It's called a book review 'cos you've read it.

What I'm reading this December

2011-12-19T16:49:00.002+02:00

A couple of years ago, my in-laws introduced me to a wonderful friend of theirs: Mary from Minnesota.

(Really. From Minnesota. I'd never met anyone from Minnesota before.)

Anyway, during the course of our time together, I learned two very interesting things from Mary and her husband, Terry.

(Yes, really. Mary and Terry.)

The first was that, on his birthday, Terry chooses which birthday to celebrate - i.e. not the birthday linked to the current year. So, on his 50th, he celebrates his 24th. On his 51st, it's his 80th. On his 52nd, it's his 18th. This little eccentricity keeps his birthdays fun. (They also share birthdays - 2012 will be Terry-'n-Mary's 130th!)
The second interesting thing I learned is that Mary keeps a 'Book Book'. This is a list, contained in several hardcover notebooks, of every book she's read since she was 20 or so. Broken down by month. It reminds her what she's read, so she doesn't read the same books twice (I do this a lot. I'm getting old and dof.), and it's very cool.

Having used this blog for book reviews for the last number of years, and having largely ignored the beautiful (and expensive, because it came from Exclusive Books) notebook I bought for this very purpose after meeting Mary, I am going to list my books here. Lucky you.

So, every month, all two or three of you (Hi Mom.) will be able to see what I'm reading, whether I loved it or hated it, and which of those I've deigned to review. If there's a book I've mentioned, but not reviewed, feel free to ask me what I thought of it. I'll be honest. Promise.

Let's begin.

December's reading list (1 Dec 2011 to date):

In random order

Some Girls - My Life in a Harem (Jillian Lauren)
The Family (Mario Puzo)
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake - Aimee Bender
True Detectives (Jonathan Kellerman)
Lady of the Rivers (Philippa Gregory - an audiobook)
Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson)
Rules of Prey (John Sandford)
Eyes of Prey (John Sandford)
Silent Prey (John Sandford)
Shock Wave (John Sandford)
Storm Prey (John Sandford)
Buried Prey (John Sandford)
The Governor's Wife (Mark Gimenez)
Married Lovers (Jackie Collins) - holiday drivel :)

More to follow...

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

Photo credit: Pinterest

I've been a pretty shitty reviewer...

2011-12-18T17:07:00.001+02:00

Apologies. To the two or three of you who read this blog. (Hi Mom.)

I've been a pretty shitty reviewer lately. Not because I'm not reading. But because I've been writing so much for work that I simply couldn't face writing for the sheer unbridled pleasure of it. However, that's soon to stop. I'm on holiday. In one of the world's most beautiful, simple, chilled places. With childcare reinforcements in the form of my in-laws. In the last seven days, I've read about seven books. I'm not writing AT ALL for work (believe it or not, Mom) and I've just started the mammoth tome that is Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs. So, there are reviews in the pipeline. Promise.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

Photo credit: Pinterest

A Year in the Wild (James Hendry)

2011-09-23T09:45:00.006+02:00

The best place to read a book set in the bush is in the bush. So you can imagine my glee when it arrived before I left for a week in Madikwe Game Reserve. And A Year in the Wild: A Riotous Novel by James Hendry continued to delight me from there.

It’s both delicious and deliciously funny. It draws easy-to-imagine pictures of madness and mayhem; hilarity and horror. And it gives the most fascinating insights into what goes on behind the posh scenes of larney lodges, in a very similar manner to Imogen Edwards-Jones’s Babylon novels, all of which I have greedily devoured.

But I don’t think the back cover blurb does this book sufficient justice, because there’s so much more to it than the rivalry between brothers – and newly appointed Sasekile Private Game Lodge staff members – Angus and Hugh MacNaughton.

It’s about strong and strange personalities, ridiculous holidaymakers, broken rules and ignored regulations. It’s about animals and birds and the human beings who live and work alongside them. And it’s about the author’s own real-life experience of the bush and the game lodge world, translated into comic (and sometimes tragic) fiction.

I typically disparage novels written in correspondence form. I don’t like them as a rule; I find them cheesy. But the device works well in A Year in the Wild, because the plot is mostly light and undemanding. The writer has also taken great care to give his two main narrators, Angus and Hugh, completely different voices, styles and tones.

Not an easy thing to achieve for an author who’s new to fiction. I’m impressed.

My only criticism, then? The novel gets more enjoyable the deeper you delve, with a strong middle and a great end. It’s neither as flawless nor as compelling in the start as it could be, and is, elsewhere. Buy it for bush or beach reading, though. It’s fun.

Your Sensory Baby (Megan Faure)

2011-06-11T12:50:00.001+02:00

Available at all good bookstores and from Penguin Books South Africa.

So, like all new moms, I have a copy of Baby Sense.

I’ve read some of it. Like most moms-to-be, I intended to read all of it, but then my baby arrived and my reading ground to a screeching halt. And like several moms, I’m convinced that Baby Sense is part utter genius and part stuff that I’m simply too lazy to try. (Eep! Honesty!)

I do know which page the Jungle Juice recipe is on, though, like everyone else. So that's something. But it was with no small measure of trepidation that I opened Megan Faure’s new book, aimed at helping moms to achieve ‘happy days and peaceful nights’: Your Sensory Baby. Was I ready?

Yup. My trepidation was largely unwarranted.

Before I get into that, however, let me first say that Your Sensory Baby is not a sequel. Not a part II. It’s a whole new book. (It’s not like What to Expect When You’re Expecting, which gets re-vamped and re-written every few years, with the necessary updates and a preggie in increasingly modern attire on the cover.)

So if you’ve read one, or several of Megan Faure’s superb books in the past, you should read this one too. And if you’ve never read one of her books, start here.

The first three chapters of the book are about, you guessed it, senses, and how these influence your new baby’s feelings, sleep and development. You’re also taught to use ‘gentle and flexible’ routines to soothe and feed the little creature.

They're largely simple and straightforward, mind you, but if they feel like hard work, select the ones that don't... (That's what I've done. Or, am trying to do. Or, will do.)

Chapters 4, 5 and 6 are about translating your baby’s behaviour into meaningful signals, about getting your own personality to work for you, and about baby’s potential for development, and from Chapter 7, you’ll encounter age-banded sections – your premature baby, your newborn, your baby at two to six weeks, your baby at six weeks to four months, and so on – that hold answers, tips, techniques and testimonials relating to particular periods in your mommyhood. I really like this element...

So, my take? This book is fantastic.

It’s beautifully presented, easy to read through in detail or to scan with a screaming kid swinging from your neck, and full of useful, user-friendly, simple-to-apply advice you can use immediately, wherever in the parenting game you are.

Its advice is all-encompassing, and whether you choose to use all of it, some of it or tiny bits of it, depending on the kind of parent you want to be, there's something for you.

I have only one criticism and here it is: the book divides babies into ‘social butterfly’, ‘settled’, ‘slow to warm up’ and ‘sensitive’, and it’s not that easy to tell which one your child is until they’re four months or older. This means that a fair bit of the good value in the book, because it’s linked to the four ‘types’, can’t really be accessed til later. By which time habits have formed – for mommy and baby…

But on the whole, this is a must-read if you’re that sort of mom. You know, the one who has, and reads, most of the must-read mommy/baby/parenting books. Or, the one who wants to.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

The Empress of Ice Cream (Anthony Capella)

2011-06-11T12:13:00.001+02:00

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa, and on www.kalahari.net.

For my money, Anthony Capella is the master of literary deliciousness. Firstly, because he writes books about food. Okay, centred on food. And the people who produce it, eat it and love-make with it. And secondly, because his characters, plots, and colour are utterly yummy. (If a leetle simplistic and one-dimensional.)

In this, his fourth novel, following in the lip-smacking footsteps of The Food of Love, The Wedding Officer and The Various Flavours of Coffee (one of my favourites), Carlo Demirco is the dashing Italian confectioner-to-the-king who rises from nothingness to be vaunted by the French and English courts.

What does he confection? Cream ice. Or rather, ice cream. [There was a bit of Italian-to-English translation confusion, you see, and the term 'ice cream' was born.]

In short, Signor Demirco is the god of creating smooth, sultry, addictive ice cream in fruity, herby and other flavours I'd never even considered, let alone heard of (pippin, rose petal, celery, hibiscus, basil, maidenhair fern, black pepper, fig, cardamom, lavender - yum!), and his icy masterpieces, together with their exquisite and whimsical presentation, become the talk of two royal towns.

Along the way, Carlo meets Louise de Keroualle, an impoverished yet beautiful lady-in-waiting, and the two become friends, enemies and then allies as strangers to England and to the awkward English way of doing things. This is when the novel becomes largely Philippa Gregory-ish in its orientation... And this is when I really start to enjoy it. Because there's only so much ice cream I can dream about.

[The novel is narrated in the first person by both Carlo and Louise - not a beloved device of mine. But it works in this story. Especially since Louise is a lot like Mary Boleyn in The Other Boleyn Girl...]

So, if you're into novels focused on food, and you like historical fiction, and you're not looking for complexity, disturbia or major drama, get yourself a bowl, a spoon and this book. Bon appetit.

www.tiffanymarkman

His Last Duchess (Gabrielle Kimm)

2011-04-15T17:15:00.000+02:00

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa, and on www.kalahari.net.

This is a debut novel. By a teacher. A teacher of drama, among other things. Which is probably why I couldn’t help thinking, throughout, what a beautiful movie it’d make. Think The Tudors meets Love in the Time of Cholera meets Under the Tuscan Sun. Delicious.

Only problem? It’s more than a little simple*.

Having said that, perhaps that’s not a bad thing.

If you like historical fiction, or need a nice, pretty, easy, feel-goody, ever-so-slightly sinister novel masquerading as a love story, His Last Duchess is for you. I predict that the bookclub bobbas will love it. (Wonder what that says about me?)

Storyline:

The sixteen-year-old gem of the de Medici family, Lucrezia, is wed to a handsome, wealthy Duke (aren’t they always?) and packed off to live with him in his lush duchy, Ferrara. She tries to love him, and to make a happy life in her new home, but the man is – quite simply – deeply disturbed.

And, as her married life progresses, poor Crezzi becomes ever more isolated, seeking companionship from household servants, visiting artists and her loyal cousin, Giovanni. You can imagine how delighted her evil husband is.

In short order, Crezzi finds love elsewhere. With Jacomo, who has been commissioned to paint a magnificent fresco on the castello’s walls. And her husband, rendered desperate by the fact that he is physically unable to consummate their marriage and produce an heir, and may lose his precious title to the Vatican as a result, becomes a very dangerous foe.

* By ‘simple’, I wish to imply little more than lots of convenient plot twists, characters who do exactly what you want them to, and smooth segues. I prefer more elaborate story planning but, having said that, I’d read a sequel.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

Gold in Graphite - Jozi Sketchbook (Somayya A.E. & Zafrica Cabral)

2011-02-11T13:30:00.000+02:00

Available from www.davidkrutpublishing.com.

You know, book reviewers get a bit jaded sometimes. It happens. It happens to all of us eventually – not just the real skeptics like me. And when we get jaded, we feel blasé about books that publicists rave about, before we’ve even seen them.

But then, like the one green Smartie left in the box, something special comes along. And, as we unfold the flap of the envelope or cut the plastic tape on the box, we start to feel an unmistakable sense of surprised delight. ‘Hey! This looks pretty good.’

When we finally open the book in question, and it really is pretty good, well – that’s wonderful. Why the long back-story? Because Gold in Graphite – Jozi Sketchbook (Impressions of Johannesburg through Sketch & Prose) is just such a treat.

Gold in Graphite – Jozi Sketchbook is an upbeat portrayal of the city. A collection of frozen moments in which the city’s original masterpieces - some dilapidated, some forgotten, some unknown – are captured by a single artist in stark black and white.

Among these (50-odd) are the original Park Station, Carlton Centre, the Rissik Street Post Office, the Oriental Plaza, the Orlando Cooling Towers, Astor Mansions, Ponte City Apartments, Gandhi’s House, Mai Mai Muti Market and Northcliff Ridge.

