Books, Issue 697
10 articles
Sorted by popularity / date
Summer Festivals 2012: Books
25 May 2012
Essential info on Bloody Scotland and the Wigtown and Borders book fests
Borders Book Festival Where: Harmony Garden, Melrose, 14–17 June, bordersbookfestival.org Price: £9–£13 per event. Line-up: Sir David Frost, Hilary Mantel, William Boyd, Alistair Darling, John Sessions There have been a few eyebrows raised by this…
Alan Warner - The Deadman's Pedal
22 May 2012
Evocative and personal rural drama from the Morvern Callar author
In a literary career which has played down the overly autobiographical tendency (all that writing from a female perspective malarkey for one thing), The Deadman’s Pedal seems far and away Alan Warner’s most personal fiction to date. We return to the…
Travel books round-up - June 2012
22 May 2012
New books from Hardeep Singh Kohli, Samanth Subramanian and Terry Darlington
He may be a man of Glasgow, but Hardeep Singh Kohli knows a thing or two about travelling around London. In The 38 Bus: A Love Song to a Bus Route (Unbound) he pours out the emotions he has for the route which has served the capital for a century…
First Writes - Elaine Proctor, author of Rhumba
22 May 2012
The books tells the story of a Congolese boy’s life in London
Give us five words to describe Rhumba? ‘They had horns and tails’. Can you name one author who should be more famous than they are now? Mark Gevisser is the brightest, most original witness to the complicated condition of being a global South…
Hannah Berry - Adamtine
22 May 2012
A disconcerting horror comic from the creator of Britten and Brülightly
British graphic novelist Hannah Berry’s near-perfect debut, Britten and Brülightly, was a detective yarn inspired by Graham Greene and Carol Reed. But the familiar post-war milieu was given a surreal comic twist with the inclusion of a character that…
Howard Marks in discussion event with MC5 manager John Sinclair
22 May 2012
The two can offer different takes on the 1960s counter culture
Every generation needs a figurehead to accentuate the fun side of drugs. From Thomas de Quincey to Sherlock Holmes and through to Timothy Leary, the Beatles and Bill Hicks, it’s not all been bad trips and cold turkey (if there any wags out there…
Ewan Morrison - Tales from the Mall
22 May 2012
A wealth of information and anecdotes drawn together to paint a funny, scary portrait of our times
As Ewan Morrison notes in his introduction, the shopping mall is a potent symbol of the homogenised world in which we live now. You could look at images of shopping centres in Dundee and Dresden and chances are you won’t be able to tell them apart. The…
Nikita Lalwani - The Village
22 May 2012
A tense social drama about trust and betrayal, set in an Indian prison
When Ray Bhullar travels to an Indian ‘open prison’ village to film a behind-the-scenes BBC documentary, she gets more than she bargained for. ‘Everyone here has killed someone,’ she’s told, as she slowly adapts to the sights and smells of her alien new…
John Irving - In One Person
22 May 2012
A fascinating and engaging novel set against the backdrop of gay culture in America
Write about what you know, we’re told, and John Irving is certainly a big subscriber to that particular maxim. For his 13th novel, Irving once again inhabits the worlds of New Hampshire (his birthplace) and wrestling (his preferred sport). Our…
Chris Cleave - Gold
22 May 2012
Well-timed Olympic-themed novel fails to fulfill the promise of its intriguing premise
There’s something intriguing about the mindset of those athletes who are honed from a very young age into Olympic machines. Lives are altered irrevocably in pursuit of a small gold disc and the too-fleeting associated glory: a strange, self-obsessed way…
