability of graphic fiction that the examples cited most frequently by exponents of the form tend to be graphic non-fiction, particularly of the autobiographical variety: Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles, David Heatley’s My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down – not to mention Art Spiegelman’s Maus and In The Shadow Of No Towers.
Book review: The Soldier’s Wife
IT’S A LONG time since Joanna Trollope was regarded – or indeed dismissed in rather patronising style – as a writer of Aga-sagas. She is a serious novelist with the knack of hitting on issues of importance today and exploring them with intelligence.
Book review: You Can’t Read This Book
IT’S A strange title: we plainly can read Nick Cohen’s latest book. Its subject is censorship, and Cohen’s cover undermines much of his excellent content. At least one reader worked his way through the pages in forlorn anticipation of the sections that he would not be allowed to read.
Book review: The Revelations
POVERTY, chastity and obedience can really put the modern masses off what many think is the one true way of being a good, God-fearing Christian – unless you are one of the bright young things in Alex Preston’s racy, trendy second novel, The Revelations.
Book review: War Against The Taliban – Why It All Went Wrong In Afghanistan
Even a commentator as familiar with the Afghan disaster as Sandy Gall doesn’t have the answers, writes James Fergusson
Book review: The Evolution Of Inanimate Objects
THIS may be a bagatelle of a novel, but it is one with so much charm and erudition it is more memorable than any door-stopping wodge of prose presenting itself as a diagnosis of the state of the nation.
Book review - The Death Of Mao: The Tangshan Earthquake And The Birth Of The New China
IT’S often forgotten just how disastrous the 19th and 20th centuries were for China.
Book review: Ladies And Gentlemen
THERE’S something rewarding about reaching the twist in Futures, the first in this book of short stories by Adam Ross. We know a twist is coming, but there’s a niggling sense that Ross might just leave things open to interpretation.
Book reviews: A Small Circus | More Lives Than One
Crook, boozer, junkie, womaniser, lunatic – the compromised life of the man who chronicled Nazi-era Germany is as riveting as his novels
Book review: What Are Universities For?
“UNIVERSITIES need advocates,” says Stefan Collini, professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at Cambridge, and his latest book is written in their defence. Whether it succeeds or not is another matter.
1 commentBook reviews: The Press Gang In Orkney And Shetland | Sir Gilbert’s Children | Boyling Point 2
Michael Kerrigan casts his eye on the rest of this week’s literature releases
Book reviews: When I Am Playing With My Cat, How Do I Know She Is Not Playing With Me? | The London Train | The Social Animal
William Leith reviews this week’s paperback releases
Interview: John Brockman, king of the cyberspace brainiacs
AGENT, editor and online salon founder John Brockman tells LEE RANDALL about his mission to bring together the world’s finest minds
Book review: The Perfect Man
EUGEN Sandow was a penniless German acrobat blessed with one dazzling asset. His naked, highly toned, muscle-taut body was considered by all who gazed on it to be absolutely perfect.
Book review: The Greatcoat
FIRST, a note on the publisher. We all know about Hammer Films, purveyors of horror. Now, in association with Arrow Books, an imprint of the Random House group, we are promised a series of original novellas spanning “the literary and the mass market”.
Book review: Birthdays for the Dead
CRIME fiction can be formulaic. But what if your policeman protagonist, normally the story’s moral backbone, is capable of just about anything?
Book review: Calories and Corsets
IT’S a catchy title, so it’s a pity Louise Foxcroft’s history of dieting isn’t more filling.
Book review: Zona
I OUGHT to begin this review with a confession. Before I started reading Geoff Dyer’s Zona, his account of his almost lifelong obsession with Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, I had never seen the 1979 film.
Book review: Cairo - My City, Our Revolution
‘A REVOLUTION,” writes Ahdaf Soueif, “is a process, not an event.” In this account of the “18 golden days” that shook Egypt in February 2011, the acclaimed author of The Map Of Love conveys the fervour, but also the dangers and delusions, of political upheaval.
Book review: Bombay Baby
TINA Wilson was an Indian embryo acquired by a Glasgow couple. At adulthood, Tina yearns to find her genetic mother.
Book review: Stolen Souls
STOLEN Souls is a fabulous exercise in breath control. One gulp, so deep and fathomless, released softly over 300 torso-tense pages, a slow, continuous exhalation, rank, and hissing with tension and menace –and just one notable surprise – as Stuart Neville releases the final, cool whisper of deliverance to his tale of serial slaughter.
Books in brief: Contested Visions | The Science Delusion | It Was a Long Time Ago...
Michael Kerrigan casts his eye over recent publications
Book review: The Last Holiday
Gil Scott-Heron’s posthumous memoir reveals a gifted and gracious man, yet so much of his story remains untold
Paperback reviews: The Stranger in the Mirror | Treasure Islands | Give Me Your Heart
William Leith casts his eye over the latest paperbacks
Book review: Wits and Wives: Dr Johnson in the Company of Women
THE 18th-century polymath Samuel Johnson is known chiefly through his quotations. This skews the popular understanding of his character and attitudes.
Book review: An Honourable Man
It is fair to say General Gordon has always been a mystery to biographers
Book review: Public Enemies
PUBLIC Enemies – which has taken too long to appear in translation in this country, having come out in France three years ago – belongs to the dire genre of the artificial exchange of letters always intended for publication.
Book review: God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the making of the modern world
THE Inquisition is almost shorthand for all the backward, repressive and intolerant features of life which modernity has defined itself in opposition to; and yet, as Cullen Murphy elegantly and persuasively shows, a strain of the “inquisitorial impulse” is alive and well in the 21st century.
Book review: Sanctuary Line
IF “write what you know” is the rule followed by award winning Canadian author Jane Urquhart, then it is clear what she knows is sleepy, rural southern Ontario and the generational entwinement of Irish families transplanted and taken root there.
Book review: The Hunted
THIS story about an IRA terrorist, Tom Costello, explores the contradictions we are familiar with in other prominent terrorist figures – or freedom fighters.
Pressed to impress
TOM Mueller’s fascination with olive oil started with the tree next to his home in the Italian farmlands of Liguria. An ancient, wizened stump clinging onto a stone pathway that dates back to Roman times, its oil lit every home in his village, ran machines, cured ailments and today still feeds the people.
Book review: Getting Off
ALTHOUGH he is regrettably not as famous as them, Lawrence Block counts among his admirers some very significant authors: Stephen King, Elmore Leonard, James M Cain, Ed McBain, Robert Ludlum and Ian Rankin have all expressed their admiration for his work.
- Scottish independence: David Cameron set to snub Alex Salmond’s separation talks bid
- Broken Rangers: Club signals intention to go into administration
- Six Nations: Steadman given notice as ruthless Robinson seeks to strengthen team
- Six Nations: Wales 27-13 Scotland: Second-half scoring blitz stuns Scots
- The Rumour Mill: Monday’s football news and gossip
- Scottish independence: David Cameron set to snub Alex Salmond’s separation talks bid
- The Rumour Mill: Monday’s football news and gossip
- Scottish independence: No breakthrough in talks between Alex Salmond and Michael Moore
- Jim Murphy warns that independence could cost ‘thousands’ of defence jobs
- Six Nations: Wales 27-13 Scotland: Second-half scoring blitz stuns Scots
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Weather for Edinburgh
Tuesday 14 February 2012
Today
Cloudy
Temperature: 5 C to 9 C
Wind Speed: 18 mph
Wind direction: West
Tomorrow
Sunny spells
Temperature: 6 C to 10 C
Wind Speed: 21 mph
Wind direction: West
