Opium trail
Sea of Poppies
by Amitav Ghosh |
THE TELEGRAPH SAID:  "The backdrop to Amitav Ghosh's fine, spacious novel, Sea of Poppies, is the Opium Wars of the 19th century, one of those inglorious chapters in the history of the British Empire that tend to get omitted from school history books. Fans of Patrick O'Brian, say, will find parts of the book heavy weather. There is an absolute plethora of nautical and dialect terms that will mean nothing to the general reader. One page alone yields 'siladhars', 'subedar', 'dabusa', 'peechil', 'kamra' and 'maistries'.
But if the prose is thorny, Ghosh has immersed himself so thoroughly in the period that the patient reader will reap rich rewards.
As the Ibis sets to sea, with its motley human cargo, there is a real sense - as there should be in any novel - of a journey into the unknown."
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The Story of Forgetting
by Stefan Merrill Block
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THE INDEPENDENT SAID: "The Story of Forgetting is a debut novel by an American writer with more than literary ambition at stake. Stefan Merrill Block has invested his family's health in this book. His subject, Alzheimer's, has waged what he calls a "slow, unsparing warpath" across generations of his family, returning its sufferers to the children they once were. But, conversely, Block's genetic curse has given him material that is overflowing with meaning and vitality. " |
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Spellbound by Beauty
by Donald Spoto |
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THE DAILY MAIL said: "The movies are disturbing, the director of those movies was disturbed. Or, for 'disturbed', read kinky, weird, aberrant or even perverted. Donald Spoto, world authority on Alfred Hitchcock and with two major Hitchcock biographies already under his belt, paints a repellent and sleazy picture of his reclusive, odd-ball hero in Spellbound by Beauty. Spoto believes that his biography 'documents the decline of a great genius who lost all control over himself'. It certainly does, and it will surely satiate the modern hunger for salacious gossip and titillation. It will also explain why many people, feminists in particular, find Hitchcock's dark and dated movies over-rated and uncomfortable to watch." |
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The Post-American World
by Fareed Zakaria
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THE SUNDAY TIMES said: "Fareed Zakaria is the editor of Newsweek International, in which capacity he appears regularly on panels dispensing wisdom and prophesy. Zakaria has what economists call the comparative advantage in the cutthroat world of wonkery of being a youngish Indian transplant, thus putatively better placed than US-born palefaces to describe what he calls 'the post-American world'. If Zakaria wants to reposition himself for the new era he will have to go far beyond the usual mantras about 'reforming' Medicare and social security. In America, as in France and Spain and India, life is getting harder for most people, albeit more flush for the thin tier at the top."
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Madresfield
by Jane Mulvagh
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THE DAILY EXPRESS said: "Since the film of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited is to be released in October - and Waugh drew on the house and family for inspiration - Jane Mulvagh devotes her first 35 pages to his visits to the Lygon family at Madresfield Court.
But this is familiar stuff and her subtitle is an overstatement. Waugh is pretentious and once he has been left behind Madresfield perks up. The Lygons weren't among the great families but kept records so there is much that is fresh and the result, somewhat against expectations after the cloying start, is a delightful work of social history, beautifully written."
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