Category Books

Auto Added by WPeMatico

Bless Me Father by Kevin Rowland review – the Dexys Midnight Runners frontman tells all

A picaresque story of massive success and deep despair that Rowland narrates with an impressive lack of self-pity

In the summer of 1979, Dexys Midnight Runners were a band you would have been hard-pushed to describe as anything other than unique. Their sound was a pugilistic update of classic 60s soul, topped with frontman Kevin Rowland’s extraordinary vocals, impassioned to the point that he permanently sounded on the verge of tears. It was fervent and a little retro, perfect for a musical climate in which mod and ska revivals were already bubbling. But Dexys’ image threw a spanner in the works. “I wore a white 1930s shirt and big baggy light-grey trousers tucked into white football socks just below the knee to give the effect of ‘plus fours’,” writes Rowland of a typical outfit. “I wore pink Mary Jane ballet shoes and my hair swept back, Valentino style.”

Other members appear on stage clad in jodhpurs and satin harem pants. The disparity between how they sound and how they look is so disconcerting, even their manager seems baffled. After a gig supporting the Specials, at which their appearance so enrages the crowd that the band have to be locked in a dressing room (“for our own safety”), they tone things down completely and begin taking to the stage in donkey jackets and mariner-style beanie hats.

Continue reading...

Orbital by Samantha Harvey audiobook review – lyrical, hypnotic reading of otherworldly tale

Sarah Naudi reads the Booker-prize-winning novel about the daily lives of astronauts on the International Space Station

Tracking the movements of six astronauts on the International Space Station, Samantha Harvey’s Orbital – the winner of last year’s Booker prize – imagines the day-to-day lives of those who have chosen to be “shot into the sky on a kerosene bomb and then through the atmosphere in a burning capsule with the equivalent weight of two black bears upon them”.

Only basic information is provided about the crew, who are from Russia, the United States, Japan, Italy and the UK. Harvey is more interested in the tasks undertaken to keep themselves healthy and their lodgings shipshape. Simultaneously expansive and intimate, Orbital reveals how the usual routines of eating, sleeping and exercising are fraught with challenges when you are weightless: toothpaste foam must be swallowed rather than spat out and cutlery adhered to the table using magnets.

Continue reading...

Inside the Salt Path controversy: ‘Scandal has stalked memoir since the genre was invented’

Raynor Winn’s bestselling book is far from the first time a true story has been called into question after publication. But how does it happen? And should readers really feel betrayed?

“The Salt Path is an unflinchingly honest, inspiring and life-affirming true story,” reads the description of Raynor Winn’s bestselling memoir on its publisher Penguin Random House’s website.

Which is unfortunate wording if accusations made at the weekend turn out to be true: an investigation by the Observer alleged that the 2018 book – which has recently been adapted into a film starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs – is not all that it seems. Winn writes in The Salt Path that she and her husband, Moth, had their home repossessed due to an investment in a friend’s company that went on to fail. With nowhere to live, as she tells it, the couple decided to walk the length of the South West Coast Path, wild camping along the way and relying on the kindness of strangers. The Observer piece suggests Winn’s account of becoming homeless is untruthful, and reports that she took £64,000 from her former employer. It also questions the legitimacy of Moth’s diagnosis with the neurological condition corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a core part of the memoir.

Continue reading...

The Mission by Tim Weiner review – unmasking the CIA

This impeccably sourced account of the secretive agency during a period of global turmoil deserves a Pulitzer

In 1976 when we were both based in Brussels, my BBC mentor, the great Charles Wheeler, came back to the office from a grand US embassy party one evening and remarked: “The cleverest and most entertaining people at these things are always CIA. Makes it all the harder to understand why they get everything wrong.” An exaggeration, of course, but one with a degree of truth to it. Why has an organisation with huge amounts of money at its disposal, a record of recruiting the brightest and the best, and the widest of remits, failed to notch up a better record? It’s true that we may not know about many of the CIA’s successes. But we know about a lot of its failures, and some of them have marked US history ineradicably.

In The Mission, Tim Weiner, whose reporting on the CIA in the New York Times was always essential reading, and whose subsequent books on the US intelligence community have a place on the shelves of anyone interested in international affairs, provides a variety of answers to this essential question. As he showed nearly 20 years ago in Legacy of Ashes, his history of the CIA from its founding in 1947 to the end of the 20th century, the agency’s position by the end of the 90s was pretty desperate. It was starved of cash and bleeding talent. A high-flyer who had been station chief in Bucharest was revealed to be working for the Russians, handing them the names of large numbers of agents and employees. But the new US administration that came in at the start of 2001 wasn’t too worried. In March that year, Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, told the joint chiefs of staff: “For the first time in decades, the country faces no strategic challenge.” Six months later came 9/11. The CIA had tried to convince the feckless George W Bush about the looming threat of Islamic ultra-fundamentalism, but no one in the administration listened. The agency was regarded as broken.

