To The Last Page

Tied-up and a bit let down In her latest book Michelle Lovric finds a fascinating suitable subject that proves to be worthy of the talents of the author of The Book of Human Skin . The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters is another wonderful, imaginative and often sensual exploration of human experience from an unusual perspective, and this time it's all "tied-up" in hair. After the huge scope and ambition of The Book of Human Skin however, it's possible that one might also be just a little "let down" by all the hair-raising business and domestic matters in the author's latest book. There's not much chance however of the reader being anything but dazzled by the brilliance and wit of the creation of the seven Swiney sisters, or as they become known by their stage-name, the Swiney Godivas. Famed for the extraordinary length and lustre of their hair (Lovric every bit as creative in her descriptions of the ladies' hair as she was ab...

Judge the book by the cover The Pink Suit is about much more than the creation of the iconic costume Jackie Kennedy was wearing on the day in 1963 when her husband John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Texas. It's also so much more than an insight into the fashion industry during its golden age, but undoubtedly this is also a significant and fascinating aspect of Nicole Mary Kelby's novel, particularly in the loving attention to detail that goes into her descriptions of the cut and craft of the Chanel design, as well as the controversy over the copies and the competition. The creation of the famous pink suit however is actually delicately undertaken by a Manhattan fashion house, Chez Ninon, where Kate is a seamstress. It's a higher class knock-off copy designer house, a kind of a front to ensure that the First Lady is seen to be supporting the US fashion industry and not spending a fortune on importing a fancy French wardrobe. It's Kate, tasked with replicating the Chane...

War and Morality The first thing that attracted me to this book was the setting. 1935 in Italian occupied Eritrea is an interesting time and place, not quite war time, but moving in that direction. The second thing that interested me was the title. The Italian perspective of the events that brought them into the war on the side of the Germans is complex and rarely covered in fiction, so a look at them from the view of a "good Italian" also promises an intriguing moral angle on the situation. Stephen Burke's novel doesn't disappoint on either of those questions - or at least not until the latter chapters that seem to bring some of the most interesting events leading up to the war in North Africa to a rather hurried conclusion. Initially however, there is indeed something Graham Greene-like about the moral position of Enzo Sacchi, a young man from Genoa who finds himself harbourmaster at the port of Massawa. With Italy about to expand their colonisation of the region, d...

Digging up the past There'll be a few eyebrows raised at the realisation that not only does Tom Thorne not get fired after the fiasco of his action in The Dying Hours , but he actually gets promoted. Or rather, reinstated back to his position as Detective Inspector. Billingham slightly glosses over this issue - investigation ongoing - but does present a kind of rationale for it. Thorne is needed for a very special task, a prisoner escort operation to locate a buried body that a serial killer has owned up to many years after his imprisonment. Thorne is needed because he's had dealings with the prisoner in the past. A guy called Stuart Nicklin. Having Thorne back as DI and bringing back Stuart Nicklin (from Scaredy Cat ) would seem like Billingham is returning to safe and familiar ground, but surprisingly, The Bones Beneath takes Thorne away from his familiar London stomping grounds for a very different setting - a small remote island off the coast of Wales, Bardsey Island. As y...

Chinese whispers In some respects, Adam Brookes' Night Heron is a standard and even run-of-the-mill espionage thriller.  The operation here runs along familiar lines, with stock characters and shady agencies. There are however a few points where Night Heron stands out from the crowd. One is that it's set in China, a place of major significance in the world today, and one whose actions and growing power is still largely unknown. Another point in its favour is that this is the debut novel from a former BBC correspondent in China, so it's written with an on-the-ground familiarity with the subject. What is most interesting about this spy thriller however is the nature of the informant. Peanut/Li Huasheng, code-name Night Heron, has helped the British Intelligence before, but it was 20 years ago. In the meantime he's been locked away in a "labour reform faculty" in the Qinghau desert. On escape he attempts to reopen his links with British Intelligence through a j...

Walking through some dark places... When issues related to the working class communities of Glasgow are tackled - in my experience more often in cinema than literature (in Red Road , in the films of Ken Loach and Peter Mullan) - it's to depict sordid situations of drugs, alcohol, poverty, abuse, deprivation and street violence (Mullan's brilliant Neds  being the hardest-hitting of all). Rachel Seiffert's The Walk Home deals with similar ground-level issues, but from a perspective of a community that rarely has a voice in UK literature - the working class loyalist Protestant and Orange communities living in the schemes of greater Glasgow in places like Drumchapel. Rachel Seiffert made her mark with The Dark Room (filmed as Lore ) and The Way Home similarly deals with social upheaval, family troubles and absent parents, but the subject seems closer to home this time and the situation rather more complex. The focus is divided between Graham and Stevie (the connection betwee...

New life forms The first part of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy manages to present a vaguely unsettling new spin on what amounts to a familiar SF situation where a group of explorers face unknown dangers in a hostile alien environment. Just to raise the tensions, the volunteers are aware that they are not the first explorers of Area X either. This, we are told, is the twelfth expedition (but you'll soon find that you can take nothing as written in Annihilation ), the previous expeditions having ended in rather strange and inconclusive terms, with scientists and investigators wandering off, disappearing or committing suicide. What's strange about the alien environment of Area X however is that it appears to be an area of natural wilderness on Earth. In fact, Annihilation initially bears more than a passing resemblance to Andrei Tarkovsky's remarkable and influential film Stalker , but only as a jumping off point. In contrast to Tarkovsky's poetical allegor...