Weekend Review Roundup
9:30am 02/02/2010
The Children's Book, by A S Byatt, narrated by Nicolette McKenzie
"A S Byatt's latest highbrow blockbuster, shortlisted for the 2009 Booker prize, is about the upwardly mobile Wellwood family and their seven children circa 1900. My problem is that it is so crammed with characters, plots, revelations, history, sociology and random information about, oh, everything - theosophy, ceramics, puppets, vegetarianism, the Fabian Society - that I'm pushed to remember anything clearly. Except maybe the bit where the Wellwoods' adolescent children and friends go camping, read poetry aloud, swim naked, sing extracts from Winterreise and get the runs after eating undercooked sausages. Serves them right, the beastly prigs. Of course there's a serious message, there always is with ASB. Mrs Wellwood, a successful children's author, might, it turns out, have been wiser to concentrate on her own brood rather than entertaining other people's." - The Guardian
A Whispered Name, by William Brodrick, narrated by Gordon Griffin
"For some inexplicable reason, considering my preference for quirky sleuths, I've missed out on Brodrick's Father Anselm books. He's a barrister-turned-monk who is regularly given special dispensation to break his vow of silence and leave his Suffolk cloisters to solve some mystery that has the usual gumshoes baffled. Here Anselm has to dig deep into first world war archives to find out if his late mentor, Fr Herbert Moore, and the two other officers who court - martialled Private Joseph Flanagan in 1917 and sentenced him to death for desertion, were guilty of a terrible miscarriage of justice. Compellingly read and, as Great War books go, a worthy successor to Jennifer Johnston, Pat Barker and Sebastian Faulks." - The Guardian
The Various Flavours of Coffee, by Anthony Capella, narrated by Jonathan Aris
"Capella's book covers almost exactly the same 30-year period as Byatt's, but there the resemblance ends. Robert Wallis, libertine, spendthrift and would-be poet, is hired by a wealthy coffee merchant first to provide a Jilly Goolden-style taste directory for his umpteen flavours of coffee and second to travel to north Africa, home of the legendary mocha of Harar. Adventure, colonialism, love, slavery, suffragettes - it's all here. And sackfuls of sex along with the coffee beans." - The Guardian
This is How, by M J Hyland, narrated by Rupert Farley
"Patrick, an ordinary, decent young man in a boarding house, does an extraordinary thing he can't explain: he kills another man. Very simply told, his life gets right under your skin, while the clever narration invites sympathy for people you'd probably avoid in the world outside. Compelling." - The Observer
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