‘My mother began me one evening in 1968 on a table in the café of the town’s only cinema. One short flight of stairs away, up behind the balding red velvet of the Balcony curtain, the usherette was yawning, dandling her off torch, leaning on her elbow above the rustlings and tonguings of the back […]
Since the success of Brazzaville Beach (1990), William Boyd (http://www.williamboyd.co.uk/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Boyd_(writer) has enjoyed a reputation as a male novelist who understands women and writes believably from a female viewpoint. Given that women hold up rather more than half the market as novel-buyers, the reputation has undoubtedly proved useful. With Restless (2006), he enters the female-friendly territory
In Michael Frayn’s (http://literature.britishcouncil.org/michael-frayn and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Frayn) novel Spies (2002) an old man returns to the scene of his seemingly ordinary suburban childhood. Stephen Wheatley is unsure of what he is seeking but, as he walks once-familiar streets he hasn’t seen in 50 years, he unfolds a story of childish games colliding cruelly with adult realities. It is
Soho in the Fifties and London half a century later form the two interlocking time frames for Maggie O’Farrell’s (http://www.maggieofarrell.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maggie_O%27Farrell) 2010 novel. A chance meeting in a Devon Lane between a bored graduate, Alexandra Sinclair, and a flamboyant older man with a broken-down car instigate events that, decades on, will have an unprecedented effect on new parents Elina and
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In 1857 when Captain Illiam Quillian Kewley and his band of rum smugglers from the Isle of Man have most of their contraband confiscated by British Customs, they are forced to put their ship up for charter. The only takers are two eccentric Englishmen who want to embark for the other side of the globe.
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The centrepiece of this book by Alasdair Gray (http://www.alasdairgray.co.uk/ and http://www.alasdairgray.co.uk/) is the text of ‘Episodes from the Early Life of a Scottish Public Health Officer’, said to be written and published at his own expense (in 1909) by Archibald McCandless. Belying its stolid title, this tells of a student doctor’s only friendship with the equally solitary
Secrecy‘s protagonist is Zummo, a maker of beautiful and macabre waxworks, who is offered the patronage of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo III. He is happy to have something like a regular job after a life more or less on the run, having been drummed out of his Sicilian hometown as a teenager for
Thriller, beast-fable and fantasy, Evie Wyld’s (http://www.eviewyld.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evie_Wyld ) second novel is a sparky, dark yarn set in a georgic world of sheep husbandry where things have gone spectacularly awry. A double narrative runs between an unnamed island off the British coast and prior action in Australia. All the Birds, Singing (2013) opens with the discovery of
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Starving children who eat vomit and a prisoner chewing through one of his own arteries in an attempt to escape torture were among the horrors on show in Nadeem Aslam’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadeem_Aslam and http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/jan/26/nadeem-aslam-life-in-writing) previous novel, The Wasted Vigil, set in Afghanistan amid the rise and fall of the Taliban. In his new book we find children forced to drink urine and
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