PREVIOUS FICTION PICKS
FEBRUARY 2006 | |
| FEBRUARY 2006 This is a selection of the first new books received for 2006. There is no general theme linking these titles, apart from subject diversity. As with all good novels they reflect different aspects of society, nationality and culture, so they cover a very broad view of our world, from American politics to the English countryside living, albeit satirical, from a South African apartheid experience to the experience of a Lahore born Glaswegian DJ, trendy New York families in crisis to a fantastical literary illusion. Although they are all very different, each will prove to be a enjoyable reading experience. | |
 | Love and other impossible pursuits by Ayelet Waldman is set amongst the professional families on the Upper East side of New York and tells the story of Emilia Greenleaf's struggle to relate to her precocious five-year-old stepson William. She is married to Jack, a successful partner in a law firm and the proud father of William. Emilia is on a leave of absence from her own legal career after the sudden death of their two day old daughter. She tries valiantly to care for William after school, but fails although help does comes from the most unlikely of place. This is a sensitive, funny and moving contemporary story that explores the resentment and/or affection people feel towards immediate or extended members of their family. Aylete Waldman is a well know New York essayist, married to the author Michael Chabon, and mother of four children. |
 | The Camel Club is the title of the latest book by David Baldacci. Again a masterly complex, character driven novel, such as readers of Baldacci have come to expect. The main character is called Oliver Stone; a man with no past who spends his days camped opposite the White House, permanently protesting and hoping to expose corruption wherever he may find it. When he and his friends, a group of conspiracy theorists known as the Camel Club, witness a murder of an intelligence analyst, they suddenly find themselves involved in a very dangerous plot that reaches to the highest levels of Washington society. In this his 12th novel David Baldacci goes beyond the traditional boundaries of fiction, painting a frighteningly vivid portrait of a world that could be our own very soon, and the few people who have a chance to stop the last war the world may ever fight. |
 | After several years, the long awaited latest novel by Rachel Cusk titled, In the fold has arrived. Although born in Canada, she finished her schooling in England, and read English at New College, Oxford. She was nominated by Granta magazine in 2002 as one of 20 Best Young British Novelists. She won the Whitbread First Novel award in 1993 for Saving Agnes, The Somerset Maugham Award in 1997 for The Country Life. In her latest novel, Rachel Cusk returns to the English Countryside and the lives of the bohemian living (or so they like to think) Hambury family of Egypt Hill. A return visit after a dozen years by University friend Michael, with his young son, shatters all Michael's lofty illusions about, wealth, heritage, friendship, and family. The complex relationships of families and the emotional needs of modern living are explored in this novel, which is at times funny, but slightly disturbing novel. |
 | Readers of Jasper FForde's previous novels will know what to expect in his new novel titled, The big over easy. A master at literary allusion, wordplays and tightly scripted plots, it is impossible to fit any of his novels into any type of genre. The big over easy is the fifth novel from English born Jasper Fforde, and is actually a reworking of his first novel that failed to find a publisher. This novel is set in Reading at Easter and no one can remember the last sunny day. Humpty Dumpty, a large egg, ex-convict and millionaire philanthropist is found shattered beneath a wall in a shabby area of town. Detective Inspector Jack Spratt and his colleague Mary Mary are assigned to the case, and soon grappling with a sinister plot involving cross-border money laundering, the illegal Bearnaise sauce market, corporate politics and the cut and thrust world of international Chiropody. This is an outrageously entertaining fantasy novel. |
 | The debut novel Psychoraag by Suhayl Saadi is a critically acclaimed best seller that was also short-listed for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2005. Born in Yorkshire to Pakistani parents, Shuayl Saadi trained as a doctor and manages to continue this work in Glasgow, along with his writing. He is also a dramatist, awarding short story writer and poet. The novel's main character Zaf is a community radio DJ who finds the ghosts of his and his family's past catching up with him during his last night on air. Spanning everything from his parents' turbulent past in Pakistan to the relative merits of the Asian Dub Foundation, this novel is about the experience of being a young Pakistani man growing up in urban Scotland. Although challenging, the prose in Psychoraag is blend of standard English with a distinctive urban Scots peppered with Urdu, it is never dull, but provides a rewarding reading experience. Also included is a discography of the music played during Zaf's last broadcast. |
 | Another extremely successful debut novel comes from South African born writer Rachel Zadok and is titled Gem Squash Tokoloshe. This novel was short-listed for the Whitbread First Novel Award 2005. She was educated in South Africa and after earning a Fine Arts degree, she worked as a freelance graphic designer. In 2001 with her husband, she moved to London, where she began her novel, set in her native South Africa. It tells the story of an isolated family on a drought stricken farm in the Northern Transvaal. The Father took to the road to become a travelling salesman, returning only in weekends, leaving his daughter Faith and wife Bella alone. Eventually he stops returning to the farm, and Bella's health begins to go into rapid decline. Fifteen years later after her mother's death in the Sterkfontein asylum for the criminally insane, Faith returns to the farm to claim her inheritance and to confront the dark, terrifying mysteries of the past. She also has to make sense of the complex world she lives in and come to terms with the beliefs that her society and upbringing have instilled in her. This is an intense, yet compelling novel. |
| DECEMBER 2005 At the end of every year most newspapers and magazines publish lists of the best books of the year. These can be selected by celebrity guests, which can include writers, politicians and media personalities, as in the Guardian Unlimited Books of the year. Another form of selecting the best books is by preference of the newspaper writers, as by the Times onLine or the New York Times. As this will be the last Fiction page up-date for this year, we decided to produce our own Best Books of 2005. We asked staff members of Wellington City libraries for a novel that stood out from all the others they had read this year, why they enjoyed and remembered it. Here is our selection. | |
 | The big picture / Douglas Kennedy. c1997. This was a riveting story of obsession, murder and identity, with a great ending. (Eleanor) |
 | Flicker / Theodore Roszak. 2005. Flicker is to be made into a film by Darren Aronofsky, who also made Requiem for a dream and Pi. This novel is regarded as the Da Vinci code for film goers. (Karl) |
 | The family tree / Carole Cadwalladr. 2005. A funny good read identifiable by anyone who was a child in the 70s. A well written debut novel that is whimsical and zany. (Pauline) |
 | The memory keeper's daughter / Kim Edwards. C2005. This is a good involving read, part thriller, part human interest. It was a page turner and very intriguing. (Marilyn) |
 | A long way down / Nick Hornby. 2005 This was a very moving novel with great sympathetic characters. It was a well written tragic/comedy that ends hopefully. (Sue) |
 | Beyond black / Hilary Mantel. 2005. Beyond Black was an amazing read, not only for the subject matter, but because is was very dark and frightening at times, and very funny at others. A combination of living and dead characters that was masterly. (Linda) |
 | Cinnamon kiss / Walter Mosley. (2005) Few people transcend genres and write novels that make meaningful statements about how people at a certain time in history. Mosley does, check him out. (Mark) |
 | The memory of running / Ron McLarty. (2005) Leaving his back door open, the world's most likeable loser gets on his bike just to go to the end of the street, but decides to go a bit further and ends up crossing America. Who would not find this novel unforgettable? (Neil) |
| NOVEMBER 2005 This month we decided to focus on several Japanese authors, who write in the suspense/thriller genre and who have risen to cult status in Japan. Very few novels published in Japanese are translated into English, but the same cannot be stated about the number of English novels translated into Japanese. In 1982 the ratio was 36 English novels translated into Japanese and only 1 Japanese novel into English. In 2002 this ration stood at 20:1. Although this comparison remains significant this year Wellington City Libraries have received more novels from new Japanese authors than previous years. Not all the following novels will be to everyone's taste, but they do proved suspenseful, entertaining reading and give a view of Japanese society, not always available. | |
 | Snakes and Earrings is the first novel of Hitomi Kanehara to be translated into English. Born in 1983, she stopped attending school at the age of eleven. After leaving home as a teenager she would send stories to her writer father by e-mail who then helped her edit them. Snakes and Earrings won Japan's top literary award, the Akutagawa Prize in 2003. In this novel, nineteen year old Nakazawa Lui is a freeter, or independent young adult, living on part-time jobs and effortlessly clubbing, drinking, and drugging. She meets literally fork-tongued Ama. She decides to have her tongue done likewise and becomes Ama's noncommittal lover. Violence, heavy drinking, and death eventually disrupt this drama of youthful degeneracy that steadfastly rejects romanticism. The depiction of the violent world of Japan's underground youth culture is both shocking and strangely beautiful. |
 | Natsuo Kirino was born in 1951 and has a reputation in Japan as a crime writer whose work goes well beyond the conventional crime novel. She has won not only Japan's top mystery awards , but also one of the major Literary Awards, the Naoki Prize. Her novel Out is a psychologically tense and unflinching journey into the recesses of the human soul, a reminder that the desperate desire for freedom can make an ordinary person do the unimaginable. In the Tokyo suburbs four women work the draining graveyard shift at a boxed-lunch factory. Burdened with chores and heavy debts and isolated from husbands and children, they all secretly dream of a way out of their dead-end lives. A young mother among them finally cracks and strangles her philandering, gambling husband, then confesses her crime to Masako, the closest of her colleagues. For reasons of her own, Masako agrees to assist her friend and seeks the help of the other co-workers to dismember and dispose of the body. This is the first novel by Natsuo Kirino to be translated into English. |
 | Winter Sleep by Kenzo Kitakata is only his second novel to be translated into English, although he has written over a 100 since 1970. He has won almost all the main literature awards for five years since moving from polite novels to hard-boiled. He has also actively challenged various other genres, and recently became very well known as a bestseller writer of historical novels. Winter Sleep tells of well-known painter, Masatake Nakagi, recently released from prison, where he served three years for killing a man, he now lives and works in a cabin provided to him by a patron of sorts. He can neither shed his violent past nor fit into straight society. Nakagi is happy to live according to his own needs and rhythms. Drinking, jogging, whittling, and painting though the desire and ability to paint come and go with less regularity. Several people do enter his life. Natsue Kosugi his agent and a teenager, Akiko Tsukada, who wants to learn as much as possible. But the trouble starts with the arrival of journalist, who not getting the response he needs from Nakagi, for a book he is writing, brings along on the visit another man who has killed, Koichi Oshita. Not surprisingly, someone ends up dead. |
 | A real page turn, In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami is funny, horrific and compelling. It has the hard edge of any hard-boiled thriller. Ryu Mirakami was born in 1952 and grew up in the port city of Sasebo in Western Japan before moving to Tokyo to study at the Musashino College of art. His novel Transparent Blue established him as the enfant terrible of Japanese literature. He remains at the cutting edge of popular culture in Japan. He is a prolific author of fiction and non-fiction and has achieved cult status for his movies and screenplays. Miso Soup tells of Frank, an overweight American tourist, who hires Kenji to take him on guided tours of Tokyo's sleazy nightlife for three successive evenings. But Frank's behaviour is so strange that Kenji begins to entertain a horrible suspicion: that his new client is in fact the serial killer currently terrorizing the city. It isn't until the second night, Kenji learns exactly how much he has to fear and how irrevocably his encounter with this great white whale of an American will change his life. Through Kenji's intimate knowledge of Tokyo's sex industry, with his thoughtful observations and jokes about the emptiness and hypocrisy of contemporary Japan, the reader is given much to think about on every page. |
