bwl 28 - February 2005
Fiction
| Boris Akunin - Murder on the Leviathan
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| A treat for those who enjoyed The Winter Queen (bwl 25). This time the handsome, young Russian sleuth is travelling on the world's newest and largest steamship, posing as a diplomat. Shades of Agatha Christie, the suspects of a multiple murder in Paris are contained within the elite area of the great ship together with the hapless French investigator, Commissioner Gauche. Lots of false leads and more casualties keep you guessing until Fedorin explains. (James Baker)
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| Kate Atkinson - Case Histories
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| Jackson Brodie, private detective, lives and works in Cambridge, where his services are much in demand: a jealous husband wants his wife followed, a girl has been murdered, another disappeared years ago, a nurse has lost her niece, a widow her cat. Meanwhile Jackson's own life is in a mess. This intricately woven story, full of suspense and heartbreak, is quite unlike Kate Atkinson's previous novels but I thought it was one of her best. (Wendy Swann)
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| Margaret Atwood - Oryx and Crake
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| Atwood has once again created a terrifying and horrific world without stretching credibility too far. The people and animals who inhabit this world are strangely altered: the reader gradually understands what has happened and why. There are just enough touches of realism to contemplate the possibility of this actually happening. A gripping read - it could not be described as enjoyable - which will stay with you for a long time afterwards. (Annie Noble)
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| Louis de Bernieres - Birds without Wings
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| The history of the birth of modern Turkey told through the lives of the inhabitants of one village throughout the 20th Century. Their destinies through wars, forced population transfers, famine and political upheaval make grim points about the terrible, arbitrary human cost of power-struggles but as always de Bernières' wonderfully vivid characters shine through the surrounding tragedy. Equally crammed with history and humanity. I was enthralled and bewitched. (Annabel Bedini)
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| Elizabeth Buchan - That Certain Age
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| This is the story of two wives in two marriages forty years apart, 1959 and 1999. Although the two stories are interwoven I did not find much in common between them. The 1959 wife finds an outlet in an affair; the 1999 wife has a career while her husband wants a child. Both stories though are well told, showing how marriage and the place of women has changed in our society in recent decades. (Patrick Fitzgerald-Lombard)
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| A S Byatt - Little Black Book of Stories
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| Five short stories, all of them very strange and very black (as the title of the book suggests). In 'Raw Material', a teacher of creative writing discovers among his ungifted pupils a Writer, but when he goes to see her, he makes a dreadful discovery... Very disturbing. (Laurence Martin Euler)
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| J M Coetzee - Elizabeth Costello
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| Elizabeth Costello is a famous, elderly Australian writer whose life has become a series of conferences throughout the world. But she's become a bore! She compares the killings of the animals we eat with the holocaust, for example. Definitely not a good book, a disappointment by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. (Laurence Martin Euler)
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| Esther Freud - The Wild
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| Francine and her children rent rooms from the hopelessly idealistic William and his girls, forming a sometimes idyllic but ultimately doomed ménage. Complicating matters are ex-spouses on both sides, unpredictable pets, seething adolescents and a shotgun. All the characters are interesting, there isn't a single cliché and no scene is overindulged. A gripping, very skilful, sometimes heart-rending warning of how confused and vulnerable (but ultimately resilient) children can be among all-too-human adults. (Victoria Grey-Edwards)
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| Eva Ibbotson - The Star of Kazan
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| The main character is called Annika and she is an orphan found by a young cook called Ellie while she is on a walk with her fellow housemaid, Sigrid, who works for the same professors as Ellie. When she is older a woman comes to their house and claims she is the mother of the girl, but things don't turn out as well as expected. (Eloise May)
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| Andrea Levy - Small Island
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Centred in 1948 drab, down-at-heel London, four contrasting voices tell their overlapping stories: blonde, blue-eyed Queenie Bligh, her lacklustre husband, Bernard, and Jamaican immigrants, Gilbert Joseph and his wife whom he calls Miss Mucky Foot. It's funny, perceptive and moving in its handling of empire, racial prejudice, people's preconceptions, war and love. A real corker of a book and a deserving winner of so many awards.
