 | Doppelgänger by Daša Drndić {Reviewed by THOMAS} “We may speak of the body as an ever-advancing boundary between the future and the past, as the pointed end, which our past is continually driving forward into our future. ... My body is always situated at the very point where my past expires in a deed,” wrote Henri Bergson. For the characters in Doppelganger, two novellas hinged to each other by a barbed contingency, no deed can be satisfactorily discharged due to historical traumas pressing with too great a force upon that boundary. If wars, according to Drndić, are “orgies of forgetting”, memory is the means of undoing, or at least resisting, some of the harm done to personal by collective histories. Her novels are full of archival lists of persons, objects, prices, actions, meticulously researched particulars set as pegs against the process of generalisation that is the first symptom of erasure. Remembering is necessary to existence as an autonomous and continual individual, but what happens to that individual when the the burden of memory overwhelms their ability to withstand the past that presses upon them? Does one’s refusal to become an agent for the perpetuation of a trauma make one instead a victim of that trauma? It is upon the body that the collective presses upon the personal, the external world upon the internal - and vice-versa - but when the pressures cannot be balanced, when one world traumatises the other, when the two cannot mutually converse in deeds, it is with the body that the symptoms of this imbalance are made known. In ‘Artur and Isabella’, the first part of Doppelganger, two elderly people’s lives briefly intersect physically, despite the abjection of their bodies, the centrifugal forces of their respective histories making continued companionship in the present impossible. The story is told in a mixture of verbalisations from one or the other of the characters - though it is not certain whether these verbalisations are actually spoken - and apparently straightforward reportage with the precision and flatness of a detective’s notes, interspersed with police reports and other documents. Isabella’s history of loss, of avoiding the Nazi death camps that claimed the rest of her family, of her marriage to a Jewish shoe-manufacturer in Croatia, and of subsequently fleeing the Axis invasion, intersects with ‘Pupi’, the second part of Doppelganger, the protagonist of which is Printz, the elder son of a Yugoslav chemist and spy who was awarded Isabella’s property in the newly established Socialist Yugoslavia. Printz’s is also a story of loss - of both circumstances and sanity - a story of erasure and of resistance to that erasure. The text proceeds as a sort of double narrative: objective and a subjective, outer and inner, observation and assertion. Both voices belong to Printz - he is his own double. Sometimes the objective and subjective voices are in accord, sometimes they are opposed, bringing suspicion onto both from the reader. Printz is unable to align the collective and personal histories that press upon him, and, as his circumstances diminish and following the deaths first of his mother and then of his father (in whose company he “watches a world disappear, their world, after which comes nothing”), even the most straightforward of observations trigger fugues of memory and association which further alienate Printz from others and from the mores which both enable and police social interaction. “I have temporal blotches in my brain,” states Printz as his hold upon the present becomes more tenuous and he begins to rant more frequently and publicly. “He will talk as long as his thoughts keep coming,” thoughts alternating between Bernhardian invective, actual historical fact, and delicately surreal fantasy. “Maybe none of us has his own life. Is your life unconditionally yours?” he is asked, and it is the weight of trauma in history that distorts the present, even for the beneficiaries of that trauma. Burdened with guilt, Printz attempts to return confiscated silver to Isabella (from the first story), only to find that she has died. When trauma cannot be addressed it is taken upon the body. When the past cannot be expended in a deed it overwhelms the future. Printz’s life becomes precarious. He asks himself, “Where is your strength to refrain from the compulsion to breathe? How can you continue to put up with the dense air that blocks your lungs and oppresses your body?” |
BOOKS @ VOLUME #112 (26.1.19)
Read our latest newsletter and find out what we've been reading and recommending, about the latest new releases and our Book of the Week, and about upcoming events and writing courses.
This book is comprised of 50 'literary' postcards, drawn from Gauld's book-related contributions to The Guardian over the last decade. Funny, serious, and often poignant, Gauld's cartoons are endlessly inventive and thoughtful.
>> We will be posting a daily image this week our instagram page.
>> Preview here.
>> Tom Gauld's website.
>> Drawing as language.
>> Other books by Tom Gauld.
 | Kingdom by Jon McNaught Heading away for a family holiday is a recipe for both anticipation and disappointment. In Jon McNaught’s Kingdom, Suzie, Andy and Mum are driving to the summer holiday caravan park on the English coast. Mum’s excited - she remembers it from her own childhood and has fond memories of it being the best place ever. Filled with memories of discovering mermaids’ caves, giant sand dunes and crashing waves, she can’t wait to share it with her children. In this graphic novel, we start en route, GPS on, traffic jams and boredom. With Suzie’s keen eye, we are given the view from the back seat. Each frame is a blink of the eye, like viewing the world through the shutter of an old-fashioned Viewfinder. It’s eerily reminiscent of your own memories of long-distance car trips, - an ever changing view as you move towards your destination, but where, because you are sitting still and not moving actively through the landscape, you slow down in your observations. McNaught gives us half-views of signs, the backs of vehicles, trucks with advertising, birds whirling overhead, sounds that infiltrate the capsule of the car, the inane conversation and the games, both verbal and visual, that attempt to speed up the journey. On the way, there’s the traditional stop for junk food and the anticipation of arriving, but the slightly uncomfortable sense of being nowhere - in limbo - where you are strangely anonymous and self-contained but a unit outside of itself and its familiar stomping ground. And finally, you arrive, all the necessary unpacking is done, yet you are not quite there yet - your emotional self is still somewhere in the ‘old world’, trying to find the internet reception above one bar. As Suzie heads off for walks to the caves with her mother, Andy fools around on his laptop until he is bored and wanders through the caravan park and up the hill. And here the story starts to hum - being alone has its upside: no tales of yesteryear, no-one telling you what to do. Yet there’s also the tedium of rain, of the rundown museum (which has its own charm, but maybe not to two bored children more accustomed to digital overload), of a parent reminding you about school, and a kid sister who is always tagging along. When Suzie and Mum go to visit Aunt Lizzie, Andy refuses to go along, preferring to be left alone. This is a story of discovery, of starting to see and sense how a place makes one behave differently. In this very subtly illustrated graphic novel, McNaught captures the mundane and the exceptional without any change in palette, tone or texture - images of the landscape, of the natural world and the strangely prescribed human world - the manicured caravan park and the images on the digital devices that are ever present - are juxtaposed playfully. The sense of doing something, but also very little - that ‘holiday feeling’ - creates a meditative quality and as a reader you too slow down, sharpen your senses (re-read and look more closely) and engage in the quiet, yet profound moments that make us look at the world, ourselves and our place in that world anew - experiences that change us incrementally. |
