“…Tony Blair’s ridiculous lie that we’re all middle-class now - he’s clearly never visited Moss Side. That’s a message I wanted to come over clear…”

…Crucially, those with no knowledge of the original could find great joy in the writing here, perhaps the truest test. Webb has managed to avoid the myriad pitfalls of pastiche, whimsy and showboating to create a novel of real beauty, of wit, intelligence, radiance and relevance…

…Given his subject matter it’s natural that Daniel Wallace should attempt some authorly tricks, and his multiple points of view allow him to play with the concepts of truth and illusion. By the end you’ll be uncertain whether Mr. Sebastian was the devil, whether he was actually several different people – or even if he existed at all…

…While Doré is known as being a gifted illustrator and artist, he can also be said to share in Milton’s perspicuity in realizing and communicating the breath and scope of the poet’s vision…

…It’s hard to imagine any debut writer having a story this short published as a stand-alone novel, yet because McEwan is one of the literary world’s big earners the public are expected to pay more than twice as much for his work…

“…While Jonathan Raban’s Surveillance looked at the near future, however, and predicted where we might end up if the current political climate continues, Jim Crace takes us several centuries further into this brave new world. Except it’s not so brave, and not even so new. In fact, it’s positively medieval….”

“…Whenever there was a chance to have a shot at Catholicism in his writing, George Orwell could always be relied on to take aim and discharge both barrels. With the grim vision of Vatican support for Franco fresh in his mind, he was hardly without justification…”

Eric Saeger

Eric Saeger

Eric Saeger

Eric Saeger

Eric Saeger

Eric Saeger

“…Transferring literary bestsellers to the big screen is never an easy business. Some adaptations get it right, and some get it wrong. Luckily Jeremy Padewsa’s Fugitive Pieces falls into the first camp…”

Eric Saeger

Eric Saeger

Eric Saeger

Eric Saeger

“…A sinister experiment in the Welsh hills. A daughter born of an unholy communion. A peasant boy terrified witless by a strange tableau in the glade of a wood. A prosperous Londoner discovered raving and destitute on the city streets…”

“…Dodgy dentists. The Dalai Llama. High-altitude polo players. Maoist rebels. Yak herders. Imran Khan. Just a few of the diverse personalities professional funnyman turned adventure traveller Michael Palin met on his epic 125-day journey across the world’s greatest mountain range…”

“…Not many punk rockers will tell you it was a copper that made them what they are today, but bestselling British author Ian Rankin is an exception to this rule. He owes his livelihood to one Detective Inspector John Rebus, a hard-nosed Edinburgh cop….”

“…The life I lived at the end of the 70s was 24 hours a day, 365 days a year – you can only do that for so long… I was glad to get out before I was 25, and happy to get out alive…”

“…People sometimes talk and write about foreign affairs as though it was the sort of subject that can only be understood by a secret society of diplomats and politicians. In fact they should be accessible to all of us…”

“…When even Green Day can achieve international success with a Bush-whacking album, then you can be sure that something’s going on in the public consciousness. Jonathan Raban takes a slightly different approach to the subject with his new novel Surveillance…”

“…
Unlike most people, Jane Flemming, the protagonist of Scottish author Christopher Brookmyre’s novel All Fun and Games Until Someone Loses an Eye, can pinpoint the exact turn of events that transformed her life. A drunken, awkward, and most importantly unprotected bout of unsatisfying sex with her Catholic boyfriend Tom… ”

“…Europe has yielded a few glum-faced, overly metalized coveters of the Evanescence throne – Norway’s Octavia Sperati, Austria’s hapless, underrated Visions of Atlantis for two….”

Eric Saeger

“… Fresh off a one-song soundtrack appearance in the Winona Ryder vehicle “Sex And Death 101″ come North Carolina’s Baumer bearing a drywall-bucket full of curveballs….”

“…A disturbed teenager slaughtering rabbits and torturing wasps; A futuristic religious leader decapitating his nemesis, keeping the head alive as he uses it daily as a punch bag; A serial killer intent on murdering those who represent the excesses of Thatcher’s Britain.

Just a few examples of the dark, warped and, often perversely funny themes that run through the works of Iain Banks….”

“…In this, Grammy award-winning piano soloist Ryuichi Sakamoto hooked up with newcomer guitar experimentalist Christopher Willits in one-take improvisations bent on soundtracking the ocean world….”

