Author: David Hebblethwaite

Simon Lelic, The Child Who (2012)

12th January 2012 / / 4 Comments

Simon Lelic is developing a track record as a novelist who approaches his subject matter from interesting angles and explores thorny moral issues, notably in his 2010 debut Rupture, a multi-viewpoint examination of what drove a teacher to open fire in a school assembly. Lelic turned the conspiracy thriller inside-out in last year’s The Facility; now he has returned to contemporary crime with The Child Who. This new novel concerns the case of a twelve-year-old boy who killed a girl at his school; though Lelic’s main focus is neither victim nor murderer, but the boy’s lawyer.

Leo Curtice is the solicitor who takes the call and ends up representing Daniel Blake, in what becomesExeter’s most attention-grabbing trial in years. From the beginning, Lelic makes clear what a double-edged sword this assignment is for Leo: on the one hand, such a high-profile case is an opportunity that comes around very rarely; on the other, the job is repugnant, because there is no doubt of the boy’s guilt. Leo isn’t entirely comfortable with viewing the case as an ‘opportunity’, and struggles to justify his involvement to himself and others; his purpose seems nebulous even when he discusses it with Daniel Blake, and reveals that it’s not so much a matter of defending the boy as presenting his culpability in the least worst light.

The Child Who builds into a study of a man under emotional pressure from all sides (we learn relatively early on that Leo’s involvement in the case rips his family apart).

Leo deals with negative reactions by focusing in on his work, and there’s a strong sense that he is using the formal words of his profession as a shield; when Leo tries to explain to his daughter Ellie why he’s representing Blake, all his talk of habeus corpus does not satisfy her when she just wants to know why it’s he in particular who has the case. And Leo is still falling into the same pattern of behaviour when his wife Megan is about to leave him:

‘I need a break. From the house as much as anything. And it’s clear you need to focus. If you really feel you need to do this, it would be better, for your sake, if you did it without any more . . . distractions.’

Leo nodded – not conceding the point, just bobbing past it. ‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘I was looking at some recent cases. At the coverage in the press once things actually got underway. And what happens is, when a trial begins, there’s actually less attention in a way because of all the restric . . .’

Leo stopped himself. From the look on Megan’s face, the coverage was not the point.

‘I’ll be in the kitchen,’ she said. ‘Let me know when you’re ready.’

For all that Leo acts in this way, he finds it no easier to deal with being on the receiving end of similar behaviour; he is himself frustrated by the rhetorical fencing of Ellie’s headteacher. This is one of the most interesting things Lelic does in The Child Who: to gradually place Leo in the same position as the parents of Felicity Forbes (the girl killed by Blake), and examine his response. Leo begins to receive threatening notes, then Ellie disappears; and his feelings towards the anonymous culprit are no less hostile than others’ have been towards Daniel Blake.

There are several striking scenes in which Lelic presents emotionally-charged events from a distance, because of Leo’s perspective. There’s a violent protest when Daniel is driven to court for the first time, but we experience it all from inside his police van, where it becomes particularly abstract and menacing for Leo. Felicity Forbes’s funeral is a national event, but, seen on television (and as the only glimpse we get of Felicity’s family), it could as well be happening in a different reality. In keeping with the idea of Leo’s personal life and work mirroring each other, it might be considered that eventually he becomes as distanced from his family as he was from external views of the case. In its complex portrait of the protagonist and his situation, The Child Who might just be Lelic’s most effective novel yet.

Elsewhere
Scotsman interview with Simon Lelic
Some other reviews of The Child Who: Reader Dad; Julie Martis for Bookgeeks; Mean Streets.

Book notes: Harris, Dafydd, Clare

8th January 2012 / / 3 Comments

Shelley Harris, Jubilee (2011)

Satish Patel was a boy at the time of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, the son of an immigrant Ugandan family in an otherwise all-white Buckinghamshire village; he was a key figure in a photograph taken of the village’s Jubilee celebrations, an image which became iconic. Thirty years on, Satish is a successful cardiologist with a habit of helping himself to diazepam from the medicine cabinet; he receives a call from an old friend, telling him of plans to stage a reconstruction of the photo – but Satish is reluctant to take part.

Shelley Harris’s debut novel unpicks its central situation carefully, revealing the tensions beneath the apparent harmony shown in the photograph, and the secrets hidden by Satish and his friends and neighbours. If the ending feels to jump the gap of years a little too quickly in terms of how it deals with the issues between characters, the journey up to that point is engaging – with the writing of Satish’s addiction particularly sharp – and the book as a whole represents a promising start to Harris’s career as a novelist.