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All the Devils are Here by David Seabrook (Reviewed by THOMAS}
Kent juts out from the rest of England like an elbow. In David Seabrook’s stumbling psychogeographic tour of this elbow’s tip (Margate, Broadstairs, Deal), he portrays it as teeming (although ‘teeming’ seems perhaps too energetic a word) with people elbowed to the margins of English society, margins at which, paradoxically, this sense of Englishness is most defined: mad persons, alcoholics, louche millionaires, well-connected fascists, octogenarian ex-rentboys, spent eccentrics, writers either unacknowledged or forgotten. “Hell is empty and all the devils are here,” wrote Shakespeare in The Tempest of (ostensibly) another haunted paradise and ‘isle of noises’, and Seabrook is at his best when nailing a persistent cultural misery in a single sentence: “Staccato laughter strafing the Casino Rooms just off the High Street, where audiences are entertained by comedians such as ‘X-Rated’ Jimmy Jones or Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown, big men who tour England ceaselessly like lardy takes on the Ancient Mariner, bringing none of the poetry and all of the guilt.” Seabrook’s position is not lofty, however: he lived almost all his life on this elbow, never more than an hour’s bus-ride from the locations mentioned, an outsider himself, culturally irritable, full of sympathies but excluded from involvement by his own uncertainty of motive and by his insecure role as second-hand witness to pasts of which only decrepit and partial residues remain. Although Seabrook ostensibly seeks and relays facts, albeit fragmented second-hand facts, these facts seldom reach any conclusion other than their enervation. Knowledge will not save us from that which we do not understand. “I can connect / Nothing with nothing,” wrote T.S. Eliot in ‘The Waste Land’ while recuperating from a mental breakdown in Margate. On visiting Chatham, Seabrook gives a discursive account of the painter Richard Dadd, his experiences accompanying Sir Thomas Phillips on the “cultural commando course” of a Grand Tour, his murder of his father and subsequent confinement to Bedlam, concluding his account of a visit to the now-neglected park in which the murder took place with the observation that “it’s a place that won’t quite fit on the heritage map. Kent police exercise their dogs here.” Seabrook is to Sebald what a queasy stomach is to a headache. Whether analysing literature or exposing the private lives of third-rung celebrities, Seabrook is always an intruder, his observations always gossip, with the ambivalences of fascination and repulsion always inherent in gossip. Seabrook’s mind is desperate to make connections between the details he observes, but he seems aware all along that there will be no overall shape to, or conclusion to be drawn from, these details. Towards the end of the book he spends an uncomfortable number of pages recounting the details in an unsolved series of murders with which he has evidently become obsessed before returning to his interview with the faded rent-boy which forms the connecting thread of the final part of the book, entitled ‘Tombatism’, a word coined by a character in Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood from a combination of ‘tomb’ and ‘rheumatism’. Edwin Drood was never finished, its mysteries irresolvable, inevitable consequences, in Seabrook’s cosmology, of being set and written in the elbow of Kent. David Seabrook was found dead in his flat in Kent in 2009. Most of his writings are lost.
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NEW RELEASES
Dirt is an experimental cookbook that digs into the relationship between food and words. Twelve earthy recipes from chef Gemma Walsh are accompanied by a collection of stories, poems and conversations from some of New Zealand’s contemporary writers. Contributors include Courtney Sina Meredith, Lana Lopesi, Rosabel Tan, Dominic Huey, Vanessa Crofskey, Natasha Matila-Smith, Owen Connors, Liam Jacobson, Amy Weng, Reem Musa, Gabi Lardies and Sam Walsh.
>>Preview here.
Inspired by a series of domestic still lifes by photographer Laura Letinsky, Dutton (author of Margaret the First and Dorothy Project publisher) creates her own trenchant series of tableaux, attentive to the surfaces of the suburbs and the ways in which life there is willfully, almost desperately, on display. In locating the language of sprawl itself—engrossing, unremitting, ever expansive—Dutton has written a work of fiction that takes us deep into the familiar and to its very edge: nothing is ever the same under such close inspection.
"Reads as if Gertrude Stein channelled Alice B. Toklas writing an Arcades Project set in contemporary suburbia." - The Believer
Two novellas that revisit the question of "doubles" (famously explored by Stevenson, Dostoyevsky and others), and how an individual is perpetually caught between their own beliefs and those imposed on them by society. `Arthur and Isabella' is a story of the relationship between two elderly people who meet on New Year's Eve - a romantic encounter which turns into a grotesque portrayal of the loneliness of old age. The second story, `Pupi' - a strange mirror of the first - centres on the life of a man who ends up on the street.
"The capacity to see the bricolage of a reticent, morally compromised, elegiac past - and, more unsettlingly, how that past might see us - is a central feature of the work of the Croatian writer Dasa Drndic." - Paris Review
Listed for the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize.
When a friend dies, a woman inherits his Great Dane. As she gets to know this dog, so large, so inconvenient, so representative of her grief, she comes to understand the dog's grief, too, and their lives begin to change in subtle ways.
"Nunez's prose itself comforts us. Her confident and direct style uplifts--the music in her sentences, her deep and varied intelligence." - The New York Times
2018 (US) National Book Award winner.
>> Also available as a lovely hardback.
Ten stories from this unsparing and deeply perceptive Japanese author whose characters are moved by unacknowledgeable but wholly convincing desires.
"Disturbing and exceptional." - Publishers Weekly
"A completely individual writer, who described the intricacies of sexual relationships boldly, committedly, utterly fearlessly. And yet her writing is writing that doesn't actually 'bare all', but rather hints at what lies underneath - at things deep, quiet, and mysterious." - Yoko Tawada
"Kono should be an electrifying discovery for English-speaking lovers of short fiction. Each story unburies something that feels both thrillingly specific and surprisingly contemporary." —Kirkus
Here is the body turned inside out, its members set free, its humours released upon the world. Hearts bigger than planets devour light and warp the space around them. The city of London has a menstrual flow that gushes through its underground pipes. Gobs of phlegm cement friendships and sexual relationships. A floating fetus larger than a human becomes the new town pastor. In these stories, Shelley Jackson rewrites our private passages and translates the dumb show of the body into prose as gorgeous as it is unhygienic.
