The Riverside Bookshop blog
We are monitoring the situation daily and have no confirmed cases of coronavirus among our staff to date. We will take immediate action if needed and will notify through our Instagram and/or blog if we need to close the shop for a period of time. So it’s business as usual for now.
If you are planning to make a special trip to see us, please ring us before you travel – 020 7378 1824.
Best wishes from all at the Riverside Bookshop.
Paperback, Andersen Press, £6.99, out now
Wolf in the Snow is an adventurous and heart-warming winter story. Told through pictures, with almost all of the words being the sounds made by the human and non-human animals, this is an instantly engaging story.
A little girl in a red coat leaves her school just as a blizzard is starting. As the snow becomes heavier, she finds a wolf cub who has accidentally become separated from their pack. She tries to get the cub back to the pack, and will not abandon it. But when she becomes lost, will anyone be able to find her and bring her home?
Like all the best children’s books, this is appropriate for every age. I’m not surprised that it won the Caldecott medal. I love that the author’s note at the beginning includes: “thanks to Kira Cassidy of the Yellowstone Wolf Project for taking the time to answer my questions about wolves and wolf behaviour”. The wolves and humans manage to be equally relatable, which is a remarkable achievement. It also has lovely messages about connection, taking risks to help others, love and friendship. A perfect gift book for winter, if you can bear to give it away.
Review by Bethan
We are looking for a PART TIME Bookseller to join our team permanently.
Bookselling experience is preferred and recent retail experience is essential.
As a key part of our small, friendly and enthusiastic team, you will provide excellent customer service and help keep our well curated stock interesting. Come and join London Bridge’s independent bookshop.
You would need to be available to start in late November/early December, to work weekend shifts, and to work flexible weekday shifts as needed.
To apply, please send your CV and a covering letter to Suzanne Dean, by email or post or by hand, by Monday 11th November. If you’d like more information, please phone or drop into the shop. Call 020 7378 1824 or email info@riversidebookshop.co.uk.
Hardback, Picador, £16.99, out now
Ted Chiang is perhaps best-known outside science fiction circles as the writer of the short story on which the 2016 film Arrival was based. Inside those circles, he’s the much-praised winner of a dozen sci fi writing awards – an incredibly high hit rate for a guy who’s only published seventeen short stories. This, his second collection, compiles his noughties-teens output and two originals in a single thought-provoking volume.
The deeply imaginative worlds Chiang creates within, philosophical questions he explores and his commitment to the teasing out of conundrums both moral and scientific have drawn comparisons to Borges and Calvino; given this, it would be tempting to say that these stories are in danger of “transcending science fiction”. But that would be to play down the fact that each of them revels in the genre. They are, unapologetically, part of that canon; the title story is effectively a meditation on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, while references to tech innovation, alien worlds and near-futures abound.
In this way, it’s doubly impressive that Chiang’s use of oft-trodden genre tropes yields such new and innovating results, ones that feel extremely pertinent to the present day – at times, terrifyingly so. It helps that he is, in an unflashy way, a master craftsman. His chameleonic style alters cleverly to service the needs of each story – our narrators are variously un-humanoid beings with recognisably human feelings of existential angst, fabric merchants from ancient Iraq, and an omniscient, unaffected third person narrator, recounting a truly distressing tale of Frankensteinien neglect and anonymous cruelty.
His ability to build suspense, meanwhile, is subtle and brilliant. In Exhalation our mysterious non-human storyteller’s perfectly plausible withholding of information as it tells its tale fuels our curiosity, its peculiar world introduced to us piece by piece. Reading The Lifecycle of Software Objects, meanwhile, is like watching a small child slowly crawl closer and closer to a cliff-edge. There’re shades of Michael Haneke in its blending of creeping dread and apparent mundanity, as well as in its dispassionate depictions of awful brutality; but it’s his ability to steadily crank up the unease well before any actual unpleasantness arrives that’s hugely impressive. And, because it’s fantastic sci-fi, it also takes place in an immersive world of just-on-the-horizon technological speculation (techulation?), feeling all the more grimly-plausible for that.
