Book Reviews From The Bookbag

The latest in the annual series of short story collections edited by Maxim Jakubowski gives readers a wide range of stories from authors as diverse as the much-acclaimed Ian Rankin and Kate Atkinson, newwcomers such as Nigel Bird and Jay Stringer, and father and son combination Peter and Phil Lovesey. Full review...

The Moment by Douglas Kennedy

After I'd read the blurb on the back cover I gave a bit of a shrug as if to say, well, I've read quite a number of books recently where undying love has been found in war-torn Europe, so was this book going to be different, or better? Thomas Nesbitt, middle-aged, disillusioned with love and more than a tad world-weary is trying to move on in his life. His marriage of more than twenty years is dissolving before his very eyes. But rather than being upset, he's feeling as if a weight has been lifted from his shoulders. He and his wife were never really in love in the true sense of the phrase, despite having a daughter together. And there's a very good reason as to why Thomas is like this and the rest of the book tells us why, warts and all. Full review...

The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna

The setting for this story is a hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone, soon after the government has declared an end to an 11 year civil war. How can people come to terms with the terrible things that have happened? Actually, can they come to terms with those things? Full review...

The Good Thief's Guide to Venice by Chris Ewan

'I'd never met a female burglar before, let alone one with the credentials to model lingerie, and I confess that I was more than a little intrigued.' So says Charlie Howard before he realises that the lady in question has stolen his most prized possession. A talisman that he thinks is essential to his writing is the framed first edition of The Maltese Falcon that hangs above his desk. All his mysterious visitor leaves in this spot is empty space. The explosive and chaotic events that follow are fuelled by Charlie's determination to get his book back. Full review...

Die For Me by Amy Plum

Ever since Kate's parents died, she's been living life on pause – moving from day to day without actually ever living. She's moved with her sister to Paris to live with their grandparents, but even the beautiful city of love can't shake her out of her apathy. At least, not until she meets Vincent. Full review...

Daisy Plays Hide-and-Seek by Ellie Sandall

Jake's friend, Daisy, is a cow. In fact, she's a very special cow. If we were a little older than Jake we'd call her a chameleon because she's not black, or black and white, or brown. Wherever Daisy goes she can take on the colours of what's around her. So when she stands in front of the stone wall she's a mottled grey colour but when she's in the field of corn she turns golden. Funniest of all is when she stands in front Mum's washing and is the colour of the sheets which she has hung out on the line. Full review...

Bad Tuesdays 4: The Nonsuch King by Benjamin J Myers

With Chess teaching herself the skills she'll need when time reaches the fifth node and with Box stuck on a distant planet fighting for his life with the other Fleshlings, it's time to see what Splinter is doing... Full review...

Dark Woods by Steve Voake

Cal has been taken on holiday to America by the latest in a long line of foster families. Despite the trip, there are tensions. Cal has been let down so many times that he refuses to trust in anyone and he rejects any overtures his foster mother makes. He knows they'll send him back to the children's home - the only question is when. So when he meets Eden - vital, funny, exciting - at a campsite and she suggests a walk in the woods, Cal snatches at the chance to get away with someone who doesn't know anything about him or his past. Full review...

Pandamonium by Dan Crisp and Mark Chambers

At the start of 'Pandamonium' by Dan Crisp and Mark Chambers, everything is very quiet at the zoo. In fact, it is so quiet that the zoo keeper is taking the opportunity to put his feet up and to have forty winks. Once the octopus spots this though, he reaches over with one of his long tentacles and borrows the keys that have been left on the table. Before long, he has opened all the cages and freed the animals who decide that it is time to have a party. Soon there is a lot of noise and partying but somehow the zoo keeper manages to sleep through it all. That is until the skunk disgraces himself by making an extremely nasty pong to all of the animals' eyes. It even rouses the zoo keeper who surprisingly does not realise that all of animals have been out partying because the awful smell has made them all return to their cages. As far as he is concerned, it's just another quiet night at the zoo. Full review...