“Wilson’s Odyssey feels like a restoration of an old, familiar building that had over the years been encrusted with too much gilt. She scrapes away at old encrusted layers, until she exposes what lies beneath.” - Financial Times
"This translation will change the way the poem is read in English." - The Guardian
"Wilson's project is basically a progressive one: to scrape away all the centuries of verbal and ideological buildup — the Christianising (Homer predates Christianity), the nostalgia, the added sexism (the epics are sexist enough as they are), and the Victorian euphemisms — to reveal something fresh and clean." - NPR
Zeran uses the three characters in her novel to demonstrate the way in which the trauma of the Pinochet regime continues to distort the lives and memories of a second generation of Chileans.
"The Remainder controls a remarkable range of registers (it is, by turns, lyrical, elegiac, sensual, funny, tragic). The author, like her characters, is obsessed with words, those`cracks in language' that house our particular ways of understanding things. Thanks, among other things, to the meticulous, obsessive attention to detail of her language, this novel is sure to endure." - Edmundo Paz Soldan
In prewar Budapest three families live side by side on gracious Katalin Street, their lives closely intertwined. A game is played by the four children in which Bálint, the promising son of the Major, invariably chooses Irén Elekes, the headmaster's dutiful elder daughter, over her younger sister, the scatterbrained Blanka, and little Henriette Held, the daughter of the Jewish dentist. Their lives are torn apart in 1944 by the German occupation, which only the Elekes family survives intact. The postwar regime relocates them to a cramped Soviet-style apartment and they struggle to come to terms with social and political change, personal loss, and unstated feelings of guilt over the deportation of the Held parents and the death of little Henriette, who had been left in their protection.
Winner of the 2018 Pen Translation Prize.
"To read Power's stories is to take a journey through a landscape familiar enough to console, yet strange enough to unsettle. The thrills and dangers of such a journey lie with the unexpectedness of life's undercurrents and our uncertain, unknowable selves. Chris Power's quiet yet compelling touch is reminiscent of Alice Munro and Peter Stamm." - Yiyun Li
In 1946, one-time world chess champion Alexander Alekhine was found dead in his hotel room in Portugal. His death is usually explained as a heart attack or from choking on poorly-chewed meat, but speculation abounds that his collaboration with the Nazis during World War 2 made him a target for the Soviet or French secret services. With the pace of a thriller and the acuity of a chess match, this novel brings to life this 'sadist of the chess world', both on the board and in the most unusual circumstances of his life.
>> Ruthless Alekhine dispatched the elegant Capablanca to become World Chess Champion in 1927.
A funny and sharp graphic novel about how women's bodies have been a battleground for power throughout history.
"How I loved reading Liv Strömquist’s Fruit of Knowledge. Mostly, this was down to its sheer, punchy brilliance. Strömquist’s strips are clever, angry, funny and righteous, they’re also informative to an eye-popping degree. Every page is fantastically acute." - Rachel Cooke, The Guardian
As surreal and "beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella" (to use words written in anticipation by le Comte de Lautréamont (with particular emphasis with reference to this collection upon the sewing machine)), Grodova's stories, full of baroque detail worn via patina to a thinness that makes them dangerously sharp to handle, take place in a world governed by strange customs, where significance is found in odd conjunctions, where obsessions assume the fatal ordinariness of custom, where only misfits approach normal, and where childhood is the conduit of immense threat, to children, parents and to wider society. All that is riven will henceforth continue to diverge, but Grodova's stories, lying on an axis of mitteleuropean flavour somewhere between Grimm's tales and accounts of Soviet privations, and on another axis somewhere between the stories of Angela Carter (pleasantly close to these) and those of Ben Marcus, have as much delight (and even hope) in them as they do despair, for, after all, with an imagination as fertile (and a hand as steady) as Grudova's, anything could happen (not only the dreadful).
"That I cannot say what all these stories are about is a testament to their worth. They have been haunting me for days now. They have their own, highly distinct flavour, and the inevitability of uncomfortable dreams." — Nicholas Lezard, Guardian
>> Read 'Unstitching'.
>> The author's playlist for the book.
>> Posing.
>> An interview with Grudova.
A beautifully written journey through the phenomena (both objective and subjective) and frozen histories of the Arctic an the Antarctic via the holdings of remarkable museums (including the world's northernmost museum at Upernavik in Greenland). A subtle exploration of the relationship between humans and habitats that are both harsh and fragile.
"A wonderful book. Glaciers, Arctic floe, verglas, frost and snow - I can think of no better or warmer guide to the icy ends of the Earth. " - Dan Richards (author of Climbing Days)
As Vivian, a self-described 'changeling', travels around Dublin, following her very own brand of logic, the reader is invited to reconsider their own attitudes towards 'misfits' and to broaden their acceptance of human individuality.
"Inventive, funny and, ultimately, moving." - Guardian
"Wildly funny." - The New York Times
In the 1790s, Britain underwent what the politician Edmund Burke called 'the most important of all revolutions ... a revolution in sentiments'. Inspired by the French Revolution, British radicals concocted new political worlds to enshrine healthier, more productive, human emotions and relationships. The Enlightenment's wildest hopes crested in the utopian projects of such optimists - including the young poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the philosophers William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the physician Thomas Beddoes and the first photographer Thomas Wedgwood - who sought to reform sex, education, commerce, politics and medicine by freeing desire from repressive constraints. But by the middle of the decade, the wind had changed. The French Revolution descended into bloody Terror and the British government quashed radical political activities. In the space of one decade, feverish optimism gave way to bleak disappointment, and changed the way we think about human need and longing.
Wynflæd was an Anglo-Saxon noblewoman who owned male slaves and badger-skin gowns; Egeria a Gaulish nun who toured the Holy Land as the Roman Empire was collapsing; Gudrid an Icelandic explorer and the first woman to give birth to a European child on American soil; Mary Astell a philosopher who out-thought John Locke. Max Adam gives considerable breadth to our understanding of women's lives in the so-called Dark and so-called Middle Ages.
Required reading for understanding the relationship between identity politics and the sort of group identity that can either justify atrocity or throw off oppression. How can the will of the people blur into unthinking populism?
A leading astrophysicist clearly and entertainingly discusses the universe, and our place in it, from the basics to the latest research. Does the universe get stranger the more me know about it?
>>Reach for the stars.
