en-US Thu, 17 Apr 2025 20:26:52 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 214152261 From Booker Prize finalist David Szalay, a propulsive, hypnotic novel, about a man whose future is derailed by a series of events that he is unable to control.

Teenaged István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. Shy and new in town, he is a stranger to the social rituals practiced by his classmates and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbor—a married woman close to his mother’s age, whom he begrudgingly helps with errands—as his only companion. But as these periodical encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that István himself can barely understand, his life soon spirals out of control, ending in a violent accident that leaves a man dead.

What follows is a rocky trajectory that sees István emigrate from Hungary to London, where he moves from job to job before finding steady work as a driver for London’s billionaire class. At each juncture, his life is affected by the goodwill or self-interest of strangers. Through it all, István is a calm, detached observer of his own life, and through his eyes we experience a tragic twist on an immigrant “success story,�� brightened by moments of sensitivity, softness, and Szalay’s keen observation.

Fast-paced and immersive, Flesh reveals István’s life through intimate moments, with lovers, employers, and family members, charted over the course of decades. As the story unfolds, the tension between what is seen and unseen, what can and cannot be said, hurtles forward until finally—with everything at stake—sudden tragedy again throws life as István knows it in jeopardy. Spare and penetrating, Flesh traces the imperceptible but indelible contours of unresolved trauma and its aftermath amid the precarity and violence of an ever-globalizing Europe with incisive insight, unyielding pathos, and startling humanity.]]> 368 David Szalay 198212279X John 5 contemporary, eastern-europe
In some ways it has a touch of Highsmith, in the way that Istvan reflects on his life and also in his fraught and sometimes violent relationship with his stepson. I will certainly look out for Szalay's other writing.]]> 3.94 2025
author: David Szalay
name: John
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/17
date added: 2025/04/17
shelves: contemporary, eastern-europe
review:
This story is compeling and immersive even though its protagonist is not an especially attractive character. Perhaps what he is, though, is a reflection of many characteristics that we all have, albeit that his circumstances change so radically in the course of the novel that in the end it is no ordinary life story.

In some ways it has a touch of Highsmith, in the way that Istvan reflects on his life and also in his fraught and sometimes violent relationship with his stepson. I will certainly look out for Szalay's other writing.
]]> 127938747 From a visionary Mexican author, a hallucinatory, revelatory, colonial revenge story that reimagines the fall of Tenochtitlan.

One morning in 1519, conquistador Hernán Cortés entered the city of Tenochtitlan �� today's Mexico City. Later that day, he would meet the emperor Moctezuma in a collision of two worlds, two empires, two languages, two possible futures.

Cortés was accompanied by his nine captains, his troops, and his two translators: Friar Aguilar, a taciturn, former slave, and Malinalli, a strategic, former princess. Greeted at a ceremonial welcome meal by the steely princess Atotoxli, sister and wife of Moctezuma, the Spanish nearly bungle their entrance to the city. As they await their meeting with Moctezuma �� who is at a political, spiritual, and physical crossroads, and relies on hallucinogens to get himself through the day and in quest for any kind of answer from the gods �� the Spanish are ensconced in the labyrinthine palace. Soon, one of Cortés’s captains, Jazmín Caldera, overwhelmed by the grandeur of the city, begins to question the ease with which they were welcomed into the city, and wonders at the risks of getting out alive, much less conquering the empire.

You Dreamed of Empires brings to life Tenochtitlan at its height, and reimagines its destiny. The incomparably original Alvaro Enrigue sets afire the moment of conquest and turns it into a moment of revolution, a restitutive, fantastical counter-attack, in a novel so electric and so unique that it feels like a dream.]]> 220 Álvaro Enrigue 059354479X John 4 In reading the book, I was taken back to an exhibition of astonishing Mexica art that took place at the British Museum a few years ago. Having seen the exquisite artifacts of different kinds that they produced, I found the image that Enrique creates, of a sophisticated and cultured people, albeit accustomed to extreme cruelty to appease their gods, very convincing. My doubt about the book, perhaps, is whether someone unaware of the history of the conquest of Mexico would find it as entertaining, or whether they might get lost in the maze (as, at one point, Cortes's soldiers did).]]> 3.75 2022
author: Álvaro Enrigue
name: John
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/17
date added: 2025/04/17
shelves: historical-fiction, latin-america
review:
This is an intriguing and innovative novel, recreating the days after the arrival of Hernando Cortes in the capital of Moctezuma's empire in 1521. Enrigue convincingly, although often playfully, gets into the daily life of the emperor, his first concubine, a range of other characters and Cortes and his troops. Given the number of characters, the book (like the palace) is a sort of maze. Perhaps oddly, it is about the convoluted and confusing events immedaitely before Moctezuma's capture, rather than his actual fall from power. What it does well is to bring alive the characters on both sides, perhaps especially in the case of the Mexica and his depiction of their daily lives.
In reading the book, I was taken back to an exhibition of astonishing Mexica art that took place at the British Museum a few years ago. Having seen the exquisite artifacts of different kinds that they produced, I found the image that Enrique creates, of a sophisticated and cultured people, albeit accustomed to extreme cruelty to appease their gods, very convincing. My doubt about the book, perhaps, is whether someone unaware of the history of the conquest of Mexico would find it as entertaining, or whether they might get lost in the maze (as, at one point, Cortes's soldiers did).
]]> 200740797 Some women won't be painted out of history . . .

Everybody knows that in 1938, runaway heiress artist Juliette Willoughby perished in an accidental studio fire in Paris, alongside her masterpiece Self Portrait As Sphinx.

Fifty years later, two Cambridge art history students are confounded when they stumble across proof that the fire was no accident but something more sinister. What they uncover threatens the very foundation of Juliette’s aristocratic family and revives rumors of the infamous curse that has haunted the Willoughbys for generations.

But what does their discovery mean? And how is it connected to a brutal murder in present-day Dubai?

A tale of love and madness, obsession and revenge, The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby unravels the riddle posed by a Sphinx who refuses to reveal her secrets . . .]]> 336 Ellery Lloyd 0063323001 John 3 crime, contemporary 4.09 2024
author: Ellery Lloyd
name: John
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/03
date added: 2025/04/03
shelves: crime, contemporary
review:
This story is intriguing but - I found - rather too much so, as I found it difficult to follow the many twists and turns. These also stretch the reader's credibility, so one is left with the feeling of having finished a cleverly written book which doesn't quite hit the button in terms of being a satisfying read.
]]> 46430 Journey Into Fear is a classic suspense tale from one of the founders of the genre.]]> 288 Eric Ambler 0375726721 John 4 espionage 3.93 1940
author: Eric Ambler
name: John
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1940
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/19
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: espionage
review:
Eric Ambler was so good at writing these stories, with their semi-innocent protagonists and their twisting plots, that one's only regret is that the supply of them is finite!
]]> 53773242
In alternating chapters, we learn about Amir's life and how he came to be on the boat, and we follow him and the girl as they make their way toward safety. What Strange Paradise is the story of two children finding their way through a hostile world. But it is also a story of empathy and indifference, of hope and despair--and about the way each of those things can blind us to reality.
]]> 256 Omar El Akkad 0525657908 John 4 foreign-fiction, migration
El Akkad's writing brilliantly captures the conflicting emotions of those involved, including even those of the colonel whose detachment of young soldiers must try to track Amir down. He has given us a fitting reminder of the Alan Kurdis who continue their perilous journeys.]]> 4.03 2021
author: Omar El Akkad
name: John
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/19
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: foreign-fiction, migration
review:
Don't read this book if you're feeling depressed, but do read it if you want an authentic-seeming fictional account of what happens to migrants who try to cross the Mediterranean sea. The book has echoes of the sad story of Alan Kurdi, the two-year-old Syrian boy of Kurdish background whose body was found near the Turkish resort of Bodrum, in 2015. Here a rather older boy, Amir, is found in a similar way, but has survived the capsize of the boat that brought him from Egypt, and is assisted by a teenager girl, Vanna, towards an uncertain but dramatic conclusion.

El Akkad's writing brilliantly captures the conflicting emotions of those involved, including even those of the colonel whose detachment of young soldiers must try to track Amir down. He has given us a fitting reminder of the Alan Kurdis who continue their perilous journeys.
]]> 42283333
With her safe, comfortable world shattered, Anna distracts herself with someone else's story: a true-crime podcast. That is until she recognises the name of one of the victims and becomes convinced that only she knows what really happened.

With nothing left to lose, she throws herself into investigating the case. But little does she know, Anna's past and present lives are about to collide, sending everything she has worked so hard to achieve into freefall.

Conviction is the compelling and unique new thriller from multiple award-winner and author of The Long Drop, Denise Mina.]]> 376 Denise Mina 0316528501 John 3 crime 3.47 2019
author: Denise Mina
name: John
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/03
date added: 2025/03/03
shelves: crime
review:
An enjoyable romp with (I thought) a credibility-stretching conclusion.
]]> 181110028
It is said that the canal will be the greatest feat of engineering in history. But first, it must be built. For Francisco, a local fisherman who resents the foreign powers clamoring for a slice of his country, nothing is more upsetting than the decision of his son, Omar, to work as a digger in the excavation zone. But for Omar, whose upbringing was quiet and lonely, this job offers a chance to finally find connection.

Ada Bunting is a bold sixteen-year-old from Barbados who arrives in Panama as a stowaway alongside thousands of other West Indians seeking work. Alone and with no resources, she is determined to find a job that will earn enough money for her ailing sister’s surgery. When she sees a young man—Omar—who has collapsed after a grueling shift, she is the only one who rushes to his aid.

John Oswald has dedicated his life to scientific research and has journeyed to Panama in single-minded pursuit of one goal: eliminating malaria. But now, his wife, Marian, has fallen ill herself, and when he witnesses Ada’s bravery and compassion, he hires her on the spot as a caregiver. This fateful decision sets in motion a sweeping tale of ambition, loyalty, and sacrifice.

Searing and empathetic, The Great Divide explores the intersecting lives of activists, fishmongers, laborers, journalists, neighbors, doctors, and soothsayers—those rarely acknowledged by history even as they carved out its course.]]> 321 Cristina Henríquez 0063291320 John 4 3.62 2024
author: Cristina Henríquez
name: John
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/03
date added: 2025/03/03
shelves: historical-fiction, latin-america
review:
Having been writing recently about the Panama Canal and its history, it seemed serendipitous to come across this novel, based around the construction of the canal. Henríquez creates an authentic-seeming atmosphere around the heavily divided society that existed in Panama at the time, divided between 'gold' communities with the best housing, schools and other facilities, and 'silver' who endured much worse conditions. Henríquez explores this racial and racist divide, as well as the physical task of cutting through the 'Great Divide' itself, the hills of central Panama that had to be dug through to create the canal. In the process she produces some lively and sympathetic characters, with whom we enjoy the crossing.
]]> 9466842 Nat Tate is a work of art unto itself-an investigation of the blurry line between the invented and the authentic, and a thoughtful tour through the spirited and occasionally ludicrous American art scene of the 1950s.
William Boyd is the author of nine novels, including A Good Man in Africa , winner of the Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Award; An Ice-Cream War , winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize and shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Brazzaville Beach , winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; and Restless , winner of the Costa Novel of the Year Award.
Praise for Nat Tate :
"William Boyd's description of Tate's working procedure is so vivid that it convinces me that the small oil I picked up on Prince Street, New York, in the late '60s must indeed be one of the lost Third Panel Triptychs. The great sadness of this quiet and moving monograph is that the artist's most profound dread-that God will make you an artist but only a mediocre artist-did not in retrospect apply to Nat Tate."- David Bowie
"A moving account of an artist too well understood by his time."- Gore Vidal]]> 72 William Boyd 1608195805 John 2 contemporary 3.63 1998
author: William Boyd
name: John
average rating: 3.63
book published: 1998
rating: 2
read at: 2025/02/16
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves: contemporary
review:
It's good to have read one of Boyd's earliest books and see it in the context of his lifetime's work, but although the reader can see the beginnings of Boyd's characteristic style, the story itself is pretty mundane, except as an exploration (as the ŷ������ blurb puts it) of the boundaries between fiction and biography. Yes, if you imagine it as a biography, it is a pretty convincing one. But as a novel it is mercifully short and not a patch on the rest of Boyd's fiction.
]]> 35160309
When Simon, a local businessman, offers to rent the finca, Anna hopes it will pave the way for her escape. But there is more to him than meets the eye, and when a body washes up on the beach in mysterious circumstances, Anna realizes she may be the only one with the power to unravel the truth. But how can she prove that Simon is connected, and how can she reclaim her house? Anna is prepared to risk everything to get home �� even though she’s no longer sure where home really is.

Urgent, gripping and brilliantly observed, Under the Sun is an exhilarating novel about heartbreak, identity, migration and finding a place to call home.]]> 352 Lottie Moggach 150981552X John 3 contemporary 2.89
author: Lottie Moggach
name: John
average rating: 2.89
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/11
date added: 2025/02/11
shelves: contemporary
review:
Rather a slow-moving tale (I thought), based in a place whose non-fictional equivalent I know slightly, which captures the better side of ex-pat life for Brits and others in Spain, and how ex-pats and Spanish people alike interact with (and exploit) those other new arrivals - African migrants. I found the story to be subtle, but not a compelling read.
]]> 2850653
Hero Kinoull is an antiquarian bookseller whose sedate life in the picturesque English town of Beaudesert is turned upside down between the spring and autumn equinoxes of a single year. First her quiet but forbidden liaison with Hugh Shafto, the curator of the country’s finest collection of Rococo art, comes to an abrupt halt when she develops an adoration for his straight-talking, do-gooding wife Belle. But this relationship leads to other, even more unexpected feelings for Belle’s widowed mother-in-law, the majestic Kate Shafto, who spends her days tending her garden and sailing her handmade boats in the waters of the miniature archipelago she’s constructed in a disused gravel-pit.

Published two years after Elizabeth Mavor’s most famous work, The Ladies of Llangollen —a biography of two eighteenth-century Irish gentlewomen who scandalized their families by eloping to Wales, where they lived together on their own terms�� A Green Equinox is itself an intrepid exploration of gender, female sexuality, and romantic, carnal, and cerebral.]]> 192 Elizabeth Mavor 0704500469 John 2 contemporary 3.42 1973
author: Elizabeth Mavor
name: John
average rating: 3.42
book published: 1973
rating: 2
read at: 2025/02/11
date added: 2025/02/11
shelves: contemporary
review:
I can see the appeal of this book, but it was really not for me. It's one of those reads where you want to reach the end, both to find out what happens but also to get a different book from the pile. I'm sorry, Ms Mavor, I'm sure sure you're loved by some readers, but not this one.
]]> 10102881
Nuri will, however, soon regret what he wished for. His father, long a dissident in exile from his homeland, is taken under mysterious circumstances. And, as the world that Nuri and his stepmother share is shattered by events beyond their control, they begin to realize how little they knew about the man they both loved.

Anatomy of a Disappearance is written with all the emotional precision and intimacy that have won Hisham Matar tremendous international recognition. In a voice that is delicately wrought and beautifully tender, he When a loved one disappears, how does their absence shape the lives of those who are left?]]> 224 Hisham Matar 0385340443 John 4 contemporary, foreign-fiction 3.52 2011
author: Hisham Matar
name: John
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/05
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: contemporary, foreign-fiction
review:
I realise that years ago I read Matar's book about his father's disappearance, and now I have just read his fictional account of a boy losing a father, also for political reasons. My feeling is that Matar writes better when he is writing fiction, which is a strange conclusion because his fiction has the feeling of being autobiographical. But perhaps through fiction he has developed and widened his personal feelings about loss and about living in exile - something which is clearly benefitting him, at the same time as he obviously deeply loves and misses an old Libya which (sadly) no longer exists.
]]> 127488823
The trick time plays is to lull us into the belief that everything lasts forever, and although nothing does, we continue, inside our dream.

One evening, as a young boy growing up in Benghazi, Khaled hears a bizarre short story read aloud on the radio, about a man being eaten alive by a cat. Obsessed by the power of those words—and by their enigmatic author, Hosam Zowa—Khaled eventually embarks on a journey that will take him far from home, to pursue a life of the mind at the University of Edinburgh.

There, thrust into an open society that is light years away from the world he knew in Libya, Khaled begins to change. He attends a protest against the Qaddafi regime in London, only to watch it explode in tragedy. In a flash, Khaled finds himself injured, clinging to life, an exile, unable to leave England, much less��return to��the country of his birth. To even tell his mother and father back home what he has done, on tapped phone lines, would jeopardize their safety.

When a chance encounter in a hotel brings Khaled face to face with Hosam Zowa, the author of the fateful short story, he is subsumed into the deepest friendship of his life. It is a friendship that not only sustains him, but eventually forces him, as the Arab Spring erupts, to confront agonizing tensions between revolution and safety, family and exile, and how to define his own sense of self against those closest to him.

A devastating meditation on friendship and family, and the ways in which time tests—and frays—those bonds, My Friends is an achingly beautiful��work��of literature by an author��at the peak of his powers.]]> 399 Hisham Matar 081299485X John 4 foreign-fiction 4.31 2024
author: Hisham Matar
name: John
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/31
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: foreign-fiction
review:
This is the first novel by Matar I've read, and I've already looked up one of his earlier books. The way he captures the emotions of exile in My Friends is splendid. As someone who doesn't live in the country of his birth, although for very different reasons, I empathised with his main character, who must surely reflect much of Matar himself. When he then not only has to describe why he stays in the UK, but has to justify it further as his friends leave to fight in Libya, Matar captures the emotions perfectly. If the dramatic vignette within the war news is rather contrived, it doesn't detract from the rest of the story.
]]> 61714633 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a page-turning story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. The powerful narrative reveals the deeper meaning of the events on the Wager, showing that it was not only the captain and crew who ended up on trial, but the very idea of empire.

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty's Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as "the prize of all the oceans," it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.

But then . . . six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes - they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death--for whomever the court found guilty could hang.