All-in-all, this is a collection that deserves to reach well outside of the sci-fi sphere – even if the stories themselves work inside it so adeptly.
Review by Tom
Happy Easter to all of our customers!
Our opening hours are as normal with the following exceptions:
Good Friday (19 April) – 11am to 6pm
Easter Saturday (20 April) – 10am to 6pm
Easter Sunday (21 April) – CLOSED
Easter Monday (22 April) – 11am to 6pm
Paperback, Penguin, £9.99, out now
If the sheer breadth of mindfulness, meditation, wellbeing and guidance books is really stressing you out, let us recommend The Science of Meditation, by science journalist Daniel Goleman and professor of psychology and psychiatry Richard J. Davidson.
This impressive work’s greatest strength is its ability to operate on many levels at once. On the one hand it’s an interrogative history of the scientific study of meditation, detailing the (more often than not, flawed) ways in which the results of this esoteric practice on the mind and body have been tested and evaluated. This technical content, while extensive, is never too dense, and always clearly laid out – so whether you’re learning about the neural profiles consistent with different meditative states, or how a sense of purpose in life can release an enzyme capable of protecting the strands of your DNA, you’re always taken through complex ideas one step at a time. it’s comprehensive but never woolly – in their own words, our guides aim to “keep it simple”.
On the other hand, it is an argument for the wide-ranging benefits of meditation. When Goleman and Davidson aren’t merrily shooting down vast swathes of studies into mindfulness practices for potentially biasing their test-subjects and making specious assumptions, they’re digging deep into sturdier research that shows the myriad ways in which these techniques can help a person. Lieutenant colonels diminish the symptoms of PTSD, zen students show improved resistance to pain, Tibetan monks (with PhDs in science) cultivate enhanced levels of compassion… The upshot, argue the authors, both long-time meditators, is that depending on your needs these practices can do a whole lot more than a) calm you down and b) bring you closer to oneness with the universe.
Which brings us to the book’s final function: that of a very useful guide on how to utilise different forms of meditation (it turns out there are quite a few) in your own life, depending on what you want to achieve from them. And – of course – they have the science to back up why each form may be the right one for you and your joint pain, or your anxiety, or your self-criticism.
Clear-headed, rigorous and insightful, this is the book for you if you want neuroscientific certainties with your spiritual enlightenment, and as a study of what we can say for sure about meditation and its psychological and physiological potential at this time it certainly feels damn near definitive.
Review by Tom
We have some lovely signed copies in store!
The Library of Ice by Nancy Campbell
Another Planet by Tracey Thorn
Adèle by Leïla Slimani
Jimmy Page by Chris Salewicz
How to Ride a Bike by Sir Chris Hoy
We’re working on a new downstairs poetry display… and we’ve included quotes on belly 
bands so you can try before you buy and see why we like them all so much. The section will be ever-changing but at the moment it features Mona Arshi, Rachael Allen, Warsan Shire, Hannah Sullivan, Hera Lindsay Bird, Claudia Rankine, J.O. Morgan, A. K. Blakemore, Emily Berry and Richard Scott.
Get a head start on your Christmas shopping and snap up one of our excellent signed copies… when they’re gone, they’re gone!
Stephen Fry – Heroes
Max Hastings – Vietnam
Neil MacGregor – Living with the Gods
Geraint Thomas – The Tour According to G
Moeen Ali – Moeen
Neil Oliver – The Story of the British Isles in 100 Places
Matt Haig – Notes on a Nervous Planet
Tim Peake – Astronaut Selection Test Book
Peter Stafford-Bow – Brut Force
Sir Chris Hoy – How to Ride a Bike
Hardback, Chatto & Windus, £20, published 11 October 2018
Eve was Shamed is a timely and comprehensive update on women as they engage with the UK’s criminal justice system, from a legendary feminist human rights lawyer. The depth of her experience over years of legal practice and activism makes this a must-read. You don’t have to agree with everything she says to benefit from her thoughtful and erudite commentary.
