Books, Reviews

Allan Brown - Nileism: The Strange Course of the Blue Nile

Biography of enigmatic Glaswegian soul-pop perfectionists leaves much unresolved

(Polygon) The peculiar bubble which enigmatic Glaswegian soul-pop perfectionists the Blue Nile inhabited during their 26 years together burst circa 2004, leaving the three members bitterly estranged ever since. Even if the famously glacial pace they…

John Waters - Role Models

Essays from American filmmaker, writer and artist pasy homage to mad genius

Role Models (Beautiful Books) It’s been almost 30 years since outsider American filmmaker, writer and artist John Waters’ remarkable autobiography Shock Value cemented his perverse worldview and artistic transgressions with an all too rare honesty.

Stefanie Pintoff - In the Shadow of Gotham

Deeply flawed turn of the 20th century crime drama full of the unnecessary

(Penguin) A turn of the 20th century crime drama, In the Shadow of Gotham is deeply flawed. A damaged detective in a quiet town north of Manhattan is dragged back into New York’s seedy underbelly by a brutal murder, partnering with an eccentric…

PJ O'Rourke - Don’t Vote! It Just Encourages the Bastards

Caustic witticisms from Ohio-born Gonzo graduate not for everyone

(Grove Press) They say that the natural tendency is to get more right-wing with age. Few American political commentators embody this ethical shift more than PJ O’Rourke. A former ‘hippie’ turned Republican Party Reptile, it would be easy to loathe…

Adrian Johns - Death of a Pirate

History of rogue broadcasters' ideological quest resonates with Pirate Bay trial

(WW Norton) The groovy aspect of 1960s British pirate radio has already been dramatised in Richard Curtis’ film The Boat That Rocked. University of Chicago professor Adrian Johns charts the story’s more serious side: how rogue broadcasters were…

Steve Bell - If . . . Bursts Out

Hilarious and hurtful collection of vibrantly satiric strips

(Jonathan Cape) When Ed Miliband was elected leader of the Labour Party, the Guardian website ran footage of cartoonist Steve Bell turning his observations of the new man at the podium into a mocking cartoon. As Bell takes up his spot near the front…

Eoin McNamee - Orchid Blue

County Down writer’s loose follow-up to Booker-longlisted The Blue Tango

(Faber) Having picked on a true crime for his latest novel, Eoin McNamee has had comparisons with David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet thrust upon Orchid Blue. The County Down writer’s loose follow-up to his 2001 Booker-longlisted story, The Blue Tango…

The Atomic Society of Justice

John Miller's episodic one-off tribute to the 1940s ‘Golden Age’ of comics

(Small Press) In comic geek speak, the ‘Golden Age’ means the 1940s, and the advent of the superhero era from DC and Marvel. Set in 1942, this episodic one-off tribute comes from prolific Scots small press creator John Miller. As is typical of his…

Padgett Powell - The Interrogative Mood

Hypnotic text blazes a trail for innovation. But can you truly love it?

(Profile) This book’s subtitle pretty much says it all: ‘A Novel?’ As the blurb of Padgett Powell’s new effort suggests, this is the kind of thing Marcel Duchamp or Rene Magritte might have come up with had they dabbled in the written form. Over the…

Salvatore Scibona - The End

(Jonathan Cape) Salvatore Scibona is being hailed as a major new voice in American literature. On the heroic evidence of The End, his debut novel, it’s little wonder. Possessed of a dizzying capacity for character description and observation…

Natalie Haynes - The Ancient Guide to Modern Life

(Profile) With a rich broth of war, patricide and incest tales to draw upon, comedian Natalie Haynes champions the Greeks and Romans as role models and warning oracles for coping with the 21st century. A passionate authority on the classics, this…

Paul Auster - Sunset Park

(Faber) It’s nearly 25 years since New Jersey boy Paul Auster wormed his way into the literary psyche with the unnervingly brilliant New York Trilogy. The existential mysteries and metaphysical puzzles he set up and explored seemed fresh and…

Geoff Johns & Ivan Reis - Blackest Night

(DC/Titan) The first Green Lantern (aka Alan Scott) was created by Bill Finger and Martin Nodell in 1940. But it was the introduction of Hal Jordan in 1952 that was the birth of the Green Lantern Corps, an intergalactic police force who wield a power…

Paul Magrs - The Bride that Time Forgot

(Headline Review) The Bride that Time Forgot is a curious book. It’s part tale of a cosy little town, part time travel (via pinking shears and a watercolour), part vampire hunt, part spoof, and part touching tale of undying friendship among the…

Ossian Brown - Haunted Air

Former member of Coil has intense fascination with spooky Americana

(Jonathan Cape) Former member of Coil, Ossian Brown, clearly has an intense fascination with spooky Americana, having collected up these images of anonymous people posing for snaps around Hallowe’en between 1875 and 1955. The sepia tone adds an…

Yunte Huang - Charlie Chan

(WW Norton) Chinese-American academic Yunte Huang’s biography of the popular Oriental sleuth, star of six bestselling novels published from the mid-1920s on and upwards of 50 Hollywood films that followed, proves to be a pretty solid piece of…

Antony Gormley - One and Other

(Jonathan Cape) For 100 days last year, 2400 chosen people plonked themselves atop the Fourth Plinth at Trafalgar Square and had an hour to express pretty much anything they wished. So, we had one person delivering a list of apologies for all the…

Kristen Schaal & Rich Blomquist - The Sexy Book of Sexy Sex

(Hodder & Stoughton) Having previously joked about doling out sexual favours in return for positive reviews at the Fringe and playing a rubbish stalker in Flight of the Conchords, Kristen Schaal’s foray into literature with a book about doing the do…

John Ajvide Lindqvist - Harbour

(Quercus) Anyone looking for a fix of murky, unputdownable drama from Sweden after Stieg Larsson’s wildly successful Millennium Trilogy could do worse than to try John Ajvide Lindqvist. This is the Stockholm author whose debut novel, urban vampire…

Roberto Bolano - The Skating Rink

(Picador) Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño’s seemingly boundless posthumous career continues to flex its muscles with this magnificent murder mystery. Centering upon the love and lust felt by three men for fallen Spanish figure skater Nuria, a triad of…

David Sedaris - Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Wicked Bestiary

(Little, Brown) Anthropomorphism and popular culture have long been lusty bedfellows. Our tellies are crammed with salesmen masquerading as CGI meerkats, drumming gorillas, dancing cows and nodding dogs. For London-based writer and playwright David…

Magnus Mills - Screwtop Thompson

(Bloomsbury) Former London bus driver Magnus Mills’ subtle and deadpan literary sensibility inhabits a quiet world all of its own. It’s a place where mundane reality is shifted just out of focus, crafting subtle absurdities from the everyday.

Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

(Fourth Estate) It’s one thing to have your latest book dubbed the best of the year when there’s three months of it left, but to be called the finest in a century which has just over 89 years still to run seems a pretty thankless plaudit. Bold and…

Susan Hill - The Small Hand

(Profile) Susan Hill has been writing precise and chilling books in the rather unfashionable genre of the ghost story for decades, so she more or less has it down to a fine art by now. This short and typically gothic tale demonstrates the refinement…

Axel Scheffler - How to Keep a Pet Squirrel

(Faber) The cover of this book is savagely misleading. A red squirrel on a trapeze? The pages within are bound, then, to be full of imaginary and unlikely pranks which this most beloved yet endangered of countryside creatures might get up to? Well…