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31 Jan 2008
When Mark Oliver Everett was nine years old and home alone, a plane crashed in his neighbourhood. Stumbling outside, he wandered through the carnage of burning wreckage and body parts before returning to his house. ‘Just another day in my weird life,…
2 Oct 2008
MINIMALIST MEMOIRS Ernest Hemingway, challenged to write a six-word story, came up with ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn’. Inspired by that, literary website SMITH Magazine accumulated six-word memoirs from everyday punters and authors alike. This…
20 Sep 2007
Best known for The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje provides another trademark non-linear narrative, attempting to create a whole out of disparate story strands, but with rather limited success. On a Californian farm, Anna, adopted sister Claire and…
26 Mar 2007
LITERARY NOVEL AL Kennedy’s latest creation, Alfred Day, finds his purpose through the Second World War, enjoying a sense of camaraderie as tail-gunner in a bomber crew. His narrative switches between this time and 1949, when a broken Day is trying…
27 Feb 2007
Projects like Ballads of the Book don’t come along very often. And, looking at the roll call of writers and musicians involved, it is easy to see why. It must have been a logistical nightmare getting 54 of Scotland’s finest writers and musicians…
18 Sep 2008
CRIME NOVEL After 18 novels, John Rebus retired in his last outing, Exit Music. Whether the detective inspector will return is unclear, but in the meantime Ian Rankin is having some fun spreading his authorial wings. This heist story was first…
14 Aug 2008
Chuck Palahniuk tells such stark tales that people faint at his readings. Doug Johnstone crosses his legs, girds his loins and chats to the guru of gore
7 Aug 2008
Kapka Kassabova likes to travel. You can tell, because the writer’s accent is all over the place: there’s Eastern European, Antipodean and a hint of Scottish in there as she chats away. Kassabova was raised in Bulgaria before living in New Zealand for…
6 Sep 2007
So this is the end, then. Well, perhaps not quite. Exit Music, the much trumpeted latest work from Ian Rankin sees his world famous cynical copper Detective Inspector Rebus handing in his warrant card for the last time and retiring permanently to the…
12 Mar 2007
SPORT Chess attracts both child prodigies and general oddballs, both of which can be found in abundance in this well-constructed and intriguing book about American’s top high school chess team. The Edward R Murrow School in Brooklyn is an…
22 May 2008
FAMILY DRAMA (Portobello) For this French writer’s fourth novel (but first in translation), we are in the head of 15-year-old Rose, a girl who spends much of her time on her apartment’s roof terrace wearing a cape and playing with her rabbits. Rose…
23 Aug 2007
Craig Davidson doesn’t pull any punches. We might as well get the terrible boxing pun out the way at the start, because his debut novel, The Fighter, is a brutally violent but brilliantly written tale set in the world of underground bare-knuckle…
12 Feb 2007
The publication of William McIlvanney’s novel Weekend was like welcoming an old friend home after a very long holiday, and finding that the time away has left them in extremely rude health.
19 Dec 2006
CHILDHOOD MEMOIR Christopher Rush’s previous work has been widely acclaimed with his travelogue-memoir To Travel Hopefully being lauded on publication last year, and his novel, A Twelvemonth and a Day, making it into this publication’s 100 Best…
31 Jul 2008
THRILLER (Two Ravens) Both deeply thought-provoking and often truly stomach-turning, Senseless is an existential thriller told with brutal clarity and dealing with cruelty, voyeurism, consumerism and globalisation. Elliott Gast is a wealthy American…
18 Jun 2007
COMING OF AGE DRAMA The phenomenon of mathematical child prodigies is fascinating. First-time novelist Nikita Lalwani makes just such a character the centrepiece of her assured debut, as we grow up with Rumi, brought up in Cardiff by Indian parents.
4 Sep 2008
Crime fiction is routinely disregarded by literary types, but at its best it can provide the kind of sharp commentary on society that a million Oxbridge dinner party novels could only dream of. Arnaldur Indridason's Icelandic crime procedurals are…
CRIME NOVEL (Doubleday) ‘A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen.’ So says tongue-in-cheek Jackson Brodie, Kate Atkinson’s ex-army, ex-police, sort-of private investigator in a third fictional outing, neatly encapsulating the appeal of…
17 Jul 2008
FICTION (Portobello) The trouble with writing a novel satirising the mundanity of life and the mind numbing tedium of bureaucracy is, well, it risks being mundane and tedious. This second minimalist novel from Neath aims at the likes of Beckett…
27 Mar 2008
RENAISSANCE NOVEL (Jonathan Cape) There is much to admire in this ornate, complex Renaissance romp from Salman Rushdie, but when one of the main characters declares at one point: ‘A curse on all storytellers’, it’s hard not to agree, at least in part.