*Winner of the 2004 Orange Prize and the 2004 Whitbread Best Novel Award and the 2004 Whitbread Book of the Year award (Jenny Baker)
* 2004 Orange Prize, 2004 Whitbread Best Novel and Book of the Year Awards |
| Sàndor Màrai - Conversations in Bolzano
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| This novel about love, betrayal, possession and the pursuit of pleasure is as mesmerising as Embers (bwl 13). Casanova has escaped from a Venetian prison and returned to the scene of a duel fought with the Duke of Parma over Francesca, the woman they both loved. So begins another form of duel, this one with words, that can only end in a kind of death for one of the protagonists. (Jenny Baker)
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| Rohinton Mistry - Family Matters
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| Family life turns topsy-turvy when Nariman Vakeel injures himself and his middle-aged stepchildren have a bedridden invalid on their hands. The cast of characters in this seemingly mundane story astounded me. Bombay comes alive: whether in the realm of business, home, politics or religion, Mistry cunningly reveals the little acts of love and betrayal that often go unnoticed, but that make all the difference in life. Never a dull moment, even bedpan scenes are unforgettable! (Pamela Jaunin)
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| Joseph O'Connor - Star of the Sea
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| The story is set during the Irish famine. The Star of the Sea has left Ireland and is heading towards the American shores. As the journey unfolds we learn more about the passengers and the lives that they have left behind. O'Connor's writing is exquisite, he creates such believable characters and writes in an almost Dickensian style yet with the pace of a modern day novel. Beautiful writing. (Claire Bane)
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| Peter Robinson - Cold is the Grave
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| This down-to-earth thriller is set in Yorkshire with a plot involving many twists and turns as well as quite a few corpses on the way. Police Inspector Banks, with the help of his engaging assistant, copes with extensive information technology-based criminality. It gripped me. (Jeremy Swann)
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| Russell Stannard - The Time and Space of Uncle Albert
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| If, in this Einstein year, you struggle to get a glimmer of understanding of his Theory of Relativity, look no further than this enchanting book. Written ostensibly for children by a Professor of Physics, it relates how Uncle Albert's feisty niece agrees to help unlock the mysteries of space and time by being beamed up into the unknown world of the thought bubble. I enjoyed wonderful moments of revelation and almost grasped the meaning of everything! (Jenny Baker)
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| Salley Vickers - Miss Garnet's Angel
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| Two stories intriguingly intertwined - Julia Garnet breaks the mundane habits of a lifetime and moves to Venice for six months to live in the Campo Angelo Raffaele. The story of her new experiences and the people she meets alternates with the story of Tobias and the Archangel Raphael and is written with the same matter-of-fact clarity about both these very different worlds and the emotional awakening of two people living thousands of years apart. (Jane Grey-Edwards)
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| Salley Vickers - Mr Golightly's Holiday
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| I was drawn to this book by the extract from the first chapter printed at the end of Miss Garnet's Angel. The lively characters living in a small village in the present day are depicted with great clarity and understanding and the story describes the effect on their lives of a visitor from a very different background. The eventual realisation of what this was came as a complete surprise! At least it did to me. (Jane Grey-Edwards)
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| Carlos Ruiz Zafón - The Shadow of the Wind
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| Post-war Barcelona, 10 year old Daniel is taken by his father to 'The Cemetery of Forgotten Books' where he must choose and adopt one for life. He becomes obsessed by his choice and as he grows up he discovers several others inordinately interested in trying to discover more about its mysterious author, Julian Carax, whose life at moments seems to strangely mirror his own. Part atmospheric thriller, part love story, with a cast of brilliant characters. (Jenny Baker)
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Non-Fiction
| Bill Bryson - Notes from a Small Island
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| This book is perhaps 100 pages too long and the author's feelings become repetitive. It is now 13 years since it was published. That being said, for anyone who has travelled alone in England, seeing places and watching people, it rings true and in parts is very funny and a true observation of English life: worth keeping to read again in 13 years' time. (Guy Harding)
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| Elizabeth Burton - The Early Victorians at Home
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| The author vividly describes the home lives of people from the different social classes in England in early Victorian times. She covers amongst other things the buildings, private and public, domestic interiors, the food, medicine, recreations and gardens. Whilst her descriptions are clearly based on extensive research and go into fair detail and are at times even technical, in general they make lightish reading and every so often are brightened up by amusing comments. (Jeremy Swann)
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| William Dalrymple - From the Holy Mountain
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| Eminent travel writer and scholar, Dalrymple takes us through thousands of years of religious and cultural history, on the ground, visiting and commenting on what is left of the past, examining eastern Christianity. It is a journey spiced with anecdotes, reminiscences and sympathetic conversations with monks to taxi-drivers, - touching and tragic - which illuminates not only religious conflicts of the past but those of the present. For desert lovers a must. (Kathie Somerwil Ayrton)
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| Jill Duchess of Hamilton - First to Damascus
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| Jill Hamilton, former journalist, author of nine historical books, writes about her father and his horse in the Australian 10th Light Horse and its Great Ride to Damascus in 1918, its heroism completely overshadowed and forgotten by those mythmaking exploits of Lawrence of Arabia. An amazing and touching human document, it is also a serious, well-written, knowledgeable and valuable assessment of the Anzac contribution, man and horse, to WW I. (Kathie Somerwil Ayrton)
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| Andrew Eames - 8.55 to Baghdad, The