 | Spiral by Koji Suzuki continues his hugely successful Ring trilogy. A literary star in Japan Suzuki's Ring sold 2.8 million copies and has become a cult Japanese film, in fact becoming a classic, as well as a successful Hollywood remake. Both of which are available on DVD at Wellington City Libraries. Koji Suzuki lives in Tokyo. Spiral is a stunning, cutting-edge thriller with a chilling supernatural twist Pathologist Ando is at a low point in his life. His small son's death from drowning has resulted in the break-up of his marriage and he is suffering from traumatic recurrent nightmares. Work is his only escape, and his depressing world of loneliness and regret is shaken up when an old rival from medical school, Ryuji Takayama, turns up on his slab ready to be dissected. Through Ryuji's bizarre demise Ando learns of a series of mysterious deaths that seem to have been caused by a sinister virus. From beyond the grave Ryuji appears to be leading Ando towards a suspicious videotape, could this hold the answer to the riddle of the strange deaths? Or is it merely the first clue? This novel can be read as a standalone, or part of the trilogy, being followed by Loop. |
 | Sayonara, Gangsters is the first novel by Genichiro Takahashi to be translated into English. Born in 1951, he failed to graduate from Yokohama National University, but instead became a student radical. He was arrested and spent half a year in prison, a harrowing experience the left him unable to read and or write for several years. With Sayonara, Gangsters he took the Japanese literary establishment by storm and remains at the top of post-modern writing in Japan. He has the Mishma and other coveted literary awards. No literal description of Sayonara, Gangsters' plot could ever hope to do it justice. The narrator is a poetry teacher named Sayonara, Gangsters. He's named after a gang that's been killing U.S. Presidents one after another in the novel's facetious near-future. Unfolding through short sketches that often read like poetry or philosophical meditations, Sayonara, Gangsters is a hilarious and inventive postmodernist novel about language, expression, and the creative process. This is a challenging but rewarding read. |
| SEPTEMBER 2005 The short list for the Man Booker Prize has recently been announced. Now in its 37th year, and four years into its sponsorship by the Canadian Mann investment group, this is still one of the most prestigious literary awards, ensuring great acclaim globally and a prize of £50,000 to the winner. The authors, who are chosen for the shortlist also receive great prestige and of course are guaranteed a large boost in their book sales. From a very strong long list of seventeen titles, only six have been short listed. This has resulted in some very well known literary authors being omitted, such as Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie and J.M. Coetzee. The chairman of the judging panel, John Sutherland acknowledged the strength of the long list, and the difficulty in only selecting 6 novels, before the final decision. "We are aware that the rules require that the award be to the best novel." After reading the novels listed, you will realize the difficulty of the task for the judging panel. The winner of the Man Booker Prize 2005 will announced on the 10th October 2005 and no doubt, as in previous years, the final decision will cause some controversy. | |
 | The Sea is the 14th novel by Irish writer John Banville and his second to be short listed for the Booker Prize. The Book of Evidence was short listed in 1989. In The Sea, Max Morden has reached a crossroads in his life, and is trying hard to deal with several disturbing things. A recent loss is still taking its toll on him, and a trauma in his past is similarly proving hard to deal with. He decides that he will return to a town on the coast where he spent a memorable holiday when a boy. His memory of that time devolves on the charismatic Grace family, particularly the seductive twins Myles and Chloe. In a very short time, Max found himself drawn into a strange relationship with them, and the resulting events left their mark on him for the rest of his life. Now looking back and remembering all that happened, will he reach an understanding peace? A rewarding, compelling, and profoundly moving novel, claimed to be the best thing John Banville has ever written. |
 | Julian Barnes has been previously short listed for the Booker Prize on two other occasions, in 1984 for his novel Flaubert's Parrot, and in 1998 for England, England. This year his novel Arthur and George has also been short listed. Born in 1949 Julian Barnes had his first novel, Metroland, published in 1980 and has had a novel published almost every year since. Arthur and George is one of his greatest achievements. The main characters, Arthur and George grow up worlds and miles apart in late nineteenth-century Britain: Arthur in shabby-genteel Edinburgh, George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire village. Arthur becomes a doctor, and then a writer; George a solicitor in Birmingham. Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age, George remains in hardworking obscurity. But as the new century begins, they are brought together by a sequence of events which made sensational headlines at the time as The Great Wyrley Outrages. With a mixture of detailed research and vivid imagination, Julian Barnes brings to life not just this long-forgotten case, but the inner lives of these two very different men. This is a novel with wit and charm, and although the events occurred 100 years ago, questions about crime, spirituality, guilt and innocence, identity, nationality and race are still prominent in contemporary society. |
 | A Long Long Way is the third novel by Sebastian Barry. Barry was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1995 and is a much acclaimed award winning dramatist and poet. A Long Long Way set in the First World War evokes the camaraderie and humour of Willie and his regiment, the Royal Dublin Fusiliers and also the cruelty and sadness of war, Underpinning all these emotions were the divided loyalties that many Irish soldiers felt. Tracing their experiences through the course of the war, the narrative brilliantly explores and dramatises the events of the Easter Rising within Ireland, and how such a seminal political moment came to affect those boys off fighting for the King of England on foreign fields, the paralysing doubts and divisions it caused them. This is a thought provoking beautifully written novel. |
 | Kazuo Ishiguro has been short listed for the Booker Prize three times resulting in winning the prize in 1989 for the novel The Remains of the Day. His latest novel Never Let Me Go has again placed his name on the short list. He was born in Japan in 1954, but went to Britain in 1960, where he has remained. Although this is only his sixth novel, he is acclaimed world wide, with work receiving many awards and being translated into many languages. Never Let Me go is about Kathy, Ruth and Tommy who were pupils at Hailsham, an idyllic establishment situated deep in the English countryside. The children there were tenderly sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe they were special, and that their personal welfare was crucial. The reasons for this are only slowly revealed years later when Kathy, now aged 31, finally allows herself to yield to the pull of memory. What unfolds is the haunting story of how Kathy, Ruth and Tommy, slowly come to face the truth about their seemingly happy childhoods, and about their futures. This is a moving, compelling novel and topical to our times. |
 | The Accidental by Ali Smith is the second novel she has had short listed for the Man Booker Prize. The first was Hotel World in 2001, which went on to win the Scottish Arts Council Book Award and the Encore Award the following year. Ali Smith was born in Inverness, Scotland in 1962 and now lives in Cambridge. She is a regular contributor of articles and reviews to journals and newspapers. The Accidental is her third novel and she has also published two volumes of short stories. Surprise and chance have a way of intrusively wedging a new perspective into people's lives, as is seen in the Accidental. The four members of the Smart family seem in particular need of just such an unexpected element during their holiday in the Norfolk countryside. All of them are on the brink of a major crisis in their lives, but most of them are carefully avoiding the reality of their situations. At their idyllic getaway which the daughter Astrid views as an "unhygienic dump" they receive an unexpected visitor who brashly delivers a new point of view. They are shaken into a new understanding of the world. This is as intelligent and carefully structured novel that is both funny and illuminating. |
 | On Beauty, the third novel by Zadie Smith, has also been short listed for the Man Booker Prize. This is the first of her novels to achieve this honour, although her novel White Teeth won six major British awards from 2000 to 2001 and has been translated into over twenty languages. In On Beauty, Howard Belsey, a Rembrandt scholar who doesn't like Rembrandt, is an Englishman abroad and a long-suffering Professor at Wellington College. He has been married for thirty years to Kiki, an American woman who no longer resembles the sexy activist she once was. Their three children passionately pursue their own paths, and faced with the oppressive enthusiasms of his children, Howard feels that the first two acts of his life are over and he has no clear plans for the finale. Then Jerome, Howard's oldest son, falls for Victoria, the stunning daughter of the right-wing icon Monty Kipps. Increasingly, the two families find themselves thrown together in a beautiful corner of America, enacting a cultural and personal war against the background of real wars that they barely register. This is a clever, witty novel that highlights many of the least pleasant aspects of our society. |
| JULY 2005 This month the selection of new novels have one major common theme. They have all been written by Chinese authors who were born in China. As you will discover this is the only common thread as their ages differ greatly, as does their education and experiences in their country of origin. Unfortunately, despite China's immense population, very few novels are translated and marketed in western countries. Being a country with a rapidly changing society, through economics, politics and western influence on culture, more writers must inevitably become known outside China. In this ancient, vast ever changing country there must be many great stories waiting to be told. As the following selected fiction illustrates, the stories here range from historical to modern day, and all give very different views of the country and its people. | |
 | The first novel is by Ma Jain and is titled The Noodle Maker. Set in the aftermath of the Tiananmen massacre, this novel was banned in China, as was Ma's previous work, a travelogue about his journey in 1989 through China titled Red Dust. Jain Ma is a writer, painter and photographer. He left China for Hong Kong soon after finishing Red Dust, then moved to Hong Kong. At the handover of Hong Kong in 1997 he moved to Europe and now lives in London. The Noodle Maker is a darkly funny novel about the absurdities and cruelties of life in modern China. Every week, a writer of political propaganda and a professional blood-donor meet for dinner. They make unlikely friends, the one tortured by the desire for intellectual excellence, the other more concerned with the down-to-earth practicalities of life. Nevertheless, the writer enjoys the blood-donor's company, perhaps because, as the richer of the two, he provides the dinner. Over the course of one especially gastronomic and drunken evening, the writer moves from complaints about his latest commission, the composition of an epic account of a Communist hero, to recount the stories he would really like to write, had he the freedom. |
 | Mr Muo's Travelling Couch by Dai Sijie is his second novel. The first, Balzac and the Little Seamstress was later made into a film and opened the screening at the Cannes Film Festival in 2002. Dai Sijie was born in China in 1954, he became a film maker and was "re-educated" in 1971 and 1974. In 1984 he moved to France where he has lived and worked ever since. Mr Muo's Travelling Couch is a type of Chinese Don Quixote, following the misadventures of Mr Muo, Chinas first psychoanalyst. It's over ten years since Muo has visited his native China having been in Paris devouring the works of Freud. When Muo hears that his first great love has been thrown into a Chinese jail for selling a newspaper article to the foreign press, he feels he must rush home and rescue her. He returns to a China where everyone is corruptible, provided you find the right bribe. Sadly, the $10,000 Muo offers Judge Di to free his beloved is not enough. The judge, tired of cash and cars, orders Muo to bring him a virgin girl to satisfy his sexual predilection for the unsullied. Thus begins a series of hilarious adventures as Muo goes in search of a virgin. This is a fast paced, very funny satire on a true innocent attempting to negotiate the maze of modern China. |