Continue reading...

Leila Aboulela wins PEN Pinter prize for writing on migration and faith

Judges praised the Sudanese author for centring Muslim women, describing her writing as “a balm, a shelter, and an inspiration”

Leila Aboulela has won this year’s PEN Pinter prize for her writing on migration, faith and the lives of women.

The prize is awarded to a writer who, in the words of the late British playwright Harold Pinter, casts an “unflinching, unswerving” gaze on the world, and shows a “fierce intellectual determination … to define the real truth of our lives and our societies”.

Continue reading...

Havoc by Rebecca Wait review – a Saint Trinian’s tragicomedy

A mysterious illness sweeps through an isolated girls’ boarding school, in a work brimming with horror, humour and hysteria

Even if it wasn’t perched on a cliff on the south coast, the position of St Anne’s, Eastbourne – the decaying girls’ school that is the setting for Rebecca Wait’s gleefully macabre new novel, Havoc – might reasonably be described as precarious. Deeply eccentric, staffed by the barely employable, and permanently teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, St Anne’s hangs on, against all the odds. And then, in 1984, Ida Campbell turns up on the doorstep, in possession of a full scholarship and rather a lot of baggage.

Sixteen years old and already an outcast, Ida is in flight from her hapless mother, her foul-tempered sister, the small community in the Western Isles to which they have been transplanted, and the nameless scandal that has ruined their lives. St Anne’s is to be Ida’s salvation, but it soon dawns on her that the school might not be quite the refuge she had hoped for.

Continue reading...

AI translation service launched for fiction writers and publishers prompts dismay among translators

UK-based GlobeScribe is charging $100 per book, per language for use of its services, but translators say that nuanced work can only be produced by humans

An AI fiction translation service aimed at both traditional publishers and self-published authors has been launched in the UK. GlobeScribe.ai is currently charging $100 per book, per language for use of its translation services.

“There will always be a place for expert human translation, especially for highly literary or complex texts,” said the founders Fred Freeman and Betsy Reavley, who previously founded Bloodhound Books, which specialises in crime and thrillers. “But GlobeScribe.ai opens the door to new opportunities, making translation a viable option for a much broader range of fiction.”

Continue reading...

Wolf Moon by Arifa Akbar review – night terrors

The Guardian’s theatre critic’s imaginative exploration of life in the shadows

Arifa Akbar, chief theatre critic of this newspaper, is used to working at night: the journey from curtain call to home computer screen, writing into the early hours to make sure a review can appear as soon as possible, is familiar and comfortable – indeed, often actively comforting – to her. But all this exists very close to far more troubling thoughts and feelings. A childhood fear of the dark has persisted into adulthood, and is linked to recurrent bouts of insomnia; her rational awareness of the dangers inherent in being a woman out of doors at night are augmented by a less easily definable anxiety at what the shadows might conceal; and darkness also functions as a painful and complicated metaphor for the frequently impenetrable world of her elderly father, who has frontal lobe dementia and often, the staff at his care home tell her, passes a “difficult” night.

That last is a compact description, a kind of shorthand – easy to understand at surface level, but also vague; the nature of the difficulties, either for Muhammad Akbar or for the care home staff supporting him, is not revealed. His daughter’s book keeps returning to what happens under cover of darkness – what we fail to see, what we misinterpret, and what we allow to go unrecorded. For those who work at night, that will likely entail disturbed sleep patterns that, over time, have severe consequences for physical and mental health. Care workers, nightclub bouncers, transport staff, those in the hospitality industry, sex workers – all find themselves at risk of paying heavy penalties for their nocturnal lives.

Continue reading...

Author of bestselling memoir The Salt Path accused of lying

Raynor Winn is claimed to have taken ‘around £64,000’ from a former employer and lied about being homeless – accusations that Winn calls ‘highly misleading’

It has been one of the films of the summer so far – the tale of Raynor Winn and her husband Moth, who embark on the 630-mile South West Coast Path walk after their house is repossessed and Moth is diagnosed with a terminal illness.

There has been almost universal praise for the life-affirming story of The Salt Path, which has won rave reviews from critics. Until now.

Continue reading...