17 years after I first read her classic book on women and the law Eve was Framed, Eve was Shamed shows where we have made progress and where so much remains to be done. Her account includes experiences of women lawyers, survivors of domestic or sexual violence, prisoners, judges, and others. She finds that “despite the dramatic changes which have taken place in women’s lives over the last four decades, women are still facing iniquitous judgements and injustice within the legal system. All the legal reforms have produced only marginal advances”. (p. 317)
Kennedy’s dual commitment to feminism and to human rights is particularly interesting. Her values inform her approach to her work, including her analysis of difficult or controversial situations in public life. She recounts occasions when this has led to conflict with people she has been allies with, and it is evident that she values the process of discussion and exchange that leads to resolution, even where this is uncomfortable or challenging. She notes: “feminism is about justice if it is about anything, and that means for men as well as women. Justice for women is not secured by reducing justice for men.” (p. 324)
She has lost none of her passion or commitment on the things that matter to her, making her a useful model for how to survive and remain effective during bleak times. Her considered solutions to problems are offered throughout, and this means that despite the subject matter you feel that real change is possible. Jacky Fleming’s inspirational cartoon remains helpful (see https://www.jackyfleming.co.uk/product/never-give-up/).
Review by Bethan
We are very happy to be celebrating Bookshop Day here in London Bridge’s local independent! Many stickers and balloons are about and the bunting is up.
Come and say hello! You might find a book to change your life…
For all your book/chameleon storage needs, our stylish new bags will sort you out.
Made by the re-wrap co-operative, these cotton totes celebrate our 31 years as an independent bookshop.
Yours for only £5.99!
We’ll be closed for our annual stocktake on the morning of Wednesday 27 June. We hope to be open by mid afternoon, but give us a call if you want to check before visiting!
Here at Riverside we’re pleased to see that The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie at the Donmar is getting good reviews – and particularly that its characterisation of the troublingly fascism-sympathetic Brodie cleaves to Spark’s original vision – because a few of us are massive fans of the late Scottish author (and total genius).
So it’s as good a time as any to say that we’ve got in a raft of her best works – some in absolutely gorgeous new editions from Polygon – from her complete short story collection to some deep cuts more than worthy of your time.
There’s early chiller The Ballad of Peckham Rye, in which a devilish stranger turns the titular district upside-down, showcasing Spark’s fully-formed blend of blitheness and villainy. It’s a twisting delight, shocking and beguiling, with the wicked purpose of a Grimm’s fairy tale.
Comic gem A Far Cry From Kensington is a blast, a coiled spring of absurd characters, mysterious goings on, blackmail and backstabbing, the upper-class ne’er-do-wells of Agatha Christie meeting the upper-class ne’er-do-wells of Oscar Wilde. The narrator Mrs Hawkins’ misadventures in publishing, as her honesty brings the ire of influential writer Hector Bartlett, are as nutty as her ruminations are sometimes thought-provoking.
Then there’s unsung masterwork Memento Mori, which we’ve got in a beautiful new Virago and a Polygon edition. It’s a piercingly funny, at times very moving examination of the ignominy of old age; and, it being Spark, it’s all wrapped in a delicious blend of mystery and deception. Easily as good as Ms Jean Brodie.
And that’s really just the tip of the iceberg – we’re carrying a multitude more, all of which prove that this brilliant novelist could go head-to-head with Highsmith when it comes to bleakness, Greene when it comes to conspiracy and Wodehouse when it comes to wit. Every story will stick in your mind long after you’ve finished it, and that’s a Riverside guarantee.
We were so delighted this International Women’s Day to be asked to help a local
company, Slalom, build up an IWD library for their staff. It was enormous fun and Slalom were kind enough to send us a picture of the installed library.