 | The historical novel My Life as Emperor by Su Tong is his third novel to be translated into English. The first being Raise the Red Lantern in 1993, was later made into a film and nominated for an Oscar Award, this was followed in 1995 by Rice. Su Tong was born in 1963 and graduated from Beijing Normal University and now lives in Nanjing. With My Life as Emperor, Su Tong has given an alternative history to the one we know, setting the novel in the fictional Xie Empire, this is not a read for the squeamish. My life as Emperor tells the story of incompetence, cruelty, decadence and an absence of concern for anyone's well-being but those holding power. It is a chilling yet enormously entertaining glimpse of the dark side of nation-building, as well as a vivid insight into the lives of the palace women and the surrounding court intrigue richly embroidered with extraordinary calamities and rampant slaughter. Su Tong has created a powerful yet terrifying story that questions the fateful influences that shape and sustain leaders. |
 | Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather by Gao Xingjian is a book of delightful short stories. Along with his previous novels Soul Mountain and One man's Bible, these are the only works translated into English. Gao Xingjian was born in Eastern China in 1940. He took a degree in French in Beijing in 1962. He became a writer, but during the revolution was "re-educated". It was not until 1979 when could publish his work and travel abroad. He now lives in France and is a French citizen. In 2000 he was awarded the Noble Prize for Literature, the first for China. A number of his works, including plays have been translated in other languages. Buying a Fishing Rod for my Grandfather is an exquisite book of short stories, none of which has ever been published before in English. They blend the crisp immediacy of the present moment with the softness of memory and nostalgia. The stories are all delightfully simple and wise. |
 | The fourth novel by Mo Yan translated into English is Big Breasts and Wide Hips, a provocative title for a novel of seven chapters, each representing a different time period in Chinese History. Mo Yan was born in 1956 and is a native of Shandong. He is a prolific writer, of novels, novellas and short stories. He has won virtually every Chinese literary prize and is the most critically acclaimed Chinese writer of his generation. Until 2004, Yan Mo's position in the People's Liberation Army had prevented his travelling to the United States of America without an official delegation. Some of his work had been seen as subversive, especially his novel Red Sorghum, published in 2003, causing problems with the Chinese authorities. His resignation from the army eased the political tensions over his writing. Big Breast and Wide Hips is a monumental family saga, set in rural Gaomi, in northeast China, where the author grew up. Mo Yan vividly portrays, over 500 pages, political and historical events, most of them bloody, over the course of the twentieth century, from the Boxer Rebellion through the Communist Revolution, the Japanese invasion, the Cultural Revolution, and the death of Mao. Jintong, the only son of Shangguan Lu, tells the story of his remarkable mother, his eight sisters, and their families as they live through these seminal events. An epic novel, not for the faint hearted. |
 | The last novel selected is by Qian Zhongshu, who died in 1999, titled Fortress Besieged. It was originally published in 1947, and this was his last major work of fiction as after he concentrated mainly on literary research. Born in 1910 in Wuxi, Jiangsu, Qain studied foreign languages at Quighua University. In 1935 he went to Oxford, majoring in English, and in 1937 went to study French literature at the University of Paris. A year later he returned to China. In 1941 he published a collection of short stories and again in 1946 another volume of short stories; he was an expert on classical Chinese literature. Fortress Besieged is a classic of world literature, a masterpiece that mixes Western literary traditions, philosophy, and middle-class Chinese society. Set on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War, the hero Fang Hung-chien, with no particular goal in life and with a bogus degree from a fake American university in hand, returns home to Shanghai. On the French liner home, he meets two Chinese beauties, Miss Su and Miss Pao. In a sort of painful comedy, Fang obtains a teaching post at a newly established university where the pseudo-intellectuals he encounters in academia become the butt of the author's merciless satire. Soon Fang is trapped into a marriage, filled with massive proportions of distress and absurdity. |
| MAY 2005 On 7th June 2005, the winner, from the selected short list, will be announced for the 10th Orange Prize for female writers, writing in English. The complete long list can be viewed online. This is the first year where the shot list has comprised of only American and English authors. In this up date on the fiction collection, we decided to highlight the six novels that have been selected for the short list. Evenly divided between three American and three British writers, the nominated writers encompass a diversity of age and experience. The novels cover a broad range of subject matter. | |
 | Joolz Denby has been a professional writer, spoken-word performer and illustrative artist for twenty four years and is considered one of Britain's premier woman spoken-word artist and Urban Romantic Storyteller, with an international reputation for excellence. At 49 this former biker and mother of 12 children drew on her own experiences for her third novel Billie Morgan which has been shot listed. Billie is in her forties, running a little jewellery shop in Bradford, watching over her godson Natty, trying to live a quiet life, trying to forget the past, because Billie has a lot of past to forget. She was a biker chick, one of the Devil's Own, real hardcore seventies Angels, speed and acid-fuelled road demons. She lived a life that was hurtling out of control and it ended in murder. Now, years later, she has to face the consequences. Beautifully written, dark but never despairing, Billie Morgan is a perfect fusion between social realism and classic noir, with one of the best opening passages in any novel. This is a moving account of one woman's heroic attempt to escape her destiny. |
 | Old Filth is the 8th adult novel by Jane Gardam, she has also written several collections of short stories and children's fiction. In 1989 she was awarded the French Prix Baudelaire award for God on the rocks and the Whitbread Novel Award in 1991 for the novel The Queen of the Tambourine. Born in 1928 in north Yorkshire (where much of here writing is set) she has been a full time writer since 1954 after working as an editor for a literary magazine. In her much acclaimed novel Old Filth, the main character Filth is an international lawyer with a practice in the Far East. Only the oldest Silks and QCs can remember that his nickname stands for Failed in London Try Hong Kong, he has now moved back to the England to retire peacefully in the idyllic countryside. Unfortunately his past contains many secrets and dark hiding places. The memories of his early life come to haunt him .Peopled with a range of amazing characters, from monsters to eccentrics, Jane Gardam shows she has a unique understanding not only of the human heart but also of the bizarre workings of the minds of the elderly. |
 | Sheri Holman grew up in rural Virginia, but now lives in Brooklyn, New York and worked as a literary agent while writing her first novel. Now a full time writer and in her mid thirties her fourth novel, The Mammoth Cheese was selected for the short list. This novel starts with Manda Frank giving birth to an astonishing eleven babies, this causes the world descend on her home town of Three Chimneys, Virginia. Beneath the intense media spotlight the town begins to give up its long-held secrets: from the unrequited love of August Vaughn, the town's avid Thomas Jefferson impersonator, to the more dangerous and subversive passions of Mr March, the local history teacher. Meanwhile, cheese maker Margaret Prickett decides to highlight the plight of the rural community by creating 'The Mammoth Cheese', a 1,235-pound wheel of Cheshire which she plans to parade all the way to Washington. In her preoccupation she fails to notice the plight of her own teenage daughter Polly, who is caught up in the dangerous romance of rebellion, and veering precariously towards tragedy. This panoramic social novel with a needle-sharp point of view sends up both small-town America and politics in a delightful bittersweet way. |
 | It is hard to believe that The Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian is the first novel from writer Marina Lewycka. Born of Ukrainian parents in a refugee camp in Kiel, Germany at the end of the 2nd World War, she grew up in England. She teaches at Sheffield Hallam University, is married with an adult daughter and lives in Sheffield. Marina had great difficulty getting her first novel published and this did not occur until it was read by an external examiner on her creative writing course, who also happened to be a literary agent. She has previously published six books on caring for the elderly, which may have given her an insight into her main character's traits and foibles, the father of Nadezhda and Vera, two Ukrainian sisters, who were raised in England by their refugee parents, but have had as little as possible to do with each other, for which they have many reasons. But now they find they'd better learn how to get along, because since their mother's death their aging father has been sliding into his second childhood, and an alarming new woman has just entered his life. Valentina, a bosomy young synthetic blonde from the Ukraine, seems to think their father is much richer than he is, and she is keen that he departs this world with as little money to his name as possible. If Nadazhda and Vera don't stop her, no one will. But separating their addled and annoyingly lecherous dad from his new love will prove to be no easy feat. Valentina is a ruthless professional and the two sisters swiftly realize that they are mere amateurs when it comes to ruthlessness. A witty fast paced novel with yet again another attention grabbing opening paragraph. |
 | Another debut novel has been short listed and that is Liars and Saints form the young writer Maile Meloy. Born in Montana in 1972 she received her M.F.A. from the University of California, Irvine. She still lives in California. Her collection of short stories Half in Love, published in 2003 has received many awards, including the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction and the 2003 Rosenthal Academy of Arts and Letters. Her novel opens with a wedding, ends with a funeral, and in between chronicles the four generations of the Californian, catholic Santerre family, from the end of W.W. 11 to the present day. Written in a series of short story-like vignettes, the family's saga is told in turn by every member, from Yvette the matriarch down to TJ, her great-grandson. A cool, elegant prose style ensures the reader is swept along throughout all the life changing events, of secrets kept and revealed, loves, betrayals and deaths that touch every member of the family. |
 | Lionel Shriver is an establish writer and has been short listed for the Orange Prize for her seventh novel, We need to talk about Kevin. She has written extensively for the Wall Street Journal, The Inquirer, and the Economist. She lives in London and has chosen to remain childless. In this work she explores the debate of nature verses nurture, what influences the type of children produce. Eva Khatchadourian's son, Kevin, murdered seven of his fellow high-school students, a cafeteria worker, and a popular algebra teacher. Because he was only fifteen at the time of the killings, he received a lenient sentence and is now in a prison for young offenders in upstate New York. Telling the story of Kevin's upbringing, Eva addresses herself to her estranged husband through a series of letters. Fearing that her own shortcomings may have shaped what her son has become, she confesses to a deep, long-standing ambivalence about both motherhood, and Kevin in particular. How much is her fault? This is a compelling and absorbing story filled with many ideas that will give each reader much to discuss. |
| MARCH 2005 The short list for the Dublin IMPAC awards was announced on 8th March 2005. The ten titles are selected by the judges from 147 nominations. The nominations were made by 185 libraries representing 129 cities from 51 countries. The full long list and nominating libraries, with links to each library site can be found at impacdublinaward.com. The winner will be announced on 15th June 2005. This month we have selected some titles from the shortlist that are well worth reading. Because the nominations were made last year, some titles we received several months ago, and some are still to be received. We know all of the books selected for the short list will be of the same high standard. | |
 | Gardening at Night is the debut novel from South African writer Diane Awerbuck. Set in the South African mining town of Kimberly, the novel follows the unfolding of a young girl's life through a childhood filled with silences, through adolescence and young womanhood. It is about how much people are the total of their longings, how high drama can also be low comedy. It probes how much of the old century a girl should take with her into the new one, and examines the merging of families in the Eighties and their emerging into the florescence of the Nineties and beyond. It is especially the story of a girl's escape from a ghost town, Kimberly a place where the only tales are those of leaving. This novel has moments of shocking bleakness and wry humour that makes for an unusual and amazing reading experience. |