The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. Grann's recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O'Brian, his portrayal of the castaways' desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance, and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. As always with Grann's work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound.]]> 331 David Grann 0385534264 John 4
Part of the book is devoted to the question of who would be held to blame for what happened and what penalty they would pay, and the outcome is somewhat surprising. As he did in The Lost City of Z, Gann travels to the area and even finds pieces of the Wager, which adds authenticity to his descriptions of landscapes and weather, and his poring through the accounts created at the time or a few years afterwards also enables him to recreate something of the atmosphere of England in the 1700s.]]> 4.14 2023
author: David Grann
name: John
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/18
date added: 2025/01/18
shelves: history, latin-america, travel
review:
David Grann backs thorough researcher with excellent writing - again. Because he needs to give the background to the voyage that led to the wrecking of the Wager, the book starts slowly (even as the ship ploughs through the South Atalntic). But as soon as the ship is held up by mountainous seas and adverse winds Gann is in his element, reconstructing the struggle to survive on board and later the struggles to survive as castaways.

Part of the book is devoted to the question of who would be held to blame for what happened and what penalty they would pay, and the outcome is somewhat surprising. As he did in The Lost City of Z, Gann travels to the area and even finds pieces of the Wager, which adds authenticity to his descriptions of landscapes and weather, and his poring through the accounts created at the time or a few years afterwards also enables him to recreate something of the atmosphere of England in the 1700s.
]]> 41812831
In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.�� Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective.

Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process.

Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.]]> 336 Rashid Khalidi 1627798552 John 4
This personal connection is vital to the book's appeal, because while we are all too well aware of the persecution of Palestinians by the Zionist regime, and their betrayal by their Arab cousins in neighbouring states, and indeed by the Western powers (notably Britain), Khalidi is well placed to explain how Palestinians were let down by their own leaders, too. This clearly happened from the beginning, when those who might have ably represented the Palestine cause failed to do so.

Khalidi's history finishes in 2017, but the tragedy continues, with heartbreaking images appearing daily on the web. Palestine may have been let down, frequently, by its leaders, but it is not short of heroes. I write this only a day or two after the pictures began to appear of Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, leaving the ruins of the last remaining hospital in Gaza, walking towards capitivity and, very likely, a painful death. He is one such hero.

Khalidi has written the history of one of the most appalling examples of settler-colonialism, made worse by its occurring in the present day. A genocide is taking place before our eyes, we struggle to work out what to do in response, but we can at least be informed about how it came about.]]> 4.50 2020
author: Rashid Khalidi
name: John
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/31
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: middle-east, history, politics
review:
Before writing this short review I was interested to see from his Goodread's entry that Rashid Khalidi and I are the same age, but (as he makes clear in his book) he has far more distinguished immediate ancestors, several of whom were either key players in the history of Palestine or (in his father's case) had a close view from the sidelines of the United Nations Security Council.

This personal connection is vital to the book's appeal, because while we are all too well aware of the persecution of Palestinians by the Zionist regime, and their betrayal by their Arab cousins in neighbouring states, and indeed by the Western powers (notably Britain), Khalidi is well placed to explain how Palestinians were let down by their own leaders, too. This clearly happened from the beginning, when those who might have ably represented the Palestine cause failed to do so.

Khalidi's history finishes in 2017, but the tragedy continues, with heartbreaking images appearing daily on the web. Palestine may have been let down, frequently, by its leaders, but it is not short of heroes. I write this only a day or two after the pictures began to appear of Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, leaving the ruins of the last remaining hospital in Gaza, walking towards capitivity and, very likely, a painful death. He is one such hero.

Khalidi has written the history of one of the most appalling examples of settler-colonialism, made worse by its occurring in the present day. A genocide is taking place before our eyes, we struggle to work out what to do in response, but we can at least be informed about how it came about.
]]> 62919887
During the Arab Spring, an American spy's final mission goes dangerously awry in this "crackling debut thriller" (The New Yorker) written by a former CIA officer and hailed as "an instant classic" (Paul Vidich, author of Beirut Station).

Shane Collins, a world-weary CIA spy, is ready to come in from the cold. Stationed in Bahrain off the coast of Saudi Arabia for his final tour, he's anxious to dispense with his mission—uncovering Iranian support for the insurgency against the monarchy. But then he meets Almaisa, a beautiful and enigmatic artist, and his eyes are opened to a side of Bahrain most expats never experience, to questions he never thought to ask.

When his trusted informant becomes embroiled in a murder, Collins finds himself drawn deep into the conflict. His budding romance with Almaisa—and his loyalties—are upended; in an instant, he's caught in the crosswinds of a revolution. Drawing on all his skills as a spymaster, he sets out to learn the truth behind the Arab Spring, win Almaisa's love, and uncover the murky border where Bahrain's secrets end and America's begin.]]> 308 I.S. Berry 1982194545 John 4 espionage, middle-east
We also get a slow-burning but convincing spy story, focussing on the personalities and the rivalries between them, in ways that must reflect Berry's own experiences. It doesn't paint the world in black and white, either, but reflects the complexity of politics in West Asia, at least to a degree that the reader might not expect given the author's background. We will look forward to her second book.]]> 3.61 2023
author: I.S. Berry
name: John
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/31
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: espionage, middle-east
review:
While this is ostensibly a 'spy story' it is much more of a literary work than would normally be implied by those words, a novel more in the style of, say, Lawrence Osborne, in the way that it builds up a picture of Bahrain's capital, Manama, a place I'd barely heard of and knew nothing about before starting this novel. I now have it in my mind's eye, warts and all, thanks to Berry's depiction of it.

We also get a slow-burning but convincing spy story, focussing on the personalities and the rivalries between them, in ways that must reflect Berry's own experiences. It doesn't paint the world in black and white, either, but reflects the complexity of politics in West Asia, at least to a degree that the reader might not expect given the author's background. We will look forward to her second book.
]]> 54304238 320 Andrea Pitzer 1982113340 John 4 arctic-antarctic 3.66 2021
author: Andrea Pitzer
name: John
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/31
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: arctic-antarctic
review:
Andrea Pitzer has managed an extraordinary reconstruction of voyages undertaken more than 400 years ago, giving us not only vivid impressions of the arctic landscape but also, in effect, a convincing day-to-day diary of events that could easily have turned into complete disaster - and nearly did so on several occasions. Clearly she was engrossed in the diaries of two of the voyagers, and embellished their accounts with her own personal experiences of visiting the Barents Sea and the islands in the far north that the mariners discovered. To do this and create an entertaining story out of what must have been the appalling monotony of daily events while the men were stranded, especially during the Arctic winter, is remarkable.
]]> 32494031 84 Marisol Lira John 1 3.00
author: Marisol Lira
name: John
average rating: 3.00
book published:
rating: 1
read at: 2024/12/29
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves:
review:

]]> 540020 Librarian note: an alternate cover for this edition can be found here.

The Jackal. A tall, blond Englishman with opaque, gray eyes. A killer at the top of his profession. A man unknown to any secret service in the�� world. An assassin with a contract to kill the world's most heavily guarded man.

One�� man with a rifle who can change the course of history. One man whose mission is so secretive not��even his employers know his name. And as the��minutes count down to the final act of execution, it��seems that there is no power on earth that can stop��the Jackal.]]> 358 Frederick Forsyth John 5 crime 4.27 1971
author: Frederick Forsyth
name: John
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1971
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/18
date added: 2024/12/18
shelves: crime
review:
I started reading this some time ago and was put off by the rather pedestrian first chapter. Then somewhere I read that the rest of the book moves along much faster than it begins, and I started again. I'm glad I did. I think it's impossible to read this book without wondering if it is non-fiction, or at least a fictionalised version of a true tale. The build up of tension is brilliant, and the twists and turns as the assassin tries to evade the detective, each bringing out the inventiveness of the other, creates a fast-moving and very engaging story. The point made in the preface, that everyone knows that General de Gaulle was never assassinated, does not detract from the story. This is my first tale by Forsyth, and I will now be looking at his The Odessa File.
]]> 199798198
The Grand Canyon is an American treasure, visited by more than 6 million people a year, many of whom are rendered speechless by its vast beauty, mystery, and complexity. Now, in A Walk in the Park , author Kevin Fedarko chronicles his year-long effort to find a 750-mile path along the length of the Grand Canyon, through a vertical wilderness suspended between the caprock along the rims of the abyss and the Colorado River, which flows along its bottom.

Consisting of countless cliffs and steep drops, plus immense stretches with almost no access to water, and the fact that not a single trail links its eastern doorway to its western terminus, this jewel of national parks is so challenging that when Fedarko departed fewer people had completed the journey in one single hike than had walked on the moon. The intensity of the effort required him to break his trip into several legs, each of which held staggering dangers and unexpected discoveries.

Accompanying Fedarko through this sublime yet perilous terrain is the award-winning photographer Peter McBride, who captures the stunning landscape in breathtaking photos. Together, they encounter long-lost Native American ruins, the remains of Old West prospectors�� camps, present day tribal activists, and signs that commercial tourism is impinging on the park’s remote wildness.

An epic adventure, action-packed survival tale, and a deep spiritual journey, A Walk in the Park gives us an unprecedented glimpse of the crown jewel of America’s National an iconic landscape framed by ancient rock whose contours are recognized by all, but whose secrets and treasures are known to almost no one, and whose topography encompasses some of the harshest, least explored, most awe-inspiring terrain in the world.]]> 512 Kevin Fedarko 1501183052 John 4 4.22 2024
author: Kevin Fedarko
name: John
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/03
date added: 2024/12/03
shelves: biography, natural-history, travel
review:
Entertaining derring-do from a maddening character who, nevertheless, manages to undertake and survive a major test of endurance in one of the harshest environments in North America.
]]> 41880602
But Toby's new life �� liver specialist by day, kids every other weekend, rabid somewhat anonymous sex at night �� is interrupted when his ex-wife suddenly disappears. Either on a vision quest or a nervous breakdown, Toby doesn't know �� she won't answer his texts or calls.

Is Toby's ex just angry, like always? Is she punishing him, yet again, for not being the bread winner she was? As he desperately searches for her while juggling his job and parenting their two unraveling children, Toby is forced to reckon with the real reasons his marriage fell apart, and to ask if the story he has been telling himself all this time is true.]]> 373 Taffy Brodesser-Akner 0525510877 John 3 contemporary 3.61 2019
author: Taffy Brodesser-Akner
name: John
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/03
date added: 2024/12/03
shelves: contemporary
review:
This novel about infuriating, aspiring upper-middle-class people in and around New York is based around one, seemingly engaging character, who dominates two-thirds of the story as we watch his marriage fall apart. Then, it turns out, his wife has a valid story too, and things get a little bizarre - not least the conclusion. But it turns out to be an entertaining piece of social commentary even if, we find, that none of the charcaters can really be regarded as sympathetic.
]]> 46436 304 Eric Ambler 0375726748 John 4 espionage 3.84 1938
author: Eric Ambler
name: John
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1938
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/26
date added: 2024/11/26
shelves: espionage
review:
I have enjoyed being introduced (belatedly) to Eric Amber, and this story is as enjoyable as Uncommon Danger. The plot builds slowly, but it is worth waiting for the glorious journey of escape as the inadvertent spy finds himself on the wrong side of Mussolini's regime. Ambler doesn't forget to portray a range of eccentric but plausible characters and to beautifully depict the landscapes through which the protegonists pass.
]]> 205837837 An exiled political operative in search of redemption is drawn back into her past in a piercing thriller about secrets, scandals, and capital chaos by a Wall Street Journal bestselling author.

In another life, Agatha Cardiff was Congressman Paul Paxton’s chief of staff, a coolheaded fixer who made all his problems disappear. At Paxton’s behest, she covered up a shocking scandal that would have ruined a powerful senator’s career. It was one moral compromise too far and Agatha vowed, Never again.

After twenty years in exile, Agatha’s life in the margins of Washington, DC, is about to become much more difficult. The rules have changed in her absence—that senator is now president, and Paxton, number three in the House, expects a nomination to the Supreme Court. After all, he knows where the president’s skeletons are buried.

At the same time, Agatha’s quiet life on Capitol Hill shatters when her tenant—a woman with complex connections to DC—vanishes. Suddenly, Agatha is drawn back into a mire of corruption, blackmail, and deception precisely when she can least afford it. Any hope of redemption won’t come easy, because the true cost of Agatha’s sins is finally coming to light, and it is far from certain who will pay.]]> 297 Matthew FitzSimmons 1542009499 John 3 politics, contemporary, crime 4.31
author: Matthew FitzSimmons
name: John
average rating: 4.31
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/26
date added: 2024/11/26
shelves: politics, contemporary, crime
review:
This novel has an engaging protagonist, Agatha, and a reasonably compelling plot. But it's not a book I would return to, possibly because Washington politics are inherently despicable and the book - naturally - wallows in them.
]]> 35006235
Dark, chilling and complex, Whiteout is a haunting, atmospheric and stunningly plotted thriller from one of Iceland's bestselling crime writers.]]> 268 Ragnar Jónasson 1910633909 John 3 crime, scandinavia 3.91 2013
author: Ragnar Jónasson
name: John
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/17
date added: 2024/11/17
shelves: crime, scandinavia
review:
An interstingly realistic story with convincing characters, but somewhat lacking in momentum.
]]> 22926521 From the author of the New York Times-bestselling and Edgar Award-winning The Expats
��
As dawn approaches in New York, literary agent Isabel Reed is turning the final pages of a mysterious, anonymous manuscript, racing through the explosive revelations about powerful people, as well as long-hidden secrets about her own past. In Copenhagen, veteran CIA operative Hayden Gray, determined that this sweeping story be buried, is suddenly staring down the barrel of an unexpected gun. And in Zurich, the author himself is hiding in a shadowy expat life, trying to atone for a lifetime’s worth of lies and betrayals with publication of The Accident, while always looking over his shoulder.

Over the course of one long, desperate, increasingly perilous day, these lives collide as the book begins its dangerous march toward publication, toward saving or ruining careers and companies, placing everything at risk—and everyone in mortal peril.�� The rich cast of characters—in publishing and film, politics and espionage—are all forced to confront the consequences of their ambitions, the schisms between their ideal selves and the people they actually became.

The action rockets around Europe and across America, with an intricate web of duplicities stretching back a quarter-century to a dark winding road in upstate New York, where the shocking truth about the accident itself is buried.

Gripping, sophisticated, layered, and impossible to put down, The Accident proves once again that Chris Pavone is a true master of suspense.]]> 416 Chris Pavone 0385348479 John 3 crime, espionage
As he has done before, Pavone creates some engaging characters, from his heroine Isabel to his renegade CIA operative Hayden. We get an insight into the publishing world in which Pavone worked (although is it really peopled by the kind of characters that pop up - and usually get popped off - in the book?). As the pace accelerates towards the end of the 24 hours covered by the novel, events get increasingly implausible but we remain anxious to read the denouement. It's not a bad one, and I guess we might expect some of the surviving characters to reappear in further Pavone novels. They will be worth reading.]]> 3.58 2014
author: Chris Pavone
name: John
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/16
date added: 2024/11/16
shelves: crime, espionage
review:
I didn't find this novel by Chris Pavone as engaging as The Expats or The Travellers, but it is a compelling read providing you suspend your disbelief to accept a slightly improbable plot. Would a series of murders really be committed, in an attempt to prevent publication of a very embarassing book?

As he has done before, Pavone creates some engaging characters, from his heroine Isabel to his renegade CIA operative Hayden. We get an insight into the publishing world in which Pavone worked (although is it really peopled by the kind of characters that pop up - and usually get popped off - in the book?). As the pace accelerates towards the end of the 24 hours covered by the novel, events get increasingly implausible but we remain anxious to read the denouement. It's not a bad one, and I guess we might expect some of the surviving characters to reappear in further Pavone novels. They will be worth reading.
]]> 34563821
Set on the remote Siberian peninsula of Kamchatka, Disappearing Earth draws us into the world of an astonishing cast of characters, all connected by an unfathomable crime. We are transported to vistas of rugged beauty �� densely wooded forests, open expanses of tundra, soaring volcanoes and the glassy seas that border Japan and Alaska �� and into a region as complex as it is alluring, where social and ethnic tensions have long simmered, and where outsiders are often the first to be accused.

In a story as propulsive as it is emotionally engaging, and through a young writer's virtuosic feat of empathy and imagination, this powerful novel provides a new understanding of the intricate bonds of family and community, in a Russia unlike any we have seen before.

Beautifully written, thought-provoking, intense and cleverly wrought, this is the most extraordinary first novel from a mesmerising new talent.]]> 312 Julia Phillips John 3 foreign-fiction 3.82 2019
author: Julia Phillips
name: John
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/05
date added: 2024/11/05
shelves: foreign-fiction
review:
I found this book to be well-written, and enlightening, on a part of the world few people know, but also extremely depressing. I have to admit giving up halfway through, as I simply couldn't face any more tragic deaths, broken families and unfulfilled lives. I hope this does not fully reflect the reality of Kamchatka, even though the author appears to have become immersed in this unusual part of Russia.
]]> 33123864 320 Christine Mangan 0062686682 John 4 contemporary, crime 3.20 2018
author: Christine Mangan
name: John
average rating: 3.20
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/03
date added: 2024/11/03
shelves: contemporary, crime
review:
This is the third novel by Mangan that I've read and I've enjoyed them all. They are slow burners - this one especially - but the intrigue grows nicely and we grow to like both the 'good' Alice and the far less 'good' Lucy, the latter for what she is capable of doing in her own self-interest. As with the other two novels, it's difficult not to be reminded of Highsmith, especially in the way that murders happen rather casually, with the writer's main interest being the personality of the murderer. But being reminded of Highsmith is a compliment, of course!
]]> 199928404 ��
Sitting alone beside the languorous blue waters of the lagoon, Ana Magdalena Bach contemplates the men at the hotel bar. She has been happily married for twenty-seven years and has no reason to escape the life she has made with her husband and children. And yet, every August, she travels by ferry here to the island where her mother is buried, and for one night takes a new lover.
�� �� ��Across sultry Caribbean evenings full of salsa and boleros, lotharios and conmen, Ana journeys further each year into the hinterland of her desire and the fear hidden in her heart.
�� �� ��Constantly surprising, joyously sensual, Until August is a profound meditation on freedom, regret, self-transformation, and the mysteries of love—an unexpected gift from one of the greatest writers the world has ever known.]]> 144 Gabriel García Márquez 0593801997 John 3 3.52 2024
author: Gabriel García Márquez
name: John
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/03
date added: 2024/11/03
shelves: foreign-fiction, latin-america
review:
In truth, this short novel by Gabo is slight in content as well as extent. I'm pleased to have read it, as I've read almost all his works, but it doesn't really stand comparison with the main novels. That's not to say that it reads as anything other than a narrative by Gabo, but its short length and the limited scope of the plot make it somewhat shallow. It's a pleasant afternoon diversion, but not the profound experience we came to expect when reading Latin America's greatest novelist.
]]> 6261277
Liam Pennywell, who set out to be a philosopher and ended up teaching fifth grade, never much liked the job at that run-down private school, so early retirement doesn't bother him. But he is troubled by his inability to remember anything about the first night that he moved into his new, spare, and efficient condominium on the outskirts of Baltimore. All he knows when he wakes up the next day in the hospital is that his head is sore and bandaged.

