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RBS Talks - Vicky Featherstone

Books and Reviews

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Amy MacKinnon - Tethered

Amy MacKinnon - Tethered

(3 stars)5 Feb 2009

PSYCHODRAMA The most remarkable aspect of Tethered, Amy MacKinnon’s debut novel about a mortician drawn into the hunt for a missing child, is that the central character, Clara, an isolated, damaged woman, who devotes herself to beautifying the dead…

Norah Vincent

Norah Vincent - Voluntary Madness

(3 stars)22 Jan 2009

IMMERSION JOURNALISM ‘Immersion journalist’ Norah Vincent’s experience living undercover as a bloke for 18 months yielded a best-seller, Self-Made Man, but also triggered her depressive collapse and a frightening spell in a mental ward. She vowed to…

Peter Murphy - John the Revelator

Peter Murphy - John the Revelator

(4 stars)22 Jan 2009

FAMILY DRAMA That old chestnut, the dysfunctional family saga told from the point of view of a watchful youngster, is energetically revived here by debutant Peter Murphy. The titular character is John Devine, a shy adolescent who dreams of escape…

Chris Lavers - The Natural History of Unicorns

Chris Lavers - The Natural History of Unicorns

(3 stars)22 Jan 2009

MYTHICAL HISTORY Guess what? Unicorns never existed. And if you can bounce back from this early blow, Chris Lavers’ exploration of the unicorn myth actually makes for a strangely charming read. In arguing that although the soft white creature of our…

Kitty Sewell - Bloodprint

Kitty Sewell - Bloodprint

(2 stars)22 Jan 2009

PSYCHODRAMA Kitty Sewell’s second novel is decked out in the same suspense-fuelled livery as Ice Trap, her internationally successful debut. The often melodramatic storyline crams in tropical hurricanes, Eastern European gangsters, brutal sexual…

The Amazing Spider-Man 583

Mark Waid, Zeb Wells & Various - The Amazing Spider-Man 583

(3 stars)22 Jan 2009

COMICS/SUPERHERO It’s been in all the papers, President Barack Obama makes a guest appearance in Spider-Man. It’s yet more proof of how succinctly Obama has tapped into the zeitgeist and is as much of a cultural icon as he is a political…

Virginie Despentes - King Kong Theory

Virginie Despentes - King Kong Theory

(4 stars)8 Jan 2009

SOCIAL MEMOIR If ever there was an antidote to the pointless posturing of the Pussycat Dolls, it’s the work of Virginie Despentes. While they embody everything that is wrong about being female in the 21st century, this controversial French author…

Brian K Vaughan & Pia Guerra - Y: The Last Man

Brian K Vaughan & Pia Guerra - Y: The Last Man

(4 stars)8 Jan 2009

SCI-FI Brian K Vaughn is one of the most interesting writers in comics Runaways, Ex Machina and Pride of Baghdad offering a new perspective when it comes to graphic storytelling. Y: The Last Man has been similarly praised and deservedly so. In…

Luke Haines - Bad Vibes

Luke Haines - Bad Vibes

(5 stars)8 Jan 2009

MUSIC MEMOIR ‘I am a cruel and pious man,’ mourns Luke Haines. History hasn’t had much time for the 90s-vintage indie iconoclast, instead celebrating the more palatable same-but-different likes of Jarvis Cocker. Yet those whose memories stretch back…

Ryu Murakami - Audition

Ryu Murakami - Audition

(3 stars)8 Jan 2009

THRILLER NOVELLA Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike’s cult favourite has all but eclipsed the psycho-sexual-thriller novel by Ryu Murakami on which the 1999 movie is based. The simple prose of Murakami’s slim volume (here translated by the author’s…

James Hider - The Spiders of Allah

James Hider - The Spiders of Allah

(4 stars)8 Jan 2009

WAR REPORTAGE This first book by James Hider, Middle Eastern Bureau Chief for The Times, is essential stuff for anyone concerned with the dangerous condition of the region in the 21st century — and that should be just about everybody. However, not…

Tobias Hill - The Hidden

Tobias Hill - The Hidden

(4 stars)8 Jan 2009

MYSTERY DRAMA Uncovering the mystery of Tobias Hill’s new Greek-set novel is as slow and meticulous as the archaeological dig at its centre. Hill revels in detail: historical descriptions of mysterious Sparta, moments from a memory best forgotten…

