Book of the Week - Edward Hogan, Blackmoor

Blackmoor by Edward Hogan was awarded the Desmond Elliott prize for new fiction a couple of weeks ago, although it was published in 2008. Blackmoor was previously on the shortlist for the 2008 Dylan Thomas Prize, and Hogan was shortlisted for the 2009 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. He was born in Derby in 1980, a graduate of the MA in creative writing course at the University of East Anglia and a recipient of the David Higham Award in 2003. He currently lives in Brighton, and describes his previous jobs as "grass-strimmer, pot-washer, conservatory salesman, bloke holding the board in Leicester Square, and teacher". Blackmoor is set in a Derbyshire village at the time of the miners' strikes. First editions of the paperback seem surprisingly thin on the ground, but are worth picking up if you can find one.

Beth is an albino, half blind, and given to looking at the world out of the corner of her eye. Her neighbours in the Derbyshire town of Blackmoor have always thought she was 'touched', and when a series of bizarre happenings shake the very foundations of the village, they are confirmed in their opinion that Beth is an ill omen. The neighbours say that Beth eats dirt from the flowerbeds, and that smoke rises from her lawn. By the end of the year, she is dead. A decade later her son, Vincent, treated like a bad omen by his father George is living in a pleasant suburb miles from Blackmoor. There the bird-watching teenager stumbles towards the buried secrets of his mother's life and death in the abandoned village. It's the story of a community that fell apart, a young woman whose face didn't fit, and a past that refuses to go away.

Book of the Week - David Nicholls, One Day

I have been attending a graduation this week, so a book beginning with a graduation seems an appropriate choice. One Day is the third novel from David Nicholls, an English novelist and screenwriter probably best known for the novel and film "Starter for Ten". It tells the story of Emma and Dexter, who meet for the first time on the night of their graduation. The novel follows each of them on the same date of each succeeding year, telling their stories as their lives develop. The book has been widely reviewed and tipped for success as a bittersweet romantic comedy – it is one of the recommended summer fiction reads in The Times - and clearly has considerable potential as a film. Although just released, it has already been reprinted, and most of the signed copied I have seen have been second printings.

'I can imagine you at forty,' she said, a hint of malice in her voice. 'I can picture it right now.' He smiled without opening his eyes. 'Go on then.'15th July 1988. Emma and Dexter meet for the first time on the night of their graduation. Tomorrow they must go their separate ways. So where will they be on this one day next year? And the year after that? And every year that follows? Twenty years, two people, ONE DAY.

Book of the Week - Stuart Neville, The Twelve

Stuart Neville is a Northern Ireland based crime writer, and The Twelve is his first novel. He has been a musician, a composer, a teacher, a salesman, a film extra, a baker and a hand double for a well known Irish comedian, but is currently a partner in a successful multimedia design business in the wilds of Northern Ireland. He has previously published short stories in Thuglit, Electric Spec and Every Day Fiction. The Twelve has a number of very positive advance reviews and will be published in the UK and Commonwealth by Harvill Secker on July 2nd. It will also be published in the USA (as THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST by Soho Press, New York,) and by Random House Kodansha in Japan. I haven't had a chance to read it yet, although I hope to pick a copy up later this week. Looks very promising, so highly recommended.

PS - there may be a hardcover limited edition of only 50 copies - contact No Alibis bookshop in Belfast for further information.

"Former paramilitary killer Gerry Fegan is haunted by his victims, twelve souls who shadow his every waking day and scream through every drunken night. Just as he reaches the edge of sanity they reveal their desire: vengeance on those who engineered their deaths. From the greedy politicians to the corrupt security forces, the street thugs to the complacent bystanders who let it happen, all must pay the price. When Fegan's vendetta threatens to derail Northern Ireland's peace process and destabilise its fledgling government, old comrades and enemies alike want him gone. David Campbell, a double agent lost between the forces of law and terror, takes the job. But he has his own reasons for eliminating Fegan; the secrets of a dirty war should stay buried, even if its ghosts do not. Set against the backdrop of a post-conflict Northern Ireland struggling with its past, THE TWELVE takes the reader from the back streets of the city, where violence and politics go hand-in-hand, to the country's darkest heart. Often brutal, sometimes tender, the journey will see one man find his humanity while the other loses his."

