So here we are on the 2nd May 2015. Witness the ludicrous pantomime surrounding the ‘royal’ family. The establishment, and their fawning sycophants, the London media, are in a frenzy. Continuous breathless commentary oozes around a flipping hospital doorway! What has happened? A woman has given birth. It does tend to happen. Over 350,000 babies will […]
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Norwegian crime and thriller writer Jo Nesbo (http://jonesbo.com/) will need no introduction to his legions of devoted readers. In this latest thriller, Blood on Snow, we read the tender story of Olav. He is known as an extremely talented “fixer” to a handful of Oslo’s most powerful crime bosses. But Olav is also an unusually complicated fixer. He has
Educated at Edinburgh and Oxford, Kate Clanchy (http://literature.britishcouncil.org/kate-clanchy) lived in London’s East End for several years, before moving to Oxfordshire where she now works as a teacher, journalist and freelance writer. Her 2013 novel has a summary as follows. It’s in response to an advertisement that Struan Robertson, a bright orphan, and just seventeen, leaves his dour native
Meeting the English Read More »
Patrick Gale (http://galewarning.org/about-patrick/) based himself in London after graduating from Oxford in 1983, starting out in a bedsit in Notting Hill. Though his website proudly reports that he “has never had a grown-up job”, Gale supported himself while writing his first novels – The Aerodynamics of Pork (1985), Ease (1985) and Kansas in August (1987) –
A Place Called Winter Read More »
How well can you really know another person? And how far would you go to find out the truth about him or her? S.J. Watson’s (http://www.sjwatson-books.com/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._J._Watson) successor to his super-selling debut novel Before I Go To Sleep (2011) turns on a girl who is gone. A young woman called Kate Plummer has been murdered in Paris in
Glass is the first novel of London based writer Alex Christofi (http://alexchristofi.com/) The outline is as follows. Günter Glass, ex-milkman and aspiring window-cleaner, is certainly pure. And he’s pretty transparent. But the jury’s still out on how sharp he is. What naïve young Günter does have is a head for heights and, ever since he
It was only the other night that I was luxuriating in the sounds of the Symphonia armoniae celestium revelationum (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Symphoniae-Spiritual-Songs-Hildegard-Bingen/dp/B000026NDI/ref=tag_dpp_lp_edpp_ttl_in) by Hildegard of Bingen. Hildegard was in the charts in the 50s. The 1150s, that is. It occured to me that her monophonic compostions would be the ideal background for a recent publication by Robyn Cadwallader (http://robyncadwallader.com/) – ‘The Anchoress’.
What does it say about our world that the fantasy genre is so much in the ascendant? Fiction, television and film are full of it. Has technology acted as a booster to the human imagination? Are everyday conditions so mundane that escapes into weird, wonderful and colourful worlds become irresistable? Whatever the answers to these questions Victoria
A Darker Shade of Magic Read More »
It takes some chutzpah to publish an autobiographical novel in 6 parts over 3,500 pages with the title ‘Min Kamp’ (Norwegian for ‘My Struggle’) with the obvious resonance of a darker figure from twentieth century history. Yet that is exactly what Karl Ove Knausgaard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Ove_Knausg%C3%A5rd) has done. In this 4th instalment – Dancing in the Dark – Knausgaard
Dancing in the Dark by Karl Ove Knausgaard Read More »