His effort to recover the moments of his life that have been stolen from him leads him on an unexpected detour. What he needs is someone who can do the remembering for him. What he gets is well, something quite different.

We all know a Liam. In fact, there may be a little of Liam in each of us. Which is why Anne Tyler's lovely novel resonates so deeply.]]> 277 Anne Tyler 0307272400 John 3 contemporary 3.32 2009
author: Anne Tyler
name: John
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/26
date added: 2024/10/26
shelves: contemporary
review:
Really quite a slight book, entertaining because Liam is a sympathetic character and the reader hopes for a conclusion with a twist...
]]> 198902277 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781250899576.

A propulsive and uncommonly wise novel about one unexpected wedding guest and the surprising people who help her start anew.

It’s a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She's immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she’s dreamed of coming for years—she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she’s here without him, at rock bottom, and determined to have one last decadent splurge on herself. Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe and Phoebe's plan—which makes it that much more surprising when the two women can’t stop confiding in each other.

In turns absurdly funny and devastatingly tender, Alison Espach’s The Wedding People is ultimately an incredibly nuanced and resonant look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined—and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us.]]> 384 Alison Espach John 3 contemporary 4.11 2024
author: Alison Espach
name: John
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/26
date added: 2024/10/26
shelves: contemporary
review:
A book with one sypathetic character who surrounds herself with some pretty awful ones, but comes out better in the end. It's really quite a slight read, but Phoebe is engaging and pulls you into her story. She goes to a wedding, not her own, but will she end up with the bridegroom?
]]> 46125723
1987. An isolated farm house in the east of Iceland.

The snowstorm should have shut everybody out. But it didn't.

The couple should never have let him in. But they did.

An unexpected guest, a liar, a killer. Not all will survive the night. And Detective Hulda will be haunted forever.]]> 400 Ragnar Jónasson 0718189078 John 4 crime, scandinavia 3.90 2012
author: Ragnar Jónasson
name: John
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/06
date added: 2024/10/06
shelves: crime, scandinavia
review:
A new author for me and worth exploring further - he convicingly evokes rural Iceland in winter, switches timeframes interestingly and creates page-turning suspense.
]]> 51889053 A producer. A novelist. An actress.

It is summer in 1968, the year of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. While the world is reeling our trio is involved in making a rackety Swingin' Sixties British movie in sunny Brighton. All are leading secret lives.

As the film is shot, with its usual drastic ups and downs, so does our trio's private, secret world begin to take over their public one. Pressures build inexorably - someone's going to crack. Or maybe they all will.

From one of Britain's bestselling and best loved writers comes an exhilarating, tender novel that asks the vital questions: what makes life worth living? And what do you do if you find it isn't?

_______________________________________________

PRAISE FOR WILLIAM BOYD

'The ultimate in immersive fiction . . . magnificent' Sunday Times

'A finely judged performance: a deft and resonant alchemy of fact and fiction, of literary myth and imagination' Guardian on Love is Blind

'William Boyd has probably written more classic books than any of his contemporaries' Daily Telegraph

'Simply the best realistic storyteller of his generation' Sebastian Faulks]]> 352 William Boyd 0241295955 John 3 contemporary 3.48 2020
author: William Boyd
name: John
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/28
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: contemporary
review:
Having thought I'd read almost all of Boyd's books, I was surprised to find one - Trio - that had escaped my attention. I have to say, though, that it is not as gripping as his other books, and I suspect that I'm not the only one to overlook it. The plot is rather inconclusive, as if Boyd had lost interest in writing it two-thirds of the way through. So it falls between two stools - it is neither as exciting as a thriller like Ordinary Thunderstorms nor as engaging as his books which draw one in to following the life of a sympathetic main character.
]]> 19268021 “Completely satisfying, as well-paced and exhilarating as a good run.”—The Boston Globe ��Whether running is your recreation or your religion, Adharanand Finn’s incredible journey to the elite training camps of Kenya will captivate and inspire you, as he ventures to uncover the secrets of the fastest people on earth. Finn’s mesmerizing quest��combines a fresh look at barefoot running,��practical advice on the sport,��and the fulfillment of a lifelong to run with his heroes.��Uprooting his family of five, Finn traveled to a small, chaotic town in the Rift Valley province of Kenya—a mecca for long-distance runners, thanks to its high altitude, endless paths, and some of the top training schools in the world. There Finn would run side by side with Olympic champions, young hopefuls, and barefoot schoolchildren, and meet a cast of unforgettable characters. Amid the daily challenges of training and of raising a family abroad, Finn would learn invaluable lessons about running—and about life. �� With a new Afterword by the author. �� “Not everyone gets to heaven in their lifetime. Adharanand Finn tried to run there, and succeeded. Running with the Kenyans is a great read.”—Bernd Heinrich, author of Why We Run �� “Part scientific study, travel memoir, and tale of self-discovery, Finn’s journey makes for a smart and entertaining read.”—Publishers Weekly �� “A hymn to the spirit, to the heartbreaking beauty of tenacity, to the joy of movement.”—The Plain Dealer]]> 305 Adharanand Finn 0345533526 John 3 travel
When the Missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the Missionaries had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.

It comes from Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya's first president.

Despite this limitation the book is an honest attempt to capture what must have been an extraordinary experience as well as being quite a brave thing to do. I found myself warming to the author as the book builds towards the final race. I liked his descriptions of running, they chimed with my own experiences and are easier to relate to than (say) those by Haruki Murakami (even though his book is also very enjoyable).

If you are a runner I think you will like Finn's story.]]> 4.11 2010
author: Adharanand Finn
name: John
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at: 2012/08/01
date added: 2024/09/24
shelves: travel
review:
I enjoyed this book mainly because I'm a runner myself. I thought it gave some insight into the situation of the Kenyan runners Finn comes across, but as a previous reviewer says, rather a limited one. However, I did laugh out loud at this quote:

When the Missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the Missionaries had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.

It comes from Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya's first president.

Despite this limitation the book is an honest attempt to capture what must have been an extraordinary experience as well as being quite a brave thing to do. I found myself warming to the author as the book builds towards the final race. I liked his descriptions of running, they chimed with my own experiences and are easier to relate to than (say) those by Haruki Murakami (even though his book is also very enjoyable).

If you are a runner I think you will like Finn's story.
]]> 62039166 From the author of Skippy Dies comes Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, an irresistibly funny, wise, and thought-provoking tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart.

The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under―but rather than face the music, he’s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife Imelda is selling off her jewelry on eBay, while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way through her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home.

Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favor to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil―can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written―is there still time to find a happy ending?]]> 645 Paul Murray 0374600309 John 4 contemporary 3.92 2023
author: Paul Murray
name: John
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/22
date added: 2024/09/22
shelves: contemporary
review:
Paul Murray builds a fascinating story of a wildly disfunctional family, starting with accounts by the two children (which gives the impression the book may be focussed on children's experienes, as in his novel Skippy Dies, but in fact it isn't). It is very enjoyable, even if the more bizarre episodes stretch the reader's credulity. I was only disappointed with the ending, but I will leave it to others to say why, and whether they agree.
]]> 51475209 Jean Swinney is a feature writer on a local paper, disappointed in love and �� on the brink of forty �� living a limited existence with her truculent mother: a small life from which there is no likelihood of escape.

When a young Swiss woman, Gretchen Tilbury, contacts the paper to claim that her daughter is the result of a virgin birth, it is down to Jean to discover whether she is a miracle or a fraud. But the more Jean investigates, the more her life becomes strangely (and not unpleasantly) intertwined with that of the Tilburys: Gretchen is now a friend, and her quirky and charming daughter Margaret a sort of surrogate child. And Jean doesn't mean to fall in love with Gretchen's husband, Howard, but Howard surprises her with his dry wit, his intelligence and his kindness �� and when she does fall, she falls hard.

But he is married, and to her friend �� who is also the subject of the story she is researching for the newspaper, a story that increasingly seems to be causing dark ripples across all their lives. And yet Jean cannot bring herself to discard the chance of finally having a taste of happiness...

But there will be a price to pay, and it will be unbearable.]]> 352 Clare Chambers 1474613888 John 0 3.69 2021
author: Clare Chambers
name: John
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/22
date added: 2024/09/22
shelves:
review:

]]> 67356121
MOSCOW, 1964: A US diplomat caught in a clandestine love affair as the Cold War rages.

RIGA, 1992: A Russian archivist selling secrets that will change the twentieth century forever.

LONDON, THE PRESENT DAY: A British academic on the run with the chance to solve one of history's greatest mysteries.

Their stories, their lives, and the fate of the world are bound by a single manuscript. A document feared and whispered about in capitals across the globe. In its pages, history will be rewritten. It is only ever known as . . .

THE SCARLET PAPERS

The devastating secrets contained within teased by a brief invitation:

Tomorrow 11AM. Take a cab and pay in cash. Tell no one.]]> 567 Matthew Richardson John 3 espionage 4.31 2023
author: Matthew Richardson
name: John
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/03
date added: 2024/09/03
shelves: espionage
review:
This presumably entirely fictional story is woven into that of the scandals surrounding intelligence officers such as Kim Philby, so that fiction touches on fact. The action builds up nicely although at times stretches credulity as the protagonists appear to have eluded capture only to find the authorities (rather unaccountably) on their trail again. The denouement is full of twists - perhaps overfull as it left me wondering how Scarlet (the 'heroine') had managed such a complex 'double life'.
]]> 57674 384 B. Traven 1556521103 John 4 historical-fiction
At first it is rather a tortuous read, going into detail on the deprevations that seamen suffer. One wonders if conditions on the 'Death ship' could ever have been as bad as Traven describes. And where did he get his material, one asks, as the descriptions seem to come from someone who has suffered them personally?

An intriguing and unusual book.
]]> 4.18 1926
author: B. Traven
name: John
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1926
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/09/03
shelves: historical-fiction
review:
This is the first book I have read by B. Traven and I find it very difficult to categorise. It is (presumably) fiction, but reads like a real-life story, albeit with fantastical elements, especially at the end. I quickly formed the impression that it is a sort of seafarer's version of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists - an account of the hardships and exploitation suffered by workers in the first half of the 20th century, albeit with far more drama than in Robert Tressell's novel.

At first it is rather a tortuous read, going into detail on the deprevations that seamen suffer. One wonders if conditions on the 'Death ship' could ever have been as bad as Traven describes. And where did he get his material, one asks, as the descriptions seem to come from someone who has suffered them personally?

An intriguing and unusual book.

]]> 30840877 Keep your eyes peeled for a small black iron door.

Down the road from a working-class British pub, along the brick wall of a narrow alley, if the conditions are exactly right, you’ll find the entrance to Slade House. A stranger will greet you by name and invite you inside. At first, you won’t want to leave. Later, you’ll find that you can’t. Every nine years, the house’s residents �� an odd brother and sister �� extend a unique invitation to someone who’s different or a precocious teenager, a recently divorced policeman, a shy college student. But what really goes on inside Slade House? For those who find out, it’s already too late...

Spanning five decades, from the last days of the 1970s to the present, leaping genres, and barreling toward an astonishing conclusion, this intricately woven novel will pull you into a reality-warping new vision of the haunted house story—as only David Mitchell could imagine it.]]> 233 David Mitchell 1473626838 John 3 contemporary 3.79 2015
author: David Mitchell
name: John
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2019/04/01
date added: 2024/08/31
shelves: contemporary
review:
David Mitchell writes so well that any book of his must be a pleasure to read. But this story is enjoyable without being memorable. In 'Cloud Atlas' he let his imagination run wild much more successfully than in this rather slight story of the supernatural. Mitchell fans won't want to miss it, but they won't draw the same satisfaction from it as they have from his justifiably better-known novels.
]]> 59575959 ��
“Osborne is a startlingly good observer of privilege, noting the rites and rituals of the upper classes with unerring precision and an undercurrent of malice.”—Katie Kitamura, The New York Times Book Review, on Beautiful Animals
��
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE The Washington Post, CrimeReads

After two decades as a journalist in Hong Kong, ex-pat Englishman Adrian Gyle has very little to show for it. Evenings are whiled away with soup dumplings and tea at Fung Shing, the restaurant downstairs from his home on Java Road, watching the city—once overflowing with wine dinners and private members�� clubs—erupt in violence as pro-democracy demonstrations hit ever closer to home.��

Watching from the skyrises is Adrian’s old friend Jimmy Tang, the scion of one of Hong Kong’s wealthiest families. Just as Gyle prepares to turn his back on Hong Kong, he finds one last the mysterious Rebecca, a student involved in the protests, and the latest of Jimmy’s reckless dalliances. But when Rebecca goes missing and Jimmy hides, Gyle feels that old familiar urge to investigate.��

Piecing together Rebecca’s final days and hours, Gyle must tread carefully through a volatile world of friendship and betrayal where personal loyalties vanish like the city he once��knew so well. On Java Road tells the story of a man between the fault lines of old worlds and new orders in pursuit of the truth.]]> 256 Lawrence Osborne 0593242327 John 4 crime, asian 3.52 2022
author: Lawrence Osborne
name: John
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/25
date added: 2024/08/11
shelves: crime, asian
review:
Having spent a week in Hong Kong several years before the setting of this story I found it a convincing picture of the city, by someone who had clearly explored it in some detail. He is particularly good on the divide between native Hong Kongers and expats, even those who have lived there for years and speak Cantonese. The framing of the story against the background of the riots against Chinese rule is convincing too, although the story itself becomes convoluted and perhaps a little vague (or maybe this was the point Osborne was making about the circumstances in Hong Kong at the time when this happened). As often with Osborne, his main character seems to have little obvious means of financial support, raising the question of whether this affects the quality of the story (there are plenty of authors who adopt the same trope, so perhaps it doesn't or shouldn't).
]]> 3845354 The Boy Who Followed Ripley, the fourth novel in the Ripley series, is one of Patricia Highsmith's darkest and most twisted creations.

Tom Ripley meets a young American runaway who has a dark secret that he is desperate to hide. Soon this unlikely pair is drawn into the seamy underworld of Berlin and a shocking kidnapping. In this masterful thriller, Highsmith shatters our perceptions of her most famous creation by letting us glimpse a more compassionate side of this amoral charmer.

"Ripley is an unmistakable descendant of Gatsby, that 'penniless young man without a past' who will stop at nothing."
—Frank Rich, New York Times Magazine]]> 348 Patricia Highsmith 039333211X John 5 crime 3.58 1980
author: Patricia Highsmith
name: John
average rating: 3.58
book published: 1980
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/11
date added: 2024/08/11
shelves: crime
review:
If Highsmith's Ripley series flagged slightly at number 4, this is still worth reading. Highsmith has this talent for convincing the reader about implausible twists in her plots by creating characters that are easy to commit too, and she certainly takes advantage of that here. But read and enjoy the whole series and feel at the end of it that you 'know' Ripley, and by extension that you better know his creator, the late, great Patricia Highsmith!
]]> 22283890
Tasked with investigating how Dymek gained access to the confidential report, the formidable Bente Jensen of Säpo is quietly approached by the British MI6, who have an undisclosed interest in the leak. She finds out that Dymek’s boyfriend is an Egyptian Swedish national. But it’s MI6 who link his family to an extreme faction within the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo.

The case explodes into an international manhunt. Liaising with the ruthless MI6, Bente uncovers the secretive plans contained in that leaked report: plans for an omnipotent Europe-wide Intelligence Service. Forces hone in on Dymek, while Bente begins to suspect she is a red herring caught in a far wider net: one in which social media is abused for intelligence and civil rights are sacrificed to national security.

Andreas Norman, a former Swedish Ministry official, has written an explosive expose of Anglo-American spying and surveillance on European civilians in the name of counter-terrorism. This dizzying thriller anticipated the Edward Snowden revelations and rocked Sweden on publication.]]> 0 Andreas Norman 1782066039 John 4 espionage, scandinavia 3.39 2013
author: Andreas Norman
name: John
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/11
date added: 2024/08/11
shelves: espionage, scandinavia
review:
After a slow-moving start, this spy novel builds into a fairly convincing story of a (pre-Brexit) British scheme to develop a counter-terrorism operation within the European Union, and how one woman tries to thwart it. The sad thing is that, having read many real accounts of the behaviour of Western security agencies like the CIA and MI6, the violence of their response when their scheme appears to be at risk, is not surprising.
]]> 61111301
Then, a new family moves into the apartment below her. In spite of herself, Gretel can't help but begin a friendship with the little boy, Henry, though his presence brings back memories she would rather forget. One night, she witnesses a disturbing, violent argument between Henry's beautiful mother and his arrogant father, one that threatens Gretel's hard-won, self-contained existence.

All The Broken Places moves back and forth in time between Gretel's girlhood in Germany to present-day London as a woman whose life has been haunted by the past. Now, Gretel faces a similar crossroads to one she encountered long ago. Back then, she denied her own complicity, but now, faced with a chance to interrogate her guilt, grief and remorse, she can choose to save a young boy. If she does, she will be forced to reveal the secrets she has spent a lifetime protecting. This time, she can make a different choice than before -- whatever the cost to herself....