Intrepid Woman: Betty Lussier's Secret War, 1942-1945 by Betty Lussier

Autobiography

Betty Lussier was born in Alberta, Canada. At the height of the depression her father bought a Maryland farm at a bank foreclosure sale, they crossed the border to the States and settled down to the hard life of raising dairy cattle and the crops needed to feed them. Full review...

Cold Light by Jenn Ashworth

Cold Light is the story of three teenage girls who become involved in a predatory adult world. As the story opens we're looking back on what happened from a decade later and we know that one of the girls, Chloë, died in a Valentine's Day suicide pact. The town council has finally decided on a memorial to Chloë – it's to be a summerhouse at the side of the pond where she drowned, although it's difficult to understand quite why anyone would want to sit there. The ground-breaking ceremony is being televised when it becomes obvious that something has gone terribly wrong. But Lola, our narrator, knows that they've found a body. She also knows who it is. Full review...

Cinderella by Sally Gardner

Most little girls must surely know the story of Cinderella by heart. My little girl likes nothing better than putting on her princess dress and parading around the house talking about pumpkins and lost shoes. This version of the familiar story is written specifically for early readers and manages to capture the magic of this wonderful fairy tale. I once got to be Cinderella, in my very last year at school before I left for University (surely just on the verge of being too old!) It is a wonderful, magical story and I never get tired of hearing it and it is, fortunately, my daughter's favourite too so we both sat down eagerly to try out this new retelling by Sally Gardner. Full review...

Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou

In the Congolese bar of Credit Gone West, the owner Stubborn Snail wants a record of the lives of those who drink there. The man he chooses to write it? Disgraced schoolteacher Broken Glass, who fills up a notebook with the stories of the bar’s patrons – or at least their versions of those tales. Full review...

In-Flight Entertainment by Helen Simpson

Short Stories

I am always thrilled to see that Helen Simpson has brought out a new book. I am a big fan of her crisp, funny, observant short stories. So I picked up 'In Flight Entertainment' with some anticipation. I was not disappointed. Full review...

An Act of Love by Alan Gibbons

Chris and Imran were childhood friends. Blood brothers. They swore it when they played together in the wilderness behind the estate where they lived. But not any more. The riots put paid to that. 9/11 put paid to that. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan put paid to that. Ten years on, Chris is a veteran of Afghanistan, waiting to receive a medal from the country for which he lost a leg. Imran is angry and rebellious, flirting with extremism. Terrorism has wrecked their friendship and sent them in different directions. And now, terrorism is threatening to end their very lives... Full review...

Ocean of Blood (The Saga of Larten Crepsley) by Darren Shan

In book two of this prequel series about the beloved orange-haired vampire from Darren Shan's Cirque du Freak series, we find Larten Crepsley and his friend Wester Flack finally free of the restrictions and privations imposed upon them by their master, Seba Nile. The young vampires have joined the Cubs, and are wandering the world enjoying all the "pleasures" human life can give them - wine, women, song, and a ringside seat at as many bloody wars as they could shake a stick at (plus a good supply of fresh blood in the aftermath of battle). Full review...

Chasing the Devil: On Foot Through Africa's Killing Fields by Tim Butcher

Travel

Tim Butcher's day job from 1990 to 2009 was "journalist".

I wonder what today's school-kids imagine when they say they want to be a journalist… do they envisage writing about science, or economics, or celebrities, or do they see themselves as television reporters standing in flak jackets doing the obligatory piece-to-camera in the latest war zone? Do they even read newspapers any more? Do they realise that there are still also people out there in those war zones, without the glamour flak-jacket, just (if they're lucky) the ordinary pock-marked one, that they prefer not to wear because it's way too hot? People who still ply the classic trade of actually writing what they see and trusting that they can do it well enough for the words to stand alone without the sound effects, without (quite often) any pictures, to make it "real"? Full review...

Speak for Britain!: A New History of the Labour Party by Martin Pugh

History

Since the Labour Representation Committee came into existence in February 1900, the party in Britain which it spawned has had a chequered and often contrary existence. Ironically, as Pugh demonstrates, while it may have been formed to represent the workers, it never became a fully working class party. James Keir Hardie may have been a genuine socialist, but some of the senior figures who followed were recruited from middle and upper-class Conservative backgrounds. Full review...