 | Another young South African writer to make the shortlist was Damon Galgut for his novel The Good Doctor. Born in Pretoria in 1963, he now lives in Cape Town. He published his first novel at the age of 17. The Good Doctor is his 5th work of fiction and was also short listed for the 2003 Booker prize. This novel is set in South Africa, at a time of change, after apartheid rule, where politics play a large force in the people's everyday life. A young optimistic doctor, Laurence Walters, comes to work at a rural hospital. He is determined to revive the staff and people of the town. Frank, a doctor that has been working in the rural hospital for years watches with both bemusement and irritation as Laurence goes about executing his big ideas in a town were no one really cares. Where people have learned not to care and the past cripples the present , surely his ill-starred idealism cannot last. |
 | Translated from Norwegian, The Half Brother by Lars Saabye Christensen has also been short listed. A prolific writer, he has written ten novels, short stories and poetry, and lives in Oslo. Lars Saabye Christensen has also been awarded many literary prizes including the Tarjei Vesaas Prize for First Fiction and the Nordic Prize 2002 for the Half Brother , which became an immediate bestseller in Norway. The novel tells the story of half-brothers Barnum and Fred growing up in sixties Oslo. Barnum seems to have stopped growing, while his half-brother, frustrated by learning difficulties, is sent away to a special school. Theirs is an ordinary Norwegian family of the time, set apart by extraordinary family members. Their father is no better than a con man, giving the appearance of a travelling salesman, while the three women in the family (mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, the 'Old One') are all unwed mothers. Then the Old One is killed by a hit and run driver causing Fred to become mute. The two half-brothers embark on their separate courses, Fred becoming a boxer and Barnum a scriptwriter. The brothers don't meet again until they arrive at their mother's deathbed. |
 | The first novel from Canadian writer Frances Itani, titled Deafening has also been selected for the short list of the IMPAC Dublin Award. Itani originally trained as a nurse and after eight years began writing poetry, then progressing to short stories, essays review and radio drama. She has lived in most Canadian provinces, Britain, America, Germany, Italy, Croatia and Cyprus. Deafening also won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize, Best Book Award (Caribbean and Canada region) . This novel tells the story of Grania O'Neill who suffers a childhood illness that destroys her hearing. Grania's life without sound is also a life bounded by a powerful family love that tries to protect her from suffering. But when it becomes clear that Grania can no longer thrive among the hearing, her family sends her to the Ontario School for the Deaf. There, protected from the often unforgiving world outside, she learns sign language and speech. She eventually meets Jim Lloyd, a hearing man, and the two begin to create a new emotional vocabulary that encompasses both sound and silence. But a war is raging on the other side of the world and only two weeks after their wedding, Jim must leave home to serve as a stretcher-bearer on the blood-soaked battlefields of Flanders. During this long and brutal war of attrition, Jim and Grania are pulled to the centre of cataclysmic events that will alter civilisation forever. |
 | The Known World by Edward P Jones has already received much acclaim, becoming a finalist in the National Book Awards and eventually winning the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Edward P Jones was born and raised in Washington D. C. and educated at Holy Cross College and the University of Virginia. His first collection of short stories titled The Lost City was published in 1992 and also short listed for the national Book Awards. The Known World is his first novel and claimed as a landmark in modern American literature. Henry Townsend, a black farmer, boot maker, and former slave, becomes proprietor of his own plantation as well as his own slaves. When he dies, his widow, Caldonia, succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart: slaves take to escaping under the cover of night, and families who had once found love beneath the weight of slavery begin to betray one another. Beyond the Townsend household, the known world also unravels: low-paid white patrollers stand watch as slave 'speculators' sell free black people into slavery, and rumours of slave rebellions set white families against slaves who have served them for years. |
 | Another American writer short listed for the IMPAC Dublin Award is Jonathan Lethem for his novel The Fortress of Solitude. Born and educated in Brooklyn New York where he currently lives, Lethem's first collection of short stories was published in 1990 and the first novel Gun, with occasional Music was published in 1994. He has published a novel, short story collection and essays nearly every year since. Lethem has a tendency to draw elements from different genre traditions and combine them in new ways, which can lead to surreal creations of plot and character. The Fortress of Solitude is set in the messed-up Brooklyn of the 1970s to the present day and spans thirty years in the life of two best friends, Dylan and Mingus, their families and an entire neighbourhood. From their stories comes the history of soul music, of graffiti art, of comic books, of experimental film and 'rock writing'. With a cast of more than a hundred characters and more than fifty speaking parts, this is a touching and intimate novel on an epic scale.
The other short-listed novels are Elle by Douglas Glover, Phantom Pain by Arnon Grunberg, The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard and Willenbrock by Christoph Hein. |
| JANUARY 2005 We thought that there would be no better way to start 2005 than with some excellent fiction. After the holiday break and the light easy reading some will have indulged in, perhaps now the mind will be craving something a little more challenging. This month's selection of new novels are not only well written, but all provide a gripping narrative, diversity of plot to keep the brain active and enough mystery to keep the pages turning. Of the five novels selected here only one is catalogued as murder mysteries, but the theme that unites them all is mystery, with or without an actual murder. We hope you will give them a try as all are rewarding reads. | |
 | Case Histories by Kate Atkinson has been reviewed and acclaimed by many. We are including it in this collection of recent material as it presents a different and interesting variation of the standard crime novel genre. To Jackson Brodie, former police inspector turned private investigator, the world consists of one accounting sheet - Lost on the left, Found on the right - and the two never seem to balance. His days are full of people clamouring for answers and explanations. A jealous husband suspects his wife. Two spinster sisters make a shocking find. A solicitor investigates an old murder. A nurse has lost her niece; a widow, her cats. Surrounded by death, intrigue and misfortune, his own life is brought sharply into focus and will be changed by those he tries to help. |
 | The final Solution: a story of detection is the latest novel from Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon. In this novel he has crafted a short, suspenseful tale of compassion and with that re-imagines the classic nineteenth-century detective story. In deep retirement in the English country-side, an eight-nine year-old man, vaguely remembered by locals as a once-famous detective is more concerned with his beekeeping than his fellow man. Into his life wanders Linus Steinman, nine years old and mute, who has escaped from Nazi Germany with his sole companion, an African Gray parrot. What is the meaning of the mysterious strings of German numbers the bird repeats, a top secret SS code, or the key to a Swiss bank account? Or could it be something far more sinister? Is the solution to what may be his last case, beyond the reach of the once famous sleuth? |
 | Death in Danzig is the first novel of Polish author Stefan Chwin to be translated and published in English. This is a moving portrait of people in transition - between old and new, life and death. Germans flee the besieged city of Danzig in 1945. As the Poles are driven out of eastern regions by the Russians they move into the homes hastily abandoned by their previous German inhabitants. In an area of the city graced with beech trees and a stately cathedral, the stories of old and new residents intertwine: Hanemann, a German and a former professor of anatomy, who chooses to stay in Danzig after the mysterious death of his lover; the Polish family of the narrator, driven out of Warsaw; and a young Carpathian woman who no longer has a country, her cheerful nature concealing deep wounds. Through his brilliantly defined characters, stunning evocation of place, and memorable description of remnants of a world that was German but survives in Polish households, Chwin has created a reality that is beyond destruction. We look forward to translations of his earlier work. |
 | Andrew Martin was a former Spectator Young Writer of the year and Blackpool Highflyer is his fourth novel to date. Set in Edwardian England he again evokes the age of steam as well as he did in his last novel, the murder mystery The Necropolis Railway. When railwayman Jim Stringer is assigned to drive holidaymakers to the seaside resort of Blackpool in the hot summer of 1905, he thinks he's struck lucky. But his dreams of beer and pretty women soon fall away - when his high-speed train meets a huge millstone on the line. In the months that follow as he hunts for the saboteur, Jim is drawn into a beguiling but dangerous world of eccentrics, conmen and cowards. From ventriloquists to funfair salesmen, ticket clerks to dandies, everyone is a suspect in this captivating adventure. Blackpool Highflyer is a superbly atmospheric thriller of sabotage, suspicion yet touched with dark wit. |
 | Dining on Stones is the sixth work of fiction from Iain Sinclair. Perhaps he is an acquired taste, but once you get started on his work it tends to become slightly addictive. A prolific, clever writer with amazing inventiveness, his use of the English language always amazes. A previous novel, Downriver (which won the James Tait Memorial Prize) was a type of road novel, in which the river Thames is followed from the estuary in Tilbury up through the city of London. Now in Dining on stones, Sinclair has written the ultimate road novel as Andrew Norton, a poet, visionary and hack is handed a mysterious package that sees him quit London and head out along the A13 on an as yet undefined quest. Holing up in a roadside hotel, unable to make sense of his search, he is haunted by ghosts: of the dead and the not-so-dead; demanding wives and ex-wives; East End gangsters; even competing versions of himself. Shifting from Hackney to Hastings and all places in between, while dissecting a man's fractured psyche piece by piece, this is a puzzle and a quest for both writer and reader. |
| NOVEMBER 2004 Each month the Central Library's Fiction collection is increased by an average of 180 new titles, this includes Science Fiction, Fantasy and Murder Mysteries. Deciding what to include in this part of the Web page is always difficult and is usually based around a recent major literary award, event, or the arrival of several books of similar genre. This month as something different we surveyed library staff for a recommendation from the recent new material that they had really enjoyed. As you will see their choices were as diverse at the fiction collection itself. Thank-you to Jason, Pauline, Karl, Nicky, and Julie for their enthusiastic and persuasive responses to the question, "can you recommend a good read?" | |
 | Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke was short listed for the 2004 Man Booker prize. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the legendary Raven King, the greatest magician ever is barely more than a legend, and England, with its mad King and its dashing poets, no longer believes in practical magic. Then the reclusive Mr Norrell of Hurtfew Abbey appears and causes the statues of York Cathedral to speak and move. News spreads of the return of magic to England and, persuaded that he must help the government in the war against Napoleon, Mr Norrell goes to London. There he meets a brilliant young magician and takes him as a pupil. Jonathan Strange is charming, rich and arrogant. Together, they dazzle the country with their feats. But the partnership soon turns to rivalry. Mr Norrell has never conquered his lifelong habits of secrecy, while Strange will always be attracted to the wildest, most perilous magic. He becomes fascinated by the shadowy figure of the Raven King, and his heedless pursuit of long-forgotten magic threatens, not only his partnership with Norrell, but everything that he holds precious. This book has been described as a blend of the Harry Potter novels, and the works of Jane Austen. |