Gilbert Hernandez - Speak of the Devil

Gilbert Hernandez - Speak of the Devil

(3 stars)8 Jan 2009

CRIME One half of Los Bros Hernandez takes time off from the long-running magic realist Mexican soap opera of Love & Rockets for this nasty little tale that mixes teen melodrama with stalk’n’slash chills. It’s a crazed cautionary tale in which a…

Will Eisner - The Best of The Spirit

Will Eisner - The Best of The Spirit

(4 stars)8 Jan 2009

SUPERHERO With his domino mask, blue suit, red tie, blue fedora hat and gloves, Denny Colt aka The Spirit was what one newspaper in the 1940s referred to ‘the only real middle-class crimefighter’. Created in 1940 for a strip in a Sunday newspaper…

Gerry Findley-Day & Various - The VCs: You’re Hit, You’re Dead

Gerry Findley-Day & Various - The VCs: You’re Hit, You’re Dead

(3 stars)8 Jan 2009

SCI-FI Rebellion here reprints 2000AD’s sci-fi tale of space warfare, The VCs, for the first time, in which the Vacuum Cleaners take on the power of the alien Geek empire. Created by Gerry Findley-Day (who also created Rogue Trooper) in many ways The…

Film Books Round-Up

Film books round-Up

11 Dec 2008

‘Tis the season to settle down with a good old-fashioned film book. Having a stack of cinema related tomes on your bedside table is essential for any aspiring cineaste at this time of year. So after many hours of sifting through recent releases this is…

Jay McInerney - The Last Bachelor

Jay McInerney - The Last Bachelor

(3 stars)11 Dec 2008

SHORT STORIES The vice that spices up this short story collection by Jay McInerney – a peeping tom on modern, urban American life – is not the overtly debauched or instantly shocking kind. Instead, his characters toy with taboos, flirt with socially…

James Bond 007: Polestar

Jim Lawrence, John McLusky & Yaroslav Horak - James Bond 007: Polestar

(3 stars)11 Dec 2008

SPY THRILLER Amidst the furious modernism of Daniel Craig’s James Bond incarnation, it’s becoming easier to forget just what a retro thrill the character was for so many years. This collection celebrates a vision of the character from the most sadly…

Charles Berlitz - The Bermuda Triangle

Charles Berlitz - The Bermuda Triangle

(3 stars)11 Dec 2008

MYSTERY RE-ISSUE Christopher Columbus was the first recorded individual to find something peculiar about the area dubbed Devil’s Triangle, writing in his log about ‘strange dancing lights on the horizon’. Five centuries on and Barry Manilow remains…

Tim Blanning - The Triumph of Music

Tim Blanning - The Triumph of Music

(3 stars)11 Dec 2008

MUSIC HISTORY Make no bones about it, The Triumph of Music is a heavy read, but it’s also a hugely fascinating one. Penned by Tim Blanning – a Professor of Modern European History at Cambridge – this book has the academic turning his attention to…

Martin Greig - The Zen of Naka

Martin Greig - The Zen of Naka

(3 stars)11 Dec 2008

SPORTS BIOGRAPHY Timing is everything when it comes to sport biogs. As Celtic tumble out of Europe in a flurry of missed opportunities, and with rumours rife that Shunsuke Nakamura may part company with the club in January, it seems Martin Greig’s…

Roy of the Rovers

Various - The Bumper Book of Roy of the Rovers

(3 stars)11 Dec 2008

FOOTIE Splitting your defences with a timely ‘gosh’, ‘heck’ and ‘thunderation’, this collection of Roy Race’s adventures from the years 1958-71 should send a tingle down the spine of anyone who ever picked up the comic. Melchester Rovers’ most famous…

Claude McKay - Banjo

Claude McKay - Banjo

(3 stars)11 Dec 2008

SOCIAL DRAMA ‘A story without a plot’ is not the most promising strapline for a novel you’ll ever come across, but there’s enough character, spice and joie de vivre in this deceptively intelligent meander to pull the reader through. Serpent’s Tail…

David Heatley - My Brain is Hanging Upside Down

David Heatley - My Brain is Hanging Upside Down

(4 stars)11 Dec 2008

AUTOBIOGRAPHY Its not unusual for an artist to use their life as source material, David Heatley has taken this autobiographical conceit to an altogether more meticulous end: he has taken entire hunks of his life and reproduce them in their entirety…

