#31 After Disasters by Viet Dinh
Apart from having one of the best covers I have seen in recent years, Viet Dinh’s debut novel was a thoroughly enjoyable read, to me, for three reasons: It explores gay male life without explanations, without apology and without titillation The topic – aid workers and disaster recovery – is one that I know a […]
#30 About My Mother by Tahar Ben Jelloun
First and foremost, I am ashamed … only my thirtieth review and I claimed I wasn’t going to take forever about these 100 reviews! However … I have been revising a complex novel which my agent is about to start sending out, and I have also written four short stories that I […]
#25 Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon
I have always understood Pynchon to be inaccessible, so in choosing Inherent Vice as my first Pynchon I was deliberately opting for the most accessible of his novels. Perhaps it’s not at all representative – Gravity’s Rainbow is described as ‘sweeping’, ‘complex’, and even ‘mysterious’ – but Inherent Vice is more of a romp […]
#21 The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon
It would be churlish to start with a complaint, but I am a churl. The only problem with this book, for me, was that it piled so many larger than life characters into the narrative that by the time we meet possibly the ultimate (or he may be the penultimate, if you consider unveiling […]
#18 Depths, by Henning Mankell
There seems to be a Scandinavian preoccupation with measurement. In Peter Hoeg’s novel, Borderliners, it is the measurement of time that is central to the narrative, in Depths, by Henning Mankell it is the distance between the surface of the ocean and the sea bed. Or at least, that’s how it begins. Lars Tobiasson-Svartman is […]
#17 The Prague Cemetery, by Umberto Eco
I’m one of those odd creatures who believes Umberto Eco’s masterwork to be Foucault’s Pendulum, not The Name of the Rose. The Prague Cemetery did not challenge this view for me. It’s a fantastically constructed novel (as in fantastical, rather than fantastic) which drapes a veil of fiction around some of the most unpalatable facts […]
# 16 Breakfast with the Borgias by DBC Pierre
A novel (or in this case novella) by DBC Pierre should be approached with caution. Unlike Vernon God Little nothing much coruscates in Breakfast with the Borgias: a mobile phone is briefly thrown on a fire like the funeral of modern communications and a sandal strap on an old woman’s foot crackles and snaps like […]
#14 Amsterdam by Ian McEwan
I’m really not doing well with this book review project, am I? But I have my reasons – I published a novel with Amazon, at the same time as my wonderful agent retired from the business, and my new agent (also wonderful, am I not a lucky writer?) is trying to get said novel in […]
#12 Istemi by Alexei Nikitin
I bought Istemi because it was translated by somebody I know. That’s ‘know’ in the internet sense, rather than the gnostic or biblical senses. I’ve never actually met Anne Marie Jackson but in the way that writers get to know other writers partly by their words and partly by their works, I was interested to […]
#4 Millennium by John Varley, multiple editions
Multiple spoiler alert – just don’t read on if you plan to read this book yourself. And I would recommend that you do – it’s a good read. Some science fiction stands the test of time. Some doesn’t. I remember reading Millennium in 1985, two years after it was published, and being blown away by […]
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