Neat Vodka
Anna Blundy
Sphere
FAITH ZANETTI is a bad girl done good - a war correspondent whose staple diet is vodka, cigarettes and trouble.
This is the third thriller about her, and after picking this up for a quick dip, I'll be hunting out the first two.
Faith has just arrived in Moscow as correspondent for the Chronicle when she's arrested for a murder that happened when she was 19.
Then, she was briefly married to a seedy but sexy Russian guy. Apparently he's been in jail ever since for the murder.
Her only memory is waking up from being passed out after 15 straight vodkas, covered in blood and being asked to stand as witness to the crime scene of the next-door neighbours, a nice young couple who'd been dismembered by an axe murderer.
Faith, back in the future, goes looking for her ex in the jail - only to find that another ex-friend is pretending to be him and serving his time.
Faith's cynical but naïve - a couple of republics short of a union, as one character puts it - but even she's puzzled by this.
Yes, it's complicated, and it gets more complicated every page, but never mind that, you can't stop laughing. A brilliant book, and as funny as a dicky machine gun.
Tuesday, 17 July 2007
Tuesday, 10 July 2007
Momzillas by Jill Kargman
Momzillas
Jill Kargman
Harper Perennial Original
GENRES are strange, appearing, becoming a craze and then disappearing. Momzillas is a genre chicklit novel about wealthy New York mothers - very like the bestselling The Manny.
Here we have Hannah Allen, a thirtysomething married girl with an adorable two-year-old and a cute husband, happy in California.
But oh no - husband Josh is a native New Yorker and his mama wants him home, so the whole family is uprooted, and Hannah must learn how to be a rich girl.
Cue nasty new friends, a mother-in-law who'd much sooner Josh married her own younger clone, the well-named Bee.
Hannah must learn how to compete, and how to spend, spend, spend.
It's mindless fun, with a story that keeps twisting and some funny lines: "It was as if the two most disgusting dresses got married and she was wearing their baby..."
Readers might long for a little more grit, but for sheer distraction, Momzillas will hit the spot like a well-mixed Manhattan.
Jill Kargman
Harper Perennial Original
GENRES are strange, appearing, becoming a craze and then disappearing. Momzillas is a genre chicklit novel about wealthy New York mothers - very like the bestselling The Manny.
Here we have Hannah Allen, a thirtysomething married girl with an adorable two-year-old and a cute husband, happy in California.
But oh no - husband Josh is a native New Yorker and his mama wants him home, so the whole family is uprooted, and Hannah must learn how to be a rich girl.
Cue nasty new friends, a mother-in-law who'd much sooner Josh married her own younger clone, the well-named Bee.
Hannah must learn how to compete, and how to spend, spend, spend.
It's mindless fun, with a story that keeps twisting and some funny lines: "It was as if the two most disgusting dresses got married and she was wearing their baby..."
Readers might long for a little more grit, but for sheer distraction, Momzillas will hit the spot like a well-mixed Manhattan.
We are Gold by Alice Chambers
We Are Gold
Alice Chambers
(New Island)
THE GOLD family are recovering from the death of a daughter, a mother and a sister in Alice Chamber's interesting first novel.
Hannah Gold has been killed in a car crash, leaving her son Jack, her sister and brother Dawn and Omega and her parents Rose and Henry bereft.
Each tries to mend the tears in different ways.
Rose writes discursive poems, exploring a world without Hannah, and a world in which her marriage is gradually exposed as polite and loving, but empty.
Jack expresses his grief in the classic manner of children: what psychologists call 'displacement activity', where a child puts great attention into play to avoid what's too painful.
Writer Alice Chambers is based between Dublin and Rome, and has worked as a translator for publishing houses. In her funny, moving novel, she uses Ireland's new cosmopolitanism as the backboard to bounce her story.
The family is one rich in eccentricity, poor in competence, with Omega weakly wandering after his wife dumps him; dippy Dawn squeaking and whinging; Henry distant and Rose one of those arty women who never quite followed her art.
Chambers is not well served by the publisher's gimmicky layout, which has distracting gaps between the paragraphs, making it hard to sink into the story with the dreamy attentiveness where you look up to find you've missed your stop.
It's a surprise best-seller, in great demand in the shops and outselling the more standardised books the publishers bet their britches on.
Alice Chambers
(New Island)
THE GOLD family are recovering from the death of a daughter, a mother and a sister in Alice Chamber's interesting first novel.
Hannah Gold has been killed in a car crash, leaving her son Jack, her sister and brother Dawn and Omega and her parents Rose and Henry bereft.
Each tries to mend the tears in different ways.
Rose writes discursive poems, exploring a world without Hannah, and a world in which her marriage is gradually exposed as polite and loving, but empty.
Jack expresses his grief in the classic manner of children: what psychologists call 'displacement activity', where a child puts great attention into play to avoid what's too painful.
