Book of the Week and bibliography - M.J.Hyland, This is How

This is How is the third novel from Maria (M.J.) Hyland. Hyland was born in London to Irish parents in 1968 and spent her early childhood in Dublin before moving to Australia. She studied English and Law at the University of Melbourne, Australia and worked as a lawyer for several years. She currently lives in Manchester, England, where she teaches in the Centre for New Writing at Manchester University.

Hyland's first novel, How the Light Gets In (2003), was short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Age Book of the Year and also took third place in the Barnes & Noble, Discover Great New Writers Award. In was also joint winner of the Best Young Australian Novelist Award. Carry Me Down (2006), her second novel, was winner of the Encore Prize (2007) and the Hawthornden Prize (2007) and was also short-listed for the Man Booker Prize (2006). Hyland writes intense and claustrophic novels. This is How has been strongly reviewed, and may well feature in prize lists later in the year. Regardless, she is a writer who is likely to have a very strong future and it is worth picking up all three of her novels. SIgned copies are relatively uncommon.

"When his fiance breaks off their engagement, Patrick Oxtoby leaves home and moves into a boarding house in a remote seaside town. But in spite of his hopes and determination to build a better life, nothing goes to plan and Patrick is soon driven to take a desperate and chilling course of action. "This is How" is a mesmerising and meticulously drawn portrait of a man whose unease in the world leads to his tragic undoing. With breathtaking wisdom and an astute insight into the human mind, award-winning M.J. Hyland's new book is a masterpiece that inspires horror and sympathy in equal measure."


Bibliography

How the light gets in. (Canongate, Edinburgh, 2004). Paperback with dust jacket.
Carry me down. (Canongate, Edinburgh, 2006). Paperback with dust jacket.
This is how. (Canongate, Edinburgh, 2009). Paperback with dust jacket.

Book of the Week - Sarah Moss, Cold Earth

I am travelling at present, so this week’s book recommendation is courtesy of a correspondent. Cold Earth is a first novel from University of Kent academic Sarah Moss, and has just been published by Granta. She completed her doctoral thesis on British Romanticism and the Arctic, and the stories which she discovered while researching this provided the inspiration for her novel. There have been very favourable reviews in The Guardian, The Times and The Independent. Signed copies seem uncommon but there may be a few available via Coombe Hill Books. As for books set in the arctic, I enjoyed The Solitude of Thomas Cave a couple of years ago, and I will return at a future date to the works of American artist and writer Rockwell Kent.


“A team of six archaeologists assembles at the beginning of the Arctic summer, to unearth traces of the lost Viking settlements in Greenland. But while they settle into uneasy domesticity, camping between the ruined farmstead and the burnt-out chapel, there is news of an epidemic back home and their communications with the outside world fall away. Facing a Greenland winter for which they are hopelessly ill-equipped, knowing that their missives may never reach their loved ones, Nina, Ruth, Catriona, Jim, Ben and Yianni write their final letters home. In this exceptional and haunting first novel, Moss weaves a rich tapestry of personal narratives, history, ghost stories, love stories, stories of grief and naked survival. Cold Earth is as compelling as a thriller, and also a highly sophisticated novel of ideas.”

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.