Fflur Dafydd, The White Trail (2011)

Time for a look at the latest in Seren’s series of books reworking tales from the Mabinogion. Fflur Dafydd’s contribution is based on the myth of ‘How Culhwch Won Olwen’; but, rather than a straightforward modern retelling, the author sends her story off in a different direction grown out of filling in gaps in the beginning of the original tale. Dafydd’s protagonist is Cilydd, who’s searching for his missing pregnant wife when he finds evidence that she is dead and the baby has been stolen. Cilydd becomes involved with a missing persons charity, and is settling into a new relationship, when his son Culhwch reappears, with the story of his strange upbringing, and the desire to rescue a beautiful girl named Olwen from the father who keeps her prisoner.

The White Trail examines what drives Cilydd to go on as he does, how far it’s  genuine concern and compassion, and how far the need to fill holes in his life. The book also explores the rights and wrongs of looking for people who may not want to be found, and this is where Dafydd uses the fantastic to great effect. The opening section on Cilydd’s life is firmly grounded in the reality of contemporary Wales, but the novel slides towards fantasy when Culhwch appears on the scene; this is imagined so convincingly that it’s a quite a jolt to be pulled back into quotidian reality at the end – and that jolt represents the way that characters’ actions and motivations which seemed reasonable to us at the time suddenly appear less so when the circumstances change. It’s a wonderful moment in a fine piece of work.

Horatio Clare, The Prince’s Pen (2011)

The Mabinogion story of ‘Lludd and Llevelys’ forms the inspiration for Horatio Clare’s novel, and his reinterpretation is less oblique than Dafydd’s: the myth tells of three ‘plagues’ which befall Britain (an invasion by a seemingly omniscient people; the maddening screams of two dragons; and the disappearantce of food from the king’s larders); Clare translates these threats into the context of a near future where only remnants of England lie above sea-level, and Wales is one of the last outposts of the free world. The volume we hold is the story of the Welsh bandit kings Ludo and Levello and their battle against the Invaders, as told by Clip, trusted associate (and amanuensis) of the illiterate Ludo.

Perhaps more so than with Dafydd’s story, The Prince’s Pen gains effect from comparison with the source tale; Clare’s updating of the ‘plagues’ is smart and speaks firmly to contemporary concerns. The book faltered a little for me as a narrative at the beginning, in that the battle scenes didn’t feel to have as strong an anchoring in reality as they might. But The Prince’s Pen works well as a portrait of the complexities faced by rulers trying to stick to their principles in time of war.

Anatomy of a library visit

4th January 2012 / / 3 Comments

One of my bookish resolutions this year is to diversify my reading, and there can be few better ways of doing that than going into a library and browsing the shelves. That’s just what I did today, and I thought I’d share the process by which I decided what to borrow. I resolved to limit myself to five titles; but, well, that didn’t quite work out.

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My first thoughts were: Stu is hosting Henry Green Week over at Winstonsdad’s Blog later this month; I’d not heard of Green before, but it would be fun to join in. There are only two Henry Green books on the shelves; I choose the one which my brief research from last night suggests is particularly well-regarded.

Book 1: Loving by Henry Green

I browse the G section further. There’s a book by Niven Govinden, whom I’ve meant to read for a while, but I’m after something older today. Elizabeth Gaskell, perhaps? Not this time. I decide that I want to read something by Iris Murdoch. There are quite a few, but it no difference from my perspective which I choose; I go for one whose title (pardon the pun) rings a bell.

Book 2: The Bell by Iris Murdoch

(Only later does it occur to me that I may have been thinking of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.) Passing the L section, a silver-spined Penguin Modern Classic catches my eye – The Periodic Table by Primo Levi. It sounds interesting and different, but I decide to put it back on the shelf for now. Instead, I go in search of something specific: I have a review copy of a book called Treasure Island!!! by Sara Levine, which is about a graduate who uses Stevenson’s novel as a guide to life; I thought it might be a good idea to read the original first, and am lucky enough to find a copy on the shelf opposite where it should be.