No Passengers Beyond This Point by Gennifer Choldenko

India is fourteen and, like many teenagers, doesn't see much outside her own narrow sphere of interest. She's spiky and defensive and reacts to any setbacks with anger and aggression, usually turned against her family. But inside, like many teenagers, she's rather lonely and lost. Finn is twelve and not as good at basketball as he'd like. He's not as popular as he'd like either. But he is honest and loyal, and he longs for a chance to prove it. Mouse is six and a bit of an oddity. She has an imaginary friend and a brain the size of a planet. This doesn't always make her easy to get along with. Full review...

Queen Victoria's Knickers by Jackie French and Bruce Whatley

A message from the palace has arrived! It's from Queen Victoria, and as mum reads it she cries out 'The Queen wants my knickers!' Queen Victoria, ruler of the British Empire, has riches galore, but she has no knickers, so the dressmaker's family set about making her some. Full review...

Letters From Home by Kristina McMorris

Liz Stephens accompanies a couple of friends to a GI social occasion. She's content and already 'spoken for' so she wouldn't normally be here where essentially most people are foot-loose and fancy-free. But she's promised her good friend Betty to come along. As the evening progresses with lots of singing and dancing, things become both interesting and just a little dangerous. But for whom? Who are we talking about here? Liz bumps into one of the many GIs present. His name's Morgan. An instant spark is there - or so someone believes. But they both end the evening on a less-than-satisfactory note. Liz returns to her life with her soon-to-be-fiance and Morgan goes off to war. Full review...

Mixed Blood by Roger Smith

I reviewed Smith's Wake Up Dead and after reading the blurb on the back cover, this book would appear to be in a similar style. We meet Jack, his heavily-pregnant wife Susan and their young son as they relax in their smart suburban home. Smith paints a lovely picture: the setting sun, drinks on the balcony and views to die for (no pun intended here) over Table Mountain. What's not to like? But this idyll is about to take a nasty and unexpected turn for the worse as a couple of no-users, high on drugs, take their chance and break in to the Burns' home. And all this action is seen by a security guard nearby. Full review...

To My Best Friends by Sam Baker

Women's Fiction

Nicci Morrison had always been the first of the four friends to do everything: fall in love, marry, have children (and twins at that) and develop a successful business. Then, at thirty six, she was the first to die – of cancer. Nicci was an organiser and she couldn't let the opportunity pass to dress her friends for her funeral and to bequeath into their care her most treasured possessions. You're probably thinking in terms of jewellery, or something similar, but Nicci left her friends her garden, her three-year-old daughters and her husband. I mean – just how much more difficult than that can you get? Full review...

Mercy by Jussi Adler-Olsen

The Prologue intends to grab the reader's attention right from the first word. I liked that. A girl, or perhaps a woman (we don't know yet) is imprisoned somewhere, barely kept alive in some sort of dark, airless and smelly makeshift prison - but why? And by whom exactly? The story opens in 2007 and we learn that Copenhagen detective Carl is recovering from a near-death experience in the line of police duty. His colleagues were not so lucky. So we see a broken and rather vulnerable man trying to claw his way back to a normal life. Guilt, revenge, anger are perhaps some of the emotions coursing through his veins. His senior colleagues are at a loss as to what to do with him - he's a good copper, after all. The solution is that a fancy new title is invented along with a fancy new department, all for Carl. But will he cope? Full review...

Burying the Bones: Pearl Buck in China by Hilary Spurling

Biography

Peal Buck, the 5th of 7 children, was born in 1892 to American missionary parents working in China, where she was then brought up. She learned Chinese before she learned English, and only realised that she was considered a foreigner when anti foreigner riots known to as the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 forced the family out of her childhood home. Later she became famous for her novels and short stories set in China, especially The Good Earth. She won America's most famous literary prize, the Pulitzer, in 1932, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938. Yet her work is mostly forgotten in the US and Europe, and in the country she loved, her books were banned by Mao's regime after they came to power in 1949. Full review...

