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Cape Martin Amis’ acerbic new novel set in the summer of 1970 explores the seventies sexual revolution when a momentous transfer of power took place between the sexes. Partly autobiographical, its looks at the casualties, including Amis’ sister, Sally, through the eyes of its three main characters: twenty-year-old English student, Keith Nearing, his girlfriend, Lily and her friend, Sheherazade. Narrated by Keith, now fifty, who reminisces about that fateful summer in 1970, we relive his sexual trauma that wounds him still like ‘pincers of bliss’. Amis uses the myth of Narcissus to illustrate the problem of aging and losing one’s sexual attractiveness at a time when men have lost increasing ground to women’s sexual and economic freedom. He brilliantly portrays the pathos and powerlessness of one bewildered man as he reaches into his past to make sense of the present.
Price: EUR 16.30
Corgi When a man dies in a remote country village from what appears to be a random snake bite, the hospital seeks the expertise of the reclusive wildlife vet, Clara Benning. A child victim of an almost deadly bite herself, Clara soon finds herself drawn unwillingly into the spotlight as she helps to unravel an ancient barbaric snake ritual, an abandoned house and a fifty-year-old unspeakable tragedy. This tense, intelligent, atmospheric psychological thriller with its intriguingly introverted, complex heroine is a must-read for those interested in the unusual combination of snake folk lore and good detective drama!
Price: EUR 9.30
Penguin T. C. Boyle is the perfect person to elucidate the life of one of the greatest architects ever, Frank Lloyd Wright; in fact, he lives in one of the houses Wright first designed. Boyle does not fiddle around with familiar biographical material about Wright’s professional success; instead, he approaches Wright’s character through the lens of his messy love life. ‘The Women’ tells the story of the four major women in Wright’s life, working backwards from 1932, when Wright was living in comparative domestic stability with his third wife Olgivanna, to his profoundly unstable second wife Miriam, back to his great love in life and his intellectual equal, Mamah Cheney, who tragically lost her life and, finally, to his first wife Kitty, mother of six of his children. Although the novel is about ‘The Women’, they exist only as acolytes surrounding the master. Wright treated all his women the same, requiring them to serve his genius at whatever cost. Boyle brilliantly captures Wright’s personal dramas alongside the privileges and pitfalls of fame and success.
Price: EUR 8.30
Penguin The hero of ‘Strangers’ is a retired bank manager, Paul Sturgis, who is ambivalent about two women; one he barely knows, the other he barely likes. But appearances are deceptive as essentially Paul Sturgis is a very isolated character, living alone in a dark flat. At night he sends himself to sleep with imaginary walks around the house he grew up in, and the rest of the time he dreams of escaping. All that remains of his family is a cousin by marriage who fiercely conceals her own loneliness by fabricating a life of friendships and busyness. Once a week they meet in ritual recognition of a shared past, and in solidarity against a shared future where they will probably die alone. Although Anita Brookner’s novels about human frailty suggest heaviness and despair, she still manages to inject them with sparkle, life and hope. A very intense tale worth reading!
Price: EUR 9.90
Little Brown Doctorow’s new novel is based on the famously eccentric Collier brothers, Homer and Langley, whose decomposing bodies were discovered in 1947 in their family brownstone among large quantities of trash. In this highly entertaining novel, fictional characters cavort with historical ones, as the brothers emerge as victims of their own stunted personalities. It is hard not to see some symbolic significance in the perspectives of Homer, a blind man with a deep intuition and an acute sense of hearing and Langley, a victim of WWI, damaged by mustard gas. These two eccentrics rarely leave their New York townhouse in an attempt to shut out the turbulent world. Nevertheless, history passes through their cluttered house in the form of immigrants, society women, prostitutes, gangsters and jazz musicians. This brilliantly conceived, imaginative novel depicts the brothers’ struggle to make meaning for themselves in a world in transition.