Book 3: Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

I leave the S section, and move on to T; I keep meaning to read Anne Tyler – maybe next time. I look at the last of the fiction shelves and spot a copy of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We; an influence on Nineteen Eighty-Four, says the back cover. I’ve recently read Orwell’s novel, but I don’t feel like trying Zamyatin’s so soon after. How about something by Émile Zola? Not today. Another idea: Kim at Reading Matters is hosting an Australian Literature Month in January, and I don’t think I have any Australian books on the TBR, so why not borrow one now? At this point, my knowledge of Australian authors conveniently escapes me; I read a David Malouf novel a couple of years ago, but let’s see if I can think of someone else… ah, Peter Carey – I’ve never read him. There are four Carey books on the shelves, and I’d prefer one that’s set in Australia, so it’ll be this:

Book 4: My Life as a Fake by Peter Carey

One slot left, and I think it should be a classic – something by one of the Brontës, perhaps. Wuthering Heights? Another time. None of the books I can see by Charlotte seem good introductory ones, and that’s all there is… until I spy a novel on the shelf below that appears to fit the bill nicely.

Book 5: Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë

And those are my five books.

Except… I saw one book earlier which I know I’ll forget if I don’t borrow it now, so I go back and get it.

Book 6: The Periodic Table by Primo Levi

Right, that’s definitely it for the library. But then I find a used-book stall in town, and one book there catches my eye. It’s far my usual reading fare, but that’s the whole point of this exercise – and it’s only 50p, and it’ll contribute to the Mixing It Up Challenge, so why not?

Book 7: Arabella by Georgette Heyer

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So there are a few more books which will be sprinkled into my reading over the next few weeks.

(This post is also a contribution this week’s Library Loot.)

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

3rd January 2012 / / 2 Comments

I always find it interesting to read iconic books and discover what they’re really like, and here’s perhaps one of the most iconic of all: one of the key works of dystopian literature, whose author’s name entered the language as a byword for oppression, largely as a result of this particular book… But, read from the vantage point of the present day, Nineteen Eighty-Four is in some ways unassuming, even unsatisfactory, as a novel: its characterisation is rather broad; its plot relatively simple; its portrayal of the ‘proles’ seems cartoonish when compared to the pin-sharp precision with which Orwell depicts the higher echelons of society; and the main female character, Julia, has relatively little role beyond being an adjunct of the protagonist, Winston Smith.

And yet.

Yet Nineteen Eighty-Fourstill has power, even for a new reader who knows its basics, and partly because of the same clarity of execution which gives rise to the issues I just noted. For me, the overriding atmosphere of the novel is one of great bleakness. The ruling Party may respond with violence against any opposition to its anthology; but it’s the grim drabness of everyday life, and its acceptance by the majority of the population, that leaves the greatest impression. As Winston Smith reflects:

In any time that he could accurately remember, there had never been quite enough to eat, one had never had socks or underclothes that were not full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety, rooms underheated, tube trains crowded, houses falling to pieces, bread dark-coloured, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tasting, cigarettes insufficient – nothing cheap and plentiful except synthetic gin. (pp. 62-3)

It’s not the operations of Orwell’s totalitarian society that I find most disturbing, but the thought processes which the Party embodies and has engendered. The whole concept of Newspeak – a language with restricted vocabulary, deliberately designed to limit the range of possible expression, and therefore of ideas – is abhorrent to me, especially as someone who loves language. The Party are oppressive rulers after power for its own sake, and literally beyond reason – when one senior figure starts spouting official pseudo-science, there is no way of knowing whether he genuinely believes it, or whether he knows that it’s just what the Party deems expedient to say; and, as the novel underlines, that doesn’t matter, because what the Party says is as good as true in the society it has created.

Nineteen Eighty-Four highlights the importance of diverse thought and opinion; that is what the Party cannot tolerate, what might cause their downfall if they allowed it to spread. We also see the dangers of not engaging – Julia may oppose the Party, but her approach is no basis for effective opposition, because she’s not interested in building the future or talking about politics. It’s the portrait of a world where options have been closed off and forgotten about that makes Orwell’s work so chilling, even now; and long may that continue to be so.

Joining the Mixing It Up Challenge 2012

2nd January 2012 / / 9 Comments

I came across this challenge at the Musings of a Bookshop Girl blog, and thought I’d join in. The idea is to read books of diifferent types, with a view to pushing the boundaries of one’s reading. Sounds fun. There are sixteen categories altogether, but I’m going for ten. They are:

1. Classics – Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë

2. Biography – People Who Say Goodbye by P.Y. Betts

3. Cookery, Food and Wine – Sweets by Tim Richardson

4. History

5. Romance

6. Travel – Touching the Void by Joe Simpson

7. Poetry and Drama

8. Journalism and Humour

9. Science and Natural History

10. Social Sciences and Philosophy

I have no set plans for which books I’ll read, or when (the Mixing It Up Challenge lasts all year), but I do want 2012 to be an interesting reading year.

