Saturday, March 13, 2010 Previous editions
WHEN I was Joe by Karen David (Frances Lincoln; €8.80) features 15-year-old Ty and his mother who are part of a witness protection scheme.
One of Britain’s best-known Anglo-Asian writers tells David Kernek that, unlike many of his fictional creations, he’s a happy man.
THERE’S a cartoon from the New Yorker magazine which shows two middle-aged men languidly sipping cocktails in front of a fake chateau.
Thousand Mile Song Whale Music in a Sea of Sound. By David Rothenburg, Basic Books; £10.99
CORK City libraries have, once again, performed a noteworthy public service, principally through the efforts of librarian Liam Ronayne and Kitty Buckley of the music library.
Jason Sheehan
Atlantic Books, €20
AWARE I once worked in restaurant kitchens, at home and abroad, I was asked to write about chef Anthony Bourdain’s book, Kitchen Confidential – Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, thinking a little insider knowledge might test the veracity of a warts ‘n’ all portrayal of life in a professional kitchen.
James S Donnelly, Jr
The Collins Press, €24.95
FOR close inspection of the genteel rapacity which once ruled in our countryside, Captain Rock: The Irish Agrarian Rebellion of 1821-1824, is highly recommended.
Review by Dick Warner
Richard Mabey
Ebury, £12.99
RICHARD MABEY has been described as Britain’s greatest living nature writer. In the course of a long career he has written nearly 40 books along with countless articles and radio and television programmes.
Edited by Máire Nic Gearailt
New Island, €12.99
PICK up this collection of short pieces of writing broadcast in Lyric FM’s Quiet Quarter and you will find it hard to put down.
Sarah Rayner
Picador, €9.99
WRITTEN in the flat style characteristic of the chick-lit genre, this modest novel relates events in the lives of three very different women during a single week, with recourse to occasional flashbacks.
Boris Akunin
Phoenix; £6.99
SISTER Pelagia is a nun and headmistress of the girls’ school in Zahvolsk. She is also a detective and at the Synod in St Petersburg has just been shamed into promising never to investigate again.
BOOKS on friendship and bonding are important for the very young who have begun mixing with their peers at pre-school.
Despite being worshipped, Clint Eastwood is very much a regular guy, his biographer tells Kathy Foley
By David Willetts
Atlantic Books; €21.75
ANYONE over 50, and thus a member of the Baby Boom generation, enjoyed a golden lifestyle attained at the expense of their children.
By Jan Wong
Atlantic Books, €11.10
WHEN Jan Wong first went to China in 1972, the bureaucrats she encountered on disembarking couldn’t get their heads around the fact that she looked Chinese but couldn’t speak Chinese. She was a third generation Canadian. Her grandfather had immigrated into Canada in 1881 as one of the coolies who built the Canadian Pacific Railroad.
By Jean Lombard
Ashfield Press; €20.00
THE lives of the author and Kathleen ffrench, the subject of this book, span some of the most momentous periods of 20th century history – the dying days of czarist Russia, the revolution, the ending of an Ireland dominated by landed gentry and, finally, for the author, the beginning of glasnost and the end of Russian communism.
By Katharine McMahon
Phoenix, £7.99
KATHARINE MCMAHON’S 1998 novel Confinement, reissued this year, recounts in parallel chapters the lives of two independent women, pre- and post-suffragette movement.
By Henning Mankell
Vintage Books; €9.85
IT IS October, 1914. A naval destroyer emerges from the Stockholm archipelago carrying an engineer charged with making depth soundings.
A HUG for Little Bunny by Steve Smallman and Janet Samuel (Little Tiger Press; €8.80) is a padded board book for toddlers.
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.
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