For more than two thousand years the people of St Kilda remained remote from the world. Their Hebridean society was viable, utopian even; but in the nineteenth century the islands were discovered by missionaries, do-gooders and tourists, who brought with them money, disease and despotism. In 1930, the few remaining islanders were evacuated, no longer able to support themselves.
Ari has left school and wants to move to another city with his band. Among the applicants to take his place in the family bakery is Hector, who loves baking as much as Ari wants to escape it. The two grow closer, but will their love bloom or be derailed? YA graphic novel.
Mila and her sisters live with their brother Oskar in a small forest cabin in the snow. One night, a fur-clad stranger arrives seeking shelter for himself and his men. But by the next morning, they've gone - taking Oskar with them. Fearful for his safety, Mila and her sisters set out to bring Oskar back - even it means going north, crossing frozen wild-lands to find a way past an eternal winter.
90 plant-based, veganised versions of traditional Asian recipes inspired by the cuisine of India, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan and China.
A attractively presented guide to heroes and heroines of world mythology.
Set in Auckland in 1942, in an area of the city known as Chinatown where the descendants of the Chinese miners and market gardeners gathered together to maintain their culture and provide a sense of community. New Zealand is at war when Silvey starts her diary, but for Silvey this is just a backdrop to the main issues of her world: the closure of her school and the arrival of Chinese-American soldiers.
The ordinary becomes extraordinary in this graphic novel of a journey through the in-between places of the landscape to the bleak coast. Kingdom follows a family on their holiday to a small caravan park, where teenager Andrew explores the dunes, and half-remembered stories from the past are shared.
An alphabet book comprised entirely of words that don't sound as if they start with their initial letter. English is a confusing language - this book celebrates that confusion.
>> Whacky.
 | Days of Awe by A.M. Homes A.M.Homes is an acerbic and confident writer. A sharp stylist, her award-winning novel May We Be Forgiven (2012) remains memorable for its dark humour and shocking clarity. Homes has said of her writing: “What I'm doing, which sometimes makes people uncomfortable, is saying the things we don't want to say out loud." In her latest short story collection, Days of Awe, she holds nothing back in damning uber-wealthy American society, and the emotional and intellectual bankruptcy of contemporary life is played out through the characters across the stories. No one is exempt from Homes’s razor-sharp knife, a knife with tearing teeth. In these LA-set tales the extreme is the norm - therapy, plastic surgery (for dogs as well as humans), ever-so-perfect apartments where not-so-perfect lives play out, boredom and disappointment dressed up as gossip and intrigue, superficiality with a capital S - while the real issues, problems and heartaches are cordoned off, ignored, or laughed at. The characters, like players in a grand soap opera, are absurd in their normality - some stories become almost surreal - in their complete conviction that what they do is right even when it is obviously immoral or obscene. A.M. Homes captures these absurdities with witty dialogue and sharp observation. In 'Brother on Sunday' the competitive sibling scenario is played out to brilliant effect, with tight dialogue and sharp satire. In 'The National Caged Bird Show', all set within an online chat room about parakeets, the conversations going backwards and forwards with the usual interjections and exclamations, two of the seven attendees reveal traumatic experiences - a young girl is abused and a soldier reveals his disturbing incidents - while the others chat about feed, bird depression and health concerns and the habits of their beloved keets. Homes writes from the perspective of the old, the young, and the middle-aged, from the egotistical, the confident, the insecure, the oblivious and the damaged, showing how each is tangled up in their own lies, fantasies and obsessions. The stories make you laugh, despair and squirm, and will leave you observing society with just a little more clarity. They provide a critique of society that isn’t shy and isn’t afraid to be both absurd and truthful. |
 | The Essential Schopenhauer: Key selections from The World as Will and Representation and other writings by Arthur Schopenhauer , edited by Wolfgang Schirmacher {Reviewed by THOMAS} “Life is a business that fails to meet its costs,” declares Schopenhauer (1788-1860), setting off to demonstrate that we live in the worst of all possible worlds. The human condition is that of “a pendulum between suffering and boredom”, and yet we persist, drawn into and through existence by an unsuppressable and unsatisfiable “will-to-live”, a malignant innate force against we must struggle to escape. Life should consist of a constant (paradoxical) struggle against one’s own willing, which “springs from want, and hence from suffering” which in turn is “simply nothing but unfulfilled and thwarted willing”. Schopenhauer’s strident pessimism and his investigations into individual motivation introduced Eastern philosophies into European thought, and underlie the work of Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein, Tolstoy, Mann, Borges, Beckett and many others. How then to go on? Society, and indeed all functional existence, is predicated on collective and individual self-deception. Thomas Bernhard puts it well in Walking: “There is no doubt that the art lies in bearing what is unbearable and in not feeling that what is horrible is something horrible. Of course we have to label this art the most difficult of all. The art of existing against the facts.” |
>> Read Stella's review.
>> Read an excerpt.
>> Step through the mirror.
>> The book is translated by Hildegarde Serle.
>> A brief teaser.
>> Someone has made an animated trailer.
>> Le Petit Monde de la Passe-Miroir.
>> ...et FB!
>> Teaching notes.
>> Read an excerpt from the yet-to-be-published-in-English The Missing of Clairdelune (the second book in 'The Mirror Visitor' series).
>> The third book will be called The Memory of Babel.
James K. Baxter was not a man of few words, and his private correspondence was no exception. Letters of a Poet, edited by his friend and frequent correspondent John Weir, contains almost 900 of Baxter's letters from 1939 to 1972, covering his teenage years and entire adult life. Frank, funny, generous, sometimes filthy, packed with poems and musings on love, the Catholic faith, and how to live well and write well, they provide remarkable new insights into his life and work. The two slip-cased volumes include letters to his parents, Archibald and Millicent Baxter, the conscientious objector Noel Ginn, and many of the leading literary figures of the time, including Charles Brasch, Allen Curnow, Frank Sargeson, Fleur Adcock, Lawrence Baigent, Barry Crump, Maurice Shadbolt, W. H. Oliver, Robin Dudding and many more.
Which of the narrators in this twin-stranded novel is dreaming the other? The man who alternates between drinking and napping on the banks of the Seine in the 1960s, or the madcap Duke who gallops through some 700 years of French history?
