Novel reads

 

Sorry by Zoran Drvenkar

 

Saying you’re sorry may not save your life…

ONE. TWO. THREE. That’s all it takes to drive the nail into her head, to leave her hanging on the wall. She deserved to die. Now all he needs is absolution for his sins. And he knows just the people who can help.

[design as business card]: IF SORRY SEEMS TO BE THE HARDEST WORD, THEN LET US SAY IT FOR YOU.

Kris, Tamara,Wolf and Frauke. Four friends with one big idea: an agency called Sorry. Unfair dismissals, the wrongly accused: everyone has a price, and Sorry will find out what it is. It’s as simple as that. But they didn’t count on their next client being a killer. Standing face to face with a brutally murdered woman, the philosophy that has brought them so much success sounds hollow. But who is the killer and why has he killed her? Someone is mocking them for playing God and hell is only just beginning.

“This thriller breaks with all conventions, topping all expectations. Drvenkar has taken the well-known theme of guilt and atonement and turned it upside down, playing a morbid game with his protagonists and the reader. Fast paced and in deadly good style. A joy to read, a piece of art.”                                 Die Welt

“It’s a terrific book, very dark, very sinister and very original. I loved it…it is really something special.”                Joanne Harris

“This is what thrillers should be about. Taut, tense and terrific, Sorry is a cracking read.”   Sean Black

“You need to be prepared and ready to read Sorry. Ready for the brave experiment in writing not seen before in this genre, and ready for an extraordinary plot.”            Berliner Zeitung

“A challenging, insightful thriller…Drvenkar adroitly keeps the reader in the dark as he unravels a horrific story of child sexual abuse, savage revenge, and retribution.” PW

The Sound of Gravity by Joe Simpson

 

As her hand slips from his grip, Patrick’s life is shattered, forever changed. The Sound of Gravity is a harrowing, dramatic and powerful tale of love, loss and redemption as that haunting split-second memory changes the course of a lifetime. Trapped high on a stormbound mountain face in the icy depths of winter, the stricken young man is forced to fight for his life. Half a lifetime later, haunted by grief and guilt, Patrick is freed from his self-imposed vigil when at last the mountain releases his heart-rending secret.

Joe Simpson is the author of several best-selling books, of which the first,Touching the Void, won both the NCR award and the Boardman Tasker Award. His later books are This Game of Ghosts - the sequel to Touching the Void, Storms of Silence, Dark Shadows Falling, The Beckoning Silence and one previous novel, The Water People.

“Touching the Void author Joe Simpson’s new novel is another gripping mountaineering epic, but also much more than that, a fine poetically written meditation on love, loss and redemption.”               Daily Mail

The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco

 

This Umberto Eco’s most ambitious  novel since The Name of the Rose – a brilliant historical novel, which has already sold over a million copies in Europe

Nineteenth-century Europe, from Turin to Prague to Paris, abounds with the ghastly and the mysterious. Conspiracies rule history. Jesuits plot against Freemasons. Italian priests are strangled with their own intestines. French criminals plan bombings by day and celebrate black masses by night. Every nation has its own secret service, perpetrating forgeries, plots, and massacres. From the unification of Italy to the Paris Commune to the Dreyfus Affair to the notorious forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Europe is in tumult and everyone needs a scapegoat.

But what if, behind all of these conspiracies both real and imagined, lay just one man? What if that evil genius created the most infamous document of all…?

“Umberto Eco is not the first to notice the overlap between fiction-making and criminality. But few books have explored the idea with the ingenuity and imagination that Eco does in this magnificent new novel, which marks a return to the heady mixture of absorbing ideas and down-and-dirty historical detail that made The Name of the Rose (1980) such an international bestseller in the 1980′s.”                      Adam Lively, Sunday Times

“Like The Name of the Rose, it is about dangerous writing; books for which men will commit murders. Like Foucault’s Pendulum, it delves into the paranoiac mind of conspiracy theorists, the awful ‘apophenia’ where everything is a sign for something else… it is a work of ingenious sleight of hand.”              Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday

 

 

1Q84

 

The year is 1984. Aomame sits in a taxi on the expressway in Tokyo.

Her work is not the kind which can be discussed in public but she is in a hurry to carry out an assignment and, with the traffic at a stand-still, the driver proposes a solution. She agrees, but as a result of her actions starts to feel increasingly detached from the real world. She has been on a top-secret mission, and her next job will lead her to encounter the apparently superhuman founder of a religious cult.

Meanwhile, Tengo is leading a nondescript life but wishes to become a writer. He inadvertently becomes involved in a strange affair surrounding a literary prize to which a mysterious seventeen-year-old girl has submitted her remarkable first novel. It seems to be based on her own experiences and moves readers in unusual ways. Can her story really be true?