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| Eames, journalist and traveller, intrigued both by the Middle East and Agatha Christie, traces her footsteps from London - via Orient Express - to the 'digs' in Syria and Iraq, no small feat four months before the 2003 invasion. The result is a deft handling of several strands: the present day, the 20s and 30s, Christie's biography and work and little-known historical details. A light, fascinating and valuable read for Christie, train and historical buffs. (Kathie Somerwil Ayrton)
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| Fergus Fleming - Barrow's Boys - A Stirring Story of Daring, Fortitude and Outright Lunacy
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| The 19th C explosion in British exploration (and the enduring myth of the plucky, bumbling British explorer) had less to do with knowledge and more to do with a lack of wars and promotion. John Barrow, Admiralty Secretary, sought to make his mark through promoting expeditions over the globe - Timbuktu, the Niger, Australia and, most famously, the North West Passage. These are extraordinarily vivid chronicles of brave, frequently under-funded and, sadly, politically disposable heroes. (Clive Yelf)
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| Richard Fortey - Trilobite! - Eyewitness to Evolution
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| It's surprising how interesting one person's obsession can be if they've the enthusiasm and an ability to communicate it. A book on an obscure branch of palaeontology actually had me ferreting around local rock-shops trying to spot a Calymene or a Phacops or two. 300 million years provides a huge evolutionary canvas but only the fragmentary evidence of shells and limbs. The detective work behind the conclusions provides a fascinating glimpse into a long-dead world. (Clive Yelf)
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| Ernesto (Che) Guavara - The Motorcycle Diaries
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| An amazing account of the journey by the engaging author and his chum Alberto motor-biking and hitchhiking round South America in 1952. Braving horrific conditions and short of money at times, they resorted to begging to avoid starvation. Medically trained, they were able to measure the shortcomings of the facilities for treating the poor and this experience clearly contributed to Che's motivation in the years ahead. (Jeremy Swann)
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| Frances Osborne - Lilla's Feast
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| An intriguing story which chronicles the history of the author's great-grandmother who was born in 1882 in China and whose life took her to India, England and back again to China where she was interned in a civilian camp by the Japanese during WW II. She sustained herself through semi-starvation by composing a book - now in the Imperial War Museum - of recipes and household hints. A mixture of the personal and world events. (Jenny Baker)
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| Sian Rees - Floating Brothel
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| In this fascinating book, the author takes a footnote in history and from it teases the human stories behind the fact. The second fleet to Australia specifically addressed the need for female convicts by emptying the gaols of London. By tracing court records, journals, naval reports and other primary sources, Rees populates the ship with real characters. Not so much a brothel as a group of women struggling against the odds and (mostly) succeeding. (Clive Yelf)
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| Dennis Ross - The Missing Peace - The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace
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| Ross - US envoy to the Middle East for Presidents Bush I and Clinton - meticulously records the intricate negotiations between Israelis and their neighbours. It reads like a thriller - secret talks, secure lines, will Arafat turn up for the summit? will Netanyahu keep his promises? Clearly a brilliant negotiator, Ross's tireless skill and commitment are praise-worthy, but ultimately he fails to understand that being the (Jewish) US envoy undermined his credibility with Arabs. (Annabel Bedini)
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| Nigel Slater - Toast - The Story of a Boy's Hunger
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| Just as The Child that Books Built (bwl 22) illustrated childhood and grief by association with the author's cultural life raft of literature, 'Toast' illustrates childhood and grief through the author's cultural life raft of food. Both are enjoyable to a large extent from the joy of recognition, which immediately places you on the side of the author. It's an entertaining read all right, but left me wondering what would be next - Autobiography by Toys? ...Songs? ...Role-models ...? (Clive Yelf)
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| Jon Snow - Shooting History - A Personal Journey
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| This is a brilliant, effectively diarised, reminder of social and political attitudes and events post WW II by this remarkably experienced reporter/newscaster. I recommend listening to the audio tape version initially, as with any modern autobiography when thus available in the author's voice. (Guy Harding)
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| Alexander Waugh - Fathers and Sons - The Autobiography of a Family
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| Those amused by the books (fictional and autobiographical) of Evelyn Waugh and his son Auberon will not be disappointed. Figures include E W's country doctor grandfather ''The Brute'' and his own publisher father Arthur, so cloyingly attached to his writer son Alec that he seems unhinged. Alexander adds to Evelyn Waugh lore with descriptions of the latter's wife (fonder of her cows than of her children) and expresses touching admiration and affection for Auberon. What a family! (Jeremy Swann)
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| Ralph Whitlock - In Search of Lost Gods - A Guide to British Folklore
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| With its separate sections on Legends, Superstitions, Games, Festivals and Sacred Sites, this book reminded me of those Readers' Digest 'dip-into' coffee-table tomes rather than one to be read from cover to cover. Which is a pity, because what comes out of such a reading is an intriguing revelation of the lingering but coherent cultural legacy of pre-Christian beliefs and attitudes that underlies much of everyday life (And not a hint of 'New Age-ism' either.....!!) (Clive Yelf)
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| Toby Young - How to Lose Friends and Alienate People
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| Anyone who has ever been hideously embarrassed by something they have said or done will take heart from this hugely entertaining and, occasionally, excruciating portrayal of a journalist's efforts to 'conquer' America. Toby Young is the perfect anti-hero, almost wallowing in the flamboyant descriptions of his misguided and often disastrous attempts to 'make it' at Vanity Fair magazine. In his desperation to succeed, Toby is not only openly insecure and honest but compellingly likeable. (Clare Thompson)
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