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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Gavin Pretor-Pinney (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Pretor-Pinney) achieved unexpected success with his previous book, The Cloudspotter’s Guide, an appreciation of the different types of water vapour masses that fill our skies. Now the author has produced what he claims is a natural follow-up. ‘A mere cloud-spotter is, in fact, without even realising it, a wave-watcher, since clouds are often borne
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Most autobiographies cover the main events of a life with the reader often left with only glimpses of the inner life of the author. Carl Jung’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung) autobiographical Memories, Dreams, Reflections (first English translation 1963), focuses on the great psychologist’s spiritual and intellectual awakenings. The descriptions of his visions, dreams and fantasies, which he considered his
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