If you’d like help doing something similar for your workplace, pop in or give us a call. We can rise to the challenge of any theme you’d like to set us! We can also order in anything we don’t have, and orders usually turn up the next day so there is no need to delay your book gratification.
Paperback, Vintage, £8.99, out now
Linda Coverdale’s superlative translations of the work of French powerhouse Emmanuel Carrère continue to delight us at Riverside – this latest sees the writer and filmmaker tell the story of a love affair, a family history and a possibly-doomed documentary in a “non-fiction novel” heavy on sex and introspection.
At the book’s beginning Carrère is ostensibly investigating the curious tale of a Hungarian soldier who, during World War 2, was imprisoned by the Russians, transferred to a psychiatric institution and somehow forgotten about, only being released in the noughties. A fascinating story; but also a feint, as we soon discover it’s not the anecdote itself that interests Carrère but its passing similarity to the life of his Nazi-collaborator grandfather, a similarly disturbed figure who was “disappeared” after the end of the occupation. It’s this buried history that hangs over the Carrères like a dark cloud, and one which this book sees him trying to purge in one way or another.
The unexpected lyricism that made his wonderful The Adversary so effective is well served here by a narrative that interrogates love, betrayal, and ennui, flitting effortlessly from travelogue to existential rumination, erotic fantasy to historical reportage. But what’s really interesting is that Carrère often doesn’t come across at all well; a slave to his neuroses and passions, irrational and impulsive, he embarks on a poorly thought-out film project in a Russian town in tandem with a poorly thought-out relationship with a woman whose non-bohemian existence he can’t help but feel ashamed of. In both cases, as apparently in all things, he seems driven not so much by constructive sentiments as demons from his past, and having an author bare all on the page in such a borderline masochistic way is both shocking and powerful.
Props must go once again to Coverdale also; as with the best translators, the continuity of the author’s voice across the works she has interpreted is evident – which is perhaps not easy when her subject is so mercurial – and her word choices paint a vibrant picture of a narrator who is at once urbane aesthete and helpless obsessive. In short, exactly the kind of person you want to read about.
Review by Tom
Riverside Bookshop is pleased to be selling the first joint work from the excellent poet Catherine Madden and superb designer Louise Evans. It is a series of poems and 
illustrations in which the authors alternate inspirations. Half the poems are Cat writing in response to drawings by Louise, and half the drawings are by Louise in response to poems by Cat.
We have signed limited editions of this beautiful book for sale. And we are especially proud to have Cat as one of our expert booksellers here at Riverside.
A second book by Cat is due out soon!
Paperback, Penguin Random House, £8.99, out now
Much has been made of the fact that this is Ali Smith’s “Brexit novel”, which in some ways is to do it a disservice. Because if, like me, the term “Brexit novel” makes you shudder internally and want to reach for the new Lee Childs instead, you’d be missing out on a fascinating entry which manages to look at our newly-divided Britain with a fresh eye.
The plot concerns the curious relationship between Elisabeth Demand, a precariously-employed “casual contract junior lecturer” visiting the town in which she grew up, and Daniel Gluck, her centenarian former neighbour who now lies dying in a hospice. But this is just the springboard from which Smith leads us through a whirlwind of dreams and memories, in tandem with her always-enjoyable day-to-day interactions deftly delivered with the usual eye for eccentricity.
And all this is of course set very much in the present, against the backdrop of the country’s historic decision to leave the EU. Working as she is in a medium where we’re used to clever allusions, parodies, fables and metaphors instead of approaching things head-on, there’s something almost illicitly exciting in the way she occasionally allows her asides about Brexit to be so on-the-nose, never shying away from directly addressing the matter at hand. This feels every inch a book written in the direct aftermath of the referendum, simultaneously angry, confused, ruminative, wounded and playful – which must be a very hard concoction to pull off as successfully as it is here.
