Books, Issue 635

First Word - Allegra McEvedy

First record you ever bought Ian Jury and the Blockheads’ ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’. Last time you were chatted up I don’t think I’ve ever been chatted up. I’m more of a predator. First film you saw that really moved you I think it…

Five festival over-achievers

Robin Ince One can only assume that Robin Ince sits in a thick blue funk for that small portion of the day when he isn’t A) hosting a ‘lunchtime celebration of science and the wonderful’, B) being a ‘bleeding-heart liberal’ or C) opposing ‘the moral…

David Peace - Occupied City

The theme of defeat has been central to the work of David Peace but has never been more potent in this, the second of his Tokyo trilogy. The Damned United featured loss at the heart of Brian Clough’s 44 days in charge of Leeds United while GB84 probed…

Words and Pictures

David Peace and Garrison Keillor celebrate fiction and adaptation

Writers David Peace and Garrison Keillor will both be making an appearance at this short season celebrating fiction and adaptation. Peace will be talking about The Red Riding Trilogy and Keillor will be talking about A Prairie Home Companion. There…

George Dawes Green - Ravens

It has been 14 long years since we were gripped by George Dawes Green’s best-selling novel The Juror, so this follow-up has plenty to live up to. Thankfully, Ravens delivers – and then some. Set in the deathly quiet US town of Brunswick, it tells the…

Tank Girl: Three - Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin

Back in the 90s there was one woman who encapsulated the spirit of the age, the epitome of cool that was Tank Girl. This irascible, boozing, bonking and brawling babe who took no shit from nobody sprang from the fevered minds of writer Alan Martin and…

AL Kennedy - What Becomes

Glasgow writer and sometime comedian AL Kennedy does nothing to overturn her reputation as a miserablist in this latest collection of short stories. Through a litany of everyday tragedy, marriages crumble, feelings are trampled on and lives are lost as…

Mathias Malzieu - The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart

Perhaps the most fantastical thing about this book is its depiction of an Edinburgh where a tumble-down old house owned by a woman who births the children of prostitutes and unfaithful women sits at the top of Arthur’s Seat. In any event, it’s the…