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Book Reviews

• Underground England by Stephen Smith | Book review February 6, 2010
  The sequel to Underground London is an illuminating guide to a seldom-seen side of England, says Alexandra MastersIn this erudite and jovial sequel to Underground London, journalist Stephen Smith takes us on an intimate underground odyssey from the "cave-riddled city" of Nottingham to the Sutton Hoo ship-burial. Smith revels in recounting tales of […]
• The Holy City by Patrick McCabe | Book review February 6, 2010
  Patrick McCabe is on familiar, darkly comic territory with his tale of a man stuck in the 1960s, says James PurdonIf you can remember the 1960s, as they say, you weren't there. Chris McCool's problem, in The Holy City, is that he never quite left them. Living in the past, he now seems to be having some trouble separating memory from make-believe. W […]
• The Bird Room by Chris Killen | Book review February 6, 2010
  Blurred identities populate this unsettling, darkly comic debut, says Alexandra MastersWill is getting cold. As he waits for his girlfriend Alice with a hat hanging from his erection, he thinks: "I should start again somewhere else." Such issues of displacement abound in this unsettling, darkly comic exploration of young love. Having recently quit […]
• The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves by Siri Hustvedt | Book review February 6, 2010
  Rachel Cooke is impressed by novelist Siri Hustvedt's cool look at a disorder that has confounded her doctorsIn our culture, telling the world that you, a woman, suffer from migraine or other mysterious and difficult-to-treat disorders is still tantamount to telling the world you are mad: unstable, unreliable, moaning, self-obsessed. So it's a brav […]
• The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Stole Their Children's Future by David Willetts | Book review February 6, 2010
  Richard Reeves on a hard-hitting account of the generation that took the houses, jobs and welfare – and is having all the funDavid Willetts is a rare creature. Britain does not produce many public intellectuals. To find one lurking deep in the jungle of Westminster politics is little short of an anthropological miracle. But with this book, Willetts, a frontl […]
• The Long Song by Andrea Levy | Book review February 6, 2010
  The follow-up to Andrea Levy's Small Island seduces Kate KellawayAndrea Levy's Small Island – her fourth novel – has had a glorious career: it not only won the Orange prize, but was voted "Best of the Best" novels ever to win that award. It was an adroit, funny, tender book about a Jamaican immigrant couple, their big-hearted white landla […]
• The Rule of Law by Tom Bingham | Book review February 6, 2010
  Conor Gearty praises the wise judgments of Tom Bingham, one of our greatest crusading judgesI grew up hating judges. It might have been because of the lunch I had with my father in a Dublin restaurant when I was 13, joviality all round until the arrival of a spectral figure whose silent brooding dominated everything there­after – a high court judge in search […]
• The Cellist of Sarajevo; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Old Curiosity Shop | Audiobook reviews February 6, 2010
  The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway. Read by Gareth ArmstrongNaxos £19.99, 5hrs 28mins unabridgedIn 1990s Sarajevo, war is devouring people's lives. In the midst of this vividly conveyed hell of massacre and destruction, one cellist braves the snipers to play his tribute to the dead. This is based on a true story and includes Albinoni's haun […]
• The Thirties: An Intimate History by Juliet Gardiner | Book review February 6, 2010
  An energetic and vivid portrait of 1930s Britain is told through the stories of its citizens, from George VI to the infamous Vicar of Stiffkey, says Lara FeigelIt's remarkable that a book too big to read in bed can be accurately entitled An Intimate History. But it is the sheer size of Juliet Gardiner's work that ­enables her to reach beyond the su […]
• My other life: Jon McGregor February 6, 2010
  Jon McGregor envisages a world of infinite possibilities but opts instead for this realityIn my other life, the laws of physics are different. All decisions are reversible, and all options remain open. In a restaurant, I eat anything on the menu and then change my mind. Stuck in traffic, I take the alternative route I was considering 30 miles ago. Disappoint […]
• The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey | Book review February 6, 2010
  This accomplished debut novel explores what happens when memory can no longer be relied onJake Jameson is an architect. His material is concrete, and the buildings he has produced – community centres, tower blocks, a prison – are utilitarian to the point of brutality. He never managed to make his grandest design: a house of glass that would have risen up fro […]
• On Fishing at Sea by Chris Yates | Book review February 6, 2010
  Chris Yates makes a fine guide to fishing, finds James PurdonThere's an old saw that fishermen – and fishing writers in particular – are fond of repeating: "It is not all of fishing to fish." In How to Fish, Chris Yates wrote warmly about the pleasures of freshwater fishing: of contemplative lulls, as well as memorable catches. On Fishing at […]
• Hollywood Hellraisers by Robert Sellers | Book review February 6, 2010
  A biography of Jack Nicholson, Marlon Brando, Dennis Hopper and Warren Beatty is great fun, if a little light, says Viola FortBiographer Robert Sellers angles his spotlight on four of cinema's most celebrated rakes: Warren Beatty, who devoured women like a child falling on chocolate cake at a birthday party; Marlon Brando, a binge-eating method actor wh […]
• Pharmakon by Dirk Wittenborn | Book review February 6, 2010
  Campus life in 1950s America is vividly evoked in an absorbing read, says Viola Fort"I was born because a man came to kill my father." So begins Dirk Wittenborn's lively novel about the psychopharmaceutical revolution in 1950s America, and its fallout. Dr William Friedrich is a professor of psychology at Yale. He stumbles upon a hallucinogen t […]
• The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson | Book review February 6, 2010
  Sophie Missing enjoys the 'definitive haunted house story'Shirley Jackson might seem an unlikely pioneer of the supernatural horror genre. A housewife who lived in Bennington, Vermont, she is best known for the large number of short stories in which she exposed the dark underbelly of small town American life. The Haunting of Hill House, her penulti […]