bwl 51 - May 2009
Fiction
| Kate Atkinson - When Will There Be Good News
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| Jackson Brodie is back, but plays a smaller role this time. The opening is dramatic and shocking; then the story jumps around but keeps you turning the page. There are too many sub-plots and coincidences, and not everything is resolved, but this is a good read as long as you ignore those coincidences and can cope with the frantic pace. (Annie Noble)
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| David Benioff - City of Thieves
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| The siege of Leningrad . . . everyone is hungry. Arrested for looting, Lev, together with Kolya, a deserter, is given a reprieve: find a dozen eggs to make a wedding cake. This is the start of a quest through the frozen wastes of the city, a quest that is horrific, tragic, comic and painful. Told as a memoir, the narrative creates a strong sense of the horrors of war-torn Leningrad. It would sit well with Dunmore's The Siege (bwl 14). (Ferelith Hordon)
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| Steven Galloway - The Cellist of Sarajevo
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| Early in the siege of Sarajevo, a cellist played Albinoni's Adagio every day for 22 days at the site where as many people had died under mortar fire while queuing for bread. Around this fact Galloway weaves the stories of three ordinary people who find themselves going about their
lives in extraordinary - and harrowing - circumstances. Apart from the first chapter (irritating) and the ending (flat), I found this deftly written, unsentimental and revealing.
(Siobhan Thomson)
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| Sue Gee - Reading in Bed
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| Books and the pleasures of reading link the lives of Dido and Georgia, both now sixty, friends since University. Neither envisages what lies in store. Dido will doubt her husband and suffer ill-health; Georgia must cope with widowhood and an eccentric country cousin suffering from dementia; both will worry about their children's love lives and for a time even their friendship will falter. Written with Gee's usual panache, sad, funny and ultimately uplifting. (Jenny Baker)
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| Khaled Hosseini - A Thousand Splendid Suns
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| I could hardly bear to put this down. Hosseini completely gets inside the heads of the two girls, who grow to women during the course of the book, and who are the main characters. The third is Afghanistan itself and its history, much of which I knew very little about. The book chronicles
decades of hope, fear, love and hate for the characters and the country. It is both moving and unbearable on all counts.
(Julie Higgins)
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| Donna Leon - About Face
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| Commissario Brunetti meets a woman, Franca Marinello, who once must have been beautiful. Now, although she is still young, she has been disfigured by what seems to have been a bad facelift. Brunetti is troubled by her appearance but charmed by her very good taste in books (Virgil and Cicero). In the course of an investigation, he will learn a great deal more about her. . . as usual with Donna Leon, a very good read. (Laurence Martin Euler)
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| John McGahern - Amongst Women
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| On an Irish farm, widowed ex-Republican officer Moran dominates his family of five. His sons escape but his daughters' lives revolve round their need to placate their angry and disappointed father. Salvation comes through Moran's second wife who brings sanity and balance to the household, enabling the daughters to spread their wings. A perceptive, sparely told tale of evolving psychological dynamics against the backdrop of rural Irish life (though the sun shines unexpectedly often!). (Annabel Bedini)
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| Haruki Murakami - Kafka on the Shore
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| Kafka on the Shore is a magical story about Kafka, a fifteen year old boy, who has the most extraordinary experiences - and it is also about ageing Nakata and his communion with cats. The book is enthralling and utterly different from others but it would be a pity to give the plot away . . . it just has to be read. (Ange Guttierez Dewar)
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| Patrick Ness - The Knife of Never Letting Go
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| This is a book to love or loathe. The first of a trilogy, it transports the reader to a planet, New World, a world of Noise. This is Todd's world . But even in a place where thoughts are public, there are secrets. Science fiction, coming-of-age novel, a tale of the pioneering adventure - non stop action, relayed in vivid, vigorous and idiosyncratic prose style. Read it and see. I loved it - unputdownable. (Ferelith Hordon)
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| Mal Peet - Exposure
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| The latest novel by Mal Peet. Once again it is set in Brazil and features Faustino, the sports writer. But it is not a football story. In this novel for young adults, Peet takes the tragedy of Othello (even the chapters are numbered as Acts) and presents a contemporary tale of celebrity destroyed by jealousy, rumour and the media. Not a comfortable read - but an interesting, modern take on a very old story. (Ferelith Hordon)
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| C J Sansom - Sovereign & Revelation
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| In these third and fourth volumes of Sansom's Tudor mysteries, lawyer Matthew Shardlake is reluctantly propelled into the world of Henry VIII's court. The atmosphere is rife with intrigue, murder, betrayal and religious fervour; the terror of torture and the Tower hangs over everyone, whether Queen or commoner. Perhaps more for curling up on the sofa than bedtime reading. Both are real page turners, especially if you like your history not too dry. Two definite musts. (Jenny Baker)
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| Lisa See - Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
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| In 19th century China, girls are worthless unless they marry well and bear sons, and their futures depend on the size and shape of their feet. At seven Lily is paired with Snow Flower in a relationship determined by their horoscopes. Between visits they exchange phrases in coded writing on a fan. Through the mutual agonies of foot-binding, family tragedies, arranged marriages and childbirth, their bond deepens - until the relationship founders on a misunderstanding. Fascinating. (Siobhan Thomson)
