Reading Matters

Top 10s: Irish novels to look forward to in 2011

It's no mistake that my two favourite authors -- John McGahern and Jennifer Johnston -- are Irish: I'm a sucker for an Irish novel.

While I've already got dozens of Irish novels in my reading queue, I can never resist the allure of another, yet-to-be-purchased title to add to the collection.

Here's a selection of forthcoming titles, due for publication this year, which have attracted my interest. It's a good mix of literary fiction and crime fiction, and includes one short story collection. The books have been arranged in alphabetical order by author's surname.

Please note that the release dates quoted are for the UK and are subject to change.

Kevin Barry's City of Bohane 

Jonathan Cape, paperback, 288 pages (7 April)

Synopsis: "Forty years in the future. The once-great city of Bohane on the west coast of Ireland is on its knees, infested by vice and split along tribal lines. There are the posh parts of town, but it is in the slums and backstreets of Smoketown, the tower blocks of the Northside Rises and on the eerie bogs of Big Nothin’ that Bohane really lives.

"For years, the city has been in the cool grip of Logan Hartnett, the dapper godfather of the Hartnett Fancy gang. But there’s trouble in the air. They say his old nemesis is back in town; his trusted henchman is getting ambitious; and his missus wants him to give it all up and go straight...and then there's his mother.

"City of Bohane is a unique and visionary novel that blends influence from film and the graphic novel, from Trojan beats and calypso rhythms, from Celtic myth and legend, from fado and the sagas, and from all the great inheritance of Irish literature. A work of mesmerising imagination and vaulting linguistic invention, it is a taste of the startlingly new."

Click to download a preview.

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Sebastian Barry's On Canaan's Side

Faber and Faber, hardcover, 304 pages (4 August)

Synopsis: "Narrated by Lilly Bere, On Canaan’s Side opens as she mourns the loss of her grandson, Bill. The story then goes back to the moment she was forced to flee Sligo, at the end of the First World War, and follows her life through into the new world of America, a world filled with both hope and danger.

"At once epic and intimate, Lilly’s narrative unfurls as she tries to make sense of the sorrows and troubles of her life and of the people whose lives she has touched.

"Spanning nearly seven decades, it is a novel of memory, war, family-ties and love, which once again displays Sebastian Barry’s exquisite prose and gift for storytelling."

Click to download a preview.

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Benjamin Black's A Death in Summer

Mantle, hardcover, number of pages not known (11 July)

Synopsis: "When newspaper magnate Richard Jewell is found dead at his country estate, clutching a shotgun in his lifeless hands, few see his demise as cause for sorrow. But before long Doctor Quirke and Inspector Hackett realise that, rather than the suspected suicide, ‘Diamond Dick’ has in fact been murdered.

"Jewell had made many enemies over the years and suspicion soon falls on one of his biggest rivals. But as Quirke and his assistant Sinclair get to know Jewell's beautiful, enigmatic wife Françoise d’Aubigny, and his fragile sister Dannie, as well as those who work for the family, it gradually becomes clear that all is not as it seems.

"As Quirke’s investigations return him to the notorious orphanage of St Christopher’s, where he once resided, events begin to take a much darker turn. Quirke finds himself reunited with an old enemy and Sinclair receives sinister threats. But what have the shadowy benefactors of St Christopher’s to do with it all?

"Against the backdrop of 1950's Dublin, Benjamin Black conjures another atmospheric, beguiling mystery."

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Frank DeLaney's The Matchmaker of Kenmare: A Novel of Ireland

Random House, hardcover, 416 pages (8 February)

Synopsis: " 'And there’s a legend—she had only vague details—that all couples who are meant to marry are connected by an invisible silver cord which is wrapped around their ankles at birth, and in time the matchmaking gods pull those cords tighter and tighter and draw the couple slowly toward one another until they meet.' So says Miss Kate Begley, Matchmaker of Kenmare, the enigmatic woman Ben MacCarthy meets in the summer of 1943.

"As World War II rages on, Ben remains haunted by the mysterious disappearance of his wife, the actress Venetia Kelly. Searching for purpose by collecting stories for the Irish Folklore Commission, he travels to a remote seaside cottage to profile the aforementioned Matchmaker of Kenmare. Ben is immediately captivated by the forthright Miss Begley, who is remarkably self-assured in her instincts but provincial in her experience. Miss Begley is determined to see that Ben moves through his grief—and a powerful friendship is forged along the way.

"But when Charles Miller, a striking American military intelligence officer, arrives on the scene, Miss Begley develops an intense infatuation and looks to make a match for herself. Miller needs a favor, but it will be dangerous. Under the cover of their neutrality as Irish citizens, Miss Begley and Ben travel to London and effectively operate as spies. As they are drawn more deeply and painfully into the conflict, both discover the perils of neutrality—in both love and war.

"Steeped in colorful history, The Matchmaker of Kenmare is a stirring story of friendship and sacrifice. Frank Delaney has written a lush and surprising novel, rich as myth, tense as a thriller, and like all grand tales—harrowing, sometimes hilarious, and heartbreaking."

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Anne Enright's The Forgotten Waltz

Jonathan Cape, hardcover, 288 pages (28 April)

Synopsis: "In Terenure, a pleasant suburb of Dublin, in the winter of 2009, it has snowed. Gina Moynihan, girl about town, recalls the trail of lust and happenstance that brought her to fall for 'the love of her life'. As the city outside comes to a halt, Gina remembers the days of their affair in one hotel room or another: long afternoons made blank by bliss and denial. Now, as the silent streets and the stillness and vertigo of the falling snow make the day luminous and full of possibility, Gina waits the arrival on her doorstep of her lover's fragile, twelve-year-old daughter, Evie - the complication, and gravity, of this second life.

"In this extraordinary novel, this opening book of secrets, Anne Enright speaks directly to the readers she won with the success of The Gathering. Here, again, is the sudden, momentous drama of everyday life, the volatile connections between people; that fresh eye for each flinch and gesture; the wry, accurate take on families, marriage, brittle middle age. The same verve and humour and breathtaking control are evident; the ability to merge the ordinary and the beautiful.

