The first book I read this month was Rebecca Gowers’ THE TWISTED HEART, a combination literary mystery and off-beat romance. Unfortunately the two halves didn’t quite gel for me at all and I found the whole thing a bit forced, although the Dickens sections are interesting. Anne Michaels’ second novel, THE WINTER VAULT, on the other hand is a beautifully realised account of the marriage between an engineer and his wife, much of which is set in Egypt in the 1960s. It’s easy to see from Michaels’ prose that she has published a lot of poetry for the language is very beautiful and moving.
Helen Oyeyemi’s third novel WHITE IS FOR WITCHING is a ghost-story of sorts but the novel is overrun by different narrative voices which make the story far more complicated than it really is, leaving the reader feeling more irritated than scared.
Deirdre Madden’s latest novel, MOLLY FOX’S BIRTHDAY, is a tremendous piece of work. The story of three friends, a playwright, an actress and an art historian, Madden sets her story over one day but uses the smallest moments to create stories of memory that tell us who these people are. It’s a very fine novel with a strong, consistent narrative voice and characters whose motivations we only slowly begin to understand as the story progresses.
Another Irish novel, ALL NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED by Claire Kilroy is a beautifully written story of a group of writing students in 1980s Dublin. The narrator is the only man in the group and Kilroy captures his voice very well. There’s a dark side to the novel too, a recognition of the heroin problems in the city in those days, and it provides a fine counterbalance to the artistic longings of the aspiring writers.
Hilary Mantel’s new book WOLF HALL is a gripping account of the rise of Thomas Cromwell to power in the Tudor court of Henry VIII. I’m a huge fan of anything relating to this period of history and found Mantel’s take completely original – which is not easy considering the wealth of literature relating to Henry – and poetic in its storytelling.
There is nothing quite so wonderful in literature as the novella form and Eugene McCabe’s brilliant THE LOVE OF SISTERS is a great example of how powerful they can be. In just over 100 pages McCabe tells the story of two sisters, particularly that of the younger sister Carmel, in a series of dramatic and moving tales. This is storytelling at its most accomplished, a novella that stays with the reader and fills one with admiration for its writer.
Ian MacKenzie’s debut CITY OF STRANGERS starts with an interesting premise: two brothers, estranged, forced to re-enter each others’ lives as their father, a former Nazi sympathiser and the cause of their fall-out, lies dying. This in itself would be enough for a novel but MacKenzie adds a further twist, a moment of violence reminiscent of Bonfire of the Vanities, which leads the brothers into unexpected directions. The first half of the book is terrific, tautly written, interesting characters, but sadly it’s let down by the second half where it rather bizarrely descends into melodrama and the standard tropes of a conventional thriller.
AS Byatt’s new novel THE CHILDREN’S BOOK is a powerful novel. A large cast of characters whose relationships we gradually come to understand as the story develops it takes a very careful reading but it’s worth the effort. Less obtuse but equally long is Iain Pears’ STONE’S FALL, which reads like a 19th century novel, a terrific story of journalists, spies, bankers, warmongers. A really compulsive read.
Kazuo Ishiguro is one of my favourite authors and his first collection of stories, NOCTURNES, contains five stories, each of which has some connection with music. There’s a great freshness to the narrative voices, often a very casual sense of phrasing which makes the stories feel alive. My favourite was probably ‘Malvern Hills’ but like all Ishiguro’s writing, it’s just a delight to read every one.
Rosie Alison’s debut novel THE VERY THOUGHT OF YOU grips from start to finish. Beginning with the story of a young girl evacuated to a country house at the start of the war, it opens up to include doomed romances, thwarted love affairs, innocence corrupted, and a cast of characters that are as passionate as they are believable. Alison writes with a real understanding of the period and true compassion for her characters and the plot develops in unexpected and often shocking ways. Without question one of the best debuts I’ve read in recent years and an important addition to the growing body of literature which concerns itself with the effect of the Second World War on the people back home.
And finally, THE SELECTED WORKS OF TS SPIVET, another debut, this time by an American writer Reif Larsen. It’s narrated by a highly precocious 12 year old mapmaker who’s travelling to Washington DC to collect an award. There are so many, so very many, debut novels narrated by smart-beyond-their-years children and teenagers and very few of them work, mainly because the narrators don’t actually sound like precocious children at all but like adults pretending to be them. There’s a lot of gimmicks in the book too as can be seen by its extraordinary production values – which are, it has to be said, great fun – but unfortunately I wasn’t sold on the novel itself.
Tickets have gone on sale for two festivals I’m appearing at in about a month’s time.
e festival 
Anyone who’s ever read anything about me will know that I was a student on the Creative Writing course at the University of East Anglia during 1994/95 and returned there a decade later as Writing Fellow in 2004/05, which was where I made a great friend in the poet 
One of my former university lectures, Senator David Norris, interviewed me on his Sunday morning programme on 
I just returned home to Dublin after a few days in England and Scotland where I attended a couple of literary festivals I’d never been to before. On Thursday I was at the 
I’m in the UK for the rest of the week on the promotional trail for 
This month’s Tesco Book Club book of the month is MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY.