The Kailyard School is alive and well in contemporary Scottish fiction, but it has relocated to Botswana. Decidedly kicking against the hard-boiled masculine orthodoxies of recent Scottish crime fiction, Alexander McCall Smith’s best-selling No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series currently spans thirteen novels and has been adapted for a BBC/HBO television series by Richard Curtis and Anthony Read More
Jasper Fforde (Hodder Paperbacks, 2001), pbk. £7.99. Any avid peruser of the fiction shelves of second-hand bookshops very quickly realises by the sheer frequency with which certain titles recur that these have the widest readership and the most enduring popularity. Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair is one such novel (the sequel, Lost in a Good Read More
Ian Fleming (Vintage Classics, 2012); pbk, £5.99. In 1952, Ian Fleming fled London’s winter chill for Goldeneye, his home in Jamaica, with the aim of writing ‘the spy story to end all spy stories’. The result was Casino Royale (1953), and the birth of the most enduring fictional icon the world has ever seen. Dispatched Read More
The Wolf Stepped Out is a character study of a man straddling the threshold of madness in a world which at best cares little and at worst deliberately aggravates his psychosis. The titular “wolf” is Jason Irvine, a thirty-something former rock musician of the most uncompromising kind now facing a life without music, prospects, family, or Read More
First impressions often colour the perspective, and in the case of Alexander McCall Smith’s new novel, Trains and Lovers, the initial sense is of a self-help book most likely to be found close to the booksellers’ counter. The size, feel and appearance of the book give off that sense of introspection. McCall Smith is renowned for Read More
Drawing her New South Wales trilogy to a stunning conclusion, Kate Grenville’s latest novel, Sarah Thornhill, appeals to the romantic soul and the aesthete alike. Once more South-east Australia’s Hawkesbury River provides the mise-en-scène in which the Sydney-born author’s drama unfolds – an untamed coastline that exhibits as much personality as any one of the novel’s Read More
Chris Dolan’s new book, Redlegs, relocates from the Glasgow of his previous work, Ascension Day, to the seemingly exotic location of the Caribbean. Set in 1830, the novel follows the history of the poor whites (redlegsis the pejorative term used to describe them) as they leave Scotland to work in sugar plantations. The plantation becomes the new home Read More
Véronique Tadjo; author, scholar, artist, educator, brings us her unique take on the original myth of the Baoulé people of Côte D’Ivoire Queen Pokou: Concerto for a Sacrifice; it won the 2005 Grand Prix Littéraire D’Afrique Noire. Parisian-born Tadjo was brought up in Abidjan by her French mother and Ivorian father; such a cultural heterogenity may Read More
As much as we do not like to admit to such trivial temptation, it is often the title or the cover design that draws us to a book. A History of Sarcasm does not, however, represent a history or catalogue of the word sarcasm and its meanings. Seventeen of Burton’s published stories have been collected Read More