Category: News

  • Ten Days, by Gillian Slovo

    Hardback, Canongate, £14.99, out 3 March Martin Luther King said that “riots are the language of the unheard”. Developed from Slovo’s successful 2011 verbatim play The Riots at the Tricycle theatre, this readable novel offers multiple voices and a wholly convincing and gripping anatomy of how a London riot happens. It is a scorching summer,…

  • London Fog: the Biography, by Christine L. Corton

    Hardback, Harvard University Press, £22.95, out now This very readable history of London fog was a surprise hit this winter. Beautifully illustrated, with colour pictures well integrated into the text, Corton provides not only a good summary of why fogs happened and why they stopped but also gives an erudite account of how they affected…

  • The Outrun, by Amy Liptrot

    Hardback, Canongate, £14.99, out now A young woman flies back into Orkney with her newborn baby – pausing at the airport to introduce the baby to her husband, who is being flown out, in a straitjacket, to a psychiatric hospital. Amy Liptrot, the author of this engaging addition to the nature/memoir selection, was the baby…

  • Lila: Marilynne Robinson

    The third novel in Robinson’s Gilead trilogy, Lila is the eponymous story of the Reverend John Ames’ much younger wife, whose poverty-stricken and itinerant childhood in Dust Bowl America has shaped her into a deeply insecure, yet compassionate and courageous human being. The narrative is a mixture of omniscient third person narration and Lila’s own…

  • Pond, Claire-Louise Bennett

    It’s rare to discover a truly original book but Pond is just that. A series of short ‘stories’, sometimes no more than a few paragraphs, this highly eccentric and experimental work revolves around an unnamed woman whose rural isolation is the occasion of her meandering meditations upon everything from bananas, control knobs, a conglomeration of…

  • The Incarnations, Susan Barker

    A ghost is this highly original novel’s second protagonist; its’ first is Wang, a taxi driver in contemporary Beijing who is the recipient of a series of mysterious letters purporting to be from a soul he has encountered in past lives. Barker weaves a seamless and gripping narrative between the modern-day and a dozen brilliantly…

  • Edna O’Brien, The Little Red Chairs

    Hardback, Faber and Faber, £18.99, out now In 2012, in memory of the Sarajevo siege which began in 1992, “11,541 red chairs were laid out in rows along… the Sarajevo high street. One empty chair for every Sarajevan killed during the 1,425 days of siege. Six hundred and forty-three small chairs for the children killed…

  • Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter about People Who Think Differently, by Steve Silberman

    Allen and Unwin, £16.99, paperback out now A worthy winner of the Samuel Johnson non-fiction book prize, this is a fascinating and highly readable history of autism. We also get to meet several interesting people affected by autism, and an invitation to reconsider what we think we know about it. Silberman, a journalist for Wired…

  • Gods of Metal, Eric Schlosser

    Penguin, paperback out now £1.99 Somehow I had stopped really thinking about the piles of nuclear weapons placed all over the world: owned, operated and sought by fallible humans. In this substantial and important new piece of reportage, Eric Schlosser (author of Fast Food Nation, Executive Producer of There Will be Blood) updates us on…

  • Robert Aickman: 1914-1981

    Robert Aickman is another contender for the best writer you’ve never heard of, so his centenary (on 27 June) is a perfect moment to sample his ‘strange stories’. Tartarus Press has done valiant work in keeping Aickman in print by publishing handsome hardback editions, and now Faber & Faber is reissuing several paperback collections this…

  • Tenth of December: George Saunders

    Paperback now available – £8.99 Hoping to read Tenth of December by George Saunders in a handy paperback format on 10 December, 2013? Well, if you call at the Riverside you can indeed enjoy this moment of literary synchronicity; or at the very least get hold of this acclaimed collection before all your well-read friends.…

  • The Luminaries, The Goldfinch

    If you’re in the mood for autumnal immersion into a big book, here’s a brace of blockbuster novels – a Booker winner and a long-awaited comeback. The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton is back in stock after publishers Granta reprinted the Booker-winning, 830-page literary novel that doubles up as a homage to Victorian sensation novels. A…

  • Morrissey: Autobiography

    Penguin Classics paperback out now – £8.99 We’ve had a lot of big titles out this month including Stephen King, William Boyd’s Bond and the new Bridget Jones. But Steven Patrick Morrissey is shaping up to be the biggest of the bunch. Even before it was out, the media was awash with commentators opining on…

  • The Lowest Heaven, Memory Palace

    We’re used to book tie-ins for films, TV shows and grasping celebrities but fiction inspired by an exhibition is a more engaging combination. Alongside Hari Kunzru’s dystopian Memory Palace, written as part of a new V&A exhibition, there’s The Lowest Heaven, a science fiction anthology to coincide with Visions of the Universe at the National…

  • Patrick Leigh Fermor – An Adventure: Artemis Cooper

    Paperback now available Like any worthwhile biographical subject, the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor was a bundle of contradictions. A garrulous, worldly adventurer who secluded himself in French monasteries; an urbane clubman who yearned for the Greek countryside; and a bon vivant and seducer who built his life around one loyal woman. The excitable young…

  • The Old Ways: Robert Macfarlane

    Paperback now available – £9.99 Nominated for the Samuel Johnson Prize, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot is lyrical nature writing that draws deep on literature, myth and memory. It’s a book for walkers or indeed anyone who’s felt their imagination stir as they put one foot in front of the other on an…

  • Arthur C Clarke Award 2013: Chris Beckett

    Chris Beckett was the deserving winning of the UK’s major science fiction prize, which he accepted at the Royal Society tonight along with a cheque for £2,013. He won for Dark Eden, an SF novel that draws on the Adam and Eve creation story for a richly textured tale about stranded astronauts and their incestuous…

  • The Teleportation Accident: Ned Beauman

    Now in paperback – £8.99 Ned Beauman published a precociously confident debut novel, Boxer, Beetle, in 2010. He’s followed that with an audacious comic romp that made the Man Booker Prize longlist. The globe-trotting story begins in Berlin in 1931 where sex-starved set designer Egon Loeser is working on a production about his 17th century…