The Twelve - limited edition

The Twelve by Stuart Neville has had some very positive reviews, and will be published in the US (as The Ghosts of Belfast) in October. The UK softcover edition from Harvill is being reprinted. However, in addition a very collectable limited edition hardcover of the book has now been produced, 50 copies only, with illustrations by Julie Chalmers. The book is in green boards and with a gold foil stamped design, and in a black blindstamped cloth case. It is number and signed by the author and illustrator. Copies (if any are still available) from No Alibis bookshop in Belfast.

A collection of short stories, The Six, can be downloaded as a pdf file from Stuart Neville's website, and this has also been produced in a strictly limited softcover edition of only 50 copies, numbered and signed by the author. Neville is an author to watch, and if he is successful both of these limited editions will be avidly pursued in years to come.

Book of the Week - William Trevor, Love and Summer

William Trevor has been shortlisted four times for the Booker Prize, and Love and Summer, which has just been published, is on this year's longlist. Trevor was born in Mitchelstown, County Cork, in the Republic of Ireland on 24 May 1928. He was educated at St Columba's College, County Dublin, and Trinity College, Dublin. He worked briefly as a teacher, and later as a copywriter in an advertising agency before he began to work full-time as a writer in 1965. He was also a sculptor and exhibited frequently in Dublin and London. His first novel, A Standard of Behaviour, was published in 1958. His fiction, set mainly in Ireland and England, ranges from black comedies characterised by eccentrics and sexual deviants to stories exploring Irish history and politics, and he articulates the tensions between Irish Protestant landowners and Catholic tenants in what critics have termed the 'big house' novel. He is the acclaimed author of several collections of short stories, and has adapted a number of his own stories for the stage, television and radio. The Children of Dynmouth (1976) and Fools of Fortune (1983) both won the Whitbread Novel Award, and Felicia's Journey (1994), the story of a young Irish girl who becomes the victim of a sexual sociopath, won both the Whitbread Book of the Year and the Sunday Express Book of the Year awards. Trevor currently lives in Devon, in South West England.

"It’s summer and nothing much is happening in Rathmoye. So it doesn’t go unnoticed when a dark-haired stranger appears on his bicycle and begins photographing the mourners at Mrs Connulty’s funeral. Florian Kilderry couldn't know that the Connultys were said to own half the town; and, in any case, he had come to Rathmoye only to see the scorched remains of the cinema. But Mrs Connulty's daughter, liberated at last by the death of her imperious mother, resolves to keep an eye on Florian Kilderry, and it's she who comes to witness the events that follow. A few miles out in the country a farmer called Dillahan lives with the knowledge that he was accidentally responsible for the deaths of his wife and baby. He has married again: Ellie is the young convent girl who came to work for him when he was widowed. But she falls in love with Florian and though he plans to leave Ireland, a dangerously reckless attachment develops between them . In a characteristically masterly way Trevor evokes the passions and frustrations felt by Ellie and Florian, and by the people of a small Irish town during one long summer."

Simon Scarrow Update

The latest volume in Simon Scarrow's Macro and Cato series has just been released. Gladiator is the ninth book, and like the last volume (Centurion), there is a version available with an additional short story (Deadly Games). This has not been widely advertised, and is the version to watch out for (apart from a special signed version, which was available directly from the author's website, but is now sold out).

Book of the Week and bibliography - Sarah Hall, How to Paint a Dead Man

"How to Paint a Dead Man" is the fourth novel by Sarah Hall, who was born in Cumbria in 1974. It has been included on the longlist for this year's Man Booker Prize; her three previous novels all won literary prizes, and she is clearly an author to watch.

Hall took a degree in English and Art History at Aberystwyth University. She began to take writing seriously from the age of twenty, first as a poet (several of her poems appearing in poetry magazines), then as a fiction-writer. She took an M.Litt. in Creative Writing at St Andrew's University and stayed on for a year afterwards to teach on the undergraduate Creative Writing programme.

Hall's first novel, Haweswater, was published in 2002. It is set in the 1930s, focuses on one family - the Lightburns - and is a rural tragedy about the disintegration of a community of Cumbrian hill-framers, due to the building of a reservoir. It won several awards, including the 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best First Book). Her second book, The Electric Michelangelo (2004), set in the turn-of-the-century seaside resorts of Morecambe Bay and Coney Island, was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the 2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book). The Carhullan Army (2007), won the 2007 John Llewellyn-Rhys Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the 2008 Arthur C Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction. How to Paint a Dead Man has now joined this list of successful novels, although it remains very much an outsider for this year's Booker Prize.

" Italy in the early 1960s: a dying painter considers the sacrifices and losses that have made him an enigma, both to strangers and those closest to him. He begins his last life painting, using the same objects he has painted obsessively for his entire career - a small group of bottles. In Cumbria 30 years later, a landscape artist - and admirer of the Italian recluse - finds himself trapped in the extreme terrain that has made him famous. And in present-day London, his daughter, an art curator struggling with the sudden loss of her twin brother while trying to curate an exhibition about the lives of the twentieth-century European masters, is drawn into a world of darkness and sexual abandon. Covering half a century, this is a luminous and searching novel, and Hall's most accomplished work to date. "


Bibliography

Haweswater. Faber and Faber, 2002. Card covers with dustwrapper.
The Electric Michelangelo. Faber and Faber, 2004. Card covers with dustwrapper.
The Carhullan Army. Faber and Faber, 2007. Hardcover with dustwrapper.
How to Paint a Dead Man .Faber and Faber, 2009. Card covers with dustwrapper.