Stunning, really. The only negative thing I have to say is that I don’t like the typefaces used. Any of them. The layout, the artwork, the words and the paper are so deeply classy – so appropriate – that the fonts just seem brash to me. But that’s me.

The artist is Zafrica Cabral. Born in Johannesburg, he has worked in the city as a construction worker, Ellis Park snack vendor, flea market salesman, fitness instructor, designer, model builder and architectural technologist.

The supporting text was written by somayya a.e, who completed a BA with majors in English and Social Anthropology and punctuated her studies by exploring the wonders of language, food and culture. She lives in the City of Gold.

Pseudonymas notwithstanding, Zafrica Cabral and somayya a.e. are otherwise known as Zubair Hassem and Somayya Essack, a married couple with two small children. And they have collaborated for the past year on this fascinating book, producing what they believe is the first sketchbook of buildings in Joburg.

Something else you should know about Gold in Graphite is that its foreword, penned by poet Dr Don Mattera, is more than a mere introduction. It is a lullaby.

“The City has changed dramatically…so much so that the new must give credit to the old; where today’s Jozi came from must inform the journey ahead… No room for moping and pining: people must extol Johannesburg’s right to exist as a world-class city…as well as…a centre of…coexistence for peace, progress and prosperity.”

I adore this book and, while I’m not a coffee table book person, it proudly adorns my coffee table. You should own one. But before you do, there is one thing you should know: you will want these sketches for your walls, where you can see them.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

Worth Dying For (Lee Child)

2011-02-11T13:22:00.005+02:00

Available on the Amazon Kindle.

If you’re a Lee Child fan you’ll know that Jack Reacher - former US Army Major, former military policeman and current wandering nomad - can’t leave things alone.

He’s like a rabid dog that way: he smells a bit of small-town drama, some nasty local lore, and that’s it. He’s mad. And bad people (notably those who hurt women, children, animals or the vulnerable) are going to get hurt in all the ways they deserve to. Impressively. Brutally. Utterly unemotionally. In about three seconds flat.

If you’re not a Lee Child fan, meet Jack Reacher – the coolest hero of contemporary skop-skiet-en-donder fiction. (There are 14 books before this; find them.) But you should know a couple of important and fascinating things at the outset…

Reacher’s a drifter. His only possessions are a foldable toothbrush and, since 9/11, an expired passport. He wears his clothing for a couple of days before discarding it and replacing it at cheap chain stores - because he doesn’t like luggage.

And although he doesn’t own a cell phone, or know how to use Google, he can tell the time – to the minute – using the ‘clock in his head’. He’s also passionate about strong black coffee, blues music and gamine yet powerful women in positions of authority.

Worth Dying For, host to Reacher’s latest appearance, is a by-the-book Child: there is a small town with an egomaniacal boss family, a couple of broken-hearted locals, a few cases of mistaken identity, some seriously dark and dangerous secret stuff going on, and Reacher in the middle – with the clock ticking towards a showdown.

Here’s a taste of our man, and of this novel:

"Reacher smiled. He had been raised on military bases around the world, battling hardcore Marine progeny, honing his skills against gangs of resentful native youths in dusty Pacific streets and damp European alleys. Whatever hardscrabble town…these guys had come up in had been a feather bed by comparison. And while they had been studying the playbook and learning to run and jump and catch, he had been broken down and built back up by the kind of experts who could snap your neck so fast you never knew it had happened until you went to nod your head and it rolled away down the street without you."

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

Those Who Love Night (Wessel Ebersohn)

2011-02-11T13:15:00.004+02:00

Available on www.kalahari.net.

Let me start by saying that this was not an easy book for me to read…

The Witness review on the jacket of Wessel Ebersohn’s Those Who Love Night suggests that it ‘will be gobbled down by even the most jaded reader’. Guess what? I’m the most jaded reader. I’m not typically a fan of local fiction. I’m usually unenthusiastic about stories of African political tragedy. And I’m largely disparaging of crime thrillers set in Zimbabwe. But I couldn’t lower this book.

For starters, I should admit that I’m seven months pregnant. And in the opening scene, Janice Makumbe, who is eight months pregnant, flees into the bush in the dead of night, to save herself and her two small children from the soldiers of the Five Brigade during Zimbabwe’s brutal Gukurahundi Massacres of the 1980s.

She doesn’t make it. (From there, you can imagine my morbid fascination.)

Abigail Bukula is the talented South African lawyer who is asked to travel to Zim to defend activist Tony Makumbe – Janice’s surviving son and Abigail’s cousin – one of seven detained at the notorious Chikurubi Prison. And when she and oddball Jewish psychologist, Yudel Gordon, arrive, what they find is a messy web of murder, corruption, secrets, lies and political charades. Against the backdrop of a ravaged country that is hanging onto some of the traces of its former beauty. And interspersed with a cast of Zim locals who are alternately charming and chilling.

That’s all I’m going to give you on the storyline front, because I believe that this particular book deserves to be read without too much context or background.

But I will say that Wessel Ebersohn is a gifted writer – able to adopt convincingly the voices, nuances and personalities of his characters; able to pen colourful sketches of locations and interactions; and able, in a way that is unusual for South African writers, to distance himself sufficiently from ‘our’ closeness to Zimbabwe to give it representation that is simultaneously objective and deeply touching.

(I intend to read his other books, even though they’re local. Don’t tell anyone.)

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

Rush Home Road (Lori Lansens)

2011-01-17T14:29:00.000+02:00

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa.

If you love Wally Lamb, Lionel Shriver and Kathryn Stockett, and wish they’d just write faster, dammit, your heart will sing when you read your first Lori Lansens. She’s authored three books to date, every one of which I have passionately loved, and the latest, Rush Home Road, is an utter triumph.

(Note: This book is actually the author’s first, but released only now, in 2010.)

Rush Home Road is about Addy (Adelaide Shadd), a coloured woman living in a pristine square of Ontario trailer park, circa 1978. A neighbour, Collette, abandons her troubled five-year-old daughter Sharla one afternoon, to run off with the latest in a line of shady boyfriends, and Addy takes her in – beginning a beautiful, loving relationship that irrevocably transforms them both.

Throughout the novel, Addy recalls the tragic, turbulent and touching details of her 70 years: her childhood in Rusholme, a town settled by fugitive slaves in the mid 1800s; L’il Leam, her baby brother; Chick, her lost daughter; heart-rending sadnesses; blissful moments; successes; hungers and feasts.

She daydreams about past lovers, old friends and kind strangers. She dips in and out of her history, both consciously and unconsciously – and against the backdrop of historical events like the Underground Railroad, the Pullman porter movement and Prohibition – the tapestry of Addy’s life unfolds.

This writer has been likened to John Steinbeck but for me, her style is much more contemporary than that. She’s what Pat Conroy would be if he got to the point; what Jeffery Eugenides would be if he kept it slightly simpler. She’s as good as both, but cleaner. More concise. If possible, more disciplined.

In short, Lansens is a superlative writer, and her trio of books – The Girls, The Wife’s Tale and now Rush Home Road – succeeds masterfully in showcasing how unusual story ideas, exquisite character development, fabulous plotting and great structure can manifest in three completely different ways. Unlike so many writers who find their way, see that it works and then stick rigidly to it, there’s no formula here – Lansens just gets it right every time.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

Elephantoms: Tracking the Elephant (Lyall Watson)

2010-11-14T12:02:00.001+02:00

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa.

Lyall Watson is a well-known naturalist who lives in Ireland, but his youth was spent in South Africa, and this is where his lifelong fascination with elephants began. Elephantoms wanders across diverse terrain, drawing on history, anthropology, evolutionary theory and the author's experiences to illuminate the elephant world. Colourful anecdotes from animal trackers and wildlife researchers alternate with tidbits on elephant biology (the trunk can lift more than 450 kilograms) and behaviour (elephants mourn their dead: burying and revisiting the bones of family members). And above all, you close this book with a strong sense of having evolved as a human being. I absolutely loved it. And it's in my top 10. For life.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer (John Grisham)

2010-11-14T11:52:00.002+02:00

Available at all good bookstores.

I don't usually review tween fiction, but this is John Grisham...

After years and years and books and books, John Grisham is paying attention to the younger set with his new legal thriller, Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer, targeted at readers aged 9 to 12. The only child of two busy lawyers — one a divorce attorney, the other specialising in real estate — Boone has a dog named Judge and spends his free time at the local courthouse. His interest in the law is so well-known that classmates seek him out for legal advice and judges deign to speak to him. Boone even scores prime seats at the local murder trial. But then he is approached with evidence that could affect the trial's outcome. And this dilemma results in some ethical wrestling for Boone, who must decide between betraying a confidence and letting a guilty man walk. Absolutely superb for tweens!

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

Skinny Bitch (Rory Freedman & Kim Barnouin)

2010-11-14T11:47:00.002+02:00

Available at all good bookstores.

Show me a woman who hasn't been on a diet. (And I'll beat her to death with a box of Pick 'n Pay assorted glazed doughnuts.) As a woman who's been on every diet there is, from Atkins to Zone, over 20 years or so, there was no way I wasn't going to read a book positioned as 'A no-nonsense, tough-love guide for savvy girls who want to stop eating crap and start looking fabulous!'

Especially when the blurb reads, 'If you can't take one more day of self-loathing, you're ready to hear the truth: You cannot keep shoveling the same crap into your mouth every day and expect to lose weight.'

How divine? Skinny Bitch. A book that tells it like it is. A book containing the real truth about carbs, sugar, aspartame, meat, dairy and a whole lot of other things... A book that cuts to the chase, doesn't encourage completely unfeasible bullshit like on-again/off-again fasting, 350 supplements a day or cutting out major food groups... Woah, hang on. I'm getting ahead of myself here...

Because just after Chapter 3, Skinny Bitch reveals itself as a skinny piece of thinly veiled propaganda for the vegan movement. Complete with extensive reference to dead, rotting, decomposing flesh.

It also promotes not eating breakfast, lunch or dinner until you're absolutely starving, eating a lot of boring green things that taste like earth, fasting once a month and removing all meat, chicken, fish and dairy from your diet, because they make you fat, constipated, bloated and really, really ill.

So, so much for Skinny Bitch. There's a lot of what looks like good research in there, and some of it even sounds perfectly logical, but I'm skeptical. Deeply so. And unless you've been wanting to go vegan for ages, are teetering on the edge of the cliff and would like that last convincing shove, avoid this book at all costs. (You can also probably avoid sugar, aspartame and fatty meat without doing yourself too much damage. But I guess you knew that.)

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

The White Queen/Red Queen (Philippa Gregory)

2010-09-09T17:48:00.005+02:00

Available at all good bookstores and on the Amazon Kindle.

Philippa Gregory’s latest two pieces of historical heaven are so tightly (incestuously, in true Tudor fashion?) intertwined as to warrant simultaneous review. So here it is…

First, The White Queen – Book I in the series Gregory calls The Cousins’ War (the original name for the War of the Roses, which pitted Lancaster against York).

Elizabeth Woodville, a young Lancastrian widow of exceptional beauty and ambition, catches the eye of the handsome, virile and newly crowned king – and marries him in secret. She is The White Queen; the York queen. But, rising to the demands of her position, Elizabeth is forced to fight, sacrifice and bewitch for the sake of her family. And, as the intrigue unfolds, her two sons – ‘the missing princes in the Tower’ – become central figures in a mystery that has confounded historians for centuries.

(Incidentally, for the historians among us, Elizabeth is indeed mother to a royal dynasty, just as her father and mother hoped she would be. She is mother of Henry VIII and her granddaughter is England's greatest queen – Elizabeth I.)

Then, there’s Elizabeth’s arch-enemy, The Red Queen, who makes a tantalising appearance as a shrewish matriarch in Book I, but earns a novel to herself in Book II.

Margaret Beaufort grows from a pious nine-year-old who wants to be Joan of Arc into a conspiring courtier who stops at nothing to see her son on England's throne. The opposite of her alluring rival, plain Lancastrian heiress Margaret Beaufort weds warrior Edmund Tudor at age 12 and pours her ambition into his only son, Henry.

