CATEGORIES

In a recent article about women’s writing it was claimed that respect and a wide readership is more likely if the author adopts a male perspective. Kate Worsley’s book half fulfills this criterion by offering a male and a female perspective in alternating chapters, but it also subverts it. However, to explain just how Worsley [...]

It is rare to find a book written in a language which so beautifully conveys its imaginative essence; or one with a title which is so exactly right. O’Malley’s writing is often lyrical and evocative and he can take the reader and his characters to places far removed from the gritty world in which they [...]

Granta‘s theme ‘Betrayal’ offers scope for many things, from love to war, from politics to survival, and more. As usual, the pieces included come from authors around the world and their contributions are unexpected, innovative and excellent. Janine di Giovanni, who has reported on wars for more than twenty years, begins ‘Seven Days in Syria’ [...]

“What follows is a record of where Meadow and I have been since our disappearance.” So, begins the opening statement of Schroder, and it is prefaced by the e.e.cummings poem “here is the deepest secret nobody knows“. This sounds tantalizing, especially when you know from the cover blurb that Meadow is the narrator’s six-year-old daughter and [...]

Kate Summerscale’s book is more than just the story of a Victorian wife’s romantic indiscretions and a scandalous divorce case. It is a glimpse of a changing society. One in which a  woman’s sexuality could be discussed in terms of hysteria and insanity caused by disorders of the womb. One in which gynaecology and psychology [...]

The first third of this book is about sex: love and sex; sex and love. In the first five chapters, Sarita remembers how she fell in love with Karun and the details of  her increasingly adventurous attempts to get him to consummate their marriage. The next five chapters deal with Jaz’s homosexual seduction of Karun, [...]

The Columbian folk-tale figure of the Robber of Memories haunts this book in many different ways. Michael Jacobs’ journey to the source of the Magdalena River in Columbia is a record of his travels but it is also about memory and loss – about history, conflict, disappeared people, and about personal experiences of loss.  Jacobs’ [...]

Futh is in his forties, newly separated from his wife, and taking a walking holiday in Germany. He hasn’t been doing much walking recently but he plans on doing fifteen miles a day and coming home fit and tanned. And he remembers walking with his mother and father as a child and, especially, a sunny [...]

A body in the swimming pool is always a good start. But this is no ordinary mystery story. And Kitty Finch is no ordinary body. Her appearance at the tourist villa which the Jacobs have rented disturbs everyone – Joe, Isabel and their fourteen-year-old daughter, Nina, and their friends Mitchell and Laura. Jurgen, the German [...]

I am an ordinary reader who knows a little about art but I am no expert. I already like Cézanne’s later work but I know nothing about him, and I hoped that this book would tell me more about his life and about his work. It did both these things but I found it a [...]

Those who know Edna O’Brien’s work will instantly feel at home in this autobiographical memoir: not just because it reads like one of her novels, but also because O’Brien’s fiction has always drawn on her Irish roots and on places and events in her own life. The book begins with two dreams set at her [...]

“Caterina Pellegrini is a young Venetian musicologist hired to find the truthful heir to an alleged treasure concealed by a once-famous baroque composer”: “A gripping tale of Intrigue, Music and Obsession” The publicity material for this book says that it is based on the true story of the composer Agostino Steffani – with “months and [...]

There is an old-fashioned style about this book. Not just because it was written in the 1920s and is set in France just after the First World War, but because Némirovsky writes in a way which is more leisurely and descriptive than is customary now. Her character live at a more leisurely pace. Social status [...]

I should say from the start that I am not a laugh-out-loud reader of funny books. So, this book is not my usual sort of reading. However, Jonas Jonasson is a superb teller of tall tales; and enough people have found this book hilarious (so the publisher’s blurb tells me) for it to have been [...]

Why do we travel? What is travel? Is it tourism or migration; voluntary or necessary? Something driven by restlessness, curiosity, a desire to learn and see new things or the need to escape? Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel tells the stories of two very different people: Laura, an Australian woman for whom travel has been an [...]

This book of poems is described in the press release as “A personal journey through the works of poets that most influenced Kinsella’s work“. Kinsella himself describes it as “creating responses, translations, versions, distractions, takes, adaptations and interpolations“. He goes on to say that “the poems are ‘my’ poems in so far as my own [...]