Book of the Week and bibliography - David Peace, Occupied City

Occupied City is the second book in the Tokyo Trilogy by David Peace, and is a striking and unusual novel. Peace has had huge publicity this year, as a result of the success on television of Red Riding and in the cinema of The Damned United. He has an unusual writing style, which has become more pronounced in Occupied Territory, favouring repetition and use of multiple voices. His writing style does not appeal to everyone, and will probably come as a considerable shock to anyone buying this novel based on their experience of the television or cinema adaptations of the earlier books. Occupied City has received some very polarised reviews, with at least as many negative as positive. Nonetheless, if approached in the way you might approach poetry, this novel (and Peace’s earlier books) have much to offer. Peace has given a number of interviews recently indicating that he only intends to write twelve novels. He has accumulated a significant body of work and is certainly a writer worth investigating, and collecting.

David Peace was born in 1967 and grew up in Ossett, near Wakefield. He left Manchester Polytechnic in 1991, and went to Istanbul to teach English. In 1994 he took up a teaching post in Tokyo and lived there with his family for a number of years. He has recently returned to the UK. His formative years were shadowed by the activities of the Yorkshire Ripper, and this had a profound influence on him which led to a strong interest in crime. His quartet of Red Riding books grew from this obsession with the dark side of Yorkshire. These are powerful novels of crime and police corruption, using the Yorkshire Ripper as their basis and inspiration. They are entitled Nineteen Seventy-Four (1999), Nineteen Seventy-Seven (2000), Nineteen Eighty (2001), and Nineteen Eighty-Three (2002), and have been translated into French, Italian, German and Japanese. In 2003 David Peace was named by Granta magazine as one of twenty 'Best of Young British Novelists'. His novel, GB84, set amid the 1984 miners' strike, was published in 2005. His most recent books are The Damned Utd (2006), recreating Brian Clough's time at Leeds United Football Club; and Tokyo Year Zero (2007), the first of a trilogy set in Tokyo in the aftermath of World War II. Occupied City is the second book in this trilogy.

'We all know what this could be: we know it could be dysentery, we know it could be typhoid. In the "Occupied City", we all know what this could mean -' Tokyo, January 26th, 1948. As the third year of the US Occupation of Japan begins, a man enters a downtown bank. He speaks of an outbreak of dysentery and says he is a doctor, sent by the Occupation authorities, to treat anyone who might have been exposed. Clear liquid is poured into sixteen teacups. Sixteen employees of the bank drink this liquid according to strict instructions. Within minutes twelve of them are dead, the other four unconscious. The man disappears along with some, but not all, of the bank's money. And so begins the biggest manhunt in Japanese history. In "Occupied City", David Peace dramatises and explores the rumours of complicity, conspiracy and cover-up that surround the chilling case of the Teikoku Bank Massacre: of the man who was convicted of the crime, of the legacy of biological warfare programmes, and of the victims and survivors themselves.

Bibliography

The Red Riding Quartet
1999 Nineteen Seventy-Four (Serpent's Tail, paperback)
2000 Nineteen Seventy-Seven (Serpent's Tail, paperback)
2001 Nineteen Eighty (Serpent's Tail, hardcover)
2002 Nineteen Eighty-Three (Serpent's Tail, paperback)

2004 GB84 (Faber, paperback)
2006 The Damned Utd (Faber, paperback)

Tokyo Trilogy
2007 Tokyo Year Zero (Faber, hardcover)
2009 Occupied City (Faber, hardcover)

Man Booker Prize longlist - 2009

This year's longlist for the Man Booker Prize was announed today. Those books which I have recommended over the last year (five of the eleven published at present) are highlighted. Summertime by Coetzee is not yet published in the UK, but appears to be an early favourite, probably based on the fact that he has won the prize twice before.. The novel which has attracted most press attention is Me Cheeta, the fictional biography of Tarzan's chimp - one that passed me by during the year!


Byatt, AS - The Children's Book, Chatto and Windus
Coetzee, JM - Summertime, Harvill Secker
Foulds, Adam - The Quickening Maze, Jonathan Cape
Hall, Sarah - How to paint a dead man, Faber and Faber
Harvey, Samantha - The Wilderness, Jonathan Cape
Lever, James - Me Cheeta, Fourth Estate
Mantel, Hilary - Wolf Hall, Fourth Estate
Mawer, Simon - The Glass Room, Little Brown
O'Loughlin, Ed - Not Untrue & Not Unkind, Penguin
Scudamore, James - Heliopolis, Harvill Secker
Toibin, Colm - Brooklyn, Viking
Trevor, William - Love and Summer,Viking
Waters, Sarah - The Little Stranger, Little Brown

Book of the Week - Eleanor Catton, The Rehearsal

The Rehearsal is a first novel by Eleanor Catton, and was originally published as a paperback by Victoria University Press in New Zealand in 2008. Catton was born in 1985 in Canada and raised in Canterbury, New Zealand. She won New Zealand’s Adam Prize in Creative Writing for The Rehearsal, her first novel. She was also awarded the 2007 New Zealand Sunday Star-Times short-story competition prize, the 2008 Glenn Schaeffer Fellowship to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the 2008 Louis Johnson New Writers’ Bursary. Currently, she lives in Iowa. Reviews of this book have been outstanding, although some have commented that while it is intellectually extremely clever, it does not succeed in fully capturing the reader's heart as well as their mind. The UK edition has just been released and is likely to do extremely well.

A high-school sex scandal jolts a group of teenage girls into a new awareness of their own potency and power. The sudden and total publicity seems to turn every act into a performance and every platform into a stage. But when the local drama school decides to turn the scandal into a show, the real world and the world of the theater are forced to meet, and soon the boundaries between private and public begin to dissolve. "The Rehearsal" is an exhilarating and provocative novel about the unsimple mess of human desire, at once a tender evocation of its young protagonists and a shrewd expose of emotional compromise.