"Queneau is a unique example of a wise and intelligent writer who always goes against the grain of the dominant terndencies of his age and of French culture in particular - and he combines this with an endless need to invent and test possibilities. The Blue Flowers makes fun of history , denying its progress and reducing it to the substance of daily existence." - Italo Calvino
Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A sales assistant makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the dresses she sells. A woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. Now in paperback.
"Carmen Maria Machado is the best writer of cognitive dysphoria I’ve read in years. " - Tor
"Life is too short to be afraid of nothing." - Machado
At the end of the First World War in Germany, the journalist and theatre critic Kurt Eisner organised a revolution which overthrew the monarchy, and declared a Free State of Bavaria. In February 1919, he was assassinated, and the revolution failed. But while the dream lived, it was the writers, the poets, the playwrights and the intellectuals who led the way. As well as Eisner, Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, and many other prominent figures in German cultural history were involved.
What shapes our ideas of home and homelessness? Just days after Raynor learns that Moth, her husband of 32 years, is terminally ill, their home is taken away and they lose their livelihood. With nothing left and little time, they make the brave and impulsive decision to walk the 630 miles of the sea-swept South West Coast Path, from Somerset to Dorset, via Devon and Cornwall. Carrying only the essentials for survival on their backs, they live wild in the ancient, weathered landscape of cliffs, sea and sky. This account is an astounding piece of nature writing, revealing the immense restorative power of the natural world in times of grief and stress.
>>"The wildness of nature became the reason to go on."
When author Pablo Martín Sánchez decides to search himself on the internet, he discovers that he shares his name with an anarchist who, in November 1924, was part of an attempt to overthrow Spanish dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera. Intrigued, Martín Sánchez sets out to learn more about the life of the man who shares his namesake. What he uncovers is the fascinating account of an unintentional revolutionary, swept up in a campaign he isn’t sure he believes in—one that leads, ultimately, to a tragic fate.
An interestingly structured mixture of fiction and fact, from the first Spanish member of the OuLiPo.
>> Read an excerpt.
An excellent new translation of Wittlin's classic antiwar novel. When the First World War comes to the Carpathian mountains, Piotr is drafted into the army. Unwilling, uncomprehending, the bewildered man is forced to fight a war he does not understand - against his national as well as his personal interests.
A tripartite story of relationships across boundaries of age, gender, politics and nationality.
“Asymmetry is extraordinary. Halliday has written, somehow all at once, a transgressive roman a clef, a novel of ideas and a politically engaged work of metafiction.” — The New York Times Book Review
"A scorchingly intelligent first novel...Asymmetry will make you a better reader, a more active noticer. It hones your senses." - The New York Times
"A book unlike any you've read." - Chuck Harbach
Grace Russell, at fourteen, has already had to adjust to a devastating accident from which she'll never recover. Now she and her newly-single mother are leaving their suburban home for Flambards house, out in the Essex countryside. The house has a long history, and Grace's mother is to work there for the summer - an exciting new opportunity. But, for Grace, everything feels wrong. She doesn't want yet another change. However, in spite of herself, she find herself becoming involved with two boys: Jamie, who leads her down a path of thrilling freedom, and the deeply troubled Marcus, who is dealing with his difficult, potentially violent father. Over time, Grace discovers her own links to the house and landscape she has just arrived in, and in turn, her own place in the world.
A new selection newly translated by Alexander Starritt, and an excellent introduction to Kafka.
>> Another excellent introduction to Kafka.
Re-establishes Darwin as a pioneering botanist, whose close observations of plants were crucial to his theories of evolution.
Mark Miodownik takes us on a tour of the world of the droplets, heartbeats and ocean waves that we come across every day. Structured around a plane journey which sees encounters with substances from water and glue to coffee and wine, he shows how these liquids can bring death and destruction as well as wonder and fascination. From László Bíró's revolutionary pen and Abraham Gesner's kerosene to cutting-edge research on self-repairing roads and liquid computers, Miodownik brings the everyday to life. He reveals why liquids can flow up a tree but down a hill, why oil is sticky, and how waves can travel so far.
"Exciting, anarchic and surprising." - The Guardian
The meeting between a group of emigrants and a mysterious, wandering actress in an empty train station sets the stage for this fragmentary yet lyrical meditation on language, travel, and memory. As the actress recounts the story of her stateless existence, an unreliable narrator and the interruptions of her audience challenge traditional notions of storytelling and identity.
This is the story of a gorilla like no other. This is the story of a fantastic voyage across the world, from the Congolese rainforest to the grand bazaar of Istanbul, from Borneo to London, Singapore and beyond. The story of a mysterious jewel thief and a sad sailor with a heart of gold. A story of friendship and adventure on the high seas. A wonderful graphic novel prequel to The Murderer's Ape.
Why can't a young girl play music in public in Afghanistan? Beautifully drawn and affirming.
"Consider the Oyster marks M. F. K. Fisher's emergence as a storyteller so confident that she can manoeuver a reader through a narrative in which recipes enhance instead of interrupt the reader's attention to the tales. She approaches a recipe as a published dream or wish, and the stories she tells here are also stories of the pleasures and disillusionments of dreams fulfilled." - The New York Review of Books
"Since Lewis Carroll no one had written charmingly about that indecisively sexed bivalve until Mrs. Fisher came along with her Consider the Oyster. Surely this will stand for some time as the most judicious treatment in English." - Cliffton Fadiman
Sanguivores, hematophages, &c. Fascinating.
What do you do if your best friend lives in another city and the adults can’t keep their promises about when you’ll see her? You have to sort it out for yourself!
Another book in this lovely series.
The poems are consciously rooted in Greek mythology and in the idea of storytelling as a continuous river, flowing from the ancients to the present, telling one story on the surface, but carrying in its depths the glints of ancient archetypes, symbols and myths.
The daily lives of ordinary people are replete with objects, common things used in commonplace settings. These objects are our constant companions in life. As such, writes Soetsu Yanagi, they should be made with care and built to last, treated with respect and even affection. They should be natural and simple, sturdy and safe - the aesthetic result of wholeheartedly fulfilling utilitarian needs.
The Balfour Declaration was a statement issued by the British government in 1917 during World War I announcing support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population. Regan offers new insights into the imperial rivalries between Britain, Germany and the Ottomans, and exposes British policy in the region as part of a larger geopolitical game. Yet the course of events was not straightforward, and Regan charts the ongoing debates within the British government, the Zionist movement, and the Palestinian groups struggling for self-determination.
A beautiful story about friendship, change and our place in nature. Beautiful woodcuts, too.