"With The Forgotten Waltz Enright turns her attention fully to love as she follows another flawed and unforgettable heroine on a journey of the heart. This is Anne Enright's tour de force, a novel of intelligence, passion and real distinction."

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Carlo Grébler's The Dead Eight

New Island, paperback, number of pages not known (April 22)

Synopsis: "On a wet November morning in 1940 Harry Gleeson, a farm manager in his early forties, discovered the body of Moll McCarthy (also in her forties) in a field, near Marlhill, a couple of miles from the village of New Inn, Co. Tipperary. Moll McCarthy had been shot twice with a shotgun, once in the face.

"The local Guards decided immediately that there was only one suspect: the man who discovered the body, Harry Gleeson. Moll, they said, had seven children by seven different men one of whom, they alleged was Gleeson. His motive for killing Moll McCarthy they said was that she was blackmailing him and threatening to expose him.

"Within days of reporting the body, Harry Gleeson was arrested and, early in 1941, he was convicted of Moll McCarthy's murder. It seemed like justice had been done except that, as everyone in New Inn knew, Gleeson had never had a relationship with Moll McCarthy, had never had a child with Moll McCarthy and, if that wasn't enough, he also had a cast iron alibi. Her killer, as was also widely known, was more than likely the father of her seventh child.

"Carlo Gébler's novel is an attempt to explain, using the known facts, augmented with invented or speculative material, the motives of the man and his accomplices who killed Moll McCarthy, how the crime was committed, how the local police fabricated their case and fitted up Harry Gleeson, and why an entire community looked away as the Irish judicial system prosecuted, convicted and condemned to death an innocent man. Albert Pierrepoint (the hangman) executed Harry Gleeson in Mountjoy in April 1941."

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Alan Glynn's Limitless

Faber and Faber, paperback, 368 pages (3 March 2011)

Synopsis: "A stunning international thriller and a wild, compulsive ride into the greedy vortex of modern life.

"Imagine a drug that made your brain function to its full potential. A drug that allowed you to pick up a foreign language in a single day.  A drug that helped you process information so fast you could see patterns in the stock market.

"Just as his life is fading into mediocrity, Eddie Spinola comes across such a pill: MDT-48 - a sort of Viagra for the brain. But while its benefits materialise quickly, so do certain unwelcome side-effects. And when Eddie decides to track down other users, he soon discovers that they’re all dying, or already dead..."

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Gene Kerrigan's The Rage

Harvill Secker, paperback, 304 pages (2 June)

Synopsis: "Vincent Naylor is a professional thief, as confident as he is reckless. Just ten days out of jail, and he’s preparing his next robbery. Already, his plan is unravelling.

"While investigating the murder of a crooked banker, Detective Sergeant Bob Tidey gets a call from an old acquaintance, Maura Coady. The retired nun believes there’s something suspicious happening in the Dublin backstreet where she lives alone.

"Maura’s call inadvertently unleashes a storm of violence that will engulf Vincent Naylor and force Tidey to make a deadly choice.

"The Rage is a masterpiece of suspense, told against the background of a country’s shameful past and its troubled present."

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Alan Monaghan's The Soldier's Return

Pan MacMillan, paperback, 208 pages (4 March)

Synopsis: "Battered and broken by three years of fighting, Stephen Ryan returns to Ireland – to the woman he loves, and in the hope of a return to his old life. But, instead, he finds the seeds of a new conflict are being sown in Dublin. Sinn Fein is resurgent, and more determined than ever to gain independence for Ireland. Stephen’s own brother is among those who are prepared to fight for their cause, and there is growing civil unrest at the shocking losses of the First World War and the threat of conscription looming over Ireland. With the mood of the whole country changing, Stephen must ask himself if he has chosen the right side.

"All he knows is that he cannot stay at home. Despite his wounds, and his growing addiction to the morphine he needs to ease his pain, Stephen feels compelled to return to the front, where he has some hope of laying his ghosts to rest and where at least he knows where his loyalties lie.

"But war is deceitful – whether at home or abroad – and Stephen eventually finds himself dragged into a complex web of deceit and violence. He must think fast, as everything that he holds dear is threatened – this new Ireland has new, unpredictable rules."

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Edna O'Brien's Saints and Sinners

Faber and Faber, paperback, 224 pages (17 February)

Synopsis: "A woman walks the streets of Manhattan and contemplates with exquisite longing the precarious affair she has embarked on, amidst the grandeur and cacophony of the cityscape; a young Irish girl and her mother are thrilled to be invited to visit the glamorous Coughlan's but find - for all the promise of their green gorgette, silver shoes and fancy dinner parties - they leave disappointed; an Irishman in north London retraces his life as a young lad with his mates digging the streets and dreaming of the apocryphal gold, an outside both in Ireland and England, yet he carries the lodestar of his native land.

"This is a collection characterised by all of Edna O'Brien's trademark lyricism, powerful evocations of place and a glorious and an often heart-breaking grasp of people and their desires and contradictions."

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Are there any yet-to-be-released Irish books I have left out? Or are there any on this list that have piqued your interest? Which Irish novel are you most looking forward to reading in 2011?

'The Submerged Cathedral' by Charlotte Wood

Fiction - paperback; Vintage Australia; 297 pages; 2004.

Last year an English friend told me that one of the things that most impressed him about Australians was not their sense of humour, their propensity to drink vast quantities of beer or their prowess on the cricket field, but their affinity with natural history. "It seems to me," he said, "that you guys really love nature, you have an appreciation for it."

I told him that was probably largely due to bitter experience. Nature is harsh -- dare I mention droughts, floods, bushfire? -- and we have had to learn to live alongside it. In doing so we have come to appreciate its power and its beauty. And because so much of the flora and fauna is not found anywhere else on earth, many of these plants and animals have become national symbols in which Australians take pride and wish to protect.

This appreciation of nature is often found in Australian novels, too. Henry Lawson is probably one of the earliest proponents. But 20th century writers, such as Patrick White, Tim Winton, Randolph Stow and Murray Bail, just to name a few, have also written novels which look at how the Australian psyche is shaped by the landscape of this island continent.