 | The Falls by Joyce Carol Oates is her 46th published novel. Joyce Carol Oates, also known as Rosamund Smith is an amazingly accomplished writer in many different fields including 27 collections of short stories. The Falls is a novel of tremendous sweep and pace about the American family in crisis - but also about America itself in the mid-20th century. A man climbs over the railings and plunges into Niagara Falls. He's a newly-wed, and his bride has been left behind in the honeymoon suite the morning after their wedding. For two weeks, Ariah, the deserted bride, waits by the side of the roaring waterfall for news of her husband's recovered body. During her vigil, an unlikely new love story begins to unfold when she meets a wealthy lawyer who is transfixed by her strange, otherworldly gaze. So it all begins, in the 1950s, with the dark foreboding of the Falls the sinister background to events. From this cataclysmic event unfurls a drama of parents and their children; of secrets and sins; of lawsuits, murder and, eventually redemption. As Ariah's children learn that their past is enmeshed with a hushed-up scandal involving radioactive waste materials, they are confronting not only their own family history, but America's own murky past. |
 | This choice is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novel, Going Postal by Terry Pratchett. This is the 29th title in the very funny Discworld series, set in Ankh-Morpork. The main character Moist von Lipwig is a con artist and a fraud and a man faced with a life choice: be hanged, or put Ankh-Morpork's ailing postal service back on its feet. It was a tough decision, but he decides he's got to see that the mail gets though, come rain, hail, sleet, dogs, the Post Office Workers Friendly and Benevolent Society, the evil chairman of the Grand Trunk Semaphore Company, and a midnight killer. Getting a date with Adora Bell Dearheart would be nice, too. Maybe it'll take a criminal to succeed where honest men have failed, or maybe it's a death sentence either way. Or perhaps there is a shot at redemption in the mad world of the mail, waiting for a man who's prepared to push the envelope. |
 | The Plot against America is the most recent novel from Philip Roth, one of America's most revered writers. In this alternative American history the renowned aviation hero and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide in the 1940 presidential election, fear then invades every Jewish household in America. Not only has Lindbergh, in a nationwide radio address, publicly blamed the Jews for selfishly pushing America towards a pointless war with Nazi Germany, but, upon taking office as the 33rd president of the United States, he negotiated a cordial 'understanding' with Adolf Hitler, whose conquest of Europe and whose virulent anti-Semitic policies he appears to have accepted without difficulty. We relive this time through Philip Roth, who recounts what it was like for his Newark family - and for a million such families all over the country - during the menacing years of the Lindbergh presidency, when American citizens who happened to be Jews had every reason to expect the worst. |
 | 1998 Nobel Prize winning author Jose Saramago who at the age of 82 has published his latest book, The Double and proves he is still a master of psychological suspense. What happens when Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, a 38-year-old professor of history, discovers that there is a man living in the same city who is identical to him in every physical detail, but not related by blood at all. And what happens when each of these men attempt to investigate each other's lives? How do we know who we are? What do we mean by identity? What defines us as individual, unique people? Could we ever come to terms with the existence of another person with our voice, our features, everything, down to the smallest distinguishing mark? Could we change places with our double without those closest to us noticing? This is dark yet comic, a work of literature that immerses us in the essential questions of life. |
| SEPTEMBER 2004 This month we decided to highlight several novels included on the Man Booker Prize long list that we highly recommend as good reads. | |
 | Maps for Lost Lovers is the second novel from writer Nadeem Aslam,who was born in Pakistan and moved to Britain at the age of 14 when his father, a communist, fled President Zia's regime. Nadeem Aslam had his first short story published in Urdu in a Pakistani newspaper at the age of 13. His first novel was published in 1993 and was short listed for the Whitbread First Novel award. In Maps for lost lovers, he relates the story, of two young lovers, Jugnu and Chandra who disappear from their homes in a small English town. Chandra's brothers are arrested for their murders and this causes both families to question their culture, community, nationality and religion. The need for tolerance and understanding in multicultural societies is poetically, and brutal portrayed in this novel. |
 | Neil Cross was born in Bristol in 1969, grew up in Scotland and came to live in Wellington two years ago. His third novel Always the Sun has been included in the Man Booker Long list. It is the story of a father who will do anything to protect his son. After the death of his wife, Sam moves his son Jamie to his old home town, where he starts a new job and Jamie a new school. But when Jamie comes home one day with his body marked by bullies, Sam decides he must do something. A gripping but harrowing read. |
 | Short listed for the 2004 Orange Prize, The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard has been recognized by the Man Booker Prize judges as worthy of consideration. Telling the story of two young people caught in the ravaged times of the Second World War and the aftermath, how they survive, learning to reinvent their lives and expectations, and in turn discovering their own self-resiliance and destinies. Shirley Hazzard was born in Sydney in 1931; leaving Australia in 1947 she has lived in Hong Kong, Europe and the United States of America. Her first novel was published in 1973 and the previous novel, to this nomination, The Transit of Venus was published in 1980. |
 | David Mitchell was named in 2003 by Granta magazine as one of twenty Best of Young British Novelists and his latest novel Cloud Atlas certainly lives up to expectations. Born in 1969 he grew up in Worcestershire. He completed a degree in English and American Literature followed by an MA in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent. He spent eight years in Japan teaching English before returning to England. Both his previous novels, Ghostwritten and Number9dream have been nominated and short listed for the Guardian First Book Award and the Man Booker Prize respectively. Cloud Atlas is a complex multi layered novel, structured with stories within stories about the nature of humanity, power, oppression, race, colonialism and consumerism. This is a very creative novel with exceptional depth, perhaps a novel for our time. |
 | Colm Toibin needs no introduction, being a winner of many literary prizes and having been short listed previously for the Booker Prize 1999 and I.M.P.A.C Dublin Award 2001 both for The Heather Blazing and the Whitbread First Novel Prize for The South. Now in 2004 he has been selected for his historical novel The Master, set in 1895 and covering the five years of Henry James's life spent in England, a sort of self imposed exile from his home in New England. America. During this time he writes his masterpiece 'The turn of the Screw', although impelled to continue working, he is haunted by his past, the country he loves, the death of his sister, and his own failure to fight in the American Civil War. Toibin captures the Edwardian period to perfection in this complex, emotional, yet thoroughly enjoyable novel. |
| JULY 2004 As we are now into the depths of winter, we thought this month's selection of new humorous novels would bring some warm cheer. The six novels selected from our recent material range from satire to black comedy but all show modern life from slightly different angles, if not strangely bizarre ones. Definitely, recommended as a great form of escapist fun for the long winter nights. | |
 | Maggie Gee was chosen as one of Granta's 'Best Young British Novelists' in 1983. Since then she has published eight novels to great acclaim, Her last novel, The White Family was short listed for the 2002 Orange Prize for Fiction and for the International Impac Dublin Literary Award 2004. In her gripping, original and highly entertaining The flood, she shows willing to address issues topical to contemporary Britain. After months of rain, a capital city full of birds, foxes and humans is sinking under the floods. The rich still live much as usual, in their big houses on higher ground, but the poor in their packed tower-blocks are becoming more and more cut off while the fanatical 'Last Days' religious sect is recruiting thousands. When the rain suddenly stops, the government - eager to distract attention from a foreign war they have been waging - announces a spectacular City Gala to which the swarming characters of this visionary book flock. |
 | Mr Starlight is the latest title from Laurie Graham. With her characteristic wit and wisdom Laurie Graham brings us the Boff brothers who live at home with their Mam. They play bookings at the Birmingham Welsh and the Rover Sports and Social, Cled tinkles on the piano and Sel is the crooner. 'Sel's the one who can lift people out of themselves and send them home feeling grand and you can't argue against that' says Cled. When Sel decides he must try his chances with the bright lights of New York City, he packs up his sequinned suits and enlists his brother as travel companion and accompanist. Things begin to roll and what follows is a tale of high jinx; of mirrored ceilings and heart-shaped tubs; of screaming girls, romancing and No Business like Show Business. As jealousy starts encroaching on the brothers' relationship, Cled finds that there are more secrets in his family than he had bargained for. |
 | The most recent novel from popular novelist Howard Jacobson is Making of Henry. Howard Jacobson is the author of seven novels and four works of non-fiction. He won the Everyman Wodehouse Award for comic writing in 1999 for The Mighty Walzer. In the Making of Henry, Henry Nagel, much to his surprise and astonishment, receives a solicitor's letter telling him he has inherited a sumptuous apartment in St John's Wood. Is it divine intervention or his late father's love-nest? Henry doesn't know, but he is glad to escape the North, where there is nothing and no one to keep him. After nearly sixty years of angry disappointment, Henry's life is about to change. Jacobson's writing is as luscious and funny as ever, it is never far from comic brilliance. |
 | Daren King was born in 1972 in Harlow, Essex. He was educated at Bath Spa University College, Bath. Boxy an Star, his first novel, was short listed for the 1999 Guardian First Book Award. Jim Giraffe :a ghost story about a ghost giraffe is about Scott Spectrum, Head Script Writer, Science Fiction Channel. He is being haunted by a ghost giraffe called Jim. Scott thinks he is the man who has everything with a high speed internet connection, high-tech armchair, alien-shaped slippers, and a beautiful wife called Continence. But according to Jim, Scott's days are numbered. Jim is on a mission to save Scott from certain death by sexual repression. This is a brilliant, funny, unforgettable book, one that explodes many taboos in a way that's fresh and fearless. |
 | Herding cats if the latest novel from John McCabe. In a small town in the south west of England, a brutal turf war is raging quietly. Rivals of a large pork pie manufacturer are being dealt with one by one. Caught up in the thick of things is Gary Shrubble, award-dodging journalist of the town's only newspaper. Gary has a hunch that this is the Big One, the story that will free him forever from the mind-numbing tedium of local reporting. Unfortunately Tim Power, would-be hot-shot advertiser, is dragged reluctantly into the war. Tim discovers that bad advertising can be every bit as effective as good advertising, provided you don't mind upsetting borderline psychopaths along the way. This in turn causes Alistaire Smythe, the sole surviving skin head in the town, and a psychopath to be very upset indeed. John McCabe works as a geneticist and has written four other novels. Herding cats is a very funny, fast moving black comedy. |
 | Geoff Nicholson was educated at Cambridge University, he worked as a bookseller before becoming a writer and has since written fourteen novels and two works of non-fiction. His satirical novel, Bleeding London was short listed for the 1997 Whitbread Prize. He now lives in Los Angeles were his latest novel, Hollywood dodo is set. Henry Cadwallader, an English doctor, is accompanying his aspiring-actress daughter on a trip to Hollywood, were he greatly fears she will corrupted. Once there, however, he finds that he is the one being corrupted, at every turn. He finds himself drawn into a world of Hollywood glamour, obsession, pornography and dodos, where dreams die and extinction threatens. This is a black comedy, where film and history intertwine to offer a lively original read. |
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MAY 2004 Andrea Levy's Small island was announced the winner of the 2004 Orange Prize for Women Fiction writers on 8th June. Information about the award ceremony and Levy is available on the Orange Prize website.
