A Woman's Story by Annie Ernaux
After spending two years in an old people's home, Annie Ernaux's mother finally succumbs to Alzheimer's Disease. It has been a terrifyingly protracted end, and one that has spawned feelings of absolute helplessness in her daughter, who watched as her mother's life crumbled before an 'imagination' that bore 'no relation to reality'. Yet Ernaux's distress is also fuelled by the realisation that she'll 'never hear the sound of her [mother's] voice again', and by the fact that the fraying bond between the present and the past has finally been 'severed'. Impulsively, Ernaux decides to recreate that past, hoping to 'bring her [mother back] into the world' through a piece of writing. In short, she is 'incapable of doing anything else'. Full review...
Call the Vet: Farmers, Dramas and Disasters - My First Year as a Country Vet by Anna Birch
Newly-qualified vet Anna arrives in the sleepy coastal village of Ebbourne filled with dreams of following in the footsteps of her hero, James Herriot as she starts her new role working in a rural mixed practice. She will be treating farm animals, as well as smaller pets, in a friendly community in a stunning location. However, Anna barely has time to settle in before being thrown headlong into the thick of things with two tricky calvings to deal with and plenty of muck, blood and gore. “Oh yes Mum, it’s a glamorous job...” she laments. Full review...
Slow Getting Up by Nate Jackson
Sporting autobiographies are often written by those sports men and women who made it to the very pinnacle of their profession. Their stories surround past glories and how they lifted themselves up above the great to become the very best. However, for every superstar footballer or tennis player, there needs to be a lot more average Joes and Joettes for them to shine against. And who is to say that being an average player in a professional league is not an achievement in itself? Nate Jackson was one such ‘average’ player in the NFL – but would you call him that to his face? Full review...
Levels of Life by Julian Barnes
If you read a broadsheet you will know the format of this book from when it came out in hardback – indeed I recognised a great portion of the third part as having been excerpted somewhere. Part one of this triptych is a look back at pioneering aeronauts in hot air balloons – either hydrogen balloons or flame balloons, whatever they are. They may have had crash landings, they may have suffered problems here and there and risked life and limb, but they travelled, they saw the world from unique angles, and almost in homage to Barnes' characters chasing the sun in an airplane in his own book, saw themselves as a photographic negative writ large in shadow form on the tops of clouds. Full review...
To Bed On Thursdays by Jenny Selby-Green
The advert asked for a young man, but seventeen year old Jenny Selby-Green applied anyway. She met all the other attributes, and the alternative would be having to take whatever job she was offered via the Labour Exchange, seeing as she’d already rejected the maximum of two offers under the 1950s Direction of Labour. And so, she became a journalist, or journalist of sorts anyway. Full review...
A Little Piece of England: A tale of self-sufficiency by John Jackson
Here at Bookbag we're great fans of John Jackson. We loved his Tales for Great Grandchildren and Brahma Dreaming: Legends from Hindu Mythology so it was something of a treat to meet the author on his own ground, so to speak. Originally published as A Bucket of Nuts and a Herring Net: The Birth of a Spare-Time Farm this is actually Jackson's first book and thirty-five years later we're delighted that it's been republished in hardback complete with the original black-and-white illustrations by Val Biro. Full review...
My Life In Agony by Irma Kurtz
I used to love the problem pages of magazines as a teenager. My friends and I would pour over the letters which invariable ended with some form of the question Am I normal? and mock the invariable Agony Aunt answer of Of course you’re normal, hooting instead No, you’re, really, REALLY not! That response perhaps illustrates why none of us decided to follow that as a career plan, but Irma Kurtz did, and as agony aunt for Cosmopolitan for more than 40 years it’s safe to say she has been a fair bit more sympathetic than we ever were. Full review...
Never Mind the Bullocks: One girl's 10,000 km adventure around India in the worlds cheapest car by Vanessa Able
With a cute little map of India on the front cover and cartoon cars puttering over the page, I thought I’d chosen an entertaining yet mind-broadening travelogue. Well I was wrong. Now I’ve read it through, I don’t even see it on the same shelf as a Lonely Planet. But that’s possibly this book’s novelty and great strength. The travelogue shelf is fair groaning under weighty tomes by Europeans digging into Indian life and culture. So let me unpack the delights of this particular book for you, but don’t be misled: you aren’t going to pick up many recommendations for your own odyssey from this round-India skedaddle. Full review...