Into this canon of Australian "nature novels", if I can call them that, is Charlotte Wood's second novel, The Submerged Cathedral, which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2005. This highly evocative book, written in stark but lyrical prose, puts the rugged beauty of the Australian landscape centre stage.

Divided into four key time periods -- 1963, 1964, 1975 and 1984 -- the story focuses mainly on Jocelyn, a proof reader, who has inherited her parent's home in the Blue Mountains. As she pours over the galleys of The Complete Illustrated Encyclopedia of Australia, she is reminded of the country's unique flora and begins to dream of building a "huge, elaborate garden of wild Australian plants" even though she is not a gardener and knows nothing of the plants other than she loves their names, their shapes.

The importance of Jocelyn's dream should not be under-estimated. This desire to build a native garden would have been hugely unfashionable at the time. Back then all Australian gardens were essentially English gardens, comprising annuals and perennials, with neatly pruned shrubbery and manicured lawns. Native plants were confined to the bush; you did not put them in your garden. (As an aside, one of my favourite scenes in George Johnston's My Brother Jack is when Davy, the main protagonist, plants a gum tree in the middle of his suburban lawn, attracting the wrath of the neighbourhood for daring to be so unconventional.)

And yet Jocelyn knows that English gardens in the Australian climate do not make sense.

All winter the garden is washed out and grey, and then in spring it explodes into colour. By midsummer it is leached dry again, but all through the childhoods of Jocelyn and her sister their mother had loved this eight weeks of English bloom.

When Jocelyn meets Martin, a doctor, from the city, the dream continues to ferment. She has a "sense of dormant things coming alive".

One day in the garden, they crouched over a bucket.
'Did you grow that?' Martin asked, peering into the bucket in which the white star of a water lily was prising itself open.
'It grew itself,' she said. 'I just threw a lump of wood into the water.'
'Then it's a gift,' he said, smiling.

Their love affair, which is portrayed with immense sensitivity and gentleness (surprisingly, there is little or no sex in this novel), is a gift also. It's 1963 and co-habiting is a social no-no. But Jocelyn risks her reputation to live with Martin, enduring the withering looks of locals who condemn her as "the doctor's mistress".

But there is a sense that Jocelyn knows exactly what she is doing. She is haunted by the memory of the man who asked to marry her when she was 18. She broke off their engagement a year later, knowing she did not love him. But her sister's voice, ripe with disbelief and pity, still echoes in her ear: "You know there's something wrong with you, don't you?"

And therein lies the nub of the novel: if we are damaged by our pasts how do we heal ourselves? And what role does love and faith play in this process?

When Ellen re-enters Jocelyn's life after a long absence -- she had been living with her Australian husband in London -- Ellen is hurting, too. She's left her husband, has a young daughter and is now three months pregnant.

Jocelyn returns to her parent's Blue Mountains home to look after her. Ellen is needy, demanding and prone to making her life seem more dramatic than it really is. Martin, once a central figure in Jocelyn's life, feels himself being squeezed out by the sister's shared bond. Jocelyn, so enamoured of Martin, is unable to compartmentalise her life: she cannot ignore Ellen's claim on her.

To elaborate further would spoil the plot. But I don't think I'm revealing any secrets when I say that Jocelyn does eventually get to build that wonderful, sublime garden, filled with native ground covers, grasses and shade trees, of her dreams. It is only then that you begin to realise that the garden is a kind of allegory about cultivating love in our hearts, reaping what we sow and finding solace in the natural world. 

The Submerged Cathedral is available to buy direct from the Australian publisher's website, but you can also pick up cheap second-hand copies via Amazon UK.

'Witness the Night' by Kishwar Desai

Fiction - Kindle edition; Beautiful Books; 352 pages; 2010.

Kishwar Desai's Witness the Night recently won the 2010 Costa First Novel Award. I was intrigued by the novel's exploration of the hidden world of female infanticide in India, so downloaded it to my Kindle shortly after the announcement was made.

The story opens with the diary entry of a 14-year-old girl that feels like a candid, if somewhat confused, confession to a crime in which she was involved. The details of the crime are hazy, but it appears that the girl might have staged her own rape in order to make it look like "someone had tried to hurt me".

The narrative then shifts to the social worker, Simran Singh, who has been assigned the case. It turns out that the girl, Durga, is now in a remand home, charged with the murder of 13 members of her family in one night. All of the victims had been poisoned, some had been stabbed and others burnt.

Despite the lack of fingerprints and no evidence to suggest an outsider was involved, Singh is convinced there is more to the story than meets the eye. She wonders if a man was involved or whether Durga acted in self-defence. She feels that the only reason the case has attracted a blaze of publicity is because of the large inheritance involved.

What follows is Singh's painstaking investigation in which she immerses herself in the convoluted Indian legal and judicial system in an attempt to unearth the truth. What she finds out along the way is often eye-opening. But it's not until she is forced to confront an entire culture intent on eliminating unwanted females, often before they are born, that Singh begins to understand Durga's dilemma.

Singh's narrative is bookmarked at the beginning and end of each chapter with two others: Durga's diary entries, which provide an insight into her thought processes and painful family history, and  Durga's London-based sister-in-law, Binny, who corresponds with Singh via email, offering further clues to Durga's complicated background.

While the story is easy to read and Singh is an intriguing, well-drawn and unconventional character -- 45 years old, single and still trying to escape her mother's emotional blackmail regarding the need to settle down and produce children -- the structure of the book doesn't quite work.

Binny's emails might give the story a contemporary feel and offer some clues to Durga's plight, but they come across as forced and interrupt the otherwise smooth flow of the narrative. By comparison, Durga's diary entries lack authenticity on the basis they just seem too well written for a traumatised teenager to have compiled. (They also offer way too many obvious clues as to what happened on the night of the murders.)

In her "Author's Note" Desai claims that while the characters in her book are fictional, the events are true. I suspect she is referring to infanticide as "events" or perhaps it's the actual crime? She doesn't specify. She adds: "There is a complicity of corruption between the police, the judicial system, politicians, media and the uncivil society [...] gender issues are still treated with contempt."