From the New York Times bestselling author John Boyne, a devastating, beautiful story about a woman who must confront the sins of her own terrible past, and a present in which it is never too late for bravery. ]]> 400 John Boyne 0593653068 John 4 contemporary 4.43 2022
author: John Boyne
name: John
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/11
date added: 2024/08/11
shelves: contemporary
review:
I've not read Boyne's previous novel but this one is a nicely complex story about guilt in the afternath of war, and how it conditions someone's life even if their 'guilt' only arises from their presence as a child among the horrors of Nazi Germany. Boyne creates a very sympathetic character in the elderly lady, Gretel, and if the ending stretches credulity it nevertheless provides a fitting punctuation for her life story.
]]> 63083089
In an elite English boarding school where the girls kiss the marble statue of the famous dead author who used to walk the halls, a butch antipodean outsider arrives to take up the antiquated role of “matron.�� Within this landscape of immense privilege, where difference is met with hostility, the matron finds herself unsure of her role, her accent and her body.

That is until she meets Mrs. S, the headmaster’s wife, a woman who is her polar opposite—an assured, authoritative paragon of femininity. Over the course of a long, restless summer, their unspoken yearning blooms into an illicit affair of electric intensity. But, as the summer fades, a choice must be made.

Seductive, stylish, and disarmingly wry, K Patrick’s bold and revelatory debut smolders with the heat of summer as it explores the queer experience and the force of forbidden love.]]> 240 K. Patrick 1609458419 John 4 contemporary 3.61 2023
author: K. Patrick
name: John
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/01
date added: 2024/07/01
shelves: contemporary
review:
This is a powerful book about sexual attraction, which surprised me by how its unfamiliar and initially jarring style of very short, punchy sentences gradually captures the reader and draws her/him into the story. Essentially it is about the protagonist's identity, and how it is shaped by the encounter and then relationship she has with "Mrs S". The students in the girls' school where it takes place are participating in and rehearsing for a performance of Lorca's play, The House of Bernarda Alba, and the disconnect between the dramatic representation of the lives of women in pre-civil war Spain and the humdrum lives and attitudes of the parents invited to see the play, seem to mirror the clash between the ferocious intensity of the sexual relationship which is the book's focus, and the apparent tranquility of the setting in which it is taking place
]]> 448159 212 Beryl Bainbridge 0349116113 John 4 crime, comic 3.42 1977
author: Beryl Bainbridge
name: John
average rating: 3.42
book published: 1977
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/25
date added: 2024/06/25
shelves: crime, comic
review:
Beryl Bainbridge is brilliant at capturing Englishness, and she does so here in a tale of horror that she turns into a comedy. It would be easy to see it as a farce set on stage (maybe it has been). A grisly romp of a read.
]]> 3327199 From internationally renowned literary phenomenon Haruki Murakami comes this spellbinding novel set in Tokyo during the spooky hours between midnight and dawn.

Nineteen-year-old Mari is waiting out the night in an anonymous Denny’s when she meets a young man who insists he knows her older sister, thus setting her on an odyssey through the sleeping city. In the space of a single night, the lives of a diverse cast of Tokyo residents—models, prostitutes, mobsters, and musicians—collide in a world suspended between fantasy and reality. Utterly enchanting and infused with surrealism, After Dark is a thrilling account of the magical hours separating midnight from dawn.]]> 201 Haruki Murakami 0099520869 John 2 contemporary 3.81 2004
author: Haruki Murakami
name: John
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2004
rating: 2
read at: 2008/01/01
date added: 2024/06/19
shelves: contemporary
review:
Enjoyable as Murakami always is, but nowhere near as brilliant as his major novels. I do hope he is not losing that magic touch!
]]> 40670008 On a foggy summer night, eleven people--ten privileged, one down-on-his-luck painter--depart Martha's Vineyard on a private jet headed for New York. Sixteen minutes later, the unthinkable the plane plunges into the ocean. The only survivors are Scott Burroughs-the painter-and a four-year-old boy, who is now the last remaining member of an immensely wealthy and powerful media mogul's family.
With chapters weaving between the aftermath of the crash and the backstories of the passengers and crew members--including a Wall Street titan and his wife, a Texan-born party boy just in from London, a young woman questioning her path in life, and a career pilot--the mystery surrounding the tragedy heightens. As the passengers' intrigues unravel, odd coincidences point to a conspiracy. Was it merely by dumb chance that so many influential people perished? Or was something far more sinister at work? Events soon threaten to spiral out of control in an escalating storm of media outrage and accusations. And while Scott struggles to cope with fame that borders on notoriety, the authorities scramble to salvage the truth from the wreckage.
Amid pulse-quickening suspense, the fragile relationship between Scott and the young boy glows at the heart of this stunning novel, raising questions of fate, human nature, and the inextricable ties that bind us together.
]]> 401 Noah Hawley 1455561800 John 3 crime 3.69 2016
author: Noah Hawley
name: John
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/11
date added: 2024/06/11
shelves: crime
review:
In this book, Noah Hawley sets up an intriguing plot - a plane crash with no apparent explanation, and a survivor driven to find out why it occurred. But he rather spoils it by creating stereotypical characters - the budding artist (long hair, earnest, desperate for success), the rich spinster eager to jump into bed with him, the heavily armed personal bodyguard with a back history, and the rest. I finished the book to find out 'who did it' (but it does become fairly obvious).
]]> 55369892
As a new relationship becomes increasingly claustrophobic, and the discussions of impending political crisis are harder to avoid, she starts to dream of water; of escaping entwining tentacles through deep blue seas. She sets out to the other side of the globe to find that vision of freedom, and to decide who she wants to be when she returns.

But when she arrives at her destination, she finds instead that the world, and life, she left behind no longer exists.

Starting at the end and eventually returning there, with alternate chapters set Before and After, THE STRANDING is a story of how to make a life, what it is to be a woman, and what remains when everything we know is stripped away.]]> 352 Kate Sawyer John 4 dystopias While there are parts of the plot that stretch the imagination (the incident with a whale carcass, especially), much of it has the ring of possible truth. The result is a story that is both compelling and a somewhat depressing picture of a future that might await us.]]> 4.35 2021
author: Kate Sawyer
name: John
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/11
date added: 2024/06/11
shelves: dystopias
review:
Kate Sawyer's novel has a clever format where we switch timeframes from a time in the near future to another around a year later, when a near-global catastrophe has occured. The incidents in the first timeframe converge on the second, so that by the close of the book we have, as it were, the completed story. The neat arrangement gives us a picture of the world as it might be after some unmitigated disaster, interspersed with reminders of how the world was just beforehand, before normal life was suddenly halted.
While there are parts of the plot that stretch the imagination (the incident with a whale carcass, especially), much of it has the ring of possible truth. The result is a story that is both compelling and a somewhat depressing picture of a future that might await us.
]]> 54860603
It’s 1966 and Frankie Croy retreats to her friend’s vacant palazzo in Venice. Years have passed since the initial success of Frankie’s debut novel and she has spent her career trying to live up to the expectations. Now, after a particularly scathing review of her most recent work, alongside a very public breakdown, she needs to recharge and get re-inspired.

Then Gilly appears. A precocious young admirer eager to make friends, Gilly seems determined to insinuate herself into Frankie’s solitary life. But there’s something about the young woman that gives Frankie pause. How much of what Gilly tells her is the truth? As a series of lies and revelations emerge, the lives of these two women will be tragically altered as the catastrophic 1966 flooding of Venice ravages the city.

Suspenseful and transporting, Christine Mangan's Palace of the Drowned brings the mystery of Venice to life while delivering a twisted tale of ambition and human nature.]]> 320 Christine Mangan 1250788420 John 4 crime
Mangan contrives an excellent plot, that builds slowly yet provides us with unexpected twists in the climax, resulting (as often with Highsmith) from the protagonists's own mistakes. She conjures up the sense of Venice in winter (where most of the book is set) in a convincing way (I have only visited the city in the summer) and, as would Highsmith, she makes sure the reader sympathises with her protagonist, Frankie, regardless of her behaviour. The result is both entertaining and thought-provoking, posing the quaestion - how would we have reacted in similar circumstances?]]> 3.36 2021
author: Christine Mangan
name: John
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/27
date added: 2024/05/27
shelves: crime
review:
Is it unfair to compare a modern author with Patricia Highsmith? I thought of this comparison when I read Mangan's The Continental Affair, but it is even more pertinent with this novel. It's not that in any way that she copies a Highsmith plot, it's just that her strong interest in the feelings of a murderer and how she uses the story to explore them is very Highsmithian.

Mangan contrives an excellent plot, that builds slowly yet provides us with unexpected twists in the climax, resulting (as often with Highsmith) from the protagonists's own mistakes. She conjures up the sense of Venice in winter (where most of the book is set) in a convincing way (I have only visited the city in the summer) and, as would Highsmith, she makes sure the reader sympathises with her protagonist, Frankie, regardless of her behaviour. The result is both entertaining and thought-provoking, posing the quaestion - how would we have reacted in similar circumstances?
]]> 63241099
In a tiny village in Provence, nine guests arrive at a luxury holiday home. The visitors know each other well, or at least they think they do. The only stranger among them is Lulu, the young woman catering their stay. But Lulu is not exactly the woman on the video the guests thought they’d hired. Turns out Lulu has plenty to hide—and nowhere to run as the heat rises. In this seemingly idyllic getaway, under the scorching sun, loyalties will be tested, secrets exposed, and tensions pushed to the brink . . . Dripping in intrigue, Sun Damage is a glamorous, witty, and totally riveting story chock full of secrets, lies and . . . more lies.]]> 368 Sabine Durrant 0063277689 John 3 3.42 2022
author: Sabine Durrant
name: John
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/05/24
shelves:
review:
It seems a common fault with crime stories that they develop well but rush towards a slightly improbable resolution towards the end. The fault is apparent here: although the story's main character is convincing and earns our sympathy as the plot develops, we're left feeling that the conclusion is slightly rushed and contrived.
]]> 40712499 The powerful story of a young poet who becomes an activist through a trial by fire

What You Have Heard is True is a devastating, lyrical, and visionary memoir about a young woman's brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others. Written by one of the most gifted poets of her generation, this is the story of a woman's radical act of empathy, and her fateful encounter with an intriguing man who changes the course of her life.

Carolyn Forché is twenty-seven when the mysterious stranger appears on her doorstep. The relative of a friend, he is a charming polymath with a mind as seemingly disordered as it is brilliant. She's heard rumors from her friend about who he might be: a lone wolf, a communist, a CIA operative, a sharpshooter, a revolutionary, a small coffee farmer, but according to her, no one seemed to know for certain. He has driven from El Salvador to invite Forché to visit and learn about his country. Captivated for reasons she doesn't fully understand, she accepts and becomes enmeshed in something beyond her comprehension.

Together they meet with high-ranking military officers, impoverished farm workers, and clergy desperately trying to assist the poor and keep the peace. These encounters are a part of his plan to educate her, but also to learn for himself just how close the country is to war. As priests and farm-workers are murdered and protest marches attacked, he is determined to save his country, and Forché is swept up in his work and in the lives of his friends. Pursued by death squads and sheltering in safe houses, the two forge a rich friendship, as she attempts to make sense of what she's experiencing and establish a moral foothold amidst profound suffering. This is the powerful story of a poet's experience in a country on the verge of war, and a journey toward social conscience in a perilous time.]]> 400 Carolyn Forché 0525560378 John 5
As extraordinary as the meeting is, perhaps, her apparently reckless decision to accede to Leonel's request. She travels to San Salvador, and then begins a kind of wild learning experience, in which she sees the extremes of poverty and wealth, and the extremes of comfort and horrific violence, that characterised El Salvador (and indeed, much of Central America) at the time. She takes notes of her experiences, collects them, makes friends, escapes danger and near death (twice), loses friends and neighbours to the pervading violence, and survives to tell the tale, much later.

It is difficult to say that Forché's book had the impact that Gómez Vides hoped for - after all, the US continued to finance the horrific repression in the region for the whole of the 1980s. As well as Forché's account, which in any case was published much later, there were news stories of horrors like the appalling massacre at El Mozote, even if they were delayed and incomplete.

But the book is nevertheless very valuable and eminently readable, although the reader needs a strong stomach to handle the scenes of violence (one can only imagine how they affected the author, not to mention the victims and their families, of course). Here is an innocent bystander, with practically no prior knowledge or experience, deliberately being plunged into what quickly becomes a nightmare. We do not, perhaps, find out overmuch about her feelings in response to this, but we do accompany her as she learns more and more, begins to speak more Spanish, becomes more aware and more cautious of her surroundings and how to stay safe, while never, it seems, holding back from seeing and documenting some of the worst horrors of what would soon become a civil war. As she puts it, she is forced to move from "one constellation of understanding and perception to another".

Inevitably, we hear about US indifference to and active engagement in the violence, even when it involves the killing of US citizens. Forché handles this subtly, though, letting us experience her growing awareness after her initial assumptions that US officials will be interested in protecting human rights, are proved to be false. One telling example, if not one of the extreme ones, is the female official who declaims enthusiastically the projects they are financing in the countryside, only for Forche to be told that it is very unlikely that this official ever leaves the city.

Equally telling are the attitudes of the Salvadoran officials who believe that Forché must have some influence with Washington, just because she is a respectable-looking gringa whose visits to the US embassy suggest she has important connections. Clearly they expect Washington’s help in dealing with insurgents, and are confused by the US's apparent insistence that they must observe the human rights of their victims. In time, of course, they realise that this concern is a charade.

Leonel Gómez Vides remains a mysterious, enigmatic figure, throughout the story, his roles unclear as he appears to move seamlessly between high society and the military high command on the one hand, and the desperate campesinos trying to make ends meet and avoid being killed, on the other. The reader is left wishing there had been more about him in an epilogue, especially as he died years before the book was published. However, perhaps he remained an enigma to Forché too: clearly their relationship was complex, paternalistic on his part at first, but evolving as Forché learned to "become her own person".

Her description of this personal evolution speaks to the experience of all of us who have become politically involved in the struggles of Central America. Whether our role changes anything is debateable, but what is not debateable is the way that Central America has changed us.

A final note on the book is that, as it happens, I have been reading it while the current century's most horrific act of collective violence has been in progress - the US-assisted genocide in Gaza. A comment from Gómez, remembered by Forché, is just as pertinent now as it was then: “I promise you that it is going to be difficult to get Americans to believe what is happening here,�� he tells her. “For one thing, this is outside the realm of their imaginations. For another, it isn’t in their interests to believe you. For a third, it is possible that we are not human beings to them.��
]]> 4.43 2019
author: Carolyn Forché
name: John
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/09
date added: 2024/05/09
shelves:
review:
This book is the fruit of an extraordinary coming together of two very different people. One was a burgeoning poet living in Southern California, the other a coffee-growing entrepreneur turned political activist from El Salvador. Wanting more people to know about the disaster that was beginning to befall his country in the turbulent late 1970s, Leonel Gómez Vides turns up at the home of Carolyn Forché, who is a friend of a relative of his, to persuade her to visit and learn about El Salvador, a country of which she knows almost nothing.

As extraordinary as the meeting is, perhaps, her apparently reckless decision to accede to Leonel's request. She travels to San Salvador, and then begins a kind of wild learning experience, in which she sees the extremes of poverty and wealth, and the extremes of comfort and horrific violence, that characterised El Salvador (and indeed, much of Central America) at the time. She takes notes of her experiences, collects them, makes friends, escapes danger and near death (twice), loses friends and neighbours to the pervading violence, and survives to tell the tale, much later.

It is difficult to say that Forché's book had the impact that Gómez Vides hoped for - after all, the US continued to finance the horrific repression in the region for the whole of the 1980s. As well as Forché's account, which in any case was published much later, there were news stories of horrors like the appalling massacre at El Mozote, even if they were delayed and incomplete.

But the book is nevertheless very valuable and eminently readable, although the reader needs a strong stomach to handle the scenes of violence (one can only imagine how they affected the author, not to mention the victims and their families, of course). Here is an innocent bystander, with practically no prior knowledge or experience, deliberately being plunged into what quickly becomes a nightmare. We do not, perhaps, find out overmuch about her feelings in response to this, but we do accompany her as she learns more and more, begins to speak more Spanish, becomes more aware and more cautious of her surroundings and how to stay safe, while never, it seems, holding back from seeing and documenting some of the worst horrors of what would soon become a civil war. As she puts it, she is forced to move from "one constellation of understanding and perception to another".

Inevitably, we hear about US indifference to and active engagement in the violence, even when it involves the killing of US citizens. Forché handles this subtly, though, letting us experience her growing awareness after her initial assumptions that US officials will be interested in protecting human rights, are proved to be false. One telling example, if not one of the extreme ones, is the female official who declaims enthusiastically the projects they are financing in the countryside, only for Forche to be told that it is very unlikely that this official ever leaves the city.

Equally telling are the attitudes of the Salvadoran officials who believe that Forché must have some influence with Washington, just because she is a respectable-looking gringa whose visits to the US embassy suggest she has important connections. Clearly they expect Washington’s help in dealing with insurgents, and are confused by the US's apparent insistence that they must observe the human rights of their victims. In time, of course, they realise that this concern is a charade.

Leonel Gómez Vides remains a mysterious, enigmatic figure, throughout the story, his roles unclear as he appears to move seamlessly between high society and the military high command on the one hand, and the desperate campesinos trying to make ends meet and avoid being killed, on the other. The reader is left wishing there had been more about him in an epilogue, especially as he died years before the book was published. However, perhaps he remained an enigma to Forché too: clearly their relationship was complex, paternalistic on his part at first, but evolving as Forché learned to "become her own person".

Her description of this personal evolution speaks to the experience of all of us who have become politically involved in the struggles of Central America. Whether our role changes anything is debateable, but what is not debateable is the way that Central America has changed us.