While England seethes with discord during the turbulent War of the Roses, Margaret transforms from powerless innocent into political mastermind – so that rival heirs to England's throne are killed in battle, executed or deliberately eliminated.

And now, onto the actual review…

What I have always loved about Gregory’s books is their overlaps: the fact that the evil one-dimensional bitch from one book is sometimes the ditzy heroine of another. And because The Red Queen and The White Queen cover roughly the same period from different perspectives, the reader really gets a voyeuristic sense of insight; of peeking through a dusty keyhole into a secret room in which dark things happen.

So, a thumbs-up from me. However…

Gregory is veering away from the sexy and intricate historical fiction – and here I emphasise ‘fiction’ - that she championed in A Respectable Trade, The Queen’s Fool and The Other Boleyn Girl, and towards a more accurate, sensical historical fiction – and here I emphasise ‘historical’. I like it better when she makes stuff up.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

The Slap (Christos Tsiolkas)

2010-07-28T18:14:00.001+02:00

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa.

I read The Slap a while ago and must admit that I'm only reviewing it now because a Penguin Books press release jogged my memory. Christos Tsiolkas, the Aussie author of this brave and bizarre book, has been nominated for the 2010 MAN Booker Prize. Deservedly so. This is a novel to be talked about.

In short, an already troubled family man slaps someone else’s child at a barbecue. The sound reverberates around the garden; the onlookers gasp in horror. And the small universe at the heart of this piece of middle-class, suburban, non-white-bread Melbourne begins to unravel - because not only are friends and family deeply divided by the event, but it also brings to the surface all the ugly stuff lurking below.

First things first, the people in this novel are not mainstream. They are real. Disturbingly so. Screwing around, making poor choices, fighting with friends, lying about each other, fantasising about each other. Coming to terms with their own private miseries. Everyone's muddled; everyone's soul is murky.

The sex is explicit, and more than a little cheesy, but it fits. As does the hardcore language. Sorry.

And beyond it all, Tsiolkas displays magical control of the multiple threads of his narrative, via eight of the people, across three generations, who were present at the ill-fated barbecue. There are raw themes to be examined, yes, but this is masterfully carried out and, with sensitivity and pathos, Tsiolkas shows us how to understand even the most despicable people, whether we want to or not. The Slap is, as other reviewers have put it (who am I to reinvent the wheel?) a 'rewarding' read.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

The Help (Kathryn Stockett)

2010-06-26T14:46:00.000+02:00

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa.

A lot of people have said a lot of things about Kathryn Stockett’s completely brilliant debut novel, The Help; among them:

“…immensely funny…” – Daily Telegraph

“A laugh-out-loud…must-read” – Marie Claire

“Touching, disgraceful, funny.” – Daily Mail

I’m sorry – are we talking about the same book here? I’m prepared to put money on the fact that none of the reviewers quoted above are South African.

Because only a South African, raised by a nanny, used to having a full-time maid around and used to being raised, in many cases, by two moms – one white and one black – can appreciate that this is a sad book.

A masterfully written book, yes. A tragicomic book, yes. But a heart-breaking book, above all. Maybe I’m making too much of it. It’s possible. Read the book yourself, and let me know. To start with, here’s the blurb:

“Enter a vanished world: Jackson, Mississippi, 1962. Where black maids raise white children, but aren’t trusted not to steal the silver…”

That world hasn’t vanished, okes. Not really.

Granted, there are no separate water fountains, no separate counters at the grocery store, no separate seats on the bus – but there were more recently than 1962 and a lot of what’s in this book rings very true for me. Okay. Rant over.

Stockett’s The Help is spectacular. Each of its three narrators, Minny, Aibileen and Skeeter, have her own voice; her own way of explaining what’s going down in segregationist Jackson. And regardless of who’s talking, you can’t put it down.

Here’s Aibileen:

“I arrange the-this and the-that for her lady friends. Set out the good crystal, put the silver service out. Miss Leefolt don’t put up no dinky card table like the other ladies do. We set at the dining room table. Put a cloth on top to cover the big L-shaped crack, move that red flower centerpiece to the sideboard to hide where the wood all scratched. Miss Leefolt, she like it fancy when she do a luncheon. Maybe she trying to make up for her house being small. They ain’t rich folks, that I know. Rich folk don’t try so hard.”

There’ve been so many rave reviews. This book is the must-read of the year. Even the one-book-a-month bookclub bobbas are reading it. But the only reviewer with whom I agree is the legendary Marian Keyes, with her “Daring, vitally important and very courageous.”

She clearly got it. Must be because she’s Irish.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

Fieldwork (Mischa Berlinski)

2010-06-22T11:58:00.002+02:00

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa.

This is a story about a story.

If you’re used to the way I write my reviews, and you don’t mind that everything is more or less about me, read on.

If you’re new to this blog and want ‘a real book review’, maybe fish around in the archive?

Anyway, approximately six months ago, Penguin sent me a box of review books that included, among others, Mischa Berlinski’s Fieldwork. I read the back; it sounded great. So I took it with me on holiday. The sad part is that I never got to it. It looked wonderful, but there were so many other wonderfuls in December! Like...

Chic Jozi (Nikki Temkin)
The Well and the Mine (Gin Phillips)
Free Food for Millionaires (Min Jin Lee)
Bright Shiny Morning (James Frey)
Ways of Staying (Kevin Bloom)

So, I left Fieldwork at the beach house for my in-laws or their guests to enjoy on a future holiday (there’s a burgeoning library there, next to the fireplace, largely thanks to Penguin and, I suppose, me) – and duly forgot all about it.

Until this trip.

There it was. Waiting for me. Not on the shelf where I’d left it, but in full view. Not inside. On top. I vaguely recalled the original appeal and picked it up for a cursory flick-through. Three days later, I put it down again; thrilled with myself.

Whadda book!

Here’s a hint:

“This novel began not as fiction but as a history of the conversion of the Lisu people of northern Thailand to Christianity. Then one afternoon, I woke up from a long nap with a plot in my head, and my history became a novel. At that moment, I abandoned any intention I had to tell a true story. The Dyalo do not exist, except in these pages. None of this stuff happened to anyone.”

– Author’s Note

How fantastic?

I’ve kind of ruined things for you, though, because I didn’t have this compelling context until the very last page (literally) of the book. So all the while I wondered about Mischa, who writes in the first person, as himself, and that was delicious, to say the least. But the fact is that this book – even if you don’t like anthropology, ethnography, religion, research or fieldwork (and I really, really don’t) – is completely and utterly brilliant.

More information:

This sort-of-thriller is about Mischa Berlinski, a reporter who's moved to northern Thailand to be with his schoolteacher girlfriend. He hears from a friend about the suicide of Martiya van der Leun, an American anthropologist, in the Thai jail where she was serving 50 years for murder. Fascinated, Mischa begins to investigate Martiya's life and supposed crimes and in doing so, uses readable and clever backstory to explore the enduring conflict between faith and science.

The problem is that the plot doesn’t do the book much justice. Read it. It’s lekker.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

Okay, okay. So I lied.

2010-06-20T19:40:00.003+02:00

I didn't mean to. Really. But, yes. The promised reviews never materialised. Time rolled on. I read more books. Life happened.

Sorry.

The good news is that I have a good story about a good story. Gird your loins. Here it comes...

On the cards (I swear!)...

2010-04-23T14:32:00.001+02:00

To come, as soon as I have a free moment (ha ha), are reviews on Lyall Watson's genius book (and one of my all-time top 5), Elephantoms; Lori Lansens' superlative The Wife's Tale (think Wally Lamb, but sadder, if that's even possible); and local copywriter Paige Nicks' fiction (I think?) debut: A Million Miles from Normal. Hang in there. I'll get to 'em. As soon as humanly possible, assuming I'm human. Promise.

Chic Jozi (Nikki Temkin)

2010-04-23T14:25:00.000+02:00

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa.

So, Chic Jozi. I've been threatening to review it for months and months. But the problem is, I've been too busy reading it, reading it again and re-reading it. I even - no jokes now - keep it in the bathroom, right next to the loo, for ready referral. (And by that I mean to cast no aspersions whatsoever on it.)

Penned by prolific Jozi scribe, Nikki Temkin, this pink-'n-black mini-tome is a resource for must-knows related to shopping, preening, eating, jolling, chilling, decorating and other critical pre-occupations - and its author has clearly done her research.

Which must have been heavenly [she italicises jealously].

From secret spots for glorious trinkets to top facialists and nail experts; superb restaurants to plain and simple good ideas for sunshine fun, Chic Jozi has it all. It's also tiny. Handbag-sized, really. Which is useful. And it's good for new info, or to remind you of 'that place' you've meant to check out.

I was particularly smug about the fact that I'd been there and done that, mostly, until I came nose to page with a coupla tip-offs I'd never even heard of, let alone mastered. So that just goes to show.

One thing, though. I'm a bit puzzled by the constant, albeit thorough, reference to kosher stores, restaurants and resources, as I hadn't thought these to be important to most (waspy) Joburgers - much less chic. But if, like me, Temkin's readers are mostly kugels, so be it. Good to know. I guess.

Buy it. It's cute.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

My top 5 (and maybe 10) books of all time...

2010-04-03T16:37:00.003+02:00

Even as I type this, I'm not sure I can limit it to only five. Because, this weekend, I'm reading a book so spectacular that I've had to re-visit a list that hasn't changed in some time... (Review and more info to follow next week. In the interim, any guesses? It's about mammals, of all things.)

So, something unusual is now about to happen: a long-time book reviewer / commitment-phobe is about to put down, in writing, committedly, her top five (ish) books of all time. [Whew. Deep breath.] Here goes, in random order:

1. Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides)
2. The Girls (Lori Lansens)
3. Shantaram (Gregory David Roberts)
4. The Time Traveller's Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
5. Where the Heart is (Marita van der Vyver)

So much for only five...

6. The Other Boleyn Girl (Philippa Gregory)
7. The Hour I First Believed (Wally Lamb)
8. Shutter Island (Dennis Lehane)
9. The House of the Spirits (Isabel Allende)
10. This weekend's book - review to follow

Disclaimer: For those of you who have seen some of the (frankly, awful) movie versions of the books above, please do me the kindness of not unfairly judging their literary counterparts. Thank you.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

The Well and the Mine (Gin Phillips)

2010-03-28T16:08:00.001+02:00

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa.

"After she threw the baby in, nobody believed me for the longest time. But I kept hearing that splash."

Wouldn't you chalish [Yiddish, v.: yearn] to read a book that started there? Well, I did. And it was worth it.

This, Gin Phillips' first novel, is set in a small coal mining town in Alabama in Depression-damaged 1931 - where little Tess Moore watches from her favourite night-time hiding place, the back porch, as a strange woman lifts the cover of the family well and without a word, tosses a baby in.

The story shifts narrators often and suddenly, which I usually don't like. But each of the characters (Albert, Tess's father; Leta, her mother; Virgie, her older sister; and tiny Jack, her baby brother) is so likeable and so real that this device soon becomes comfortable and indeed, useful.

Each in their own way, the family members try to get to the bottom of the baby in the well, all the while mildly disbelieving. And in the end, against the overarching tapestry of the hardest, hungriest of times in American history, they find the answer.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

Free Food for Millionaires (Min Jin Lee)

2010-03-28T15:29:00.005+02:00

Available at Exclusive Books and all good bookstores.

As I've said before, I'm not a book buyer. Reviewers (and Kindle owners) seldom are. But this book was on sale. And the title intrigued me. So I did what we're never supposed to do, and I bought it largely based on the cover. Lucky me.

Free Food for Millionaires has been positioned as a potential 'Great American Novel' which is, um, a little out there - but it is a super read. Have a go at the first bit of the blurb, and you'll see what I mean:

"Casey Han's years at Princeton have given her 'a refined diction, an enviable golf handicap, wealthy friends, a popular white boyfriend, and a magna cum laude degree in economics'. But no job, and a number of bad habits."

And it gets better from there. Casey Han is fabulous - a gal with a designer lifestyle she can't possibly afford, a knack for choosing the right friends and the wrong men, and a spectacular taste in and addiction to beautiful hats. Hats?! I ask you.

