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Colm Toibin: 'Where's your boom novel?'

Colm Toibin on why he hasn't written a novel about the Celtic Tiger's rise and fall, the beauty of a simple sentence, the pain of writing and the pleasure of reading.

Triple Choice Tuesday: Follow the Thread

Welcome to Triple Choice Tuesday. This is where I ask some of my favourite bloggers, writers and readers to share the names of three books that mean a lot to them. The idea is that it might raise the profile of certain books and introduce you to new titles, new authors and new bloggers.

Today's guest is David Hebblethwaite from Follow the Thread, a blog filled with an eclectic mix of book reviews and the occasional foray into music and film.

David is originally from Yorkshire but now lives in the south of England. He has been reviewing books online since 2004 and blogging seriously since 2009.

"Above all, I like well-crafted books — of most sorts," he tells me. "But I do enjoy the quirky and unusual."

Without further ado, here's David's Triple Choice Tuesday selections:

A favourite book: The Prestige by Christopher Priest

When I think back to the books I’ve most loved reading, I find that many of them are strongly tied to particular times in my life. Most of them, I haven’t re-read; some, I don’t even want to, because I have a nagging sense that I wouldn’t find them as good second time around. I’m not going to choose any of those books here, because I feel that a book I nominate as a favourite should be one that stands the test of personal time — one I can go back to and still enjoy as much as I did on the first reading.

The Prestige is the story of two feuding Victorian stage magicians, each of whose lives is shaped to an extraordinary degree by the secret of his signature illusion. The book is something of a magic trick itself, full of misdirection and uncertainty, only gradually revealing the truth, which may not be (indeed, probably isn’t) everything you expect. I first read it some time in the early 2000s, polished it off in a weekend, and absolutely loved it.

Fast-forward to 2006, when Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of The Prestige was released (as an aside, the movie is good in its own right, but very different; I’d recommend reading the book first). I chose it for my then reading group and had to face the possibility that it would not be as good as I had remembered it. Well, I needn’t have been concerned; if anything, I read it even quicker the second time, and enjoyed it even more. And the reading group? I don’t think there was a more animated discussion of a book in all the time I was a member.

Christopher Priest was on Granta’s original list of Best Young British Novelists back in 1983, but I think he’s much less well known than he deserves to be. I should catch up on more of his books myself — I’ve read both The Affirmation and The Separation, and found both to be as good as The Prestige — and I’d be delighted if this post encouraged more people to search out Priest’s work.


A book that changed my world: The Encyclopedia of Fantasy edited by John Clute and John Grant

I was working on an A Level English coursework project about fantasy literature when I came across a cheap copy of The Encyclopedia of Fantasy at a book sale on holiday. The book had been published only a year or so before; a full-price copy would have been well out of my budget, but I could afford to take a chance on the sale copy — and it turned out to be one of the best purchases I ever made.

It’s difficult to put into words just what it felt like to read The Encyclopedia of Fantasy and be swept away by its enthusiasm and knowledge. For one thing, the book is incredibly wide-ranging: it has entries on individual authors, artists, films and TV series; different types of fantasy; "motifs" used in fantasy stories, and more besides (flick through the pages around the entry on Tolkien, for example, and you’ll also find entries on tall tales, three wishes, Mark Twain, tricksters, Time Bandits, trains...); and it’s great for browsing, because there’s always something else interesting nearby. And the Encyclopedia is great for discovery, because it brings together so many different things, and finds links where one wouldn’t necessarily expect to see them — I’ve certainly found plenty in its pages that I wanted to investigate (including, as it happens, The Prestige), and I still have a lot of investigating to do.

Something else I particularly like about The Encyclopedia of Fantasy is that it’s not just descriptive; it has its own idea of what makes good fantasy (it should “release or even...catapult the reader into new areas of the imagination,” as John Grant puts it in one entry), one that doesn’t map neatly on to the published category. When I started reading it, I found that the Encyclopedia’s way of thinking chimed pretty well with my own developing taste; I also appreciated its prose style, which managed to sound knowledgeable without being stuffy. These became strong influences on the way I think and write about books, and some of that influence is still there today. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy did more to shape me as a reader than just about any book before or since, and that’s why I’ve chosen it as a book that changed my world.


A book that deserves a wider audience: The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton

You never know where the next great read will come from, and I just love it when a book about which I know nothing turns out to be brilliant. I bought The Rehearsal on a whim when I was visiting Cambridge; I hadn’t heard of it, but the synopsis was intriguing, and I like to read books by young writers (I’m interested to hear what my generation has to say in its literature), so I decided to take a chance. On the surface, The Rehearsal is the story of a scandal involving a teacher and student at a girls’ school, and a play based on the scandal that’s being staged by students from the local drama college; matters are complicated for one of the drama students when he unwittingly embarks on a relationship with the sister of the girl involved in the scandal. Yet there’s so much more going on underneath that in the novel.

It took me a while to get into the book, as much of the dialogue is written in a deliberately florid and mannered style. It wasn’t until about a hundred pages in that I realised what Catton was doing: the whole book is about performance of one kind or another — not just theatrical performance, but pretending to be something you’re not (in school and in life), placing different interpretations on events, and so on — and the text of The Rehearsal is itself a performance, with many scenes written as theatrical reconstructions of events. This is one of the things that impressed me most about the book: the way its main theme is reflected so completely in so many of its different aspects.

On top of all this, I found the novel immensely enjoyable to read. The Rehearsal is the best book I’ve read in the past couple of years; I expect it’ll become a lifelong favourite. I can’t wait to see what Eleanor Catton writes next; for now, though, I’d recommend her debut as a book that deserves to be read more widely.

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Thanks, David, for taking part in my Triple Choice Tuesday!

What do you think of David's choices? Have you read any of these books? I've not read any of them, but I have heard a lot of good things about The Prestige in the past. Interestingly, The Rehearsal has been nominated in the "books that deserve a wider audience" category once before — by Steph from Steph & Tony Investigate — so clearly it's a book that has garnered a few dedicated fans...

'Vault: An Anti-Novel' by David Rose

Fiction - paperback; Salt Publishing; 168 pages; 2011. Review copy courtesy of publisher.

David Rose's debut novel has one of the most intriguing dedications I've ever come across in all my years of reading: "Vault is dedicated to the staff of Pizza Express, Staines, where it was written, in my lunch hours."