At times it feels like Smith is examining this disorienting time in the same way that Gunter Grass so brilliantly tackled the incremental rise of Nazi Germany in The Tin Drum; by focusing alternately on scenes of domesticity, surreality and hard, painful truth.
And as in many of Smith’s novels, it’s somehow dreamlike yet relatable, like a glimpse inside a brain at once the same and totally different to your own. Written in the distinctly idiosyncratic prose – peppered with elastic quips, digressions through language and the occasional startling image – which has won her such a loyal fan-base, it’s no surprise that such a talented writer, wrestling with so seismic a period in our history, has turned out a piece of work as singular as this. Get it down you.
Review by Tom
Hardback, Granta, £12.99, out now
Another week, another deeply unsettling novella. Tom Lee’s dream-like tale of suburban living gone awry would make a good companion piece to Matthew Weiner’s Heather, the Totality; but where that short novel felt very American in its evocation of a divided, gentrified New York, Lee’s is distinctly, queasily English, exploiting the tensions behind middle-class social mores.
Unremarkable family man James Orr wakes up one morning to discover he has contracted Bell’s Palsy, which has caused the left side of his face to droop unresponsively. In the hands of Lee, dealing with this plausible (if unlikely) malady becomes a Kafkaesque nightmare, as Orr – like the haplessly metamorphosed Gregor Samsa – tries his best to navigate his life and responsibilities in a world where he has been indelibly transformed.
Suddenly unable to work at his client-facing company, he is forced to confront the grim reality of days unmoored from any sort of routine. Meanwhile his unblemished cul-de-sac community of identical homes is under siege, as youths are using its quiet streets for sexual encounters in their cars. As head of the neighbourhood residents’ committee, James may have to do something – but his predicament is a doubly unfortunate one, as he finds that his face is sufficiently disabled that he often can’t speak or make himself understood.
Tough stuff for anyone to deal with; but like in any bad dream, an inexplicable edge begins to creep into our hero’s behaviour. As his visage is obscured so too are the motives behind his actions, and the unpredictability of the narrative as he becomes increasingly erratic makes for compelling reading.
This is a novel which utilizes its idyllic setting perfectly in a way that recalls Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby or The Stepford Wives, and the slow and innocuous way that an atmosphere of dread is built is remarkable. A quick, punchy read that stays with you long after the final page.
Review by Tom
We have some new signed copies:
Tom Lee – The Alarming Palsy of James Orr
Matthew Weiner – Heather, the Totality
Peter Stafford-Bow – Corkscrew
Jenny Uglow – Mr Lear
Nigel Slater – The Christmas Chronicles
Jennifer Bell – The Smoking Hourglass
Max Leonard – Higher Calling
Still a few copies left of:
Matt Haig – Father Christmas and Me
Maggie O’Farrell – I am, I am, I am
Uploaded by Arianna
Hardback, Unbound, £14.99, out now
A really interesting conceit here, and well executed; Ruth and Martin’s Album Club is a compendium of record reviews – the twist being that each one is being judged by a celebrity who is hearing it for the first time. For those who agree with Frank Zappa’s famous maxim that writing about music is like “dancing about architecture” and like their reportage on the subject to come with just a bit extra, look no further.
It’s reminiscent of the 33/3 series of books, in which writers delve into the minutiae of a beloved LP of their choosing, but this has an enjoyable casualness to it which makes each entry a joy. Every album has a prologue written about it by the incredibly well-informed Martin Fitzgerald, and these are pleasingly illuminating. He’s got a loose prose style that feels punchy and good-humoured, the compere before the main event – which consists of folks like J.K. Rowling, Ian Rankin, Chris Addison and Bonnie Greer laying out their pre-and-post-conceptions of a classic album they’re hearing for the first time.
