The Bookseller.com

1st December 2008

Elaine Szewczyk

Elaine Szewczyk is the editor of Kirkus Reviews, which previews more than 5,000 books a year, two to three months ahead of publication in the US. In her blog, she will share Kirkus' latest starred reviews of books "of unusual merit".
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Elaine's debut novel, I'm with Stupid, will be published in July by Hachette.

Snakes and nightingales

28.05.08

Forthcoming books of unusual merit, as featured in the 1st June edition of Kirkus Reviews.

FICTION

Vicious Circle by Mike Carey
UK publisher: Orbit (10th April)
US publisher: Grand Central Publishing (28th July)

"Deftly crafted, can't-turn-the-page-fast-enough read"

Comic-book writer turned novelist Carey resurrects his hero, exorcist Felix Castor, for another throw-down with supernatural forces in this intricately plotted tale set in London. Although many second novels disappoint, Carey's fans have nothing to worry about. If anything, this book ratchets up the action, making it even more compelling than the previous The Devil You Know. The story line never falters under the author's deft plotting, and his main man Felix retains that all-important dark sense of humor that somehow matches the London he inhabits.

Carey juggles characters and bits and pieces of plot like a man with a thousand arms, catching each word and positioning it in exactly the right place in this deftly crafted, can't-turn-the-page-fast-enough read.

Palace Council by Stephen L Carter
US publisher: Knopf (8th July)

"Grade-A entertainment"

A brilliant black writer's harsh education in reality, a search for a lost sibling and the history of "a radical organisation [created] to scare white America" are the primary ingredients of the third bulky thriller from Carter.

The serpentine plot spans two decades of the previous century's history, beginning in 1954 when recent Amherst graduate and semi-willing tool of Harlem crime bosses Eddie Wesley stumbles onto the body of a murdered black attorney, and into a whirlwind of intrigue that's gradually linked to the title organisation, a shadowy cabal that exploits and endangers even its most hopeful and idealistic members. There are arguably too many barely distinguishable scenes in which Eddie is abducted, interrogated, threatened or tortured. But Carter keeps the pot boiling energetically, and surprises leap out until this very long (but never dull) novel's penultimate page.

The so-called masters of the genre could learn something from Carter's intoxicating blend of political street smarts and literary skill. This is Grade-A entertainment.

Stand the Storm by Breena Clarke
US publisher: Little, Brown (28th July)

"[Brings] a freshness to the somber subject matter"

After her Oprah-pick début, River, Cross My Heart (Orion), the African-American novelist delivers a compassionate portrait of the terrors and hopes of slaves. With its slightly clipped period language, coolly measured tone and rich supply of telling detail, Clarke's second novel delves into a compelling social panorama of black servitude in Washington, DC, as the Civil War begins. The book's heart is the Coats family, initially bondspersons, then freed, around whom forms a circle of other black characters, some escaped, some raped and beaten, some passing as white. The story winds through the war to reach a sober conclusion that nevertheless heralds change.

Clarke's sensitivity and her lyrical, earthy narration bring a freshness to the somber subject matter.

The Trophy Exchange by Diane Fanning
US publisher: Severn House (1st August)

"Exciting, emotionally intense"

A physically and emotionally scarred detective gets a chance to change her life. Lucinda Pierce has recently returned to duty after being cleared in the accidental shooting of a child. Her face still bears the scars she suffered in the domestic violence case, which cost her an eye, but she's refused plastic surgery to fix the damage. When Charley Spencer finds the body of her brutally murdered mother, Lucinda is drawn to her. But she suspects that Charley's father, Dr Evan Spencer, may be the murderer even though he was out of the country at the time. When a victim manages to escape the killer and identifies her attacker as Spencer, the case takes a strange turn. After all, Spencer was in police custody at the time of the attack.

Fanning has produced an exciting, emotionally intense story with a complex heroine whose future adventures will be widely anticipated.

