Simon Kernick (http://www.simonkernick.com/about/) has been steadily building a reputation for himself as a thriller writer over the last decade. As in many an episode of ‘Spooks’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spooks) the authorities have a limited time to prevent the unimaginable happening. The brief synopsis for this 2013 title is as follows. It’s 8am and an explosion blasts through a cafe in […]
Ever since the publication of Bravo Two Zero in 1993 SAS Sergeant Andy McNab (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_McNab) has had an ardent following for the gritty realism of his military action thrillers. The gripping 2012 follow-up to the bestselling War Torn has the following synopsis. Writing with Kym Jordan, Andy McNab has created a stunning sequel to his bestselling novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man This is Joyce’s semi-autobiographical portrait of his alter ego Stephen Dedalus as he struggles free from his Irish Catholic heritage and of his eventual abandonment of Ireland. The portrait begins with Stephen as a young child, listening to the talk around the dinner table of Irish
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The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age The Professor of Human Biology at Stanford (http://nathanwolfe.net/) tells a chilling tale. The virus has probably been around since the evolution of the first cell. This is a teensy bit longer than humans have been around. Three and a half billion years longer, actually. So
Scotland’s own Val McDermid writes what has become known as ‘Tartan Noir’. Some of her offerings are seriously not for the faint hearted. They hover, with lovingly painted detail, over graphic scenes of violence and torture. For a gentle introduction to her oeuvre try The Last Temptation. The plot goes as follows. A twisted killer
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A memoir hovers over the pre-occupations of its author in contrast to an autobiography which attempts something more structured and comprehensive. Lorna Sage’s pre-occupation here is the thought that children carry, like an imprinted curse, the full range of the joy and angst of their forebears. Rather than develop from a freshly minted individual Sage had
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In Mike Leigh’s wonderful film Secrets & Lies the audience is gradually shown all the ‘unknown knowns’ (to use a phrase of Donald Rumsfeld’s) which have been hidden from the characters. It’s a disconcerting thought that there may be dozens of truths about our circumstances of which we are blissfully unaware, many of a personal
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Prolific Lee Child (http://www.leechild.com/) struck again in 2012 with another Jack Reacher adventure. Jim Grant (the author’s true name) was actually born in Coventry but manages to set his yarns convincingly all over America. Child has a huge and enthusiastic following. If you’ve never been tempted by a thriller this is as good as any. The brief summary
Shortly after the New Year of 1960, a powerful sports car crashed in the French town of Villeblevin in Burgundy, killing two of its occupants. One was the publisher Michel Gallimard; the other was the writer Albert Camus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Camus). In Camus’ pocket was an unused train ticket and in the boot of the car his
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Seamus Deane (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seamus_Deane) was brought up in Derry, Northern Ireland, as part of a Catholic Nationalist family. Reading in the Dark (1996) is his first novel. It won the 1996 Guardian Fiction Prize and the 1996 South Bank Show Annual Award for Literature. This is a novel, well imbued with solid personal memories, which is delivered
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Pride and Prejudice (1813) is the best known of the novels of Jane Austen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Austen). There have been at least six major treatments of the novel on film and television not counting spin-offs such as the 2004 Bollywood ‘Bride and Prejudice’. As entertaining, hilarious and insightful as the story of Elizabeth Bennett and Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy is,
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How did an obscure Jewish religious sect in Roman occupied Judea go from nothing to become the world’s most dominant organised religion? Why did any one of the hundreds of other obscure cults such as Mithraism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithraism) not meet with the same success? There have been hundreds of histories of Christianity, each positioned somewhere along the spectrum
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Some autobiographies are enjoyed for the content of their revelations, others for their style and quality of prose in which they are executed. Speak, Memory (1967) by Russian emigre Vladimir Nabokov (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Nabokov) is certainly the latter. It offers a gorgeous and beguiling account of a pampered Russian childhood broken into fragments of exile and loss by revolutionary
Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters (1999) is about as easy as it gets to understand this subject matter. Matt Ridley is a science journalist and author. He is best known for his books on genetics, evolution and looking at human behaviour from an evolutionary viewpoint. Genome has one chapter for every
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The Rainbow (1915) shocked its first readers by its frankness about humans as incarnate beings. The body and its impulsive needs are central to this inter-generational tale and the truth of these things rings out like a silver coin thrown down on stone. The author has broken decisively with Victorian fiction. The novel is about
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