Both Aomame and Tengo notice that the world has grown strange; both realise that they are indispensable to each other. While their stories influence one another, at times by accident and at times intentionally, the two come closer and closer to intertwining.

“[Murakami's] towering new novel, his magnum opus, a work on a par with Don DeLillo’s Underworld or Roberto Bolano’s 2666..”                Stephen Amidon, Sunday Times

“It is a work of maddening brilliance and gripping originality, deceptively casual in style, but vibrating with wit, intellect and ambition.”             Richard Lloyd Parry, The Times

 

 

Nightwoods by Charles Frazier

 

The main lesson Luce had learned was that you couldn’t count on anybody.

In the lonesome beauty of the forest, across the far shore of the mountain lake from town, Luce acts as caretaker to an empty, decaying Lodge, a relic of holidaymakers a century before. Her days are long and peaceful, her nights filled with Nashville radio and yellow lights shimmering on the black water. A solitary life, and the perfect escape.

Until the strange children come.

Bringing fire. And murder. And love.

“His best book to date…Frazier’s exquisitely efficient style is matched by some finely tuned suspense…And the climactic pursuit through the darkened forest of the book’s title proves to be gripping without ever descending into gothic melodrama.’                       Sunday Times

“Charles Frazier’s third novel is as accomplished as his first two…In anyone else’s hands, this might turn out to be a gripping but ultimately forgettable thriller. Frazier, however, is a writer whose spare prose paradoxically oozes atmosphere – you can almost smell the verdant pine trees and hear the crack of the twigs underfoot…Beneath the chilling, photogenic story, the writing remains beautiful.”     Independent

 

 

Ed King by David Guterson

 

In 1962, actuary Walter Cousins makes the biggest mistake of his life. When mild-mannered Walter – ‘a man who weighs risk for a living’ – sleeps with the sharp-tongued, not-quite-legal British au pair, Diane Burroughs, he can have no sense of the magnitude of his error. For this brief affair sets in motion a tragedy of epic proportions, upending Sophocles’ immortal tale of fate, free will, and forbidden desire. At the centre is Ed King, an infant given up for adoption who becomes one of the world’s richest and most powerful men. But beneath the sizzling story of Ed’s seemingly inexorable rise to fame and fortune is a dark and unsettling destiny, one that approaches with ever-increasing suspense as the book reaches its shattering and surprising conclusion. An assured, and epic novel, Ed King is a classic of contemporary American life: a daringly told story of a man and a myth, of blindness and narcissism, and of the precarious foundations on which carefully constructed lives are built – and timeless stories are created. From the bestselling author of Snow Falling on Cedars, a dazzling, darkly funny, extraordinary modern take on an ancient tragedy.

The Sealed Letter by Emma Donoghue

 

After a separation of many years, Emily ‘Fido’ Faithfull bumps into her old friend Helen Codrington on the streets of Victorian London. Much has changed: Helen is more and more unhappy in her marriage to the older Vice-Admiral Codrington, while Fido has become a successful woman of business and a pioneer in the British Women’s Movement. But, for all her independence of mind, Fido is too trusting of her once-dear companion and finds herself drawn into aiding Helen’s obsessive affair with a young army officer.

When the Vice-Admiral seizes the children and sues for divorce, the women’s friendship unravels amid accusations of adultery and counter-accusations of cruelty and attempted rape, as well as a mysterious ‘sealed letter’ that could destroy more than one life…

Based on blow-by-blow newspaper reports of the 1864 Codrington Divorce, The Sealed Letter, full of sparkling characters and wicked dialogue, is a thought-provoking mystery and gripping drama of friends, lovers and marriage. A wonderful new book from the author of Room.

“A very enjoyable romp.”     Independent on Sunday

“Donoghue plunges her readers headlong into her deeply researched world…[she] never allows the pace to falter, while her fresh imagery and fastidious attention to period detail…recall the immersive, mock-Victorian milieu of Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White…It’s in her characterisation that Donoghue is most successful.”                  Big Issue

“Blissfully readable and immaculately researched.”                  The Times

“The Sealed Letter is an enjoyable romp with subtle intrigue woven into the plot and demonstrates a deftness for dialogue, brining to life the well-painted characters.”                    Press Association

“Set in Victorian England and based on a real-life divorce case that scandalised the country in 1864, it tells the tale of two female friends whose lives are never the same again once one of them embarks on an obsessive affair.”      Bella

“A page-turning drama packed with sex, passion and intrigue.”           Daily Mail

“The author interlaces hard-hitting historical fact and imaginative fiction into the narrative with a deft and breezy touch: the reader can almost hear the characters’ voices long after closing the book.”                   Sunday Telegraph

 

 

The Fear Index by Robert Harris

A chilling contemporary thriller from Robert Harris set in the competitive world of high finance

His name is carefully guarded from the general public but within the secretive inner circles of the ultra-rich Dr Alex Hoffmann is a legend – a visionary scientist whose computer software turns everything it touches into gold.

