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18 Sep 2008
GOTHIC TALE With so many books on all our to-read lists, brevity is a virtue. The Gargoyle flouts this with great success. Framed by the sceptical voice of a severely burned car crash victim, events swing from medieval times to the present, from…
21 Aug 2008
In a famous sketch by Bill Hicks, the great comedian is stumped by the question, ‘What are you reading for?’ The enquiry – and its correlative, ‘What are you writing for?’ – are deceptively simple. For Kei Miller, the Jamaican-born poet, novelist and…
7 Aug 2008
‘The disease in question had, as its main deleterious effect, the fact that it renders its victims perfectly unable to write anything but 500-page books about the civil war in Sudan.’ The ‘victim’ in this case is US author Dave Eggers, but the…
28 Feb 2008
RURAL DRAMA (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) Kei Miller, a recent addition to the teaching staff on Glasgow University’s Creative Writing course, is under 30 and of the male persuasion. So the ease with which he tells this homely collection of life stories…
29 Nov 2007
MANGA ROM-COM Scott Pilgrim Gets it Together (Oni Press) Scott Pilgrim is a 23-year-old slacker with no money, no job and no hope of getting either. Luckily, in the tradition of classic gen X wastrels he is totally irresistible, which is why the…
15 Nov 2007
SOCIAL DRAMA Veronica (Serpent’s Tail) Mary Gaitskill rarely shies away from the violence of inner life. S&M, self-harm and bad sex torment characters as they struggle to define themselves and the world and new novel Veronica is no different. Alison…
4 Oct 2007
Set ten years after the US dropped the ‘Little Boy’ atomic bomb on Hiroshima, decimating the city, these two stories follow the lives of the Hibakusha (‘explosion-affected people’). ‘The first story, ‘Town of Evening Calm’, details the descent into…
Snowsports are gnarly and the Romantic poets were rad so why not have them meet on common ground (the ski resort of Chamonix; Shelley’s Mont-Blanc) and add in a serial rapist for good measure? After winning the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 2004 with Boy…
20 Sep 2007
Sam is 15. He skates, chases girls and narrates his own coming-of-age novel. Things are going well until he gets one of those girls pregnant and is introduced to the world of adult responsibility. Plus, his father figure is a poster of pro-skater Tony…
6 Sep 2007
POLITICAL THRILLER After being serialised in The Observer in 2006, Irish author Ronan Bennett’s thriller of politics, psychoanalysis and chess gets a fully bound release. It’s 1914. Russia is under the thrall of singularly powerful men, the…
19 Jul 2007
This year’s batch of debut authors is rich and varied. Suzanne Black finds that while some of them may be escaping from a successful parent’s shadow or scripting identity dramas, they ultimately have one thing in common
What do you do when your father is one of the world’s most respected theoretical physicists, author of the bestseller A Brief History of Time and you want to be a writer? The answer was obvious to Lucy Hawking, daughter of Stephen: write a book…
2 Jul 2007
POPULAR SCIENCE Did you know that sea urchins were the key to understanding the process of sperm/egg fertilisation? Before microscopes came along, the theories of reproduction that reigned now seem ludicrous. In this entertaining history of science…
7 May 2007
POSTMODERN ROMANCE
9 Apr 2007
FAMILY DRAMA Charlotte Mendelson returns with a sweeping familial drama charting the decline and fall of a well-to-do, very Jewish London family funnelled through the revolving narrative ciphers of three characters in crisis. Rabbi Claudia, son Leo…
12 Feb 2007
The photograph on the cover of Jennifer McCartney’s first novel, Afloat, has the author sitting on a bench holding two small oranges. ‘I needed a picture and only had six to choose from,’ she says. ‘It was taken in Rome in the Vatican Orange Garden. We…
19 Dec 2006
LITERARY DRAMA John Polidori (Byron’s travelling companion and doctor) and governess Eliza Esmond embark upon a secretive love affair, under the guises of Byron himself and Eliza’s more glamorous sister. In language stretched and manipulated to…
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