Book reviews: The Last Laird of Coll | The Keats Brothers | Shanghai

A look at this week’s literary releases

The Last Laird of Coll

by Mairi Hedderwick

(Birlinn, £6.99) ****

MAIRI Hedderwick has made herself a sort of artistic ambassador for the Islands – not just with her engagingly illustrated (and charmingly-written) children’s books but with her watercolour-sketching tours in the steps of Thomas Reid. This latest book is a bit of a departure. Which is odd, because this life of Kenneth Stewart is on the face of it more conventional than those works – there aren’t any pictures, for example, a few photo-plates apart. Yet it’s as idiosyncratic as anything she’s ever done – and personal too. Stewart’s life as Laird of Coll spans her own as adoptive islander, whilst his struggle to restore his family’s fortunes typifies the difficulties faced by island communities trying to keep the old ways alive. And the nostalgia is tinged with irreverence and optimism.

The Keats Brothers

by Denise Gigante

(Belknap, £25.95) ****

IT WAS the biblical Ruth who, in Ode to a Nightingale, famously “stood in tears amid the alien corn”; in real life it was the poet John who did the weeping. Younger brother George enjoyed his exile: a frontiersman in the American West, he was living the Romantic dream in his own way. But John’s sense of loss at George’s departure – and his feelings of bereavement on the death of an even younger brother, Tom – created a undercurrent in his work. George’s failure to repay money he’d borrowed also left John in a difficult position in London. The implications for the work? Gigante doesn’t claim to have found the key that unlocks all – but there are all sorts of intriguing insights here.

Shanghai

by Liu Heung Shing and Karen Smith

(Viking, £30) *****

BUILT by foreign traders, Shanghai was for decades “the window through which the world viewed China”; now it’s the window through which China looks out. But it bears the stamp of its hybrid origins: with a waterfront based on Liverpool’s; a hinterland of rice paddies, east met west here in a relationship which, however unhappy, was remarkably creative. A city of speculators, gangsters, fashionistas, radicals, bohemians, Shanghai was all extroversion and raffish charm. If, in recent years, this exclave has been being reclaimed by China, that’s in part because China has itself been changing too. A stunning photo-history.