Together with his partner, an investment banker, Hoffmann has developed a revolutionary form of artificial intelligence that tracks human emotions, enabling it to predict movements in the financial markets with uncanny accuracy. His hedge fund, based in Geneva, makes billions.

But then in the early hours of the morning, while he lies asleep with his wife, a sinister intruder breaches the elaborate security of their lakeside house. So begins a waking nightmare of paranoia and violence as Hoffmann attempts, with increasing desperation, to discover who is trying to destroy him.

His quest forces him to confront the deepest questions of what it is to be human. By the time night falls over Geneva, the financial markets will be in turmoil and Hoffmann’s world – and ours – transformed forever.

“As in Frankenstein, an over-reaching scientist finds himself desperately battling to destroy what he’s created. Depicting all this with sardonic relish, Harris switches the high-tension techniques that give his thrillers their heart-pounding suspense into black comic mode…The Fear Index is both cutting edge and keenly conscious of its literary predecessors… a tour-de-force.”                      Sunday Times

“Like all Harris’ books, this one is readily enjoyable as a suspense story…But what makes Harris’ thrillers so much more rewarding than those of his rivals is that they all… come out of his deep and expert interest in politics, broadly conceived–which is to say, in power, in how power is taken, held and lost; how some people are able to dominate others; how wealth and status, fear and greed, work…The Fear Index…is ultimately a study in the total lack of morality of those who manipulate the markets…in its own carefully conceived terms, The Fear Index is certainly another winner.”                        Evening Standard

“Harris is a master of pace and entertainment, and The Fear Index is a thoroughly enjoyable book…Read the book. If I die tomorrow, blame the computer.”                       Observer

“A fine dystopian parable, especially impressive for the fact that instead of giving up on what really goes on in most banks and hedge funds and making them a mere back drop for money-laundering and ancillary skulduggery, as many thriller-writers have done, his heart of darkness is the thing itself. The drama contains, as he notes in the acknowledgments, ‘Gothic flights of fantasy’–the story reminiscent of everyone from Michael Crichton to Ian Fleming, Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock. Yet there is an uncomfortable core of reality there…Quite a few Financial Times readers will, I suspect, not only savour The Fear Index, but wince with recognition.”                   Financial Times

“The Fear Index is an escapist thriller to rank with the best of them, and as a guide to what hedge funds actually do, it is surprisingly clear and instructive.”        Economist

 

 

About Whom…

 

This is a Call: the Life and Times of Dave Grohl by Paul Brannigan

 

This is a Call is the story of Dave Grohl, and his story is very much the tale of the Washington DC and Seattle Punk Rock scenes. From Mission Impossible, the first band he was ever in, to Dain Bramage where he was the frontman (lead guitar, and lead vocals) and dropping out of school as a teenager to go on tour as drummer for the band Scream. And then follows that magic moment in nineties rock music when he meets Kurt Cobain and joins Nirvana and the pivotal album Nevermind is created which turns the world upside down. And when Kurt dies and Dave decides that he’s not finished yet, how he accepts that, whatever he does next, the shadow of Nirvana will always loom over it. And how he sets about, over the next 18 years to emerge from that shadow, establishing Foo Fighters as a world-class act through hard work and perseverance, conceiving all manner of collaborations: from drumming for Queens of the Stone Age to hardcore underground albums Harlingtox AD and Probot to forming Them Crooked Vultures in 2009 and writing and performing the soundtrack for the Hollywood movie Touch, Dave Grohl has done it all. Biographer Paul Brannigan, former editor of Kerrang magazine, is clearly in awe of Dave Grohl, “the nicest man in Rock.” And as he racks up and ticks off accomplishment after accomplishment you cannot help but agree with the lofty claim that “this is the story of the man who changed music forever.”

Freddie Mercury: The Definitve Biography by Lesley-Ann Jones

 

Written by an award-winning rock journalist, Lesley-Ann Jones toured widely with Queen forming lasting friendships with the band. Now, having secured access to the remaining band members and those who were closest to Freddie, from childhood to death, Lesley-Ann has written the most in depth account of one of music’s best loved and most complex figures.

Meticulously researched, sympathetic, unsensational, the book focuses on the period in the 1980s when Queen began to fragment, before their Live Aid performance put them back in the frame.

