FANTASTIC FICTION – Escapes to other places and other times

Ralph Glasser (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1389641/Ralph-Glasser.html) was born of Jewish parents in Leeds but when only a few months old his family moved to a tenement flat in the Gorbals area of Glasgow that gained notoriety as a one of the biggest slums in Europe. His mother died when he was six and his two older sisters were decamped quickly leaving him […]

Based on the author’s youthful memories of his grandparents’ fruit farm in the Clyde Valley at Kirkfieldbank, these 24 finely observed stories (published 1995) bring vividly before us a generation now gone, and a heartening evocation of the world seen through the eyes of a small boy. It was a time without Smartphones or computer games.

In 1793, a canal digger named William Smith made a startling discovery. He found that by tracing the placement of fossils, which he uncovered in his excavations, one could follow layers of rocks as they dipped and rose and fell — clear across England and, indeed, clear across the world — making it possible, for

A worthy winner of the Booker of Bookers, Midnight’s Children (1981) is a fantastic achievement in fiction by British Indian Salman Rushdie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salman_Rushdie and http://www.salman-rushdie.com/ and http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/04/18/specials/rushdie.html) and already deemed a classic. It is a sophisticated blend of magical realism and historical fiction setting before us the (un)reality of post-colonial India. Gloriously witty and irreverent prose delivers

There has always been a tension in religion and spirituality between two impulses. These are 1) To affirm that the world is fundamentally good despite its imperfections, and therefore to embrace it. God, after all, is reported in Genesis 1:31 as follows: ‘And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was

It is 1926 and the First World War is gradually receding into the past. Tom Sherbourne is a young lighthouse keeper on a remote island off Western Australia. The only inhabitants of Janus Rock, he and his wife Isabel live a quiet life, cocooned from the rest of the world. The only, but huge, missing

This is the 2012 offering of ‘chick lit’ purveyor Sophie Kinsella. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Kinsella) and (http://www.sophiekinsella.co.uk/) The summary goes as follows. Poppy Wyatt has never felt luckier. She is about to marry her ideal man, Magnus Tavish, but in one afternoon her ‘happily ever after’ begins to fall apart. Not only has she lost her engagement ring

Lanark has more claim of importance in the life of William Wallace than Stirling. The local William Wallace Heritage Trust has long campaigned for more to be made of the connection. In this work Dr. James Mackay shares meticulous research on what can really be known about the man apart from the myth. Read this

Steven Pinker (http://stevenpinker.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker), Professor of Psychology at Harvard, is truly one of the big beasts of academia. One suspects that he must suffer from headaches because it seems he’s got six brains inside one skull. Not content to confine his research to learned journals Pinker has published, amongst other titles, The Language Instinct (1994),