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| Tim Winton - Breath
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| Short-listed for prestigious literary awards this year, Winton impresses with lyrical descriptions of a beautiful and literally breath-taking, wild natural environment. One almost surfs on the rhythms of the prose! While on one hand this is another insightful visit to youthful rites of passage in a coastal town in Western Australia, it also explores with convincing immediacy, compulsive behaviour and addictions of one kind or another. (Margaret Teh)
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Non-Fiction
| Lloyd Clark - Anzio: The Friction of War - Italy and the Battle for Rome 1944
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| If ever a campaign failed to live up to expectations it was Anzio. A Churchill-inspired landing behind German defensive lines that was fatally hamstrung by misunderstanding and distrust between the two allies with its potency further reduced by cautious local commanders. The result was one of the bloodiest campaigns of the war and a severe test of relationships just prior to the Normandy invasion. No wonder the jibe 'D-Day Dodgers' evoked such a bitter response. (Clive Yelf)
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| Orlando Figes - The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia
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| This magnificent book details the testimony of the countless ordinary Russians who were consumed into Stalin's murderous tyranny in the name of a perverted form of socialism. It sapped the moral fibre of the state. Its poisonous residue remains. Recently the offices of Memorial in which these records were kept was raided. No doubt by shadowy organs of the state. Plus ça change. (David Graham)
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| Margaret Forster - Good Wives?: Mary, Fanny, Jennie and Me, 1845-2001
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| Forster explores four aspects of being a 'good wife', whether the total devotion of Mary, wife of David Livingstone, or the striving for independence by unconventional Fanny, wife of Robert Louis Stevenson. Jennie Lee, Aneurin Bevan's wife, initially adamant that she would never be a 'wife', bowed to convention for the sake of her career. Forster, also determined not to adopt a 'wifely' role, nevertheless succumbed to marriage and children. A good read, I enjoyed it. (Diane Reeve)
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| Chris Horrie - L!ve TV!: Telly Brats and Topless Darts - The Uncut Story of Tabloid TV
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| Watching L!VE TV would have left you wondering how it had ever emerged from the primordial TV slime and why anyone would pay for it. Delving deeper would have revealed the real cut-throat story of cable against satellite, Murdoch newspapers against the Mirror group and even, on the station itself, trendy 'Yoof' against Page 3 values. L!ve TV was a desperate foot in the door and it's the desperation that makes such an entertaining read. (Clive Yelf)
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| John Kay - The Long and the Short of it: Finance and investment for normally intelligent people who are not in the industry
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| This book was a step into foreign territory. Recommended as a straightforward guide for the uninitiated, so it turned out to be. John Kay covers difficult concepts with clarity and a nice sense of irony.It is factually accurate up to October 2008 and so covers most of the recent upheavals in the financial markets. There are a couple of chapters that are tough going - skip them and come back later if you're really keen. (David Truman)
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| Greg Mortenson - Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Journey to Change the World... One Child at a Time
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| Three Cups of Tea is the amazing story of how a unique man, a mountaineer at one time, promised to build a school in one of the bleakest parts of the world - in the Karakoram mountains. Greg Mortenson not only fulfilled that promise but went on to build fifty more schools, always with the main idea of educating girls - and with Moslem men backing him up. (Ange Guttierez Dewar)
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| Graham Robb - The Discovery of France
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Cycling 14,000 miles and researching for four years in the library, the author, tells the history of France from the Revolution to the outbreak of WWI through the eyes of ordinary people, most of whom until a century ago thought French a foreign language. Told with humour and understanding and never patronising, it's full of interesting facts, anecdotes and characters. Whether you know France well or only a little, you will find much to astonish you.
Winner of the 2008 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize
(Jenny Baker)
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| Jenny Uglow - Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future
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| The Lunar Men were a Birmingham-based group of friends who shared a common interest in science and innovation. All well and good, but when the group includes Darwin Senior, Josiah Wedgwood and James Watt and the ideas they shared helped shape the modern world then it's bound to be a Christmas cake of a book, rich, moist and very full. If anything the suspicion remains that the source material was just a bit too rich! (Clive Yelf)
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| Feedback |
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| I've just read Jenna Bailey's Can Any Mother Help Me? (bwl 49) which covers 50 years of friendship, through a magazine, of several women who desperately needed contact with other mums at a time - l935 onwards - when women, once they became mothers, were expected to be kept at home. What could be boring is certainly not and is, in fact, fascinating, sad and funny. (Angela Dewar) |
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| If you haven't read The Conjuror's Bird by Martin Davies (bwl 36) do try and get hold of a copy. This was the second time round for me and I enjoyed it even more than before. Based on historical records, a mystery, a bit of romance and beautiful writing, it's a real page turner. The sort of book I love. (Jenny Baker) |
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