The Nightingales of Troy by Alice Fulton
US publisher: Norton (1st July)

"Emotionally satisfying"

Fulton offers a début collection of linked stories of distinctive, resilient women. In 1908, Mamie Flynn Garrahan is facing a difficult birth with nothing but an arsenic-eating sister-in-law, a charm from her mother and doctor-prescribed heroin to help her through it. Just when she's about to give up and die, she pulls herself together and pushes out a baby girl. A farmwife, Mamie doesn't take any nonsense, and her stolidly candid, perspicacious-yet-non-judgmental voice is one of the great pleasures of this pleasing collection. Fulton offers a complete group portrait of the Garrahan women. As she follows this family through the 20th century, the author changes her tone and her narrative tactics to allow each character to emerge as her own fully realised self.

Fulton has a poet's economy of language and an ability to choose discerning details. Emotionally satisfying and extremely well-crafted short fiction.

The Turnaround by George Pelecanos
UK publisher: Orion (7th August)
US publisher: Little, Brown (1st August)

"Pelecanos constructs a taut narrative in which the past exerts a seismic pull on the present"

The backdrop of the story sends three white teenagers on a reckless 1972 joyride into a black neighborhood, alcohol undermining their better judgment, as they shout racial epithets that ignite retaliation. Black or white, everyone involved finds his life changed (and one ended) because of a mindless clash and its escalation. It isn't until 35 years later that Alex Pappas, who inherited the family's coffee shop from his father, is able to try to reconcile the past with the present, to discover what really happened on that night, to come to terms, to move on.

Like his kindred spirits who have also written scripts for HBO's "The Wire", Pelecanos deserves the sort of popular breakthrough that Richard Price and Dennis Lehane have enjoyed.

Indignation by Philip Roth
US publisher: Houghton Mifflin (16th September)

"Timeless"

In a plot that evokes the author's earlier work, Roth focuses on a young man's collegiate coming of age against the deadly backdrop of the Korean War.

The book has a taut, elegant symmetry: A nice Jewish boy named Marcus Messner from Newark, NJ, reaches the turbulent stage where he inevitably clashes with his parents, his butcher-shop father in particular. After continuing to live at home for his first year of college, Marcus, the novel's narrator as well as protagonist, feels the need to emancipate himself by enrolling in a college as unlike urban New Jersey as possible, one that he finds in Winesburg, Ohio.

A twist in narrative perspective reinforces this novel's timelessness.

The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti
UK publisher: Headline Review (10th July)
US publisher: Dial (26th August)

"Marvelously satisfying"

In this dark but rousing 19th-century picaresque about a one-handed orphan who falls in with rogues, Tinti pays homage to 19th-century biggies, particularly Twain, Dickens and Stevenson, creating a fictional world unique yet hauntingly familiar.

Abandoned as a baby wearing a jacket with the initials REN sewn in the collar, 12-year-old Ren lives in St Anthony's monastery until a man arrives and claims him as his long-lost brother. Benjamin Nab is a small-time swindler/crook of all mistrades who sees Ren's handicap as a useful conning tool. That Ren is also a natural thief, despite his devout Catholicism, is a bonus. Soon Benjamin and his partner Tom, a former schoolteacher and erudite drunk, take Ren to grim North Umbrage, a former mining town where the only employer is a mousetrap factory run by the tyrant McGinty.

Marvelously satisfying hokum, rich with sensory details, surprising twists and living, breathing characters to root for.

NON-FICTION

A Universal History of the Destruction of Books by Fernando Báez
US publisher: Atlas & Co (18th August)

"Sobering"

Venezuelan historian Báez spent what must have been 12 depressing years assembling this horrific chronicle of the centuries-long assault on human memory. Beginning and ending in Baghdad 2003, with a description of US soldiers standing idly by while mobs looted and burned the National Library, the author's English-language début moves determinedly from ancient times to the present. His text roams the world, revisiting bibliocausts on all continents in all centuries.

A sobering reminder of just how deep-seated is the instinct to destroy other people's truths.

The Wrecking Crew by Thomas Frank
UK publisher: Harvill Secker (7th August)
US publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt (1st August)

"A forceful argument"

A refreshingly no-holds-barred exegesis on the naked cynicism of conservatism in America by political observer Frank.