This format allows for little windows into the lives of our writers (Martin’s question, put to all participants, of why the hell they haven’t listened to what they’ll be reviewing before turns up some curious answers) just as much as it does fresh perspectives on timeless records. It’s particularly invigorating to hear contributors admitting to not enjoying the kind of hallowed LPs that no one is ever allowed to confess a dislike of, and while I’d disagree with every iota of Times journalist Danny Finkelstein’s distinctly unimpressed review of The Velvet Underground and Nico, it feels delightfully subversive to see it being described in print as merely “OK”.
You also get to hear what Tim Farron thinks about N.W.A, which is information you didn’t know you needed, but most assuredly do. Perfect Christmas fodder for the musically-minded if you’re efficient enough to be looking for presents this early.
Review by Tom
We have some lovely new signed copies including several by a rather famous actor… get them while they’re hot!
Tom Hanks – Uncommon Type
Alan Bennett – Keep On Keeping On
Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris – The Lost Words
Armistead Maupin – Logical Family
Matt Haig – Father Christmas and Me and The Girl Who Saved Christmas
Natasha and Lauren O’Hara – Hortense and the Shadow
Selling fast right now!
Hardback, Sort Of Books, £10.99, out now
One of the best book things ever has just happened to me. I discovered that the Moomin prose books are not the same stories as the Moomin comic strips. This means that there is a whole world of unknown Moomin that I can explore, and I can do it through the beautiful new hardback editions of four of the prose books just issued by Sort Of Books. This is the reader equivalent of buried treasure.
Moomintroll wakes up from his winter hibernation early, and is surrounded by his sleeping family. Feeling lonely, but also adventurous, he heads out to see what the winter world is like, and who he can find there. He makes new friends, and their insights are valuable: after Moomintroll and Too-ticky see the Northern Lights, Too-ticky notes, “I’m thinking about the aurora borealis. You can’t tell if it really does exist or if it just looks like existing. All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured”. The gorgeous illustrations and fold out map (complete with Lonely Mountains and Grotto) complete the magic.
A long time fan of Jansson’s Summer Book, a novel for adults, I have found similar themes of kindness and adventure in her Moomin books (see Ali Smith on The Summer Book here – https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/jul/12/fiction.alismith). I agree absolutely with Philip Pullman when he writes: “Tove Jansson was a genius of a very subtle kind. These simple stories resonate with profound and complex emotions that are like nothing else in literature for children or adults”. I can vouch for the joy of reading them for the first time as an adult. These are books for every human. In case the books are not enough, I can also head to Dulwich Picture Gallery’s Tove Jansson exhibition (http://www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/2017/october/tove-jansson/).
There should be a word for the rare feeling that you get when reading a book that is new to you, but which you realise will be a favourite for the rest of your life. There isn’t one that I can think of, but this book would have occasioned it.
Review by Bethan
Paperback, Virago, £9.99, out now
A cracker of a memoir this, Darling Days tell the story of author and activist iO Tillett Wright’s distinctly off-the-wall upbringing in the squalor of downtown New York.
With its depiction of an exhilarating if hand-to-mouth existence in the East Village of the 1980s, the punk and new wave subcultures spawned there and the drugs that desolated its communities, Darling Days follows in the footsteps of autobiographies like Patti Smith’s Just Kids or Richard Hell’s I dreamed I was a Very Clean Tramp – both by poets and novelists who share not just glittery New York-based life stories but also a way with strong, beautiful prose. Tough acts to follow, but Tillett Wright more than holds his own on both counts.
He’s certainly had an interesting life straight out of the gate, born to a mother who was equal parts Amazonian warrior and Playboy centrefold, a model, hard drinker, addict and widow (her former husband having been shot by police in dubious circumstances). The pair’s adventures, clashes and anecdotes make for compelling, bewildering and sobering reading; there are several sections in the book, after the young iO has done something like rush to find a cop to protect her mother from an abusive boyfriend, when you find yourself saying, he’s how young at this point?