But that's not the most intriguing thing about this short, effortlessly readable novel, which defies categorisation. The subject matter is equally interesting — road cycling, army snipers and nuclear espionage. It's almost as if Rose, a 61-year-old former Post Office worker, picked three random subjects out of a hat and then strung them together in narrative form. But somehow it seems to work.

The story is about McKuen, an Englishman, who becomes a sniper in the Second World War. Disturbed by some of the events (read killings) he participates in, he decides to atone after the war by cycling through the most devastated parts of Europe, handing out medicine and other aid. He does this alone, without the backing of any formal organisation, and for this he earns legendary heroic status, which he despises almost as much as his participation in the war.

He later reinvents himself as a successful road cyclist (he takes part in the first Tour of Britain in 1955) only to be mythologised again for heroic acts of athleticism. But he chucks it all in when an ongoing knee injury, sustained in the war, means he can never go professional.

As a civil servant, he is later recruited to foil a threat to Britain's burgeoning thermonuclear programme by an anti-nuclear group calling itself the Neutron Committee. McKuen's mission is a dangerous one, but despite the possibility of death — he knows the Government has chosen an untrained civilian because he is expendable — it doesn't worry him because:

At least it would be a specific death. Not a wartime statistic, as it could earlier have been. An individual death. Which becomes more important the older you get.

And that's where the book comes full circle: a man escaping death in the war puts himself back in death's sights, almost as if he wants to test his invincibility.

But the real twist in the tale of Vault is this: McKuen (if, indeed, that is his name) has discovered that his life story has been turned into a novel. So, what you get is one chapter, written in the third person, telling McKuen's story as if it is fiction, followed by another, written in the first person, by "McKuen" himself, either expanding on what has been written about his life or pointing out the novelist's errors. "Hasn't he checked any of the history?" he moans at one point. This interwoven narrative — of a fictionalised life undercut by the subject's recall of that same life — is hugely entertaining, illuminating and often very funny.

In this way, Vault pokes fun at the art of writing a novel, exposes its illusions and the way in which it can falsify "truth", but it also showcases what fiction, when done well, can, and ought to, achieve:

Look, none of this is in the novel. It's all so dry, so cold. I've spent my life hiding my emotions — you have to, to survive — hidden even from my self. There are feelings we don't understand ourselves. That's what we look to novelists for.

This is probably the most "literary" novel I've read all year, so it's disappointing that it didn't make the longlist for this year's Man Booker. (According to a note the publisher sent me, the book was submitted.) While Vault is not perfect (I thought the narrative slightly disjointed in places and the nuclear espionage sub-plot slightly far-fetched), it's a thought-provoking,  intelligent read, one that is accessible and entertaining at the same time. The prose is lean and the storytelling thrilling. And it deserves a far wider audience than it has currently received.

Top 10s: books I'd love to share

Some of you may remember that earlier this year I took part in World Book Night and handed out free copies of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front.

Well, organisers are now making plans for next year's event, and they are looking for two of this year’s givers to join the editorial committee and help choose the titles for World Book Night 2012. Part of the entry requirement is to produce a list of top 10 books "you most love to read, give and share for 2012".

This made me think about the books I would love to press into people's hands, urging them with the words, "You must read this". In my opinion, a must-read book should be accessible (by which I mean, the language should not be off-putting), have a strong voice, great characters, a terrific storyline and a message to impart. If they make you cry or angry or take you out of yourself in one way or another then that's even better.

Here's my list, in alphabetical order according to author's name.

Richard Adams' Watership Down
Rollicking great adventure about a band of rabbits looking for a new home when the developers threaten to destroy their habitat

Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way
Young Irishman caught between the Great War and Ireland's War of Independence finds his loyalties — and family — divided

H.E. Bates' Fair Stood the Wind for France
British airman crash-lands in Occupied France and falls in love with the young French woman who nurses him back to health

Daniel Keye's Flowers for Algernon
Science fiction novel that questions how we value intelligence

John McGahern's The Barracks
Second wife of an older policeman in rural Ireland tries to hide her breast cancer from her new family — exquisitely written and the most authentic female voice I've ever read

D'Arcy Niland's The Shiralee
Australian classic about an itinerant worker trying to raise his daughter while on the road

Robert C. O'Brien's The Silver Crown
Child's adventure story about good and evil that reads like a thriller

Véronique Olmi's Beside the Sea
An astonishing look at how one woman struggles to do the best by her children — and with an emotional punch you're not likely to forget in a hurry

Gitta Sereny's Cries Unheard: The Story of Mary Bell
What causes a child to commit a horrendous crime? And how do we deal with the aftermath?

Maj Sjöwall and Peter Wahlöö's The Laughing Policeman
A 1968 Swedish detective novel that set the standard for all Scandinavian crime novels that followed

So, what did you think of my choices? What books do you think are must-reads? Let me know in the comments below, and then, if you're feeling inspired, you can submit your own Top 10 to the World Book Night site — but note that you need to register first.

'Blue Monday' by Nicci French

Fiction - hardcover; Michael Joseph; 416 pages; 2011. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Regular readers of this blog will know I have a weak spot for Nicci French, the pseudonym for husband-and-wife writing team Nicci Gerard and Sean French. I have followed her career right from the start and read each of her 12 bestselling novels, often as soon as they become available in hardcover. (I have reviewed seven of them on this site.)

Of course, they are not "literary" novels, but they are wonderful fun — and very entertaining. My only quibble is that in recent years the formula — of embattled female on the run from a threat no one else can see — has become a little jaded. Hence, I was rather excited when I found out that French was branching off into a new direction, moving away from nail-biting psychological thrillers, and focusing on a new series of crime thrillers (with the emphasis on crime).

Blue Monday, published two months ago, is the first in a series of eight novels based around psychotherapist Frieda Klein.

In this story, which oozes London ambiance — it's particularly evocative of North London and the Square Mile — Frieda is treating Alan Dekker, a troubled man who is desperate to have a child. Sadly, his wife seems unable to fall pregnant, but he is so obsessed with becoming a father that he is dreaming of his son-to-be. He relates these dreams to Frieda, describing the child in minute detail.

At about the same time, a major police hunt is underway, looking for a missing five-year-old boy called Matthew Farraday, who is believed to have been abducted. Matthew's description matches the boy in Alan's dream. Could it be that Alan has snatched him from the street? Is the "dream" merely a cover story?