Here and Now: Letters by J M Coetzee and Paul Auster
Reading letters by writers affords a particular pleasure. They give us access to the functioning of a writer’s mind when it’s somewhere between work and rest. Sometimes they reveal secrets, offer startling revelations about their writers and insights about the times they lived in. Here and Now, an exchange of letters between J M Coetzee and Paul Auster between 2008 and 2011, describes itself as ‘an epistolary dialogue between two great writers who became great friends.’ Full review...
How to Disappear Completely: on modern anorexia by Kelsey Osgood
To the awkward 14 year-old Kelsey, a happy family and a comfortable suburban life are dull and numbing. A self-professed bookworm and fan of the literary greats, she craves meaning and purpose in an utterly normal teenage existence. Full review...
Sorcerers and Orange Peel by Ian Mathie
I can’t understand why Ian Mathie isn’t a more celebrated writer and commentator on African cultural affairs. I’ve never yet heard him on radio, re-telling episodes from his memorable life. Our loss. Africa is moving forward, but to understand the Africa of today we need to pay attention to its recent past as well as its early colonial history. Ian’s unassuming witness of African tribes as they slowly emerged into the world of the 1970’s is unparalleled for its authenticity and depth of experience. This recent memoir is his best constructed yet; a seriously informative tale for anyone who wants to know about the real Africa beneath the surface of today’s mobile phones and pre-loved designer jeans. Full review...
Being Oscar: From Mob Lawyer to Mayor of Las Vegas by Oscar Goodman and George Anastasia
I've a confession to make. I've done something which I tell our reviewers they must never do: I took a book to review which I didn't expect to like. The Mafia, the mob - call it what you will - are not people I admire and I thought it would be a small step to extend that to an attorney who defended them. Las Vegas? Well, it's not going to be my destination of choice. I'm not against gambling, but I struggle with the concept of travelling to a city that revels in it. Oscar Goodman says that had he been the benevolent dictator of Las Vegas rather than the mayor he would have legalised prostitution and drugs. Hmm... This book was going to be one of those that I threw against the wall in disgust, wasn't it? Full review...
Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked by James Lasdun
In the autumn of 2003 James Lasdun taught a fiction workshop as part of the graduate writing programme at a place he calls Morgan College. On all such courses the quality of the students is very variable but one writer stood out as having talent. He calls her Nasreen. He offered help over and above the course but Nasreen read a personal interest into this - which wasn't in any way reciprocated. An email correspondence which had been friendly turned nasty, with accusations that Nasreen's work had been stolen to sell to other writers, that he had had an affair with another student and that he had arranged for Nasreen to be raped. Anti-semitic comments were made. Obsessive love had turned to obsessive hate. Full review...
Glitter and Glue by Kelly Corrigan
When Kelly leaves the USA for a life-changing trip around the world, her goal is not to end up working as a nanny in suburban Sydney. And her goal is definitely not to turn into her mother in the process. She doesn’t realise it at the time, but as this memoir shows, there are worse things that could happen. Full review...
The Wolf of Wall Street by Jordan Belfort
As if we didn't have enough excuses to appreciate the 'Masters of the Universe' of the financial sector. After the tax dodging, the bonus scamming, price fixing and the valiant attempt to bring down the entire world economy comes Jordan Belfort aka the Wolf of Wall Street. To be fair to Belfort, he plied his trade long before the most recent financial meltdown. Still, he's managed to piggy back the latest crash via a best selling book which has been re-released to coincide with a film adaptation starring Leonardo Dicaprio. Full review...
Play It Again: An Amateur Against The Impossible by Alan Rusbridger
I’ve maintained for a long time that I’ll read anything, if it’s well-enough written. So it was with this fascinating memoir, even though it’s a year in the life of an amateur pianist, and I don’t play the piano – or indeed a note of music. I couldn’t even have placed the name Alan Rusbridger in his professional role before I read the book. A quick browse through the first couple of pages on Amazon revealed that the author could indeed tell a clear story: it is his stock-in-trade as Editor of the Guardian. And the book duly held me through a messy, interrupted week of bedtime reading. Full review...
