Books
Daniel Baksi
In March 1937, the government of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk instigated what it called a “disciplinary campaign” against the Zaza-speaking Alevi Kurds in the Dersim region of eastern Turkey. What followed was a bloody, coordinated assault that resulted in thousands of civilian deaths and forcible deportations. The episode has “weighed on Turkey’s official history ever since” and supplies the context to Sema Kaygusuz’s Every Fire You Tend, translated into English by Nicholas Glastonbury. The novel, which grapples with memories that are both an obligation and a burden, is a brave rejoinder to an Read more ...
Jessica Payn
Elizabeth Strout is fond of plain titles. Much as her stories are interested in subtlety – the quiet complications and contradictions of ordinary life – her books advertise themselves by means of telling understatements. Olive, Again follows ten years on the heels of her Pulitzer Prize-winning “novel in stories” Olive Kitteridge, which painted a resonant, emotionally complex portrait of a community in fictional Crosby, a small coastal town in Strout’s native Maine. Via 13 interlinking short stories, Strout refracts glimpses of her eponymous character Olive, a retired maths Read more ...
Sarah Collins
“Truth was further from safety than two islands at opposite ends of the earth,” proclaims the narrator of ‘Lake Like A Mirror’, the titular short story in Ho Sok Fong’s intoxicating new collection. When a young Chinese Malaysian literature tutor inadvertently falls foul of the university committee after a recital of an ee cummings poem is uploaded online, she begins to feel bored with herself, and bored of “drawing the line” that determines appropriate and inappropriate, fatigued with self-censorship in the pursuit of safety. Ho’s startling prose viscerally conveys the quiet, stifling fear Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Some two million Americans are currently in prison in America. A disproportionate number are black and nearly 200,000 are estimated to be innocent. John Grisham’s quietly horrifying new novel is a damning indictment of the inequities and corruption of the American legal system, which is shown to be not only corrupt but also profoundly inefficient and adept at making victims of those it incarcerates.Over two decades before the story begins, in the small Florida town of Seabrook, a young white lawyer named Keith Russo was shot dead while working alone at his desk late into the night. There were Read more ...
James Dowsett
When U.S. president George W. Bush looked into the eyes of Vladimir Putin he famously “saw his soul”. In his latest meditation on modern Russia, Britain's top Kremlinologist Robert Service gets as close to the Russian president’s soul as may be possible in a scholarly account. No less could have been expected from the author of a series of magisterial biographies on the Soviet leaders, Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky. Service offers us no clumsy caricatures in Kremlin Winter. He does not try to scare us with bogeymen. His even-handed, level-headed analysis restores critical ambiguity to the riddle Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
People who derive comfort from Classic FM’s strapline that European classical music is “The World's Greatest Music" are going to have a major problem with this book. American music historian Ted Gioia has marshalled 25 years' worth of his own life and several centuries of music history into 500 pages which put that complacent assertion in doubt.“The scope of this book is the full history of music,” he writes in his introduction. And his aim? "Above all, I hope to topple established hierarchies and rules, subverting tired old conventions and asserting bold new ones."Gioia argues that new music Read more ...
theartsdesk
Between 1991 to 2012, Belorussian journalist and oral historian Svetlana Alexievich travelled the countries that constituted the former USSR conducting interviews with the “the little great people” who had lived under Soviet communism and witnessed its demise. The resulting book, Second-Hand Time, is an oral history which tells through the words of ordinary people the end of what she, in her 2015 Nobel Prize lecture, called a “historical experiment”. This is the third of three extracts.Margarita K., Armenian refugee, 41 years oldOh! That’s not what I’m talking about… that’s not what I want to Read more ...
theartsdesk
Between 1991 to 2012, Belorussian journalist and oral historian Svetlana Alexievich travelled the countries that constituted the former USSR conducting interviews with the “the little great people” who had lived under Soviet communism and witnessed its demise. The resulting book, Second-Hand Time, is an oral history which tells through the words of ordinary people the end of what she, in her 2015 Nobel Prize lecture, called a “historical experiment”. This is the second of three extracts.Alisa Z., advertising manager, 35 years oldI went to St Petersburg to get a different story but came back Read more ...
theartsdesk
Between 1991 to 2012, Belorussian journalist and oral historian Svetlana Alexievich travelled the countries that constituted the former USSR conducting interviews with the “the little great people” who had lived under Soviet communism and witnessed its demise. The resulting book, Second-Hand Time, is an oral history which tells through the words of ordinary people the end of what she, in her 2015 Nobel Prize lecture, called a “historical experiment”. This is the first of three extracts.— My whole life, I’ve kept my arms at my sides! I didn’t dare breathe a word of any of this to anyone. Now, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In September 1944, a heavily pregnant Resistance activist in the north of German-occupied Italy was arrested on a visit to Milan. Lisetta Giua, a law student and fiancée of the Jewish anti-Fascist chief Vittorio Foa, worked as one of hundreds of women staffette: vital underground operatives whose roles might stretch from courier and spy to liaison officer and saboteur. Lisetta, captured while away from her home in Turin, soon found herself in Milan’s notorious Villa Triste – a torture centre where a half-German Fascist degenerate named Pietro Koch practised almost indescribable “scientific” Read more ...
Jessica Payn
Visceral, gaudy, alien, otherworldly to the point of being almost improbably imaginative, the nudibranch serves as an appropriate figure for Nigerian-British writer Irenosen Okojie’s muscularly surrealist prose. Look up a picture of one if you haven’t before: the nudibranch is an exuberant, kaleidoscopic variety of sea slug. In the story that gives her newest collection of short stories its title, Okojie provides a short definition of the creature, which serves as a kind of epigraph: "Soft-bodied, marine gastropod molluscs which lose their shells after their larval stage. They are noted Read more ...
Sarah Collins
“Chauvinism is the worst form of ignorance” is the maxim of Dr Pozzi, the hero of Julian Barnes’s latest book, The Man in the Red Coat. This historical biography follows the life of a renowned gynaecologist during the Parisian Belle Époque, the “locus classicus of peace and pleasure, with more than a flush of decadence”. Once described by the Princess of Monaco as “disgustingly handsome”, Pozzi is a fascinating subject for Barnes’s obsessive attention; an exceptional doctor and rational thinker, embedded in the most fashionable Parisian social circles. From 1885 to 1916, we travel through Read more ...