How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely

With an uncompromising title like 'How I Became a Famous Novelist', this clearly isn't intended to be a subtle book. So I can hardly complain when a cynical look at the writing industry swings raw punches in every direction. It just isn't my sort of humour, but equally, if you rave about 'The Office' you will likely enjoy this book far more than I have done. Full review...

The Free World by David Bezmozgis

It's the late 1970's and a family of Latvian Jews, the Krasnanskys, are emigrating from the Soviet Union. They're made to stay in Rome whilst they apply to live in the States and they find themselves trapped in a strange migratory limbo, belonging nowhere and tied to no-one but each other. Full review...

The Dysfunctional Family by Paul Bress

Societies are constantly changing and sociology students are presented with theories to help them to comprehend what's happening. Here we have a different approach: a family has been paid a small amount of money to write diaries which they would keep secret from other members of the family and which would be available for publication. This book is the result and we follow Phil and Sue Brown and their two sons, Jack and Theo though a traumatic period which lasts for just over two months. The entries in the diaries are made daily and we read what has happened to each member of the 'dysfunctional family'. Full review...

Night on Terror Island by Philip Caveney

Kip is a real film buff, and because his dad runs the local independent cinema he gets to see all the latest films as a reward for making the popcorn and generally helping out each evening. But this happy state cannot continue for much longer: the big multiplexes on the edge of town are taking all their clients, and the Paramount Picture Palace may soon have to close for good. Things start to look up when the eccentric Mr Lazarus arrives, but Kip is suspicious: the new projectionist may have a gift for raising the quality of the films he shows to enviable standards, but he knows far more than he should about everyone who works at the cinema. And he talks about stars, films and cinemas of the past as if he had actually been there. Full review...

Piccadilly Love Stories: Don't Ask by Hilary Freeman

Lily thinks of herself as being about a 6 out of 10 on the scale of 'hideous gargoyle to Brad Pitt' and she knows her boyfriend Jack is an 8. So why would he want to be with her? Despite him seeming to be the perfect boy she's convinced there's something in his past and only gets more suspicious when he keeps clamming up about it. So when she finds his ex-girlfriend on a social networking site it seems like a great idea to create a fake profile and make friends with her. Is it worth telling this many lies just to find the truth? Full review...

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Apparently there's a saying that 'time's a goon' - no, I'd never heard of it and to be fair, neither had the first character to whom it is said in Jennifer Egan's 'A Visit from the Goon Squad', but together with a pair of epigraphs from Proust, it's clear that time is very definitely what is being explored here. Egan's subject area is all loosely based around the music world. Her central character, if one can be said to exist, is Bennie Salazar, a music mogul who we encounter both directly and tangentially at various stages of his up and down career. Goon Squad is also the title of an Elvis Costello track, continuing the music theme as Egan uses the music industry as a lens to examine time. Full review...

Toby's Little Eden by John E Flannery

Short Stories

John E Flannery's debut collection contains four short stories (although one is more of a novella) and a series of amusing sketches about the ground staff at a new Golf Course in north Manchester. They're more varied than they might appear at first glance and demonstrate Flannery's ability to get straight to the heart of the story without wasting words and to develop character as economically as possible, whilst still holding the reader's imagination. I knew as soon as I began The Ghostwriter that I wasn't going to be disappointed as a man who has written successful thrillers is possessed by the spirit of Charles Dickens. It's a neat riff on John Braine's idea that novelist wait for an idea to descend on them and Graham Greene's belief that novelists are like mediums. Full review...

Summer at Willow Lake by Susan Wiggs

Women's Fiction

Olivia Bellamy does not seem to have a lot of luck with men. When we meet her she's just about to put her third broken engagement under her belt and head of into the wilderness of the Catskills with Freddy. Don't get excited – he really is just a friend. They're going to revamp the family's old summer camp in readiness for her grandparents' fiftieth wedding anniversary celebrations and right now it seems like the best way to forget about her love life. Things turn from bad to worse though when she finds herself not only stuck up a flagpole but having to be rescued by the man who was her first boyfriend some nine years before. Full review...