Green was the only women staff writer for Rolling Stone in the early 1970s. Her perspective on the scene and on the times is compelling.
Will genetic sequencing help us to overcome the deadly shape-shifting virus? Are there other possible approaches?
>> See also Flu Hunter: Unlocking the secrets of a virus by New Zealand flu hunter Robert Webster.
What does the centuries-long fascination with these legendary figures tell us about our history, and about the relationship between ethics and biology?
After the collapse of the neoliberal experiment, will it be possible to rebuild an economy, and a society, along more egalitarian lines?
Brought up by a staunchly religious family, Tirzah has always lived quite a sheltered life in the Welsh Valleys. As she reaches her teenage years, she begins to question her upbringing and her values, moving for the first time beyond the narrow confines of the world she knows.
The two girls sat at opposite ends of the boat and Kel dug and stretched the oars into the ocean like her life depended upon it because it did. 'Just so you know,' said Rose, 'everything, and I mean everything, is your fault.
Kel Crow lives in a dead-end swamp with her deadbeat family and a damaged heart. But she has a plan to escape. It's a one-two-three fortune story that goes: stow away on the ship, kidnap the girl, swap the girl to pay for passage to America and a life-saving operation.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #110 (12.1.19)
Read this week's NEWSLETTER.
Find out what we've been reading. Find out about our Book of the Week, and about new books that have arrived this week. Find out about our forthcoming writing classes.
>> Read Stella's review.
>> "When you're writing from a feminist lens, you have to imagine a different world."
>> Sleigh on the radio.
>> The author's website.
>> A selection of Thomasin Sleigh's art writing.
>> Every story tells a picture.
>> The book is published by Lawrence & Gibson, New Zealand's most independent independent publisher.
>> Ad Lib.
 | Tales from the Inner City by Shaun Tan {Reviewed by STELLA} Imagine seeing horses running wild across a city landscape - along the freeways, across the rooftops, through the alleys and over the inner city parks. Imagine that these are the horses of all the time of the city: horses that pulled carts, horses who plodded in the same circle driving the millstone, horses that worked to build a city, that carried people, were connected to carts and when they were old were still mechanisms for making money - were sold for their meat, their bones - were glue. Imagine that you are two years old in the back seat of a car travelling along the highway at night, the horses running beside, free and wild, until they come to the edge of the city landscape where they stop, unsure of this foreign place of which they know nothing. This is just one of the stories in Shaun Tan’s mesmerising collection Tales from the Inner City. Looking at the relationship between animals and humans across the ever-changing urban landscape, Tan brings us a mysterious yet familiar world, a lament as well a beautiful observation. The tales, 25 in total, take us to the brink of our humanity in their strangeness, yet also have echoes of our ability to care, to relate to the beasts in our lives that we yearn for, fear, conquer and embrace. He describes the changing relationship between human and dog - one of the earliest domesticated animals - in verse and breathtaking illustrations that explore the chasm between the two, the worlds that each inhabits and the desire to close this gap. There is a charming story about the death of a cat - a cat that a young girl and her mother discover belongs to all, not just them - that has numerous names and humans that miss it just as much - it is the cat of all cats - nicknamed by the child ‘The greatest cat in the world’, which brings a whole neighbourhood together, freeing them from their isolation and sadness. The sea and rivers no longer exist in any form for fish to live in. People fish from the rooftops of buildings, their lines stretching into the sky, the fish mostly beyond reach aside from a few tiddlers - but oh, to catch a Moonfish, the rarest delicacy! When Pim, the brother who never jerks the line, whose bait is eaten and never catches anything, does, the family are overwhelmed by excitement and surprise. Yet their pleasure doesn’t come from the expected quarters (selling the fish to the wily Mr Hiro for his famous restaurant in the subterranean city), but from something much simpler and more beautiful. Each of these stories asks us to confront our behaviour towards our mammal cousins and our fellow creatures, to imagine the world from an animal's perspective, to take responsibility for the harm we do and, conversely, for the friendship we offer, to take pleasure in reaching our own beast within, and the care with which we should protect the environs that sustain the animals we have an unfathomable yearning for. The inner city belonged to them first, and we are yet another element in the mix, entwined by history, politics and emotion. Shaun Tan’s books are exquisite, and this is no exception. Metaphysical and philosophical, the text and illustrations are stunning. Endlessly thoughtful and thought-provoking for children and adults alike. |
 | People in the Room by Norah Lange (translated by Charlotte Whittle) {Reviewed by THOMAS} “I only believed in hopeless lives,” states the seventeen-year-old narrator in Norah Lange’s beautifully written and disconcerting novel, first published in Argentina in 1950 and now, at last, translated exquisitely into English by Charlotte Whittle. Introverted and pathologically understimulated, the narrator becomes obsessed with three young women she can see, indistinctly, each evening, sitting in the drawing room of the house facing that of her family’s. Imagination cannot help but fill in the voids in knowledge, and, in this case, as the narrator has no knowledge at all of the three women, if they indeed exist, her imagination cannot rest in applying to them every possible permutation of the sorts of stories the narrator thinks may apply to them, stories principally, it seems, drawn from her reading of Romantic novels (apparently, Lange was prompted to write this book by Branwell Brontë’s painting of his sisters Charlotte, Anne and Emily (a painting from which Branwell had erased the image of himself)). At times the narrator achieves a vividness that thrills or horrifies her: “It rained so close to their faces, and on mine, on the carriage, on the patient horse, and it seemed as long as I was still young nothing so complete or perfect could ever happen again.” The three women in the room are no more animated than dolls upon which the young narrator projects her fears and desires. Their features and characters and histories slowly accrete through speculation, but the details are impermanent, attaching and detaching from their objects with equal ease. It is as if the narrator is obsessively inflating them into three dimensions, whereas it is natural for them to revert to two dimensions, into silhouettes. In this way, the novel is about the way in which the novel is written, the way in which all novels are written. “It was as if I was slowly composing a silent film that might go on forever: a film without action or scenery.” The three women suck up, take possession of, transmit, both embody and nullify, all tragedies and stories that exist in the narrator’s mind. We are told that the narrator sees them at the post office, sending a telegram, that she observes a visit to their house by a man who touches off some rivalry of feelings between them, and that the narrator thereafter visits the three women in their drawing room almost every evening, but we cannot be any more certain that any of this *actually* happens than we can of the recurring motifs of the dead horse in the street or the fire that claimed three infants’ lives. To spy, to observe, is to be disempowered, to be outside. The spy, the voyeur, has no identity but the object of their obsession, but the object of any obsession is always primarily indicative of suppressed impulses in the one who is obsessed. When the narrator states of the three women that “I know that they alone had the right to speak of death, of ill-timed affairs, of suicides, of bitter loneliness,” she is projecting upon them, among other things, her own suicidal impulses. The three women could be seen as future versions, ten or fifteen years older, of the narrator herself, future versions she both yearns for and wishes dead with desperate ambivalence. Several times she notes a similarity of voice or demeanour between her and them: “My face, which must express - it was impossible that it shouldn’t express - their three faces behind my own, expressionless.” “I only believed in hopeless lives.” At what point would tragedy or suicide relieve her from her future? Are the three women the future selves she will never become, unachieved futures, or are they each future possible exit points from an unfulfilling life? “That is what you get for not dying,” she tells them. She senses the fragility and unsustainability of her obsessive ‘watching’, of being “alone with my gaze”. What is achieved immediately starts to slip away: “Everything changed, it was my fault, and anything could come between them and my watching them, and destroy what had begun, what had scarcely begun.” Lange keeps the melancholy and the tension perfectly balanced as the book charts the disintegration of the narrator’s (and the reader’s) ability to distinguish internal and external realities as the novel moves towards its jaw-dropping paragraph-length final exquisite sentence. |
NEW RELEASES
New books for a new year
A darkly comic fable from the 2017 Man Booker winner. Fox 8 has learned 'Yuman' by listening under the windows of children's rooms to their bedtime stories. In language falling somewhere between that of The BFG and Riddley Walker, Fox 8 tells of his quest to save his fellow foxes when their habitat is threatened by development. Charming.
