bookswelike

bwl 58 - Autumn 2010

Fiction

Jeffrey Archer - A Prisoner of Birth

Archer's own experiences in prison give a depth and sense of reality to this fast paced thriller. If Danny had proposed to Beth one day before or one after, he would not have been charged with the murder of her brother, his best friend. Innocent, sentenced to 22 years, he is sent to Belmarsh prison, from where no-one had ever escaped. How he did so, his quest for rehabilitation and revenge makes for brilliant entertainment. (Kathie Somerwil Ayrton)

Margaret Atwood - Oryx and Crake

In a world of competitive genetic-engineering enclaves, genius Crake is brewing his cure for the ills of humanity, helped by the beautiful Oryx. What happens emerges through the memories of Snowman - once Jimmy - possibly the last surviving non-modified human, who sleeps in trees to avoid wolvogs, lives on the scavenged leftovers of collapsed civilisation and watches over Crake's new human 'models'. Horrible, yes, but gruesomely enjoyable - Jimmy is real and touching and Atwood is gleefully creative. (Annabel Bedini)

David Benioff - City of Thieves

This novel fell into my hands quite by chance, and I could not put it down . . . it is the story of two quite different people, set in the time of the siege of Leningrad. A slim book which tells of loyalty and courage, cowardice and friendship and although it was a set book for my teenage grand-daughter, it is perhaps a far more gripping read for adults. (Ange Guttierez Dewar)

Kevin Brooks - iBoy

Brooks always write cracking thrillers for the young adult market, and this is no exception. In this case there is the added frisson of science fiction. As the result of a "freak" accident, Tom, the young hero, has an iPhone lodged in his brain giving him unparalleled access to the electronic world (databases, bank codes, conversations). Intriguing - add revenge and you have a heady mix. A real page turner. (Ferelith Hordon)

Pearl S Buck - The Good Earth

This twentieth century classic is enjoying a revival following Hilary Spurling's recent biography. It tells the story of a Chinese farmer and his family as they struggle to survive poverty, drought, famine and war. Familiar subjects maybe, but told by a writer who until the age of 8 considered herself Chinese and to whom China was always more real than the country of her birth. Read it if you haven't and if you have, read it again! (Jenny Baker)

Lee Child - Without Fail

This perfectly crafted thriller in the old, no-nonsense style is one in the series featuring loner Jack Reacher, ex-US military cop. Although the author is British, he brilliantly evokes the lonely Middle West landscape flawlessly handling the style and idiom. The gently relentless, fast action, sympathetic characters, knowledge of the American scene and all the insider details over the hardware used, as well as insights into the workings of governmental security forces, make this a riveting read. (Kathie Somerwil Ayrton)

Jim Crace - Signals of Distress

Am I alone in recommending Crace - too quirky? Well, here's another! In 1836 an American ship runs aground in a winter storm. The fishing village of Wherrytown finds itself playing host to the sailors, their run-away slave, their cargo of cows, and another misfit - well-meaning Aymer Smith, hopelessly out of his depth trying to make amends for injustice and find a wife. An inspired comedy of the consequences of upset equilibria, told with quietly startling poetry. (Annabel Bedini)

Jason Goodwin - The Snake Stone

Meet Yashim, an unlikely detective; he is a eunuch and the setting is 19th century Istanbul, a place full of colour, excitement, passion - and crime. This is the second novel about Yashim and I am looking forward to reading the first - The Janissary Tree - and then more. Yashim is an engaging character, the background exotic, the plots labyrinthine. What more can one want? (Ferelith Hordon)

Richard Hughes - The Fox in the Attic

The first in Hughes's intended epic sequence of novels, The Human Predicament, centres on Augustine, unjustly suspected of involvement in the murder of a young girl. Taking refuge in the remote castle of Bavarian relatives, his hopeless love for his devout cousin Mitzi blinds him to the hate that will lead to the rise of German fascism. The climax is a brilliant description of the Munich putsch and a disturbingly intimate portrait of Adolf Hitler. (Jeremy Miller)

Richard Hughes - The Wooden Shepherdess

The second, and alas last, volume in The Human Predicament as Hughes died before he could complete this epic sequence of novels, sees Augustine in prohibition era America, an increasingly fascinated participant in a country intoxicated with sex, violence, and booze. Moving to Germany, he witnesses the growing Nazi menace and the novel ends in a terrifying account of the Night of the Long Knives as Hitler ruthlessly secures his hold upon Germany. (Jeremy Miller)

Lionel Shriver - So Much for That

This is a book - not only a very good novel, one of those you can't put down - but a book that makes you think. Gladys' illness (cancer) is frightening, as is the amount of money Shep, her husband, has to spend in order to do . . . what? Give her a few more painful months to live? It asks all the good questions about life, death, love and what is worth it. Read it. (Laurence Martin Euler)

