First published 2003. Pan paperback, 2003. pp 338 c.86,000 words. This is something of a period piece, set in 1996 in the run up to the general election that took place in 1997, and the making by Tony Blair of ‘New Labour’. It was a time in Britain of optimism, of relative prosperity for most, […]
Half a World Away — Tom Bromley Read More »
First published 2016. Penguin paperback, 2017, pp 218, c.95,000 words. Everything in this novel is ambiguous: we are never sure what is real and what is only desired or feared. Ostensibly it is a simple story, told from the point of view of a young woman, Sophia Papastergiadis. She and her mother have come from
Hot Milk — Deborah Levy Read More »
First published 2011. Atlantic Books paperback, 2011, pp 273, c.55,000 words. This book notoriously was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2011, the year that Stella Rimington, thriller writer and former head of MI5, declared that one of the criteria for the prize that year would be ‘readability’. Hurrah, who wants to read an unreadable
Snowdrops — A. D. Miller Read More »
First published 1977. Johnathan Cape hardback, 1977, pp 704, c.265,000 words. The trouble with being a very successful writer is that when your next book is a turkey everyone is going to tell you it’s a swan. Fowles is quite capable of writing some really elegant and powerful prose and putting that together with absorbing
Daniel Martin — John Fowles Read More »
First published 2014. Picador hardback, 2014, pp 261, c.45,000 words. There is no doubt that St Aubyn is a very clever chap, but unfortunately that doesn’t always make for good reading. Presumably this was a vanity project that the author’s publisher allowed as an intermission after a successful series. Some parts are quite amusing. The
Lost for Words — Edward St Aubyn Read More »
First published 1860. Wordsworth paperback, 1995, pp 459, c.215,000 words. Very much a Victorian novel, this is full of authorial moralising and has a ridiculously melodramatic ending. The authorial voice slows the narrative pace, something that would be unacceptable to today’s publishers. Victorian society had its strict codes of writing that seeped in from the
Mill on the Floss, The — George Eliot Read More »
A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr First published 1980. Penguin paperback, 2016, pp104, c.36,000 words. Although short, this is a superb novel. The protagonist, Tom Birkin, looks back at a brief episode of his life when he was a young man from London and had spent a summer in a small, remote
Month in the Country, A — J. L. Carr Read More »
First published 2020. Atlantic Books paperback, 2021, pp313, c.70,000 words. This is a Scott of the Antarctic or a Titanic of a book: a magnificent try in so many ways, but ultimately a failure. I had high hope for it as the predecessor of MacInnes’s superb In Ascension, but the later coheres where this does
Gathering Evidence — Martin MacInnes Read More »
First published 2020. Amazon paperback, 2020, pp 282, c.84,000 words. There is a cracking modern thriller here, but it is let down by the lack of editing. Did Ennew not bother to read it over, or get anyone else to, before uploading it to Amazon? Firstly there are the numerous typos, often glaringly obvious like
Good Morning Girl, The — Craig Ennew Read More »
First published 2023. Atlantic paperback, 2024, pp 496, c.100,000 words. This is one of the very best modern books that I have read. The beauty and subtlety of the language shines out from first to last, and so much contains what Hilary Mantel called ‘a wobble in every sentence’: the true nature of human communication.
In Ascension — Martin MacInnes Read More »