This award started after much controversy in 1995, with the intention of promoting novels by women that were being over looked in the main stream literary prize area, therefore drawing the attention of the reading public. | |
 | Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood is short-listed for this year's Orange Prize. This is her 11th novel and probably the most chilling. It moves beyond the futuristic fantasy of her 1985 bestseller The Handmaid's Tale to an even more disturbing world, shows a deep concern with the stark moral issues facing the human race, and accords a glimpse of a future that lies all too uneasily within reach. A man, once named Jimmy, lives in a tree, wrapped in old bed sheets, now calls himself Snowman. The voice of Oryx, the woman he loved, teasingly haunts him. And the green-eyed Children of Crake are, for some reason, his responsibility. In Jimmy, Atwood has created a great character: a tragic-comic artist of the future, part buffoon, part Orpheus, an adman who's a sad man; a jealous lover who's in perpetual mourning; a fantasist who can only remember the past. |
 | The long awaited new novel from Shirley Hazzard titled The Great Fire, the fire of her title is the Second World War. In war-torn Asia and stricken Europe, men and women, still young but veterans of harsh experience, must reinvent their lives and expectations, and learn, from their past, to dream again. Some will fulfil their destinies, others will falter. At the centre of the story, a brave and brilliant soldier finds that survival and worldly achievement are not enough. His counterpart, a young girl living in Occupied Japan and tending her dying brother, falls in love and in the process discovers herself. In the looming shadow of world enmities resumed, and of Asia's coming centrality in world affairs, a man and a woman seek to recover self-reliance, balance, and tenderness, struggling to reclaim their humanity. |
 | Andrea Levy has been selected for the Orange Prize short list with her novel titled Small Island. Of Jamaican descent, Andrea Levy was previously selected for the 1996 long list with her novel Never far from nowhere. Her new novel is written from a Jamaican perspective and is set just after World War II in London. It concerns Gilbert Joseph, who returning to England after the war is treated very differently now that he is no longer in an RAF uniform. Joined by his wife Hortense, he rekindles a friendship with Queenie who takes in Jamaican lodgers. Can their dreams of a better life in England overcome the prejudice they face? |
 | Also short listed this year is Purple Hibiscus, a debut novel from Nigerian writer Chimamanda Hgozi Adichie. Fifteen-year-old Kambili's world is circumscribed by the high walls of her family compound and the frangipani trees she can see from her bedroom window. Her wealthy Catholic father, although generous and well-respected in the community, is repressive and fanatically religious at home. Her life is lived under his shadow and regulated by schedules: prayer, sleep, study, and more prayer. and the words in her. When Nigeria begins to fall apart under a military coup, Kambili's father, involved in mysterious ways with the unfolding political crisis, sends Kambili and her brother away to their aunt's. Here she discovers love and a life - dangerous and heathen - beyond the confines of her father's authority. The visit will lift the silence from her world and, in time, reveal a terrible, bruising secret at the heart of her family life. |
 | The tenth novel from South African writer Gillian Slovo titled Ice Road has also been short listed for this year's Orange prize. Set in Leningrad in 1933, Ice Road tells the story of loyalty, belief, love and family ties which are all are about to be test to the limit in a fight to see who will survive one of the most crushing moments the world will ever know. Boris Ivanov, the father who understands politics and pragmatism; his daughter Natasha, a carefree, delightful girl who will be almost crushed because of political compromises; Anton, Boris's oldest friend, who in an uncharacteristic moment saves a skinny little orphan he finds on the Moscow train; Anna, a tough intriguing child. Watching it all is the marvellous Irina. Wry, wise, ironic, Irina understands that simple loyalty to an individual may well be more powerful than blind loyalty to an idea. |
 | The Colour by Rose Tremain is a powerful drama of greed and aspiration set in the New Zealand Gold Rush of the mid-19th Century. Harriet and Joseph Baxter, who (along with Joseph's mother) leave England for the promise of the new world that islands of New Zealand represent. Their struggle for survival against the land continues until Joseph discovers gold in a nearby creek and ill-advisedly conceals the find from his mother and his wife. Gold fever takes an all-consuming grip upon him, and he leaves the family-owned farm to traverse the gold fields of the Southern Alps. There he will find a strange fate: one that affects those he has left behind as well as him. |
| For complete information on the Orange Prize, including author biographies, reviews, past winners, and long list selections, go to Orange Prize. | |
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MARCH 2004 With the huge success of Peter Jackson's interpretation of The Lord of the Rings trilogy into film, this month we are featuring novels that have been adapted and are presently being presented on film. The debates continue as to the merits of the novel over the adaptation into film. An informed opinion cannot be reached until both forms of the work have been experienced. Historical opinion seems to confirm that films adapted from novels are usually more acclaimed. Former Hello Sailor singer Graham Brazier, when interviewed in a recent newspaper article said:- "Dreams are the cinema of the subconscious mind, books are the script." | |
 | The Missing by Thomas Eidson is a novel of the American West. It is the story of a dying man's attempts to make peace with his daughter, their struggle to rescue his granddaughter from renegades and slave traders, and his lifelong search for inner peace. It has been made into a major film directed by Ron Howard and stars Tommy Lee Jones and Cate Blanchett. |
 | Set during the American Civil War Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier has been adapted into a Bafta award winning movie staring Nicole Kidman. It tells the story of a very long walk. In the waning months of the Civil War, a wounded Confederate veteran named Inman gets up from his hospital bed and begins the long journey back to his home in the remote hills of North Carolina. Along the way he meets rogues and outlaws, Good Samaritans and vigilantes, people who help and others who hinder, but through it all Inman's aim is true: his one goal is to return to Cold Mountain and to Ada, the woman he left behind. Charles Frazier based the novel on his own family history, and in the characters of Inman and Ada he has paid a rich compliment to their historical counterparts. |
 | Witi Ihimaera's fourth novel Whale rider was first published in 1987 and now since the adaptation into film has globally acclaimed. With it's timeless story of family love, tradition and community, Whale rider tells of the courage of one young girl who stood against the tide of that tradition to enabled her tribe to reconnect with their ancestral life force. Witi Ihimaera wrote the screenplay for the film which was directed by Niki Caro. |
 | The dark suspense thriller by Susanna Moore titled In the cut has been released as a movie directed by Jane Campion and stars Meg Ryan. It is the story of Frannie, who starts an affair with a married detective while he is trying to catch a serial murderer. Through Frannie's eyes, Susanna Moore depicts a world in which violence, silence and sexual oppression are part of women's everyday lives. Frannie is never too sure who she is, or for that matter if her lover is genuine. The novel's ending is the real clincher of this book. Shocking, disturbing and powerfully poetic, it leaves you stunned and wanting more. |
 | The Human stain by Philip Roth was published in 2000. The main character, Coleman Silk has a secret. But it's not the secret of his affair, at seventy-one, with a woman half his age. And it's not the secret of his alleged racism, which provoked the college witchhunt that cost him his job. Coleman's secret is deeper, and lies at the very core of who he is, and he has kept it hidden from everyone for fifty years. Set in 1998, with the backdrop of the possible impeachment of a president, The Human Stain shows us an America where conflicting moralities and ideological divisions result in public denunciations and media harassments, and where innocence is not always a good enough excuse. |
 | The eloquent and witty novel by Daniel Wallace titled Big fish : a novel of mystic proportions has been made into a film by Tim Burton and stars Ewan McGregor and Albert Finney. I tells the story of William, who throughout his childhood, his much-absent father, Edward, regaled him with tall tales of his exploits as a young man. But now that his father is dying, William must get to know the real Edward Bloom, before it's all too late. Inspired by the fragments of stories he's gathered over the years, William recreates his father's life in a series of legends and myths, through which he begins to understand Edward Bloom's great feats - and great failings - at last finding a way to say goodbye. |
 A useful website for films based on books:-The Mid-Continent Public Library in America have produced a great web site called "Based on the book". Here 950 novels and short stories that have been adapted into film are listed. Accessible through movie title, book title, book author or year of movie release.