December wrap-up

1st January 2012 / / 0 Comments

Book of the Month

December saw the launch of the Huffington Post‘s UK Culture section, to which I’ve been contributing; and the best book I read this month was the first I reviewed for them – Sarah Winman’s debut, When God Was a Rabbit.

Reviews

Features

And that is the end of 2011 on Follow the Thread. Thank you for reading, and my best wishes to you for the new year. See you in 2012!

A selection of 2011 favourites

28th December 2011 / / 6 Comments

Wherever you are, I hope you’re enjoying the festive season. Now it’s time for my annual look back on my favourite reads of the year. I’m going to split 2011’s list in two: six books from this year, six published in previous years. The lists are in alphabetical order of author surname, and all links will take you to my reviews.

Without further ado, then, here are six of my favourite books that received their first UK publication in 2011:

Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

I love fantasy with structural elegance, and this book has it: it’s the tale of a girl who can taste the feelings of whoever made her food (and hence detects trouble in her family’s relationships); what I like most is that it works equally as well whether you read the protagonist’s ability literally or metaphorically.

Stuart Evers, Ten Stories About Smoking

Certainly the best-designed book I read in 2011 (it comes in a flip-top box made to resemble a packet of cigarettes, this is also a fine set of stories which use smoking as a metaphor in various ways; I look forward eagerly to Evers’ debut novel next year.

Helen Oyeyemi, Mr Fox

Variations on the tale of Bluebeard, embedded in the broader narrative of a writer and his muse, who is rather less imaginary than she appears. The sheer range of Mr Fox is impressive, but it’s a great read to boot.

Nat Segnit, Pub Walks in Underhill Country

The idea of a novel written as a ramblers’ guide might seem gimmicky, but what makes this book work is the way Segnit uses the structure as a means of characterisation: the protagonist’s wife has left him, and the walking-guide format is set against a more novelistic style as the narrator tries to keep a hold on his world.

Conrad Williams, Loss of Separation

A fascinating psychological portrait of a pilot who’s recovered from an air crash, only to find that his girlfriend has disappeared.  Williams brilliantly plays creeping personal fears of decline and loss against grander horrors, and asks which is truly the most frightening.

Naomi Wood, The Godless Boys

A superb portrait of a divergent England ruled by the Church, where members of the Secular Movement have been exiled to a nearby island. Wood creates a vivid sense of place and character, and a subtle sense of how isolation has changed the Islanders’ ideas about faith.

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And now half a dozen from previous years:

Chris Beckett, The Holy Machine

A translator in the world’s only atheist city-state falls in love with one of the city’s lifelike robots; when a new law raises the possibility that the android’s personality will be erased, the pair are forced to flee. Becektt’s complex examination of science, religion, and what it means to be human makes an interesting comparison with The Godless Boys, which I read in tandem with this.

Joe Moran, On Roads: a Hidden History

A wide-ranging and perceptive history of the British post-war road system. If that sounds dry, I can only emphasise that it’s quite the opposite, as Moran spins gold from such an everyday topic.

Sarah Salway, Leading the Dance

Another book which turns the ordinary into something more, this time in the form of short stories which reveal the significance of ostensibly mundane events to the people involved in them.

Robert Shearman, Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical

The single best book of short stories I read in 2011. Shearman combines the unremarkable and the fantastic to brilliant effect in a collection whose main subject is love, seen from various angles.

Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

The story of how cancer cells taken from a poor African American woman played a vital part in modern medicine, though for twenty years her family didn’t even know a sample had been taken. Though this is a fascinating tale in its own right, Skloot’s orchestration of her material makes it all the more so.

Mike Thomas, Pocket Notebook

I didn’t know what to expect from this story of a police officer going off the rails, and it utterly blew me away. One of the best written books I’ve read all year, one of the sharpest character-portraits… I can’t wait to see what Thomas writes next.

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So that’s my dozen picks from the reading year. What books have you most enjoyed?