Born in Siberia by Tamara Astafieva, Michael Darlow and Debbie Slater
I tend to shy away from reviewing book titles, but this time it seems appropriate – here it's a title that doesn't tell you the half of the story. As much as Tamara Astafieva was born in Siberia, and returned there several times, for many different reasons and with many very different outcomes, this is much more of a picture of the Soviet Union as we in Britain think of it – Moscow, a bit of Saint Petersburg, and little else. That's not a fault – and again it's not half of the story. The story here is so complex, so rich with detail and incident, and itself came about in such an unusual way, that any summary of the book has its work cut out in defining its many qualities. Full review...
The Dog Nobody Loved by Jon Katz
When we first meet Jon Katz he's not in a good place: his marriage of thirty-five years was breaking up and he was close to a nervous breakdown. He didn't need any more problems. He particularly didn't need a young rescue dog, a Rottweiler/Shepherd mix, who'd been living wild, to contend with and to upset the fragile equilibrium of the life he lived with his animals on Bedlam Farm. Frieda was near feral but devoted to her rescuer, Maria Wulf and it was Maria who was at the centre of this conundrum. Katz was spectacularly disconnected from the world - and Maria was the only person to whom he seemed able to talk, but to connect with Maria he had to connect with Frieda too. Full review...
Empire Antarctica: Ice, Silence and Emperor Penguins by Gavin Francis
I know two books don't make a genre, but twice in recent years I have read autobiographical travelogues of men who felt too much was going on in their lives and their surroundings, and took themselves off to remote, isolated, extremely cold and inhospitable places. One went to the shores of Lake Baikal, and shared his days hunting, fishing, drinking and reading with only a few very distant neighbours. Gavin Francis took himself south, to the edge of the Antarctic ice, to spend a year as a scientific doctor. He wasn't able to be completely as alone as some have been in the past – even if he hid himself away in isolation before the week-long annual changeover of staff was through. Francis ends up with a baker's dozen of companions, in a place where – apart from the ice, sealing things up – only two lockable doors exist. You might think this was a large group of people for someone wanting to be alone, but the very tenuous and isolated feel of the place in the huge emptiness of the landscape is the main point of this book – that, and communing with emperor penguins… Full review...
Harry: My Autobiography by Harry Redknapp
Everybody with an interest in football knows who Harry is. The cover of his book won't tell you who he is, but if you're not in the know it's Harry Redknapp - football manager and for many of us, something of a national treasure. He's the manager who's seen it all, having started at rock bottom - a 70s Portakabin at Oxford City - and risen to the heights of managing Tottenham Hotspur in the Premiership. At the same time he was the popular choice for the England Manager's job when Capello threw in the towel. It's fair to say that Harry has lived his football life to the full and anyone buying this book will get their money's worth. Full review...
Love, Nina by Nina Stibbe
When I began reading this book I wasn't entirely sure that I liked it. I didn't quite know how to take the Nina from the title. She's a twenty year old Nanny, employed by the editor of the London Review of Books and living near Regent's Park in North London. The book contains her letters to her sister, Victoria living at home in Leicestershire, and tell of the events and happenings in her life as a Nanny and then, going on, in her life as a student at Thames Polytechnic. Initially it felt like she was name dropping - Alan Bennett lives over the road and drops in for dinner most days; the father of Will and Sam, the two boys she is nannying, is Stephen Frears; down the road lives Claire Tomalin and her partner Michael Frayn...and yet, given chance, you begin to see that she isn't awed by the notoriety of these people (indeed, she tells her sister that Alan Bennett was in Coronation Street!) and actually they are just the neighbours and so it is less important that Alan Bennett (AB as he's referred to in the book) comes around for dinner every night since he isn't there for fame value but rather for his own unique place in this rather crazy family life memoir! Full review...
