Benjamin Wood’s first novel, The Bellwether Revivals, was published in 2012, picked up good reviews, was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Book Prize and has become a bestseller in France — a promising start to a literary career, in other words. Wood’s new novel The Ecliptic is both an attempt
Just over a century after Virginia Woolf declared that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’, the American novelist Hanya Yanagihara has announced a new shift in consciousness. Jude, the lead character in A Little Life, is known to his friends as the Postman, ‘post-sexual, post-racial, post-identity, post-past’. The obscurity of his origins (left
I opened the envelope: it contained a ticket in my name from London St Pancras to Paris Nord, departing at 9.17 on the 12th of the 12th, a Friday; coach 3 seat 27, non-smoking; and another for returning the following day, at 13 minutes past two, in the afternoon – dans l’après- midi; and a
‘Why do another translation of Homer?’ Richmond Lattimore asked in the foreword to his own great translation of the Iliad first published in 1951. It was a doubt he was grateful his friends and family had refrained from expressing in the long labour of translating the Greek. But he had a response for any who
In June 2009, the good people of South Carolina lost Mark Sanford, their governor. Per his instructions, his staff told the press that he was ‘hiking the Appalachian trail’. When he turned up six days later at an airport in Atlanta, Georgia, he said that he had scratched the hike in favour of something more
Michael Moorcock has put his name to more books, pamphlets and fanzines than, probably, even Michael Moorcock can count, but nothing ‘major’ over the past ten years. He’s now 75. But not, as this eruption witnesses, extinct. A cult has formed around him — Moorcockians who can discourse knowledgeably on the second aether and the
Early August and not yet half past eight, but all along the dual carriageway more than half the cars have headlights showing in the air from which daylight moves away — the summer, not the hour, being late — the shapely boxes streaming and glowing under the sky that was brighter two weeks ago, and
This novel comes with two mysteries attached, one substantial, the other superficial. The big mystery is the author’s identity. Gender-neutral, nominally Anglo-Saxon, almost provocatively bland, ‘C.B. George’ screams ‘pseudonym’ to any reader. A call to the literary agent confirms the suspicion: the author is keeping his identity secret ‘for personal reasons’, which may or may
Mediterranean crockery has a lot to answer for. It famously spoke thus to John Keats: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ Well, even if true, it’s obviously not all one needs to know. But then Keats was never one for irritable reaching after fact
The BBC was created out of the ether in 1922. Its first director general, Lord Reith, inhabited a cupboard some six feet in length and presided over a staff of four people, operating out of one long room. Reith confessed that he did not actually know what broadcasting was — an affliction which you might
Novels set in the music business (from blockbuster to coming-of-age) are few and far between — far less than in the film industry, say. Is this because writers are scared of looking square, Daddy-O, being as a breed not the most ‘street’ of types, whereas pop stars have traditionally been quite rough, ready and proletarian?
It’s not Paul Murray’s settings or themes — decadent aristocrats, clerical sex abuse, the financial crisis — that mark him out as original, it’s his handling: the wild plotting, the witty dialogue and the eccentricity of his characters. The follow-up to his widely admired second novel Skippy Dies swaps the adolescent funk of a Catholic
Sikkim was a Himalayan kingdom a third of the size of Wales squeezed between China, India, Nepal and Bhutan. I was there once in April, when the sky was cornflower blue. When Britain withdrew from India the last ‘Chogyal’, or king, battled for his country’s independence, but Mrs Ghandi won the war, and Sikkim is
It’s the 150th anniversary of Alice in Wonderland — cue an explosion of editions of the book, a new biography of Lewis Carroll, make-and-do books, jigsaw puzzles and general Alice overload. In a way, it’s all dandy. Alice is part of our collective consciousness, even though for modern children it’s chiefly through the medium of
For his 75th birthday, Sir Roy Strong gave himself a personal trainer. For his 80th, he has commissioned a book of portraits of himself by the photographer John Swannell. The fruits of all that training — much of it undertaken on a racing tricycle around the lanes of Herefordshire — can be seen in the
In October 2013, a jeep ploughed through a crowd of pedestrians on the edge of Tiananmen Square, crashed and burst into flames, killing five people. The authorities identified the driver as Uighur, a member of an Islamic ethnic minority hailing from China’s northwest region of Xinjiang. Six months later, eight knife-wielding Uighurs rampaged through a
Ryan Gattis’s novel All Involved is set in South Central Los Angeles in 1992, during the riots that began after four white police officers were acquitted of beating the black taxi-driver Rodney King. The inadvertent coup that the book’s publishers have scored by bringing it out in the wake of the Baltimore and Ferguson riots
Who’d be young? Not 25-year-old Tamsin, if her behaviour is anything to go by. A classical pianist who’s never quite going to hit the heights, she devotes herself to playing for the residents of an old people’s home. She’s also acquired a boyfriend, Callum, a teacher several years her senior, for whom, when Christmas comes
Last month, at Edinburgh School of Art, I was interested to come across a student who’d chosen Marlowe’s Dr Faustus as her end-of-year degree project. In the wonderful stage costume she’d designed for its central figure were three gloriously embroidered butterflies fluttering around his hat. Bats, yes, moths, maybe, but what exactly was the significance
Summertime, and the living is… variable. Depends who you ask. People come to mind, of course: one in hospital, waiting for an MRI scan; another just come out of hospital having had two little frosted ova thawed out and implanted, so with a bit of luck she’ll have a baby at last. One old chap,