Saturday, November 7, 2009 Previous editions
A TENSE psychological drama against the backdrop of Saudi Arabian mores, and prescriptive Shari laws, is the setting for Zoe Ferraris’s debut novel, The Night of the Mi’raj. Nouf ash-Shrawi, a beautiful young girl, disappears from her palatial home on an island off Jeddah, in advance of her arranged marriage.
WHEN Anchee Min wrote Red Azalea, she realised that it was not just her own story “but also the story of China, its yesterday, today and tomorrow”.
FOR his latest novel, In Zodiac Light, Robert Edric frames the post-war life of Britain’s lesser known war poet and composer Ivor Gurney.
is a delightful blend of loud colours, bold line, quirky story and – for an extra thrill – an enigmatic glowing shape. A boy looks through his telescope at the night sky. What is that shape outlined against the moon?
EVOKING Cuban crime novels like Jerome Charyn’s Paradise Man, Fifty Grand by Adrian McKinty takes us on a rampage through a corrupt Colorado town and the decadence of Cuban military rule as it flicks between America and the Caribbean island.
WITH the Children’s Book Festival imminent, now is a good time to introduce the very young to the pleasure of reading.
JENNET MALLOW is a fictional artist whose biography An Equal Stillness by Francesca Kay won this year’s new writers Orange Award.
BOOKS that genuinely break new ground don’t come along very often, and even then they tend to be academic rather than reader-friendly.
ALAN GLYNN’S new novel covers territory readers of Irish noir usually associate with Declan Hughes or Ken Bruen. And like Hughes, there are shady deals involving property, former IRA or INLA gunmen working as bouncers or fixers.
WHETHER Michael Jackson knew it or not, he had a huge following in the Arabian desert.
PATRICK HENNESSEY read English at Oxford before joining the Grenadier Guards at the age of 22, going to Sandhurst, seeing spells guarding Buckingham Palace and in Bosnia before serving in Iraq and seeing some of the fiercest fighting in decades in Afghanistan.
MICHELANGELO di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni is one of only a handful of artists whose achievements one might well describe as immortal.
My Father’s Tears and other Stories
John Updike
Hamish Hamilton, £18.99
THE American auto industry as we knew it – even just 12 short months ago – is officially dead and as nobody yet knows what will emerge from the ashes of automotive behemoths such as General Motors and Chrysler (Ford are still clinging to the wreckage of gross corporate mismanagement), PJ O’Rourke’s paean to this once-great and all powerful manufacturing phenomenon is timely.
is the fifth novel in the series by Colin Cotterill featuring Dr Siri Paiboun, national coroner of Laos, south-east Asia.
I FOUND this book extremely frustrating to read. Apart from my scepticism of the subject matter, I found it repetitive, simplistic and gushing.
We first meet Mad Dog in the home of his foster parents, a kindly couple who really want to make the boy and his baby brother happy.
PHILIPPA GREGORY is best known for The Other Boleyn Girl, her Tudor novel that spawned both a TV series and the 2008 film starring Scarlett Johansson.
“HE leaned against the rail of the Cape Town, the ship of his flight.
BEFORE Joe Kennedy went to Hollywood for his short-lived affair with the movies in 1926, he was well off.
WHEN the World is Ready for Bed by Gillian Shields (Bloomsbury €12.63 HB) is just the book to help round up reluctant sleepyheads.
A FORMER journalist, Baltimore-based Lippman knows her city – but not, perhaps, the world of the small screen series, which is the focus of her latest offering.
IN THE 1920s, the Irish Free State was, if not wholly independent, then at least democratic.
GEORGE BAILEY is a burly policeman disenchanted with his life.
IT’S LESS than a year since Aravind Adiga won the Man Booker Prize.
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