Archive for 'Fiction'
Get a move on
Howard Jacobson can write prose in a rhythm that can really move you along. I’ve just picked up Roots Schmoots and come across this paragraph:- I don’t recall any family rambling or cycling, but we could have rambled or cycle, so many resemblances did we bear to the cheerful, thoughtful, self-improving gentile lower-lower middle classes [...]
Posted: December 26th, 2010 under Books, Fiction.
Comments: 3
The Griffin Encounter:- an airport novel for short-haul flights
Chapter 1 “You’ve done well, Nicky,” said Duke, as they sat in the back seat of the bullet proof car. “You’ve pulled that party together. It was a rag-tag mob of criminal gangsters and street fighters before you re-organised it.” Nick Griffin bent his head. “All learned through you, El Duke.” Only David Duke’s [...]
Posted: October 26th, 2009 under Books, Fiction.
Comments: 4
Radio 4 Sci-Fi
Radio 4 are currently broadcasting The Death of Grass [caution spoiler], part one and two of which are on iplayer. After overcoming the difficulties of taking the likeable David Mitchell seriously as a narrator, I’m finding it an interesting distraction. I always thought John Christopher’s Death of Grass was under-rated in comparison to Day of [...]
Posted: March 4th, 2009 under Books, Fiction, Television.
Comments: 17
Zoe Heller’s Believers
I get my books lukewarm from the library rather than hot off the press so I’ve only just read Zoe Heller’s The Believers. I liked her Notes on a Scandal, which was an amplification of the lines “People in love cannot be won by kindness, And opposition makes them feel like martyrs.” The martyr in [...]
Posted: February 6th, 2009 under Books, Fiction.
Comments: 11
The Other Elizabeth Taylor
According to this article in The Atlantic, Virago is re-issuing six novels by the underrated English novelist Elizabeth Taylor. Virago’s website isn’t working so I can’t say which six novels these are but evidently The Soul of Kindness, my favourite, is not one of them. A character that turns up often in Elizabeth Taylor is [...]
Posted: August 24th, 2008 under Books, Fiction, Uncategorized.
Comments: 2
Philip Roth, American Pastoral
Guest Post by Mikey Book Review: Philip Roth, American Pastoral, (London: Vintage, 1998) The tributes on the back of the British edition of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral that I have includes one from Tim Adams of the Observer who refers to the novel both as a “masterpiece” and “momentous.” Having recently read and enjoyed [...]
Posted: July 27th, 2008 under Books, Fiction, Review.
Comments: 11