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JANUARY 2004 All the novels featured this month are translated works recently received by Wellington City Libraries. Three are highly esteemed European authors, and one is a debut novelist. This selection provides a diverse range of subjects, plots and characters, but all are recommended to provide interesting reading. | |
 | The movies of my life : a novel by Alberto Fuguet is translated form the Spanish by Ezra E. Fitz. The creative plot device that steers Alberto Fuguet's novel centres around a list of 50 movies. These movies forma brilliant devise to explore a lonely childhood and a dysfunctional family and takes us from suburban Southern California to Santiago, Chile. As Beltran, the main character, describes and analyses each movie, he peppers the descriptions with details remembered from his childhood and in the process, writes a touching memoir of sorts. Movies of My Life is a book about film and about how movies embed themselves in our souls, helping us all share a blinding fondness for the magic of make-believe. |
 | The Dutch author Harry Mulisch's new novel titled Siegfried asks the question can a work of the imagination help to understand the nature of evil? The main character Rudolf Herter, an author, is in Vienna to read from his new masterwork. He reflects on his time in the same city immediately after the war and the events that lead to the destruction still evident then. He is approached by an elderly couple who have a story of their own to tell of that time, one more terrible than Herter could have imagined. |
 | Translated for the Spanish by Amanda Hopkinson, Money to burn by Ricardo Piglia is a novel based on original reports and witness statements. It tells the story of a gang of bandits who raided a bank in downtown Buenos Aires. They escaped with millions of dollars in cash but six weeks later found their hideout surrounded by 300 military police, journalists and TV cameras. The subsequent siege and its shocking outcome have become a Latin American legend. |
 | The debut novel of Elke Schmitter is titled Mrs Sartoris and is translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway. It is an explosive first novel likened to a 'Madame Bovary' in modern Germany. Mrs Sartoris is a provincial German woman, a bourgeois wife and mother. Yet she harbours secrets and enmities which have been simmering since her teenage rejection by a well-born lover. She is calculating, narcissistic, passionate and deadly, but remains within a grey, conventional existence, that is until she slides into an affair with a married man with whom she plans to run away. The repercussions of this will explode with unimaginable force. |
 | Three novellas by Arthur Schnitzler titled Desire and delusion have been selected and translated from the German by Margaret Schefer. Although Schnitzler died in 1931, he became popular again after Frederick Raphel adapted his short story, Dream Story for the Kubrick film, Eyes wide shut. In this work there are three of Schnitzler's greatest novellas, all acknowledged masterpieces of psychological realism, "Dying", "Flight into Darkness", and "Fraulein Else". They reveal the depths of his psychological and moral understanding of life as well as the storytelling techniques that immerse the readers. |
 | The most recent novel from Mario Vargas Llosa, one of Latin America's most important writers is titled The way to paradise and is translated by Natasha Wimmer. In this novel Vargas Llosa tells the dramatic story of two bold, independent adventurers: Paul Gaugin, one of the great French painters, and his grandmother Flora Tristan, a trail-blazing women's suffragist. Flora died before her grandson was born, but their travels and obsessions unfold side by side in this novel. It is rare study of passion, ambition and the determined pursuit of greatness in the face of illness, death and conservative forces. |
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NOVEMBER 2003 This month we are featuring a selection of long novels to enjoy during the summer holidays. All these novels have complex plots, many amazing characters, humour, plenty of suspense and excitement. They will in fact, ensure many hours of entertaining reading. | |
 | Translated from the Norwegian by Kenneth Steven, The Half Brother by Lars Saabye Chritensen is a family saga set in Oslo. Winner of the Nordic Prize 2002, this literary novel tells the story of an ordinary Norwegian family in the 1960s, set apart by extraordinary family members, and of two half-brothers leading very different and separate lives, until they are brought together again at their mother's deathbed. |
 | Another translated novel, this time from the Italian by William Weaver, Baudolino by Umberto Eco is a historical novel set in the middle ages. This is a wondrous, dazzling, beguiling tale of history, myth and invention. It is 1204, and Constantinople is being sacked and burned by the knights of the fourth Crusade. Amid the carnage and confusion Baudolino saves a Byzantine historian and high court official from certain death at the hands of the crusading warriors, and proceeds to tell his own fantastical story. |
 | Mailman by J. Robert Lennon is a black comedy about the state of small town America to-day seen through interior life of its most neurotic mailman. Albert Lippincott is a thirty-year veteran of the Nestor New York Post Office - a letter carrier extraordinaire, aggressively cheerful, obsessively efficient. But Albert has a few things to hide. His unfortunate habit, for instance, of reading other people's mail. Also his abortive university career, a nervous breakdown, his disastrous marriage, grotesquely self-absorbed parents, and a sexually ambiguous entanglement with his melodramatic sister. Things are closing in on Albert, and he is forced to confront, once and for all, his life's failures |
 | Audrey Niffenegger's debut novel The time traveler's wife is the story of Clare, a beautiful art student and Henry, an adventuresome librarian, who have known each other since Clare was six and Henry Thirty-six and who were married when Clare was twenty-three and Henry thirty one. Impossible but true, because Henry is one of the first people diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder. Periodically his genetic clock resets and he finds himself misplaced in time, pulled to moments of emotional gravity from his life, past and future. His disappearances are spontaneous, his experiences unpredictable, alternately harrowing and amusing. This novel depicts the effects on their marriage and passionate love for each other, as the story unfolds from both points of view. |
 | Two decades in the making, The Family by Mario Puzo marks the final triumph by the Godfather of Mafia epics. This is the story of the greatest crime family in Italian history - the Borgias. Set in fifteenth-century Rome, the extravagance and intrigue of the Vatican are revealed. The story is told how Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander, created his son Cesare as the dark instrument of his will, and how Lucrezia, the emotional heart of the family, became a woman many remember as saintly in spite of participating fully, even incestuously, in her family's intrigues. The intermingled stories constitute a symphony of human emotion and behaviour, from pride to romance to jealousy to betrayal and murderous rage. |
 | Another historical novel, Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson is set in the late 17th century, with the natural philosophers of England's newly formed Royal Society questioning the universe and dissecting everything that moves. While towering geniuses like Newton and Leibniz decode nature itself, bizarre adventures (merely beginning with the Great Plague and Great Fire) happen to the fictional Royal Society member Daniel Waterhouse, who knows everyone but isn't quite bright enough for cutting-edge science. As the reign of Charles II gives way to that of James II and then William of Orange, Stephenson traces the complex lines of finance and power that form the 17th-century Internet. Gold and silver, lead and (repeatedly) mercury or quicksilver flow in glittering patterns between centres of marketing and intrigue in England, Germany, France and Holland. Paper flows as well: stocks, shares, scams and letters holding layers of concealed code messages. This is a huge, exhausting read, full of rewards and quirky insights that no other author could have created. Fantastic or farcical episodes sometimes clash strangely with the deep cruelty and suffering of 17th-century realism. |
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SEPTEMBER 2003 This month we are featuring a selection of novels that were chosen for the Man Booker prize longlist. Although these were not include in the shortlist announced on 16th September, 2003, they are all fine example of each author's writing ability. The short list can be viewed here. The winner chosen from the shortlist will be announced on 14th October, 2003. | |
 | An amazing omission for the shortlist was Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee. In this his latest work of fiction Coetzee offers us a profound and delicate vision of literary celebrity, artistry and the private life of the mind. Elizabeth Costello is an Australian writer of international renown; she is feted, studied, honoured. Famous principally for an early novel that established her reputation and from which, it seems, she will never escape, she has reached the stage, late in life, where her remaining function is to be venerated and applauded. One of a new breed of intellectual nomads, her life has become a series of engagements in sterile conference rooms throughout the world - a private consciousness obliged to reveal itself to a curious public. |
 | The Taxi driver's daughter is the touching and wonderfully engaging second novel by Julia Darling. It is late December and fifteen year old Caris is trying to hang an angel on a Christmas tree in a terraced street in Newcastle upon Tyne. She is interrupted by the arrival of the police who have come to the house to announce that her mother, Louise, has been caught stealing shoes in a department store in town. Caris's father Mac, a taxi driver, struggles to keep the family together as Christmas looks set for disaster, especially when Louise's drunken, dishevelled mother moves in. |
 | The Curious incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon was published simultaneously for adults and for children. The Publishers were convinced that both audiences would recognise it as one of those very rare books that change the way you see everything. Christopher is an intelligent youth who lives in the functional hinterland of autism. Every day is an investigation for him because of all the aspects of human life that he does not quite get. When the dog next door is killed with a garden fork, Christopher becomes quietly persistent in his desire to find out what has happened and tugs away at the world around him until a lot of secrets unravel messily. |
 | For octogenarian Francis King, the latest of his life-time of published work, The Nick of Time is his debut on the Booker listings. His novel looks at the havoc wrought when a young Egyptian, an illegal immigrant finds himself in London. Ahmad leads a double life, befriending and lodging with an elderly woman who suffers from MS; while at the same time throwing himself onto the London gay scene. Jealousy looms when he begins a relationship with a gay protector and is arrested because of his illegal status. |
 | Heligoland by Shena Mackay was nominated for the 2003 Booker long list. It is the second time one of her works has achieved such acclaim. In this warm and moving novel Rowena Snow, a woman of Indian/Scottish parentage, comes to South London in search of her own Utopia or the Heligoland of her childhood imagination. The people she befriends are mainly elderly or middle-aged, all living fretfully in genteel obscurity. The circumstances of these marginal defeated lives are sketched in almost short stories, but are all linked through the main character, Rowena Snow. |
 | A second Booker nomination for Tim Parks, since 1997 with his novel titled Judge Savage. Savage, promoted at a young age to the position of Crown Court Judge because of his ability and because of the political convenience of promoting a man with coloured skin, thinks it is now time to slow down, to enjoy his marriage and give more attention to his teenage children. His career demands the most responsible behaviour. Day by day Judge Savage presides over those whose double lives have been exposed. He must be above suspicion. But the passage from complexity to simplicity eludes him. As the most tangled lives are ironed out in court, Daniel Savage's own existence descends into a mess of violence and confusion. |
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NEW FICTION BOOKS - AUGUST 2003 This month we are featuring a selection of some great page-turning thrillers! | |
 | The new psychological thriller from the master writer Jeffrey Deaver is titled The Vanished Man In this novel a gifted illusionist turns his hand to violent death, and vanishing from the crime scene is only one of a series of classic conjuring tricks that paralysed forensic investigator Lincoln Rhyme finds himself having to understand. More important than his tricks is the conjuror's habits of mind--misdirection piled on deceit piled on false leads. It is not just sleight of hand that deceives the eye; it is where the eye is tricked into looking. Is the killer who calls himself Malerik just after a sequence of showy violent deaths, or is that what he wants Lincoln to think? |
 | Cradle Song is the title of a stunning literary crime debut from Robert Edric. This is the first of a planned crime trilogy set in the city of Hull. Cradle Song is told in the wry tones of a very troubled private investigator called Leo Rivers against a backdrop of Internet pornography, Police corruption and child murder. This is a dark, intense and chillingly suspenseful novel. |