She's also trying to make it in high finance, from the bottom up, while dragging behind her all of the fundamental crises of immigrants' children, class struggle, social status and, yes, love.

All this, against the backdrop of Nineties New York. Read it.

P.S. I realise that the hats and clothing and man drama collaborate to make this book sound alarmingly like chick lit, which I unreservedly and unapologetically despise, but I promise it isn't. Vaguely. Even a little bit.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

Bright Shiny Morning (James Frey)

2010-03-28T15:08:00.000+02:00

Available at Exclusive Books and all good bookstores.

I have to be honest here... When Oprah publicly glorified and then just-as-publicly crucified James Frey for writing an 'autobiographical account' of his drug-addicted past that was, actually, largely fiction, I snorted and harrumphed along with everyone else. The shyster! I thought. The liar. The cheat. I bet he can't even write.

Silly me.

As the Evening Standard so aptly puts it, 'Frey really can write. Brilliantly. And if you don't think so f*** you.' (Frey also has a sense of humour. His first page reads, 'Nothing in this book should be considered accurate or reliable.')

Anyway, back to the point...

Bright Shiny Morning rips the glittery veil off the city of Los Angeles, revealing beneath its pocked and grimy skin, topped with a pair of fairly pretty (if bloodshot) eyes. To do so, Frey uses a cast of related-yet-unrelated characters who get up to mischief or sadden us or force us to recognise within them strong hints of real celebrities (look out for Tom Cruise, Perez Hilton and several others). Frey also injects each chapter with real-life facts, stats and figures about LA - some of which are, frankly, horrifying.

To say that I loved this book beyond reason is true. To say that it made me even more afraid of Los Angeles than three previous visits have caused me to be, is truer. Particularly since I am married to an actor. But what's truest of all is that James Frey is a kick-ass writer and I no longer care whether or not he lied unashamedly in A Million Little Pieces. I'm going to read it, and My Friend Leonard, anyway.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

Ways of Staying (Kevin Bloom)

2010-03-28T14:29:00.004+02:00

Available at Exclusive Books and all good bookstores.

Reviewers usually don't buy books. Why would we? We're lucky and suitably smug buggers who typically take delivery of a large box every month - free, gratis, for nothing - thanks to the many superb publishers out there (Penguin, chief among them).

And since the arrival of my Kindle, I buy new books even less. But that's another self-satisfied rant for another day...

My point is that I bought Kevin Bloom's Ways of Staying. I didn't even have a book voucher. I took the money out of my purse and paid for it. (Which hurt. A lot.) It's not my usual choice of reading material, in that I'm not a wild fan of local authors, much less local journos who are much, much smarter than me and whose regular columns I seldom, if ever, understand. But the blurb spoke to me.

Here's why.

Like many, we've been thinking about emigration. In a vague, passive-aggressive, weak-willed sort of a way, but still. I've been moaning about how I didn't work this hard to move to Boston and be 'poor'. My husband's been whining about how shitty the service is here and how, in the States, you get Amazon deliveries the next day. To the front door. (We don't talk about crime. It's too real an issue.)

And Bloom's blurb ends thus:

"Ways of Staying is in the final analysis a love letter to a country that will not be forsaken. This is not only the story of why we stay, and how; it's the story of who we are."

So I brought the book home, took it on holiday with me a week or two later, and didn't put it down again til I was done. Oy vey. It's a ride and a half, through truth and lies and human suffering and humour and the tragedies of communities including my own tiny Jewish one. On the surface pretty harrowing, its content is surprisingly palatable, thanks to Bloom's interesting narrative style and on-the-ground insights.

Also, as he's a journo by day, he writes clean. None of the droning waffle, effusive adjective use and academiish you'd expect from someone with a Writing Fellowship.

I never like to give too much away in my reviews, so I won't here either. But my parting shot is this: if you've ever considered leaving the country because you feel like you can't take the drama any more; if you've even dwelt on the idea briefly and then put it out of your mind; or if you've had it and you're outta here, this brilliant book should be your next step. At the very least, you can read it on the plane.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

I've been the slackest of slack reviewers lately...

2010-03-07T14:55:00.004+02:00

I've been reading a lot (but not as much as usual, thanks to audiobooks and my Kindle full of old classics), and gradually adding review books to the teetering 'To be urgently reviewed' pile on my desk. (Which I largely ignore, but for balancing the occasional coffee cup on it.) This means, of course, that I haven't actually posted anything substantial for some time. Apologies. I do plan to remedy the situation. Soonest. So please check back in a coupla days...

Reviews in the pipeline for December/Jan

2009-12-05T08:48:00.007+02:00

Look out for upcoming reviews on:

The Cassandra Chronicles, a hilarious tome of malcontentedness, by Ariel Leve

Erica Emdon's superb Jelly Dog Days

Joanne Brodie's heart-breaking Woman, Trashed

Chic Jozi, another inspired, inspiring and get-out-and-go-jolling book by Nikki Temkin

The Death of Bunny Munro, by Nick Cave, my weirdest book of 2009

(Provided for review by Penguin)

The Hour I First Believed (Wally Lamb)

2009-07-31T16:11:00.006+02:00

You know those independent films that come from nowhere, with little budgets, amazing casts (composed equally of the famous and the nobody), simple storylines and MASSIVE FOLLOWINGS? Those wacky movies that blow Tom Cruise's latest cheesy offering right outta the water? Little Miss Sunshine, Juno, Lars and The Real Girl, The Garden State, and others?

Wally Lamb's writing reminds me of those movies. Every single time.

His breakthrough first novel, I Know This Much Is True, knocked my socks off and made my exclusive Top 10. His second, She's Come Undone, made me cry in the car. That never happens. And this masterpiece, The Hour I First Believed, set as it is in the run-up to and aftermath of the Columbine shootings, blew me away - if you'll pardon the totally inappropriate pun.

Why is Wally Lamb such a genius?

Because he creates sad, damaged, lonely, real people. They're not characters. They're human beings; flesh and blood. They're the sad guy at the corner cafe. The fat lady who cleans the canteen. The unfriendly nurse at your doctor's office. They're present in your life - and their heartbreaking stories weave slyly through your legs like mangy cats - only you don't see them.

Right, now, onto the story at hand.

Caelum Quirk and his wife Maureen co-exist in a shaky marriage with more downs than ups - there's a lot of bitterness; a lot of mutual resentment. So off they go to Littleton, Colorado, hoping to find the elusive fresh start. He's a teacher and she's a nurse, and in no time at all, they're settled in a new school. But if you think that's 'all she wrote', you don't know Wally Lamb.

Caelum and Maureen make connections with the kids and with their fellow staff members. Maureen even takes a troublemaking teenage stray under her wing. And then, catastrophe. For their place of work is Columbine High School and one day, two students go on a murderous rampage. But again, in Lamb form, this book manages to be about more than the massacre.

It's about what happens after the tragedy; about how the people involved come to terms with their losses and with being spared; about the many ways in which they don't deal with it at all. Like Lamb's first two novels, it's about the small, prickly, maddening sufferings of real people.

"I just wish to Christ I’d gotten up the stairs that night. Made love to her. Held her in my arms and made her feel safe. Because time was almost up. They’d bought their guns, taped their farewell videos finalized their plans. They’d worked their last shift together at Blackjack—had made and sold me that pizza that, piece by piece, Mo and I had lifted out of the box and eaten. Chaos was coming, and it would drive us both so deeply into the maze that we’d wander among the corpses, lost to each other for years."

Other reviewers have called it 'bloated', 'massive', 'big' - for me, though it did ramble a little in places, it is a book into which I could quite happily have dug for another 617 pages. It is an exceptional book.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

44 Scotland Street (Alexander McCall Smith)

2009-07-31T13:31:00.003+02:00

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa.

I loved the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. I loved it to distraction. I loved it so much I bought several copies of each book and widely distributed them. I’m a one-woman Ladies Detective Agency road show. And when McCall Smith began to branch out, into philosophy clubs and bohemian buildings, I rubbed my little hands in unmitigated glee.

But, ‘twas not to be.

Don’t get me wrong: 44 Scotland Street, the second in its series, is a sweet little book. I took it with me on a weekend trip to Cape Town and read it in the bath. But I guess the familiarity and charm and goodness inherent in the divine books set in Africa, and their plump, pleasant and deeply shrewd protagonist, are missing entirely from number 44.

For a start, its characters/inhabitants are astoundingly irritating.

Pat is a pain. She knows she’s a bit of a delinquent (she admits as much in Chapter 1), but despite this obviation, I can’t get past how badly I want to slap her.

Bruce, too, is unbearable – representing every smarmy, smug, self-adoring, gel-addicted, pretty-but-not-very-bright boykie I’ve ever met and disliked on sight.

The rest aren’t too bad. I particularly like the gifted five-year-old Bertie. A prodigy. A genius. A precocious but delightful little monster. And a source of complete confuddlement to his pretentious (altogether slap-worthy) mother, the glossy Irene.

Having read this book some time ago (the intervening few weeks have been enough to wrench the blissful Cape Town weekend from my memory), I can’t quite recall the plot – which doesn’t bode well. I know there was an art gallery, a lovely nerd, a misappropriation of something precious and expensive, and some other interesting events, but can’t remember much else.

All I can say is, if you’re an avid fan of observing human nature and the weird things it makes strange people do, this is a nice light book to carry around with you til you’re done. It’s also exceptionally well-written (what d’you expect?), but for me, that didn’t save it. Sorry.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

A Bitter Harvest (Peter Yeldham)

2009-07-31T13:25:00.004+02:00

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa

I have a serious pash for books set in early Australia. This, despite not being a fan of Australia at all. Perhaps it’s because I like colonial settings? Perhaps because I like tales of struggle and strife? Perhaps because Australian writers write well? Whatever... The fact is, if it’s a book set in Oz in the 1800s or so, I’m into it in seconds.

You can imagine my joy when I opened my monthly box from Penguin Books and discovered in it the latest offering from Peter Yeldham – of whom I’d never heard. Positioned as ‘the master of the Australian historical blockbuster’, Yeldham has written several books about and set in the dry land down under, and is considered to be a king of his genre. Yeeha! A new friend for me.

So here’s an idea of plot: On a dark night, a desperate man does something criminal and is forced to run for his life. Many years later, when he has built a new life elsewhere and is a wealthy, settled, influential husband and father, he looks unkindly on the young, penniless immigrant who would woo his precious daughter, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth runs away, to be with her Stefan, and they begin a hard life in an unwelcoming place. From there, it’s a short leap into prejudice, political turmoil, betrayal and community conflicts – and as you watch Elizabeth and Stefan’s life take shape, you become ever more entangled in their dramas, despairs and decisions. True to Ozzie form, they unfold over generations. My best!

It’s not complex, sophisticated writing, but it is absorbing and it is epic and it is engaging.

If you liked Courtenay’s early stuff, or the early writings of Paullina Simons, you’ll love this book. (I subsequently tracked down other books by Peter Yeldham and so far, have loved them.)

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

Salvation in Death (JD Robb)

2009-03-09T17:09:00.006+02:00

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa

JD Robb is one of my favourite, favourite, favourite authors. Despite the fact that she's really Nora Roberts and I don't like Nora Roberts' books at all. That little nom-de-plumary tidbit notwithstanding, JD Robb's futuristic murder books, the ... In Death series, featuring the superb Lieutenant Eve Dallas, are so fabulous that I named my kitten Dallas.

But... For a while now she's been getting tired. JD Robb, I mean, not Eve Dallas or (Oh, I wish!) my kitten. And her novels started to head off in the direction of formulaic and not a little bit trite. So you can imagine my joy when I read her penultimate offering, Salvation in Death, and found it fresh, clever, and fully capable of standing on its own even without the rest of the series behind it.

Yay!

This, the story of a priest who dies a grisly and public death when he sips from a poisoned chalice, is new in its setting and style. It is fresh in its detail and in the clever way it weaves the whodunnit web around the unsuspecting reader. It's great. But (and this is my only reservation) I'm growing a little tired of Dallas' past finding its way into every book...

Surely she wasn't connected to everyone on earth when she was eight years old and tormented by her drunken father?