Book of the Week and bibliography - Alaa Al Aswany, Friendly Fire

Alaa Al Aswany is a dentist, and also a successful author, an uncommon combination. He trained as a dentist in Egypt and Chicago, and has contributed numerous articles to Egyptian newspapers on literature, politics, and social issues. His second novel, The Yacoubian Building, an ironic depiction of modern Egyptian society, has been widely read in Egypt and throughout the Middle East, and was allegedly the best selling novel in Arabic for several years. It has been translated into English, French and Norwegian, and was adapted into a film (2006) and a television series (2007) of the same name. Friendly fire is his third book in English - the UK editions of all three are available, signed, at relatively modest cost. I thoroughly enjoyed the first two novels and am looking forward to reading these stories, which have been well reviewed.

Friendly Fire is a novella and collection of short stories. Al Aswany dissects modern Egyptian society and reveals with skill and detachment the hypocrisy, violence and abuse of power characteristic of a world in moral crisis. Here, though, the focus has shifted from the broad historical canvas to the minute stitches of pain that hold together an individual, a family, a school classroom, or the relationship between a man and a woman. Can a man so alienated from his society that he regards all its members as no better than microbes wriggling under a microscope survive within it? Can cynical religiosity triumph over human decency? Can a man put the thought of a delicious dish of beans behind him long enough to mourn his father's death? Alongside these wry questions, other, less mordant perspectives also have their place: an ageing cabaret dancer bestows the blessing of a vanished world on her lover's son; a crippled boy wins subjective victory from objective disaster. Friendly Fire also features an introduction by Alaa Al Aswany giving the history of the novella, 'The Isam Abd el-Ati Papers', which was banned in Egypt for a decade.

Book of the Week and Bibliography - Rawi Hage, Cockroach

One day late with my Book of the Week, due to ongoing travel commitments! Cockroach is the second novel from Rawi Hage. Hage was born in Beirut, and grew up in Lebanon and Cyprus. He moved to New York City in 1982, and after studying at the New York Institute of Photographyrelocated to Montreal in 1991 . He subsequently began exhibiting as a photographer, and has had works acquired by the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Canada's capital. In addition to his work as a writer and a visual artist, Hage also spent time as a cab driver in Montreal. His debut novel, De Niro's Game (2006), won the 2008 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the most lucrative literary prize in the world for a single novel, and was shortlisted for the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the 2006 Governor General's Award for English fiction. His second novel, Cockroach, was published in Canada in 2008 and was also a shortlisted nominee for the Giller Prize and the Governor General's Award, as well as being the winner of the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize, awarded by the Quebec Writers' Federation. Canadian firsts (Anansi Press) are very expensive, but UK firsts are well worth picking up now.

"During a bitterly cold winter in a snowy northern city, a self-confessed thief has just tried to commit suicide by hanging himself from a tree in the local park. Rescued against his will and obliged to attend sessions with a well-meaning but naïve therapist, our narrator tells her – and us – his heartrending and hallucinatory story. From his childhood in a war-torn Arab country, to his current life in the smoky émigré cafes of his new city, Cockroach traces our narrator's journey – his longing for a place in the world, his guilt over his sister's death at the hands of her husband, and his love for an Iranian woman, Shoreh, whose life is also a flight from the darkness of the past. As the stories in this remarkable book converge, our narrator must confront the events of the past in the form of another moral but potentially murderous dilemma in the present."

Bibliography

De Niro's Game - Old Street. London, 2007. Paperback.
Cockroach - Hamish Hamilton, London, 2009.

Book of the Week - Geoff Dyer; Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi is the fourth novel from Geoff Dyer, who has also published a number of non-fiction books on a range of topics. The novel came out earlier this year as a paperback from Canongate, and was well-reviewed by most of the major papers. It has continued to receive notice, this week winning the Wodehouse Prize for Comic Writing, and is now into reprints. As a result a Gloucester Old Spot pig has been named after the book. Despite the nature of the prize, this is a fundamentally serious novel and may feature in other prize lists later in the year.

