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The only novel by the playwright Tom Stoppard – and a completely bonkers one! Surreal, off-the-wall; you choose the phrase – but it’s also funny and poignant, and I suspect says quite a lot about the young 1966 Stoppard who wrote it just after finished Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.…
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Twist is the fifth novel from Colum McCann I’ve read – and I daresay it won’t be the last. A fluent narrative with just enough in terms of ‘teasers’ to keep you reading. Interestingly, many of these come at the beginning of chapters rather than at the end; a kind…
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I should start by confessing that it has taken me more than two years – if not three or four! – to finish reading Georges Perec’s novel, Life A User’s Manual. And why is that? Although it weighs in at 500 pages (in my 2008 Vintage paperback edition), it’s not…
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Ia Genberg’s Small Comfort is something of a smorgasbord: five stories which, we’re told are ‘interconnected’. Indeed, from the perspective of broad subject – money – they are; but in solid narrative terms the ‘overspill’ between one story and the next is limited perhaps to the first two stories. Style…
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Having taken four years to write, I am pleased to announce that my latest novel, The Extra Shot, has now been published in both paperback and ebook formats.
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I really must stop trying to read Korean novels (in translation). It seems to me that they are too simple, repetitive, predictable, moralistic, and positive. If that generalisation is correct then I suspect it must be a cultural thing – allied to the fact that I don’t like my novels…
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Simply excellent. For me there are two reasons Howard Jacobson’s Live a Little shines: the more minor of the two is that he doesn’t let the religious backgrounds of the characters overpower the story; the major is the marvellous Beryl Dusinbery. What a marvellous confection of a character! Without doubt…
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David Szalay’s Booker-winning novel Flesh is a brutal read; not in terms of the narrative – though it has its moments! – but in terms of its style: short staccato punchy and repetitive sentences which seem to strip the language down to its bare bones and remove any kind of…