If you're new to Robb, this is a great start. If you're a Robb fan, this'll reassure you that she's more or less back on track. But if you staunchly dislike like books set in the 2070s and you can't open up enough to try just one, read Coben or Siegel or Fairstein or Deaver instead.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

The Various Flavours of Coffee (Anthony Capella)

2009-03-09T16:36:00.009+02:00

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa

I'm a coffee fiend, and I'll readily admit it. If it makes a difference, you should know that I like my coffee strong, black and thick enough to hold the spoon upright all by itself. And in this, as it turns out, I'm not alone.

Anthony Capella's Robert Wallis is what I call a bum - but he's a circa 1896 bum, so he speaks beautifully, dresses beautifully, comes up with endless beautiful nonsense and charms the petticoats off the ladies. He's also the composer of a 'vocabulary of coffees': new leaf, summer leaf, pewter, jet, smoke, gingerbread - intended to capture different beans' elusive flavours and explain them, uniformly, to the world.

But when he is denied the hand of Emily, his boss's bright and beautiful daughter, he heads off to Africa to find the world's finest coffee, and encounters things he'd never have believed were possible: slavery, corruption, passion, betrayal, and twists and turns that unravel over two decades.

Incidentally, this book (by the author of The Food of Love and The Wedding Officer) is one of the most erotic I've read in years...

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

Pieternella - Daughter of Eva (Dalene Matthee)

2009-03-09T16:31:00.007+02:00

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa

I was, perhaps, the only kid in my class who adored Fiela se Kind. Who sent her mom to buy her the English version not because she couldn’t be bothered to read it in its original Afrikaans, but because it was a pretty cool story. Who finished school and then, horror of horrors, read it again. Out of choice.

This is why the latest in the Dalene Matthee stable, Pieternella – Daughter of Eva, excited me so much. First published as Pieternella van die Kaap in 2000, it was translated into English in 2008 by Malcolm Hacksley, who I don’t know and have never heard of, but who must be an utter, utter genius.

The book, from cover to characters, plot to punchlines, setting to story, is exquisite. And much of it is true. Set in the 17th century, when the first white settlers arrived at The Cape of Good Hope, Pieternella introduces us to the realities of being mixed-race; of having a Goringhaicona mother and a Dutch father. She walks us through the corridors of The Dutch East India Company; she shows us its stranglehold on Robben Island, the isle of banishment.

And, all the while, we grow fonder and fonder of this strong-willed girl, and we will her to be happy. As she enters the frightening penal colony that is Mauritius. As she enters a premature marriage to what we hope will be a kind man. As she tries to manage her damaged brother, Solomon. As she bites her nails and prays that her children will not be born 'too brown'... We hold thumbs and hope along with her.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

Buy! Buy! Buy!

2008-12-02T16:50:00.007+02:00

The 4th issue of the magnificent literary journal, Wordsetc - one of the finest publications I've read in ages and certainly one of the best to come out of South African publishing - will be out soon...

It's available at Exclusive Books and top selected CNA stores, as well as at many independent bookstores nationwide.

Feel free to contact Flamenco Publishing for more information: Tel: 011 626 2676; Cell: 083 287 1955; Fax: 086 510 5716; Email: Flamencomail@gmail.com

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

Please look out for new reviews on...

2008-12-02T16:39:00.009+02:00

Allan Hall's Monster - the gripping and not-one-bit-believable-but-still-bizarrely-true story of Austria's Josef Fritzl, who kidnapped his own daughter when she was 18, kept her under his home in a secret basement, and had 7 children with her.

Anita Shreve's latest, Testimony - my first Shreve, unlikely to be my last, is a brilliant account of what happens to a school, a community, and the little people who fill it when a couple of drunken teenagers host an orgy, and its protagonist is only 14.

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

Fatboy & the Dancing Ladies (Michael Holman)

2008-10-27T17:33:00.004+02:00

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa

I need to preface this review by admitting that I loved its prequel so much I nearly wallpapered my study with it... At the time, about a year back, I likened Holman's debut novel, Last Orders at Harrods, to Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, with the following:

My adage has always been that if it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it is probably a duck. This time, however, I was wrong. Last Orders at Harrods: An African Tale looks like a book by Alexander McCall Smith, sounds like a book by Alexander McCall Smith and features a township heroine who closely resembles one of Alexander McCall Smith’s – but Last Orders is another species of novel altogether.

Fatboy is less Smith-ish than its predecessor. More chilling. Less cheerful. More messages. Less merriment. In short, it's not be quite as fresh, but it's as delicious. Like Charity Mupanga's dough balls the day after. The only downside? I can't recall if corruption was as clear a theme in Last Orders as it is here but, either way, it disturbs me. Perhaps things have changed in a year?

Here's a more detailed insight, with a little less editorialising from little old me:

Ferdinand Mlambo is in big trouble. Not only has disloyalty to Kuwisha’s corrupt Life President cost him his prestigious job as senior kitchen toto, but he has also been stripped of his name: henceforth he will be known as 'Fatboy'. With the help of Titus, leader of the notorious street-children, the Mboya Boys, and under the watchful eye of the irrepressible Charity Mupanga, her suitor Ed, and a motley crew of other ex-pats, locals and neighbourhood lunatics, Mlambo sets out to recover his name - and his dignity.

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One Fifth Avenue (Candace Bushnell)

2008-10-27T17:07:00.008+02:00

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa

Yes, Candace Bushnell's latest work, One Fifth Avenue, is very Sex And The City. Lots of couture and money and nose-in-the-air New York culture. Lots of very explicit but very interesting sex. And lots of feuds, secrets and foibles, a la Carrie, Miranda, et al.

But, more than that, One Fifth Avenue is what would happen if the SATC girls aged twenty years, developed a bizarre obsession with high-end property (and I mean obsession, not girly awe) and married Ben Elton. Why Ben Elton, you ask, and not a grizzled, grumpy older version of Mr Big? Well, there's some weird murderous stuff in this book; some dark scary overtones that I don't recall feeling in Bushnell's debut novel. And these inject a touch of Elton-esque farcical blackness into an otherwise fluffy (yet tightly penned and colourfully charactered) story.

It's about five women: actress Schiffer, spoiled Lola, classy Annalisa, miserable Mindy and eccentric Enid.

She's a particular delight, the glam old duck and popular gossip columnist who "has lived at One Fifth for decades and sees everything there is to see from her penthouse view". Wanna be her, when I grow up. Picture an amalgamation of Audrey Hepburn and Carol Burnett... with the backbone and brains of Boston Legal's Shirley Schmidt.

In short? One Fifth is nowhere near as iconic as its more fashionable sibling (grand-daughter, maybe?), but certainly worth a week at the beach this December, with the obligatory Cosmo - or perhaps a pink gin?

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

The Konkans (Tony D’Souza)

2008-10-01T13:43:00.003+02:00

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa

My goodness, did I love this book! And I didn’t expect to – which makes it all the better. Weird name. Weird cover. Weird premise. But what a superb story. What delicious writing. What heavenly characters. And the possibility that it is autobiography thinly disguised as fiction? Yum.

This is how the author positions it:

Francisco D'Sai is a firstborn son of a firstborn son — all the way back to the beginning of a long line of proud Konkans. Known as the ‘Jews of India’, the Konkans kneeled before Vasco da Gama's sword and before Saint Francis Xavier's cross, abandoned their Hindu traditions, and became Catholics.

In 1973 Francisco's Konkan father, Lawrence, and American mother, Denise, move to Chicago, where Francisco is born. His father, who does his best to assimilate into American culture, drinks a lot and speaks a little. But his mother, who served in the Peace Corps in India, and his Uncle Sam are passionate raconteurs who do their best to preserve the family's Konkan heritage.

Friends, allies, and eventually lovers, Sam and Denise feed Francisco's imagination with startling visions of India and Konkan history. Filled with romance, comedy, and masterful storytelling, The Konkans leaves us surprised by what secrets history may hold for us if only we wonder enough to look.

And all I can add is this: abandon your preconceptions about what you do and do not like to read. Dismiss your ideas about your favourite genre, or style, or setting. Lose your literary biases. And fall in love with The Konkans; truly one of the best books I’ve read in years.

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Under a Blood-Red Sky (Kate Furnivall)

2008-10-01T13:37:00.004+02:00

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa

Sofia and Anna are imprisoned together in Siberia’s Davinsky Labour Camp in 1933 – and inseparable. When Anna becomes gravely ill, Sofia promises to escape the camp and return with Vasily: the long-lost love of Anna’s life and the chief character in the decades-old, desperately remembered and often retold stories that have, so far, kept the two women alive.

But Sofia’s dangerous quest drives her to a remote village in the Urals, where she discovers an unusual community. Fraught with the ugly betrayals that simmer beneath the dusty streets walked by Stalin-era bolsheviks, mensheviks, kulaks and assorted revolutionaries, it is also a town in which gypsy magic and white arts work hard to keep the good people safe.

Like The Russian Concubine, Kate Furnivall’s last novel of love, loss and liberation in the pre-revolutionary East, Under a Blood-Red Sky is wonderfully drawn portrait of the little people who writhe beneath totalitarian fists. Its love stories also ring beautifully true, based as they are on the part-Russian author’s belief that “…love is also a fundamental reason for survival. Love of someone, of one's family. Or of an ideal. It is like girders round the soul; it gives you strength.”

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The Brutal Art (Jesse Kellerman)

2008-08-12T17:35:00.003+02:00

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa

The product of best-selling bookstore stalwarts, Faye and Jonathan Kellerman, Jesse Kellerman (or one of his large brood of siblings, in fairness) was bound to be a writer. What's surprising is that he's pretty good.

It's taken two books, in my opinion, to warm him up for this truly superb third novel, The Brutal Art: a richly peopled, thoughtfully plotted, elaborately sketched story that is as free of genre-imposed formulae and inoffensive orthodox Jewish caricature as his parents' popular offerings are famous for.

Oh, Ethan - how we root for you! New York art gallery owner Ethan Muller uncovers a cache of brilliant but disturbing drawings by a mysterious artist who has since vanished. And before long, old secrets about Ethan's own family begin to hack away at the fictions carefully constructed by those who want the ugly past to remain safely tucked away.

To be frank, The Brutal Art has two features I usually decry: the use of first-person singular ('I') and random flashbacks. But in this manifestation, both are so matter-of-fact, clean, clear and free of not-so-subtle author's guile that they work - all the while leading the reader towards the delicious brown-paper-wrapped gift that is eventual understanding.

Nicely done, Jesse.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

Gifted (Nikita Lalwani)

2008-08-12T17:15:00.006+02:00

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa

I'm a little freaked out by those popular semi-scathing documentaries on the paranormal genius kids who compete in spelling bees - but more so, by the pushy, scary Nazi-parents who always seem to feature so prominently and so loudly.

Nonetheless, I really got into Gifted, with its troubled, lonely adolescent protagonist, the maths prodigy Rumika, who stresses herself out so much that she becomes addicted to eating cumin seeds. Yes, really. Raw. More than 100 grams a day.

After writing her A-levels at 14, she's accepted at Oxford, and that's when things go horribly wrong. Because teenage angst, nasty-father-induced pain, horny twenty-something hotties and Ivy League pressure just don't gel when you're 14.

So Rumika runs away.

This little book made me deeply grateful that I was classroom clever in my early teens, but nowhere near clever enough to be really different. After all, it's hard enough to be a teenager without having to be different.

Only one problem with Gifted, really: It's so similar in vein (English setting, Indian cultural dislocation, prodigy plot) to others out there that I forgot I'd read it, started it two weeks after finishing it the first time and only realised after half an hour why the storyline seemed like an old friend.

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Novel About My Wife (Emily Perkins)

2008-08-12T17:06:00.003+02:00

This book disturbed me so profoundly that I had to sit in the sunshine, cuddle my (nice, normal, stable) husband and take a hot shower, just to get through it. Unusually good writing and familiar, flawed, screwy characters notwithstanding, Novel About My Wife is hard to read – and not just because I’m a relative newlywed.