When a friend dies, a woman inherits his Great Dane. As she gets to know this dog, so large, so inconvenient, so representative of her grief, she comes to understand the dog's grief, too, and their lives begin to change in subtle ways.
"Nunez's prose itself comforts us. Her confident and direct style uplifts--the music in her sentences, her deep and varied intelligence." - The New York Times
2018 (US) National Book Award winner.
In 1814, Hokusai's sketches were published in a handbook of some 4000 images. It surpassed expectations as a student reference book, and became a bestseller. Here, in a three-volume package, an expansive selection of these works is revealed, presenting all of the themes, motifs and drawing techniques found in Hokusai's art. The caricatures, satirical drawings, multi-panel illustrations and narrative depictions found in the book can clearly be seen as the basis for manga as it is understood today.
Structured to impede the progress of the middle-aged love affair that it describes, this novel charts the steps two people take towards each other and asks what it means if the two people have taken those steps before.
"This is a guide for instructing posthumans in living a Dada life. It is not advisable, nor was it ever, to lead a Dada life." Codrescu uses an imagined chess game in 1916 between Tristan Tzara and V.I. Lenin to discuss the sometimes-shared and sometimes-opposed approaches of the the arts and politics to assail the status quo and enact a new way of being.
"No other book has treated the relationship between the artistic and revolutionary avant-gardes as originally and provocatively as Codrescu's. This is both an immensely illuminating essay of intellectual history and a disturbing meditation on absolute ideals turned into alibis for tyranny." - Vladimir Tismaneanu
"Highly original, beautifully written, and charming." - Marjory Perloff
A lovesick kraken slowly drags the object of its desire - a ship of sailors - into the sea; a group of cantankerous saints materialise in a well-appointed parlour, and must unravel the mystery of how they got there; ageing fathers are sunk to the bottom of the ocean in pressure-sealed crates in a time-honoured ritual. Andreasen romps through the lunatic and surreal with a tender generous ease; there is a joyous absurdity to each premise. Just because a sister is born without a head doesn't mean her brother won't love and protect her; just because an adulterous tryst ends in alien abduction doesn't mean the man doesn't miss his wife.
For centuries, art has documented the atrocities of wars, participated in propaganda campaigns, and served as an advocate for peace and social justice around the world. How can art assist in creating dialogue and bridges across cultures? 100 leading and emerging architects, artists, curators, choreographers, composers, and directors of art institutions around the globe explore the potentially constructive role of the arts in resolving conflicts or building bridges among opposing groups. Interesting, and beautifully presented.
A tale of two philosophical journeys: one made by John Kaag as an introspective young man of nineteen; the other seventeen years later, in radically different circumstances: he is now a husband and father, and his wife and small child are in tow. Kaag sets off for the Swiss peaks above Sils Maria where Nietzsche wrote his landmark work Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Both of Kaag's journeys are made in search of the wisdom at the core of Nietzsche's philosophy, yet they deliver him to radically different interpretations and, more crucially, revelations about the human condition.
Unanticipated reading pleasures (with great maps).
A fascinating exploration of Chinese bapo paintings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which messages, often politically or socially critical, were encoded in seemingly realistic depictions of historical documents and fragments.
A gripping and perceptive account of the 1819 St Peter’s Field massacre, in which an assembly of 60000 campaigners for parliamentary and suffrage reform were charged by the 15th regiment of hussars and the Manchester and Salford and Cheshire yeomanries, leaving fifteen dead and 650 injured, is a reminder of the role of class conflict in political change.
"Quite simply magnificent: splendidly researched, thoroughly well written, and very difficult to put down." - The Guardian
>> Of course, Mike Leigh made a film of it.
Quietly unassuming and full of subtle ways in which a few simple ingredients can be transformed into classic Italian dishes (and some of his own creation). One of The Guardian's 'Best Food Books of 2018'.
Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in art, architecture and film by Giuliana Bruno $65
How is our understanding or art, film and architecture predicated on the experience of the body? What is the connection between sight and site? Between motion and emotion? A fascinating history of the spacio-visual arts.
"One of those critical works packed with learning and insights that at the same time takes you on an exhilarating ride through its author's imagination." - Marina Warner, Guardian
The narrator recounts her progress to motherhood, while remembering the death of her own mother ten years before, and the childhood summers she spent with her psychoanalyst grandmother. Woven among these personal recollections are significant events in medical history: Wilhelm Rontgen's discovery of the X-ray; Sigmund Freud's development of psychoanalysis and the work that he did with his daughter, Anna; and the origins of modern surgery and the anatomy of pregnant bodies. Sight is a novel about being a parent and a child: what it is like to bring a person in to the world, and what it is to let one go.
