Books and Malcolm Jack

Stephen Kelman set for Edinburgh Book Festival appearance

Author of Booker longlisted Pigeon English

9 Aug 2011

Probably most humdrum offices in Britain hide an aspiring creative type who dreams of ditching the day job and succeeding at what they love. For Stephen Kelman, the dream came dramatically true. Penned while he worked as a council administrator, his…

AL Kennedy - The Blue Book

Surreal drama from the talented comic/author

3 Aug 2011

(Jonathan Cape) Her first novel since 2007’s Day, celebrated Scots miserablist AL Kennedy’s sixth full-length work of fiction attempts to mess with readers’ minds in a way that few other authors might dare. The Blue Book is laced with cryptic…

Beryl Bainbridge - The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress

The author's final, unfinished novel is a masterclass in confident prose

23 May 2011

(Little, Brown) Beryl Bainbridge’s editor Brendan King called this final novel by the five-times Booker-shortlisted English author – who died of cancer in 2010 – a flawed masterpiece. And he should know, having remastered the nearly-finished…

Stephen Kelman - Pigeon English

Stephen Kelman's much-vaunted social drama of race and manhood.

4 Mar 2011

Stephen Kelman went from redundant council administrator to becoming the subject of a 12-way publisher bidding war thanks to this exceptional debut novel. Penned with that unburdened lightness of touch perhaps only a writer who never believed his words…

Aimee Bender - The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake - interview

Surrealist impulses drive the new novel by LA writer

9 Feb 2011

‘I have a friend who sometimes uses food language to talk about feelings,’ says author Aimee Bender, over the phone from her Los Angeles home, about the genesis of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. ‘She’ll talk about feelings that are “undigested…

The Hot 100 2010 - Mark Millar, Kevin Bridges and Alasdair Gray take top 3 spots

Our annual chart of the people from Scotland being interesting, successful and creative

16 Dec 2010

The Hot 100 is a list of Scots who’ve made a sizeable creative splash in 2010. It includes musicians, artists, writers, actors, fashion designers, technological innovators, shop owners, festival directors, record label heads and one mad cyclist.

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

Biography of enigmatic Glaswegian soul-pop perfectionists leaves much unresolved

30 Nov 2010

(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…

Adrian Johns - Death of a Pirate

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

19 Nov 2010

(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…

John Ajvide Lindqvist - Harbour

6 Oct 2010

(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…

Magnus Mills - Screwtop Thompson

22 Sep 2010

(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.

Adam Haslett - Union Atlantic

24 Jun 2010

(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…

Alex McBride - Defending the Guilty

19 Mar 2010

(Viking) They might have a public image problem, but when a lawyer is the difference to you between freedom and incarceration, they can suddenly become closer than any family member or friend. In Defending the Guilty, criminal barrister Alex McBride…

Laila Lalami - Secret Son

27 Jan 2010

(Viking) Nineteen-year-old Youssef El Mekki lives with his mother in a Casablanca slum, having grown up believing that his father died when he was young. In fact he’s the illegitimate son of a rich local businessman, and when he makes the connection…

Rockers and Rollers by Brian Johnson

15 Oct 2009

AC/DC singer and sometime amateur racer Brian Johnson measures his ride along the highway to hell above all not in sex, drugs or rock’n’roll, but automobiles. Motors are the Geordie petrolhead’s passion – from E-Type Jags to TVRs, Rolls Royce Phantoms…

Rebecca Gowers

12 Aug 2009

‘How you write about a woman somewhere in her 20s without being labeled chick-lit, I don’t know,’ says Rebecca Gowers, frustrated by the fact that her novels are so often lumped into the genre of pastel-covered books all about modern ladies cooing over…

David Aaronovitch

How paranoid ideas shaped modern history

7 Aug 2009

It’s easy to assume that conspiracy theorists are odd, simple, lonely blokes who still live with their parents and spend far too much time on the internet. But in truth, they’re usually otherwise normal, intelligent and rational people. Author…

David Aaronovitch: Voodoo Histories

14 May 2009

Pearl Harbour was engineered by FDR so America could enter World War II. Princess Di was bumped off by MI6. And 9/11 was the master plot of a wicked American administration. All because TV documentaries, the internet or some bloke down the pub told us…

Rebecca Gowers - The Twisted Heart

16 Apr 2009

Kit is a gangly Oxford literature student, immersed in her thesis about the fictionalisation of real-life murders by Victorian authors. To let off steam, she goes to a dance class and meets a mysterious bloke called Joe, embarking on a relationship…

Walter Jon Williams - This Is Not a Game

5 Mar 2009

TECHNO THRILLER If a novel set in a world of ‘greed, betrayal and social networking’ doesn’t sound especially exciting, that’s because it’s not. Walter Jon Williams might be highly acclaimed as a sci-fi writer, but This Is Not a Game engages a muddle…

Richard Milward: Tall tale

19 Feb 2009

Bedraggled old residential tower blocks are gradually being demolished in towns and cities across the UK. Yet, young Middlesbrough author Richard Milward has reversed the trend in his own small way, by erecting a sky-high tale from a solid stack of…

Norah Vincent - Voluntary Madness

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…

James Hider - The Spiders of Allah

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…

Toni Morrison - A Mercy

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…

Simon Schama - The American Future: A History

2 Oct 2008

With its military overstretched, natural resources running dry and markets fluctuating wildly, America faces the biggest presidential election in generations this November. You might scoff that a country which gave George ‘Dubya’ Bush two terms in…

Marilynne Robinson - Home

18 Sep 2008

FAMILY DRAMA With its groaningly slow pace and scriptural debate-heavy prose, labouring through Marilynne Robinson’s thick-set third novel – a companion piece of sorts to 2005’s Pulitzer Prize winning Gilead – is an experience recommended only to the…