 | The latest novel from the great crime writer P. D. James has the title, The Murder Room. In this new masterpiece of suspense, Commander Dalgliesh is persuaded by an old friend to visit the Dupayne, a small private museum on the edge of Hampstead Heath, he has no idea that he will return to it one week later under very different circumstances. One of the family trustees has been horribly murdered and Dalgliesh and his team are called in to investigate a death which, from the first, is fraught with complications. Another great novel from P. D. James, that of course will keep the reader guessing to the very end. |
 | The international bestselling author Jonathan Kellerman's new novel is titled, A Cold Heart and has the return of the character Alex Delaware, the psychiatrist detective. He becomes involved personally in a series of killings of promising artists, on the brink of breakthroughs or comebacks. His investigations lead to a gruesome, sadistic pattern of death, that brings the dark side of the art world to the fore endangering the lives of Alex Delaware and his friends. As always this is a clever, chilling American thriller. |
 | Fear itself by Jonathan Nasaw, is a riveting psychological thriller. In this novel FBI agent E. L. Pender is requested by an old friend to investigate the suspicious deaths of three fellow attendees of a convention for Persons with Specific Phobia disorder. A man suffering from acrophobic jumped from a 19th story window, a woman with haemophobia dies in a bath when her wrists are cut, and a woman with a horror of suffocation is found in a canal, her lungs empty of water. As E. L. Pender investigates, more deaths occur and he realises his life and the life of his old friend are in great danger. |
 | The Best revenge is the title of new psychological thriller from Stephen White. Clinical psychologist, Alan Gregory is hired to help a young man readjust to normal life after spending 13 years in prison. The recent discovery of a murder weapon, along with DNA testing proved the young man' innocence. Unfortunately prison would seem to be a safer option him as the unravelling of truth becomes a race against time. What Alan Gregory discovers is the dark chaos of a disturbing past, the twisted logic of a tormented and a person with a thirst for revenge that knows no bounds. |
| NEW FICTION BOOKS - JULY 2003 | |
| Featuring: GRANTA'S TOP TEN YOUNG NOVELISTS Every decade the publishers Granta list the top ten young novelists they predict will become the most celebrated in the following ten years. As previously listed writers have gone on to receive international acclaim for great literary achievements. In celebration of this announcement this month we will showcase new fiction from six of the young novelist named by Granta. All titles have recently been received by Wellington City Libraries. Examples of the authors' work and interviews are in Granta Magazine for Spring 2003. | |
 | Brick Lane / Monica Ali With its gritty Tower Hamlets setting, this sharply observed contemporary novel about the life of an Asian immigrant girl deals cogently with issues of love, cultural difference and the human spirit. Nazneen is a teenager forced into an arranged marriage with a man considerably older than her. Fearfully leaving the sultry oppression of her Bangladeshi village, Nazneen finds herself cloistered in a small flat in a high-rise block in the East End of London. Because she speaks no English, she is obliged to depend totally on her husband. But it becomes apparent that, of the two, she is the real survivor: more able to deal with the ways of the world, and a better judge of the vagaries of human behaviour. (Amazon) |
 | Voices /Susan Elderkin In the remote, blood-red landscape of the Australian bush, thirteen-year-old Billy Saint hears the haunting song of an Aboriginal girl. The song tugs at something deep, something larger and more powerful than himself. She has sung Billy up - and he is destined to love her for ever... In an Alice Springs hospital ten years later, recovering from gruesome wounds of mysterious origin, Billy attempts to explain the voices in his head. But only Cecily, the Aboriginal nurse, will listen. What unravels is a mesmerising account of the relationship between a man, the land he loves, and the spirits of the country, struggling to be heard before it is too late. (Book cover) |
 | Indelible acts / A.L. Kennedy. The twelve stories in Indelible Acts are variations on a theme of longing - the unassailable human need for contact, for completion, for that most fugitive gift of all: reciprocal love. Its characters' lives are thwarted, dashed, impassioned, each in their own way immolated by hope. (Amazon). |
 | The impressionist / by Hari Kunzru. In India, at the birth of the last century, an infant is brought howling into the world, his remarkable paleness marking him out from his brown-skinned fellows. Revered at first, he is later cast out form his wealthy home when his true parentage is revealed. So begins Pran Nath's odyssey of self-discovery - a journey that will take him from the streets of Agra, via the red light district of Bombay, to the green lawns of England and beyond - as he struggles to understand who he really is. (Amazon). |
 | Finding myself / Toby Litt. In this expertly plotted funny novel Toby Litt has invented a successful chick-lit novelist, Victoria About, who plans a new book loosely emulating To The Lighthouse. She will invite a dozen people, friends, acquaintances and unknowns to spend a month in a lovely big house by the sea. They will get a holiday, waited on hand and foot. She, from their exploits and interactions, and characters will get a novel or so it seems. Of course not all goes according to plan. |
 | Timoleon Vieta come home : a sentimental journey / Dan Rhodes. Cockroft, a faded composer and socialite, lives in self-imposed exile and fantasises of true love and extravagant suicides. Rattling about his dilapidated farmhouse in the Italian countryside, subsisting on a trickle of royalties from past successes, his only constant source of company is the ever loyal Timoleon Vieta - a mongrel with the most beautiful eyes. When a handsome but surly individual - known only as The Bosnian - arrives on the scene, the strong bond between Cockroft and Timoleon is put under strain. This is a tragi-comic work of macabre beauty, that amuses and moves in equal measure. (Amazon). |
| NEW FICTION BOOKS - MAY 2003 | |
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The long awaited new novel from Rachel Cusk is titled
The Lucky Ones. This is a profound study of human relationships, five overlapping narratives of love and detachment merge to form a powerful evocation of family identity. Rachel Cusk writes of life's transformations; of what separates us from those we love and what binds us to those we no longer understand. The Lucky Ones is a novel about creating and sustaining life. It illuminates with startling precision the texture and complexity of emotional existence. A rewarding read.
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The debut novel,
Death and the penguin by Andrey Kurkov is the must read of the year. This is a thoughtful, gentle yet darkly melancholy novel. Set in the Ukraine in the years immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the novel chronicles the journalistic career of Victor, who shares a flat with Misha, his depressed Penguin, rescued from the under-funded zoo in Kiev. Victor is asked to write obelisks, obituaries, for a prominent city paper about notable figures in the community, and quickly transforms himself from struggling writer to wealthy journalist. It soon becomes apparent that there is a more sinister motive at play, and Victor finds himself descending in a Kafkaesque realm of suspicion and unease.
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Crabwalk is latest novel from Gunter Grass.
In this new novel Grass examines the suffering of Germans during World War II. Crabwalk tells the story of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a former cruise ship turned refugee carrier, by a Soviet submarine in January 1945. Some 9,000 people, most of them women and children fleeing from the advancing Red Army, went down in the Baltic Sea, making it the deadliest maritime disaster of all time. Grass's narrator is one of the few survivors, a middle-aged journalist who lives in Berlin. Born to an unwed mother on a lifeboat the night of the attack, Paul Pokriefke tries to piece together the tragic events. A deeply moving novel, ending with a very unexpected twist.
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 | The recent novel, All over creation by Ruth Ozeki skilfully and subtlety uses as its main theme the arguments around genetic modification. Lloyd and Momoko Fuller were once the largest potato producers in Power County, now 25 years later they have drastically downsized their farm and are both beginning to feel the ravages of time. Unfortunately their simple agricultural life style is about to be disrupted, beyond their wildest imaginings. With the arrival of their estranged daughter Yumi and her three children, the invasion by eco-revolutionaries, and the unwanted interests of a Washington based agribusiness. the Fullers lives will never be the same again. |
 | Barbara Trapido has beautifully written slice of both personal and political history with her new novel Frankie and Stankie. Dinah and her sister Lisa are growing up in South Africa in the fifties - a time of dreadful changes.The novel follows Dinah from childhood, through adolescence and marriage, to voluntary exile in London, we get a vivid glimpse of one of the darker passages of twentieth century history. A beautifully written novel, giving a glimpse of both personal and political history. At times very funny, sad and quite dark. |
 | The recent novel, The colour is the title of Rose Tremain's latest novel, surprisingly set in New Zealand in the mid 19th Century gold rush period. Joseph and Harriet Blackstone, along with Joseph's mother Lillian, emigrate from England in search of new beginnings and prosperity in New Zealand. But the harsh land near Christchurch where they settle threatens to destroy them almost before they begin. When Joseph finds gold in the creek, he guiltily hides the discovery from his wife and mother and is seized by a rapturous obsession with the voluptuous riches awaiting him deep in the earth. Abandoning his farm and family, he sets off alone for the new gold-fields over the Southern Alps. The Colour is the story of a quest for the impossible, an attempt to mine the complexities of love and in the process discover what it is that makes men and women happy. |
| NEW FICTION BOOKS - FEBRUARY 2003 | |
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We recently received the latest and fifth novel from the IMPAC prize winner Nicola Baker titled
Behindlings. Set in parochial Canvey Island, Barker has returned to the funny , inventive unnerving Gothic terrain of her last novel. This novel is about following, as some people follow the stars, the soaps, rare birds, football or racehorses, Wesley - the hero of this book - prefers not to follow. He thinks that to follow anything too assiduously is a sign of intellectual weakness. Wesley is a prankster, a maverick, a charismatic manipulator, an accidental murderer. For these reasons he longs to live his life anonymously. But he can't. It is his awful destiny to be hotly pursued - secretly stalked, obsessively hunted - by a disparate group of oddballs he calls The Behindlings. Their motivations? Love, boredom, habit, greed, hatred, revenge. Can he stop them? Does he really want to?
A great distracting read, full of deadpan wit and black comedy and a slightly surreal touch.
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The
Seven sisters is the latest novel from Margaret Drabble. From her first book Drabble has charted the progress of the English family life in the welfare state. Her protagonists were energetic, larky intelligent women. Candida Wilton - the diarist of "Seven Sisters" is the older version of those amazing characters and so, a bit slower. When the book opens, Candida has been living alone for a couple of years since being supplanted by a younger woman. Candida's life started to change when the building where she took evening classes was redeveloped into a health club, and she was encouraged to join. The flattening of her personality from a long boring marriage, begins to open out - she suggests the old classmates meet to continue their study. They discuss travelling to the Mediterranean to follow in the footsteps of Virgil's story. Then an unexpected windfall encourages her to organise the trip - six assorted intelligent women - and an exotic tour operator who drives their vehicle - makes seven. A satisfying and pleasurable novel.
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Milan Kundera's brilliant new novel,
Ignorance is set in contemporary Prague It takes up the complex and emotionally charged theme of exile and creates from it a literary masterpiece. In this novel a man and a woman meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned twenty years earlier when they chose to become exiles. Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted almost as soon as it began and then lost in the tides of history? The truth is that after such a long absence 'their memories no longer match'. The concepts of absence, memory, forgetting and ignorance are carefully woven into a richly rewarding tale.
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The long awaited new novel from Annie Proulx has finally arrived and is titled
That old ace in the hole. This is a richly textured story of one man's struggle to make good in the inhospitable ranch country of the Texas panhandle. As usual, Proulx has filled her novel with an array of amazingly quirky characters each with even quirkier names. Filled with razor sharp wit, this is a novel mixed with history, landscape and quixotic Texan life about chasing dreams in a corporate world. A very entertaining read.
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