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SELECTED WRITINGS 1990-2010
Sara Wheeler

A well-known explorer once told me that he and his fellows could be divided into two categories. There were those who thrived in hot climates but could not abide the idea of a frozen waste, and those who cheerfully negotiated Siberian steppes but went mad in the tropics. The contents of this diverse book suggest otherwise.View

A GATE AT THE STAIRS
Lorrie Moore

Although 9/11 is mentioned only twice in A Gate at the Stairs, its shadow falls across the heart of the novel. The brilliance of Moore’s approach to this forbidding subject is that it is so tangential: not until you have been mesmerised by a scarcely related story line does her real purpose become clear. View

ALICE IN EXILE
Piers Paul Read

Opening some books is like being ushered aboard the Orient Express: you can tell that the author is out to impress you, waving you off with all the razzmatazz at his command.  Piers Paul Read, on the other hand, launches into his narrative without flourishes or fuss, whisking you into another world as easily as if you had stepped onto the London Underground.  It may seem humdrum, but don’t be deceived: this is an enthralling journey.View

BIRDS WITHOUT WINGS
Louis de Bernières

    Waiting for the follow-up to Captain Corelli’s Mandolin has felt at times like scouring the sky for the return of Halley’s comet. The good news is not only that it has appeared in our generation, but that it is bigger and if possible brighter than the novel that launched a thousand book clubs.  View

BLINDING LIGHT
Paul Theroux

    Paul Theroux is not an author to underplay a useful motif. In the first paragraph of his new novel, we find a planeful of passengers settled down for a night flight in their sleep-masks. No sooner have they arrived at their destination – Ecuador – than the protagonist, Slade Steadman, and his lover Ava Katsina embark on an erotic game of blind man’s buff; and when, shortly afterwards, they set off along a jungle river to experience a Secoya drug ceremony, their guide insists on covering their eyes with strips of cloth. View

DEAD PETS
Sam Leith

    In his journalism, Sam Leith comes across as a level-headed type.  But if there is a more eccentric book on the market than this sprawling, strangely fascinating compendium, I’ll eat my hamster – and Freddie Starr’s with it. View

LOVING MONSTERS
James Hamilton-Paterson

    James, a British writer living in Italy, is cornered while shopping for fizzy wine by a fellow expatriate with an unusual request: he wants his biography written.  After visiting the man’s villa, which features a signed photograph of Henry Kissinger and a silver trinket modelled on an unusual part of Disraeli’s anatomy, James is so intrigued that he agrees. View

ON GREEN DOLPHIN STREET
Sebastian Faulks

    Those who prize Sebastian Faulks as a chronicler of love and war may be dismayed by the opening of his new novel.  Charlie van der Linden, a British diplomat, and his wife Mary are giving a party in Washington DC to celebrate their wedding anniversary.  Outside, their guests’ new Cadillacs stand in an orderly row; upstairs, the children are peacefully asleep.  The year is 1959, and we appear to be a world away from the front-line ferocity of Birdsong or the behind-the-lines derring-do of Charlotte Gray. View

RESURRECTION MEN
Ian Rankin

    At a bleak Scottish baronial hall, half a dozen hard-bitten detectives are gathered – ready, you might think, to interrogate the parlourmaid and unmask the laird’s psychopathic son.  But this is the age of DI Rebus rather than Hercule Poirot, and the hall has become a police college, to which the six have been sent not for their Cluedo skills but for counselling. View

SLOW MAN
J.M. Coetzee

    To what extent does an author control the lives of his characters? This is the question at the heart of J.M. Coetzee’s new novel. But alongside it lies another, almost as intriguing: why is the Nobel Laureate’s writing so much easier to admire than to enjoy? View

STORY OF IRELAND: IN SEARCH OF A NEW NATIONAL MEMORY
Neil Hegarty

    There cannot be many books with a more ambitious subtitle than this one. The inability to forget has long been regarded as Ireland’s curse – but as this highly readable account makes clear, the sofa of history contains a good deal that has slid into the recesses of the upholstery.View

THE MAIN CAGES
Philip Marsden

    Philip Marsden’s acclaimed travel books have covered Ethiopia, Armenia and Belorussia.  The Main Cages may have a British setting – and take the form of a novel – but it is still very much a travelogue, exploring in intimate detail the geography, customs, joys and tragedies of a Cornish fishing community.  View

THE OMNIPOTENT MAGICIAN
Jane Brown

    What’s in a nickname? If Capability Brown is by far the best known of all British landscape designers – and, indeed, of all Browns apart from the recent Prime Minister – it must be due in part to his unique and memorable cognomen.  It comes as a surprise to discover that there is no record of it being used in his lifetime, and that after his death he was all but forgotten for the best part of two centuries. View

UNCLE RUDOLF
Paul Bailey

    Reading Paul Bailey’s superb new novel is like biting into a ripe fig and finding a shard of glass in the middle.  The shock is real, but the fruit is so delicious that at first you barely taste the blood. View

WHO’S SORRY NOW?
Howard Jacobsen

    In an age of partners and swingers, the term ‘wife-swapping’ has an old-fashioned ring to it: like ‘love child’ or ‘fork supper’, it suggests a world more easily shocked by sexual shenanigans than our own.  But then Marvin Kreitman, the hero of Howard Jacobsen’s latest novel, is an old-fashioned man; he just happens to have a wife and five mistresses. View

YOUTH
J. M. Coetzee

     You would be hard pressed to find a more exasperating character than John, the hero of J. M. Coetzee’s follow-up to Disgrace.  ‘His sole talent,’ his creator tells us, ‘is for misery, dull, honest misery.’  Selfish, introverted and indecisive, he makes Hamlet look like Rudi Guliani, and Eeyore seem positively gung-ho. View

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