To sum it up, it’s about a charming neurotic, Tom (“skinnyish, fortyish, English”), with a deeply disturbed but beautiful Australian wife, Ann, and how her psychological demons take over their happy hippie lives.

If you like a book to get inside your head and stay there for a while, unbidden, this one’s for you. And yes, I do have one unqualified ‘nice thing’ to say about it: Emily Perkins writes her male protagonist so convincingly and with such absolute authenticity, that I googled her in case she’d used a misleading pseudonym.

But be warned…

If the intermittent flashbacks throw you off as much as they did me, you may have to read this novel twice – something I simply don’t have the heart for.

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The Fairy Bible (Teresa Moorey)

2008-07-30T18:02:00.001+02:00

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa

I am decidedly not a fairy person. Don’t like elves, pixies, goblins or sprites. Not into rainbows or aromatherapy oils or meditation or pretty butterflies. Except on retro wallpaper. So even I was taken aback when my hands drifted towards a copy of The Fairy Bible by Teresa Moorey. (Perhaps somebody’s elfin little mitts were guiding me?)

It’s a beautifully illustrated, deliciously presented fairy encyclopedia, with all of the facts, info and non-jiggery-pokery background to intrigue even a confirmed skeptic. I even toyed, for a brief moment, with keeping it all to myself…

But why not share this friendly little tome – which introduces the realm of fairies; elaborates on water fairies, air fairies, fire fairies, earth fairies (who knew?), house and hearth fairies, flower fairies, tree fairies, and weather fairies; and ends with a dictionary of which ones come from which countries, philosophies, religions and belief systems?

It’s a cracker of a gift: a lovely pressie for a certain kind of child – or for that divine adult in your life who spends her free time trying out sweat lodges, flipping through tarot cards, checking out her star sign, twiddling the crystal around her neck or simply dreaming.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

Richistan (Robert Frank)

2008-07-17T12:56:00.008+02:00

'A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich'

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa

I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed a book so unexpectedly… Not that I didn’t expect much from it, you understand, but this little volume sat next to my bed every night for a week, causing me – despite being a confirmed narcoleptic – to stay up ‘n read.

Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich introduces us to the inhabitants of Richistan – a fictional breakaway republic peopled entirely by the super-rich.

Not the slightly-rich. Not the moderately rich. The obscenely, hideously, nauseatingly rich, rendered sleepless by troubles like, ‘My yacht doesn’t fit into the marina’, ‘It’s hard to manage 105 staff members’, and ‘How to out-donate the dot.com tycoon next door.’

Please note: this is not a book on how ‘the other half’ lives. It’s a book on the lifestyles of the 0.001% who make up America’s progressive new rich – and how they’re actually getting richer every year. It’s delicious stuff!

Richistan’s author, Robert Frank, is a senior special writer at The Wall Street Journal. In the process of creating his multi-carat republic, Frank inveigled his way into centuries-old charity balls, mammoth private estates, yacht clubs, fancy boardrooms, butler academies and other havens, where he recognised, observed and then elicited the ins and outs from the brave billionaires who’ve been both on top and down ‘n out.

Here’s a taste:

The rich have now created their own economy for their needs, at a time when the average worker's wage rises will merely match inflation and where 36 million people live below the poverty line. In Richistan sums of money are rendered almost meaningless because of their size. It also has other names. There is the 'Platinum Triangle' used to describe the slice of Beverly Hills where many houses go for above $10m. Then there is the Jewel Coast, used to describe the strip of Madison Avenue in Manhattan where boutique jewellery stories have sprung up to cater for the new riches' needs. Or it exists in the MetCircle society, a Manhattan club open only to those whose net worth is at least $100m.

It’s been said that “All good journalism is really travel writing. You prepare for a serious story the way a foreign correspondent would. You buy the maps, you learn the language, you hang out with the locals — not just the taxi drivers! — and then you write.” Gotta agree with that. Robert Frank’s is like the finest travel writing: packed with colourful and interesting stories, peppered with crazy people and rich in insights into an alien locale.

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The Adventures of the Wishing-Chair (Enid Blyton)

2008-06-30T14:32:00.005+02:00

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa

What is heaven? Heaven is dark chocolate cake and strong coffee. Heaven is ‘under-sleeping’: waking up a delicious 30 minutes before the alarm clock does. Heaven is orange roses. And heaven is re-reading a book you ADORED as a child, 20 years later.

I credit Enid Blyton for giving me my imagination. For creating characters and places and adventures so colourful and so tantalising that I could taste them. Even when the book was closed. And because I am a copywriter who feeds herself and her family with the fruits of her imagination, I think Enid Blyton is deserving of sainthood.

The Adventures of the Wishing-Chair (originally penned in 1937) is the book that started it. Off we went – Mollie, Peter and I – to the Land of Dreams. To Chinky’s home. To the magician’s party. Again and again, over years and years. And all in the magic chair with the cheeky personality and the little red wings.

Egmont has re-published this first enchanting Blyton book, but retained the original artwork. I’m also pleased to see tidbits of charming, anachronistic language like, ‘Horrid thing!’; ‘We’ll go to-morrow’; and ‘Hurrah!’. All I have to do, now that I’ve read this book for perhaps the hundredth time, is find somewhere safe to keep it until I have kids.

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Gillian McKeith's Food Bible (Gillian McKeith)

2008-06-30T14:10:00.008+02:00

'The Complete A-Z Guide to a Healthy Life'

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa and delivered to me by both Penguin and the team at MediaCo UK

The only fair way to begin this review is to say that I’ve been on every diet known to civilised man – and some that even uncivilised man wouldn’t tolerate. From Atkins to Zone; Blood Type to South Beach; grapefruit to veggie soup; and everything in between. Including only eating foods that are purple.

Not too long ago, I picked up a book called You Are What You Eat, by Gillian McKeith – who turned out to be that blonde lady on TV who examines people’s tongues and poo (although not at the same time, thank G-d). I read it, made a long list of foods to seek out, foods to avoid and foods to buy – and never looked at the list again.

It seemed, at the time, that McKeith advised eating a lot of weird healthy stuff I’d never heard of and didn’t know where to find. I even joked that ‘tincture of spider’ and ‘essence of seaweed gathered at midnight’ weren’t my cup of tea, so to speak.

Enter: McKeith’s latest offering, Gillian McKeith’s Food Bible – . This time, it’s a different story. Not because I’m more committed to my health (I ate MacDonalds yesterday). Not because I know where to find healthy stuff (okay, I do, but it’s far). It’s different this time because the book is so flippin’ easy to follow.

It really is a complete A-Z guide, detailing the key health factors, what makes up a healthy diet in general, which foods to eat at which age and stage of life, and then how to use food to prevent or treat a list of staggering conditions – including acne, Alzheimer’s, autism, breast cancer, bronchitis, bruising … I could go on for 200 pages (the book does).

And for each ailment, there are sections entitled ‘Causes may include’; ‘Action plan’; ‘Eat/drink’; ‘Avoid’; Herbs and supplements’; and ‘Extra tips’.

So let’s say I’m experiencing bloating. (Just to be hypothetical, you understand. Not because I have any idea what it’s like to lug a huge swollen stomach around for days on end, like a kangaroo’s pouch.) This book doesn’t, like other diet books, say, ‘Well, bran’s bad for you, because you’re in the O blood group. Stay away from it at all costs, or die.’

It says, drink warm water, chew really well, avoid refined carbs, consider a couple of supplements, combine food carefully, eat when relaxed, close your mouth when you eat, etc., but in a lot more detail – and more importantly, with good reasons that are specific to the condition in question!

The clincher is, it’s not a once-off read-this-book-and-change-your-life situation. It’s a tome-for-the-home. A big, heavy, easy-to-follow guide to feeling better – all the time, most of the time, as needed, or almost never. It is what it promises to be: a bible. And I intend not only to treasure my own copy, but to give one as a gift to everyone who’s important to me.

For more info on Gillian, her philosophies and her following, visit www.gillianmckeithclinic.com, www.mckeithinteractive.com or www.gillianmckeithclub.com, or take the quiz at http://www.gillianmckeith.info/yourbody/health/questionnaire/index.php.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

This Charming Man (Marian Keyes)

2008-06-05T17:02:00.001+02:00

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa

In my world, Marian Keyes is queen. She can do no wrong. Fiction. Non-fiction. Heart-breaking. Hilarious. And whatever she attempts turns into a cuppa hot literary tea: delicious, soothing, welcome – but bloody scalding if you sip too fast.

Despite my overwhelming bias, Keyes’ latest offering, This Charming Man, threw me totally. For starters, it has four narrators and four accompanying first-person perspectives. Not my favourite. Second, there are no Walshes in it. Sad, but forgivable.

But, while its usual fist-in-mouth humour still rolls across every page, there is more sinister grimness than I’m used to from this author; more pain, more anguish, more ugliness, more anxiety, more subtlety. And a plotline that is profoundly disturbing.

Nonetheless, I couldn’t put it down.

Paddy de Courcy, Irish politician and JohnJohn Kennedy-esque hunka-runka, is the charming man. And when he announces his engagement to the graceful (yet equine) Alicia, four women take it very badly. In different ways, for different reasons, and with different results. It’s a great story, but the undertone is undeniably hardcore.

My conclusion? Either Marian’s writing has grown up faster than I have and it’s up to me to keep pace – or I’m more of a softie than I thought. Go ahead - see what you think.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

Don't Panic! (Alan Knott-Craig)

2008-05-26T18:34:00.004+02:00

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa

It was a fresh, new year. The first few days of 2008. Optimism. Promise. Potential. We’d had our well-deserved rests, spend more than we should have and eaten more than we’d thought possible – and the hard work was upon us. But then, the world went dark.

In the midst of the Eskom disaster, climbing interest rates, soaring fuel costs and plummeting property prices, we were all starting to wonder whether the grass wasn’t actually a bit greener in Perth, Toronto, or even sweltering Dallas. We were whining and whinging, albeit by candlelight.

And then, like a friendly virus, Alan Knott-Craig’s reassuring missive began to make its way across the country and soon, across the world. Oh, the power of word of mouth! Don’t panic, it said. See 2008 as a year of opportunity and remember: we’ve had worse, and survived worse, before.

I read it, and felt better. I sent it to everyone I could, and they felt better. Tsotsis started to attack helpless foreigners in the townships and we almost panicked, but didn’t – because we were feeling better. We just did what we could, donated blankets and bought gas.

The end of this long story is that Alan Knott-Craig’s e-mail has spawned a little book of joy, titled Don’t Panic: a book by South Africans, for South Africans.

The result of South Africans wanting to share their positive messages with the rest of the country, it includes thoughtful contributions from John Robbie, Branko Brkic, Noeleen Maholwana-Sangqu, Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein, local writers and thinkers, and a whole lot of cheerful kids for whom ‘there’s no place like home…’

It’s upbeat and inspirational. It’s sweet. I liked it. But I am a little disappointed that the original message couldn’t remain just that: a simple piece of writing with a cracker of a message, able to achieve surprise success – without yielding a whole jolly bandwagon.

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A$$HOLE (Martin Kihn)

2008-05-26T18:07:00.006+02:00

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa

Where do you start, when the book is called A$$HOLE and sub-titled, ‘How I got rich and happy by not giving a shit about you’? Well, you kick off with a hefty chunk of tongue in your cheek and you keep an open mind.

Martin Kihn’s A$$HOLE is an eye-opener.

Promising access to a revolutionary programme for assholism, it covers essential body language (‘no smiling, unless others are in pain’), workplace etiquette (‘take credit for everything, except mistakes’) and feelings (‘the one luxury you can’t afford’), while detailing the author’s real-life journey from utter dorkness to total jerkhood.

I loved it – until the end of the second chapter. And then I started to wonder how someone could fill an entire book (granted, a small one, but 244 pages nonetheless) with tips like ‘be a fighter, not a lover’, ‘become the alpha dog’ and ‘put the tame back in team’. It was getting cold, fast. There’s only so much anti-nice I can stomach.

The story behind old Martin’s transformation is interesting, but it’s no page-turner – and the contents are funny, but hardly bursting with brilliant dry wit. My advice? Mid-year stocking filler. Buy a copy of A$$HOLE for the person in your life with the best sense of humour (a man, ideally) or get your own and keep it in the loo. No jokes. It’s great toilet reading.

