Burial Rites (2013) is the work of an Australian who visited Iceland on a cultural exchange. Based on a true 19th-century story, this powerful book has the stark and tragic tone of the sagas, where a veneer of Christianity cannot conceal a bleak and stoic belief in the workings of fate. Old superstitions are rife, and […]
Alan Warner (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/may/25/life-in-writing-alan-warner and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Warner) gives us this peculiarly Scottish tale of purposelessness and amorality set in the 1980s. For it he won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1996 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerset_Maugham_Award). Morvern Callar, a low-paid young woman in the local supermarket of a desolate and beautiful port town (Oban??) in the west of Scotland, wakes one morning in late December to find
Ian Rankin (http://www.ianrankin.net/) is on top form with the 8th in the Inspector Rebus series. This detective novel is full of wit, style and intricacy. Bible John killed three women, and took three souvenirs. Johnny Bible killed to steal his namesake’s glory. Oilman Allan Mitchelson died for his principles. And convict Lenny Spaven died just to prove
Antonio Damasio (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Damasio and http://www.ted.com/speakers/antonio_damasio.html) does not claim to have solved the mystery of consciousness in The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. This is fortunate, because in many senses Damasio’s book does not provide much new information about consciousness and why its highest forms occur only in humans. Instead, Damasio
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Meticulously observed, agonizing and funny, this unconventional account of clinical depression was the novelistic debut of the author of the praised short-story collection Blood (1991). Drama teacher Joy Stone has become severely depressed following the death of her married lover. Surrounded by his effects in the house they briefly shared, she can’t summon the will
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Andrew O’Hagan (http://literature.britishcouncil.org/andrew-ohagan and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_O’Hagan) has been a contributing editor to the London Review of Books and Granta magazine. Our Fathers (1999), his first novel, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award. In the novel we meet Hugh Provan who has been a Modernist hero. A dreamer, a Socialist, a
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The Bad Sister (1978) is a tale of witches in contemporary life. Drawing from and reinterpreting James Hogg’s classic Gothic tale Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which focused on an evil alter ego, the novel is itself rather schizophrenic, alternating between a documentary account of the murder of Michael Dalzell and his daughter, tracked down
Edith Pearlman (http://www.edithpearlman.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Pearlman) writes intelligent, perceptive, funny and beautiful stories. She is the author of three previous collections, Vaquita, Love Among the Greats and How to Fall. Her themes are the predicaments — odd, wry, funny and painful — of human life. Her characters are sophisticated, literate, relatively affluent and often musical. They travel, they read, they go to
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Inimitable, Jim Crace (http://www.jim-crace.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crace) stands on his own ground among living English novelists. Immune to trends, guided by his own singular star, he has sown and grown an 11-volume shelf of finely crafted, intensely atmospheric books. Each novel fashions a unique climate, landscape and mood, a far cry from everyday realism though nothing to
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