A final note on the book is that, as it happens, I have been reading it while the current century's most horrific act of collective violence has been in progress - the US-assisted genocide in Gaza. A comment from Gómez, remembered by Forché, is just as pertinent now as it was then: “I promise you that it is going to be difficult to get Americans to believe what is happening here,�� he tells her. “For one thing, this is outside the realm of their imaginations. For another, it isn’t in their interests to believe you. For a third, it is possible that we are not human beings to them.��

]]> 60890956 From the bestselling writer of Italian Ways, Europa and The Hero's Way, a story set during the first days of lockdown in Europe, about the unexpected kindness of strangers and one man's emotional reckoning.

Milan, 2020. Drawn abruptly from his reclusive life in London for a friend's funeral, Frank finds himself in the eye of a pandemic he had barely registered on the news. From the relative comfort of his balcony at Hotel Milano, he surveys the train station across the piazza, seeing the mad dash for the last trains, hearing the sirens and watching the police stop people in the street. He feels himself remote from it all.

Then, one night, the sound of a child's footsteps leads him to discover a family sheltering secretly above him: a family who need his help. As the days pass, this reserved and difficult man begins to open himself to others. Faced with the task of saving a life, he must also take stock of his own.]]> 229 Tim Parks 1529191726 John 4 contemporary, foreign-fiction 3.47
author: Tim Parks
name: John
average rating: 3.47
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/12
date added: 2024/04/12
shelves: contemporary, foreign-fiction
review:
This novel has a neat theme - a man who is staying in a luxury hotel in Milian, almost by accident, finds himself trapped there when the Covid-19 pandemic begins. It takes us back to a time which is so recent yet seems so far in the past, as suddenly wearing masks and keeping one's distance from strangers becomes so important. The unexpected happens - as might be hoped - and although I found the ending rather inconclusive I thought that, overall, it was an entertaining exploration of the kind of chance human contacts that carry much more weight than they normally would, because of the unique circumstances.
]]> 385068 264 Patricia Highsmith 0871132591 John 5 3.46 1967
author: Patricia Highsmith
name: John
average rating: 3.46
book published: 1967
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/16
date added: 2024/03/16
shelves:
review:
I'm hooked on Highsmith at the moment, and this novel must be one of her best. Curiously, there are fewer murders than usual, but Highsmith's skill is her ability to explore the mindset and behaviour of an apparently ordinary man (they always seem to be men) who commits a violent crime. In this case, too, she focuses equally on the behaviour of the victim, and the revenge he wants to exact. Setting this within the always intriguing landscape of the Venetian alleyways and canals gives the novel a unique flavour.
]]> 39792 The Man Who Smiled begins with Inspector Kurt Wallander deep in a personal and professional crisis after killing a man in the line of duty; eventually, he vows to quit the Ystad police force for good. Just then, however, a friend who had asked Wallander to look into the death of his father winds up dead himself, shot three times. Ann-Britt Hoglund, the department's first female detective, proves to be his best ally as he tries to pierce the smiling facade of his prime suspect, a powerful multinational business tycoon. But just as he comes close to uncovering the truth, the same shadowy threats responsible for the murders close in on Wallander himself.

All of Henning Mankell's talents as a master of the modern police procedural, which have earned him legions of fans worldwide, are showcased in The Man Who Smiled, which is the fourth of the eight Wallander books published thus far in English.]]> 325 Henning Mankell 1565849930 John 3 crime, scandinavia 3.96 1994
author: Henning Mankell
name: John
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1994
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/16
date added: 2024/03/16
shelves: crime, scandinavia
review:
Entertaining, if perhaps not the best of the Wallander series. The detective grapples with his doubts and anxieties, as ever, and with a perplexing series of murders, but I felt the reader was asked to take a bit of a leap of faith when it came to establishing exactly how the man behind the murders came to have planned them.
]]> 46170 For Whom the Bell Tolls. The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal. In his portrayal of Jordan's love for the beautiful Maria and his superb account of El Sordo's last stand, in his brilliant travesty of La Pasionaria and his unwillingness to believe in blind faith, Hemingway surpasses his achievement in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms to create a work at once rare and beautiful, strong and brutal, compassionate, moving and wise. "If the function of a writer is to reveal reality," Maxwell Perkins wrote to Hemingway after reading the manuscript, "no one ever so completely performed it." Greater in power, broader in scope, and more intensely emotional than any of the author's previous works, it stands as one of the best war novels of all time.]]> 471 Ernest Hemingway John 4
So, it remains a remarkable book, with the build up to the attack on the bridge being so realistic that you imagine (as presumably Hemingway intended) that the 'Ingles', Robert Jordan, was actually Hemingway himself.]]> 3.98 1940
author: Ernest Hemingway
name: John
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1940
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/16
date added: 2024/03/16
shelves: foreign-fiction, historical-fiction
review:
Re-reading Hemingway's classic, perhaps four decades after I first read it, was an interesting experience. I now live in a Spanish-speaking country, which makes his literal translations of the language (with 'thee' and 'thou') easier to appreciate. Also since then I know more about the landscape he is writing about (for example, the unnamed town where the massacre of fascists took place was clearly Ronda in Andalucia). And having since read Cormac McCarthy's border trilogy, this was a reminder of how much he owed to Hemingway.

So, it remains a remarkable book, with the build up to the attack on the bridge being so realistic that you imagine (as presumably Hemingway intended) that the 'Ingles', Robert Jordan, was actually Hemingway himself.
]]> 176968422 269 Antti Tuomainen John 3 crime, humour 4.00 2022
author: Antti Tuomainen
name: John
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/04
date added: 2024/03/04
shelves: crime, humour
review:
I found the third of the Rabbit Factor books rather disappointing. It started off well, but I had the feeling that the author ran out of steam, and enthusiam, halfway through. The plot becomes rather vague, with much reitaration of how the protagonist's life has changed because of his marriage. The first two books were better - equally improbable but amusing, and the plot didn't flag as it does here.
]]> 243401 304 Josephine Tey 0684842564 John 4 crime 3.95 1948
author: Josephine Tey
name: John
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1948
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/03/02
shelves: crime
review:
My first Josephine Tey crime story, and I think I'll read more - she is a kind of low-key, English small-town version of Patricia Highsmith, with some attractive depictions of characters and an intriguing story of a crime that (perhaps) never was.
]]> 6485095 237 Eric Ambler 0141190345 John 4 espionage, eastern-europe 3.84 1937
author: Eric Ambler
name: John
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1937
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/28
date added: 2024/02/28
shelves: espionage, eastern-europe
review:
This was my first taste of Eric Ambler and it won't be the last. The combination of an entertaining and fast-moving spy story with locations in mid-20th century central Europe is excellent. Kenton is a sympathetic (and intrepid) journalist who seems to spend little time writing news storie and more time making them. I'll be pleased to catch up with him in an another adventure!
]]> 18085516 The Wind Is Not a River is Brian Payton's gripping tale of survival and an epic love story in which a��husband and wife—separated by the only battle of World War II��to take place on American soil—fight to reunite in��Alaska's starkly beautiful Aleutian Islands.

Following the death of his younger brother in Europe, journalist John Easley is determined to find meaning in his loss. Leaving behind his beloved wife, Helen, he heads north to investigate the Japanese invasion of Alaska's Aleutian��Islands, a story censored by the U.S. government.��

While John is accompanying a crew on a bombing run, his plane is shot down over the island of Attu. He survives only to find himself exposed to a harsh and unforgiving wilderness, known as “the birthplace of winds.�� There, John must battle the elements, starvation, and his own remorse while evading discovery by the Japanese.��

Alone at home, Helen struggles with the burden of her husband's disappearance. Caught in extraordinary circumstances, in this new world of the missing, she is forced to reimagine who she is—and what she is capable of doing. Somehow, she must find John and bring him home, a quest that takes her into the farthest reaches of the war, beyond the safety of everything she knows.��]]> 320 Brian Payton 0062279971 John 4 3.68 2013
author: Brian Payton
name: John
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/25
date added: 2024/02/25
shelves: arctic-antarctic, historical-fiction
review:
Books fascinate me that introduce parts of the world that I don't know and - in this case - was barely aware of: the Aleutian Islands. Payton has clearly been there and absorbed their special, treeless, barren character, and he builds a convincing picture of what it might have been like to be marooned there, in an almost hopeless situation, during World War II. Some of the scenes of violence seem a little artificial but the main character's survival story is well-sketched and the love story around his wife's search for him is engaging. Payton portrays the arbitrariness of war very well, picking out a personal story (or two intertwined stories) that would, had they really happened, probably have gone completely unnoticed.
]]> 61426788
Touching down in Mexico City, he doesn't have much in the way of funds, but he has a new continent and surely that's enough to start afresh. But it's not as easy as that. An idyllic interlude in a coastal village is interrupted when men turn up who seem to know exactly who he is. And they have some very urgent questions.

DI Kirsty Craik had also hoped she'd left Nick Belsey behind her, in the wilder days of her career. When a five am call instructs her to track him down or she'll be dead by Christmas, it seems he's walked back into her life with characteristic commotion. Craik is forced to break the rules once more to find out what her former lover is up to.

She needs to save herself, and, just maybe, to save Belsey too.]]> 336 Oliver Harris 140871292X John 3 crime 4.20 2022
author: Oliver Harris
name: John
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/02/25
date added: 2024/02/25
shelves: crime
review:
Harris's books move along nicely although in this case the plot stretches the reader's credulity. Nevertheless there are some pleasing twists and contrasting landscapes, all - seemingly - filled with villains.
]]> 77844
From his birth in 1899, Todd was doomed. Emerging from his angst-filled childhood, he rushes into the throes of the twentieth century on the Western Front during the Great War, and quickly changes his role on the battlefield from cannon fodder to cameraman. When he becomes a prisoner of war, he discovers Rousseau's Confessions , and dedicates his life to bringing the memoir to the silver screen. Plagued by bad luck and blind ambition, Todd becomes a celebrated London upstart, a Weimar luminary, and finally a disgruntled director of cowboy movies and the eleventh member of the Hollywood Ten. Ambitious and entertaining, Boyd has invented a most irresistible hero.]]> 480 William Boyd 0375705031 John 5 historical-fiction 4.10
author: William Boyd
name: John
average rating: 4.10
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/05
date added: 2024/02/05
shelves: historical-fiction
review:
While Boyd will, I suspect, never surpass 'Any Human Heart', his life-story novels are always a delight. I first read 'The New Confessions' years ago, and knew I would enjoy rereading it. It would be an excellent story for film buffs, and for the rest of us the pace slackens at times, but it remains a very good read and (like the other Boyd novels in similar vein) provocative in one's thinking about one's own life.
]]> 61047409
Ariana Rojas is alluring, intelligent, sophisticated, and wealthy �� at least until a brutal dictator steals the family fortune. Determined to get back what she lost; she joins the revolution. It isn’t long before she hatches a clever scheme, the perfect crime, to recover what she once had while getting revenge at the same time. She arranges the kidnapping of Jimmy Foster, a wealthy American who spends weekends in Havana with his gorgeous wife Darlene.

Even with meticulous planning, Ariana makes one crucial mistake. She never dreams that Darlene Foster won’t pay the ransom. But with a missing husband and a huge inheritance, Darlene has options she likes a whole lot more.

The Drop has a unique cast of characters: a Mafia casino manager, an unbearable wife, a mysterious detective, and revolutionaries in name only. Ariana manipulates all involved to affect an outcome few can predict, none can imagine, and all will enjoy.]]> 262 John Anthony Miller 1956851186 John 4 crime, latin-america 4.30 2022
author: John Anthony Miller
name: John
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/05
date added: 2024/02/05
shelves: crime, latin-america
review:
A kind of faster-paced 'Our Man in Havana' with a nice twist at the end, Miller explores the complexities of late-Batista corruption in Cuba, although does less justitice than they deserve to the 'rebels' who become caricatures. But treated as a crime novel, it moves along nicely.
]]> 62047984
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? This piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller. That is what June believes, and The New York Times bestseller list agrees.

But June cannot escape Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens her stolen success. As she races to protect her secret she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.]]> 319 R.F. Kuang 000853277X John 3 contemporary
I would contrast it with Jean Hanff Korelitz's The Plot, which takes a similar theme - a stolen storyline - and weaves a more complex novel from it.]]> 3.69 2023
author: R.F. Kuang
name: John
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/01/10
shelves: contemporary
review:
Having finished this novel I'm still not sure what to make of it. I felt compelled to reach the end, to find out what finally happened to the protagonist, June, but I felt much of the story stretched the reader's capacity to believe it, beginning with the plot's key event and the other crucial one towards the end. I felt that the novel was based on a good idea - a robbed story whose theft has cross-cultural consequences - but, in the end, it wasn't as subtly handled as it might have been.

I would contrast it with Jean Hanff Korelitz's The Plot, which takes a similar theme - a stolen storyline - and weaves a more complex novel from it.
]]> 36738604
Making use of the best current science, Gould turns what many assume to be true about the universe on its head. The cosmos expands inward, not outward. Gravity can drive things apart, not merely together. And the universe seems to defy entropy as it becomes more ordered, rather than the other way around. Strangest of all, the universe is exquisitely hospitable to life, despite its being constructed from undistinguished atoms and a few unexceptional rules of behavior. Universe in Creation explores whether the emergence of life, rather than being a mere cosmic afterthought, may be written into the most basic laws of nature.

Offering a fresh take on what brought the world―and us―into being, Gould helps us see the universe as the master of its own creation, not tethered to a singular event but burgeoning as new space and energy continuously stream into existence. It is a very old story, as yet unfinished, with plotlines that twist and churn through infinite space and time.]]> 288 Roy R. Gould 067497607X John 4 science 3.87
author: Roy R. Gould
name: John
average rating: 3.87
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/06
date added: 2024/01/06
shelves: science
review:
A short but informative book that takes us from the origins of the universe to the origins of life, and more, explaining complex phenomena in an entertaining and accessible fashion. I learnt many things I didn't know, and Gould puts forward a convincing case for the creation of life and the existence of the universe being integral to one another.
]]> 59419908
Harry Compton is as far from a plant hunter as one could imagine �� a salesman plucked from the obscurity of the nursery growing fields to become 'the face that sold a thousand plants'.

But one small act of kindness sees him inherit a precious gift �� a specimen of a fabled tree last heard of in The Travels of Marco Polo, and a map.

Seizing his chance for fame and fortune, Harry sets out to make his mark. But where there is wealth there is corruption, and soon Harry is fleeing England, rounding the Cape of Good Hope and sailing up the Yangtze alongside a young widow �� both in pursuit of the plant that could transform both their lives forever.]]> 423 T.L. Mogford John 4 historical-fiction 3.69 2022
author: T.L. Mogford
name: John
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/06
date added: 2024/01/06
shelves: historical-fiction
review:
The surprising subject matter of this novel is the huge business of finding and importing exotic plants in Victorian England, with the plant hunters (apparently) willing to kill to get the most-prized specimens. This is an adventure story - and a love story too - which moves along nicely if feeling a little trite at times.
]]> 391890 249 Patricia Highsmith 0871132583 John 4 contemporary, crime 3.75 1969
author: Patricia Highsmith
name: John
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1969
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/30
date added: 2023/12/30
shelves: contemporary, crime
review:
This is one of Highsmith's more slow-moving books, one which explores the protagonist's changing emotions in response to an accidentally committed crime. The crime is almost incidental to the story, but exposes a rift in a relationship, which widens as the story develops. The book is intriguing rather than gripping, but nonetheless very enjoyable.
]]> 26128897
Meet Daniel Sullivan, a man with a complicated life. A New Yorker living in the wilds of Ireland, he has children he never sees in California, a father he loathes in Brooklyn, and a wife, Claudette, who is a reclusive ex–film star given to pulling a gun on anyone who ventures up their driveway. Claudette was once the most glamorous and infamous woman in cinema before she staged her own disappearance and retreated to blissful seclusion in an Irish farmhouse.

But the life Daniel and Claudette have so carefully constructed is about to be disrupted by an unexpected discovery about a woman Daniel lost touch with twenty years ago. This revelation will send him off-course, far away from wife, children and home. Will his love for Claudette be enough to bring him back?

This Must be the Place is a novel about family, identity, and true love: an intimately drawn portrait of a marriage, both the forces that hold it together and the pressures that drive it apart. O'Farrell writes with complexity, insight, and laugh-out-loud humor in a narrative that hurtles forward with powerful velocity and emotion. This Must be the Place is a sophisticated, spellbinding summer read from one of the UK's most highly acclaimed and best-loved novelists.]]> 401 Maggie O'Farrell 1472230302 John 3 contemporary 3.95 2016
author: Maggie O'Farrell
name: John
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/26
date added: 2023/12/26
shelves: contemporary
review:
It took me a while to get into this novel but eventually the story of the key relationship, between Daniel and Claudette, became compelling. In retrospect, O'Farrell's handling of the shifts in time between past and present were handled well, and perhaps if I had read the novel 'in one go' I might have avoided forgetting who her different characters were. However, it is a good exploration of the coming together and then of separation of two very different personalities, and of how children handle the apparently bizarre behaviour of adults.
]]> 60890215
When a parcel of mushrooms native to her mother-in-law’s province is delivered seemingly by mistake, Song Yan sees an opportunity to bond with her, and as the packages continue to arrive every week, the women stir-fry and grill the mushrooms, adding them to soups and noodles. When a letter arrives in the mail from the sender of the mushrooms, Song Yan’s world begins to tilt further into the surreal. Summoned to an uncanny, seemingly ageless house hidden in a hutong that sits in the middle of the congested city, she finds Bai Yu, a once world-famous pianist who disappeared ten years ago.]]> 240 An Yu 0802159621 John 2 foreign-fiction 3.50 2022
author: An Yu
name: John
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2023/12/12
date added: 2023/12/12
shelves: foreign-fiction
review:
Having enjoyed An Yu's Braised Pork, I was keen to read another of her novels. But although I finished it, it was a little disappointing. The magical-realism is a little excessive, and the reader is left wondering what the story was all about (well, this one was, at least). I now realise she wrote it years before she wrote Braised Pork, and I venture to suggest that as a novelist she has matured and her writing is now more thought-provoking - and less frustrating - than it was a decade earlier.
]]> 39795
Sweden, winter, 1991. Inspector Kurt Wallander and his team receive an anonymous tip-off. A few days later a life raft is washed up on a beach. In it are two men, dressed in expensive suits, shot dead. The dead men were criminals, victims of what seems to have been a gangland hit. But what appears to be an open-and-shut case soon takes on a far more sinister aspect. Wallander travels across the Baltic Sea, to Riga in Latvia, where he is plunged into a frozen, alien world of police surveillance, scarcely veiled threats, and lies. Doomed always to be one step behind the shadowy figures he pursues, only Wallander's obstinate desire to see that justice is done brings the truth to light.]]> 326 Henning Mankell 1400031524 John 4 3.76 1992
author: Henning Mankell
name: John
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1992
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/12
date added: 2023/12/12
shelves: crime, eastern-europe, scandinavia
review:
Another impressive book in Mankell's Wallander series. It stretches the imagination to think that an off-duty police officer from Sweden might tackle a crime in Latvia when he speaks none of the language, but the drama carries us happily forward. As usual, Wallander then returns to his gloomy, self-reflective status quo ante.
]]> 43261194 448 Paul Theroux 0544866479 John 5
He doesn’t ignore either the cartels or the migrants, but he does find a new way of writing about them. He travels along the whole border, staying in border towns and making frequent crossings from one side to the other. Sometimes this involves long queues, but at other times it’s the inconsequential crossing of a small bridge over a river and after passing through a gate, perhaps with few formalities. His comparisons of the twin cities that the border separates bring the differences to life.