But all these wild experiences can make for sub-par reading at best if the author can’t bring them to life on the page. Thankfully, Tillett Wright’s writing is frankly brilliant; he has a fantastic way with imagery, razor-sharp descriptions of locales and characters bursting fully-formed into your mind’s eye. Angular faces, voluptuous bodies, mean streets and crumbling blocks are drawn in brilliant chiaroscuro style… and, as with Smith and Hell, there is something intangibly New York about it. At times his keen eye for this slum of a city and its crooked inhabitants is almost Dickensian.
The vivacity of Tillett Wright’s storytelling and style really can’t be emphasised enough, and his tale is a captivating one. For a living, breathing slice of a fascinating period of American life, look no further.
Review by Tom
Signed Hardback, Particular Books, £17.99, out now
Former Maccabees frontman Orlando Weeks has taken a surprising career-turn into bittersweet picture-books with The Gritterman, a beautifully illustrated and touching tale about a local gritter’s last night on duty.
Our unnamed hero takes us through his life and times in prose written with an understated, colloquial charm, discussing his work (ice cream man on summer days, gritterman on winter nights), late wife and private ruminations. His beloved night-time role consigned to the scrapheap by global warming and a terse letter from the council, he’s a man whose quiet profession – and way of life – is being extinguished by the relentless march of modernity.
Just as his faithful van putters along on its final mission, so he, an elderly man quite alone in the world, moves towards his ultimate destination. But while elegiac, The Gritterman is not depressing, instead finding a sweet triumphalism in a sad situation. As our narrator says; “Being alone and loneliness aren’t the same thing”.
All of this is paired with wonderful drawings by Weeks; and if lovely hand-drawn illustrations, sad scenarios and wintry landscapes are putting you in mind of Raymond Briggs, you wouldn’t be far wrong. Weeks’ melancholic, low-key style and domestic focus feel like a continuation of the kind of themes Briggs famously explored in works like The Snowman and Father Christmas, while his scratchy coloured pencil illustrations marked by subdued blues and flashes of colour recall The Snowman in particular.
But unlike Briggs’ work, this isn’t a comic, instead making use of the ample white space that a novel’s form allows to suggest isolation, and thick blankets of snow. And Weeks’ style is ultimately looser. The gritterman is rendered an incomplete ghost, fading fast; his world a foggy, unfocused one perpetually obscured by inclement weather.
It’s the little details in this book that make it shine, from the “dink on [his van’s] left wheel arch that’s the same shape as Scotland” to the turkey chow mein dinner our protagonist painstakingly prepares, a chunk of which he later removes from his molar with the corner of a Christmas card. Between them and the pictures you could pore over for hours, it’s the reading equivalent of what’s known as chrysalism; the intangible satisfaction of being snuggled up in bed while listening to a raging storm outside.
Review by Tom
Hardback, Bloomsbury, £18.99, out now
If you turn over George Saunders’ first full-length novel, you’ll be bombarded by so many quotes on the back cover from writing titans that it might lead you to believe that he’s the literary equivalent of the second coming of Christ. Jonathan Franzen says we’re lucky to have him, Zadie Smith asserts that we’ll read him “long after these times have passed”, Thomas Pynchon, Khaled Hosseini, Jennifer Egan, Junot Díaz, Lorrie Moore and more besides all sing his praises.
And the wonderful thing is, they ain’t wrong. Saunders is a singular voice, a writer whose celebrated short stories have combined Pythonesque whimsy, incomprehensible corporate/new age jargon, deep existential ennui and a strong ethical conscience to create a style that is instantly recognisable and wonderfully original. His works are uniquely his own, as funny as they are often heart-breaking – you will laugh, you will cry – and his debut novel is thankfully no different.