If that is truly the case, then hopefully Desai's novel may bring this problem to the attention of a wider audience. But despite the worthy aims of Witness the Night, I'm not sure that the story comes up with quite the same impact as, say, A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (about the Rwandan genocide), which I read shortly before it.

That said, Witness the Night is a refreshing take on the psychological crime novel. If you can forgive the author's tendency to editorialise (Desai tends to cram her normally effortless prose with chunky passages of facts and news-like observations), then this new series featuring Simran Singh is one that promises to be worth following.

'A Beautiful Place to Die' by Malla Nunn

Fiction - paperback; Pan MacMillan Australia; 408 pages; 2010.

It's hard to believe that A Beautiful Place to Die is Malla Nunn's first novel because it's such an accomplished piece of literature. Nunn, who was born in Swaziland but now resides in Sydney, Australia, is a filmmaker. She clearly brings her visual eye to her writing, because this is a truly evocative -- and provocative -- piece of work.

The story, which is set in South Africa in the spring of 1952, functions on one level as a straightforward murder mystery but at a deeper level it explores the immorality, prejudice, cruelty and violence of Apartheid rule.

It opens with the murder of a police captain in the rural town of Jacob's Rest. Captain Willem Pretorius, an Afrikaner widely respected in the community, has been found floating face down in a river with a bullet in his head and another in his back.

Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper, an "English" South African from Jo'berg, is called to investigate.

Cooper, still haunted by the battlefields of the Second World War, has no truck with the race laws. He sees his job in very simple terms: to find the perpetrator of the crime regardless of their skin colour.

But Cooper's code of ethics makes his task more difficult, because as far as the captain's wife and five adult sons are concerned, only a black man would kill a white. And when the police Security Branch step in to take over the investigation they're already eyeing up potential suspects that suit the outcome they desire, regardless of the truth.

Cooper finds himself in a difficult position (his life is put at risk on more than one occasion), but continues his work undaunted. He is aided by two allies, Zulu policeman Constable Samuel Shabalala and Dr Zweigman, a Jewish German who owns the town's general store.

The quick-paced narrative is filled with plenty of surprises, as Cooper sets out to unearth Pretorius' secret life while trying to hide secrets of his own...

A Beautiful Place to Die, first published in 2008, is a highly intelligent literary crime novel, one that brims with a slow burning anger. Not only does it reveal the sheer injustice (and stupidity) of The Immorality Act -- one of the first Apartheid laws -- which bans all sexual relations between whites and non-whites, it highlights the subjugation of black women and the volatile tension of racial segregation.

In Cooper, Nunn has created a slightly damaged but wise man with a strong moral compass and plenty of courage. It will be interesting to follow his development in the second instalment, Let the Dead Lie, which was published last year to critical acclaim.

'A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali' by Gil Courtemanche

Fiction - Kindle edition; Canongate; 320 pages; 2009. Translated from the French by Patricia Claxton.

One of the consequences of living in the fast-moving modern world is that we become desensitised to events that should shock us to the core.

We are bombarded with so much news and information that we cannot process it in any meaningful way. War, floods, famine might fill our TV screens every night but unless you are directly affected by those events we are too removed, both physically and mentally, to do much about it. Deaths become mere numbers -- and numbers are impersonal. What does it matter if 80 people were blown up by a suicide bomber in a country you've never been to and probably never will?

Thank goodness, then, for the humble novel, which still has the power to move -- and to shake us out of our complacency.

Gil Courtemanche's A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali is one such novel. It's set during the Rwandan genocide of 1994, in which more than 800,000 people were systematically slaughtered. It was an event that I was aware of in only the vaguest terms -- probably because, as Courtemanche writes in this novel, "the media don't show dead bodies cut up by men and shredded by vultures and wild dogs".

Now, having read this book, I know more about what happened in Rwanda than I possibly may have ever wanted to know, but it felt so much more real, heart-breaking and hard-hitting than anything the TV screen could have shown me at the time.

The story is told in the third person, but we see it mainly through the world-weary eyes of Bernard Valcourt, a widower and highly experienced journalist from Canada, who is bored with his job as a Radio-Canada producer.

When a friend informs him that the Canadian government is financing the establishment of a television station in Rwanda he jumps at the chance to be its co-director. We get a real sense of what makes Valcourt tick, because it's not the station's honorable cause -- which is to be educational, "particularly in community health and AIDS" -- that attracts him, but the idea that it will save him from the loneliness of his current existence.

But this is mere backstory, because when we first meet Valcourt, by the pool at the Hotel des Mille-Collines in Kingali where he resides, two years have passed since he accepted the job. The television station still hasn't been launched because the Rwandan government keeps finding reasons to put it off. Once again, Valcourt is bored -- and lonely.

But one thing had impassioned Valcourt. He had discovered with horror that over a third of Kingali's adults were HIV positive. The government was denying its own statistics. Those stricken with AIDS were living in infamy, shame, concealment and delusion. Only a few people were trying to face up to the disaster and, paradoxically, they were parish priests and nuns.

The disease is like a ghoulish spectre that hangs over the entire novel. There is so much death here that the coffin makers can't keep up with the demand.

But even this outrageous situation, which could easily be contained by condoms and education, is overshadowed by something more sinister: the looming genocide of the Tutsi population. (To paraphrase one character, people might be dying of AIDS and malaria, but the biggest killer is hate.)

On several occasions Valcourt describes the situation in Rwanda as "tropical Nazism". The country's "two ethnic groups, the Hutus, the majority by far, and the Tutsis, about fifteen per cent of the population, were locked in an undeclared civil war". But the Hutus, by sheer numbers and force, had the upper hand.

As a novelist, Courtemanche does not shy away from describing the consequences of this unchecked racism between two black groups. There's an overwhelming sense of hopelessness when family after family are being torn asunder by brutal rapes and savage murders. And yet, with every incident Courtemanche relays (often in overwhelming technicolor detail), the sense of abject pointlessness begins to build and build.

This is a country on the road to ruin, but no one, including the corrupt Rwandan government officials, the Hutu militia, the Westerners who swan around the pool at Kingali, the international media and the United Nations, do anything about it.