Price: EUR 14.50
Faber and Faber Harrison William Shepherd, known as Will, Harry or Insólito is the son of an American ‘bean counter’ and a Mexican flapper. He is brought up in both countries, eventually becoming the celebrated author of American potboilers about the Aztecs. Kingsolver cleverly inserts the fictional Shepherd into pivotal moments of recorded history, using both fictional and actual newspaper reports. As a youth in Mexico City, he sees a tiny woman of regal bearing, her hair ‘braided in a heavy crown’, buying parrots in the street, and becomes a plaster-mixer and cook to her husband, Diego Rivera. He observes how Frida Kahlo despairs of Rivera's infidelities and when Lev Trotsky seeks refuge with the revolutionary artist from Stalin's assassins, Shepherd becomes Kahlo's sometime spy and Trotsky's cook and secretary. As a naive and humble typist he plays a bit part in the rift between Trotsky and Rivera, and in Trotsky's murder. Back in the US, as the cold war escalates, these associations draw the scrutiny of the House Un-American Activities Committee. In this vibrant story of identity, Kingsolver probes the source of the vexed historical relationship between art and politics in the United States, as well as the gap - the lacuna - between truth and public presumption.
Price: EUR 14.80
Harvill One cold day in January, the police are summoned to investigate a savage murder in a sleepy little hamlet in North Sweden. The village seems eerily quiet and deserted until the police uncover a massacre of unprecedented proportion in Swedish history. When Judge Birgitta Roslin reads about it, she realises that she has a family connection to one of the couples killed and decides to investigate. She eventually uncovers an international web of complex corruption and vengeance spanning over a hundred years. In this exceptional and subtle novel, Mankell handles both pressing international issues and broad historical themes with great psychological insight and chilling suspense, propelling the reader onwards to uncover the slowly burning ‘truths’ revealed behind the Swedish massacre.
Penguin ‘Jerusalem’ is a riotous, hilarious but, at the same time, poignant parody of the English, Englishness and the colonial rulers’ relationship with their colonies, pre and post-independence. Like David Mitchell in ‘Cloud Atlas’, Patrick Neate deploys different writing styles to characterise the spanned generations. The story begins with the journal of an unnamed officer serving during the Boer War, an initially proudly English servant of king and country who begins to question the principles behind the Empire. Retiring home following a leg amputation, he takes a lively anthropological interest in what constitutes a ‘rural idyll.’ The link between this vividly portrayed England and the equally vivid portrayal of ‘Zambawi’ is provided by the ‘white man’s’ dreams of Prisoner 118, incarcerated on charges of alleged treason, and coincidentally the sufferer of an excruciating infection that rots his leg. Family ties between compelling characters complete the contrast between English rural traditions of a century ago, the seedier side of London life today, and the bleakness, corruption and glimmers of hope in a fictional, yet recognisable African country in a novel simply bursting with witty observation and satirical commentary!
Century In Deadly Communion, the streets of imperial Vienna are being stalked by a sexually deranged psychopath. When the body of a young girl is found killed by the insertion of a hat pin into her brain, Detective Inspector Rheinhardt calls on his old friend psychoanalyst Dr. Max Liebermann, to gain insights into the murderer’s mind. But Liebermann is distracted by one of his own patients who has seen a man in the street without a shadow and is convinced that he had caught sight of his own doppelganger as a prelude to death. Liebermann suggests that the killer is a thanatophilliac, someone who finds death arousing. By writing a few chapters from the murderer’s perspective, giving clues to his motivation for the killings, Frank Tallis creates a gripping tension between the killer and his pursuers. What makes this fifth novel in the Liebermann series so compelling is its use of the then latest psychoanalytical techniques combined with fascinating insights into the historical development of modern ‘pathology’ and its labels.
Price: EUR 14.30
Windmill It is 1914 and an English archaeologist, Somerville, is about to fulfil his lifelong dream of excavating for buried treasure in the Mesopotamian desert. He soon finds his idealism and expertise sorely tested when he is confronted with the naked ambition, treachery and greed of the other parties involved each vying for control over Mesopotamia’s heritage. Richly peopled, fast moving and written with Unsworth’s hallmark of economy and elegance, this novel’s universal theme makes us reflect yet again with satisfying intensity on the fate of humanity’s buried ideals when confronted with human destructiveness.
