The Year of the Runaways | Book Review

The Year of the Runaways

Sunjeev Sahota

468 pages

Paperback

Picador Collection

2015

ISBN: 9781035061761

Review

‘It really is a pathetic thing. To mourn a past you never had. Don’t you think?’

The scope of ‘The Year of the Runaways’ might put the frighteners on any author. Migration into Britain, visa marriages, modern slavery…these are not easy subjects to write about in Brexit-inflamed, red-op apoplexy infused Britain. Nevertheless, it is into these waters which Sunjeev Sahota sails us, steadfastly and skilfully.

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Boater | Book Review

Boater: A Life on England’s Waterways

Jo Bell

304 pages

Paperback

Harper Collins

2025

ISBN: 9780008716295

Review

‘[The greatest difference between boat-life and non-boat life]…is not the sense of place, but the sense of time.’

Disclaimer: I love canals. They are a throwback to a bygone era of industry, but also one of the few places in cities where there is genuine peace. The world of the narrowboat is one of exquisite aesthetics – the eddies around opening lock gates, the sudden splash from a bank, the morning skeins of mist over the still water. I was always likely to be a sucker for Jo Bell’s book, and so it proved.

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Perfume | Book Review

Perfume

Patrick Süskind

263 pages

Paperback

Penguin Books

1987

ISBN: 9780241973615

Review

‘In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages…’

I wanted to love this book. On spec I should have; it is driven by an ambitious, fresh idea – a man with the most refined sense of smell, sniffing his way around Paris, the French countryside, and murder scenes. Grenouille is our protagonist – an orphan disfigured with smallpox scars and dirt-poor into the bargain. So far, so compelling.

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Trust | Book Review

Trust

Hernan Diaz

402 pages

Paperback

Picador

2022

ISBN: 9781529074529

Review

‘Most of us prefer to believe we are the active subjects of our victories but only the passive objects of our defeats. We triumph, but it is not really we who fail – we are ruined by forces beyond our control.’

Andrew Bevel, a fabulously rich Wall Street trader with a gift for seeing trends before others, and his young wife Mildred bask in 1920s New York. Theirs is a seemingly carefree existence filled with extravagance and speculation. It is only when the layers of their lives are peeled away that we uncover the shocking secrets hidden by their wealth.

‘Trust’ was a book which I dearly wanted to love. A puzzle book set in the jazz age, and a novels-set-within-novels structure to boot? What’s not to love? The book does deliver on some of these promises – 1920s New York is beautifully evoked and the introverted, frantic, obsessive world of the trader makes for compelling copy.

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The Woman in White | Book Review

The Woman in White

Wilkie Collins

569 pages

Paperback

Penguin Books

1868

ISBN: 9780140420245

Review

‘There, in the middle of the broad, bright high-road – there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven – stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments…’

Walter Hartright, walk along a lonely, moonlit road are disrupted by his meeting a distressed figure, clad entirely in white. What seems at first to be a coincidental encounter is placed into uneasy context when Hartright takes up his duties at drawing master to half-sisters Marian Halcombe and the beautiful heiress Laura Fairlie. The thin, worried woman in white will prove to be the link between Laura and those determined to wrest her fortune from her.

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Mantel Pieces | Book Review

Mantel Pieces

Hilary Mantel

335 pages

Paperback

4^th Estate

2021

£9.99

ISBN: 9780008430009

Review

Hilary Mantel is known to many for her peerless ‘Wolf Hall’ trilogy, the last book of which I reviewed here. She was a true national treasure in an era when such terms are used cheaply. Her short stories, some of which are found in ‘The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher’, are also lean and gripping. Although I have listened to her lecture on YouTube many times, I had not read much of her non-fiction.

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The Heart in Winter | Book Review

The Heart in Winter

Kevin Barry

214 pages

Hardback

Canongate Books Ltd

2024

£16.99

ISBN: 9781805302117

Review

‘They rode on. They rode double. The day was sharp and bright. They were mellow of mood if not entirely at a distance to the sadnesses natural to both of them, and these they knew were sadnesses unanswerable.’

‘The Heart in Winter’ by Kevin Barry feels like an oft-told tale. A western in which two young lovers elope and are chased by low-down, no good varmints – haven’t we heard this story before? If this novel risks covering old ground (or being as worn as a pair of old leather chaps?) it is brought to life by the fact that it is not a western, or at least not primarily a western.

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No Judgement | Book Review

No Judgement

Lauren Oyler

Virago Press

ISBN: 9780349016511

£20

‘It is the age of internet gossip; of social networks, repackaged ideas and rating everything out of five stars. Mega-famous celebrities respond with fury to critics who publish less-than rapturous reviews of their work (and then delete their tweets); CEOs talk about reclaiming “the power of vulnerability”; and in the world of fiction, writers eschew actually making things up in favour of ‘always just talking about themselves.’

Review

In his series of interviews with Dennis O’Driscoll, Seamus Heaney says that writers should not take account of anything said by critics who themselves have not written anything of note. Lauren Oyler is an established literary critic and less established author; as such, her book on being critical looks at the concept from a multifaceted perspective.

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A Time to Keep | Book Review

A Time to Keep

George Mackay Brown

Polygon Books

ISBN: 9781904898657

£7.99

‘It was early spring. Darkness was still long but the light was slowly encroaching and the days grew colder. The last of the snow still scarred the Orphir hills. One sensed a latent fertility; under the hard earth the seeds were awake and astir; their long journey to blossom and ripeness was beginning. But in Hamnavoe, the fishermen’s town, the lamps still had to be lit early.’

Review

I was first introduced to the work of George Mackay Brown by an academic who came to Ayr Writers’ Club to speak about his work. She spoke of his fiction being centred around the Orkney Isles where he spent most of his life, and of how he captured those Orcadian communities in his writing. I read ‘Simple Fire’, a selection of his short stories, before moving on to ‘A Time to Keep’, his own arrangement of work.

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The Promise | Book Review

The Promise

Damon Galgut

293 pages

ISBN: 9781784744069

£16.99

Penguin Random House

Hardback

Review

Salome has served the Swart family for years. A Black South African, she has seen to the needs of Rachael, her husband Manie, and raised the couple’s three children – Anton, Astrid, and Amor. As Salome tends to a dying Rachael, the white matriarch of the family, she is promised her own house and plot of land on the Swart farm. Years pass, and Rachael’s spoken promise rests with one family member after another. South Africa, though, is a country coming to terms with Apartheid. Old promises are broken whilst new ones are made, and the word of a dying woman is blown away on the winds of change.

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