Notes From the Teenage Underground by Simmone Howell

Gem, only child of arty mother Bev and an absent haiku-obsessed father always found fitting in difficult until the mysterious Lo turned up at school. The trio of her, Lo and Mira have been inseparable for a while now but as they plan their summer project – an Andy Warhol inspired underground film – she starts to feel pushed out by the other two. Can she deal with exams, romance co-worker Dodgy, save her friendship with Mira and Lo and cope with her father’s reappearance? Full review...

Every Last One by Anna Quindlen

Mary Beth Latham is contemplating her average, ordinary life where every day is more of less the same. Would things be better if life were more exciting, varied, newsworthy? Is that a legitimate thing to hope for? They say to be careful what you wish for, and Mary Beth never comes right out and says this is what she wants, but there are hints to this effect. Full review...

Shades of Greene: One Generation of an English Family by Jeremy Lewis

Biography

Graham Greene's father actually had six children, and his brother six of his own. (Well, there were nine in their generation for a start...) The surprising and joyous thing about this book is that it can show that Graham Greene's remarkable life is by no means the only standout in that whole generation of family history. It can continuously throw up surprises - we know Hugh Greene was high up in the BBC, but it wasn't him who helped found Canadian public service broadcasting. We are familiar with Graham himself traipsing around the world, reporting back in fact and fiction from unusual circumstances and exotic climes with dubious systems of government, but it wasn't he who was noted for being an ardently public supporter of pro-Communist China. Full review...

The West Rand Jive Cats Boxing Club by Lauren Liebenberg

Best friends Tommy and Chris are 12 years old. It is 1958 and they are growing up in a small mining town near Johannesburg, South Africa. They are learning to box and to dance to rock and roll music. Full review...

A Lily of the Field by John Lawton

The book opens in the early 1930s in Vienna where we meet one of the main characters; ten year old Meret. She's gifted musically and in particular in playing the cello. Even at this tender age, people are talking about her starry future on the world stage. She is the apple of her father's eye and soon she's being given extra musical tuition by a kind but much older man. He's old enough to be her grandfather but nevertheless they strike up a rather unusual friendship with music being the common denominator. But some of their conversations are serious and quite grown-up for a young girl, not yet into puberty. The tutor, Viktor Rosen is Jewish and has already suffered at the hands of the Germans. Meret progresses at such a pace that before you know it, she's performing in public. Her life appears to be wonderful and full of future promise. Full review...

Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer

Popular Science

In Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare wrote,'Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, wherin he puts alms for oblivion'. This fully accords with the discoveries of modern brain science. Proust in his famous novel, 'In Search of Lost Time' anticipates such discoveries by neuroscientists, such as Rachel Hertz, that smell and taste are the only senses that connect directly to the hippocampus. Thus the taste of a petit madeleine evokes a rediscovery by Proust of Combray and a flow of associations - it is the part of the brain in which long term memory is centred. Lehrer in ' Proust was a Neuroscientist' weaves an intriguing argument about the relationship between recent neuroscientific discoveries and the novels of George Eliot, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf. A scientist, who has researched with Nobel Prize-winning, Eric Kandel, has a taste for philosophy; Lehrer intends to heal the rift between what C.P.Snow termed the 'Two Cultures'. He wishes to accord respect to the truths and the intuitive discoveries, especially of modernist writers and painters. Full review...

For the Record by Ellie Irving

Luke is obsessed with records. He's so busy planning on breaking world records when he grows up, and playing world records DVD games, that he doesn't take much of an interest in what's going on around him. But that's about to change, because when the village of Port Bren is chosen to host a waste-incinerator plant his house will be demolished and the graveyard where his dad's buried will be destroyed – unless the village is too historically important for this to happen. How can they put themselves on the map in one week? Luke comes up with the idea to break 50 world records… but why won't his mum let him take part? Full review...

While We Sleep... the Dream Snatchers Cometh! by Wolfren Riverstick