Book of the Week - Stephen Kelman, Pigeon English

Pigeon English is a first novel which comes with a good deal of hype – it was the subject of a significant bidding war on the part of several publishers, and the full weight of a considerable publicity machine is behind it. Nonetheless, reviewers have been very positive. It employs the increasingly popular device of a first person child narrator, and addresses the rather trendy societal problems of the poor and disaffected urban black working class population. Central to the story is a stabbing (presumably inspired by Damilola Taylor), but the novel is humerous while addressing serious issues. Rather disappointingly, it is only released as a paperback (although in French folds). However, well worth picking up a signed copy.

Stephen Kelman was born in Luton in 1976. He had his first short story published in an anthology at the age of 16, and after finishing his degree he worked variously as a warehouse operative, a careworker, and in marketing and local government administration. He decided to pursue his writing seriously in 2005, and has completed several feature screenplays since then. Pigeon English is his first novel; he is currently working on his second.


“Newly arrived from Ghana with his mother and older sister, eleven-year-old Harrison Opoku lives on the ninth floor of a block of flats on a London housing estate. The second best runner in the whole of Year 7, Harri races through his new life in his personalised trainers - the Adidas stripes drawn on with marker pen - blissfully unaware of the very real threat all around him. With equal fascination for the local gang - the Dell Farm Crew - and the pigeon who visits his balcony, Harri absorbs the many strange elements of his new life in England: watching, listening, and learning the tricks of inner-city survival.
But when a boy is knifed to death on the high street and a police appeal for witnesses draws only silence, Harri decides to start a murder investigation of his own. In doing so, he unwittingly endangers the fragile web his mother has spun around her family to try and keep them safe. A story of innocence and experience, hope and harsh reality, PIGEON ENGLISH is a spellbinding portrayal of a boy balancing on the edge of manhood and of the forces around him that try to shape the way he falls.”

Book of the Week - Sarah Winman, When God was a Rabbit

This week I have chosen a first novel which has attracted quite a lot of attention, and which has already been reprinted in hardcover. When God was a Rabbit is a book about a brother and sister, told in the first person by the sister over a period of about 30 years from 1968 to the events of 9/11. The author, Sarah Winman, was born in 1964 and grew up in Essex. She attended the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art and went on to act in theatre, film and television. She currently lives in London. Signed and dated copies are currently available at cover price (£12.99) if you look around. The novel has been highlighted by Waterstones as one of its 11 first novels to watch this year, and certainly looks promising.

"This is a book about a brother and a sister. Spanning four decades, from 1968 onwards, it is the story of a fabulous but flawed family and the slew of ordinary and extraordinary incidents that shape their everyday lives. It is a story about childhood and growing up, loss of innocence, eccentricity, familial ties and friendships, love and life. Stripped down to its bare bones, more than anything, it’s a book about love in all its forms."

Book of the Week - Hisham Matar, Anatomy of a Disappearance

It is appropriate this week to select a book by a Libyan author, in which the central event is the disappearance of a father kidnapped by the secret police. Anatomy of a Disappearance is a second novel from Hisham Matar, who’s first book (In the Country of Men) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2006. In real life, Matar’s father has disappeared in Libya, and is perhaps still alive in custody, so he writes at least in part from personal experience. He writes well about small details, capturing the minor incongruous elements which make terrible events seem real. Reviews suggest that this is a strong second novel, certainly worth picking up and reading, and perhaps again a contender for prizes.

" Nuri is a young boy when his mother dies. It seems that nothing will fill the emptiness that her strange death leaves behind in the Cairo apartment he shares with his father. Until Mona. When Nuri first sees Mona, sitting in her bright yellow swimsuit by the pool of the Magda Marina holiday resort, the rest of the world vanishes. But it is Nuri’s father with whom Mona falls in love and who she will eventually marry. And their happiness consumes Nuri to the point where he longs to get his father out of the way. However, Nuri will soon regret what he wished for. And, as he and his stepmother’s world is shattered by events beyond their control, they both begin to realise how little they really knew about the man they loved. In a voice that is delicately wrought and beautifully tender, Hisham Matar asks, in his extraordinary new novel, when a loved one disappears how does their absence shape the lives of those who are left?"

Book of the Week - Paul Bailey, Chapman's Odyssey

Chapman's Odyssey is Paul Bailey's first novel for 9 years. Bailey was shortlisted twice for the BookerPrize early in his career (Peter Smart's Confessions (1977) and Gabriel's Lament(1986)), so it is a good opportunity to pick up a signed copy of a novel from a writer near the end of a distinguished career.

In Bailey's work the physical frailty of humanity and the bizarre nature of human disintegration are significant symbols of what it means to be human. Many of Bailey's characters are obsessed with human frailty and physicality, and with the symptoms of disease and decay. Bailey's first novel focussed on an elderly lady in a nursing home, and Chapman's Odyssey continues with these elements, as the story is told from the perspective of an elderly man dying in a hospital bed. Although this might seem a little depressing, the subject matter is handled with humour and lightness of touch, although not shying away from the messiness of the end of life. A possible contender for this year's literary prizes.

Bailey has said 'I write because I have to and want to. It's as simple, or as complicated, as that. And I write novels specifically because I am curious about my fellow creatures. There is no end to their mystery. I share Isaac Babel's lifelong ambition to write with simplicity, brevity and precision. It was he who said 'No steel can pierce the human heart so chillingly as a period at the right moment.' I hope one or two of my full stops have done, and will do, just that.'