In her journey to understand the man behind the legend, Lesley-Ann Jones has travelled from London to Zanzibar to India. Packed with exclusive interviews and told with the invaluable perspective that the twenty years since Mercury’s death presents, Freddie Mercury is the most up to date portrait of a legendary man and a great performer.

 

 

Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel, Nazi Agent by Hal Vaughan

 

Coco Chanel, high priestess of couture, created the look of the chic modern woman: her simple and elegant designs freed women from their corsets and inspired them to crop their hair. By the 1920s, Chanel employed more than two thousand people in her workrooms, and had amassed a personal fortune. But at the start of the Second World War, Chanel closed down her couture house and went to live quietly at the Ritz, moving to Switzerland after the war. For more than half a century, Chanel’s life from 1941 to 1954 has been shrouded in contradictions. Neither Chanel nor her biographers have told the full story, until now.

In this explosive narrative Hal Vaughan pieces together Chanel’s hidden years, from the Nazi occupation of Paris to the aftermath of the Liberation. He uncovers the truth of Chanel’s anti-Semitism and long-whispered collaboration with Hitler’s officials. In particular, Chanel’s long relationship with ‘Spatz’, Baron von Dincklage, previously described as a tennis-playing playboy and German diplomat, and finally exposed here as a Nazi master spy and agent who ran an intelligence ring in the Mediterranean and reported directly to Joseph Goebbels.

Sleeping with the Enemy tells in detail how Chanel became a German intelligence operative, Abwehr agent F-7124; how she was enlisted in spy missions, and why she evaded arrest in France after the war. It reveals the role played by Winston Churchill in her escape from retribution; and how, after a nine-year exile in Switzerland with Dincklage, and despite French investigations into her espionage activities, Coco was able to return to Paris and triumphantly reinvent herself – and rebuild the House of Chanel.

As Hal Vaughan shows, far from being a heroine of France, Chanel was in fact one of its most surprising traitors.

“Riveting History…An Astonishing Story.”            Washington Post

“A terrific and fascinating story…It is that rarest of good reads, a biography about a famous person with a surprise on every page. Nancy Mitford, I think, would have loved it, and written a wonderful letter to Evelyn Waugh about it!”       Daily Beast

“It takes a spy to catch a spy…Hal Vaughan, a former newsman and CIA operative, has finally done what the legions of Coco Chanel’s other biographers resolutely failed to do: uncover the French fasion queen’s secret past as a Nazi agent…Vaughan, who writes with welcome economy and flair, deserves a lot of credit for finally unravelling the strands of Chanel’s deeply deceptive personality.” Financial Times

 

 

[Sic] by Joshua Cody

 

Joshua Cody was about to receive his PhD from Columbia University when he was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer. He underwent six months of chemotherapy. The treatment failed. Expectations for survival plummeted. After consulting with several oncologists, he embarked on a risky course of high-dose chemotherapy, full body radiation, and an autologous bone marrow transplant. In a fevered, mesmerising voice, slaloming between references to Ezra Pound, The Rolling Stones and Beethoven, he charts the struggle: the fury, the tendancy to self-destruction, the ruthless grasping for life, for sensation – the beautiful Ariel who gives him cocaine and a blowjob in a Manhattan restaurant following his first treatment; the detailed Hungarian morphine fantasy complete with bride called Valentina while, in reality, hospital staff are pinning him to his bed. As fresh and beguiling as it is brave and revealing, Joshua Cody has created a book that gives readers a long glimpse into a dark thrashing in the forecourt of death. Literary, hallucinatory and at times uncomfortable reading, [sic] is ultimately a celebration of art, language music and life.

Arms and the Man…

 

 

The Devil in the Detail by Paul Holden and Hennie van Vuuren

 

The South African Arms Deal was never a single event. Rather it was, and still is, a series of scandals and outrages, all contributing towards a dubious momentum that takes South Africa further away from transparent democratic practice.

The Devil in the Detail, written by two of South Africa’s leading researchers on the subject, takes the reader on a journey of insight. Witness at close hand the breaking open of State secrets, with tales of outrageous personal enrichment. Explore how the Arms Deal emerged out of the criminal networks of both the old SADF and the ANC’s security apparatus, raising questions as to whether South Africa’s remarkable transition was not oiled, at key points, by criminal intent and collusion.

Follow the trail of the various offset deals done after the Arms Deal – cumulatively worth just as much as – and discover that corruption continues to impact on defence spending in South Africa. Examine the economics and witness how the Arms Deal was not only economically irrational, but virtually suicidal, almost single-handedly derailing the post-apartheid economic project. Finally, read about the rise of the ‘shadow state’, the politicisation of prosecutions, and the rise of the ‘spooks’.