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Requiem for an Assassin (Barry Eisler)

2008-05-21T16:47:00.003+02:00

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa

In my crazed mind, Barry Eisler’s sexy assassin, John Rain, is a hybrid of Lee Child’s drifter Jack Reacher, Keith Lindsay’s dark vigilante Dexter, and Chow Yun-Fat. And in the long-awaited sixth Rain novel, Requiem for an Assassin, he’s better than ever.

Newly entangled in a tempestuous romance with Israeli Mossad agent, Delilah, Rain is caught off-guard when friend and fellow hit-man-for-hire, Dox, is kidnapped from his Bali villa by rogue CIA operative Jim Hilger (a familiar Eisler antagonist).

Carry out three hits for me, demands the vengeful Hilger, meet my deadlines and make each look like a natural death, or Dox dies.

And so John Rain enters a web of murder, mayhem and madness that stretches from Bali to Paris, San Francisco to Saigon and New York to Rotterdam, as he tries to work out what Hilger is up to and how to rescue Dox – before the final likely hit: Rain himself.

Requiem is a goodie: tight, taut and tough, with rare insights into the moral dilemmas that must plague any assassin who, deep down, starts to wrestle with his own humanity. But I’m faced with my own dilemma: what happens if…gasp!...this is the last of Rain?

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The Making of Mr Hai’s Daughter (Yasmin Hai)

2008-05-21T16:14:00.003+02:00

THE MAKING OF MR HAI’S DAUGHTER, a memoir by Yasmin Hai (VIRAGO) IN A NUTSHELL: For Mr Hai, a Pakistani immigrant, becoming English is something to be taught to his wife and children. No Urdu, no long plaits, no salwar kameezes and - although they are Muslim - no religion. BUT IT’S NOT JUST ANOTHER BOOK ABOUT RELIGION; it’s a book about family, and fitting in. THE SADDEST BIT: “…something changed once we dropped Urdu... It just became too frustrating trying to explain complex matters of the head and heart to my mother in English. After dropping Urdu, she became lost to me for years.”

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The Perk (Mark Gimenez)

2008-05-21T16:01:00.005+02:00

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa

Mark Gimenez has been touted as 'the next Grisham' - which excited the hell out of me, as I adore Grisham (when he sticks to his formula, that is, and stays away from unwelcome and unexpected gallops towards painted houses, pizza and bizarrely, bleachers).

But as I devoured Gimenez' third offering, The Perk, I realised that the similarities between the two writers are superficial (backwater settings, rural justice, strange characters, patent racism and unimaginative titles starting with 'The'), while the differences are major.

For one, The Perk contains more genuine heartbreak, more realistic feeling and more children than any of Grisham's legal masterpieces. For another, the former is not as much a courtroom thriller as it is a tale about people that unfolds in and around the legal system.

...as much as there is a legal system in one-goat Fredericksburg. Finally, The Perk has more twists, more turns and - admittedly - more cheap shots, than Grisham is known for.

It's about Beck Hardin - recently bereaved and utterly bereft - who returns to his hometown with his two young kids and finds it completely changed. Pushed into running for district judge, he unleashes a chain of disturbing events (and a pack of rabid white-collar 'old boys').

In sum, The Perk is a well-considered, well-plotted, well-penned novel that I munched in one shot, and it has turned me on to seeking out this author's first two novels. But positioning it as a Grisham-esque opus, in my mind, did it no justice - if you'll pardon the...

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Look out for...

2008-05-08T09:33:00.003+02:00

New book reviews coming, including Yasmin Hai's The Making of Mr Hai's Daughter, Gillian McKeith's new Food Bible, Barry Eisler's Requiem for an Assassin, Mark Giminez' The Perk, Anita Shreve's Body Surfing, and others (available from Penguin)!

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam (Lauren Liebenberg)

2008-04-28T09:23:00.004+02:00

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa

Chaos right next door, in Zimbabwe, has been a feature of every South African’s life. Especially now, as electoral confusion meets possible social carnage and the Zim treasury has taken to printing on only one side of the currency, because its value is so laughable.

What better time, then, to read Lauren Liebenberg’s debut The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam?

Peanut Butter has a lot of Spud in it, due largely to its deliciously naïve and heartbreakingly frank little narrator. It also has a fair helping of The Power of One in it, in terms of its backdrop of civil war, pain, inter-racial tension and power struggle.

But perhaps the most appealing thing about this exquisitely written book is that it is a story about sisters; about being young; about mad grandparents and stressed out parents; and about growing up in beautiful, abundant, troubled, damaged Africa.

At the same time, there are two things about this book that profoundly disturb me.

The first is its antagonist, Ronin – the calibre of serpentine evil teenager that makes you want to have your tubes tied immediately and without remorse. The second is that, even though Peanut Butter is fiction, so much of it, especially the unpalatable parts, is true.

Regardless, it’s a must-read.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

Look out for...

2008-04-03T15:33:00.003+02:00

New book reviews coming, including a review of Lauren Liebenberg's The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam (published by Virago and available from Penguin)!

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

Mary, Mary (Julie Parsons)

2008-03-15T15:16:00.002+02:00

MARY, MARY, the debut novel by Julie Parsons, now available in paperback (PAN) TO SUM UP: Margaret Mitchell’s 20-year-old daughter is missing and the police think she’s over-reacting. Until a beaten and broken body turns up in the canal. IT GOES BEYOND: the tired old murder-mystery-meets-psychological thriller hybrid, by wielding unusual emotional impact and introducing a charming Irish cast. THE REALLY SATISFYING ELEMENT IS: that it’s written in two parts: the first, Mary’s kidnap and murder and the second, Margaret’s revenge. If you’re growing tired of the formulaic James Patterson, this intelligent book is for you.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

The Chameleon's Shadow (Minette Walters)

2008-03-15T15:15:00.005+02:00

THE CHAMELEON’S SHADOW, a novel by Minette Walters (MACMILLAN) TO SUM UP: Lieutenant Charles Acland returns from Iraq, severely disfigured and psychologically changed. When violent murders begin to plague the area, Acland is a prime suspect. WE LOVED IT BECAUSE: Everyone else writes sob stories in which demobbed soldiers from Iraq are so traumatised that they can be forgiven anything – Walters is braver than that. THE REALLY COOL PART IS: that the chief ‘goodie’ in the story is a 135kg lesbian weightlifter, doctor and kindhearted straight-talker called Jackson (with the potential to become a literary cult heroine).

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

Days of Atonement (Michael Gregorio)

2008-03-15T15:14:00.001+02:00

DAYS OF ATONEMENT, a novel by Michael Gregorio (FABER & FABER) TO SUM UP: Prussia has fallen to the French under Napoleon and a local prosecutor must team up with a French criminologist to solve the horrifying murder of three small children. IT’S UNUSUAL BECAUSE: it’s so brilliantly written – painting a realistic picture of a time, a place and a nation lost to history. WHY IT KNOCKED OUR SOCKS OFF: not since Caleb Carr’s The Alienist has an author woven such a fast-paced and exciting criminological tale against a centuries-old backdrop.

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Of Merchants and Heroes (Paul Waters)

2008-03-15T15:13:00.001+02:00

OF MERCHANTS & HEROES, a novel by Paul Waters (MACMILLAN) TO SUM UP: Amidst love, politics, honour and war, Marcus is a young Roman determined to avenge his father’s murder and to live life by his father’s high ideals, when he is caught up in events that will shake the world. IT REMINDS US OF: the evocative vividness of Robert Harris’ Imperium and Pompeii. YOU’LL LOVE IT IF: you appreciate novels infused with understated grace and the power to make you lose yourself in their stories of history and humanity.

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Stolen Time (Sunny Jacobs)

2008-03-15T15:12:00.001+02:00

STOLEN TIME, a true story by Sunny Jacobs (DOUBLEDAY) TO SUM UP: A no-holds-barred account of one woman’s condemnation to death, and then 17 years in jail, for a crime she didn’t commit. THE PART THAT MAY BREAK YOUR HEART: Sunny is eventually exonerated and reunited with her two children, but only two years after her partner’s botched execution. WHY IT KNOCKED OUR STRIPEY SOCKS OFF: It’s a rare look into the strength, resilience and even joy to be found in the world’s darkest places on the soul’s darkest days. And it is all true.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

The Faces of Angels (Lucretia Grindle)

2008-03-15T15:09:00.001+02:00

THE FACES OF ANGELS, a novel by Lucretia Grindle (PAN) TO SUM UP: Newlywed Mary Warren is stalked and brutally attacked as she explores the streets of Italy – and survives only because her young husband gives his life to save her. But is the indigent who was charged with the crime, actually the man who did it? WHY IT’S A PAGE-TURNER: You feel Mary’s fear, her friends’ anxiety and Florence’s terror – and when the twists come, you don’t spot them until the very last minute. YOU’LL LOVE IT IF: you’ve ever been to atmospheric Italy, felt a chill down your spine in a musty alley, or shivered with delight in a scary movie.

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Anybody Out There? (Marian Keyes)

2007-11-08T13:19:00.004+02:00

Marian Keyes once wrote (an equally heart-breaking and hilarious) novel about the battle to overcome alcoholism, and a reviewer – whose name I don’t know, but if I did I would certainly mention it here – didn’t read it and wrote it off as ‘forgettable froth’.

It’s this deplorable review I think about when I open anything written by Marian Keyes.

Marian Keyes writes funny novels about wacky families and mad siblings and loony relationships and wild, passionate love and shoes and handbags, but she roots them in touching plots so searingly real that there’s nothing forgettable or frothy about them.

Actually, sometimes they hurt. Anybody Out There? is one of these.

Badly injured in an accident, Anna Walsh is staying in Dublin with her parents and batty older sister, Helen. She’s pining for her Big Apple home, her heavenly husband Aidan and The Most Fabulous Job in the World^TM. But where the hell is Aidan, and why is he refusing to respond to Anna’s messages?

Proving that she is a maestro able to mix dark and light, tragic and comic, in a way that few writers can, Marian Keyes is getting better all the time. Always just as cheeky as they are thought-provoking, her stories are getting cleverer, her characters nuttier and her dialogues more delicious. Read this book!

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

There is a Season (Marita van der Vyver)

2007-11-08T13:18:00.003+02:00

When I encountered Marita van der Vyver’s last book, Where the Heart is, I described it as ‘a pretty cake tin filled with slices of life’ and I mentioned how some of its tongue-in-cheek comments on people and personalities ‘made my shoulders shake with such uncontrollable mirth that I woke the sleeping man at my side’.

Well, Marita’s done it again. This time, when my chuckles woke the (same) man beside me, he knew enough to ask, “It’s that Afrikaans author again, isn’t it?”

There is a Season (translated from the Afrikaans Vergenoeg) is both very funny and very heart-breaking. It gives us Adele, a charismatic woman of 60, who leaves hospital to go home to rural Vergenoeg and die of cancer – in the arms of her adult daughters, the irritatingly responsible San and the unashamedly irreverent Bella.

As Adele's physical deterioration – and the feelings that accompany this process – is described in painful detail, we ache for all three characters. And we’re reminded of mothers and daughters and family and fights and present selves and past mistakes and journeys that, in the end, have nothing and everything to do with death.

Like Where the Heart is, There is a Season doesn’t read at all like a translation, instead featuring beautiful English flavoured with whimsical ingredients and delicious dialogue.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

Cry For Help: 36 Scam E-mails from Africa (Henning Wagenbreth)

2007-11-08T13:17:00.001+02:00

This colourful little book is as bizarrely humorous as it is magnificently illustrated and cleverly laid out. Beginning with the premise that “African scam mails differ from other fraudulent e-mails in their creativity, audacity and their ludicrous claims”, the author/illustrator of Cry For Help has selected and presented a fanciful collection of original missives from fraudsters posing as repentant Islamic guerillas, wealthy orphans, corrupt yet repentant government employees, and other richly detailed characters:

You’ve seen a few of these before, haven’t you? And after the tenth or twentieth, you probably hit ‘Delete’, twiddled your spam filter and got on with your life. But pity the poor schmuck who’s not as skeptical as you are. The ignorant American, for example, for whom Africa is rich and wild and exotic. The letter assures him that he’s been carefully selected as a business partner, the description of a tragedy awakens his compassion and the awareness of his civilising advantage sways him to certainty. He pays a (relatively small, in USD) ‘admin fee’, and he never hears from the swindler again.