Writer Alice Chambers is based between Dublin and Rome, and has worked as a translator for publishing houses. In her funny, moving novel, she uses Ireland's new cosmopolitanism as the backboard to bounce her story.
The family is one rich in eccentricity, poor in competence, with Omega weakly wandering after his wife dumps him; dippy Dawn squeaking and whinging; Henry distant and Rose one of those arty women who never quite followed her art.
Chambers is not well served by the publisher's gimmicky layout, which has distracting gaps between the paragraphs, making it hard to sink into the story with the dreamy attentiveness where you look up to find you've missed your stop.
It's a surprise best-seller, in great demand in the shops and outselling the more standardised books the publishers bet their britches on.
Monday, 2 July 2007
The Fallen by Jefferson Parker
The Fallen
Jefferson Parker
(Harper)
CAN YOU imagine the advantage for a cop of always knowing for sure?
In Jefferson Parker's The Fallen his hero, detective Robbie Brownlaw, has plunged into a burning building to save a frightened man. But the man turns and throws him out the window, six storeys up.
Brownlaw falls, but lands on a canopy and lives. When he wakes in hospital he is subject to a condition called synesthesis, a leakage of the senses.
This actually exists, though it's unusual. Certain musicians perceive particular notes as colours, or as scents, while some people see pictures and hear music.
In Brownlaw's case, the sense affected is truth. He can sense the true emotions when people are speaking, with coloured shapes sliding out of their mouths if what they feel isn't what they say.
Handy enough in investigating the apparent murder of a super-ethical super-policeman - Garret Asplundh, who left a trail of clues into his own probe into the police department.
What starts as an earnest police procedural plod takes off when Brownlaw discovers the first of Garret's secrets: he was hiding a young prostitute, bringing her back from the brink.
It doesn't stop, and speeds along, swerving from high to high, with plenty of shocks to keep the reader's adrenaline surging.
Jefferson Parker
(Harper)
CAN YOU imagine the advantage for a cop of always knowing for sure?
In Jefferson Parker's The Fallen his hero, detective Robbie Brownlaw, has plunged into a burning building to save a frightened man. But the man turns and throws him out the window, six storeys up.
Brownlaw falls, but lands on a canopy and lives. When he wakes in hospital he is subject to a condition called synesthesis, a leakage of the senses.
This actually exists, though it's unusual. Certain musicians perceive particular notes as colours, or as scents, while some people see pictures and hear music.
In Brownlaw's case, the sense affected is truth. He can sense the true emotions when people are speaking, with coloured shapes sliding out of their mouths if what they feel isn't what they say.
Handy enough in investigating the apparent murder of a super-ethical super-policeman - Garret Asplundh, who left a trail of clues into his own probe into the police department.
What starts as an earnest police procedural plod takes off when Brownlaw discovers the first of Garret's secrets: he was hiding a young prostitute, bringing her back from the brink.
It doesn't stop, and speeds along, swerving from high to high, with plenty of shocks to keep the reader's adrenaline surging.
Nabeel's Song by Jo Tatchell
Nabeel's Song
Jo Tatchell
Sceptre €??
NABEEL YASIN is an Iraqi poet, now in exile for many years, whose smuggled poems are the songs of the resistance.
Nabeel's Song tracks Iraq from Nabeel's 1950s childhood up to the oppressive regime of the pan-Arab nationalist Ba'ath party.
Nabeel's brother was arrested and tortured for months in the national stadium with hundreds of other suspected communists.
His mother's house was regularly raided by different branches of police - once one group leaving met another arriving - and Nabeel's passport and papers were stamped 'Enemy of the State'.
As a poet who spoke out against the party - and particularly against ex-CIA assassin and Ba'ath puppetmaster Saddam Hussein - Nabeel was hated and hunted.
When his father fell off a roof and died, and Nabeel applied for a permit to bury him, the police accused him of murder.
After years on the run and a series of brutal beatings, he left Iraq in 1979. Two of his brothers were in jail, another, Tariq, who could normally talk his way out of any trouble, would be used as a human minesweeper before the Iraqi troops in the Iran-Iraq War.
Fascinating, horrible and impossible to stop reading, this should be read by anyone who thinks his own state couldn't become totalitarian.
Jo Tatchell
Sceptre €??
NABEEL YASIN is an Iraqi poet, now in exile for many years, whose smuggled poems are the songs of the resistance.
Nabeel's Song tracks Iraq from Nabeel's 1950s childhood up to the oppressive regime of the pan-Arab nationalist Ba'ath party.
Nabeel's brother was arrested and tortured for months in the national stadium with hundreds of other suspected communists.
His mother's house was regularly raided by different branches of police - once one group leaving met another arriving - and Nabeel's passport and papers were stamped 'Enemy of the State'.
As a poet who spoke out against the party - and particularly against ex-CIA assassin and Ba'ath puppetmaster Saddam Hussein - Nabeel was hated and hunted.