Then he travels through the rest of Mexico, pointing out that the country changes markedly only 20 miles from the border. He finds small villages with huge churches, often built on the tops of demolished temples to “heathen�� gods, he explores Mexico City, teaches a group of stimulating students and later improves his Spanish in classes in Oaxaca. He gets stopped by threatening police officers whom he’s forced to bribe, but he also finds narrow, stoney rural roads through countryside where there is staggering poverty and half the population has emigrated northwards.

In one such village he describes a scene of everyday life in which “each person is animated in a task�� and likens this to a Mexican clock made of spare parts, “its workings tapping the time, gulping the seconds.�� He observes that “travel is less about landscapes than about people �� not power brokers but pedestrians, in the long march of everyman.�� He says that he feels lucky in the people he met.

He makes an observation which accords with my own experience. After meeting Subcomandante Marcos, the Zapatista leader in Chiapas, he notes Marcos’s views on the paternalism of foreign aid. Theroux then comments: “…foreign aid as it is conventionally practised is essentially a failure, futile in relieving poverty, and often harmful, relieving the ills of a few at the expense of the many.�� I have seen such failure myself in Nicaragua, with poorly designed and often costly projects that gave great volunteer opportunities to visiting Europeans but did little for the poor communities they were intended to benefit.

Although Theroux is a traveller, he largely avoids tourists, as he managed to do in all his other travel writings. This, of course, makes it more likely that he will capture some vital essence of the places through which he travels. If he has stopped travelling and, more importantly, writing accounts of his journeys, we will miss him.]]> 3.94 2019
author: Paul Theroux
name: John
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/25
date added: 2023/11/25
shelves: latin-america, travel, migration
review:
Is this the last of Theroux’s travel books? If it is, he has created an impressive cannon, and this is a fitting finale. In this book he joins the many writers who have travelled through Mexico, but his story is a refreshing one as many others have covered the violence of the cartels or the horrors faced by migrants travelling to the US border, while Theroux finds new angles from which to view a huge, complex country which has a capital city with (as he points out) a population far larger than that of any of the Central American countries to its south.

He doesn’t ignore either the cartels or the migrants, but he does find a new way of writing about them. He travels along the whole border, staying in border towns and making frequent crossings from one side to the other. Sometimes this involves long queues, but at other times it’s the inconsequential crossing of a small bridge over a river and after passing through a gate, perhaps with few formalities. His comparisons of the twin cities that the border separates bring the differences to life.

Then he travels through the rest of Mexico, pointing out that the country changes markedly only 20 miles from the border. He finds small villages with huge churches, often built on the tops of demolished temples to “heathen�� gods, he explores Mexico City, teaches a group of stimulating students and later improves his Spanish in classes in Oaxaca. He gets stopped by threatening police officers whom he’s forced to bribe, but he also finds narrow, stoney rural roads through countryside where there is staggering poverty and half the population has emigrated northwards.

In one such village he describes a scene of everyday life in which “each person is animated in a task�� and likens this to a Mexican clock made of spare parts, “its workings tapping the time, gulping the seconds.�� He observes that “travel is less about landscapes than about people �� not power brokers but pedestrians, in the long march of everyman.�� He says that he feels lucky in the people he met.

He makes an observation which accords with my own experience. After meeting Subcomandante Marcos, the Zapatista leader in Chiapas, he notes Marcos’s views on the paternalism of foreign aid. Theroux then comments: “…foreign aid as it is conventionally practised is essentially a failure, futile in relieving poverty, and often harmful, relieving the ills of a few at the expense of the many.�� I have seen such failure myself in Nicaragua, with poorly designed and often costly projects that gave great volunteer opportunities to visiting Europeans but did little for the poor communities they were intended to benefit.

Although Theroux is a traveller, he largely avoids tourists, as he managed to do in all his other travel writings. This, of course, makes it more likely that he will capture some vital essence of the places through which he travels. If he has stopped travelling and, more importantly, writing accounts of his journeys, we will miss him.
]]> 60049861
Moving from County Cork to London, from Waterloo to Zanzibar, Cashel seeks his fortune across continents in war and in peace. He faces a terrible moral choice in a village in Sri Lanka as part of the East Indian Army. He enters the world of the Romantic Poets in Pisa. In Ravenna he meets a woman who will live in his heart for the rest of his days. As he travels the world as a soldier, a farmer, a felon, a writer, a father, a lover, he experiences all the vicissitudes of life and, through the accelerating turbulence of the nineteenth century, he discovers who he truly is. This is the romance of life itself, and the beating heart of The Romantic.]]> 451 William Boyd 0241542030 John 5 historical-fiction
I’ve read almost all of Boyd’s novels and this one doesn’t disappoint. He admits in an interview that he has woven into the story places and themes from his earlier work, making ‘a kind of echo chamber of work�� he had already done. Certainly, he continues to be adept at creating what appear to be very unlikely characters (often with unlikely names, too), but who quickly earn their credibility and the reader’s sympathy. We have learnt to trust Boyd in another sense, too, in that when he takes us to unfamiliar places such as Trieste we are confident in his descriptions and the likelihood that they will be apt for the time period concerned.

Given that I live in Nicaragua I was intrigued that the country crept into Boyd’s story, when Cashel is appointed as its ‘consul�� in Trieste, for nefarious purposes, it turns out. This part of the story certainly stretched my belief in the plot, but on the other hand I could complain little given that Nicaragua had just been through a turbulent period (rightly spotted by Boyd) when it was invaded by the ‘filibuster�� William Walker in 1855.

Boyd hints in the interview that he may yet write another ‘life story�� novel. There is hope for his readers, then, that there will be a fifth.]]> 4.03 2022
author: William Boyd
name: John
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/25
date added: 2023/11/25
shelves: historical-fiction
review:
Reviews of this book rightly categorise it with ‘Any Human Heart�� (one of my favourite books) and with ‘The New Confessions��, and this is right, in the sense that it is a life story that predates the current era, whose main character is on the edges of high society, mixes with some of the great and good (Byron and Shelley, in the case of Cashel, the hero of this book), has eventful romantic adventures, avoids hard work but nevertheless manages to travel widely and conjure up an income largely through happenstance.

I’ve read almost all of Boyd’s novels and this one doesn’t disappoint. He admits in an interview that he has woven into the story places and themes from his earlier work, making ‘a kind of echo chamber of work�� he had already done. Certainly, he continues to be adept at creating what appear to be very unlikely characters (often with unlikely names, too), but who quickly earn their credibility and the reader’s sympathy. We have learnt to trust Boyd in another sense, too, in that when he takes us to unfamiliar places such as Trieste we are confident in his descriptions and the likelihood that they will be apt for the time period concerned.

Given that I live in Nicaragua I was intrigued that the country crept into Boyd’s story, when Cashel is appointed as its ‘consul�� in Trieste, for nefarious purposes, it turns out. This part of the story certainly stretched my belief in the plot, but on the other hand I could complain little given that Nicaragua had just been through a turbulent period (rightly spotted by Boyd) when it was invaded by the ‘filibuster�� William Walker in 1855.

Boyd hints in the interview that he may yet write another ‘life story�� novel. There is hope for his readers, then, that there will be a fifth.
]]> 935308
Unlike the situation with his ex-wife, his estranged daughter, or the beautiful but married young prosecuter who has piqued his interest, in this case, Wallander finds a problem he can handle. He quickly becomes obsessed with solving the crime before the already tense situation explodes, but soon comes to realize that it will require all his reserves of energy and dedication to solve.
--back cover]]> 280 Henning Mankell 1400031575 John 4 crime, scandinavia
It strikes me that a detective’s life is somewhat like that of a writer. Wallander may not exactly be Mankell (Wallander has some disagreeable right-wing views, for example), but the life of investigation and inspiration, punctuated by long periods with little of either, have similarities. Mankell didn’t spend his whole life writing Wallander stories and he had various experiences unrelated to crime and its investigation, but was there a sense in which Wallander partly became Mankell, and vice versa?]]> 3.79 1991
author: Henning Mankell
name: John
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1991
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/24
date added: 2023/11/24
shelves: crime, scandinavia
review:
Until recently I’d only read one ‘Wallander�� novel and had been impressed with it, and with Mankell’s autobiographical ‘Quicksand. A friend then reintroduced me to Wallander, specifically to ‘The White Lioness�� and this then led me to look at this, Mankell’s first Wallander novel. It might be his best (I now have to explore the rest of the series) as in some ways it is a crime story for someone who doesn’t like crime stories. While it begins with a violent and apparently inexplicable double murder, most of the book is taken up with investigation of the crime and, at times, inspiration as to the culprits, with periods when nothing much happens and we are left looking at Wallander’s rather disastrous private life while we await the next development.

It strikes me that a detective’s life is somewhat like that of a writer. Wallander may not exactly be Mankell (Wallander has some disagreeable right-wing views, for example), but the life of investigation and inspiration, punctuated by long periods with little of either, have similarities. Mankell didn’t spend his whole life writing Wallander stories and he had various experiences unrelated to crime and its investigation, but was there a sense in which Wallander partly became Mankell, and vice versa?
]]> 6437429 247 Henning Mankell 1846551005 John 3 crime 3.43 2006
author: Henning Mankell
name: John
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 2010/09/01
date added: 2023/11/24
shelves: crime
review:
My first Henning Mankell - I was attracted to his books by his role in the recent attempts to take aid to Gaza. A gloomy but enjoyable read, although with a rather frustrating conclusion. He likes to leave some loose ends trailing it seems, and in this novel he leaves several.
]]> 33638476 A stunning and poignant autobiographical look at the myriad experiences that shape a meaningful life, by the bestselling author of the Kurt Wallander mysteries. ��
��
In January 2014, Henning Mankell received a diagnosis of lung cancer.��Quicksand��is a response to this shattering news—but it is not a memoir of destruction. Instead, it is a testament to a life fully lived, a tribute to the extraordinary but fleeting human journey that delivers both boundless opportunity and crucial responsibility. In a series of intimate vignettes, Mankell ranges over rich and varied reflections: of growing up in a small Swedish town, where he experiences a startling revelation on a winter morning as a young boy; of living hand-to-mouth during a summer in Paris as an ambitious young writer; of his work at a theater in Mozambique, where��Lysistrata��is staged in the midst of civil war; of chance encounters with men and women who changed his understanding of the world. Along the way, Mankell ponders the meaning of a good life, and the critically important ways we can shape the future of humanity if we are fortunate enough to have the choice. Vivid, clear-eyed, and breathtakingly beautiful,��Quicksand��is an invaluable parting gift from a great man.]]> 319 Henning Mankell 0525432167 John 4 biography, scandinavia
The most interesting, however, are the incidents where his life brushes across that of someone else, usually someone who is in the middle of some personal drama or life-changing event, or is engaged in something which changes others�� lives. In other words these brief stories illustrate, one might say illuminate, what we are as human beings, what distinguishes us from other animals, even if there are and have been (over the course of the last 25,000 or even 35,000 years) so many of us, all identifiably human and having more in common than we have differences. Not much remains of human history from the very earliest centuries of our existence as a distinct species (and were we distinct enough, Mankell asks, to have had individual names so long ago?). But if we can find a doll that is 25,000 years old, or consider the motivations and actions of cave painters from 10,000 years before even that time, we can (and should) appreciate what a wonderful experience it is to be human, to have lived, however briefly, on this singular planet. Thanks, Henning Mankel, for leaving us a fitting reminder before you passed on.
]]> 4.06 2014
author: Henning Mankell
name: John
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2016/05/01
date added: 2023/11/24
shelves: biography, scandinavia
review:
Henning Mankell was born in the same year as me so, although I’ve only read a couple of his novels, I was convinced that this book would have something interesting to say to me. I was right. Written after his cancer diagnosis and finished (I think) only months before he died, it touches fairly lightly on the subject of his dying, although other people’s deaths figure prominently. I think the book is best described as a sought of audit of his life, not in terms of his writing (his novels are barely mentioned, although his stage work receives more attention) but more in terms of the key experiences he has had, and the key places he has engaged with. They include what he considers to be his greatest moment on unalloyed joy, as well as several incidents of great sadness or brutality.

The most interesting, however, are the incidents where his life brushes across that of someone else, usually someone who is in the middle of some personal drama or life-changing event, or is engaged in something which changes others�� lives. In other words these brief stories illustrate, one might say illuminate, what we are as human beings, what distinguishes us from other animals, even if there are and have been (over the course of the last 25,000 or even 35,000 years) so many of us, all identifiably human and having more in common than we have differences. Not much remains of human history from the very earliest centuries of our existence as a distinct species (and were we distinct enough, Mankell asks, to have had individual names so long ago?). But if we can find a doll that is 25,000 years old, or consider the motivations and actions of cave painters from 10,000 years before even that time, we can (and should) appreciate what a wonderful experience it is to be human, to have lived, however briefly, on this singular planet. Thanks, Henning Mankel, for leaving us a fitting reminder before you passed on.

]]> 39801
Combining compelling insights into the sinister side of modern life with a riveting tale of international intrigue, The White Lioness keeps you on the knife-edge of suspense.]]> 576 Henning Mankell John 4 crime, scandinavia 3.87 1993
author: Henning Mankell
name: John
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1993
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/03
date added: 2023/11/24
shelves: crime, scandinavia
review:
I wasn't sure I would enjoy this book as much as some previous stories by Mankell but once the plot jumped to South Africa it became very gripping. Of course there is the usual stretching of credibility in places, but the criminal characters are well developed and convincing, and Mankell nicely cultivates the reader's sympathy for the would-be assassin. It's a crime story, but one that feeds on Mankell's own progressive political views and, of course, on his personal knowledge of southern Africa.
]]> 160969
Highsmith has once again, as Graham Greene wrote "created a world of her own, a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger". And that sense of danger grows from the first page to the sinister and chilling conclusion.]]> 270 Patricia Highsmith 0099282976 John 5 crime
Robert is the main protagonist: he has a history of mental health problems, and finds some stability and security through watching a young woman through her window while she is engaged in day-to-day tasks like cooking. This bizarre if rather harmless compulsion leads him into conflicts in which the three other main characters are seen to be far more unstable than he is, yet he is the one suspected by the police.

The story has some nice twists, each one plunging Robert into more difficulties, leaving him to handle a final one, perhaps the worst, but the conclusion of which Highsmith allows to hang in the air (I notice she does that sometimes with other novels). It is a compelling and also intriguing story, in which it is the voyeur who earns the reader's sympathy, at least as much as the woman who is being watched.]]> 3.79 1962
author: Patricia Highsmith
name: John
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1962
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/11/23
shelves: crime
review:
Highsmith here explores the personalities of mentally unbalanced people, in which the hero commits an error, or a minor crime (of rather chaste peeping-tomery) and as a consequence gets accused of murder while he himself is being searched for by someone wanting to kill him.

Robert is the main protagonist: he has a history of mental health problems, and finds some stability and security through watching a young woman through her window while she is engaged in day-to-day tasks like cooking. This bizarre if rather harmless compulsion leads him into conflicts in which the three other main characters are seen to be far more unstable than he is, yet he is the one suspected by the police.

The story has some nice twists, each one plunging Robert into more difficulties, leaving him to handle a final one, perhaps the worst, but the conclusion of which Highsmith allows to hang in the air (I notice she does that sometimes with other novels). It is a compelling and also intriguing story, in which it is the voyeur who earns the reader's sympathy, at least as much as the woman who is being watched.
]]> 59892387

Antonio, an impoverished duke, clings to the decaying legacy of the House of Olivares. When he meets Cate on the train to Seville, he joins her search, and together they uncover evidence in his five hundred-year old library to support the painting's provenance including a document about the artist's final years that will shock the titans of art history. But Cate vacillates about revealing the truth, fearful that it may destroy her career, her family's expectations, and her future with Antonio.