Kathyrn Stockett - The Help

A young woman is compiling a book containing the stories of their day-to-day lives written by the maids in her town, who are raising the children and doing all the cleaning and cooking. Innocent enough . . . but it's 1962, the town: Jackson, Mississippi; she is white, they are black. Warm, funny, angry, an extraordinary novel which keeps you on tenterhooks as she and the maids forge true friendships while facing ostracism, racial prejudice and worse. (Jenny Baker)

Harry Thompson - This Thing of Darkness

Fictionalised but fully researched life of Captain Fitzroy of the Beagle - an epic of sea-faring adventure, dramatic landscapes, tragi-comic Fuegians, scientific discovery, personal disaster and the Empire. Dominated by Fitzroy, brave, able well-intentioned but his own, troubled, worst enemy, and the inexperienced, affable Darwin in whom brilliant observation and independent thought are balanced by some less sympathetic behaviour. A friendship soured. Terrific story, grippingly and movingly told. (Tony Pratt)

Abraham Verghese - Cutting for Stone

In a tiny Mission hospital in Haile Selassie's Ethiopia, twin boys, orphaned at birth, are raised by two of the hospital's resident doctors. And so unfolds an engrossing story of forbidden love, sibling rivalry and the search for identity against a backdrop of war and revolution, climaxing in a hospital in America's Bronx. Beware, there's a lot of blood and guts, but Verghese, himself a physician and surgeon, is an inspired story teller. (Jenny Baker)

Penny Vincenzi - The Best of Times

For Vincenzi fans - her latest big, fat, entertaining novel. A traffic accident on a crowded motorway, a split second that changes everything in many lives, Although the diverse situations in which the characters find themselves are scarcely original, the author handles the colourful forces she creates with more than enough strength to pull it off satisfactorily. Not the highest of literature but a gripping read in the best Vincenzi tradition. (Kathie Somerwil Ayrton)

Non-Fiction

Michael Axworthy - Iran - Empire of the Mind: A History from Zoroaster to the Present Day

Accessible account of three thousand years of history from Zoroaster to the Ayatollahs, Xerxes to Ahmadinejad, enlivened by opinions on topics as diverse as Catholicism, Persian poetry, democracy, Islam and the failures of Western diplomacy. If you want to know more about where the Iranians came and are coming from, this is an enjoyable way of doing it. (Tony Pratt)

Hugh Barnes - Gannibal: The Moor of Petersburg

Although pretentiously written and repetitious, this is important to anyone interested in Pushkin, the greatest Russian literary icon, and Russian history and letters in general. Pushkin, inordinately proud of his African great-grandfather, did a great deal of research about him. There are few historic sources, given that Gannibal in a fit of panic destroyed his memoirs. However, Barnes valiantly fills in the gaps with plausible solutions based on solid knowledge and wide reading. Excellent Notes and useful bibliography. (Kathie Somerwil Ayrton)

James Campbell - Brick: A World History

and with co-author: Will Pryce
A somewhat prosaic title for the most fascinating of books. This gloriously illustrated study by Thames & Hudson shows examples of brick buildings from 5,000BC to the present day, from ziggurats of the ancient world, through perhaps the more familiar basilicas of ancient Rome to modern masterpieces by Renzo Piano. Of equal interest is a comprehensive review of brick-making and bricklaying. Surely impossible to read without wanting to visit such wondrous buildings near or far. (Jeremy Miller)

Laura Cumming - A Face to the World: on self portraits

Perhaps the key to this fascinating book is the quote by Dickens on his ideal of Shakespeare's likeness: " . . . a genius and absolute blank". No portrait was necessary, his work is a self-portrait. Yet we're fascinated from Rembrandt to Lucien Freud, by artists' studying themselves in self-portraiture. Do we discover anything? About them, about ourselves? Or do we see just an image to make of what we will? Irresistible (James Baker)

Barbara Demick - Nothing To Envy: Real Lives in North Korea

A detailed and devastating account of the life lived by the ordinary citizens in the nightmare that is North Korea. Written from observation at first hand and from the testimony of defectors, it illustrates what happens when a criminal clique, ruling in the name of a perverted form of socialism, lead a country back to the dark ages, but cannot quite quench the human spirit. The book has deservedly won the Orange Prize. (David Graham)

