First thoughts
Hodder & Stoughton, €24.55;
Kindle, £10.99
Review: Chris Gibbings
Coming fresh to Stephen King’s ‘The Dark Tower’ series was not the problem I feared, as he delivers on his promise in the foreword to make the story suitable for all.
The series is King’s version of a fantasy epic in the same vein as the ‘Lord Of The Rings’ but he includes tropes used in other fantasies, such as characters and incidents from parallel worlds overlapping with each other.
There is even a nod to Aslan from CS Lewis’s ‘Narnia’ tales at one point, although I doubt Lewis would have approved of the occasional explicit language used in this story.
King once more provides a good read with a well-plotted story involving a hunt for a ‘skin-man’ who can change from human to deadly animal.
The book is always entertaining as it follows the saga of Roland Deschain, a gunslinger in Mid-World, and provides an entertainingly tense fairytale sub-plot.
Alice Walker
Phoenix, €17.15;
Kindle, £4.99
Review: Tinashe Sithole
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author who brought us the acclaimed ‘The Color Purple’ now presents an entirely different offering.
Alice Walker’s acquisition of a flock of chicks leads her down a journey of discovery, reminiscence and intrigue around the animal kingdom.
Her child-like enthusiasm makes this an easy read and even easier to relate to. It serves as a provocateur to the thoughts we have all undoubtedly had about what animals think and feel and if they indeed do have personalities.
Stirring the animal lover inside and providing humour through the personification of her flock, it is authentic and engaging throughout and a far more light-hearted and innocently written insight into the mind of an author known for her much weightier and socially provocative literature.
However, some may grow frustrated by the inescapable fact that one is indeed reading a book about, well... chickens. A great read for adults and especially for children learning the complexities of love, life, and death.
Philip Hensher
Fourth Estate, €25.85;
ebook, €22.48
Review: Daisy Wyatt
The latest novel from Booker-nominated author Philip Hensher is set during the fight for Bangladesh’s independence and is partly inspired by Hensher’s husband, Zaved Mahmood, who was born in Dacca in 1970.
The novel follows the interspersed lives of an upper-class Bengali family living under the regime of West Pakistan militants.
The culture of Bengal, what was then called East Pakistan, is under threat. All Bengali literature is burned, it becomes illegal to carry a musical instrument and women are required to have a male escort at all times.
The novel is told in the form of a memoir, narrated by Zaved, a young boy in the four-generation family.
Scenes From Early Life is a sensitive and insightful account of the split from Pakistan, and Hensher sheds light on a brutal struggle for independence through his accounts of family life.
Keith Lowe
Viking, €34;
adobe ebook, €16.99
Review: Chris Gibbings
Lowe has followed up his first book, ‘Inferno: The Devastation Of Hamburg, 1943’, about one of the heaviest bombing raids of the war, with this work of much wider scope. In a valuable corrective to the vision of World War II in many minds as simply a fight ending with good triumphant over evil, he shows how the war provoked more mass killings and ethnic cleansings after Hitler was defeated.
Despite the Holocaust, the fresh injustices in non-German nations were often depressingly anti-Semitic too.
The Cold War stand-off between the victors over Hitler — the Communist Soviet Union and the capitalist West — is covered to a degree, with the surprising omission of the 1948-49 Berlin Airlift.
Although it has an irritating first-person narrative occasionally, the breadth of coverage is very good.
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