Published by Wordcraft of Oregon, 2007, 192 pages. The title of this book is borrowed from a story by Balzac about betrayal and mistrust, two threads running through the book. The third is love, with all its inadequacies and flaws. Fred Twomey is a creative writing professor, married with two sons. He has a reasonably …
Category: Fiction
The Neapolitan Novels: Elena Ferrante
Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein(Publishing details at the end.)Review by Tom Peak The Neapolitan Novels, Elena Ferrante’s four-piece masterwork, is rightly the literary sensation of its time. The epic narrative, sweeping over decades, gallivanting across the life of a neighbourhood—a city—a country—an epoch, rummaging through the lives of the two protagonists, a pair locked …
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell: Susanna Clarke
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, 2004, 782 pages. England, early 1800s. The country is at war with France under Napolean. Magic—the practical kind, anyway—has not been seen in the land for hundreds of years. The only magicians left are theoreticians, men who had never caused a “leaf to tremble upon a tree or made one mote …
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V. : Thomas Pynchon
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 …
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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