Book and story notes: Miéville, Brown, Hyslop

23rd December 2011 / / 4 Comments

China Miéville, Embassytown (2011)

The rumour before publication was that Embassytown would be China Miéville’s first proper oray into science fiction; and, technically, it is – but Miéville is a fantasy writer at heart, and setting a novel on a planet in deep space with aliens hasn’t changed the essential feel of his work. Our narrator is Avice Benner Cho, a human native of Embassytown, which lies on a world whose indigenous species are known as Hosts. The Hosts can only understand their own language, and even then only if it’s spoken by a sentient being; as the Hosts have two mouths which they use simultaneously, humans communicate with Hosts through specially-bred clone pairs called Ambassadors. The start of the novel sees the arrival in Embassytown of a new Ambassador named EzRa who are, uniquely and impossibly, not clones – and when they address the Hosts, they start a change of events that will lead to all-out war.

Embassytown may not represent a dramatic shift in genre for Miéville, but it is his first novel in quite some time not to be set at least partly on present-day Earth, and here things do feel different. I’m thinking in particular back to Perdido Street Station; granted, it’s a good ten years since I read that book, but I remember it glorying in its own strangeness. Embassytown is more subdued and remote: partly this is a function of its narrator, who admits that she’s not naturally one for the limelight; and Avice’s voice remains correspondingly cool and measured throughout. But it’s also appropriate to the story Miéville is telling, as it concerns a species and mode of communication which are so very inscrutable.

Yet, even though I recongnise its importance, that distancing effect still stops me from really engaging with the novel. There’s certainly some interesting fantasy in there: for example, the Hosts cannot lie, even to make metaphors; they can use similes, but have to enact the object of comparison first – and they can involve humans, including Avice herself. However, mostly, I find the issues around Hosts and their language too abstract to really work as the key emotional anchor for the story; and that is what puts Embassytown in the lower tier of Miéville’s works for me.

This novel has been shortlisted for the 2012 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Click here to read my other posts about the Award.

Kat Brown, ‘A Marvellous Party’ (2011)

This new story from Shortfire Press concerns Adie, whose boyfriend Simon breaks up with her on a railway-station platform just as they were about to go on holiday for Christmas. He boards the train, and she returns dejectedly to her flat – where her friend Becca invites Adie to a party that might just turn her life around. There’s some neat writing here, as Kat Brown creates an atmosphere very efficiently, with a few choice details; whether it’s life in Adie’s flat (‘John [her flatmate] dropped four Nurofen into a carton of orange juice’), or the party itself:

Glazed middle managers buzzed around a beige buffet, and Becca was absorbed almost immediately by a cloud of sequins and novelty jumpers. Adie took a glass of festively disgusting red wine and was swept into conversation by a group who spoke only in buzzwords.

Brown won this month’s Literary Death Match in London with ‘A Marvellous Party’; it’s not hard to see why, and I imagine that the story works just as well read aloud as it does on the page.

Jess Hyslop, ‘Augury’ (2011)

Another new Shortfire Press piece, in this case one that won its author Cambridge University’s Quiller-Couch prize for creative writing – again, it’s clear why. Jess Hyslop takes us to Nazi-occupied Guernsey, where Peter Davies gets by after a German soldier shot him in the leg; he only survived because his neighbour, Anne Brehaut, found him and took him in – not that Anne’s blind husband Louis was keen on having a man in the house who could see her when he himself couldn’t. Now, Peter fixates on the Brehauts’ shed, where he’s sure they’re keeping a bird; or perhaps he’s really fixating on Anne.

Peter Davies comes to life as an ambiguous, not-quite-sympathetic character, who has been scarred (emotionally as well as physically) by his injury, and left world-weary and cautious:

What currently worries him most is Talk. There is a lot of Talk about. This Talk is surreptitious, taking place at odd hours in odd corners amongst what he considers, frankly, odd people. And it is idealistic, which means that it is dangerous. It is exactly the kind of Talk he tries not to get involved with, the kind that he will hurry past with his head down, if he catches so much as a whisper.

The tension which builds throughout this story comes from never being quite sure what the characters might do, or what their true motivations are – right up to the sharply effective ending.

Book notes: Smith, Finch, Lipska

18th December 2011 / / 5 Comments

Helen Smith, Alison Wonderland (1999)

Now this, I think it’s fair to say, is a bit of an oddity. Alison Temple first came across the all-female-staffed Fitzgerald’s Bureau of Investigation when she hired them to find out whether her husband was cheating on her (which he was); now divorced, Alison works for Fitzgerald’s, her latest assignment being to investigate a sinister pharmaceutical company. Alongside this, her friend Taron is requesting information that will help her steal an abandoned baby; and Jeff, Alison’s neighbour and sort-of lover, writes poems for her and works on inventions like the formula for a single advertisement that could advertise any product.