Ammonites and Leaping Fish: A Life in Time by Penelope Lively
Now aged 80, Penelope Lively, the Booker Prize-winning author of twenty works of fiction including Moon Tiger (1987) and How It All Began (2011), is increasingly conscious of death approaching. It may be true that, as concluded in Nothing to be Frightened of by Julian Barnes, 'we cannot truly savour life without a regular awareness of extinction', but this memoir is less a memento mori than an agreeably scattered tour through Lively's life and times. Full review...
The Last Diaries: A Blaze of Autumn Sunshine by Tony Benn
Throughout my life I've found that whilst I might not always agree with Tony Benn's politics, whatever he had to say would give me food for thought - and frequently changed the way that I viewed a situation. He's a wonderful mixture of supreme intelligence and humanity which is so rarely found - particularly in modern-day politics and it was with some misgivings that I opened this volume of his diaries, given that the slipcover speaks of the compensations and challenges of old age and the disadvantages of growing older, the loneliness of widowhood, the upheaval of moving from the family home of sixty years and the problems of failing health. I've always been relieved that Benn has never quite achieved the status of national treasure, but surely he couldn't be in decline? Full review...
Canton Elegy: A Father's Letter of Sacrifice, Survival and Love by Stephen Jin-Nom Lee and Howard Webster
Stephen Jin-Nom Lee, known in his childhood as Ah Nom, was born early in the twentieth century in the village of Dai Waan in rural China. His father died when he was young and he lived with his grandmother, mother and 'Little Uncle', who was only a matter of months older than Ah Nom. They'd become friends as they grew older, but when his Grandfather returned after a long absence in America there as a distinct rivalry between the two. Then Grandfather revealed his reason for returning home - he intended to take the boys to America to be educated. It was a wonderful opportunity and Ah Nom left the village and his mother not knowing when he would see either again. Full review...
My Life by David Jason
Born in North London in February 1940 during the early years of the Second World War, David John White once had a brief career as an electrician. Fortunately for the world of entertainment and the public, he soon forsook the world of fuses and wires for that of the stage and small screen. When he joined Equity, they already had a David White on their records, and after a little quick thinking on the phone, he became David Jason. Full review...
A Piece of Danish Happiness by Sharmi Albrechtsen
Sharmi Albrechtsen was a true Hindu-American princess. Obsessed with shoes and handbags and designer labels, she saw status and wealth as the only route to happiness. But she wasn't happy enough, no matter how much designer gear she owned. And it wasn't until 1997, when she married her second husband, a Dane, and relocated to Denmark, that she began to wonder if it was something lacking in herself, rather than her possessions, that was at the root of her problems. Full review...
The True German: The Diary of a World War II Military Judge by Werner Otto Muller-Hill and Benjamin Carter Hett
We've had diaries of teenagers, opium addicts, drug smugglers, and a lot more. Some of them have been optimistic, happy things, and many not. Clearly World War II was not a place for a terribly cheerful outlook, whatever the diarist. However sometimes it was not the done thing to be pessimistic, for example when you were in the huge German military and were publicly denigrating the dreamt-of Nazi success. Such corrosion of morale would mean you being put in front of a three-man military tribunal, and most probably sentenced for such treacherous behaviour. The startling thing about this book, however, is that it contains much that would certainly have been deemed corrosion of morale, yet it was written by one of the very military judges who served on those panels. Full review...
Hospice Voices: Lessons for Living at the End of Life by Eric Lindner
Hospice Voices tells the stories of the last days of some fascinating people while it follows author Eric Lindner through his journey as a hospice volunteer and a crisis in his own daughter's health. Full review...
Lucky Me: My Life With - And Without - My Mom, Shirley MacLaine by Sachi Parker with Frederick Stroppel
Born in Los Angeles, raised in Tokyo, and schooled across Europe, Sachi Parker had already lead an eventful life before she turned 18. Add to the mix a secretive father with an explosive temper and a Hollywood icon for a mother and you have enough stories to fill a book.
And that's exactly what she's done. Full review...
Monkeys in my Garden: Unbelievable but true stories of my life in Mozambique by Valerie Pixley
Valerie Pixley and her husband O'D live in Mozambique, amidst its rapidly disappearing forests. Monkeys in my Garden tells the story of what life is like in the Nhamacoa Forest and how they came to be there. It opens with a terrifying scene: armed bandits in their bedroom in the middle of the night. Full review...