One might expect that Valcourt, already jaded by his time in Rwanda, would flee the country. But something holds him back. Without wishing to make the novel sound like a tacky romance, it's the love of a good woman who gives him reason to stay.

Indeed, his relationship with Gentille, a Hutu who looks like a Tutsi, is a welcome contrast to the death and destruction that fills most of this novel. While their life together is generally described in carnal terms (along with death, there's a lot of sex in this novel -- you have been warned), Gentille serves as a stark reminder that people cannot be simply classified as a Hutu or a Tutsi on appearance alone.

Time after time, Gentille must explain her background and show her ID card (specifying ethnicity) to prove it, but you know that not every machete-wielding Hutu is going to take the time to check.

Of course, a novel of this nature doesn't have an uplifting ending. It's based on a true story after all. Indeed, Courtemanche claims the book is an "eyewitness report" and that he hasn't bothered to change the names of those who planned and carried out the genocide. But as you read his account (masquerading as Bernard Valcourt's account) the sense of impending doom builds and builds. It reminded me a lot of Ma Jian's Beijing Coma, another novel with a real ring of authenticity about it.

Although there were times that I felt the author was editorialising, I never felt as if he was putting a spin on events or trying to make a point other than the fact that civil war and genocide is a messy, horrifying business and that while humans do terrible, unimaginable things to one another, life must go on. There is some finger-pointing at the Western media, but as a journalist, it's clear Courtemanche understands the constraints and machinations well enough to know that it would be foolish to pin all hopes on an international news organisation saving the day.

It's true that no one comes out of this novel looking good. The Westerners who live in the hotel come across as selfish ignoramuses, more intent on living a life of "great adventure" with "perks of prestige, power and freedom they'd never known before". And yet "every one of these good people gathered around the pool had seen a Rwandan colleague disappear mysteriously, or funds evaporate as if by magic."

The Belgians, who colonized Rwanda, come out of it looking pretty bad too, mainly for fuelling the racial tensions by favouring the Tutsis for their more "European" appearance.

The men of Rwanda, whether black, white or some colour in between, also come across as brutes who regard women as nothing more than sex objects. Gentille puts it in simple, eloquent terms when she tells Valcourt:

"My whole life, all I've ever heard is orders, advice, forbiddings, litanies, hyms and sermons. I've never been part of a conversation. I've also heard insults and roars from men showing they were pleased or frustrated, but the only long sentences meant just for me are the ones you've said."

And finally, the Hutus come across as Nazis, who arranged mass killings in an organised, systematic and savage manner. To put it more bluntly:

It was not because they were improvising or were out of their minds, but simply that they were too poor to build gas chambers.

I doubt very much whether this review has done justice to this eye-opening novel. It's probably the most confronting book I've ever read. It's so shocking and horrifying I felt dirty reading it. It also made me terribly ashamed. You only need to visit this website to see how the international community turned a blind eye to this terrible atrocity.

A Sunday at the Pool in Kingali spent more than a year on the Quebec best sellers list when it was published in the French language in 2000. That same year it won the Prix des Libraires, the booksellers' award for outstanding book of the year. I'm not in the least suprised. This is a profoundly important book that reveals so much more than a two-minute news bulletin ever could.

'Spinner' by Ron Elliott

Fiction - paperback; Fremantle Press; 472 pages; 2010.

If I said this was a book about cricket, I suspect many of you would have absolutely no interest in reading it. But even if you hate the sport, there's plenty to love about this story. Even Lisa Hill from ANZLitLovers, who is not a cricket fan, found herself enthralled by this one. (I'm grateful to Lisa for sharing the love and buying me a copy of my own...)

This novel is the first by Ron Elliott, who is also a television director and screen writer based in Western Australia. It's apparent that he has probably written it with an eye towards the big screen, because Spinner would make a terrific kid's movie. It's got brilliant dialogue, for a start, but it's also packed with plenty of drama and is peopled with richly drawn characters. And there's enough plot surprises to keep people on the edge of their seat throughout.

The story is set between the wars. Australia is in the grip of the Great Depression and there's not much to smile about. Even the national cricket team is experiencing a slump and losing out to its great cricketing rival, England, which has brought out a killer team for the latest test series.

That's where our hero enters the story. David Donald is a 12-year-old orphan whose father died in the battle fields of France during the Great War. His mother drowned in a dam on the family farm, where David is now being raised by his maternal grandfather, George Baker.  George, a "Scottish calvinist", was once a spin bowler for the state side, and is now training his grandson in the fine art of spin bowling.

David, who has especially long fingers, has a real talent for it, particularly as he seems able to use finger spin and wrist spin techniques when delivering the ball. (Here's your first cricket lesson: spin bowlers usually use one of these techniques, not both.) In fact, David is so impressive as a spin bowler that he catches the eye of the Australian Cricket Board, and -- you guessed it -- he becomes the youngest ever member of the national team.

Initially, I thought the story was preposterous (a kid who plays Test cricket at international level!!), but it somehow works because of Elliott's understated writing style. On the surface this is a simple tale about one boy's rise to national hero. But underneath there's a whole lot more going on about the Australian psyche, the way men relate to one another and the redemptive power of sport to cheer up a nation.

Because Spinner is told in the third person, we get an overview of events to which David is not privy. He's a child after all and much of what happens goes over his head.

And while he's being ferried around the country in the care of his Uncle Michael, we see that Michael is a spinner of a different variety. He's what Australians would call a bullshit artist, a man who likes to spin the truth in order to earn a bob or two. When David begins to understand that his uncle is not all that he seems, you really feel his pain -- and bewilderment.

While Spinner is fiction, Elliott has clearly based some of the characters on real cricketing heroes from the past and simply changed their names. The fun, if you are a cricket aficionado, is trying to work out who's a thinly veiled version of who. (I spotted English cricketer Douglas Jardine from the 1932-33 Bodyline series for a start.) It's also worth reading to try and spot which ball delivered by David Donald is based on Shane Warne's "ball of the century".

If you don't know anything about cricket there is a useful glossary of terms at the back, along with a diagram explaining field positions.

As a love letter to the game of cricket Elliott has certainly hit a six!

Spinner is aimed at a younger audience, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The book is not available outside of Australia, but you can order the paperback direct from Fremantle Press website or purchase an digital version from eBooks.com

UPDATE: According to the publisher, who kindly left a comment below, the book is now available to British readers via Amazon.co.uk and American readers via the Independent Publishers Group website.

'Echoes from the Dead' by Johan Theorin

Fiction - Kindle edition; Transworld Digital; 480 pages; 2009. Translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy.

With so many publishers jumping on the Stieg Larsson bandwagon, it's hard to know which Scandinavian crime thrillers are worth reading and which ones are just cashing in on the phenomenon. Despite the promotional sticker on the cover of Johan Theorin's debut novel, Echoes from the Dead, I can attest that this book falls into the former rather than the latter category.

The story is set on the atmospheric Swedish island of Öland during the off-season. All the tourists have gone home and the seaside villages are deserted and empty. The alvar -- "a labyrinth of long stone walls, boulders, bushes and endless grassy plains" -- which covers large parts of Öland, lies still and silent.

The alvar is like a sea. Yes. Anything at all could happen out there, and no one would be any the wiser.

Twenty years earlier a little boy, Jens, disappeared in thick fog on the alvar. His body has never been recovered. His mother, Julia, a nurse on the mainland, has never got over her grief; she's convinced her boy is still alive and is waiting for the phone call that says he's been found.

When her elderly father Gerlof (pronounced Yairloff) receives a child's sandal in the post Julia's belief that Jens is still alive gains further weight. If the shoe is one of Jens, who sent it -- and why?

Together Julia and Gerloff, a retired sea-captain living in sheltered accommodation, embark on their own private investigation as they piece together clues from the past.

Their story is intercut with the story of the main suspect, local bad boy Nils Kant, who was suspected of murdering his younger brother on the island in 1936 and was rumoured to have shot two German soldiers and run off to South America with their "spoils of war" several years later.

What makes Echoes from the Dead such a great read is Theorin's terrific plot, which goes off in unexpected directions without sacrificing plausibility.

The pacing is carefully controlled by the interleaving of two separate narrative threads, so that the significance of certain clues discovered in one storyline help inform the second, and vice-versa. All of this builds into a superb climax, one that ties up loose ends and has you feeling genuinely moved by all that has happened before.

But it's the characterisation that elevates Echoes from the Dead above the average whodunit. Julia is sympathetically drawn: she's a deeply troubled woman, prone to drinking too much and unable to stand up to her bullying older sister, but emerges from this story much stronger despite the grief. And Gerloff is a standout: an intelligent, resourceful and kind man, who never lets age or infirmity put him off his mission to find out what really happened to his beloved grandson all those years ago. And how refreshing it is to have a lead character in a crime novel who isn't a journalist or a policeman!

Echoes from the Dead was voted Best First Mystery Novel by the Swedish Academy of Crime Writers in 2007 and won the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger in 2009.

 

The big one million

Some time over the past 24 hours, the one-millionth page impression was recorded on this blog. That's a lot of visitors to this little part of the interweb since I began Reading Matters in April 2004!

Is it any wonder the carpet's looking a bit tatty with everyone traipsing in and out without taking their shoes off!

Thanks to one and all for your ongoing support. It's lovely to know so many of you continue to drop by. Here's to the next million!

The great Australian book haul

I've just spent four days in Melbourne, revisiting old haunts, discovering new ones, drinking the world's best coffee, eating the world's best cooked vegetarian breakfasts, catching up with a few blog friends (hello to @anzlitlovers and @wildsoda), seeing The King's Speech at the cinema ... and in between doing a little bit of book shopping!

Here's what's in the pile:

• Alex Miller's Lovesong (Miller has won the Miles Franklin Award twice; this is his latest novel in paperback)
  
  
• Robert Wainwright and Paolo Totaro's Born or Bred? (A true crime book about Martin Bryant, who carried out the Port Arthur massacre in 1996)
  
  
• Alan Collins' A Promised Land? (A trilogy of novels about a Jewish man living in Australia - given to me by @anzlitlovers)
  
  
• Malla Nunn's A Beautiful Place to Die (A literary crime novel set in South Africa by a film maker who lives in Sydney)
  
  
• Helen Garner's Joe Cinque's Consolation (A non-fiction exploration of Joe Cinque's death - he was killed by his girlfriend with a massive overdose of Rohypnol and heroin)
  
  
• Ron Elliott's Spinner (A coming of age novel for cricket lovers given to me by @anzlitlovers, who has reviewed it very favourably here)
  
  
• Peter Singer's The Life You Can Save (Another book from @anzlitlovers; this one is about practical steps each of us can carry out to end world poverty. Again, it's been reviewed favourably here)
  
  
• Anna Krien's Into the Woods (A non-fiction account of the battle for Tasmania's forests, first brought to my attention by Whispering Gums' review)
  
  
• Jeff Apter's Together Alone (A biography of two of my musical heroes: New Zealand singer/songwriters Tim and Neil Finn)
  
  
• Charlotte Wood's The Submerged Cathedral (This one was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2005)
  
  
• Frank Hardy's Power Without Glory (An Australian classic, first published in 1950, which sparked a huge criminal libel case)
  
  
• Thea Astley It's Raining in Mango (Another 20th century Australian classic about a man who moves his family from Sydney to Far North Queensland in the 19th century)
  
  
• Maurice Gee's Going West (A coming-of-age tale by one of New Zealand's most loved authors)
  
  
• Sonya Hartnett's Surrender (Yet another coming-of-age tale, but set in small town Australia)

'Jane Eyre' by Charlotte Brontë

Fiction - Kindle edition; Optimized for Kindle; 624 pages; 2009.

I might have read hundreds of modern and contemporary novels in my time, but when it comes to pre-20th century classics I am woefully un-educated.

Which is why I was slightly wary about reading Charlotte Brontë's classic novel Jane Eyre. Surely anything published in 1847 was going to be too over-written for my modern eyes  and at more than 600 pages a real test of my endurance? Oh, how wrong one can be!

