Val McDermid (https://www.valmcdermid.com/) has established a loyal readership for her crime fiction over the last 31 years since the publication of her first novel in 1987. In a Radio 4 broadcast of 23 September 2018 (‘A Point of View‘ – https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bkpszm) she argued that crime fiction is not predominantly about murder or the grisly details […]
The latest outpouring of resentment and anger happens to be in Chemnitz in eastern Germany (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/fear-and-loathing-in-neo-nazi-chemnitz-cvzmw52fx), but it’s only an example of what’s cropping up all over the world. In this case, something truly horrible – the resurrection of the fascist far right in Germany – should set all sorts of alarm bells ringing. What
Age of Anger by Pankaj Mishra Read More »
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. This one will be November 2018. Library shelves are empty at the places where his fiction is stored, and reservation lists are long. There is
Past Tense by Lee Child Read More »
The breakneck rush into digital technologies has delivered much that is useful, impressive and dazzling. But what have we lost, and what are the dangers? James Bridle (http://jamesbridle.com/) takes on these concerns here. We live in times of increasing bafflement. Our news feeds are filled with unverified, unverifiable speculation, much of it automatically generated by
Psychological research has been digging about in that highly subjective matter – personal happiness. It’s against a background of consumer culture which offers ‘solutions’ about how we can be ‘made’ to be happy. These offers come in various forms of chemical compound, guru generated bullshit and lifestyle choices which (not co-incidentally) cost a lot of
Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert Read More »
‘Art’ is one of those notoriously elastic terms and ideas. It’s very difficult to establish any fixed or simple definition for what art is, or should be. Hence the endless, and mostly fruitless, debates about what constitutes art. Every year we get the stage-managed and media driven hype of bewilderment when the exhibits are shown
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Jane Harper (http://janeharper.com.au/About-Jane) is an Australian citizen of UK birth. Her 2017 novel The Dry won the Crime Writers’ Association Awards Gold Dagger for Crime Novel of the Year. The summary is as follows. Melbourne cop Aaron Falk has reluctantly returned to Kiewarra, the remote Australian farming community he left as a teenager 20 years
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Long on the ‘to do’ list for reading fiction, I’m delighted to have completed Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/oct/06/fiction.impacprize) over the Easter break 2018. An American novelist and short story writer, Eugenides received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for this novel in 2003. Not many multi-generational American novels are narrated by an omniscient hermaphrodite. Cal Stephanides
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Long on the ‘to do’ reading list, I’m delighted finally to have read Bel Canto (2001) by Ann Patchett (http://www.annpatchett.com/) this Easter 2018. The novel was awarded both the Orange Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In December 1996, 14 members of the Tupac Amaru guerrilla group entered the Japanese ambassador’s residence in Lima, Peru, seized
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