Books of the year

11 Dec 2008

Gordon Burn - Born Yesterday Another remarkable literary achievement from Burn as he re-imagines the epochal news events from the summer of 2007. Chuck Palahniuk - Snuff A beautifully crafted yet typically grotesque portrayal of the porn industry…

The Complete Ro-Busters

Pat Mills & Various - The Complete Ro-Busters

(4 stars)11 Dec 2008

SCI-FI Starting out in 2000AD’s sister mag Starlord (before jumping ship when Starlord folded to its more successful sibling), Ro-Busters was a more cynical version of Thunderbirds. They are an all robot search and rescue team run by Mr 10 Percent, a…

Neil Rafferty and Paul Stokes - Halfwit Nation

(4 stars)27 Nov 2008

HUMOUR While Private Eye and The Onion remain the cornerstones of written news satire in print and online respectively, and Mock the Week and Have I Got News For You keep our square eyes tearing, the joyous silliness of spoofing website The Daily…

Various - The Essential Punisher Volume 1

(4 stars)27 Nov 2008

CRIME With The Punisher: War Zone being released on the big screen in early 2009 now is the perfect time to look back on one of comics darkest heroes. Frank Castle has no superpowers, just sheer grit, a high pain threshold, a formidable arsenal and…

Nick Brownlee - Bait

Nick Brownlee - Bait

(4 stars)27 Nov 2008

CRIME NOVEL In the opening scene of this high-octane crime debut, a victim is eviscerated on a boat while still alive, his steaming innards and gutted body tossed overboard. Welcome to the flipside of African crime fiction where instead of Precious…

Garth Ennis & Steve Dillon - The Punisher: Welcome Back Frank

(4 stars)27 Nov 2008

CRIME There couldn’t be a better marriage of writer and character than Irish bad boy Garth Ennis and lone vigilante Frank Castle, teaming up with regular artistic partner Steve Dillon for an often irreverent but always brutal and bloody reboot. This…

Charlie Owen - Bravo Jubilee

Charlie Owen - Bravo Jubilee

(2 stars)27 Nov 2008

SOCIAL DRAMA Copper-turned-crime writer Charlie Owen’s third novel is another retro-fitted 1970s police procedural set in a grim Manchester overspill named Handstead aka Horse’s Arse. Picking up the year after the previous book, Foxtrot Oscar, this…

Rod Stoneman - Chávez: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

Rod Stoneman - Chávez: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

(3 stars)27 Nov 2008

POLITICAL STUDY On its release in 2003, a documentary that fortuitously caught the coup ousting Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez for all of a weekend, caused a furore in that country and elsewhere for its apparent bias. Rod Stoneman was the executive…

Matt Fraction & Ariel Olivetti - Punisher War Journal: Civil War

(3 stars)27 Nov 2008

CRIME The latest incarnation of the Punisher throws him back into the middle of Marvel continuity. Castle usually operates on the fringes of society but the scale of the Superhero Registration Act is too big for even the Punisher to ignore. Never one…

Pat Mills & Various - Punisher: Eternal War

Pat Mills & Various - Punisher: Eternal War

(3 stars)27 Nov 2008

CRIME During the 80s the Punisher was one of Marvel’s biggest stars, with multiple tiles and a 1989 movie (starring Dolph Lundgren). In Eternal War we get more tales from the archives as The Punisher hits his stride in terms of popularity. The main…

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky - The Essential Chomsky

(3 stars)13 Nov 2008

(Bodley Head) For over 40 years, ‘the world’s greatest public intellectual’ has been not so much a thorn in the side of the West’s establishment structures as a battering ram to everything held dear by liberals and conservatives alike. Now fast…

Ace Trucking Co. Vol.1

Alan Grant, John Wagner and Massimo Belardinelli & Ian Gibson - Ace Trucking Co. Vol.1

(4 stars)13 Nov 2008

Born out of the 70s and 80s-mired misapprehension that CB radio talk was the vernacular of the future (let’s blame Burt Reynolds for that), this weekly 2000AD serial nevertheless became one of the British comic’s best for a while. That’s partly down to…

Jack Kilborn - Afraid

Jack Kilborn - Afraid

(4 stars)13 Nov 2008

Starting with a plane crash and ending with a coyote-on-human chow down, Afraid is a rattling good read for those who have the stomach for it. When a mutant military force turns up unannounced at the friendly law-abiding town of Safe Haven (population…