Written with vivid prose, rich references to seventeenth century Spanish art, compelling characters and a historical puzzle, Attribution is the story of one contemporary woman's journey to understand the past--and unlock her future.]]> 309 Linda Moore 1647422531 John 4 contemporary, art 3.92 2022
author: Linda Moore
name: John
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/08
date added: 2023/11/08
shelves: contemporary, art
review:
If you're interested in the history of art, as I am, this novel is a good read, although some of the detail about identifying old paintings can be a little laboured. It is a hell of a tall story, of course, unless a note at the end reveals that it's closer to art history than fiction (I've not quite finished the novel). Certainly parts of it stretch the reader's credulity. Who meets an impoverished duke on a train, whose ancestors hosted Velazquez? Which non-native Spanish speakers (like me) can read - apparently with no difficulty - diaries from the time of Spain's Golden Age? But it's a good, romantic romp, that keeps the reader engaged.
]]> 61089497 432 James Crawford 1324037040 John 3 ecology, migration, travel 3.99 2022
author: James Crawford
name: John
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/11/08
date added: 2023/11/08
shelves: ecology, migration, travel
review:
I found this book very mixed. Crawford writes about some interesting boundaries, such as the wall that demarcates Palestinian from Israeli territories in the West Bank, and the Sahel in northern Africa, and he tells some interesting stories. However I found it rather patchy and a book to dip into, rather than read cover-to-cover.
]]> 76752325 0 Louise Doughty 0571322204 John 3 espionage 3.55 2023
author: Louise Doughty
name: John
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/11/02
date added: 2023/11/02
shelves: espionage
review:
This story is compelling because it involves a chase, but it lacks the realism of (say) 'Apple Tree Yard' and at times seems a little far-fetched. The crime that, it turns out, is the reason for 'Bird' making a dash to leave the spy service is also somewhat vague. I had a feeling that Doughty had two reasonable stories (Bird's life before she became a spy being the other one), but didn't quite bring them to fruition.
]]> 456 New York Times��bestselling author Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy) opens Leviathan with the tearing of a bomb explosion and the death of one Benjamin Sachs. Ben’s one-time best friend, Peter Aaron, begins to retrospectively investigate the transformation that led Ben from his enviable stable life, to one of a recluse. Both were once intelligent, yet struggling novelists until Ben’s near-death experience falling from a fire escape triggers a tumble in which he becomes withdrawn and disturbed, living alone and building bombs in a far-off cabin. That is, until he mysteriously disappears, leaving behind only a manuscript titled Leviathan, pages rustling in the wind.]]> 275 Paul Auster 0140178139 John 4 contemporary
These happenstances do, of course, stretch the reader's credibility, but not uncomfortably, as we quickly give ourselves over to the notion that this is the whole basis of the novel. It works; we are intrigued, and we are keen to find out why Sachs met the fate depicted in the opening chapter of the book. It is a pretty impressive death, and an impressive story that leads (eventually) to it.]]> 3.99 1992
author: Paul Auster
name: John
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1992
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/01
date added: 2023/11/01
shelves: contemporary
review:
I have come late to Paul Auster and I read his New York Trilogy almost by accident. If that book (or collection of novellas) was about ambiguity, 'Leviathan' is about coincidencies and how they combine to shape our lives. Auster writes in the first person (again), and seems to partly inhabit the personality of the protagonist, Peter Aaron, who of course is also an author. Indeed he is the 'author' of the story we are told, which focusses on a wayward character, Ben Sachs, who is himself a writer, leading a chaotic life, in many ways intertwined with that of Aaron, subject as they both are to a sequence of extraordinary, life-shaping coincidences.

These happenstances do, of course, stretch the reader's credibility, but not uncomfortably, as we quickly give ourselves over to the notion that this is the whole basis of the novel. It works; we are intrigued, and we are keen to find out why Sachs met the fate depicted in the opening chapter of the book. It is a pretty impressive death, and an impressive story that leads (eventually) to it.
]]> 61884831
Meet Henri and Louise. Two strangers, traveling alone, on the train from Belgrade to Istanbul. Except this isn't the first time they have met.

It's the 1960s and Louise is running. From her past in England, from the owners of the money she has stolen―and from Henri, the person who has been sent to collect it. Across the Continent―from Granada to Paris, from Belgrade to Istanbul―Henri follows, desperate to leave behind his own troubles. The memories of his past life as a gendarme in Algeria that keep resurfacing. His inability to reconcile the growing responsibilities of his current criminal path with this former self.

But Henri soon realizes that Louise is no ordinary mark. As the train hurtles toward its final destination, Henri and Louise must decide what the future will hold―and whether it involves one another.]]> 320 Christine Mangan 125078848X John 4 crime 3.26 2023
author: Christine Mangan
name: John
average rating: 3.26
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/10/06
date added: 2023/10/06
shelves: crime
review:
A not-quite-a-crime story, somewhat in the style of Patricia Highsmith, that takes a will-they, won't-they format as a strange couple travel across Europe in the aftermath of an accidental robbery, pursued by a mysterious 'fulano' (in Spanish, 'somebody'). The pleasure of the story is in the journey, as the two come together and move apart, with the question of whether they will end up together left hanging right until the end.
]]> 3845355
But some new neighbors have moved to Villeperce: the Pritchards, just arrived from America. they are a ghastly pair, with vulgar manners and even more vulgar taste. Most inconvenient, though, is their curiosity. Ripley does, after all, have a few things to hide. When menacing coincidences begin to occur, a spiraling contest of sinister hints and mutual terrorism ensues, resulting in one of Patricia Highsmith's most elegantly harrowing novels to date.]]> 304 Patricia Highsmith 0393333191 John 4 crime, comic
The way that violence suddenly erupts in the middle of the lazy atmosphere of rural France is conjured brilliantly, and we will never read book #6 to see what more may have followed... and what further bodies may have been uncovered.]]> 3.79 1991
author: Patricia Highsmith
name: John
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1991
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/28
date added: 2023/09/28
shelves: crime, comic
review:
How disappointing to come to the end of the 'Ripley' series, surely Highsmith's best books? The last one is slightly lower key than the earlier ones, with an ending that suggests there were more Ripley books to come... but sadly there weren't. Highsmith was an expert at writing crime novels with a comic touch, which also capture perfectly what might be called upper middle-class life in Europe a few decades ago, especially for those who - like Ripley - managed a very pleasant lifestyle with no discernible income except (in his case) the one coming from a life of intermittent crime.

The way that violence suddenly erupts in the middle of the lazy atmosphere of rural France is conjured brilliantly, and we will never read book #6 to see what more may have followed... and what further bodies may have been uncovered.
]]> 431 The remarkable, acclaimed series of interconnected detective novels �� from the author of 4 3 2 1: A Novel

The New York Review of Books has called Paul Auster’s work “one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature.�� Moving at the breathless pace of a thriller, this uniquely stylized triology of detective novels begins with City of Glass, in which Quinn, a mystery writer, receives an ominous phone call in the middle of the night. He’s drawn into the streets of New York, onto an elusive case that’s more puzzling and more deeply-layered than anything he might have written himself. In Ghosts, Blue, a mentee of Brown, is hired by White to spy on Black from a window on Orange Street. Once Blue starts stalking Black, he finds his subject on a similar mission, as well. In The Locked Room, Fanshawe has disappeared, leaving behind his wife and baby and nothing but a cache of novels, plays, and poems.

This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition includes an introduction from author and professor Luc Sante, as well as a pulp novel-inspired cover from Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic artist of Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers.]]> 308 Paul Auster 0143039830 John 4 contemporary
For long periods not a lot appears to happen, as one character doggedly pursues another across New York, usually on foot, or sits watching him through a window. But all the time we are alert to the transformations taking place, and the uncertainty of whether a character will remain as depicted or be permanently changed by his exposure to the other.

The novels are compelling, in a kind of 'magical realism detective story' kind of way, and provoke ones thoughts about the extent to which each of us becomes a different person through those we closely relate to.]]> 3.93 1987
author: Paul Auster
name: John
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1987
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/15
date added: 2023/09/15
shelves: contemporary
review:
Auster has said that these three short novels are about “learning to live with ambiguity.�� He contends that they are nothing to do with detective fiction, but nevertheless they all involve people watching or investigating other lives, and somehow getting inextricably mixed up in them, even to the point of one character merging into another.

For long periods not a lot appears to happen, as one character doggedly pursues another across New York, usually on foot, or sits watching him through a window. But all the time we are alert to the transformations taking place, and the uncertainty of whether a character will remain as depicted or be permanently changed by his exposure to the other.

The novels are compelling, in a kind of 'magical realism detective story' kind of way, and provoke ones thoughts about the extent to which each of us becomes a different person through those we closely relate to.
]]> 45161754
Profoundly troubled by what she has seen, even while she is abruptly released from a marriage that had constrained her, Jia Jia embarks on a journey to discover the truth of the sketch. Starting at her neighbourhood bar, with its brandy and vinyl, and fuelled by anger, bewilderment, curiosity and love, Jia Jia travels deep into her past in order to arrive at her future.

Braised Pork is a cinematic, often dreamlike evocation of nocturnal Beijing and the high plains of Tibet, and an exploration of myth-making, loss, and a world beyond words, which ultimately sees a young woman find a new and deeper sense of herself.]]> 240 An Yu 1787301877 John 4 contemporary, foreign-fiction
But An Yu is creative in her own right, capturing what appears to be the essence of a poor Tibetan village and perhaps investing more depth into ancilliary characters than Murakami does. There is no doubt that there is a genre of books from Asian writers whose heroes search for life's meaning, where the search is the story rather than the eventual outcome.]]> 3.43 2020
author: An Yu
name: John
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/09
date added: 2023/09/09
shelves: contemporary, foreign-fiction
review:
To say that An Yu is influenced by Haruki Murakami is true but perhaps does her a disservice, because she brings a distinctively feminine and rather gentle touch to her magical realism. There are some similarities to be sure: in this novel the heroine passes into a world of water in the way that Marukami's heroes pass through walls into another dimension of reality, and there are details like her fascination with a large birthmark she has (shades of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle).

But An Yu is creative in her own right, capturing what appears to be the essence of a poor Tibetan village and perhaps investing more depth into ancilliary characters than Murakami does. There is no doubt that there is a genre of books from Asian writers whose heroes search for life's meaning, where the search is the story rather than the eventual outcome.
]]> 12663992 703 Tim Jeal 0571277772 John 4 travel, history
Nevertheless Jeal does a good job, managing to combine the entertaining if often horrific adventures of the explorers with a largely sensitive account of their impact, both on the indigenous people that they met or employed, and on the slave traders who bedevilled the region (and whose protagonists often knew the geography better than the explorers, even if they didn’t join up the dots to link the Nile to its source). Jeal’s latest book is also more adventurous in looking at the longer-term implications of the penetration of Africa by different explorers and what happened as �� at the end of the nineteenth century �� the region first became properly colonised. He takes this story, in inevitably sketchy form, right up to the period of decolonisation and its consequences, such as the emergence of the Mau-Mau and the expulsion of the East African Asians.

He even reviews the subsequent history from the likely viewpoints of the notable explorers such as Livingstone, Stanley, Speke and so on. Jeal is responsible, in this book and previous ones, for a considerable reappraisal of the key personalities of the era, often using sources that have only been available in recent years. These reappraisals, of men like Stanley and Burton, will certainly endure. He is building up a definitive and accessible history of a complex place and period, that is also very readable.
]]> 3.89 2011
author: Tim Jeal
name: John
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2012/12/01
date added: 2023/07/31
shelves: travel, history
review:
I read Explorers of the Nile in part because I enjoyed Tim Jeal’s book on Stanley, and this in many ways takes up that story where it left off. The tale gets quite complicated, not least because what might be the common-sense assumption, that explorers of the Nile started off by sailing up the river from its estuary, is largely wrong. The key discoveries were made by those who entered the interior of Africa from the Indian Ocean coast, notably from Zanzibar. Unless you have an atlas open �� and especially if like me you read the book with the pathetic maps available with the Kindle edition �� the geography is often difficult to follow.

Nevertheless Jeal does a good job, managing to combine the entertaining if often horrific adventures of the explorers with a largely sensitive account of their impact, both on the indigenous people that they met or employed, and on the slave traders who bedevilled the region (and whose protagonists often knew the geography better than the explorers, even if they didn’t join up the dots to link the Nile to its source). Jeal’s latest book is also more adventurous in looking at the longer-term implications of the penetration of Africa by different explorers and what happened as �� at the end of the nineteenth century �� the region first became properly colonised. He takes this story, in inevitably sketchy form, right up to the period of decolonisation and its consequences, such as the emergence of the Mau-Mau and the expulsion of the East African Asians.

He even reviews the subsequent history from the likely viewpoints of the notable explorers such as Livingstone, Stanley, Speke and so on. Jeal is responsible, in this book and previous ones, for a considerable reappraisal of the key personalities of the era, often using sources that have only been available in recent years. These reappraisals, of men like Stanley and Burton, will certainly endure. He is building up a definitive and accessible history of a complex place and period, that is also very readable.

]]> 26014651
Twenty-two-year-old Jane Fairchild has worked as a maid at an English country house since she was sixteen. For almost all of those years she has been the clandestine lover to Paul Sheringham, young heir of a neighboring house. The two now meet on an unseasonably warm March day—Mothering Sunday—a day that will change Jane's life forever.

As the narrative moves back and forth from 1924 to the end of the century, what we know and understand about Jane—about the way she loves, thinks, feels, sees, remembers—expands with every vividly captured moment. Her story is one of profound self-discovery, and through her, Graham Swift has created an emotionally soaring, deeply affecting work of fiction.]]> 177 Graham Swift 1101947527 John 4 historical-fiction
The shocking event that is at the heart of the book is nicely slipped in at the end of a chapter, almost as a matter of no consequence. But I found the events outside the two big houses to be the least satisfactory parts of the novel. Do we really find out why the terrible tragedy occurred? And do we really find ourselves drawn into the background story of how the events on this one day in 1924 went on to shape Jay's whole life? I wasn't, and found this part of the novel distracting. I wanted more of that rich description with which the book began.]]> 3.71 2016
author: Graham Swift
name: John
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2017/08/01
date added: 2023/07/30
shelves: historical-fiction
review:
Swift's description of a langorous, unexpectedly hot March day in the English countryside is rich and evocative in its detail: I could imagine myself there, even though my knowledge of country estates like the two described, and even more so in the early part of the last century, is very limited. The events that form the core of the novel are also beautifully handled - the tryst, that for the first time is taking place in the gentleman's own bedroom, and the aftermath, when Jay (the maid from another large house) is left alone and walks around the empty house, naked.

The shocking event that is at the heart of the book is nicely slipped in at the end of a chapter, almost as a matter of no consequence. But I found the events outside the two big houses to be the least satisfactory parts of the novel. Do we really find out why the terrible tragedy occurred? And do we really find ourselves drawn into the background story of how the events on this one day in 1924 went on to shape Jay's whole life? I wasn't, and found this part of the novel distracting. I wanted more of that rich description with which the book began.
]]> 58772746
You think you know a person . . .

Ariel Pryce wakes up in Lisbon, alone. Her husband is gone―no warning, no note, not answering his phone. Something is wrong.

She starts with hotel security, then the police, then the American embassy, at each confronting questions she can’t fully answer: What exactly is John doing in Lisbon? Why would he drag her along on his business trip? Who would want to harm him? And why does Ariel know so little about her new―much younger―husband?

The clock is ticking. Ariel is increasingly frustrated and desperate, running out of time, and the one person in the world who can help is the one person she least wants to ask.

With sparkling prose and razor-sharp insights, bestselling author Chris Pavone delivers a stunning and sophisticated international thriller that will linger long after the surprising final page.]]> 436 Chris Pavone 0374604762 John 5 crime 3.62 2022
author: Chris Pavone
name: John
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/06/28
date added: 2023/06/28
shelves: crime
review:
I'm a fan of Pavone's but his previous books do seem to move too fast, and it's easy to lose the plot. This one has an intense plot, too, but with more observation of the characters and recounting of their past lives, which brings theor personalities out more. He could perhaps have also given a little more time to describing the atmospheric city of Lisbon, but let's not complain as this book has a good plot, which is pretty fantastic but convinces us to suspend belief, and offers us a nice twist or two before it ends.
]]> 11275
In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife's missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo. As these searches intersect, Okada encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute; a malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid sixteen-year-old-girl; and an aging war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria.

Gripping, prophetic, suffused with comedy and menace, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force equal in scope to the masterpieces of Mishima and Pynchon.]]> 607 Haruki Murakami 0965341984 John 4 contemporary 4.16 1994
author: Haruki Murakami
name: John
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1994
rating: 4
read at: 2023/06/09
date added: 2023/06/09
shelves: contemporary
review:
I first read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle many years ago and have reread it since. On a third reading, I realise that I find it hard going and perhaps I'm at last post-Murakami. I'm finishing the book, and enjoying a good part of it, but I now find tedious some of the very lengthy parallel stories that he weaves into the 'plot'. It's a remarkable book, but I haven't found its entertainment value as durable as I thought.
]]> 60898737 When there’s a pack on the hunt, nobody’s safe

A closed community

Rose Farm is home to a group of survivalists, completely cut off from the outside world. Until now.

A missing person

A young woman goes missing within the perimeter of the farm compound. Can Tuva talk her way inside the tight-knit group to find her story?

A frantic search

As Tuva attempts to unmask the culprit, she gains unique access to the residents. But soon she finds herself in danger of the pack turning against her �� will she make her way back to safety so she can expose the truth?

Will Dean’s most heart-pounding Tuva Moodyson thriller yet takes Tuva to her absolute limits in exposing a heinous crime, and in her own personal life. Can she, and will she, do the right thing?]]> 323 Will Dean John 3 crime, scandinavia 4.00 2022
author: Will Dean
name: John
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/06/09
date added: 2023/06/09
shelves: crime, scandinavia
review:
I realise in reading another Tuva Moodyson crime story that there is a problem, at least with this and I think the previous episode - the conclusions are rather too dramatic to be credible. The plot develops in an entertaining, measured and reasonably credible way, but all of a suddent things get out of hand. To me this rather spoils the book.
]]> 481606 Dervla Murphy 0007123094 John 3
Reading 'Full Tilt' took me to her early autobiography, which is not as gripping as the books about her journeys but is very interesting about how her unusual early life formed her, and how the wish to escape (and specifically to cycle to India) grew in her at a very early age.]]> 4.11 1979
author: Dervla Murphy
name: John
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1979
rating: 3
read at: 2023/06/01
date added: 2023/06/01
shelves:
review:
Having enjoyed Dervla Murphy's book about Cuba some years ago I was interested to read about her first major cycling expedition - to India - in 'Full Tilt'. This is both entertaining and informative, written with her characteristic aplomb. An incident in which a budding rapist enters her room in the middle of the night and she scares him away by reaching for the revolver under her pillow and firing a bullet into the ceiling, is perhaps the most remarkable incident, to which Murphy devotes only a few rather dismissive lines.