Buddhaland Brooklyn is the story of a middle-aged, Japanese Buddhist priest, Seido Oda, who, after a quiet life creating and teaching art in his mountainside monastery in Japan, is suddenly sent to New York to lead a group of American believers and to manage the construction of a new Buddhist temple there. Seido Oda tells his [...]

Craig Taylor is Canadian, but after living for several years in London and growing attached to the place he began to ask “What is a Londoner?”. It seems that there are almost as many answers to that question as there are people living in London but my favourite is that ” a real Londoner would [...]

Some will know of the Irishman, Roger Casement, because of the infamous ‘Black Diaries’ in which he reputedly detailed his homosexual relationships, and which were published in the British press at the time of his imprisonment in Pentonville Prison in 1916. Some will also know that he was stripped of his Knighthood and hanged as [...]

“Now he was Dr Norman Wilfred, Oliver had discovered, once the security guard had unlocked his room and broken the padlock off his suitcase for him, he had an unexpected taste for pure silk underpants and pure silk pyjamas” But Oliver was not Dr Norman Wilfred, however much he had convinced himself and guests at [...]

“Finn fell. I don’t  think, if I used a million words, I could call up the horror. It isn’t a matter of words.” Finn is Martha’s five-year-old son and she sees him fall from the balcony of their home. But there is more to this terrible event than Martha is willing to tell us or [...]

TITLE: Nest: The Art of Birds AUTHOR: Janine Burke PUBLISHER: Allen & Unwin (81 Alexander St. Crows Nest, NSW 2065, Australia) (March 2012) ISBN: 978 1 74237 829 9      182 pages. Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@skea.com) There are many good things about this book. Its central theme, as the author tells us, is that birds’ [...]

TITLE: Waiting for Sunrise AUTHOR: William Boyd PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury (March 2012) ISBN: 9781408818589   353 pages. Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@skea.com) The Year is 1913, the setting Vienna. Lysander Ulrich Rief is a 28 year-old English actor. He is “a young, almost handsome man” and “almost a dandy” and he writes poetry. His surname, he says, is [...]

TITLE:  GRANTA 118: Exit Strategies EDITOR: John Freeman PUBLISHER: Granta (12 Addison Ave.London, W11 4QR, U.K.) (30 January 2012) ISBN: 9781905881550        256pages Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@skea.com. http://ann.skea.com/). I always thought that Douglas Adams’s dolphins had the perfect exit line: ” So long, and thanks for all the fish” . But was that [...]

TITLE:  GRANTA 117: Horror EDITOR: John Freeman PUBLISHER:  Granta (12 Addison Ave.London, W11 4QR, U.K.) (21 November 2011) ISBN: 9781905881369         256pages. Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@skea.com). This is no collection of ghosts, ghouls and gruesome fantasies. Indeed, there is enough real horror in the world for imagination to be unnecessary. So, Granta’s [...]

TITLE:  The Sense of an Ending AUTHOR: Julian Barnes PUBLISHER: Random House (1 August 2011) ISBN: 9780224094153    150 pages. Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@skea.com). “some approximate memories, which time has deformed into certainties”, that’s how Barnes’s narrator, Tony Webster, describes this exploration of his past. He begins with schooldays, because, “that’s where it all began”. And [...]

TITLE:  Private Journal of A Voyage to Australia AUTHOR: James Bell. (Introduction and Epilogue by Anthony Laube). PUBLISHER: Allen & Unwin ISBN: 978 1 74237 795 7         202 pages. Buy it here… Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@skea.com). In 1838, when 21-year-old James Bell set sail from England on the long voyage to [...]

TITLE: The Cat’s Table AUTHOR:  Michael Ondaatje PUBLISHER: Random House  (2 August 2011) Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@skea.com). Buy The Cat’s Table here… “I try to imagine who the boy on the ship was. Perhaps a sense of self is not even there in his nervous stillness in the narrow bunk, in this green grasshopper [...]

TITLE:  Dante in Love AUTHOR: A.N.Wilson PUBLISHER:      Atlantic Books (Ormond House, 26-27 Boswell St. London, WC1N 3JZ)  (9 June 2011) ISBN: 978 1 84887 948 5        386 pages. Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@skea.com). Buy Dante in Love here… A.N.Wilson’s stated aim in Dante in Love is to act as a travel-guide in the unfamiliar [...]