Geoff Dyer was born in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, in 1958 and was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. His first book, Ways of Telling: The Work of John Berger, was published in 1986. His first novel was The Colour of Memory (1989), set in Brixton, south London, in the 1980s. His non-fiction includes a book about jazz entitled But Beautiful (1991), winner of a Somerset Maugham Award; The Missing of the Somme (1994), which was adapted for BBC Radio 3 and broadcast on the eve of the 80th anniversary of the battle of the Somme; a book about D. H. Lawrence entitled Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D. H. Lawrence (1997), which was shortlisted for the National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (USA); and a collection of essays, Anglo-English Attitudes: Essays, Reviews, Misadventures, 1984-99, published in 1999. Other novels include the Search (1993), a complex narrative about a woman's search for her missing husband, and Paris Trance (1998), chronicling the sex and drug-fuelled adventures of two couples living in Paris.

"Jeff Atman, a journalist, is in Venice to cover the opening of the Venice Art Biennale. He's expecting to see a load of art, go to a lot of parties and drink too many bellinis. He's not expecting to meet the spellbinding Laura, who will completely transform his few days in the city. Another city, another assignment: this time on the banks of the Ganges in Varanasi. Amid the crowds, ghats and chaos of India's holiest Hindu city a different kind of transformation lies in wait. A beautifully told story of erotic love and spiritual yearning."

Man Booker Prize bibliography

1971

Winner

In a Free State. VS Naipaul, Deutsch, London, 1971. Relatively common - £30 or above in dustwrapper. Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born August 17, 1932, in Trinidad, where his grandfather, an indentured worker, had come from India. An agnostic, Naipaul very early experienced a profound alienation, both from the close-knit family life of his Brahmin ancestors and from the social and political life of his native Trinidad. He won a scholarship to University College in Oxford, and subsequently made his home in England. In 2001 Naipaul won the Nobel Prize for literature.

"The novel is set in a free state of Africa at a time of civil conflict when a once-ruling tribe is being decimated. But for English people like Bobby and Linda, driving back from the capital to their expatriates' compound, the roads are open. Neutral, white, protected, they have both in their different ways found liberation in Africa, and they too might be said to be 'in a free state'. But their neutrality will not last; there is a danger on the open road. Exploiter and exploited: it is one of the conditions of life in a free state that the roles should ceaselessly shift. Ths is not the Africa of romance or 'service', but something infinitely more ambiguous."

Shortlist

The Big Chapel. Thomas Kilroy, Faber and Faber, London, 1971. Relatively uncommon, but available at present for £30 - 40. Thomas Kilroy, an Irish playwright and novelist, was born on 23 September 1934 in Green Street, Callan, County Kilkenny and studied at University College, Dublin. In his early career he was play editor at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. In the 1980s, he sat on the board of Field Day Theatre Company, founded by Brian Friel and Stephen Rea in 1980, and was Director of its touring company. He became Professor of English in University College, Galway, a post from which he resigned in 1989 to concentrate on writing. He now lives in County Mayo and is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters, the Royal Society of Literature, and Aosdána. He has published widely, but The Big Chapel is his only novel, and in addition to being shortlisted for the 1971 Booker Prize it was also the winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize. It is a novel about a man, a family and a town.

"Basing his work upon a notorious clerical scandal of Victorian Ireland, Thomas Kilroy has written an anatomy of religious violence that remains relevant. In scenes that range from the private and lyrical to the panorama of a whole community in convulsion he draws upon a deep knowledge of the history and folklore of nineteenth-century Ireland.
While there is a great deal of humour in The Big Chapel it is, finally, a work of grave tragic proportions. It is the characters however that remain longest in the memory. Father Lannigan, the anguished demagogue, the man haunted by the implications of his own revolution. Emerine Scully, a man unable to choose, at a time when all men are faced by choice. And Horace Percy Butler, landlord and amateur scientist, a comic, tragic character who is quite unlike anyone else in Irish fiction. The novel is punctuated with extracts from Butler's journal which is itself a remarkable tour de force."


Briefing for a Descent into Hell, Doris Lessing
St. Urbain's Horseman, Mordecai Richler
Goshawk Squadron, Derek Robinson
Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, Elizabeth Taylor