When his father fell off a roof and died, and Nabeel applied for a permit to bury him, the police accused him of murder.
After years on the run and a series of brutal beatings, he left Iraq in 1979. Two of his brothers were in jail, another, Tariq, who could normally talk his way out of any trouble, would be used as a human minesweeper before the Iraqi troops in the Iran-Iraq War.
Fascinating, horrible and impossible to stop reading, this should be read by anyone who thinks his own state couldn't become totalitarian.
Monday, 25 June 2007
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Khaled Hosseini
Bloomsbury
AFGHANISTAN'S agony is mediated through its shut-in women in Khaled Hosseini's extraordinary follow-up to The Kite Runner.
Laila's father, a teacher made jobless by the Russian invaders, reads her The Old Man and the Sea, and that image of the great fish being towed tenderly home by the fishermen, while the circling sharks tear it to pieces, is his image of his country.
Devoted Mujahadeen, idealistic communists, torn lovers and the snipers and bombers in the hills are treated with the same tenderness by this most plotty of writers.
Hosseini narrates like a street storyteller, who must keep the paying audience fascinated by twists and turns and revelations of character or they'll walk away.
The result is a book that holds the reader more with every page. If you see someone on a bus dashing away a tear as they read, they're probably in the middle of A Thousand Splendid Suns.
The story spans the time from the Soviet invaders to the American invaders. But against these large themes is the larger story of two families, full of love and anger.
It's written at a distance - Hosseini has not experienced life as a woman, and has not lived in Afghanistan for many years - but his tale-telling skills triumph and he makes great characters and a believable country.
Khaled Hosseini
Bloomsbury
AFGHANISTAN'S agony is mediated through its shut-in women in Khaled Hosseini's extraordinary follow-up to The Kite Runner.
Laila's father, a teacher made jobless by the Russian invaders, reads her The Old Man and the Sea, and that image of the great fish being towed tenderly home by the fishermen, while the circling sharks tear it to pieces, is his image of his country.
Devoted Mujahadeen, idealistic communists, torn lovers and the snipers and bombers in the hills are treated with the same tenderness by this most plotty of writers.
Hosseini narrates like a street storyteller, who must keep the paying audience fascinated by twists and turns and revelations of character or they'll walk away.
The result is a book that holds the reader more with every page. If you see someone on a bus dashing away a tear as they read, they're probably in the middle of A Thousand Splendid Suns.
The story spans the time from the Soviet invaders to the American invaders. But against these large themes is the larger story of two families, full of love and anger.
It's written at a distance - Hosseini has not experienced life as a woman, and has not lived in Afghanistan for many years - but his tale-telling skills triumph and he makes great characters and a believable country.
The Interpretation of Murder by Jeb Rubenfeld
The Interpretation of Murder
Jed Rubenfeld
(Headline Review €??)
JED Rubenfeld teaches law at Yale, wrote his senior thesis in Princeton on Freud and studied Shakespeare at the Juilliard School of Drama.
The Interpretation of Murder is his perfect storm, bringing together his three obsessions.
There's a craze in America for whodunits set in Victorian and Edwardian New York, with historical characters - Poe, Freud - and on-the-spot reportage.
Rubenfeld uses the sado-masochistic scenes and opium-dreaming brothels of Victorian fantasy in a mystery to be solved by one of Sigmund Freud's bumbling coterie of psychoanalysts. (The story is based on Freud's actual visit to New York in 1909.)
It's selling awfully well, and justifiably so; it's a good read for the first half. Then it falls away, with the plot too convoluted and the villain too far from the centre.
But there are great moments - notably in the caisson where the foundations of the Manhattan Bridge were laid. And the writer enjoys himself with quotations from Hamlet, the analyst hero convincing himself that the 'to be or not to be' soliloquy is not about being, but about seeming.
It's fabulous fun, if not for all the family.
Jed Rubenfeld
(Headline Review €??)
JED Rubenfeld teaches law at Yale, wrote his senior thesis in Princeton on Freud and studied Shakespeare at the Juilliard School of Drama.
The Interpretation of Murder is his perfect storm, bringing together his three obsessions.
There's a craze in America for whodunits set in Victorian and Edwardian New York, with historical characters - Poe, Freud - and on-the-spot reportage.
Rubenfeld uses the sado-masochistic scenes and opium-dreaming brothels of Victorian fantasy in a mystery to be solved by one of Sigmund Freud's bumbling coterie of psychoanalysts. (The story is based on Freud's actual visit to New York in 1909.)
It's selling awfully well, and justifiably so; it's a good read for the first half. Then it falls away, with the plot too convoluted and the villain too far from the centre.
But there are great moments - notably in the caisson where the foundations of the Manhattan Bridge were laid. And the writer enjoys himself with quotations from Hamlet, the analyst hero convincing himself that the 'to be or not to be' soliloquy is not about being, but about seeming.
It's fabulous fun, if not for all the family.
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