Frieda takes her concerns to Detective Chief Inspector Karlsson, who is leading the investigation into Mathew's disappearance, but he think she is wasting his time. But when an important link with another unsolved abduction — of a young girl 20 years go in similar circumstances — emerges, Frieda suddenly becomes a vital cog in the inquiry.

Blue Monday isn't a police procedural, so it's not that sort of crime novel. But it is very much a page-turner, with a mystery to solve and a relatively satisfying — if slightly unrealistic — ending. And while Karlsson — a divorced father of two young children — and Frieda — a loner with a troubled family background — are well drawn and believable characters, you get the feeling that French has deliberately kept many things about them under wraps in order to flesh them out in later books.

It may also be the reason why the narrative has quite a lot of distractions — Frieda's academic background, her tendency to walk the streets at night to overcome insomnia, her delicate relationship with a demanding 16-year-old niece and a fledgling friendship with a Ukrainian builder, just to name a few. There are so many of these subsidiary storylines it feels as if French decided to lay the foundations of a thousand different threads to draw upon in future novels.

I can't say Blue Monday feels that much different from the usual Nicci French fare. The fear and paranoia  — and even Karlsson's refusal to believe Frieda's initial claims — are distinctive trademarks from her earlier work. Perhaps the only real significant change is that the narrative has switched from intimate first-person to "remote" third person.

Regardless, Blue Monday is a fast-paced read, with a few twists and turns along the way, making it far from predictable. It certainly kept me entertained last weekend when I was holed up in bed with a nasty chest cold.

'Far to Go' by Alison Pick

Fiction - hardcover; Headline Review; 288 pages; 2011. Review copy courtesy of publisher.

Alison Pick's Far to Go has been longlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize.

It is billed as a history of the Kindertransport — in which nearly 10,000 Jewish children were sent to Britain to escape Nazi Germany during the Second World War — but that's really only part of the story. The heart of this novel revolves around a married couple, Pavel and Anneliese Bauer, who fail to agree on how to personally deal with the invasion of Czechoslovakia, their homeland, by the Nazis.

The pair are well-to-do non-practising Jews.

Pavel, a wealthy and successful industrialist, refuses to believe that he should do anything other than carry out his life as normal. He is fiercely nationalistic and does not accept that Czechoslovakia will be occupied. He will not kowtow to the Germans, nor feel ashamed of his Jewishness.

But Anneliese, his rather uptight glamorous wife, is frightened. She knows that the political situation does not bode well and takes defensive steps to ensure the family's safety — moving to Prague, for instance, in the hope that things will blow over. And when they don't, she is eager to escape eastern Europe altogether. It is only when Pavel continues to bury his head in the sand that she tries to convince him that he should at least think of his six-year-old son, Pepik, and get him on the Kindertransport.

Pepik's trip to Britain is not so much the focus of the novel, but its climax. His journey does not begin until page 245, which is part four of a story divided into five parts.

What's more, much of the tale is told through the eyes of a Gentile, who resides with the Bauer family. Her name is Marta and she is Pepik's devoted nanny. She is quite naive — and young — and gets entangled in an illicit romantic dalliance with Ernst, one of Pavel's business associates, that puts the Bauer family in danger.

But Marta is kind-hearted and loyal — if occasionally misguided — and very much devoted to her young charge. She is so well drawn that in many ways she is the life and soul of the novel, and it's hard not to feel for her situation, caught between a young family she wishes to serve and an older man — a Nazi sympathiser — who offers her excitement, passion and intrigue.

This might sound like a fairly straightforward story, but Pick frames it in an usual way, breaking up each section with letters between family members — written after Pepik has gone to Britain — and chapters written by a modern Holocaust expert who has a mysterious connection to the Bauers. This connection isn't revealed until the very end of the book, which makes for a fine conclusion, and adds an extra layer of meaning to an otherwise predictable plot.

Far to Go, which is based on Pick's own family history, is not a typical Holocaust novel. Yes, it's sad and yes, it's filled with tragedy and betrayal. But this isn't a story about what happened during the War, but what life was like before the Nazis banished — and exterminated — the Jews and the legacy that survivors were confronted with after their families had been destroyed.

I wouldn't describe the book as anything particularly special — and I'm loathe to understand its inclusion on this year's Man Booker longlist — but it's an interesting story, well told, and there are worse ways to spend your time than reading this one.

Triple Choice Tuesday: Leo Benedictus

Welcome to Triple Choice Tuesday. This is where I ask some of my favourite bloggers, writers and readers to share the names of three books that mean a lot to them. The idea is that it might raise the profile of certain books and introduce you to new titles, new authors and new bloggers.

Today's guest is author and journalist Leo Benedictus, whose debut novel The Afterparty, has been longlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize and shortlisted for the London Book Award. I gave it a five-star review earlier this year.

Leo, who was born in London in 1975, studied English at Oxford University. His career has included copywriting, reporting, sub-editing and feature writing. He currently writes for the Guardian, where his work has garnered several awards, including feature writer of the year in 2007/08 (WorldWork Media Awards).

You can follow him on Twitter @leobenedictus

Without further ado, here's Leo's Triple Choice Tuesday selections:

A favourite book: Couples by John Updike

I am grateful for that “A”. There are just so many favourites, not all of them remotely highbrow. (Steven Pile’s Return of Heroic Failures had me crying with laughter more or less throughout my teens.) I’ve gone for Couples, though, because by jingo there’s a book! It absolutely hums with what may well be, if anybody ever ranks them, the greatest of all literary virtues: bravery. Fifty years later, I still would never dare to write something so toweringly graphic, sexually. And the style, being Updike’s, is remorselessly Baroque. “Over-the-top,” many would say. The hero is also, or at least he felt to me, misogynistic. In part, this is surely a result of the book’s age, and it is certainly not appealing. But if we love novels for their capacity to show us the insides of other people’s minds, then it is the minds that disgust us – surely – that merit most attention. I want to read about misogynists.


A book that changed my life: The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster

This book won a coin-toss against Earthly Powers — Burgess’s novel is probably the one, more than any other, which made me want to write a few myself. But reading Auster’s stories showed me where I wanted to go. There is a moment early in the first title in the trilogy, City of Glass, when the hero picks up a ringing phone in the middle of the night and says, "Hello?" At which, a voice says back to him, "Is this Paul Auster?" I still remember the instant that I read that line, and the drug-like exhilaration which came with it. I was an English graduate in my early twenties, I had read quite a few novels by then, but it had never occurred to me that this – the real author suddenly appearing in their own fiction – was possible. It was frightening and wonderful. Suddenly, all bets were off.