The remarkable conclusion of this landmark study by two eminently qualified experts is that years after the deal took place, the forces that drove its decisions have only grown in strength, further blighting South Africa’s prospects for a future in which all may have a share.

Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade by Andrew Feinstein

Pulling back the curtain on the secretive world of the global arms trade, Andrew Feinstein reveals the corruption and the cover-ups behind weapons deals ranging from the largest in history – between the British and Saudi governments – to BAE’s controversial transactions in South Africa, Tanzania and eastern Europe, and the revolving-door relationships that characterise the US Congressional-Military-Industrial Complex. He exposes in forensic detail both the formal government-to-government trade in arms and the shadow world of illicit weapons dealing – and lays bare the shocking and inextricable links between the two.

The Shadow World places us in the midst of the arms trade’s dramatic wheeling and dealing, ranging from corporate boardrooms to seedy out-of-the-way hotels via far-flung offshore havens, and reveals the profound danger this network represents to all of us.

Andrew Feinstein is the author of After the Party: A Personal and Political Journey Inside the ANC, a best-selling memoir of his time as an African National Congress Member of Parliament in South Africa. His journalism has been featured in the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, Prospect, the New York Times, Der Spiegel, the New Statesman and Africa Report. In 2011 he authored the lead article in the authoritative Sipri Yearbook. He appears regularly on the BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera. He has recently been an Open Society Institute International Fellow and is the founding co-director of Corruption Watch, an anti-corruption NGO, and chairperson of the Aids charity FoTAC.

“The “Shadow World” peels back the veil of secrecy behind which the global arms trade undermines accountable democracy, socioeconomic development, and human rights, causing suffering across the world. In the same way that Andrew Feinstein exposed a corrupt arms deal that darkened South Africa’s rainbow nation, he has now turned his forensic gaze on the impact of similar weapons deals around the world. This book is essential reading for anyone who cares about justice, transparency, and accountability in both the public and private spheres, and for anyone who believes that it is more important to invest in saving lives than in the machinery of death.”             Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Something Beautiful

 

 

Adjaye · Africa · Architecture: A Photographic Survey of Metropolitan Architecture in 7 Volumes by David Adjaye

 

At just over forty, David Adjaye is one of the world’s most exciting and accomplished architects, and has built many highly acclaimed houses and public buildings in the UK and USA. Over a ten-year period, the Tanzanian born, London-based architect has visited 53 major African cities and photographed thousands of buildings, sites and places that few of us will ever be able to visit.

This beautiful 7-volume slipcased edition documents Adjayes tribute to African metropolitan architecture. The individual volumes present cities according to the terrain in which they are situated the Maghreb, Desert, The Sahel, Savannah and Grassland, Mountain and Highveld, and Forest. Each city is shown in a concise urban history, fact file, maps and satellite imagery, along with Adjaye’s personal travel notes and dozens of photographs of the cities’ civic, commercial and residential architecture. All six terrain volumes feature an introductory essay by Adjaye, and a separate volume is dedicated to essays by leading academics and commentators on Africa.

Bento’s Sketchbook by John Berger

 

The seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza – generally known as Benedict (or Bento) de Spinoza – spent the most intense years of his short life writing. A keen draughtsman, he also carried with him a sketchbook. After his sudden death, his friends rescued letters, manuscripts, notes, but apparently didn’t find a sketchbook. Or, if they did, it was subsequently lost. For years, John Berger has imagined Bento’s sketchbook being found, not knowing what he hoped to find in it, but wanting to reread his words while being able to look at the things Bento had seen with his own eyes. When one day a friend gave John a blank sketchbook he began to draw: not like a seventeenth-century Dutch amateur, nor to try and illustrate Bento’s thoughts, but drawing, in Spinoza’s company, from life today, and telling stories and asking questions. A book of images and words, Bento’s Sketchbook is an exploration of the practice of drawing, about where and to what it leads. It is, too, a beautiful, clear-sighted meditation on how we perceive, and seek to explain, our ever-changing relationship with the world around us.

“I admire and love John Berger’s books. He writes about what is important, not just interesting. In contemporary English letters, he seems to me peerless; not since Lawrence has there been a writer who offers such attentiveness to the sensual world with responsiveness to the imperatives of conscience. He is a wonderful artist and thinker.”       Susan Sontag

With a Nod to History…

 

 

The Elizabethans by A.N. Wilson

 

With all the panoramic sweep of his bestselling study The Victorians, A. N. Wilson relates the exhilarating story of the Elizabethan Age. It was a time of exceptional creativity, wealth creation and political expansion. It was also a period of English history more remarkable than any other for the technicolour personalities of its leading participants.