I won’t pretend to have puzzled out everything that Alison Wonderland was trying to achieve, with all its digressions, and hints at extraordinary phenomena that might or might not be real; but I do appreciate the way that Helen Smith juxtaposes the bizarre and the mundane: however strange events become, the emotional issues that Alison deals with remain grounded in everyday reality; and some of the best-written passages deal with the more ordinary subjects.

Alison Wonderland might also be seen as an unusual take on the conspiracy story, in that the main conspiracies which the characters imagine to exist actually don’t; whilst the real secrets go unsuspected. Smith’s novel brought to mind the work of Sarah Salway and Aliya Whiteley in its sideways approach to everyday life – but it’s not quite like anything else I’ve ever read.

Reviews elsewhere: For Books’ Sake; Lucy Popescu.

Paul Finch, King Death (2011)

After three contemporary tales, the fourth chapbook from Spectral Press takes us back to 1348. In an England ravaged by the Black Death, a mercenary named Rodric is strangely immune to the plague; styling himself ‘King Death’, he travels the land, making the most of his fortunate circumstances. A chance meeting with a page from a fallen manor-house apparently presents a new opportunity for Rodric – or it could be his downfall instead.

This is one story I’d love to hear read aloud; there’s something about Paul Finch’s prose which suggests to me the rhythms of oral storytelling. There are points where King Death gets a little too clotted with detail (such as the description of Rodric’s costume, which feels as though it’s trying to namecheck as many pieces of armour as possible); but there are also striking moments like the opening scene of a parade of coaches, their occupants all dead. For the most part, the story rumbles on inexorably towards its wry conclusion.

Reviews elsewhere: The Eloquent Page; Bookhound’s Den.

Anya Lipska, Where the Devil Can’t Go (2011)

Anya Lipska’s debut novel is set amongst the Polish diaspora of East London, where fixer-for-hire Janusz Kiszka is engaged to find a missing young woman. Meanwhile, the body another woman is found washed up out of the Thames – and DC Natalie Kershaw’s investigations soon lead her to Janusz, who will find himself travelling back to Poland in a bid to unravel what is going on.

Where the Devil Can’t Go is a fine crime story, but it’s also strong thematically. The main theme could be described as pragmatism in the face of reality: Janusz was once on track to become a physicist, but gave up his studies to join the protests against the Communist regime; now, he has a wife and son back in Poland, but circumstances brought him to London, where he does what he can to make a living. Janusz has a deep-rooted sense of dignity and propriety, but will not hesitate to use violence to get a job done; a similar sense of doing what one feels must be done in the situation goes right to the heart of the mystery. And it’s not just the Polish characters who have to make such choices: Natalie Kershaw also has to decide how far she wants to fit into the man’s world of the Metropolitan Police.

The novel’s main weakness, I think, is a technical one: the tendency to switch between character viewpoints without a scene break. This is annoying but tolerable when the characters are in different places; but, when Janusz and Kershaw are together, the dramatic irony of how they view each other loses some of its impact from how the shifts are handled. But, otherwise, Where the Devil Can’t Go is a solid piece of work which is well worth reading.

Although the novel is being published in Germany by Random House next year, it hasn’t been picked up by a UK publisher; so the English-language version is a self-published ebook. I’d love to see Lipska’s book get a full UK publication, though, as it really does deserve one.

Reviews elsewhere: Winstonsdad’s Blog; It’s a Crime!

Today’s little diversion

16th December 2011 / / 2 Comments

This meme comes from the Cornflower Books blog — complete the sentences with the titles of books you have read this year. I was quite surprised at how well my year’s reading list matched with some of these.

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I began the day with The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

On my way to work I saw The Tiny Wife

and walked by Rivers of London

to avoid A Visit from the Goon Squad

but I made sure to stop at The Night Circus

In the office, my boss said, Where Would I Be Without You?  

and sent me to research Pub Walks in Underhill Country

At lunch with Mr Fox

I noticed The Cornet-Player Who Betrayed Ireland

under The Silver Wind

then went back to my desk Down the Rabbit Hole

Later, on the journey home, I bought Everything I Found on the Beach

because I have Generosity

then settling down for the evening, I picked up The Sense of an Ending

and studied Tree Surgery for Beginners

before saying goodnight to The Islanders

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