28 Feb 2008
On the face of it, football and poetry are not obvious bedfellows. The Tartan Army enjoy a good singalong but they’re not renowned for their linguistic prowess or their gentle poetic insights. Likewise, you can’t imagine a Poets XI mastering the 4-5-1…
18 Oct 2007
Frankly, I’m not usually one for tomes about the past, but this remarkable and ambitious piece of work is no ordinary history book. An incredibly diverse collection of writings spanning 2000 years, it tells the story of this country through the people…
9 Aug 2007
Katrin Himmler was born into a family with a dark history, but has only now been able to write about it. She tells Doug Johnstone about reliving the past
16 Jul 2007
DEBUT NOVEL TOD WODICKA All Shall Be Well; And All Shall Be Well; And All Manner of Things Shall Be Well (Jonathan Cape) What an exceptionally odd yet utterly compelling debut novel this is, quite unlike the typical…
21 May 2007
SHORT STORIES I’ll admit, I feared this book. A debut collection of short stories from an LA-based performance artist and indie filmmaker? Surely it’s going to be all pointlessly quirky characters, self-obsessed existential ennui and vacuous…
11 Dec 2006
2006 has proven to be a tumultuous year for Scotland’s leading independent publisher Canongate. On the plus side, the company became the first Scottish publisher ever to have two novels on the Booker shortlist, Kate Grenville’s The Secret River and…
12 Oct 2006
SOCIAL HISTORY Billy Bragg has been so outspoken over the years that it comes as a surprise that this is his first ever book. Conceived as a reaction to the rise of the BNP in his hometown of Barking and the 7 July bombings, this is a heartfelt yet…
1 Jan 2005
A host of successful new authors has sprung from Glasgow University’s highly productive creative writing course over the last few years, with Louise Welsh at the front of the pack. The Cutting Room was Welsh’s 2002 debut novel and it is a book that has…
They say that often an author's debut novel is his or her most autobiographical. Well if that's the case, heaven help Iain Banks. The Wasp Factory created a stushie amongst bamboozled literary critics who didn't know how to take this coruscating…
21 Aug 2008
‘OK, you’re a wolf, it’s winter, you’re hungry and desperate and hunting for food. Now go away and write something.’ You can picture the creative writing class and the half-baked stuff you might get handed in, can’t you? Welcome to The Wolf, a debut…
Rosemary Goring tells Doug Johnstone about finding the voices or ordinary people. There’s been a resurgence of interest in Scottish history among ordinary punters, a trend Scotland: The Autobiography taps into brilliantly. Edited by Rosemary Goring, a…
As well as writing novels, James Meek has spent a lot of time as a journalist reporting from conflict zones, and this experience fed into his latest fictional work, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent. A global book, it ranges from London to rural America…
5 Jun 2008
Daren King lives in a strange world. Not in real life, you understand, for there he lives in Dublin because of the generous tax breaks for writers, which is perfectly normal and not at all strange. No, the strangeness of Daren King is in his head and on…
24 Apr 2008
POST-WAR NOVEL (Hamish Hamilton) James Kelman doesn’t have a reputation for writing easy-to-read books. Not necessarily a bad thing, since often the most rewarding fiction is the most demanding. Compared to his last two novels, Translated Accounts and…
HISTORICAL TALE (Polygon) Scottish author Andrew Drummond has a strong reputation for writing comedic historical novels, and while this third book covers similar territory, it seems thinner on substance than his previous outings. Purporting to be the…
17 Jan 2008
FUTURISTIC DRAMA (Jonathan Cape) Comparing a book to A Clockwork Orange and 1984 in the press release is a risky tactic, and one which backfires on this underwhelming debut. In the near future, we’re in the company of Jensen Interceptor, a…
15 Nov 2007
COLLECTED JOURNALISM What I Do (Picador) I’ve mostly avoided Jon Ronson in the past, mainly because of an irrational fear of his ultra-liberal-looking potato-head, and witnessing an early simpering appearance of his on late-night Channel 4. So…
16 Aug 2007
Billy Bragg was described by The Times as ‘a national treasure’. That particular phrase would surely bring a wry smile to his face, not least because the topic currently vexing the lifelong political campaigner and singer-songwriter is the fundamental…
Iain Banks can probably be accused of many things, but lack of imagination isn’t one of them. While most of his outlandish ideas get channelled into his sci-fi work, there’s still plenty of inventive stuff to be found in his mainstream novels.
23 Apr 2007
EXISTENTIAL TALE Young Mancunian writer Gwendoline Riley is much-praised in literary circles, but it’s hard to see why from this turgid sliver of immature existential angst. A young female novelist from Manchester (hmmm) and an older American…
11 Nov 2006
RURAL DRAMA Award-winning novelist Patrick McCabe is known for his darkly violent books which mine the disturbing underbelly of rural Ireland, a setting he knows well from his own upbringing. Winterwood is no exception, telling the story of Redmond…
26 Oct 2006
CRIME DRAMA Truculent DI Rebus is as familiar as an old pair of slippers these days, not least because of Ken Stott’s excellent recent portrayal on television. This latest escapade around Ian Rankin’s schizophrenic Edinburgh (the 17th Rebus book…
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