Apart from the complex character of the Virgin Queen herself, we follow the story of Francis Drake and political intriguers like William Cecil and Francis Walsingham, so important to a monarch who often made a key strategy out of her indecisiveness. Favourites like Leicester and Essex skated very close to the edge as far as Elizabeth’s affections were concerned, and Essex made a big mistake when he led a rebellion against the crown.

There was a Renaissance during this period in the world of words, which included the all-round hero and literary genius, Sir Philip Sidney, playwright-spy Christopher Marlowe and that ‘myriad-minded man’, William Shakespeare.

Life in Elizabethan England could be very harsh. Plague swept the land. And the poor received little assistance from the State. Thumbscrews and the rack could be the grim prelude to the executioner’s block. But crucially, this was the age when modern Britain was born, and established independence from mainland Europe. After Sir Walter Raleigh established the colony of Virginia, English was destined to become the language of the great globe itself, and the the foundations were laid not only of later British imperial power but also of American domination of the world.

“Wilson’s one volume histories – such as The Victorians and Our Times - have a very adept facility in limning both the continuities and the dramatic changes over an era…Wilson brings a novelist’s skill with detail in rendering the large cast human. Much attention is paid to the literary figures of the period , and Wilson makes a wonderful defence of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, a poem too often overlooked as dreamy allegory….And for such an English book, there is a curious homage to Scotland. Elizabeth, Wilson argues, was more influenced by John Knox then we might have thought.”                    Scotland on Sunday

“The author, well known for his magisterial overview of the Victorian period, works steadily through Elizabeth’s reign… the England Wilson describes is one of perennial fascination to readers of both history and fiction. It continues to draw scholars because this is where modern Britain was forged; we can see ourselves in the past. Wilson captures this particularly well in his description of the doomed struggle to dominate Ireland and in his understanding of the progress of the Reformation in England…There is much to treasure.”               Financial Times

“The Elizabethans is much more than a reanimation of some of the most vigorous personalities of that, or any, age. It is a largely successful attempt to recapture the energy and spirit of a time of burgeoning self-confidence in a variety of fields–statecraft, pageantry, exploration, poetry, drama–which nonetheless does not pass over the more ‘difficult’ aspects of the reign, including the plight of the majority of women, the poor, the Irish, Catholics and those whose systematic enslavement provided the blood-money for an incipient British Empire… At times Wilson’s perceptions of his subject are more than a match for the professionals, and twice as well-expressed…The Elizabethans is itself a fitting monument to an expansive epoch.”           Daily Telegraph

 

 

Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis

 

If the quest for Mount Everest began as a grand imperial gesture, as redemption for an empire of explorers that had lost the race to the Poles, it ended as a mission of regeneration for a country and a people bled white by war. Of the twenty-six British climbers who, on three expeditions (1921-24), walked 400 miles off the map to find and assault the highest mountain on Earth, twenty had seen the worst of the fighting. Six had been severely wounded, two others nearly killed by disease at the Front, one hospitalised twice with shell shock. Three as army surgeons dealt for the duration with the agonies of the dying. Two lost brothers, killed in action. All had endured the slaughter, the coughing of the guns, the bones and barbed wire, the white faces of the dead.

In a monumental work of history and adventure, ten years in the writing, Wade Davis asks not whether George Mallory was the first to reach the summit of Everest, but rather why he kept on climbing on that fateful day. His answer lies in a single phrase uttered by one of the survivors as they retreated from the mountain: “The price of life is death.” Mallory walked on because for him, as for all of his generation, death was but ‘a frail barrier that men crossed, smiling and gallant, every day’.

As climbers they accepted a degree of risk unimaginable before the war. They were not cavalier, but death was no stranger. They had seen so much that it had no hold on them. What mattered was how one lived, the moments of being alive. For all of them Everest had become an exalted radiance, a sentinel in the sky, a symbol of hope in a world gone mad.