A bizarre story – Abraham Lincoln’s deceased eleven-year-old son Willie tries to navigate a transitional stage of the afterlife known as the Bardo over one night of ghostly weirdness – is complemented by an equally bizarre form; when Saunders isn’t leading the plot through playscript-like dialogues narrated from within the Bardo he’s employing an even more remarkable narrative convention, that of telling the tale of the surviving Abraham Lincoln by amalgamating passages from (fictional) history books. This creates a procession of voices mostly many-times removed from the events they clamour to describe. It sounds odd, is odd, but is as wrong-footing and unexpectedly affecting as anything he has written.
It’s not often you read a book that feels as deliciously, daringly new as this. And the fact that, like Saunders’ short stories, it somehow feels casual, unpretentious and effortless just shows the extent of this fascinating author’s talent.
Review by Tom
Hardback, Jonathan Cape, £16.99, out now
Rachel Cusk returns with Transit, the paperback of which will be arriving next month. As a taster, here’s our review of this distinctive and multifaceted novel.
Centred around a series of domestic vignettes, Cusk’s latest follows a narrator who goes not just unnamed for the majority of the novel but unremarked upon, an incisive and mysterious ghost whose duties around a London she has returned to in the wake of a divorce lead her to encounter a cast of old flames and new neighbours. Coldly, detachedly, she questions and interrogates those she meets, leading them into confessions that hold a mirror up to her own apprehensions.
The narrator (and very possibly Cusk’s alter ego) is an intriguing proposition – the kind of peculiar operator who sees fit to ask her hairdresser whether he thinks freeing oneself causes someone else to become imprisoned. She speaks almost entirely in the kind of searching philosophical inquiries that seem at odds with the workaday scenarios she inhabits, putting existentialist queries to friends and acquaintances, handymen and (of course) hairdressers; but it’s through the prism of her idiosyncrasy that these encounters are ultimately lent powerful meaning.
Whether it’s the builder whose failing health may jeopardise his career and livelihood or the ex-partner who appears so unchanged in the decades since their breakup that he may even be wearing the same shirt, much human frailty, eccentricity and beauty is on display here, dug up from beneath the surface mundanity by our guide’s relentless examinations. And, of course, there is the narrator herself; whose chilly, once-removed demeanour may well be reflecting how alone the newly-divorced mother feels in a world of couples, cliques and happy families. It’s a really interesting work, with a great deal to say about the human condition and much in it that readers will recognise about themselves.
Review by Tom
Hardback, Penguin Viking, £18.99, out now
The final part of Will Self’s modernist trilogy famous for its lack of paragraphs and preponderance of big words, Phone is more of the same; frequently frustrating, stubbornly literary and ultimately brilliant. Written again without paragraphs in his trademark run-on style, this is fiction that acce
lerates off the page as you read, in a torrent of euphemisms, witticisms and aphorisms.
It’s heady stuff. We’re constantly being uprooted, pulled from thought to thought, place to place, character to character and time to time without warning (and always mid-sentence). We spend spells in the brains of (among others) Zach Busner, an aging psychiatrist who’s equal parts OIiver Sacks and King Lear; a spy called the Butcher, who applies the tricks of his trade to night-time homosexual conquests; and Gawain, the closeted military man he seduces.
We’re completely submerged in each character’s psyche, hearing the songs they can’t get out of their heads, the reminiscences from forty years or four seconds ago, and even, in the case of the Butcher, the private mental conversations they have with their genitalia. Which means that as occasionally arduous as the act of following this cluttered and restless prose can be, it’s as near an analogue to actually being inside a person’s consciousness as I’ve ever read. To accurately depict the life of the mind is an astonishing feat, and Self nails it in laudable style.
Our author is really pushing the envelope here, and like similarly impenetrable works like Ulysses or Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy, Phone is incredibly rewarding once you’re knee-deep in it. Plus it’s really funny, which always helps.
Review by Tom
We’re always proud to be part of this community, and even more so after the horrible events of the weekend. We are sending our love and good thoughts to everyone affected.
We are open as normal and will be glad to see London Bridgers at any time. Come in and say hello.
