Books, Reviews

Shit My Dad Says - Justin Halpern

Dads can get a bit crotchety. Dads can occasionally be pretty funny. And sometimes dads can let a little sweary word slip out. You know, when they bang their thumb with the hammer or if someone pulls out in front of them on the road. But there’s…

Bret Easton Ellis - Imperial Bedrooms

(Picador) Bret Easton Ellis blazed onto the American literary scene in 1985 with a novel so filled with hedonistic excess, you felt drunk just reading it. Populated by a cast of largely dislikeable teenagers, Less Than Zero took us to the heart of…

Rhys Thomas - On the Third Day

(Doubleday) Rampaging humans infected with a mysterious, incurable disease, society’s structures crumbling, whole countries vanquished and just one family on the run from it all. We can see what Rhys Thomas is trying to do with his second novel and…

Sloane Crosley - How Did You Get This Number

(Portobello) You have to hand it to someone who footnotes the parental dedication at the beginning of their book with a diatribe about the memory of some still-raw teenage punishment. Then again, you may also feel compelled towards suspicion when you…

Peter Milligan & Davide Gianfelice - Greek Street: Blood Calls For Blood

(Titan/Vertigo) Peter Milligan is one of the comic world’s most interesting writers. From back on his days at 2000AD (where he gave us the wonderful ‘Bad Company’) through oddities such as Skin to his natural home at Vertigo, where his Shade the…

Alex Marsh - Sex & Bowls & Rock & Roll

(The Friday Project) Pooterish internet celebrity Alex Marsh (privatesecretdiary.com) features the adultescent concerns of that modern publishing anomaly, the hobbyist’s memoir (yeah, thanks Mr Hornby), in this book about rock’n’roll dreams being…

Alice Thompson - The Existential Detective

(Two Ravens Press) When a work opens, as The Existential Detective does, with the lyrics to Pat Ballard’s ‘Mister Sandman’, followed by an extract from ‘The Sandman’ by ETA Hoffmann, you just know it’s going to be spine-chilling. And this is Alice…

Kei Miller - The Last Warner Woman

(Weidenfeld & Nicolson) Skipping effortlessly through a host of complex characters, with this searching and lyrical work Kei Miller achieves an incredibly engaging range of voice from the outset. Gently dropping through three generations of Jamaican…

Adam Haslett - Union Atlantic

(Tuskar Rock) The post-9/11 landscape of Massachusetts in 2002 is the canvas upon which Pulitzer-shortlisted author Adam Haslett places his debut novel. With some style, he foreshadows the culture of greed and moral bankruptcy in the American…

Lars Husum - My Friend Jesus Christ

(Portobello Books) Before authoring this, his first novel, Danish writer Lars Husum worked at filmmaker Lars von Trier’s Copenhagen production company Zentropa as a script doctor. It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that My Friend Jesus Christ has…

Tim Thornton - Death of an Unsigned Band

(Jonathan Cape) The internal wranglings of unsigned indie bands is fertile territory for dramatic tension, as well as self-aware comedy, and so it is with this second novel from Tim Thornton, a veteran of plenty contract-free groups himself…

Don’t Look Now - Ed. Paul Newland

(Intellect Press) Don’t Look Now is a work of low-key persuasion; it wants to convince us that seventies British cinema wasn’t an aesthetic dire strait, but a forking path of numerous possibilities. The decade may have given us film versions of On…

Christopher Hitchens - Hitch-22

Hitch-22 (Atlantic) Many of history’s key figures have contradictory sides to their nature. Churchill was a focussed leader who often sank a quart of vodka before lunch. Hitler loved animals so much he couldn’t bring himself to chomp on them, but was…

Christos Tsiolkas - The Slap

(Tuskar Rock) Christos Tsiolkas may have chosen the eponymous chastisement to hang his novel on, but his engaging look at Australian life could easily have functioned without it. The slap in question is visited upon an ill-mannered child by the…

Adam Ross - Mr Peanut

(Jonathan Cape) A terse thriller, Mr Peanut pivots along three narrative threads, each of which takes a look at the sinister side of marriage, and two of which end in murder. That they do not become entangled is a testament to the skilfulness with…

Sam Lipsyte - The Ask

(Old Street) Satire has become a dirty word in Britain, devalued through excessive application to intelligent but superficial, self-satisfied observations of our uncertain times. In the US though, where The Daily Show and The Onion set the standard…

Benjamin Markovits - Playing Days

(Faber) Though not explicitly billed as a memoir, Benjamin Markovits’ new novel appears to be largely autobiographical. A college graduate with literary ambitions, its narrator takes up a spot on a second division German basketball team, in a move…

Alan Warner - The Stars in the Bright Sky

(Jonathan Cape) While Alan Warner has described the choice of The Sopranos to be given the sequel treatment as ‘vulgar’, he has penned a follow-up which can best be dubbed ‘tasteful’. While the chattering class of his ‘98 tale of female mayhem have…

Daniel Clowes - Wilson

(Jonathan Cape) It’s heartening to know that Daniel Clowes isn’t turning his back on comics, despite writing movies in earnest since his Oscar nomination for adapting his own graphic novel, Ghost World. Clowes’ current movie projects include The…

Louise Stern - Chattering: Stories

(Granta) Those of us in the hearing world ponder rarely on the everyday lives of our neighbours in the deaf community, where an ease in communication that we take for granted has a profound, stunting effect in its absence on the social lives of the…

Jackie Kay - Red Dust Road

(Picador) Those familiar with Jackie Kay’s poetry and fiction will know it exudes a uniquely uplifting and rib-tickling form of optimism, and that general ambience also pervades this wonderfully engaging memoir. Kay was born in Edinburgh to a…

Austin Wright - Tony & Susan

(Atlantic) New York novelist Austin Wright created this clever, multi-layered novel in 1993, to reasonable acclaim and the acquisition of film rights. Then it disappeared, out of print and forgotten until somebody saw fit to rescue it. Which is just…

Paul Rennie - Modern British Posters

(Black Dog Publishing) As its title hints, with allusions to the gallery and the auction house, Paul Rennie’s intellectually rigorous, aesthetically pleasing book deals with a very specific type of art in Britain from the mid-20th century. Rennie’s…

Andrew O'Hagan - The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe

(Faber) Featuring one of the more florid novel titles of the year, Andrew O’Hagan’s shaggy dog story hasn’t prevented some commentators tipping the London-based North Ayrshire-bred writer as a strong bet to reach the Booker shortlist for the first…

Simon Armitage - Seeing Stars

(Faber) Billed as a poetry collection, this book raises one obvious question: what exactly is poetry then? For here are short tales, monologues, anecdotes and musings rather than anything approximating verse as we know it. But Simon Armitage is not a…