When conservatives rule, all hell breaks loose, the author amply demonstrates in this muckraking, well-reasoned account. Clear-eyed and occasionally sarcastic, he offers examples of such howlers as conservatives' rationalisation of apartheid in South Africa, the depredations of Angolan guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi, labour exploitation in Saipan and the right's blatant goal to defund and destroy the pillars of liberalism.

A forceful argument that resurrecting equitable, intelligent government starts with understanding how the present plutocracy came about.

The Shipwreck that Saved Jamestown by Lorri Glover
US publisher: Henry Holt (1st August)

"Thrilling adventure story"

An energetic examination of the maritime disaster that, surprisingly, cemented England's claim to a colonial empire in the Americas.

In the early 1600s, with its plantation at Jamestown fractious and failing, the Virginia Company went all in, adopting a new charter to strengthen the colonial government, adding dozens of prominent names to the company council, raising additional funds and recruiting more colonists. In 1609, a hurricane wrecked the Sea Venture, sent by London investors to rescue the settlers, on a Bermuda reef. Previously, mariners had avoided the "Isle of Devils," but the Virginia colonists discovered a paradise teeming with natural resources sufficient to refresh them and sustain a continuation of the mission to relieve Jamestown. This [book] stands out for its artful placement and discussion of the episode between Jamestown's suffering and squabbling and the Virginia Company's desperate maneuvering to keep the colonial enterprise from completely foundering. Moreover, Glover uses this tale of shipwreck and survival to convey the larger spirit of the age, a brew of enterprise, greed, godliness, hucksterism and self-advancement.

A thrilling adventure story gracefully told.

Why We Watched by Theodore S Hamerow
US publisher: Norton (1st August)

"Masterful analysis" of the conditions Jews faced in the allied countries before and during World War Two.

In his eminently readable account, Hamerow describes how Jewish communities in parts of Western Europe and the United States reacted—and often turned a blind eye—to the growing fascist threat against their co-religionists. Relying heavily on demographic and economic data, the author is balanced and never polemical. Though his lengthy narrative occasionally goes off on tangents, for the most part it moves at a brisk pace. Scholarly enough to appeal to academics, it will also find an audience with general history buffs. The story Hamerow tells is unequivocally sad, but he ends with an optimistic assessment of the current state of Jewry.

An important contribution to the scholarly literature about one of the seminal events in European history.

The Ridiculous Race by Steve Hely
US publisher: Henry Holt (8th July)

"Hilarious"

A drunken challenge pits Hollywood television writers against each other in a bumbling race around the world. Start with several bottles of 99-cent-store wine. Add a pinch of nostalgia for Old World exploration, a dash of witty (if often juvenile) one-upmanship and a healthy advance from a book publisher. Shake well, and you have this savory cocktail of comedy, adventure and barbed insults. Hely's Victorian notions of world travel and the glory of bygone eras provide the perfect foil for Chandrasekaran's glib embrace of the comforts of modern life. Their comically inoffensive braggadocio is akin to your older brother's tales of his misspent youth; Chandrasekaran and Hely might be slightly obnoxious, but therein lies their charm.

Hilarious travel writing for the chronically snarky.

The Snake Charmer by Jamie James
US publisher: Hyperion (3rd June)

"Exquisitely crafted"

Absorbing, stylishly written account of the life and career of a celebrated young herpetologist whose reckless fascination with venomous snakes ended with his slow death in the sub-Himalayan wilderness of northern Burma.

James focuses in on Slowinski's last Burma outing, made in 2001. He embarked with 15 naturalists on a grueling trek through remote Burmese jungle in search of the many-banded krait, one of the world's most venomous snakes. Drawing on interviews, the author recreates that final expedition and the 29 hours it took Slowinski to die (on 9/11) after reaching into a bag of snakes and being bitten by a krait. Without impeding his narrative, James frequently veers into wonderful stories of snake lore, academic rivalries, rattlesnake roundups and other pertinent herpetological matters.

An exquisitely crafted book that will grab even those who have no interest in snakes.

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