Alastair Campbell

Hitlist-Books

13 Nov 2008

● Alastair Campbell New Labour’s arch doctor of spin tackles matters concerning real health with his debut novel, All in the Mind, based on his own mental breakdown back in the 1980s. Waterstone’s, Glasgow, Wed 19 Nov. ● Alexei Sayle In the not too…

Chris Addison - It Wasn’t Me

Chris Addison - It Wasn’t Me

(3 stars)13 Nov 2008

One grotesquely amusing aspect of the current economic crisis has been the sight of our beloved PM desperately trying to hammer home the notion that the predicament should be blamed on ‘global’ factors and is absolutely nothing to do with him, mate. You…

Gillian Slovo - Black Orchids

Gillian Slovo - Black Orchids

(2 stars)13 Nov 2008

Evelyn wishes to be ‘rescued from the boredom of her life’ and it’s in Emil, the beneficiary of a rich Ceylon family, that she finds her non-white knight in shining armour. What seems like an exotic fairy tale in 40s Ceylon, however, is an altogether…

Toni Morrison - A Mercy

Toni Morrison - A Mercy

(4 stars)13 Nov 2008

In 1993, Toni Morrison became the first (still only) African American author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her ninth novel A Mercy, which addresses the cruel genesis of slavery in early colonial America, arrives as an African American strides…

Also released - 5 Poetry Books

13 Nov 2008

● Vera Brittain Because You Died A collection of poems and prose from the author of Testament of Youth, all about the men she loved who perished in the First World War. Virago. ● Dennis O’Donnell Stepping Stones This one features interviews with…

Boris Artzybasheff - As I See

Boris Artzybasheff - As I See

(4 stars)13 Nov 2008

On a trajectory from the surreal to the satirical Russian-born New Yorker lies somewhere between Man Ray and Gerald Scarfe. First published in 1954, As I See is a collection of striking illustrations reflecting, among other things, the burgeoning…

John Updike

John Updike - The Widows of Eastwick

(3 stars)30 Oct 2008

For almost half a century, novelist, poet and New Yorker writer John Updike has chronicled the concerns, thoughts and sexual foibles of the American middle class. Not always successfully though, as can be forgiven amidst a career which embraces almost…

Alexander McCall Smith - La's Orchestra Saves the World

Alexander McCall Smith - La's Orchestra Saves the World

(4 stars)30 Oct 2008

When a master of storytelling such as Alexander McCall Smith puts pen to paper, we have come to expect great things. And he doesn't disappoint with this latest stand-alone title, a warm and captivating tale of strength, passion and friendship set in…

Jim Holt - Stop Me If You've Heard This

Jim Holt - Stop Me If You've Heard This

(3 stars)30 Oct 2008

If there is one art form often deemed to be beyond analysis, it's comedy. You hear, see or read something funny and then you laugh. End of. Right? Anyone who seeks to go beneath the skin of stand-up and explain the mechanics only succeeds in killing the…

Will Eisner - Textbooks

Will Eisner - Textbooks

30 Oct 2008

Undoubtedly what editor Denis Kitchen calls the 'primary treatise on the theory and mechanics of modern comics', Eisner's influential textbook Comics and Sequential Art and its two companion guides get a makeover for the digital age. Honed from lectures…

Dag Solstad - Novel 11, Book 18

Dag Solstad - Novel 11, Book 18

(3 stars)30 Oct 2008

The only three-time winner of the Norwegian Literary Critics Award, Dag Solstad follows up 2006's much praised Shyness and Dignity with this sophisticated, sometimes claustrophobic, representation of a mid-life crisis coming to an extreme end. The plot…

Laura Dockrill - Mistakes in the Background

Laura Dockrill - Mistakes in the Background

(2 stars)30 Oct 2008

The emergence of a sassy-tongued poet who can relate to the yoof should be a good thing. And Laura Dockrill, aka MC Dockers, truly does seem to be articulating, in her unaffected, unchecked, stream of consciousness way, the existence of the Facebook…

Jesse Reklaw - The Night of Your Life

Jesse Reklaw - The Night of Your Life

(4 stars)30 Oct 2008

Since 1995 American cartoonist Jesse Reklaw has invited readers of his website to submit synopses of their dreams, then adapts the best into four-panel comic strips. Reklaw's second compilation (after 2000's Dreamtoons) features a surreal discount…

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