Book Review by Sara McKee A whole new perspective on Doctor Zhivago “You and I, it’s as though we have been taught to kiss in heaven and sent down to earth together to see if we know what we were taught.” Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak My experience of Doctor Zhivago was primarily watching the […]
REVIEW BY IAN JAMES BRYDON The eleventh volume of Anthony Powell’s masterful Dance to the Music of Time sequence opens in Venice where the narrator, Nick Jenkins, has been lured to attend a literary conference. Among his fellow delegates are the erudite but rather intimidating academic, Dr Emily Brightman, and Russell Gwinnett, an American professor […]
REVIEW BY IAN JAMES BRYDON Like her previous book, Bluebird, Bluebird¸ this novel is set in East Texas and features Texas Ranger, Darren Matthews. Until I read the previous book, I hadn’t been aware that the Texas Rangers still existed, and had assumed that they had passed into legend during the period of the wild […]
I read a few critical reviews of this debut novel by Caoilinn Hughes and decided to give it a whirl. Described as “Kick-Ass and Whip-Smart”, “Dazzling, Heady Fiction”, “Urgent, Funny, Painstaking”. In fact the publisher’s own blurb followed with similar hyperbole: “Written in electric, heart-stopping prose, Orchid and The Wasp is a dazzlingly original novel […]
Chris Pavone’s previous novels (Expats, The Accident and Travellers) were notable for their highly complex plots, and this new one is true to form. All the action (and there is a lot of action) is encompassed within a span of twelve hours, and moves the reader back and forth across central Paris (with occasional scenes […]
This is the third instalment in Mick Herron’s series featuring the inimitable Jackson Lamb and his team of ‘slow horses’. Lamb himself is an extraordinary creation, reminiscent of Reginald Hill’s burly and crass Superintendent Andy Dalziel, only far more dishevelled and boorish. His ‘slow horses’ are cast-offs from the elite world of MI5, each having […]
This book marks the return of Jackson Brodie, protagonist of four of Kate Atkinson’s previous novels, the last of which, Started Early, Took My Dog, was published some nine years ago. All of Atkinson’s customary ingredients are present: plausible characters; a labyrinthine plot (well, it is more a case of several different plots all interlaced […]
The second volume of Powell’s epic roman fleuve opens with the narrator, Nick Jenkins, presumably in middle age or beyond, looking through the wares on offer at a downmarket auction and recognising four paintings by E Bosworth Deacon. This prompts Jenkins to recollect his earliest encounter with Mr Deacon, who had been a friend of […]
The Wall is John Lanchester’s fifth novel, and I would happily place three of the previous ones (The Debt to Pleasure, Fragrant Harbour, and Capital), all of which are completely different in style and content to each other, within my personal top fifty books. Given that since I started formally listing the books I read […]
I have always had a particular fondness for meta-fiction, and love reading books about writing books. This is a particularly delicious example of the genre. The book opens with celebrated author Erich Ackerman returning to West Berlin in 1988 to promote his latest novel, Dread, which had recently won a prestigious literary award (known simply […]