“`magnificent .. impressive…a vivid account.”      Observer

“profoundly ambitious…impressive…its intentions are terrific.”             Sunday Telegraph

“A meticulous recreation …The death in 1912 of Captain Scott and his companions in the Antarctic set a precedent of sacrifice for the generation of young British men who, a few years later, would hurl themselves into the maelstrom of the Great War. That Scott’s expedition was, according to later accounts, doomed by incompetent leadership only makes its failure seem more prophetic. Now, in Wade Davis’s magnificent new book, the remaining goal of imperial exploration is seen as an outcome of – and response to – the First World War. While Scott’s expedition was, in some ways, an exercise in heroic futility, the conquest of Mount Everest could help to exorcise the massed ghosts of the dead.”      Observer

“A magnificent, audacious venture…Into the Silence is quite unlike any other mountaineering book. It not only spins a gripping Boy’s Own yarn about the early British expeditions to Everest, but investigates how the carnage of the trenches bled into a desire for redemption at the top of the world. Many of those Himalayan explorers, including Mallory, had served in the corpse-ridden fields of northern France. Indeed, of the 26 men who climbed in the three expeditions, 20 had seen front-line action. Six had been severely wounded, two others hospitalized by disease at the front, and one treated for shell shock. All had seen dozens of friends and countrymen die. For these veterans, the author argues, death had lost its power…At its heart, Into the Silence is an elegy for a lost generation.”                   Sunday Times

“Combining the pace of a thriller with a degree of detail as nuanced as any academic study, this is an atmospheric and exhilarating book“                     Time Out

“I was captivated. Wade Davis has penned an exceptional book on an extraordinary generation. They do not make them like that anymore. And there would always only ever be one Mallory. From the pathos of the trenches to the inevitable tragedies high on Everest this is a book deserving of awards. Monumental in its scope and conception it nevertheless remains hypnotically fascinating throughout. A wonderful story tinged with sadness.”                       Joe Simpson, author of Touching the Void

 

 

Pakistan: A Personal History by Imran Khan

 

Born only five years after Pakistan was created in 1947, Imran Khan has lived his country’s history. Undermined by a ruling elite hungry for money and power, Pakistan now stands alone as the only Islamic country with a nuclear bomb, yet it is unable to protect its people from the carnage of regular bombings from terrorists and its own ally, America. Now with the revelation that Pakistan has been the hiding place of Osama bin Laden for several years, that relationship can only grow more strained. How did it reach this flashpoint of instability and injustice with such potentially catastrophic results for Pakistan?

Recounting his country’s history through the prism of his own memories, Imran Khan starts from its foundation, ripped out of the dying British Raj. He guides us through and comments on subsequent historical developments which shook the Muslim world – the wars with India in 1965 and 1971, the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the 9/11 terrorist attacks and America’s retribution 10 years later with the assassination of bin Laden – to the current controversial and intractable war in Afghanistan. We see these events viewed not only through the eyes of Westerners, but through those of ordinary Pakistanis.

Drawing on the experiences of his own family and his wide travels within his homeland, Pakistan: A Personal History provides a unique insider’s view of a country unfamiliar to a western audience. Woven into this history we see how Imran Khan’s personal life – his happy childhood in Lahore, his Oxford education, his extraordinary cricketing career, his marriage to Jemima Goldsmith, his mother’s influence and that of his Islamic faith – inform both the historical narrative and his current philanthropic and political activities. It is at once absorbing and insightful, casting fresh light upon a country whose culture he believes is largely misunderstood by the West.

South Africa Our Land

 

Torn Apart: 13 refugees retell their stories

 

First published in 2003, Torn Apart: Thirteen refugees tell their stories is a collection of accounts by refugees from five different war-torn African countries.

This year, the storytellers were re-interviewed and these new testimonies form part of the new edition. Part of the “Survival Stories” initiative by the Human Rights Media Centre, the book aims “to create awareness in local communities of the ongoing suffering endured by refugees”.

Papa Chris’s essay, ‘In transit’, describes his flight from Burundi to Zimbabwe, and then eventually to South Africa, where he escaped the war but found himself in a different kind of living hell. He and his wife lived in a Wendy house in someone else’s yard. “My landlord stopped us from using the toilet because he said we wasted water in flushing…we had to resort to using the toilet at Hanover Park taxi rank and at night we used plastic bags for toilets.”

They were also ordered not to speak their mother tongue, Kirundi, in the back yard, and a subsequent landlord told Chris’s wife to give their child urine to drink in order to save water.

Fani M, from Rwanda, speaks of the difficulty in finding a job or even opening a bank account in South Africa without a South African ID document. “‘No, it’s impossible. Without your GREEN (they emphasised green) ID, you cannot open an account…It would be easier for me to get a job if I had studied here. But we don’t have the money for studies and we can’t get loans because, again, we are required to present the green ID.”

Some tales are more chilling. In his account, “Feeling sorry for myself just makes it worse”, Collin Emanuel from Angola tells a horrendous story: “I will never forget the day I returned home sick from work. I got myself into bed and asked the people with whom I was sharing a house to buy some Panado and Medlemon from the shop. I gave them R5 for the medicine but they went and bought poison for me. When I took those tablets I immediately lost consciousness. That was when they threw paraffin on my body and burnt me.”