"So here he was at last, where he had long feared to be. Harry Chapman is not well, and he doesn't like hospitals. Superficially all is as it normally is in such places, with nurses to chide him and a priest to console. But there are more than usual quotient of voices - is it because of Dr Pereira's wonder drug that he can hear the voice of his mother, acerbic and disappointed in him as ever? Perhaps her presence would be understandable enough, but what is Pip from Great Expectations doing here? More and more voices add their differing notes and stories to the chorus, squabbling, cajoling, commenting: friends from childhood, lovers, characters from novels and poetry; his father, fighting in the First World War; Babar and Celeste, who dances with Fred Astaire; Jane Austen's "Emma"; his aunt Rose, 'a stranger to moodiness'; Christopher Smart's cat Jeoffrey; a man who wants to sell him T.S. Eliot's teeth; Virginia Woolf, the scourge of servants; and, of course, an old friend who turns up at his bedside principally to rehearse the litany of his own ailments. Slowly, endearingly, the life of Harry Chapman coalesces before our eyes, through voices real and unreal. Written with a gentle, effortless generosity, full of delicate observation, "Chapman's Odyssey" is the work of a master; a superbly rendered act of storytelling and ventriloquism that is waspish, witty, deeply moving and wise by turns and which constantly explores 'the unsolvable enigma of love'.

Updates

A couple of brief updates this week on authors I have featured previously.  Joe Abercrombie has published The Heroes, his fifth novel.  He did an extensive UK tour, and he is a generous signer, so there have been plenty of signed, lined and dated copies available via ebay (where I got mine). Waterstones in the UK had an exclusive first edition with an additional short story, and I think this should be the edition of choice. Prices of his earlier books also updated - these have continued to climb since I wrote the original entry, and the first two in particular now have significant value.
 
Meanwhile, Simon Scarrow has published his first novel aimed at young adults - Gladiator, Fight for Freedom.  This is the first in a series, published both as a hardcover and paperback.  A limited collectors' edition is available from the authors website. Profits go to charity. 

Book of the Week - Anthony Quinn, Half of the Human Race

Half of the Human Race is the second novel of Liverpool born author Anthony Quinn. Quinn moved to London in 1986 and has written about film and books for a number of newspapers and magazines, including The Independent, Daily Telegraph, New York Times and Mail on Sunday. For three years he was the arts editor at Harpers & Queens. Since 1998 he has been film critic of The Independent. In 2006 he was one of the judges of the Man Booker Prize. His first novel (Rescue Man, 2009, set in Liverpool during the blitz)  won a number of awards, including the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award. Half of the Human Race is set earlier in the 20th century against the background of the suffragette movement and cricket. An unusual combination, but positive reviews suggest that this book may do well.

“London. In the sweltering summer of 1911, the streets ring to the cheers for a new king’s coronation, and to the cries of suffragist women marching for the vote. One of them is twenty-one-year-old Connie Callaway, daughter of a middle-class Islington family fallen on hard times since the death of her father. Forced to abandon her dream of a medical career, Connie is now faced with another hard choice - to maintain lawful protest against an intransigent government or to join the glass-breaking militants in 'the greatest cause the world has ever known'.

Holidaying with her family on the South Coast, Connie is introduced to Will Maitland, cricketer and rising star of his county. Despite their mutual attraction, they part on unfriendly terms, she dismayed by his innate chauvinism, he astonished by her outspokenness. Yet they are destined to meet again, their lives inextricably entangled in the fate of Will’s friend and idol Andrew Tamburlain, 'The Great Tam', a former Test batsman whose legendary big hitting was once the toast of the nation.
Duty plays a commanding part in the life of these two young people, whose love for one another, in a different time, might have bound them in matrimony. But Connie, fired up by the possibilities of independence, wants more than the conventional comforts of marriage; and Will, a son of his age and class, is both attracted and appalled by her quest for self-fulfilment. Buffeted and spun by choice and chance, the two remain tied together, even as the outbreak of war drives them further apart.

Combining national drama and private tragedy, Half of The Human Race is a book about men and women and their difficulties in understanding each other at a turning-point in history. It is a deeply affecting story of love, sacrifice, suffrage and county cricket, projected against a vivid backdrop of England in an extraordinary age of turmoil and violence.”

Book of the Week - Nicole Krauss, Great House

Great House is the third novel by Nicole Krauss; the UK edition has just appeared, although it was published in the US in October 2010. I greatly enjoyed her previous novel (The History of Love), which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize – it also won the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Ėtranger, was named #1 book of the year by Amazon.com, and was short-listed for the Médicis and Femina prizes. Her first novel, Man Walks Into a Room, was previously a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for First Fiction. In 2007, she was selected as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists, and in 2010 The New Yorker named her one of the 20 best writers under 40. Krauss married novelist Jonathan Safran Foer in 2004, and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. Great House did very well in the US, and is certainly worth picking up.

“For twenty-five years, a reclusive American novelist has been writing at the desk she inherited from a young Chilean poet who disappeared at the hands of Pinochet’s secret police; one day a girl claiming to be the poet’s daughter arrives to take it away, sending the writer’s life reeling. Across the ocean, in the leafy suburbs of London, a man caring for his dying wife discovers, among her papers, a lock of hair that unravels a terrible secret. In Jerusalem, an antiques dealer slowly reassembles his father’s study, plundered by the Nazis in Budapest in 1944.

Connecting these stories is a desk of many drawers that exerts a power over those who possess it or have given it away. As the narrators of Great House make their confessions, the desk takes on more and more meaning, and comes finally to stand for all that has been taken from them, and all that binds them to what has disappeared.

Great House is a story haunted by questions: What do we pass on to our children and how do they absorb our dreams and losses? How do we respond to disappearance, destruction, and change?

Nicole Krauss has written a soaring, powerful novel about memory struggling to create a meaningful permanence in the face of inevitable loss.”