It’s closer than your next breath, and without it you will have ‘passed’ (as people euphemistically say, these days, for being dead). It’s the air you breathe every minute and this book is the story of the atmosphere that organisms suck in all the time. The book starts with the natural history of the […]
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If faced with surgery most of us expect to go under the knife painlessly and wake up sorted. For almost the whole of human history that would have been impossible. Agony, a botched job or death were next to certain. How then did we get from butchery to modern surgery in the last 200 years?
The Butchering Art Read More »
Amanda Craig (https://www.amandacraig.com/) has written a cycle of seven interconnected novels which deal with contemporary British society, often in an expansive, dramatic and satirical manner. Her multi-stranded approach to writing fiction has invited comparison with the output of Anthony Trollope. She has contributed journalism to over 10 newspapers and periodicals over many years. Craig’s 7th
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Lee Child (http://www.leechild.com/) sells crime thriller novels on a shipping container scale. His legion of devoted readers mark their diaries with the expected date of character Jack Reacher’s next outing. Library shelves are empty at the places where his fiction is stored, and reservation lists long. There is clearly a market for Child’s hard boiled
Perhaps you’re aching for a seductively readable, lusciously page-turning, utterly compelling and hugely rewarding read? Fantastic fiction is, after all, an escape to another place or time than your own. Look no further than Penny Vincenzi (http://pennyvincenzi.com/). Since her first novel, Old Sins, was published in 1989, Penny has written fourteen scorching masterpieces, most recently
A Question of Trust Read More »
When someone you really admire gushes about an author and their work, one is inclined to take notice. When that person offers an articulate critical appraisal from memory about a piece of fiction from 2004 – well, I had to set the weekend aside for it. That novel was Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. Marilynne Summers
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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), this is 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. The tale is delivered in gloriously witty and
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On first reading this at school in 1977, it took me a while to get fully involved in the narrative. By half way through I wondered if there could ever be a more subtle and penetrating novelist than Mary Ann Evans. 40 years later I’ve not read any fiction finer than that of George Eliot
Middlemarch by George Eliot Read More »
Debates about whether the digital world is shortening attention spans rumble on. School teachers now report that pupils can’t concentrate for long, and the likely cause is the constant distraction of digital gadgets and social media. University teachers report that year one is remedial work, an exercise in basic education. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/3342827/Half-of-all-universities-have-to-teach-remedial-maths-and-English.html) No doubt there is
Essayism by Brian Dillon Read More »