Some stories are uplifting – other refugees speak of the kindliness of their neighbours: “When I am in hospital or when things are bad, they feed us and look after my kids. They help me every time the situation is out of my control.”

Says the Human Rights Media Centre, “The hope is that awareness will lead to understanding and compassion, not only among individual South Africans, but also in institutions of learning, banks and workplaces, and at the level of government policy-making and implementation.”

Writing the Deep South by Ariel Dorfman

 

From his first visit to South Africa in 1997, Ariel Dorfman, acclaimed Chilean-American author, human rights activist and distinguished professor, has felt a deep connection to the country, its people and the issues it grapples with.

In Writing the Deep South Dorfman has brought together a personal selection of his widely read texts from past decades that are of particular significance to South Africans. In these pieces, Dorfman reflects on familiar challenges and issues such as terror and peace, bilingualism and globalisation, compassion and war, torture, fear and dignity in the aftermath of 9/11, civilisation and barbarism, and the necessity and insufficiency of truth commissions. He draws from Latin Americans such as Che Guevara and Gabriel García Márques that have exceptional messages for South Africans. There is also his 2010 Mandela Lecture, and reflections on what it will mean to say goodbye to Nelson Mandela.

Writing the Deep South is a volume that holds up multiple mirrors for South Africa and the rest of the world, allowing a welcome reflective space for the pressing issues of language, identity, renewed struggle and integrity.

 

 

Clever Stuff

 

 

Price of Civilisation: Economics and Ethics after the Fall by Jeffrey Sachs

 

One of the world’s most brilliant economists and the bestselling author of The End of Poverty, Jeffrey Sachs has written a book that is essential reading for everyone – politicians, people in business and industry, and you. Setting out a bold and provocative, yet responsible and achievable, plan, The Price of Civilisation reveals why we must – and how we can – change our entire economic culture in this time of crisis.

The world economy remains in a precarious state after the recent global recession – where quick fixes were implemented instead of sustainable solutions to systemic problems. Jeffrey Sachs argues powerfully for a new co-operative, common-sense political economy, one that stresses practical partnership between government and the private sector, demands competence in both arenas and occasionally insists on carefully chosen public and private sacrifices. In this new era of global capitalism, Sachs believes that we have to forget partisanship and solve these enormous problems together, clinically and holistically, just as one would approach the eradication of a disease.

Sparing no-one but potentially benefiting us all, The Price of Civilisation is a masterful roadmap, a programme designed to bridge seemingly impossible divides in our society and a way forward that we – and our leaders – ignore at our peril.

“The ideas in the book have a hook you won’t forget; the end of poverty… In Jeff’s hands, the millstone of opportunity around our necks becomes an adventure, something doable and achievable.”                      Bono

 

 

The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes by Stephen Pinker

 

This riveting, myth-destroying book reveals how, contrary to popular belief, humankind has become progressively less violent, over millenia and decades. Can violence really have declined? The images of conflict we see daily on our screens from around the world suggest this is an almost obscene claim to be making. Extraordinarily, however, Steven Pinker shows violence within and between societies – both murder and warfare – really has declined from prehistory to today. We are much less likely to die at someone else’s hands than ever before. Even the horrific carnage of the last century, when compared to the dangers of pre-state societies, is part of this trend.

Debunking both the idea of the ‘noble savage’ and an over-simplistic Hobbesian notion of a ‘nasty, brutish and short’ life, Steven Pinker argues that modernity and its cultural institutions are actually making us better people. He ranges over everything from art to religion, international trade to individual table manners, and shows how life has changed across the centuries and around the world – not simply through the huge benefits of organized government, but also because of the extraordinary power of progressive ideas. Why has this come about? And what does it tell us about ourselves? It takes one of the world’s greatest psychologists to have the ambition and the breadth of understanding to appreciate and explain this story, to show us our very natures.

“Brilliant, mind-altering…Everyone should read this astonishing book.”         Guardian

“A supremely important book. To have command of so much research, spread across so many different fields, is a masterly achievement. Pinker convincingly demonstrates that there has been a dramatic decline in violence, and he is persuasive about the causes of that decline.”             New York Times

“[A] sweeping new review of the history of human violence…[Pinker has] the kind of academic superbrain that can translate otherwise impenetrable statistics into a meaningful narrative of human behaviour…impeccable scholarship.”                   Sunday Times

“Written in Pinker’s distinctively entertaining and clear personal style…a marvellous synthesis of science, history and storytelling.”      Financial Times

“A salutary reality-check…Better Angels is itself a great liberal landmark.”                Independent

“Pinker’s scholarhsip is astounding…flawless…masterful.”                   The Times

 

Happy Reading!

Megan