This year sees the 20th anniversary of Tom Wolfe’s landmark novel The Bonfire of the Vanities of 1987. Seven years prior to its publication I had been shaken to be told by a biblical scholar that Ecclesiastes doesn’t belong in the Old Testament. It is evidently a Greek text, he proclaimed, and is not consistent […]
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Ann Patchett’s (http://www.annpatchett.com/about/) new novel is an American family saga involving six children, 50 years and many coincidences. It opens with Bert, a father of three with another baby on the way, sneaking a kiss from Beverly, a married woman hosting a christening party for her second child, Frances. They’re drunk and it’s the Sixties;
Subtitled ‘Documents relating to the case of Roderick Macrae’, His Bloody Project contains the memoir of a 17-year-old crofter, written while awaiting trial in Inverness in 1869 for three brutal murders, and ‘discovered’ by the author while researching his own Highland roots. This manuscript, we are informed, divided the Edinburgh literati of the time, who feared
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Stephen Leather (http://www.stephenleather.com/) has been entertaining us for nearly 20 years with his novels of crime, imprisonment, military service, and terrorism. He’s certainly tapped into the zeitgeist because our daily news is saturated with crime, war, terrorism, death and destruction. Every night brings further gory detail about the bloodbath in The Middle East. The appetite for
Dilly Court has been enriching the lives of her readers with carefully crafted novels of great power and conviction for some time. Her 24th, The Christmas Card, is available now and her devoted readership can expect many a masterpiece to follow. Court writes Dillygently every morning before rewarding herself with a custard cream and a pot
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Stephenie Meyer (http://stepheniemeyer.com/) is an American young adult fiction writer and film producer, best known for her vampire romance series Twilight. These novels have gained worldwide recognition, selling over 100 million copies, with translations into 37 different languages. This year sees the author venture into the adult action thriller with The Chemist. The summary is as follows. An
Dilly Court has been enriching the lives of her readers with carefully crafted novels of great power and conviction for some time. Her 23rd, The Swan Maid, is available now and her devoted readership can fully expect more to follow before the year is out. Court writes Dillygently every morning before rewarding herself with a
Robert Harris (http://www.robert-harris.com/) is the author of ten bestselling novels: the Cicero Trilogy – Imperium, Lustrum and Dictator, then Fatherland, Enigma, Archangel, Pompeii, The Ghost, The Fear Index, and An Officer and a Spy, (which won four prizes including the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction). Several of his books have been filmed, most recently The
On one of my visits to Berlin in the mid 1990s I was making my way through a street market in the Museum Island area. Many of the stalls were offering memorabilia from the era of the German Democratic Republic. Nostalgia for a lost time had already set in, not long after the fall of