Reading 'Full Tilt' took me to her early autobiography, which is not as gripping as the books about her journeys but is very interesting about how her unusual early life formed her, and how the wish to escape (and specifically to cycle to India) grew in her at a very early age.
]]> 163921
Full Tilt was only the first in of Murphy's accounts of her travel adventures, and provides an exciting introduction to this remarkable woman..]]> 256 Dervla Murphy 0879512482 John 4 middle-east, travel
Reading 'Full Tilt' took me to her early autobiography, which is not as gripping as the books about her journeys but is very interesting about how her unusual early life formed her, and how the wish to escape (and specifically to cycle to India) grew in her at a very early age.]]> 4.05 1965
author: Dervla Murphy
name: John
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1965
rating: 4
read at: 2023/06/01
date added: 2023/06/01
shelves: middle-east, travel
review:
Having enjoyed Dervla Murphy's book about Cuba some years ago I was interested to read about her first major cycling expedition - to India. This is both entertaining and informative, written with her characteristic aplomb. An incident in which a budding rapist enters her room in the middle of the night and she scares him away by reaching for the revolver under her pillow and firing a bullet into the ceiling, is perhaps the most remarkable incident, to which Murphy devotes only a few rather dismissive lines.

Reading 'Full Tilt' took me to her early autobiography, which is not as gripping as the books about her journeys but is very interesting about how her unusual early life formed her, and how the wish to escape (and specifically to cycle to India) grew in her at a very early age.
]]> 6868 226 Ian McEwan John 4 espionage, eastern-europe 3.70 1990
author: Ian McEwan
name: John
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1990
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/10
date added: 2023/05/10
shelves: espionage, eastern-europe
review:
Having thought I'd read all of McEwan's novels I came across this by accident, and it didn't disappoint. It bears the hallmark of his usual rigorous research, building a convincing picture of post-ar Berlin, populated by characters from the British and US forces based there which seem realistic if in one or two cases verging on the stereotypical. It wouldn't be a McEwan novel without some unexpected and horrific act of violence, and also with a nicely twisted conclusion. It has both.
]]> 391883
In 'A Dog's Ransom', Highsmith blends a savage humor with brilliant social satire in this dark tale of a highminded criminal who hits a wealthy Manhattan couple where it hurts the most when he kidnaps their beloved poodle. This work attests to Highsmith's reputation as "the poet of apprehension" (Graham Greene).]]> 271 Patricia Highsmith 0393323366 John 3 crime 3.50 1972
author: Patricia Highsmith
name: John
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1972
rating: 3
read at: 2023/05/07
date added: 2023/05/07
shelves: crime
review:
In this book Highsmith explores the mind of a murderer and of those around him, and how their feelings evolve, in a perhaps even more detailed way than in some of her other books. The story is fascinating rather than entertaining: not, perhaps, the most enjoyable of her books.
]]> 58141236 The thrilling narrative of an unlikely friendship and a Guatemalan migrant-hacker’s journey, revealing the chaos and cruelty U.S. immigration policies have unleashed even beyond our borders

Axel Kirschner was a lifelong New Yorker, all Queens hustle and bravado. But he was also undocumented. After a minor traffic violation while driving his son to kindergarten, Axel was deported to Guatemala, a country he swore he had not lived in since he was a baby. While fighting his way back through Mexico on a migrant caravan, Axel met Levi Vonk, a young anthropologist and journalist from the US. That chance encounter would change both of their lives forever.

Levi soon discovered that Axel was no ordinary migrant. He was harboring a secret: Axel was a��hacker. This secret would launch the two friends on a dangerous adventure far beyond what either of them could have imagined. While Axel’s abilities gave him an edge in a system that denied his existence, they would also ensnare him in a tangled underground network of human traffickers, corrupt priests, and anti-government guerillas eager to exploit his talents for their own ends. And along the way, Axel’s secret only raised more questions for Levi about his past. How had Axel learned to hack? What did he want? And was Axel really who he said he was?

Border Hacker��is at once an adventure saga—the story of a man who will do anything to return to his family, and the friend who will do anything to help him—and a deeper parable about the violence of US immigration policy as shot through a single, extraordinary life.]]> 352 Levi Vonk 1645037053 John 3 migration, biography
It is based around his close friendship with a black Guatemalan called 'Axel', who turns out to be a complex and rather a slippery character, morphing into different 'selves' as the account develops. This is perhaps where the book gets slightly bogged down, as the author's fascination with Axel often appears to overbearing and compulsive, such that he makes frequent trips away from his apparently very tolerant girlfriend to resolve Axel's multiple problems as a migrant trying to make his way in Mexico City.

The book does, however, convey very realistically the truth about life as a Central American migrant, especially of one who makes multiple attempts to reach the US, and ultimately has to settle for what Mexican president AMLO now calls 'the Mexican dream'.]]> 4.43 2022
author: Levi Vonk
name: John
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/05/07
date added: 2023/05/07
shelves: migration, biography
review:
If you are interested in the truth of what happens to migrants from Central America who try to cross into the US, and specifically the terrible dangers that face them in Mexico, this is a worthwhile account by a young anthropologist who spends considerable time with those making the journey.

It is based around his close friendship with a black Guatemalan called 'Axel', who turns out to be a complex and rather a slippery character, morphing into different 'selves' as the account develops. This is perhaps where the book gets slightly bogged down, as the author's fascination with Axel often appears to overbearing and compulsive, such that he makes frequent trips away from his apparently very tolerant girlfriend to resolve Axel's multiple problems as a migrant trying to make his way in Mexico City.

The book does, however, convey very realistically the truth about life as a Central American migrant, especially of one who makes multiple attempts to reach the US, and ultimately has to settle for what Mexican president AMLO now calls 'the Mexican dream'.
]]> 60415059
While there were intermittent US forays into Nicaragua in the 1850s, sustained intervention in Nicaragua only began in 1911 when the US invaded Nicaragua to put a halt to a canal project connecting its Atlantic and Pacific coasts to be partnered with Japan �� a project the US wanted to control for itself.

The US Marines subsequently invaded Nicaragua a number of times between 1911 and 1934 to try to maintain control over it, only to be repelled by peasant guerillas led by Augusto Cesar Sandino. The Marines left for good only after the US had set up the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza, who then lured Sandino to Managua on the promise of a peace deal and murdered him in cold blood.

Successive generations of Somozas would rule Nicaragua with an iron hand and critical US support until finally, in 1979, the latest iteration was ousted by the Sandinistas �� a movement inspired by Sandino and motivated by a unique philosophy merging Christianity and Marxism.

Led by Daniel Ortega, the Sandinistas established democracy in Nicaragua with the country’s first free and fair elections in 1984. Once again, the US attempted to subvert democracy by organizing Somoza’s former National Guardsmen into a terrorist group known as the Contras. Directed and funded by the CIA, the Contras would terrorize Nicaragua for nearly 10 years.

In 1990, the Sandinistas stood for early election and the war-weary voters selected Violeta Chamorro. The Sandinistas relinquished office peacefully stepped, ceding the government to Chamorro.

For 17 long years, from 1990 to 2007, neo-liberal governments, beginning with Violetta Chamorro, governed Nicaragua. Backed by the US, these governments neglected the people, leaving almost half of the country un-electrified, without decent education or health care, and in poverty.

When Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas returned to power in 2007 through elections, they immediately established free health care and education, built infrastructure throughout the country, and began to eradicate poverty. Now, almost 100% of the country is electrified; poverty and extreme poverty have been greatly diminished.t]]> 332 Daniel Kovalik 1949762602 John 5 politics, latin-america
This is not to say that the book is uncritical or that it skates around the issues and problems that have faced the revolution over the 44 years of its development. But it does ground his analysis in the inescapable facts that, unlike any other mainland Latin American country, and especially unlike its near neighbors, Nicaragua has both established a revolutionary government and, with some exceptional periods, resisted the attempts by the United States to put the revolution into reverse.

Indeed, Dan reminds us that the history of Nicaragua, dating almost back to its independence from Spain in 1821, is one of resistance to repeated attempts by US governments and private enterprise to have their will with Nicaragua, attempts connived in �� right up to the present day �� by many of Nicaragua’s own elite.]]> 4.42
author: Daniel Kovalik
name: John
average rating: 4.42
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2023/04/18
date added: 2023/04/18
shelves: politics, latin-america
review:
Dan Kovalik’s love for Nicaragua is very evident from this book. And this is very important in the telling of his story, as he does so from a perspective shared by many of those who first knew the country and its revolution in the heady years after 1979. Whatever one’s views on how the revolution has developed since (and Kovalik and I share very similar positions on this), that initial love for Nicaragua, its people and its revolution stamp the book with a perspective that is very different from any cold analysis by (say) a political scientist.

This is not to say that the book is uncritical or that it skates around the issues and problems that have faced the revolution over the 44 years of its development. But it does ground his analysis in the inescapable facts that, unlike any other mainland Latin American country, and especially unlike its near neighbors, Nicaragua has both established a revolutionary government and, with some exceptional periods, resisted the attempts by the United States to put the revolution into reverse.

Indeed, Dan reminds us that the history of Nicaragua, dating almost back to its independence from Spain in 1821, is one of resistance to repeated attempts by US governments and private enterprise to have their will with Nicaragua, attempts connived in �� right up to the present day �� by many of Nicaragua’s own elite.
]]> 25622296
Just in time for the centennial celebration of groundbreaking noir fiction writer Patricia Highsmith comes a reissue of her propulsive, engrossing debut, Strangers on a Train, with a new introduction by best-selling author Paula Hawkins. Guy Haines and Charles Anthony Bruno are passengers on the same train. Haines is a successful architect in the midst of a divorce, Bruno a mysterious smooth-talker with a sadistic proposal: he’ll murder Haines’s wife if Haines will murder Bruno’s father. As Bruno carries out his twisted plan, Guy finds himself trapped in Highsmith’s perilous world, where, under the right circumstances, ordinary people are capable of extraordinary crimes. The inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1951 film, Strangers on a Train launched Highsmith’s prolific career, proving her a master at depicting the unsettling forces that tremble beneath the surface of everyday life.]]> 273 Patricia Highsmith 0393351939 John 3 crime 3.67 1950
author: Patricia Highsmith
name: John
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1950
rating: 3
read at: 2023/04/15
date added: 2023/04/15
shelves: crime
review:
This is a murder story where the denouement seems inevitable from around halfway through the novel, but its interest lies more in the exploration of the two main characters and how murder affects them. Highsmith's examination of the character of a murderer, how they try to live with their crime but ultimately fail to do so, is excellent. It's perhaps surprising that she could write a serious book like this, about murder, then write more humorous (but also enjoyable) ones on the same topic in the Mr Ripley series.
]]> 38588764 Con questo noir dal fascino ossessivo, tutto incentrato su orari e nomi di treni �� un congegno perfetto che ruota intorno a una manciata di minuti ��, Matsumoto ha firmato un’indagine impossibile, ma anche un libro allusivo, che sa con sottigliezza far parlare il Giappone.]]> 175 Seichō Matsumoto 8845932443 John 4 crime, foreign-fiction 3.66 1958
author: Seichō Matsumoto
name: John
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1958
rating: 4
read at: 2023/04/15
date added: 2023/04/15
shelves: crime, foreign-fiction
review:
This book is best read in a paper version where you can refer to the map that comes with it, and understand the geography of the two long train journeys involved. It's an intriguing and complex tale, perhaps the only regret is that the solution, when it comes, is found through a twist in the story line that doesn't quite do justice to the earlier, contorted plot.
]]> 3425503 The Talented Mr. Ripley. Having accrued considerable wealth through a long career of crime—forgery, extortion, serial murder—Ripley still finds his appetite unquenched and longs to get back in the game.


In Ripley's Game, first published in 1974, Patricia Highsmith's classic chameleon relishes the opportunity to simultaneously repay an insult and help a friend commit a crime—and escape the doldrums of his idyllic retirement. This third novel in Highsmith's series is one of her most psychologically nuanced—particularly memorable for its dark, absurd humor—and was hailed by critics for its ability to manipulate the tropes of the genre. With the creation of Ripley, one of literature's most seductive sociopaths, Highsmith anticipated the likes of Norman Bates and Hannibal Lecter years before their appearance.]]> 288 Patricia Highsmith 0393332128 John 4 3.84 1974
author: Patricia Highsmith
name: John
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1974
rating: 4
read at: 2023/03/20
date added: 2023/03/20
shelves:
review:
After reading Highsmith's first book in the series I moved on to the second and now to the third. Tom Ripley is quite a compelling character in his presumptious middle-class existence and his need to be well off without any effort, not to mention his propensity for (almost accidentally) murdering people. It's the combination of rich description of settings and the rather nuanced twists in the plots that make the series attractive, together with the constant feeling the books gibe of conjuring a world which has slipped into the past.
]]> 3845356 Ripley Under Ground (1970), he lives in a beautiful French villa, surrounded by a world-class art collection and married to a pharmaceutical heiress. All seems serene in Ripley's world until a phone call from London shatters his peace. An art forgery scheme he set up a few years ago is threatening to unravel: a nosy American is asking questions and Ripley must go to London to put a stop to it. In this second Ripley novel, Patricia Highsmith offers a mesmerizing and disturbing tale in which Ripley will stop at nothing to preserve his tangle of lies.]]> 288 Patricia Highsmith 0393332136 John 3 3.68 1970
author: Patricia Highsmith
name: John
average rating: 3.68
book published: 1970
rating: 3
read at: 2023/03/20
date added: 2023/03/20
shelves:
review:
After reading Highsmith's first book in the series I moved on to the second and now to the third. Tom Ripley is quite a compelling character in his presumptious middle-class existence and his need to be well off without any effort, not to mention his propensity for (almost accidentally) murdering people. It's the combination of rich description of settings and the rather nuanced twists in the plots that make the series attractive, together with the constant feeling the books gibe of conjuring a world which has slipped into the past.
]]> 77849 337 William Boyd 0375402233 John 4 contemporary 3.55 1998
author: William Boyd
name: John
average rating: 3.55
book published: 1998
rating: 4
read at: 2023/02/26
date added: 2023/02/26
shelves: contemporary
review:
I thought I had read all but one of Boyd's books (the elusive 'Nat Tate: An American Artist') but suddenly realised I hadn't read this one. Like all Boyd's stories, it is entertaining and at time laugh-out-loud funny, but it is also even more convoluted than usual. I began to think it was a book to be tackled in one sitting, as the complexities of who was making money and who was responsible for the destruction of a luxury hotel that is under construction, play out.
]]> 60149573 A novel about a mother’s unbreakable love in a world consumed by fear.

Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving but broken father, a former linguist who now shelves books in a university library. Bird knows to not ask too many questions, stand out too much, or stray too far. For a decade, their lives have been governed by laws written to preserve “American culture�� in the wake of years of economic instability and violence. To keep the peace and restore prosperity, the authorities are now allowed to relocate children of dissidents, especially those of Asian origin, and libraries have been forced to remove books seen as unpatriotic—including the work of Bird’s mother, Margaret, a Chinese American poet who left the family when he was nine years old.

Bird has grown up disavowing his mother and her poems; he doesn’t know her work or what happened to her, and he knows he shouldn’t wonder. But when he receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, he is pulled into a quest to find her. His journey will take him back to the many folktales she poured into his head as a child, through the ranks of an underground network of librarians, into the lives of the children who have been taken, and finally to New York City, where a new act of defiance may be the beginning of much-needed change.]]> 335 Celeste Ng 0593492544 John 4 dystopias, contemporary Like many recent books that are dystopias, this book is a warning - not, in this case, about climate change, but about how close we might get to an Orwellian global conflict where major powers clash and, to justify continuous war, hatred and racism are fostered.]]> 3.74 2022
author: Celeste Ng
name: John
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/02/26
date added: 2023/02/26
shelves: dystopias, contemporary
review:
This book slowly grew on me as the fascination developed around what the heroine, Margaret, was planning and whether the two young characters would eventually find each other. The whole book has a new relevance, of which Ng must be uncomfortably aware, given the renewed threats by the US towards China and even towards Chinese people and institutions. Indeed the attacks on Russian people, as a result of the conflict in Ukraine, are an even stronger reminder of how whole peoples can be demonised and how how governments and the media can bring this about.
Like many recent books that are dystopias, this book is a warning - not, in this case, about climate change, but about how close we might get to an Orwellian global conflict where major powers clash and, to justify continuous war, hatred and racism are fostered.
]]> 2247142
It’s here, in the first volume of Patricia Highsmith’s five-book Ripley series, that we are introduced to the suave Tom Ripley, a young striver seeking to leave behind his past as an orphan bullied for being a “sissy.�� Newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan, Ripley meets a wealthy industrialist who hires him to bring his playboy son, Dickie Greenleaf, back from gallivanting in Italy. Soon Ripley’s fascination with Dickie’s debonair lifestyle turns obsessive as he finds himself enraged by Dickie’s ambivalent affections for Marge, a charming American dilettante, and Ripley begins a deadly game.

“Sinister and strangely alluring,�� (Mark Harris, Entertainment Weekly) The Talented Mr. Ripley serves as an unforgettable introduction to this smooth confidence man, whose talent for self-invention is as unnerving—and unnervingly revealing of the American psyche—as ever.]]> 271 Patricia Highsmith John 4 crime 3.96 1955
author: Patricia Highsmith
name: John
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1955
rating: 4
read at: 2023/02/04
date added: 2023/02/04
shelves: crime
review:
A chance reading of something in the New York Times led me to read this, and I never thought it would be so enjoyable. After a slow start, perhaps necessary to build the character and background of Tom Riply, we get a great canter through Italy with murders and amusing encounters thrown in. Highsmith had this talent for creating a truly despicable character, surrounded by others of similar ilk, but convincing the reader to want him (Ripley) to survive, despite his ineptitude and the ever-present danger that he'll react violently against someone and... kill them.
]]>