Stephen T. Asma - On Monsters: An Unnatural History of our Worst Fears Oxford University Press ‘On Monsters’, by Chicago-based Professor of Philosophy Stephen T. Asma, is an original and highly engrossing investigation into how the concept of ‘monsters’ must have evolved. One clue lies in the word’s origin, from the Latin ‘monstrum’, derived from the verb ‘monere’, meaning to warn; Asma’s primary point of departure is, therefore, the human intellect and how it aspired to make sense of the unfamiliar, thus ominous and intimidating, outside world. For example, scientific thinking suggests that our common phobias – such as the fear of spiders – hark back to the time when the fangs and many pairs of eyes of venomous spiders really were a threat to human evolution and a legitimate signal to make a run for it! This extremely accessible book goes on to explain that the origins of many Greek myths are revealed in the ancients’ attempts to wrap a physical shape around mystifying fossil forms: the Cyclops, for example, is apparently the outcome of an endeavour to interpret mastodon skulls. Starting from the blatant machismo of Alexander the Great and his army, who fought fantastical beasts in India, and working his way through human birth defects, freak shows, seafaring myths, well-known monsters of religion and fiction, war crimes, murders and a whole range of our ‘worst fears’ in general, Asma provides a warmly written insight into why, with such a history behind us, humans continue to be fascinated by anything that is unfamiliar.
Price: EUR 22.00
Ed. Bill Bryson - Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society Harper Since 1660, when Christopher Wren gave a lecture on astronomy, ‘The Society’ as it was called then, met weekly to witness and discuss scientific experiments. By 1662, it had secured a Royal Charter to become the ‘Royal Society’, creating whole new branches of science which oversaw splitting the atom, discovering hydrogen, the double helix and the electron. The ‘Royal Society’ also developed ideas on evolution, gravity and motion, furthering our understanding of diverse subjects from stock market analysis to astrophysics. Bill Bryson has edited this superb compilation of today’s most distinguished writers who comment on its immense achievements and disputations since its inception. Chapters include Steve Jones on biodiversity, Neal Stephenson on metaphysics, Margaret Atwood on mad scientists and Richard Dawkins on Darwin, all offering eclectic, fascinating contributions in celebration of scientific discovery, past and present.
Price: EUR 24.50
Granta In this spirited broadside, American journalist, Barbara Ehrenreich, examines the impact of ‘positive thinking’ on religion, medicine, academia and the business community. She argues that faith in ‘positive thinking’ has become so ingrained in American society that ‘positive’ has become synonymous with ‘good’, encouraging people to deny reality and submit cheerfully to misfortune rather than being actively aware. She attacks self-help gurus who encourage their followers to stop watching the news and get rid of the negative people in their lives. She despairs of business motivators who advise people who have lost their jobs, their health insurance and their homes in the aftermath of the recent financial crisis that ‘you can have all that you want, but if you feel sick, defeated or discouraged, you only have yourself to blame’. Yet despite the American infatuation with positive thinking, it has not made the nation happier. She suggest that the effort of positive thought control which is always presented as a life-saver has become a deadly weight, obscuring judgement and keeping people in the dark. The threats the world faces are real and can only be won by shaking off self-absorption and taking action.
Price: EUR 14.90
Elizabeth Gilbert - Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace with Marriage Bloomsbury Elizabeth Gilbert’s word-of-mouth bestseller ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ is the story of her journey to Italy, India and Bali in search of herself. Her odyssey began with the traumatic break-up of her marriage and concluded with her falling in love with Felipe, a Brazilian with an Australian passport. In ‘Committed’ we discover what happened next. Felipe encounters visa problems re-entering the U.S. and it seems the couple must marry before they can set up home together. Having been hurt before, both are fearful of wedlock and the necessity of marrying Felipe presents Elizabeth with the structure for this book: a memoir, but framed by an examination of marriage at a time in its history when the institution has never been less popular. The result is neither a comprehensive nor a sociological or academic study of marriage, although it does provide us with some interesting and unusual facts about how the ritual has changed through history. It is more a study of intimacy, partnership and romantic love, and the possibility (or impossibility) of finding it in the twenty-first century, told in the effortlessly analytical, wittily self-deprecating, wise voice that so enchanted readers in her first equally tender, funny autobiography.
