Katie Gould

Richard Mason - The Lighted Rooms

8 May 2008

FAMILY DRAMA (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) The Lighted Rooms takes on a vast array of human experience from Boer War concentration camps and townships of modern-day Bloemfontein to commodities trading crises and antiseptic nursing homes in 21st century…

Umberto Eco - review

Social analysis

1 Nov 2007

Umberto Eco likes to think of himself as disagreeable. Being described as such, he says, ‘fills me with pride and virtuous satisfaction.’ To this end, he exhorts readers to, among other things, insult the dead, ritually sacrifice presidents, choose…

Ann Patchett

23 Aug 2007

In the space of 24 hours, Ann Patchett’s Run covers an entire social spectrum: interracial relationships, Catholicism and its validity, familial conflict, economic and class equality, and political ethics. This is a hefty fallout from a single event for…

A Different Kettle of Fish

16 Aug 2007

Irreverent, witty, surprising, mischievous, and overacted to great dramatic effect, this was an hour spent in wonderfully silly company. The troupe – four men and one woman – rattles through sketches so fresh they ought to patent them. JK Rowling…

Lavinia Greenlaw

16 Aug 2007

Lavinia Greenlaw’s latest book, The Importance of Music to Girls, is a memoir recalling her girlhood rendered through music. Beginning with her first musical memory of waltzing on her father’s feet, it meanders through the musicals and recorder practice…

Owen Sheers

16 Aug 2007

‘Sitting at a desk talking to myself’ is how poet, novelist, playwright and journalist Owen Sheers defines writing. It seems his desk has served him well. His latest work is a radio play about WWII poet Alun Lewis; and a collaboration with composer…

Tokyo Year Zero

David Peace

16 Aug 2007

WAR DRAMA Tokyo Year Zero is unrelentingly miserable. A revolving recurrence of the same events, punctuated by endlessly repeated fragments of the narrator’s stream of consciousness, hammering, scratching and ticking, it is also, at least in parts…

Jarlath Regan

9 Aug 2007

Regan is utterly beguiling and likely to be among the most charming men you’ll meet. Self-deprecating, bewildered, and clever, he talks of hopeless government attempts to curb drinking in Ireland, his ineptitude in the workplace and with women, and a…

Panos Karnezis

9 Aug 2007

Panos Karnezis left a Sheffield engineering job for writing, looking for a new hobby. With a critically acclaimed short story collection and Whitbread-nominated novel, he has clearly surpassed the status of enthusiastic amateur. Poetic and arresting…

Paul Chowdhry

9 Aug 2007

Chowdhry’s world is one of discomfiting male nudity, racist jokes and Panorama reconstructions: he turned down an offer to play a suicide bomber in a reconstruction of 7/7 because the £200 fee ‘wasn’t enough to buy me a new identity’, and revolving…

Ben Okri

19 Jul 2007

Impoverished student, witness to the Nigerian civil war, paint shop employee, poetry editor for West Africa magazine, and BBC broadcaster, Ben Okri is now a much-lauded writer. Five years in the writing, his latest novel Starbook is a tale of slavery in…

AK47: The Story of the People’s Gun

18 Jun 2007

MILITARY HISTORY This is a horrible book and an astounding read, covering the inventor of the AK47, General Mikhail Kalashnikov, Sudanese child soldiers, American rappers and Islamic terrorists. Michael Hodges recounts its shifting cultural…

Resistance

21 May 2007

WAR DRAMA September 1944. The women of a remote valley in Wales wake to find their husbands have disappeared in the night with neither explanation nor warning. Within weeks, a German patrol moves into the valley on some unstated mission, their…

The Virgin of Flames

Chris Abani

23 Apr 2007

SOCIAL DRAMA Los Angeles, California. Black is a busy man. By day he collects racist and sexist jokes from toilets for his mural (one from Buckingham Palace via Sharon Osbourne), while being stalked by Archangel Gabriel, and obsessing over…

Edwin Morgan

A Book of Lives (Carcanet)

12 Mar 2007

POETRY COLLECTION Every so often, a collection of poems comes along which warrants closing the door, leaving emails unopened and the phone unanswered to read it from cover to cover. A Book of Lives is one such publication. As Scotland’s Makar, it’s…

Michael Muhammad Knight

The Taqwacores (Telegram)

26 Feb 2007

RELIGIOUS DRAMA Originally printed on a photocopier and distributed from the back of Michael Muhammad Knight’s car in mosque parking lots, The Taqwacores charts the attempts by Yusef, a punk and convert to Islam at 16, to live entirely by Muslim…

Lynne Truss

A Certain Age (Profile Books)

12 Feb 2007

MONOLOGUES The word ‘monologue’ conjures up two possibilities. The first is a droning, nondescript, shadowed face. The other is some heavily made-up and overly dramatic individual, unconcerned with masking anything, and most likely shouting. Taken…

Alexander McCall Smith

Dream Angus (Canongate)

28 Sep 2006

MYTHICAL DRAMA The latest in the Canongate myths series, Dream Angus is about the Celtic god of dreams, youth, beauty, and love. Despite being stolen from his gentle water spirit mother by his overbearing, philandering father and palmed off on his…

To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf (1927)

1 Jan 2005

Virginia Woolf is not a name immediately synonymous with Scottish writing. However, her evocation of the Hebrides as a place in which 'the sea is stretched like silk across the bay' should not be denied a position on the list. Conceived at the height of…