What a dazzling premise! Charlie Huston posits for his sci-fi thriller Sleepless: A Novel an alternative early 21st century in which a tenth of the population has turned sleepless, a condition that torments and eventually kills the afflicted. Into a familiar, yet ghastly Los Angeles, Huston plunges Park Haas, the last honest cop, and his [...]
Also posted in Crime Fiction |
Pleasant reading: Mr Rosenblum’s List, by Natasha Solomons, has a cover prefiguring a novel of the sensibility of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society. And so it proves to be. After WWII, German refugee Jack Rosenblum begins compiling a list, his all-encompassing guide to assimilating in Britain. Battling prejudice and his past-obsessed wife, he [...]
Also posted in Literary Fiction |
Very little light reading on the go at the moment: The Face on Your Plate: The Truth About Food by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, a companion read to Jonathan Safran Foer’s masterpiece Eating Food I’ve been hanging out for Michael Lewis’s latest, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine Unlike many, I didn’t grow besotted with Yann Martel’s [...]
They’ve been out for a week or so (here’s the official listing) and as usual what I’m interested in is: should I read any of them? I read the wonderful The City & The City last year and have read previous books by the first two authors below, but the final three are new to me. [...]
Last week’s reading: ‘What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?’: Jimmy Carter, America’s ‘Malaise,’ and the Speech that Should Have Changed the Country is an intriguing single-topic book by Kevin Mattson, an Ohio historian. He tells the story of the critical speech given by Carter on July 15, 1979, covering the energy crisis [...]
Last week’s reading: Robert Harris’s Lustrum is the second of two novels recounting the life of Roman philosopher/orator/lawyer/politician Cicero. Harris can write smoothly and entertainingly about any subject, modern or ancient, Lustrum being a good example. It’s an enjoyable and intriguing read, although the five-year period covered by this book is telescoped at the end, [...]
Transition is somewhere in between Iain Banks’s contemporary novels and his alter ego Iain M. Banks’s science fiction operas, and it is all the grander for the admixture. It opens with a baffling prologue involving scene snatches from the points of view of mysteriously named characters, some in our world, some not. The attentive reader [...]
Research crunches side reading, so October was a poor month. A bit of travel in November invites a flood of fiction: Stewart O’Nan’s Songs for the Missing Ward Just is a much-praised novelist virtually unknown in Australia – I’ll try his latest, this year’s Exiles in the Garden I hope the latest Ian Rankin – [...]
China Miéville made his mark in 1998 with King Rat, his first fantasy novel set in New Crobuzon, an imagined world. Five more fantasy novels followed. For some reason, I’ve never read any of them, but when The City & the City was described as his brand of fantasy melded to the private eye genre, [...]
Also posted in Crime Fiction |
Last weekend’s book sections contained two complimentary reviews that add more onto the bulging list: George Williams in the Weekend Australian calls Iain Banks latest, Transition, seemingly a thriller-science fiction cross, ‘dark and stylish’. Ever reliable Age reviewer Andrew Riemer says Clive James ‘reveals admirable poise, erudition and authority, whatever the subject matter’ in his [...]