A book that deserves a wider audience: One Day by Ardashir Vakil

On the whole, I do believe that those books which most conspicuously deserve a wide audience get one. (And I intend to keep believing this until my own writing career begins its unjust descent.) That said, there certainly are some obscure books I’ve loved. Dubravka Ugresic is well worth looking up, for instance. Lend Me Your Character is a brilliantly funny and inventive collection of stories.

I’ve picked Ardashir Vakil’s One Day, however, because it is about this exact problem. It is Vakil’s second novel, following a successful first, which tells the story of a married couple struggling with unspoken differences while they prepare for their young son’s birthday party. The husband Ben is a blocked writer; two of their friends are successful Anglo-Indian authors. It epitomises, in short, the reviled “Hampstead novel” – a book written by, concerned with, and sold to, the same minuscule demographic. Yet, brilliantly, the whole thing is also a satire on itself.

I read it when it came out, eight years ago, as an act of comic seppuku by a novelist who could not bear the literary world he had just triumphed in. In an incompetent review, I got carried away and called the book “an ironic masterpiece”. Aptly, Vakil has published no more since. Another One Day, even more apt, is now one of the most successful novels of the decade.

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Thanks, Leo, for taking part in my Triple Choice Tuesday!

What do you think of Leo's choices? Have you read any of these books? I read Couples last year (review here) and loved it. I had assumed the book would not be to my tastes, but I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed it. It certainly made me more interested in exploring the rest of Updike's back catalogue. New York Trilogy is one of my favourite books of all time (it was the first book up for discussion in Reading Matters' now defunct online book group) and I very clearly remember that phone call that Leo refers to here: it made me think, WTF? Not read One Day but will need to hunt it out...

This weekend...

... I will mostly be curled up in bed, keeping up my fluid intakes, swallowing cold & flu tablets, eating ice-cream, catching up on sleep and reading books — Nicci French's Blue Monday, JG Ballard's High-Rise and Alison Pick's Far To Go.

Yes, I've come down with a terrible chest cold. This will teach me to cycle home in torrential rain when I have a sore throat!

Normal service should resume shortly.

Whatever you're doing, I hope you've got a good book or two to keep you company!

'Get Me Out of Here' by Henry Sutton

Fiction - paperback; Harvill Secker; 272 pages; 2010. Review copy courtesy of publisher.

Henry Sutton's Get Me Out of Here languished in my reading queue for more than a year. Billed as a "credit crunch" novel, it wasn't something that immediately piqued my interest. Then I saw Guy Savage's perceptive review and knew I had to dig it out for a read.

The novel — Sutton's sixth — doesn't really have anything to with the global economy sliding into free-fall. Instead, it's about a 30-something brand-obsessed businessman losing his grip on reality.

Aside from my introduction to Ross O'Carroll-Kelly earlier in the year, our narrator, Matt, is the funniest — and sickest — character I've come across in modern fiction for a long time. But where Ross is pretty much harmless, Matt isn't quite as innocent.

Matt is, quite frankly, absolutely delusional and filled with an over-inflated sense of self-importance. He's the type of person who thinks the world revolves around him, and he has no sense of shame whatsoever.

When the book opens he's busy trying to get a refund on a pair of sunglasses he no longer wants. That's because he's seen another, more expensive, pair in another shop that he prefers. What he doesn't tell the sales assistant — although surely she suspects — is that he deliberately broke a lens and "possibly bent an arm back with more force thant was strictly necessary".

This is a pattern that repeats itself throughout the book: Matt buys highly desirable products at great expense, then rashly changes his mind and returns his purchases, usually damaged, and demands a refund. He is a shop manager's worst nightmare.

But these scenes, particularly when he's arguing his case and lying through his teeth, are explosively funny. Take, for instance, his purchase of some Japanese-made luggage for an impending business trip. He takes home his new grey "indestructible" ballistic nylon suitcase and...

I thought I'd put the bag through its paces and test the strength of the handle and the play on the wheels and what would happen to the grey it if were subjected to a bit of tossing around in the yard. After all, this was probably mild compared to what the baggage handlers at Heathrow, or Pyongyang International for that matter, would subject the thing to — except they wouldn't, of course, be getting their hands on it, as it was only ever meant to be hand luggage. However, the hopelessly young sales assistant in Selfridges' luggage department — what was his ambition in life? To front a boy band? — didn't necessarily know that. If I'd had a gun I'd have shot the damn thing to see what it was really made of.

While the handles and wheels "held firm", the nylon "marked atrociously", so he returns it within a matter of hours, only to be greeted with a shocked: "Why does this one look so used?"

I said, "You told me they were indestructible. Bulletproof, is what you said. How, if that's the case, is it possible that in a matter of only an hour or two they look like this, if they are really as tough and practical as you made out? What's the point in having such smart and expensive luggage if it looks like this after its first outing? What would it look like if I took it on a trip to Iraq, or Afghanistan, or the Democratic Republic of Congo? And that's beside the fact that my fiancée hates the colour. She's right. For once. What a ridiculous fucking colour for a bag. It's only ever going to show up dirt, like shit on a toilet bowl."

So, as you can see, Matt is alarmingly shallow and manipulative. But what becomes increasingly clear as you get further and further into the story is that Matt treats his girlfriends — and there are a string of them — in exactly the same way, exchanging one for another as soon as he has become tired of them. But because he is narrating the story — in a wholly unreliable manner — the reader has to fill in the gaps. Why is he cleaning stains off the wall? And why is he dumping Bobbie's secret shoebox in a skip in a laneway?

What makes Matt such a fascinating character is the gap between his reality and the real world. He is constantly making plans to leave London and set up some exotic business in far-flung locales, but never gets beyond filching expensive meals off his friends or shoplifting wine from the corner store.

All the while he moans about the state of the world, the state of the economy, the immorality of the times and his pet hate — fat people. Obnoxious, self-centred and absurdly funny, Matt is not what he seems. Sutton scatters little clues here and there which allow you to build up a picture of the real Matt — and it isn't exactly pretty.

Get Me Out of Here is a truly memorable read, one that could best be described as a wicked satire about murder, madness and the never-ending quest to keep on shopping! It's enormous fun and yet it's probably the most disturbing novel I've read all year. Do try it if you are looking for something different.

