Published by Harper / Vintage Classics, 1963, 496 pages.Review by Thomas Peak A conventional review of V. is hard to write. There is no plot, not much of a lesson, no real conclusion, no moral to be gleaned. It loosely follows a quest for V. across the globe. But 'loosely' is the operative word. What …
Category: Fiction
The Yacoubian Building: Alaa Al Aswamy
Translated from Arabic by Humphrey T. DaviesPublished by HarperCollins, 2004, 272 pages. Original version published in 2002. Peel away the outer layer of an apartment building and you’ll find a microcosm of life: people living in within a small space with their joys, sorrows, triumphs and despair, just a few feet away from each other. …
Child 44: Tom Rob Smith
Published by Simon & Schuster UK / Grand Central Publishing, 2008, 484 pages. Child 44 is set in the USSR towards the end of Stalin’s regime, a Utopia where crime—and therefore criminals—no longer exist. Or at least that’s what the state wants people to believe. What this actually means is that murders cannot be reported, …
The Woman in Black: Susan Hill
Published by Vintage Random House, 1983, 144 pages. The best ghost stories were written by Victorian writers, who knew that the most effective way to scare people was to leave something to the imagination: unsettling figures are glimpsed, noises are heard but not accounted for. Susan Hill picks up this tradition, using some of the …
The Decagon House Murders: Yukito Ayatsuji
Translated from Japanese by Ho-Ling WongPublished by Pushkin Vertigo, 2015, 228 pages. Original version published in 2007. The island of Tsunojima holds a dark secret. A year ago, the main house on the island burned down, killing four people—the architect, Nakamura Seiji and his wife, Kazue, and the couple working for them. Except that when …
The Buried Giant: Kazuo Ishiguro
Published by Knopf, 2015, 317 pages. England, a few years after King Arthur’s death. Dragons, ogres and knights roam the land. There is a sort of peace after a fierce civil war—the opposing sides, the Britons and Saxons, coexist. But a mist lies over the land, a mist that clouds people’s minds, taking away their …
Koestler’s Kafkaesque Nightmare: Parallels Beyond Perception
The Scum of the Earth by Arthur Koestler Published by Eland, London, 2006, 253 pages. Originally published in 1941 by the Left Book Club.Review by Tom Peak Arthur Koestler was a curiosity. So often spent rowing against the tide, his life personifies the experience and aura of the twentieth century intellectual more than any other. So …
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V for Vendetta: written by Alan Moore, illustrated by David Lloyd
Published by Vertigo, 1995, 288 pages. Written in the 1980s, this graphic novel is set in another one of Alan Moore’s dystopian alternative futures. It’s the late 1990s in Britain. A war and a near-miss nuclear conflict has led to the takeover by a fascist government, with Adam Susan at its head. The government is …
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Mengele Zoo: Gert Nygårdshaug
1989, 454 pages. Widely regarded to be the best Norwegian book ever written, and recipient of numerous literary awards, it is strange that Mengele Zoo has yet to be published in English. It is the first in a trilogy that continues with Himmelblomsttreets muligheter (The Sky Flower Tree’s Opportunities, 1995) and Afrodites basseng (Aphrodite’s Pool, …
Cathedral of the Sea: Ildefonso Falcones
Translated from Spanish by Nick CaistorPublished by Black Swan / Dutton, 2008, 611 pages. Original version published in 2006. The first chapter of this book felt like a piece of music—flutes gently celebrating the wedding of Bernat Estanyol, a Catalonian farmer, and his bride, the lovely Fransesca. Then the approach of the feudal lord Llorenç …
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