#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 […]
#20 Brewster by Mark Slouka
Many, many years ago, I wrote about ‘The Visible World’ and argued, somewhat contentiously I now think, that it was one of those novels that fails, but fails rather wonderfully. By ‘fail’ I mean that the reader, at the end of the novel, is left with a feeling of dissatisfaction about something (or somebody) instrumental […]
#19 Till Kingdom Come by Andrej Nikolaidis
I was offered an opportunity to review this novel by somebody who knew of my love for thrillers, novels with abrupt changes of focus, and the work of Eastern European writers in general. Let’s begin with that middle category – books with abrupt changes of focus. Two of my favourites, Peter Hoeg’s Miss Smilla’s […]
#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 […]
#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 […]
#11 The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
A reader recently compared my writing in Gatekeeper to Kingsolver’s. My agent was thrilled (what agent wouldn’t be?) while I am less convinced. I think it’s subject matter (Prodigal Summer) that prompted that linkage, rather than anything else. What strikes me most about Kingsolver’s work is the warmth – many characters start out less than […]
Review #7 The Daylight Gate by Jeannette Winterson
This is a brief book, slender even, and much the better for it. Winterson excels in revealing tiny detail and huge panorama in similarly incisive prose and in this novel, almost a novella, she manages to delineate the horrors of a country in the grip of a despot with an obsession as clearly and sparingly […]
Book Review #3: High and Inside by Russell Rowland published by Bangtail Press
This is an interesting week to be reviewing a book about alcoholism. The death of Robin Williams is in the news, but even more, in the world I move in, the idea that this happens to people is a present, maybe even an omnipresent, obsession. Creative people know that they have chosen a community on […]
Book Review #2 – A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
Something of this novel reminded me of the work of Primo Levi – not the scope, which is definitely as Dickensian as many reviewers suggest – nor the subject matter, which is relatively remote from Levi’s preoccupations. I struggle to articulate the exact parallel, but perhaps its the unremitting sense of certain failure which dominates […]
Book review: Correction Line by Craig Terlson
I can remember when Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow came out and suddenly the kind of book that I loved to read was mainstream. Not for long though, and one of the annoyances of the massive explosion in literary styles and experimental writing is that while more varied (and more variable) writing is now more […]
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