Triple Choice Tuesday: Tales from the Reading Room

Welcome to Triple Choice Tuesday. This is where I ask some of my favourite bloggers, writers and readers to share the names of three books that mean a lot to them. The idea is that it might raise the profile of certain books and introduce you to new titles, new authors and new bloggers.

Today's guest is Victoria Best, aka Litlove, who blogs at Tales from the Reading Room.

Victoria taught French literature for a decade or so at Cambridge University before taking three years out to recover from chronic fatigue syndrome, during which time she began her blog. The experience of blogging made such an impact that she returned to the university on a part-time basis to work with students in need of study support and to use the extra time to write more widely.

She lives in a village outside Cambridge with her husband and son and a lot of books.

Without further ado, here's Victoria's Triple Choice Tuesday selections:

A favourite book: The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes by Janet Malcolm

Janet Malcolm uses what must be the best biographical strategy ever in this book about iconic poet Sylvia Plath: she structures her account of Plath’s life as an investigation and travels around interviewing the people who have written about her or provided significant testimonies of her marriage, picking at the stories they’ve told to see what lies behind them, what motivations, what emotions dictated the portrait of Plath that they gave. In other words, she’s looking at the way that the process of biography transforms a life into a mythic story. Her reason for doing this is that only fiction provides everything we need to know to judge a character. When you enter the murky waters of non-fiction, you can never uncover the final truth of a life — there are only ever multiple truths, each one embodying a different perspective, or a different relationship, to the events that took place. I love Janet Malcolm’s writing because she shows how you can be intellectually clever and completely gripping at the same time.


A book that changed my life: Literary Theory: An Introduction by Terry Eagleton

When I was at university in the late 1980s, critical theory was all the rage. A brand new undergraduate course on it had just begun and I was a guinea pig, having signed up for its initiatory year. This book was recommended on the reading list and when I began it I thought I’d made a terrible mistake. The first half I covered with abusive marginalia, lots of silly remarks and exclamations. And then the penny suddenly dropped and I began to understand what this theory business was all about. My feelings made an abrupt U-turn and I rushed to my eraser to try and remove all my foolish commentary.

In fact, this book put me on the road to becoming a professional literary critic, because it gave me a structured approach to reading that I was desperately in need of at that time. Being sensitive to a text was presented as a sort of divine gift, a sheer knack that you either possessed or didn’t. But critical theory offered a useful alternative — that you could read a book through a framework of ideas and see what you got out of it. This book also introduced me to psychoanalytic theory, which has probably been the saving grace of my life. I suppose that, like the Janet Malcolm, what I like about Eagleton’s book is that it suggests there are no ultimate answers, just many different ways of thinking about things, and I find that incredibly liberating.


A book that deserves a wider audience: Everything Passes by Gabriel Josipovici

Gabriel Josipovici has been writing amazing works of fiction (and some unusual and insightful works of criticism) ever since the 1970s, but he’s never received the recognition he deserves. It may be because there are experimental elements to his writing, and that can put readers off. But he is such an accessible, easy read that it seems unfair to judge him just because he creates stories that are a little different.

This book was the first of his I read, and it remains my favourite. It’s a novella, and on the brief side too at 60 or so pages. It recounts the life of literary critic, Felix, his two wives, his children, his study of Rabelais, but it does so in a series of intense fragments, mostly dialogue, that somehow manage to mobilise an incredible richness of meaning, bringing together life and art, love and suffering, the sense of time passing and the eternal present we live in. Try him; he’s worth it.

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Thanks, Victoria, for taking part in my Triple Choice Tuesday!

What do you think of Victoria's choices? Have you read any of these books? I love that all the selections are titles I wouldn't normally come across, and I'm especially intrigued by Janet Malcolm's book — I read one of her other titles, The Journalist and the Murderer, and loved it, eating it up in the space of a weekend. That, too, explored the notions of truth, but put it in a journalistic context.

'Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall' by Kazuo Ishiguro

Fiction - Kindle edition; Faber and Faber; 240 pages; 2009.

The only Kazuo Ishiguro book I have read is Never Let Me Go, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2005. While I found it a slightly frustrating experience, I was intrigued enough to add a few more of his books to my TBR, where they have steadfastly remained for about five years. When Ishiguro's latest book, Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, was chosen by my book group, I was delighted to have the opportunity to finally read more of his work.

As the name suggests, the book is a collection of short stories, each of which is themed around music and/or nightfall. The choice of the word nocturne is a clever one, given that it means a musical composition that is "appropriate to the night or evening". Its other meaning — "an instrumental composition of a dreamy or pensive character" — would also be a good description of Ishiguro's prose style, which is languid and dream-like throughout.

All five stories are lovely, entertaining reads, punctuated with great wit, and all are told by male protagonists not quite at home in the world or their own skin.

In Crooner, which is set in Venice, Janeck, from an unspecified Communist country, meets a childhood hero — an old American crooner, Tony Gardner. Janeck is a musician who plays guitar as part of an orchestra that performs for tourists in Piazza San Marco. He spots Tony in the crowd and introduces himself, and before he knows it he gets to meet Tony's good-looking wife, Lindy, who appears brash and argumentative. From the outside it would seem their marriage is on the rocks, so when Tony enlists Janek to help him perform a moonlight serenade it seems like the right thing to do... but all is not as it seems.

In Come Rain or Come Shine, the narrator, 47-year-old Raymond, lives in Spain and is a bit of a drifter. He is invited to spend the weekend with his London-based friends, Emily and Charlie, with whom he went to university (Emily and Ray share a love of American show tunes). But this is not your average weekend away, because when he arrives, Charlie announces that his marriage to Emily is floundering and he wants Raymond to patch it up while Charlie goes to Frankfurt "on business". The story is pretty much a farce, in which Raymond, out of his depth, tries to cover up the fact he stole a peek at Emily's diary while she was at work. It is by far the funniest story in the collection.

In Malvern Hills, a young, struggling musician decamps to his sister's house in the Malvern Hills for the summer. He hopes to spend some down time, working on his music, but finds himself having to help his sister, Maggie, and her husband, Geoff, run their busy cafe. Even though he's not paying board or contributing to the household bills, he resents having to help Maggie in this way — and there are some hilarious moments when she politely calls him to task, but he never seems to get it. When he meets a middle-aged Austrian couple on holiday in the area, he befriends them — and is intrigued by the ways in which they present one face to the outer world and a different one to each other.

