Brian by Jeremy Cooper

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Brian

Herzog, Truffaut, and Brian from Kentish Town

We’re big fans of London publisher, Fitzcarraldo Editions, and their championing of innovative and enduring fiction, enfolded in elegant Yves Klein Blue covers. Brian by Jeremy Cooper is the third of his works they’ve launched into the world, and a novel of rich interiority. It chronicles several decades of the sedate life of Brian, loner, Camden Council employee, and cinephile. Carrying past trauma and a lifelong sense of being different, in Cooper’s inspired melding of bittersweet fiction and film criticism, Brian is set to find solace and belonging at the British Film Institute on London’s South Bank.

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Death in Spring by MercDeath in Spring by Mercè Rodoreda

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Death in Spring

Cryptic Catalan tale of tyranny and submission

In an isolated village in the Catalan mountains, an adolescent boy goes for a dip in the local river, swimming downstream to the nearby forest. Here, in the leafy half-light, amidst an ominous clustering of butterflies and bees, he witnesses his father carve open a tree and fold himself into it, in anticipation of certain death. A highlight of the marvellous Penguin European Writers collection, Death in Spring by Mercè Rodoreda is a bildungsroman unlike any other, a surreal tale of oppression, ritual and exile, with a nod to the darkest folklore.

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Broken Threads by Mishal Husain

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Broken Threads

An illuminating and compulsive read

I confess to being a complete ignoramus on the history of the partition of India. Luckily, the brilliant Broken Threads by Mishal Husain has come along to change that. Husain – fiercely intelligent BBC Radio 4 news presenter, feared by British politicians for her razor-sharp interviews – has written the memoirs of her grandparents and parents. In Broken Threads, she weaves together the political and the personal to create an insightful and moving account of their lives as well as India and Pakistan’s fraught shared history.

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Top Ten Summer Classics

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Top Ten Summer Classics

Is there anything better than a summery read to get you into a sunny mood? Or a summery novel to read on your holiday?  To get you into the spirit, we have chosen our top ten summer classics.

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The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry

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The Heart in Winter

A gleefully delinquent Irish western

Butte, Montana, 1891, a magnet for Irish immigrants seeking their fortune at its famous copper mines. Here we meet Tom Rourke, tortured soul, ballad maker, and a man whose Hibernian eyes gleam with ‘the lyric poetry of an early death’. The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry depicts his electrifying love affair with the wife of a mine captain and their subsequent flight for freedom, in possession of purloined  banknotes and pursued by vengeful hired gunmen. All hail a gleefully delinquent outlaw tale of wild hearts and hard lives, and the first Irish western I’ve ever read.

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James by Percival Everett

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James

The other side of Huckleberry Finn's adventure

Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is a classic in American juvenile fiction. Set in 1880s Missouri, it’s the story of the friendship between a young white boy and a black slave, both on the run, from a violent father and a slave owner. Much loved for its portrayal of youthful adventure, Huckleberry Finn, packed with racial stereotypes and the N-word, makes for uncomfortable reading today. In James by Percival Everett, we get the story from the black man’s perspective, and it’s far cry from the charming adventure story so many readers have come to love.

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All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley

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All the Beauty in the World

Life, death, and the art of seeing

A stand-out read of the year to date, All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley is a finely understated combination of memoir, lessons on the art of seeing, and a  glorious and very personal tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Capturing a transformative period in Bringley’s life, the book focuses on the months and years after his brother Tom’s untimely death, when poleaxed by grief, Bringley drops out of his relentless New York life and takes a job as a museum guard at the Met. Here, with a broken heart, he gets to just stand still awhile and let the art and life of the museum work its healing magic.

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Cinema Love by Jiaming Tang

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Cinema Love

Striking debut tale of immigrant dreams and secret lives

It’s the mid 1980’s in Mawei, a district in the Fujian province of China. Nestled within its humdrum streets is the Workers Cinema, a smoky, graffitied haven for gay men seeking illicit love. Here, against a backdrop of old war movies, liaisons are enjoyed and the pause button pressed on reality. In Cinema Love by Jiaming Tang, we meet regular punter, Old Second, and his future wife, Bao Mei, who runs the box office. Tang’s bold, heartfelt debut spans forty years and two continents, as the couple build a new life together but continue to be haunted by the secrets of their cinema days.

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Doppler by Erlend Loe

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Doppler

A tent, an elk, and an existential crisis

Doppler is sick of his nice life with his nice wife and nice children. Sick of toeing the line and being a passive consumer in Oslo society, chasing money in a city bloated with oil wealth. Also, his father is dead and it hurts. A bump on the head from a cycling accident prompts an epiphany, and in a clever, satirical skewering of modern life, Doppler by Erlend Loe chronicles Doppler’s desertion of his family, in exchange for a tent in the Norwegian forest, where he will take up contemplation of modern existence in the devoted company of a very small elk.

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Table for Two by Amor Towles

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Table for Two

A magnificent short story collection

Anyone wary of short stories should put their doubts to rest and dive into the utterly magnificent Table for Two by Amor Towles. I’ve been chuckling through his stories which range from a neurotic wife convinced her husband is having an affair to a Russian peasant turned opportunistic capitalist by the Russian revolution; from a high-strung Goldman Sachs banker suspicious of a fellow concert goer to the incompetent aspiring author whose skills at forging puts him on a new career path and many more. Once again, Towles’ superb storytelling skills shine.

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