Shame.

A bigger shame, however, would be if these deliciously enticing e-mails (which read like old folk tales of good and evil kings, and golden treasures) were sacrificed on the altar of anti-spam. They’re a true piece of social commentary, unveiling in a tragicomic and artful manner some of the practical ins and outs of the North-South conflict and how easily the Internet, a tool of globalisation, can be turned on its industrialised creators.

I salute the author and illustrator, and I urge you to buy this cheeky book. It’s worth chatting about, laughing at and (as a contemporary relic) having on your bookshelf.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

Any Way You Want Me (Lucy Diamond)

2007-11-08T13:16:00.001+02:00

ANY WAY YOU WANT ME, a novel by Lucy Diamond (PAN) TO SUM UP: A wry, funny and curl-your-toes-in-delighted-shock story with a fresh view of the ‘bored housewife has an affair’ cliché. WHY IT’S BETTER THAN YOUR AVERAGE CHICK LIT: Sadie, the yummy mummy, has the cheek/guts/lunacy to do something we’ve all wanted to: pretend we’re more successful, more important and infinitely cooler than we are. THE LINE THAT’LL MAKE YOU NOD IN AGREEMENT: “We discussed for hours how gorgeous we were, and how great our lives were going to be, and made idyllic roses-round-the-door plans for our wonderful, romantic future. How come then, we’d ended up like this?”

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

The Fence (Andrew Gray)

2007-11-08T13:15:00.002+02:00

THE FENCE, a novel by Andrew Gray (HUMAN & ROUSSEAU) TO SUM UP: Jan Klein is hired by the world’s biggest diamond company to investigate their top trader, The Fence. But soon Klein is ensnared in a web of corporate Jozi politics. WHAT IT REMINDS US OF: The superbly Souf Effrican dialogue of its protagonists is very Mike Nicol (Out to Score). WHY IT’S GREAT: For too long we’ve devoured novels set in Central Park, Afghanistan and Mordor. We’ve consumed local colour not our own. But The Fence is the N1 and Grootfontein and Boksburg. Real. Dusty. Familiar. Ours.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

The Mesmerist (Barbara Ewing )

2007-11-08T13:14:00.004+02:00

Barbara Ewing’s The Mesmerist is a rich piece of historical fiction cloaked in crimson velvet curtains, redolent of heavy stage makeup and heavier perfume, and tasting faintly of old-fashioned steak-and-kidney pie sweetened with a touch of port. It is, in a word, delicious.

Set in early nineteenth-century London, the story begins on the cheap wooden stage of a dingy local theatre, moves into a candle-lit, star-bedecked Bloomsbury basement and culminates in a crowded coroner’s court – tempered along the way by mad old ladies, stoic gentlemen, chamber-pots and copious cups of restorative tea.

The Mesmerist is Miss Cordelia Preston, a forty-something actress with great theatrical talent, a sharp instinct and a solid sense of the surreal – but no acting work. Bolstered by her friend, Amaryllis Spoons, Cordelia launches a ‘phreno-mesmerism’ business – and to the distant strains of Rillie’s flute, makes a success of examining the shape of clients’ skulls, advising betrothed couples on their mutual suitability and gently guiding skittish young women as to what to expect of the conjugal bed.

It’s more common-sense than the supernatural, says Cordelia, “[w]’re not making it up; it just is!”, but in no time at all, her hard-won achievements bring limelight, and with limelight comes curiosity, catastrophe, murder and infamy. Yes, The Mesmerist has it all, served warm in a thick and thoroughly satisfying plot.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

In the Country of Men (Hisham Matar)

2007-11-08T13:14:00.003+02:00

Hisham Matar’s debut novel, In the Country of Men, has been vaunted as “[o]ne of the most brilliant literary debuts of recent years”; as “exquisite”, “outstanding” and “masterly”. While I wouldn’t venture quite that far, I would certainly draw attention to its magnificent writing and to the achingly honest portrayal of a Libya trapped in terror.

Nine-year-old Suleiman lives with his parents in golden Tripoli, 10 years after Moammar Gaddafi’s 1969 revolution. There, he tries to reconcile the things he understands (sesame sticks, football and mulberries) with the things he doesn’t: secret police, clandestine agitators, intimidation and torture, televised trials and hidden addictions:

“I returned to the television. The screen was covered now in a still photograph of pink flowers. This was the picture that meant the broadcast was temporarily interrupted. I heard it said that the Guide [Gaddafi] had a switch in his sitting room, beside his television set, so that whenever he saw something he didn’t like he flicked the flowers on.”

And a little time later, Gaddafi’s Revolutionary Committee has Suleiman’s own family in its sights. His father is accused of political dissidence and vanishes “like a grain of salt in water”, his mother falls apart, and the boy’s fragile psyche begins to tremble under the combined weight of lies, fear, mistrust, betrayal, grief – and childhood itself.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

Last Orders at Harrods: An African Tale (Michael Holman)

2007-11-08T13:13:00.002+02:00

My adage has always been that if it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it is probably a duck. This time, however, I was wrong. Last Orders at Harrods: An African Tale looks like a book by Alexander McCall Smith, sounds like a book by Alexander McCall Smith and features a township heroine who closely resembles one of Alexander McCall Smith’s – but Last Orders is another species of novel altogether.

Penned by Michael Holman, born in Zimbabwe and formerly Africa editor of the London Financial Times, Last Orders draws us into a notorious East African slum in the fictional country of Kuwisha (read: Kenya), where political tensions, wild riots, gangs headed by street urchins and government corruption combine with chicken necks in Worcestershire sauce, bumbling characters, Tusker beer, devastating hilarity and legal action over the name of Harrods International Bar (and Nightspot) – where everything happens.

Like McCall Smith, Holman relies on a gently satirical fable and a strong African woman, Charity Mupanga, to introduce the reader to everyday life in Africa; unlike McCall Smith, Holman comments fearlessly on the continent’s unfortunate and often ugly realities. There is humour, but no cuteness; the story is simple, but it is no bed-time story. Holman is a serious political commentator in satirist’s clothing, and his debut novel is a must-read.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

The Loner (Josephine Cox)

2007-11-08T13:12:00.002+02:00

The Loner was my first Josephine Cox. Extremely enjoyable and a very easy read, it reminded me of Lesley Pearse, without the social commentary; of Martina Cole, without the cockney dialect. In fact, if this novel had a personality, it’d be straightforward and down-to-earth – perhaps even a little bit simple, like the loner for whom Cox has named her story. Davie Adams is a deeply good young man from Blackburn who leaves home, hearth and family under tragic circumstances in 1955, and makes his way in an uncertain world. Buy this book if you like happy endings.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

The Savage Garden (Mark Mills)

2007-11-08T13:11:00.002+02:00

I should have suspected, perhaps, that a 355-page novel centred solely on a garden would yield literary brambles, weedy characters and watery puddles of plot. Mark Mills’ The Savage Garden is set in 1958, when young Adam Strickland leaves Cambridge to study a famed 16th century Tuscan garden. There, in post-war

Italy

, Adam finds a “mysterious world of statues, grottoes, meandering rills and classical inscription”; a place that is probably just as dark, dank and hard to navigate as the story itself. If you really love gardens, you may like this book. But I make no promises.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

The Tenderness of Wolves (Stef Penney)

2007-11-08T13:10:00.001+02:00

Novels set in snowy climes never resonate with me, perhaps because their plots are always messily entangled with the weather – yielding trite images like blood on snow, footprints on snow, frantic refuge from snow. The Tenderness of Wolves, despite rave reviews and award wins, is one of these. Set in the Canadian outback in 1867, Stef Penney’s debut novel begins with murder and a search for the young suspect. One by one, groups of people with diverse motivations become embroiled in the matter. There are insights into the personalities, relationships and social norms at play – but this novel is no masterpiece.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

The Observations (Jane Harris)

2007-11-08T13:09:00.001+02:00

The beauty of this novel is its narrative: so thick and delicious you could stir it with a ladle. In The Observations, Jane Harris introduces Bessy Buckley, a first-time maid in a big country house in Scotland. In her bawdy brogue, peppered with observations of those around her, Bessy talks the reader through life in creaky Castle Haivers – while trying frantically to satisfy the strange requests of her beautiful, enigmatic Mistress. The Observations is historical fiction with a twist: there’s no romance in it. Instead, it’s a gripping story of what happens when simple people need desperately to be understood.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

It's called a book review 'cos you've *read* it.

What I'm reading this December

I've been a pretty shitty reviewer...

A Year in the Wild (James Hendry)

Your Sensory Baby (Megan Faure)

The Empress of Ice Cream (Anthony Capella)

His Last Duchess (Gabrielle Kimm)

Gold in Graphite - Jozi Sketchbook (Somayya A.E. & Zafrica Cabral)

Worth Dying For (Lee Child)

Those Who Love Night (Wessel Ebersohn)

Rush Home Road (Lori Lansens)

Elephantoms: Tracking the Elephant (Lyall Watson)

Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer (John Grisham)

Skinny Bitch (Rory Freedman & Kim Barnouin)

The White Queen/Red Queen (Philippa Gregory)

The Slap (Christos Tsiolkas)

The Help (Kathryn Stockett)

Fieldwork (Mischa Berlinski)

Okay, okay. So I lied.

On the cards (I swear!)...

Chic Jozi (Nikki Temkin)

My top 5 (and maybe 10) books of all time...

The Well and the Mine (Gin Phillips)

Free Food for Millionaires (Min Jin Lee)

Bright Shiny Morning (James Frey)

Ways of Staying (Kevin Bloom)

I've been the slackest of slack reviewers lately...

Reviews in the pipeline for December/Jan

The Hour I First Believed (Wally Lamb)

44 Scotland Street (Alexander McCall Smith)

A Bitter Harvest (Peter Yeldham)

Salvation in Death (JD Robb)

The Various Flavours of Coffee (Anthony Capella)

Pieternella - Daughter of Eva (Dalene Matthee)

Buy! Buy! Buy!

Please look out for new reviews on...

Fatboy & the Dancing Ladies (Michael Holman)

One Fifth Avenue (Candace Bushnell)

The Konkans (Tony D’Souza)

Under a Blood-Red Sky (Kate Furnivall)

The Brutal Art (Jesse Kellerman)

Gifted (Nikita Lalwani)

Novel About My Wife (Emily Perkins)

The Fairy Bible (Teresa Moorey)

Richistan (Robert Frank)

The Adventures of the Wishing-Chair (Enid Blyton)

Gillian McKeith's Food Bible (Gillian McKeith)

This Charming Man (Marian Keyes)

Don't Panic! (Alan Knott-Craig)

A$$HOLE (Martin Kihn)

Requiem for an Assassin (Barry Eisler)

The Making of Mr Hai’s Daughter (Yasmin Hai)

The Perk (Mark Gimenez)

Look out for...

The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam (Lauren Liebenberg)

Look out for...

Mary, Mary (Julie Parsons)

The Chameleon's Shadow (Minette Walters)

Days of Atonement (Michael Gregorio)

Of Merchants and Heroes (Paul Waters)

Stolen Time (Sunny Jacobs)

The Faces of Angels (Lucretia Grindle)

Anybody Out There? (Marian Keyes)

There is a Season (Marita van der Vyver)

Cry For Help: 36 Scam E-mails from Africa (Henning Wagenbreth)

Any Way You Want Me (Lucy Diamond)

The Fence (Andrew Gray)

The Mesmerist (Barbara Ewing )

In the Country of Men (Hisham Matar)

Last Orders at Harrods: An African Tale (Michael Holman)

The Loner (Josephine Cox)

The Savage Garden (Mark Mills)

The Tenderness of Wolves (Stef Penney)

The Observations (Jane Harris)

It's called a book review 'cos you've read it.