This is hands-down my favourite novel of 2010. It’s narrated by Milo Burke; failed painter, struggling toddler-dad and troubled employee in the fundraising department of a New York University. The Ask is a proper Great American Novel, about all the stuff that really matters now, and it made me laugh out loud more times than any novel I think I’ve ever read.
Nazi Literature in the Americas: Roberto Bolaño (£7.99)
The Suicide Shop: Jean Teule
If Tim Burton (pre Helena Bonham Carter) was to write a Philip K Dick novel (early Philip K Dick, without the drugs, lashings of futility, and with narratives that started and ended and went somewhere in between), and set it in France, you would probably end up with something like this.
And very good it is too.
AD 500: Simon Young
The Celtic Revolution: Simon Young
The Celts, it would seem, did an awful lot; don’t let the apparent brevity of the book deceive you. Young certainly knows his stuff and yet is one of the rare few able to effortlessly distil his arguments into something that is: –
(a) readable
(b) comprehensible
which always helps.
Perhaps not the most obvious topic but this is a lively and illuminating insight into an all too often unacknowledged period.