In Nocturnes, probably my favourite of the collection, a failed jazz musician, Bill, tries to revive his career by undergoing (illegal) plastic surgery. While recovering in the penthouse of a swanky hotel, he finds that his neighbour is Lindy Gardner, the ex-wife of crooner Tony Gardner (whom we met in the first story). Lindy is also recovering from surgery, but bored with lying in her room, she prowls the hotel at night, stealing food from the kitchen, and when she convinces Bill to join her one evening you know trouble is brewing...

In Cellists, the weakest story in the collection, a young Hungarian cellist, Tibor, accidentally finds himself a mentor and patron in the form of a mysterious older woman, whom watches him perform in a Venetian square. She introduces herself as Eloise McCormack, an American cellist, whom Tibor assumes is a distinguished musician. She criticises his performance, but wants to put him "on the correct path", so offers to tutor him. He reluctantly accepts, but Miss McCormack isn't all she's cracked up to be...

Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall is not a particularly memorable read, probably because the "voice" in each story is too similar and there's little to distinguish one character from the other. There are too many lone male musicians, older American woman and unhappy couples in it for a start. And theming the book around night and music seems like a marketing pitch that doesn't quite come off.

But as a whole, it is a gentle, effortless read — I consumed the book in one sitting — and a perfectly pleasant way to while away a few hours.

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This book was chosen by Linda for our Riverside Readers book group. Overall, I think we all pretty much agreed it was a good book, not a great one. Here's what other members thought of it:

• Chasing Bawa's review

Two winners

Thanks to all those who entered my competition to win a couple of brand new Australian books.

I used I used a random integer generator to choose two lucky winners out of the 13 who put their name in the hat.

Here are your random numbers:

9
10

Timestamp: 2011-08-12 18:26:22 UTC

That means the winners are: Bubba (Things We Didn't See Coming) and Tracey (Lovesong). I'll be in touch shortly to arrange delivery of your books.

Congratulations to you both, and commiserations to those who missed out. Thanks again to everyone who participated.

'The Disappeared' by Kim Echlin

 

Fiction - Kindle edition; Hachette Digital; 256 pages; 2010.

Why do some people live a comfortable life and others live one that is horror-filled? What part of ourselves do we shave off so we can keep on eating while others starve? If women, children and old people were being murdered a hundred miles from here, would we not run to help? Why do we stop this decision of the heart when the distance is three thousand miles instead of a hundred?

During Pol Pot's brutal regime in Cambodia (1975-1979) more than a million people were killed and buried in mass graves. Others died from disease and starvation. Others still, disappeared never to be seen again.

But how do you tell this truly disturbing story in fictionalised form without banging people over the head, aka A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali style?

Canadian Kim Echlin does it by framing it around a beautiful, all-consuming love story. In The Disappeared — Echlin's third novel — she tells the tale of Anne Greves, who as a 16-year-old motherless teenager, falls in love with an older man, Serey, a musician turned math tutor in exile from his native Cambodia. Their relationship is frowned upon by Anne's father, but there is little he can do to prevent the affair, which blossoms in the music clubs of downtown Montreal during the late 1970s.

When the Cambodian borders are re-opened, Serey returns home to look for his family. Anne never hears from him again. Eleven years later, she thinks she sees him on a TV broadcast at a political rally in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. She packs her bag and flies to Cambodia to look for him.

It's circa 1990. The Vietnamese forces that occupied Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge was removed from power have gone, only to be replaced by the UN and other Western aid agencies. The population still largely lives in fear — no one wants to talk about the country's history of genocide, they merely want to get on with their lives.

Chan [Serey's childhood neighbour] shook her head. All my children are gone. She looked across the broken road and said, Under Sihanouk, people used to greet each other, How many children have you? Under Lon Noi, people said, Are you well? Under the Khmer Rouge, How much food do you get in your cooperative? Now we say, How many of your family are still alive?

I don't think it's a plot spoiler to reveal that Anne does find her lover — albeit by a stroke of fate that belies believability — but the course of their love doesn't run smoothly: Serey disappears once again. It's her second, more frantic search, that gives the latter half of this strangely hypnotic novel a rather thrilling edge. Not only does Anne put herself in ludicrously dangerous situations — her dogged determination to find Serey borders on stupidity and obsession — but there's a very real fear that what she is looking for is not a person, but a body.

Spanning 30 years, it is written in the second person as Anne looks back on her life with Serey. It is rather hard-hitting in places, but it is also strangely moving. And despite Anne's flaws, her inability to ask Serey questions about his lifestyle, her naive, Westernised view of the world, it's hard not to admire her quest for the truth when everyone else wants to bury their head in the sand.

As well as being a terrifically fast-gripping story, The Disappeared is the type of novel that uses language carefully. Echlin's prose style is poetic, but she describes things — events, people, places, conversations — in an elegant but plain style. And it never feels like she is cramming journalistic information into her fictionalised account — it feels authentic and seamless — which only makes it feel more real and "truthful".

For another take on this novel, I would recommend you read KevinfromCanada's review, which is where I first heard about this book, while The Mookse and the Gripes' review only reinforced my desire to get my hands on a copy. I thank both of them for bringing this moving and memorable novel to my attention.

Triple Choice Tuesday: A Striped Armchair

Welcome to Triple Choice Tuesday. This is where I ask some of my favourite bloggers, writers and readers to share the names of three books that mean a lot to them. The idea is that it might raise the profile of certain books and introduce you to new titles, new authors and new bloggers.

Today's guest is Eva, who has been blogging at A Striped Armchair for more than four years.

She describes herself as "an amateur reader and full-time library aficionado" but I think that's under-selling it. In fact, out of all the book bloggers I follow, Eva impresses me most. She reads widely, across genres, nations and centuries, and writes about her reading experiences with intelligence, passion and wit. Her taste ranges across fiction and non-fiction, from the just-published to classics, includes a variety of genres, and she can name a favourite author from every (inhabited) continent.

Eva tells me that books allow her to "transcend her chronic illness" and that her perfect afternoon is spent in her armchair "with a fat book, huge mug of tea nearby and my rescue mutt Thistle curled up in my lap".