"Unusual and absorbing. The novel as a whole exudes a strange consoling power." - The New Yorker
Restaurants in Wanaka, Dunedin, Christchurch and Timaru.
Identifies collaborative arts practices emerging in response to planetary challenges including energy and financial crises, climate change, and hunger.
A beautifully presented menu notebook, evoking the ways in which mood and place can be reflected in cuisine.
"This is an extraordinary piece of food writing, pitch perfect in every way." - Nigella Lawson
Visit the studios of Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Gauguin, Keith Haring, and many other artists. Find the magnifying glass that got left behind on Claude Monet's desk. Spot the owls in Pablo Picasso's paintings. Play with Andy Warhol's flowers. Find the apples in Paul Cézanne's studio. Colour in Jeff Koons's Balloon Dog. Identify the silhouette of a sculpture by Brancusi. An enjoyable introduction to a range of interesting artists, ideal for 6-to-12-year-olds.
As a girl climbs the stairs top her apartment she imagines who might live behind each of the other doors in the building - and what an imagination she has!
>> Book trailer (in Dutch).
Wealth is just as capable of ravaging cities as is poverty.
The first articulation of democracy in Britain was made in 1747 in a series of debates between the Levellers and Oliver Cromwell. Human rights Lawyer Geoffrey Robinson shows the importance of this argument to political situations today.
In this classic work, Rodney argues that grasping "the great divergence" between the west and the rest can only be explained as the exploitation of the latter by the former. This analysis of the abiding repercussions of European colonialism on the continent of Africa remains an indispensable study for grasping global inequality today. Introduction by Angela Davis.
Lindqvist set out across Central Africa, obsessed with a single line from Conrad's Heart of Darkness - Kurtz's injunction to "Exterminate all the brutes". His account of his experiences moves in parallel with a historical investigation, revealing what Europe's imperial powers had exacted on Africa's people over the course of the preceding two centuries. A new edition of this classic, jaw-dropping work.
Anne Lister was a Yorkshire heiress, a traveller and a lesbian during a time when it was difficult simply to be female. She chose to remain unmarried, dressed all in black and spoke openly of her lack of interest in men. The first woman to climb Vignemale in the treacherous Pyrenees, she journeyed as far as Azerbaijan and slept with a pistol under her pillow. She also kept a diary, written in a code that has now been cracked.
Once the centre of Palestinian modernity, Jaffa was the country's cultural and political capital. There Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived, worked, and celebrated together. Even after 1948, Jews and Arabs gathered at the Jewish-owned spice shop Tiv and the Arab Abulafia family's twenty-four-hour bakery. Through intimate personal interviews and memoirs, letters, and diaries, LeBor gives a crucial insight into the human lives behind the apparently intractable story of national conflict and a vivid narrative of cataclysmic change. LeBor weaves the personal stories of six families, three Jewish and three Arab, into a rich and complex history of Israel and Palestine in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
"Bleakly and outrageously comic. Reading Thom Jones's fiction is like speeding in an open car: the landscape blurs, the momentum becomes intoxicating - and then the brakes are applied, with no warning." - Joyce Carol Oates
"Jones was a master of the short story. Night Train will be an amazing discovery for anyone who cares about literature." - Philipp Meyer
Omrani follows the routes of the invading Romans and tells the story of the Gallic Wars and how the Celtic culture was first destroyed and then transformed by the invaders.
Authoritarian governments, elite populists, and 'freextremists' are exploiting our digital information infrastructure and the vulnerabilities in the democratic system to distort and undermine politics and elections.
A posthumous collection of poems, excerpts from his notebooks, lyrics, hand-drawn self-portraits.
>> 1967
>> 1968
>> 1972
>> 1979
>> 1993
>> 2013
BOOKS @ VOLUME #109 (5.1.19)
Read our first NEWSLETTER of the year and find out (among other things) what we've been reading.
>> Whet you appetite with some spreads.
>> Some fun facts about coffee.
>> This infographic is not in the book and we do not understand it (but we like it).
>> Information is Beautiful!
 | A Winter's Promise by Christelle Dabos {Reviewed by STELLA} Step through the mirror into a world of Animists, Dragons, Mirages and Nihilists. These are just some of the clans in the world of Arks. The Arks are celestial states floating above the old earth. On Anima, Ophelia is happily ‘reading’ objects in her museum, unaware of the plans the Doyennes have made for her. A grand alliance is in the making and Ophelia is the central pawn in the game. She has been betrothed to a stranger from another clan from an Ark at the Pole. Ophelia is bookish and clumsy - a misfit and a genius - her special gifts are exceptional - while Thorn, powerful and taciturn, has hidden powers of his own and is as icy and cold as the Pole itself. At the Pole, Ophelia (along with her chaperone Aunt Rosaline) must decide who can be trusted in this place of deception and illusion. Why has Thorn sneaked them into his homeland? Why are they holed up at his Aunt Berenilde’s house, in effect prisoners, unable to go beyond the bounds of the manor? And why is Thorn always at work at the Treasury, barely noticing Ophelia’s presence? When Ophelia manages to sneak out into the back streets of the city, she is intrigued and confused by the inhabitants’ behaviour. Yet this is just the beginning of the adventures and dangers. When Berenilde, a favourite of Farouk, the Great Spirit, is taken into the supposed safety of The Ambassador’s realm, the city of Citaceleste, Ophelia’s life becomes further complicated and she finds herself in a world of subterfuge, deception and illusion that will test her strength as well as her skills. Here is a city of such extreme delusion and abhorrent behaviour that one could easily lose one's mind or life. Making the wrong overture or displeasing an influential person can spell certain dishonour or disaster. When no one can be trusted all that is left is one’s self - the person you see in the mirror (as long as it tells the truth). A Winter’s Promise is the first in 'The Mirror Visitor' Quartet. This translation of the award-winning French bestseller is a welcome treat and will become a firm favourite for both teens and adults, especially for fans ofPhilip Pullman, Frances Hardinge and Cornelia Funke. This is an excellent fantasy epic with compelling characters. Ophelia and Thorn are both intriguingly complex, the clans and their gifts fascinating, and the interpersonal relationships between the main characters complex and ever revealing. There is amazing world-building and the plot is tight and tense, with plenty of twists and turns, political games, and machinations of seduction, threat and trickery as the story and its characters feed on the desire for power and status. You will be craving the next instalment. |