I should have known it would be a super read. So many people have recommended it to me in the past, and Simon Savidge's review last year made me pop it on the wishlist straight away. But I didn't get around to reading it until Christmas, when looking for something substantial to read I downloaded a 77-pence version for my Kindle.

I devoured the entire book in just two days! Turns out Miss Brontë does a mean line in cliff-hangers at the end of chapters, which meant I kept turning the pages (or clicking the turn button on my e-reader) to see what happened next. Before I knew it I had read 20 per cent of the novel and I'd only meant to read a few pages to see if I liked the style!

For those who haven't read Jane Eyre (are there any of you out there?), it's billed as a kind of romance, but it is really much, much more than that.

Essentially it's the story of one woman's life, from the age of 10 to the time of her marriage nine years later. The narrative is told through Jane's eyes, which means you get to experience a first-hand account of her many privations and heartaches. And this also means you want to cheer her on, help her through the rough patches and give her the strength to carry on against the odds.

When the story opens, Jane is an orphan living in the care of her cruel aunt. She is being constantly bullied by her older cousin, John, and life is miserable.

Eventually she is sent away to commence her education at Lowood School, a boarding school for poor girls. Here she is forgotten -- or should I say abandoned -- by her family, but in the long run it doesn't matter: Jane learns to stand on her own two feet.

She then takes a job as a governess at Thornfield Hall, where she instructs a French-born orphan in the care of the landlord Edward Rochester, an ugly man with a mysterious past and a penchant for travel. When Jane finds herself becoming increasingly attracted to Rochester, you wonder where all this is going to lead... (Please, don't let me down with a traditional romance, I kept thinking!)

But, to cut an awfully long story short, Jane's life takes an unexpected twist and by the last page you feel as if she's continuing to live her life on her own terms without compromising her values or beliefs.

In its depiction of a Cinderella-like rags to riches rise, Jane Eyre has the feel and flavour of a much-loved fairytale. Ditto for the morality at its heart, in which good always overcomes evil.

But as a "morality tale" Jane Eyre is slightly more sophisticated than that. Indeed, it seems to be a story before its time, because it is a remarkable account of one woman's fight (and right) to be seen on equal terms with men, to live the kind of life she wishes to lead and not what society deems is "correct". How I wished I'd read this book as a teenager; it might have made me feel less self-conscious about forging my own path and daring to be different.

And while there were times when the prose felt too verbose and I wanted to tighten up some of the chapters, I got so lost in the story I turned off my editor's brain and just went with the flow. I can't remember the last time I got so caught up in a good old-fashioned epic like this one!

Jane Eyre is a story about recognising and appreciating value in the individual, regardless of gender or circumstance. No wonder it has attained classic status and remains such a much-loved novel more than 150 years since it was first published.

 

Find out what the best-selling books were the week you were born

I'm a bit of a sucker for book lists, so was delighted to find BiblioOz.com's magical little button which allows you to discover your "birthday best sellers".

To discover the top 10 fiction and top 10 non-fiction titles on the New York Times best sellers for the week of your birth, you simply pop in your birth date, then press the button.

Jacqueline Sussan's raunchy novel about TV celebrity, The Love Machine, was number one when I was born, but is no longer in print. But the top 10 does feature some timeless classics, including Philip Roth's Portnay's Complaint, Mario Puzo's The Godfather and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, so it wasn't all complete trash in the summer of '69!

The number one non-fiction title was The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong by Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull, which is still in print and examines why "every employee tends to rise to his own level of incompetence in a hierarchy".

To find out what the best-selling books were the week you were born visit the BibliOz website.

(Via @teresareads)

'Faithful Place' by Tana French

Fiction - Kindle edition; Hodder & Stoughton; 448 pages; 2010.

I have Irish writer Tana French to thank for getting me out of my recent fictional reading slump. I read this novel, her third, in just a couple of days and found it enormously entertaining if slightly over-written -- and over-wrought -- in places.

Faithful Place is a crime thriller, but it doesn't feature any of the main characters from her previous two novels -- the police procedural In the Woods and its sequel The Likeness. It's a completely stand-alone work of fiction, but the story does tread similar territory in that it focuses on a murder investigation in modern day Dublin.

The investigation gets under way when the suitcase of a woman once believed to have left Dublin for England 20 years ago mysteriously turns up in an abandoned home. The contents, which include her birth certificate, have not been disturbed. Does this mean she never left the city? And if she didn't leave, what happened to her?

Enter undercover cop Frank Mackey, who has an exceptional interest in the case: the suitcase belonged to his girlfriend Rosie Daly. Twenty years earlier the pair had been planning to run away together, but Rosie never turned up to their agreed rendezvous point, 16 Faithful Place, and Frank assumed he'd been unceremoniously dumped. It is something he has never quite come to terms with.

Frank, who is a bit of a maverick, is not officially on the police case, but this doesn't stop him from carrying out his own inquiries on the sly. What emerges is a portrait of a complicated man, who has unceremoniously ditched his working-class roots to pursue a career as a garda. But despite going up in the world -- he marries a nice middle-class girl, whom he later divorces, and has a beautiful daughter -- Frank can never quite let go of his troubled past.

His off-the-record investigation means re-establishing contact with people living in Faithful Place, the street he grew up on and thought he'd left behind. This includes his over-bearing mother, his alcoholic father and his four siblings. Then there are Rosie's childhood friends -- and Rosie's judgemental parents.

I'll admit there are elements of this story which are a bit soap-opera-ish, and Frank's voice doesn't feel particularly authentic as a male (he's far too sappy about Rosie, for a start), but this doesn't take away from the sheer enjoyment of ploughing through this book to find out what happens next. There are lots of unexpected plot surprises, and the story of Frank and Rosie's teenage past, told in a series of seamless flashbacks, is nicely done.

What I like about French's writing style is her ability to nail life in modern Ireland so perfectly you really feel as though you're sitting in a Dublin pub having conversations with old friends. She gets the politics, the corruption, the consumerist lifestyles and the class divides down pat, but does so without making it seem contrived. 