Without further ado, here's Eva's Triple Choice Tuesday selections:

A favourite book: Persuasion by Jane Austen

I have so many favourites, but for this I have to turn to Jane Austen, who has been a constant favourite author for well over half of my life. Persuasion is all about second chances, and hopefulness, and doing good quietly. As someone whose youth has been limited by illness, I find the story deeply comforting, and the way Austen depicts Anne's emotional journey never fails to draw me in. It doesn't matter how many times I reread it, the end still makes me gasp in surprise and laugh in delight.




A book that changed my world: Woman: An Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier

I'm cheating on this one a bit, because while I love books and they certainly make me who I am today, I can't think of a specific title that changed my world. So, I've picked a book that I think WOULD change the world if only everyone would read it. Natalie Angier is an American science writer, and she looks at the female body from a scientific, celebratory perspective. So much of what she has to say is fascinating, and flies in the face of perceived gender notions; I finished this book as a more empowered woman and committed feminist than I began it, and I imagine it would have that effect on any reader. Not to mention, it's fun!


A book that deserves a wider audience: The New Moon’s Arms by Nalo Hopkinson

Much of what I read comes from the "margins", so I feel that pretty much every amazing book I read deserves a wider audience. Unlike the other two, I agonised over this question, pondering what type of book to choose, picking and discarding authors and titles. I decided it should be a title still in print, and I wanted one that I could see a large variety of readers enjoying.

Finally, I realised that I'm always surprised that Caribbean literature isn't more popular. For such a small region, it's incredibly rich in history and culture, and it has turned out a quite an impressive list of marvellous authors. In fact, I've yet to have anything other than a wonderful experience with the Caribbean books I've picked up!

The New Moon’s Arms by Nalo Hopkinson is set on an imaginary Caribbean island. It features Calamity, a post-menopausal protagonist who, after the death of her father, finds herself not only trying to heal relationships in her life and reflecting on her past but also tracking down the origins of a mysterious little boy who appears on the beach near her house. Hopkinson's writing is powerful, with Calamity's voice so consistent and believable I often forgot she wasn't real, and her restraint in allowing the reader to see flaws Calamity herself is blind to. All of the characters, even the minor ones, breathe with life. The plotting is tight too, and the setting, of course, convincing and rich.

While the majority of the book is firmly rooted in reality, there's a flavour of the supernatural in the little boy's origins, and it's the most moving and compelling approach to mermaids and selkies I've ever seen. Indeed, the origin behind Hopkinson's mermaids is something I'll never forget.

Anyway, I'm running on in my attempt to convince everyone to pick it up, because I think after a few pages they'll be hooked!

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Thanks, Eva, for taking part in my Triple Choice Tuesday! What do you think of Eva's choices? Have you read any of these books? I've not read any of the three chosen, but I'm not in the least surprised that Eva's selected such a diverse — and interesting — list.

'The Novel in the Viola' by Natasha Solomons

Fiction - paperback; Sceptre; 416 pages; 2011.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and admit that I don't understand the fuss about this novel. It seems to have garnered very good reviews and I know that Simon from Savidge Reads adored it. But I found it hard to like.

Perhaps it says more about me than the writer, but I found the story — about a well-to-do Viennese Jewess who moves to England as a refugee in 1938 — rather dull and I never quite engaged with any of the characters. And the prose style, full of overblown descriptions, wore thin very quickly.

But for those looking for a light, gentle read — perhaps to take away on holiday while you're lying by the pool or on the beach — then it will probably fit the bill perfectly. And if you enjoy romance stories, there's plenty to appeal in this one.

Because, when all is said and done, that is essentially what The Novel in the Viola is about: it's an old-fashioned romance set during the Second World War.

Elise Landau, 19, is the youngest daughter of Anna and Julian Landau, an opera singer and novelist respectively, whom are in the process of acquiring a visa to move to New York. For some unexplained reason they cannot take Elise with them, so she is forced to place a refugee advertisement in the London Times, offering her services as a parlour maid.

Not long later she regretfully bids her family, including her married sister, Margot, goodbye and heads for Tyneford, a great house on the Dorset Coast, owned by Daniel Rivers and his son Kit. But before she leaves, her father presents her with a viola, in which he has smuggled a manuscript of the last novel he has written — hence the book's title.

Once in Tyneford, Elise suffers crippling bouts of homesickness and finds it difficult to adjust to her new position at the bottom of the pecking order.

I won't spoil the plot, but, rather predictably, Elise falls in love with Kit, and the romance that follows scandalises the local community. But when war is declared against Germany and Kit signs up to the Navy, there's a very real threat he may never return...

The story is told in first person from the perspective of Elise looking back on her life, and every now and then she drops in little clues which suggest that things never panned out the way she might have expected. This lends some intrigue to the storyline, but sadly Solomons has a tendency to play games with her readers — on at least two occasions Elise describes situations which never happened, they are merely fantasies inside her head. This has the effect of weakening the narrative as a whole, because you suddenly begin to doubt anything that Elise tells you.

While The Novel in the Viola is certainly pleasant enough reading — Solomon's strength is in her depiction of the inner workings of a big house and the class divide between the servants and the owners — the plot is not terribly gripping, and it's at least 100 pages too long.

However, given all the glowing five-star reviews on Amazon, perhaps I'm just completely out of sync with the rest of the book-buying public. I rather suspect I might be put straight in the comments below.

Australian book giveaway

I've just had a massive sort through of the world's biggest TBR and came across two Australian titles I've received from publishers as "review copies" — Steven Amsterdam's apocalyptic short story collection Things We Didn't See Coming and Alex Miller's rather lovely romance Lovesong.

Because I've already got copies of these books, having bought them on trips to Australia in the past (the hyperlinks above will take you to my reviews), there's no need for me to hang on to the free editions. Instead, I will give them away to two of my readers.

But here's the deal. Entry is only open to those of you who have left comments on this blog in the past. It doesn't matter how many times you've left a comment — it may have only been once two years ago or 50 times in the past 12 months — the important thing is you've taken the time to put your name in a comment box somewhere along the line. (I'd like to think that this will, in some small way, reward at least two of you who take the time to leave a comment or two, and cut out all the fly-by-night people who only ever seem to leave a comment when there's a competition in the offing!)

Entry is open worldwide. Simply tell me the name of the book you'd like to win by 10pm GMT on Thursday August 11. I'll then choose the winner using an online random number generator (or some such). Good luck!

Thank God it's Friday — now I've time to do some reading!