TITLE: GRANTA 115: The F Word EDITOR: John Freeman PUBLISHER: Granta (12 Addison Ave.London, W11 4QR, U.K.) (1 June 2011) ISBN: 978 1 905881 34 5         272 pages. Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@skea.com). Buy Granta 115: The F Word by John Freeman here… GRANTA, if you have not met it before, is [...]

TITLE: Smut AUTHOR: Alan Bennett PUBLISHER:      Faber  (30 May 2011) ISBN: 978 1 84668 525 5         EBOOK ISBN: 978 1 84765 765 7          180 pages. Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@skea.com). Buy Smut by Alan Bennett here… I was bribed to write about this book. My review copy came with an extra package in which I [...]

TITLE: Machiavelli’s Lawn AUTHOR: Mark Crick PUBLISHER:  Granta  (1 April 2011) ISBN: 978 1 84708 134 6       111 pages. Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@skea.com). Buy Machiavelli’s Lawn by Mark Crick here… I am not sure whether Mark Cricks’ skill is ventriloquism or parody. Whatever it is, this small book purports to be full of [...]

TITLE:  Gillespie and I AUTHOR: Jane Harris PUBLISHER:  Faber  (June 2011) ISBN: 9780571275168      504 pages. Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@skea.com). It is April 1933. Harriet Baxter is eighty, unmarried, of independent means and consumed with the urge to write of the time forty-five years ago, in 1888, when she was “friend and soul-mate” [...]

TITLE:  The Report AUTHOR: Jessica Francis Kane PUBLISHER: Granta  (March 2011) ISBN: 978 184627 279 0     240 pages. Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@skea.com). Authors find their inspiration in the most unexpected places. New Yorker, Jessica Francis Kane, found hers in a report published by Her Majesty’s Stationary Office which she picked up in the [...]

TITLE:  Fifty Plants that changed the course of History AUTHOR: Bill Laws PUBLISHER:  Allen & Unwin ISBN: 9781742372181    226 pages. Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@skea.com). This is a handsome book. A delight to look at and a pleasure to hold. It is also a pleasure to read, not just because each page is beautifully illustrated [...]

TITLE: Poetry and Childhood EDITORS: Styles,  Joy and Whitley PUBLISHER:  Trentham Books, Westview House, 734 London Road, Stoke-on-Trent, ST4 5NP, England  (February 2011) ISBN: 9781858564722     254 pages. Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@skea.com). It is almost impossible to write a short review of this book. The essays in it are all of high quality [...]

TITLE:  Brighton Rock AUTHOR: Graham Greene PUBLISHER: Random House  (January 2011) ISBN: 9780099478478     PRICE: A$12.95  (paperback)  269 pages. Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@skea.com). “He knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him”. It is many years since I first read Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, but that opening sentence immediately drew me [...]

TITLE: Proust’s Overcoat AUTHOR: Lorenza Foschini TRANSLATOR: Eric Karpeles PUBLISHER: Portobello Books. (Allen & Unwin, PO Box 8500, 83 Alexander St. NSW 2065, Australia. January 2011) ISBN: 9781846272714   128 pages. This is a curious little book. It is not so much about Proust’s overcoat or about Marcel Proust himself but about a collector, a bibliophile, Jacques [...]

TITLE:  A Small Furry Hope: Dog Rescue and the Meaning of Life AUTHOR: Steven Kotler PUBLISHER:      Bloomsbury (December 2010) ISBN: 9781408817344        307 pages. Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@skea.com). Never judge a book by its cover. Especially this one! When the Australian edition arrived on my doorstep and I saw the title and the cute sleeping [...]

TITLE:  A Postcard to Sylvia Plath (Poetry) AUTHOR: Patricia Jones PUBLISHER: Ginninderra Press (P.O. Box 3461, Port Adelaide, SA 5015, Australia) (November 2010) ISBN: 97811740276498 Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@skea.com) “Trawling out my memories – elusive as tiny silvered fish my heart flapping – a torn sail in the wind”. In her Introduction to this book of [...]