Price: EUR 14.95
Sceptre Ms. Hustvedt has long been an explorer of the brain and mind but her investigations take a more personal turn when she herself suddenly suffers from convulsions while speaking in public about her deceased father. Was the attack ‘hysteria’, ‘conversion reaction’ or just co-incidental? In this part memoir, part detective story, Ms. Hustvedt offers a wealth of enlightening information about medical theories, contemporary psychiatry, neurology and psychoanalysis. Although not delving too much into her emotional subjectivity in the process, she still asks what the relationship is between mind and body and explores the complexity of diagnosis as well as looking at what it means simply to be human.
Price: EUR 17.50
Penguin James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, named after the Greek Earth goddess, is the idea that our planet functions as a single organism, regulating itself so as to maintain conditions suitable to life. Humans are a part of this system, but they will never be in a position to control it. According to Lovelock, 'The Earth, in its own but not our interests, may be forced to move to a hot epoch, one where it can survive, though in a diminished and less habitable state’. In this bracing polemic, the prophet of environmentalism, who turns ninety in 2010, distils a lifetime of wisdom and observation of the Earth to reveal the rate at which our climate is altering, how conventional ‘green’ measures are not working, and how life as we know it is going to change forever. This is an impressive and chilling work by one of our greatest and most controversial scientists.
Price: EUR 13.50
Vintage The past is a foreign country and this is your guide. In this fresh approach to history, Ian Mortimer illuminates what life was like in the medieval England in a surprisingly immediate way. He takes the reader through the middle ages and shows them everything from the horrors of leprosy and war to the ridiculous excesses of roasted larks and haute couture. He presents answers to many questions which you would never find in traditional history books, such as how to greet people in the street, what was used for toilet paper, why a physician might want to taste your blood and how to tell if you are coming down with the plague. This is most likely the most astonishing social history book you have ever encountered. It is lively, fun and informative – Monty Python and the Holy Grail with footnotes!
Price: EUR 12.90
Penguin In a fascinating new interpretation of the history of civilization, Jeremy Rifkin examines the evolution of empathy and the profound ways it has influenced the shaping of our societies. Recent discoveries in brain science and child development are forcing us to rethink the long held belief that human beings are basically aggressive, materialistic, utilitarian and self-interested. Viewing economic history through an empathic lens, Rifkin uncovers strands of the human narrative which are weaving a new social tapestry. He argues that at its core is a paradoxical, overlapping relationship between the forces of empathy and entropy and challenges us to ask whether we can reach global empathy in time to avoid the collapse of civilization altogether.
Price: EUR 24.90
Joseph Stigliz - Freefall: Free Markets and the Sinking of the Global Economy, Allen Lane This pertinent and inspiring book traces the course of the financial crisis which began in 2007 as well as its underlying causes, showing that much more radical reform is needed to avoid similar ‘systemic’ crises in the future. Stiglitz is highly critical of the measures taken not only by the Bush administration but also, so far, by Barack Obama, stressing that the bulk of the recovery costs should be borne by those in the financial sector, not just for reasons of natural justice but for economic reasons as well. So out of the crisis of our times, Stiglitz has crafted a text which goes to the heart of economics and makes us rethink what economics are for and the human purposes they are supposed to serve - lest we forget.
Price: EUR 24.00
Vintage Nora Vincent disguised herself and assumed the role of a man for eighteen months in order to research her first book, eventually finding herself on a psychiatric ward. After that experience, she became determined to learn more about the world of psychiatry and went undercover in three difficult, pressurized and very different psychiatric institutions. Starting in a huge inner city hospital, where patients are often ‘repeats’ and usually poor and dispossessed, she encounters a place where medication is a process of containment, aimed at making life easier for the rest of us rather than for the patients. She moves onto the more calming green décor of St. Luke’s, where patients have their own room and jog in the park. Next, she wades through a lot of West Coast psychobabble at the Buddhist-inspired brand of healing of Mobius and makes some unexpected discoveries. In her inside-out view of mental health care, she finds that it is not so much her peers that are the ‘problem’ but the appalling treatment of some of the ‘professionals’ who are meant to be care givers. This fearless view of mental health care makes for riveting reading, especially for clinical psychologists, psychiatrists and other health care professionals.
