Book(s) of the Week – Fiction and Non-Fiction

Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve 

Recommended by Raphael Hibou

'It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.'

This is how Philip Reeve commences Mortal Engines, a steampunk, post-apocalyptic series about motorised, ‘traction’ cities preying on smaller ones in a chaotic future. Following a ravaging sixty-minute war, the world was geologically upheaved and people had to adapt in what was known as ‘the great downsizing’. Then, tractionism was invented and the scarcely-resourced world rapidly became an enormous hunting ground where cities vied for power in a predator-prey relationship known as Municipal Darwinism, chasing smaller cities and closing their huge hydraulic ‘jaws’ on them: melting them for fuel or salvaging them for parts in this chilling food chain. Humans are either resettled in the predator city or, in other towns, enslaved!

Book of the Week

Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha

Recommended by Mr Hager

A hard-hitting and very readable novel from the creator of the well-regarded Juniper Song detective series, this recent work from Steph Cha explores the repercussions from the LA race riots of 1991 by focusing on two families who are drawn together in very unexpected ways.

The novel is set mostly in 2019, with flashbacks to 1991, and is particularly interested in family ties, how they continue and how they are dissolved, and how the past becomes lost through acts of conscious and unconscious revision or obfuscation.  It asks important questions about our relationship with ourselves, our families and the wider community, whilst the shocking event at the centre of the novel asks important moral and ethical questions of the reader and of the characters themselves.  All of this is done within a ‘thriller’ framework, making the novel something of an addictive reading experience whilst challenging us to think more deeply about important and polarising issues.

The novel created something of a Twitter storm before its UK publication, and is well worth a read.  It also allows you to think about the great literary difficulty that is ‘ending a novel well’.  Critical opinion on the final sections of this novel has been divided.  See what you think, and let the blog know!

More details are available here from the publisher, Faber & Faber.

If you want more details about the Juniper Song series, click here.

Nobel Prize for Literature postponed until 2019

The secretive committee that decides upon the winner of the Nobel Prize has revealed today that it will not be announcing a winner in 2018.  This is due to a scandal that has rocked the committee and caused numerous members to resign in protest at the conduct of a man with whom the committee is associated.  The postponement of the award is a measure designed to restore confidence in the Nobel committee, and an attempt to ensure the longevity of the prize itself.

This means that there will be two winners in 2019.  The committee's processes are notoriously secretive, but the winner is the work who is best deemed to fulfil Alfred Nobel's vision of "the most outstanding work in an ideal direction."  In 2016, this was considered to by Bob Dylan, and last year's winner was the less controversial Kazuo Ishiguro.  Who do you think should be considered in 2019?  The book blog would love to hear your views.

In the meantime, why don't you have a look at the list of past winners if you're looking for reading inspiration for the summer?

https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/

The Booker Shortlist is out. Read them all as soon as you can.

The shortlist for the Man Booker Prize 2017 has been announced, and it is already causing controversy.  There were some high-profile casualties: Zadie Smith's Swing Time fell by the wayside, as did Jon McGregor's subtle take on the mystery genre, Reservoir 13; the bookmakers' favourite, the much-heralded Underground Railroad was also rejected, causing a chief bookseller at Waterstones to describe it as one of the "greatest shocks" that he had witnessed in his lifetime.

Last year the prize was won by an American: Paul Beatty for his daring novel The Sellout; now, there are three more Americans on the list.  Was the Booker right to open the prize up to worldwide writers and the seeming dominance of American fiction, which has plenty of its own prizes?  Why don't you read '4321' (Paul Auster), Lincoln in the Bardo (George Saunders) and History of Wolves (Emily Fridlund) to find out? They will offer you some playful narration, multiple selves, a period in a limbo state between this world and the next, an experience of growing up in a failing religious cult, and much more.

Or why not try the work of a debut British novelist, 29-year-old Fiona Mozley who wrote Elmet on her phone during her daily commute?  Moshin Hamid is back after the success of The Reluctant Fundamentalist with his new novel, Exit West, and the celebrated Ali Smith (in the running for the fourth time) completes the line-up with her post-Brexit novel, Autumn.


You'll find them in the library, so why not check one out today? If you're someone who likes to add hardbacks to your book collection at bargain prices, why not check out The Book People's annual Booker Shortlist offer where they give you all six books for about £40?

The winner will be announced on October 17, just in time for you to spend the October Remedy deciding whether the judges got it right.

Book of the Week

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
Recommended by William Shackleton

And Then There Were None is another in a long line of murder mysteries by author Agatha Christie. Ten people receive letters from a U. N. Owen inviting them to stay a few days on Soldier Island, a small island several miles off the Devon coast. Throughout their stay, one by one the guest on the island start dying. It is soon realised that the murderer is one of the guests.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - A Hundred (ish) Years On

Just over a hundred years since the publication of James Joyce's bildungsroman, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Lower Eighth Paulines share their opinions on this seminal novel.

Book of the Week

Swing Time by Zadie Smith
Recommended by Mr Kemp

Of all the books I have read this year, Swing Time is the one so far that kept me most emphatically hooked.

Reading often tilts between being a pleasure and a duty: a book that you pick up for the sake of the latter often blooms into the former (and the former can metastasise onerously into the latter). So if you just want that pleasurable and engrossing experience, the literary blockbuster, go on Amazon right now and read this no further. But, fundamentally, the book’s just not great. It’s patchy and lazy and all over the place. Smith absolutely knows her way around a sentence, and it is a truism to assert that she is a fine writer of comic set pieces, memorable characters, and good, ‘snappy’ dialogue. But this one doesn’t work. It’s a bust for many small reasons, and they probably look like one big reason when seen from a certain distance.