So, after a rather loooooong week at work — which kicked off with a 16-hour working day on Monday (don't ask) — and then a succession of evening engagements (book group on Tuesday and an evening with Sebastian Barry at Foyles on Wednesday), I have been looking forward to some down time this weekend. Reading — and chilling — will be my main priority.

I'm hoping to finally finish Natasha Solomon's The Novel in the Viola, which I won in a competition that Simon ran on his blog. Sadly, I've not enjoyed the book as much as others. It's felt too "twee" and laboured for me, and every time I've put it down I've not wanted to pick it up again.

The same can't be said of Kim Echlin's The Disappeared, which I started reading on my Kindle on Thursday lunch-time and couldn't wait to read again in bed that night. It's essentially a love story between a teenage girl in Montreal and an older Cambodian man living in exile. When he returns to his homeland in 1979 she never hears from him again. But ten years later she thinks she sees him on TV and jumps on a plane to track him down.

I'm also part-way through the latest winner of the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction. I read last year's winner — Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick, and absolutely loved it — so figured I couldn't go wrong with this year's, especially as the subject matter is one I'm very interested in — China.

Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62 by Frank Dikötter is fairly dry reading, but it is an absolutely fascinating account of what life was like during the period of the Great Leap Forward in which 45 million people died. Dikötter uses rare archive material to piece the story together and I've spent most of the time with my jaw agape as I've read of some of the atrocious policies that resulted in so many people's deaths. For example, desperate to increase productivity of farmland villagers were forced to demolish their mud-and-straw dwellings so that they could be ploughed into the earth, thinking they'd help fertilise the soil. Meanwhile, no one had anywhere to live!

I'm also eagerly looking forward to getting stuck into Sebastian Barry's On Canaan's Side, which I've had in proof form for at least four months! I heard Sebastian read a passage from it on Wednesday evening — at the Gallery in Foyles — and it was brilliantly evocative (he does accents and all, and really gets into the swing of it, raising his voice one minute, whispering the next). Plus, he spent an hour talking about the book, his other books and writing in general, and I could have listened to him all day. I love that he has taken his family's complicated history and fictionalised their lives... On Canaan's Side is about one of his great aunts, as was Annie Dunne and The Secret Scripture.

So, here's to a weekend of leisurely reading!

What are your weekend reading plans?

By the way, if you're interested in the image, you can buy posters from the Keep Calm Etsy Shop.

Literature links for a (very warm) Wednesday

• The new issue of Shelf Unbound magazine is out — and available to read online.

• Acclaimed author Barbara Kingsolver is to receive the first-ever Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award in November.

• To celebrate the 50th birthday of US President Barack Obama this week, Amazon.co.uk has revealed the top 10 most highlighted passages from his books and memoirs, as selected by Kindle readers worldwide. Here are the quotes from Dreams from my Father. And here are the quotes from The Audacity of Hope.

• Swedish author Henning Mankell, in collaboration with Ystad Tourism, has released a free app to enable fans to follow in the footsteps of Mankell’s famous detective Kurt Wallander and learn more about the location of this bestselling crime series.

• An innovative book-giving scheme, set up in the memory of writer and playwright Simon Gray, has been launched in the UK to provide reading material to selected charities.

Triple Choice Tuesday: Novel Insights

Welcome to Triple Choice Tuesday. This is where I ask some of my favourite bloggers, writers and readers to share the names of three books that mean a lot to them. The idea is that it might raise the profile of certain books and introduce you to new titles, new authors and new bloggers.

Today's guest is Polly from Novel Insights.

I know Polly personally, because we belong to the same book group here in London.

Polly reads mainly contemporary fiction and has a self-confessed penchant for dark novels, including crime and thrillers. Some of her favourite authors include Muriel Spark, Wilkie Collins and Harper Lee.

Without further ado, here's Polly's Triple Choice Tuesday selections:

A favourite book: The Magicians Nephew by C.S. Lewis 

The Magician's Nephew is the overlooked prequel to the rest of The Chronicles of Narnia and pretty much my favourite childhood book. I used to have an audio tape version as well as the paperback and listened to it repeatedly. It has all the right ingredients for a childhood classic — a secret door in the attic, magic, adventure, a wicked queen and a flying horse, as well as being charmingly written.

As with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, it is allegorical. Even though I'm not religious myself, I love the fact that it has layers of hidden meaning, and as a child it was fun to make the connections between the characters and later events in the series. It also helped that the very proper but brave little girl in the book, Polly Plummer, has the same first name as me!

A book that changed my world: The Fermata by Nicholson Baker

The Fermata is highly entertaining and completely filthy. The premise of the novel is that Arno Strine, who is an unassuming temporary admin worker, discovers that he has the capability to stop time. Instead of trying to change the world or anything grandiose like that, he decides to exploit his new skill by embarking on a sequence of sexual adventures. His voyeuristic behaviour is pretty perverted, but for some reason I never found it exactly offensive because he just seems to completely love/enjoy women and his actions lead them to their own sexual discovery.

I read it when I was in my late teens and it completely opened my eyes to the certain aspects of the male brain. I think this inadvertently gave me an interest in reading books by men, or with masculine perspectives, because at that time I was trying to make sense of the other sex. Approach with caution though, it's not for the faint-hearted!



A book that deserves a wider audience: Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb

Ever wanted to go AWOL on your life? Our Hungarian protagonist Mihaly does exactly that when by a chance misstep he and his wife are parted on their honeymoon in Italy. He goes on a journey of narcissistic self-discovery and nostalgic whim, meeting long lost friends/obsessions in unlikely places and constantly philosophising about the purpose of his life. The quality of Szerb's writing (beautifully translated by Len Rix) is wonderful and the character of Mihaly is simultaneously pathetic and endearing, which gives the novel a tragi-comic flavour. Published in 1937, I was surprised at how modern it feels in the way that it describes human emotions and entanglements. I discovered this book when I was looking for something to read on a trip to Budapest, and only read it recently when I chose it for my book group. I hope everyone else enjoyed it as much as me!

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Thanks, Polly, for taking part in my Triple Choice Tuesday! What do you think of Polly's choices? Have you read any of these books? I read The Magician's Nephew when I was a kid and remember loving it, although my favourite Narnia book was Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The Fermata sounds interesting, if slightly risqué. And having read Journey By Moonlight as part of the same book group I have already made my feelings known on it — my review is here.