And her ability to write dialogue is also pitch-perfect. There are scenes in this book between squabbling older siblings which have a genuine ring of authenticity about them, perhaps a skill she has developed from her life in the theatre (she trained as an actor at Trinity College). Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if Faithful Place wasn't adapted for the screen at some point, because it would make a good film, complete with the over-the-top, sort of unexpected and not wholly believable, ending.

And while the book could do with a good edit (it's at least 100 pages too long), it has an intelligence rarely seen in big commercially successful crime novels. French knows what makes people tick, she knows the inner-most secrets of big rambling Irish families, and she knows how the places we grow up in shape our lives and personalities.

In a nutshell, Faithful Place is perfect fare for those who appreciate good solid storytelling with a twist at the end. For me, this is the kind of comfort read that gets me out of the bookish doldrums with a jolt.

'Hypothermia' by Arnaldur Indriðason

Fiction - Kindle edition; CCV Digital; 320 pages; 2009. Translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb.

Ever since discovering Arnaldur Indriðason's Reykjavík Murder Mysteries series in 2006, I've made a point of reading each new release as soon as they have been published in paperback. (All my reviews are on my Arnaldur Indriðason page.)

But with Hypothermia, published in 2009, I left it a bit longer than usual to purchase, mainly because I'd been slightly disappointed with his last outing, Arctic Chill.

But this new novel, the sixth book starring the morose Icelandic police detective Erlunder, is a welcome return to form. Indeed, I wonder if it isn't his best book yet.

The story is less a police procedural and more a tale about laying ghosts of the past to rest. It ties together multiple story lines involving missing people and murder victims spanning more than 30 years, but does it in such an effortless way it's not until you reach the last page that you begin to appreciate Indriðason's magnificent skill as a crime writer, novelist and social commentator.

Hypothermia opens with the suicide of a woman, María, who is found hanging from a beam in her holiday cottage. Her husband Baldvin, a GP, claims she was depressed and still grappling with the death of her own mother two years earlier.

But Detective Erlunder isn't quite sure that all is as it seems. His curiosity is aroused when María's best friend gives him a tape recording of María at a seance. He can't explain it, but he knows that something is not quite right.

He begins poking around in María's past -- her father died in a boating accident when she was a young girl and she developed an incredibly strong bond with her mother as a result -- but treads very carefully in order not to arouse suspicion. His investigations are never made official.

Alongside his off-the-record enquiries about María, Erlunder begins investigating two unsolved missing persons cases from the past: a boy in his last year of sixth-form college, who disappeared in February 1976, and a girl studying biology at university, who was reported missing a few weeks later. The two cases have never been linked, but Erlunder begins to wonder if they should be.

"People don't just walk out of their homes and disappear. They always leave some trace. Except in these two cases. That's what they have in common. There's no trace. We have nothing to go on. In either case."

Things must be quiet on the Reykjavík crime front, because for the entire novel Erlunder does not carry out one official task, either in the suicide case or the missing persons' case: everything is done on the sly and his colleagues, Elinborg and Sigurdur Oli, who normally have starring roles, are only referenced in passing.

Indeed, this novel focuses very much on Erlunder's own personal history in a way that has not been addressed in any of Indriðason's previous novels. As well as talking about the loss of his own brother who went missing in a snow storm when Erlunder was a child (an incident which plays a central role in each of the books in the Reykjavík Murder Mysteries series), for the first time Erlunder has face-to-face dealings with his ex-wife, Halldora.

They might have been divorced for decades, but Halldora's bitterness resonates off the page. Her total lack of responsibility for the breakdown of their marriage is echoed in so many of the other characters that Erlunder meets in the course of his investigations: Maria's mother blames her husband for bringing his death upon himself; and Maria's husband blames Maria for her own situation.

Indriðason does this a lot in this novel: there are constant recurring themes and motifs, particularly of lakes (Maria's father drowned in one, the missing girl had an obsession with them), hypothermia (its power to kill, both accidentally and on purpose), suicide ("the act itself frequently came as a total shock and could be committed by people of all ages: adolescents, the middle-aged and elderly"), the after-life (does it exist and how do you prove it?), and being haunted by ghosts, both physical and metaphorical ("You have to free yourself from this ghost," Eva Lind, Erlunder's daughter, tells him, referring to the loss of his brother; "It's because of Maria; she's haunting me like an old ghost story," Erlunder tells Baldvin, when he wants to know why Erlunder is hassling him about her suicide.)

Of course the genius comes in linking all these disparate threads together, so that one informs the other. While the conclusion to Hypothermia was somewhat predictable I found it a satisfying, wholly believable one.

But what made this book truly work for me was the way in which Indriðason makes you genuinely feel for the victims and the parents of the missing. How he achieves this is a kind of magic, because his writing style is so understated and sparse it seems devoid of emotion. And yet, by the time you reach the last page, it's hard not to feel a lump forming in your throat...

If the rest in the series are as good as this (according to wikipedia, there are three more published in Icelandic yet to be translated into English), then boy do we have a future treat in store!

John McGahern woodland

 

via trevorcook.typepad.com

Most of you will know that the late John McGahern is my favourite writer. What you probably won't know is that I have a "thing" about trees and forests.

How wonderful, then, to see that McGahern also loved trees, so much so he planted his own 25-acre woodland near Mohill, in Co. Leitrim.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year, everyone!

By a strange twist of fate, I ended 2010 in the same way I began it: sitting on my parent's sun deck in Australia, with my feet up, a cool drink by my side and a book in my hand. I did not know that's how things would pan out when I started the year, but I'm not complaining.

The past 12 months was a boon for my reading life. I've never read so many books - 101 in total. People ask me where I find the time, but it's easy if you commute by public transport (even if it's only a 20 minute journey each way), are child-free and don't have much of a social life. It's also easy if you are taking a "career break" for a couple of months!

My real problem has been finding the time -- and motivation -- to keep up with my reviews. I've still got four more to write before my 2010 record is completely up-to-date.

I know many of you make reading resolutions, but that's not something I'm comfortable doing. I simply want to keep reading widely and perhaps broaden my horizons a little by trying a few pre-20th Century classics over the next 12 months.

So, wherever you are and whatever you read, here's hoping 2011 is a bountiful, beautiful, book-filled year!

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net