Robert M Edsel - Monuments Men

Comprising a handful of museum curators, historians and archivists the 'Monuments Men' were tasked with identifying and preserving as much of Europe's artistic heritage from the ravages of war as possible. Pitted against the onrushing Russians and a Nazi 'scorched earth' policy, their efforts to find, recover and preserve the huge stockpiles of stolen art deserves wider knowledge. A far less well-known cultural example of 'so much being owed by so many to so few...' (Clive Yelf)

Michael Frayn - My Fathers Fortune: A Life

In this moving and painfully honest memoir, Michael Frayn traces in detail his family background and gives a starring role to his Father who worked all his life as a salesman and sacrificed much to support his family. He didn't leave much material wealth but produced one of our finest writers and dramatists. Through this book we remember him fondly. He did his best. (David Graham)

Duncan Hamilton - Harold Larwood

Prize winning biography of England's great pre-war fast bowler, a 'villain' of Bodyline. Not just for cricket enthusiasts - his rise from a mining community, treatment by the grandees of the MCC and fall back into obscurity then his resurrection in, of all places, Australia speak eloquently of class-ridden mid- century Britain. Much more of a journey than Tony Blair ever contemplated. (Tony Pratt)

Peter Hofschröer - Wellington's Smallest Victory: the Duke, the Model Maker and the Secret of Waterloo

The fascinating story of how Siborne's model of the battle of Waterloo* incurred the undying enmity of the great Wellington. Siborne's inadvertent uncovering of an important discrepancy in the Waterloo Dispatch, that Wellington was desperate to cover up, ignited a long and terrible war between the two, of which Siborne was the only casualty . . . 'a cautionary tale for those who would mess with the establishment.' Almost 200 years later, Siborne is finally vindicated.
*Now in the Imperial Army Museum (Kathie Somerwil Ayrton)

Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Living to Tell the Tale

The first (and long) volume of the Colombian writer's memoirs. I found it fascinating to learn how the author drew on people, episodes and the settings of his childhood and youth when writing his two great novels One Hundred Years of Solitude (bwl 41) and Love in the Time of Cholera (bwl 20). His memoirs give a vivid description how life was for the relatively poor in Colombia's tropical regions in the second half of the last century.
*Winner 1982 Nobel Prize Literature (Jeremy Swann)

James Shapiro - Contested Will

Anyone who has read Shapiro's 1599 (bwl 37) may wonder if he can add to his reputation for the authentic re-creation of late Elizabethan life centred around the theatre. They will not be disappointed. This time he goes straight to the heart of the great mystery: Who was Shakespeare? And did he really write some of the greatest plays and poetry in the English language? His answer is an unequivocal "Yes", as he conclusively exposes the weaknesses of any opposition and of alternative candidates. (James Baker)

Julian Thompson - Forgotten Voices of Burma: The Second World War's Forgotten Conflict

A collection of oral testimonies from those who took part. It captures "what it was like to fight in the demanding terrain and climate of Burma; and . . . . to be confronted by the most formidable soldiers encountered by anyone in the Second World War - the Japanese"*. For me, it was a search for my father who was there and never spoke of it, for others it will be fascinating history.
*quoted from the author's preface. (Jenny Baker)

Claire Tomalin - The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens

At 44, Dickens began a liaison with a young actress. To safeguard his reputation, he publicly announced that it was his wife's fault that their marriage had failed, removed her from their house and forbade their children to see her. He then pretended a bachelor existence, hiding Nelly completely away. When he died his sister-in-law and Nelly herself continued the deception. All records, letters and diaries were destroyed. Or were they? Read and find out. (Jenny Baker)

Feedback

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I've just re-read The Poisonwood Bible which has already been reviewed 3 times so I can't review it again. But it's a complex book you want to tell everyone about which can be read for sheer enjoyment or delved into in search of metaphors, parables and deeper meanings. It's title is no accident. The five narrators, the mother and her four daughters, each with their distinctive voices, are presented in such a way that their motives and actions, even when they are being silly or selfish, are understandable. Even the bigoted, ghastly father has a touch of tragedy. (Jenny Baker)

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Unlike the reviewer in bwl 56 and the commentator in bwl 57 Feedback, I very much enjoyed Colm Tóibin's Brooklyn and thought it was written with almost poetic delicacy. I read it on two levels. As a perceptive account of the immigrant experience of dislocation and adaptation and, more profoundly, as a story of a particularly Irish kind of betrayal (not for nothing there's a priest at the heart of it). It seemed to me that from the moment Eilis is forced against her will to cut herself off from her 'real' self she has not only lost the right to choose her own destiny but with it, she loses the ability to know what her own truth is. She's sort of lost between two worlds. So, a story of what happens to self-determination and identity under the influence of subtle coercion. But I'm probably over-complicating things! Whatever, I'm absolutely on the side of the fans! (Annabel Bedini)

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