“…Monbiot, best known to the reading public for his campaigns against global warming, was aiming far beyond “green issues” with this 2003 projected manifesto for the future of the planet. His objective with the book was nothing if not audacious….”

“…You know what’s funny these days, you take a band like this, strip off one guitar layer and all the hooky stuff and it’s Instant Bowery Ballroom Indie-rock with no chance in hell of ever getting mainstream love…”

“… To say that disgraced politician cum author, Lord Jeffrey Archer, is a controversial character is an understatement. He has been imprisoned for perjury and perverting the court of justice; breached parole conditions; stolen coats in Canada; been accused of insider trading and ripping off charities; and was implicated in Simon Mann’s planned coup in Equatorial Guinea. The list goes on….”

“…An oddity in terms of both jazz stylings and band makeup, TJG is headed up by dreadlocked drummer Sheryl Mebane, an experimentalist in the arts of smoky-bar-jazz and African beats…”

“…The Palm-Wine Drinkard is unlike almost anything else in print. Nebulous comparisons might be made with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Kafka’s inconclusive parables or Alice in Wonderland, but things behave very differently from even these european gargoyles in Tutuola’s twilight world….”

“…The central concept/main gimmick of It’s Mawdsley is essentially how a book would read if written by the kind of person who would never write a book, a stream of consciousness from someone who is barely conscious…”

“…There’s a segment of the accounting-undergrad listening class that can’t get enough Death Cabs and Belles & Sebastians, and, with tax time nearing, we owe it to these people to acknowledge the fact that they have ears…”

“…Tsotsi, is a compelling and brutal tale that follows the life of the story’s eponymous protagonist. Set in Sophiatown, Fugard uses the oppression of the apartheid regime as a backdrop for the novel’s main setting: deep-rooted racism, the abject poverty of the black community, brooding violence…”

“…This jackboot-industrial twosome look and sound like they come from the wrong side of the German political tracks, but they’re in fact New Yorkers dressed in the fetish-club duds you’d kill to see at your local karaoke bar. Slowly but surely, more acts are partaking of the noxious Hitler-doom atmosphere first stolen and transmogrified from Skinny Puppy’s genius by Marilyn Manson, ie KMFDM, Combichrist, half of what Dancing Ferret Records is releasing…”

“…In the UK right now, there is a real taste for true-life biographies about child abuse. Every bookshop has a section dedicated to small volumes with titles like “Please Daddy No”and “A Child Called It”. It’s redolent of Alan Partridge: “I’d like to understand man’s inhumanity to man… and then make a programme about it.” On the face of it, Chris Abani’s novella Becoming Abigail should fit right in there. It is ostensibly about the traumas and abuses suffered by a young Nigerian girl caught up in the skin trade…”

“…If there’s one quality that defines Shirley Hazzard’s People in Glass Houses, it’s subtlety. This collection of eight short stories is a masterpiece of observation which clearly demonstrates the author’s perceptive wit… Set in the 1950s, amidst the corridors and offices of the newly-created monolithic and meandering bureaucracy of “the Organization” - an American-based concern intent on ‘inflicting improvement’ the world over…”

“…It’s not enough simply to let off wall-of-sound grease-fires over pretty 1960s pop songs – anybody can do that. But after listening to Lust Lust Lust with an open – okay, reverent – mind, one could argue that Dutch coed duo Raveonettes have created something not just important but essential…”

“… It has become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy that the publishing industry can’t sell debut short story collections… Because the major publishing houses don’t publish much short fiction – and rarely back it with a marketing campaign when they do – the public quite rightly tends to assume that these short story collections aren’t worth reading. If they were then they’d be making more of a fuss of them, right?…”

“…At first listen, Gram Rabbit’s new LP sounds veritably commercial in comparison to their last two albums, which bet their futures on weird psychedelic quasi-electro. In particular, their 2006 Cultivation album was strangely captivating – no, I’ll just say it, great – on the strength of Jessika von Rabbit’s sexy but unattainable teasing…”

“…Punctuated by a sharp, dark wit, and twisting subtly through an untold number of well-plotted revelations, this novel shows why Macdonald was considered the natural successor to the likes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. It also makes for a damned good read…”

“…Not only is How to be Idle thoroughly entertaining, it should resonate with anyone, except the most puritanical workaholic bores, who has ever questioned how our lives have become to be dominated by work, time, and the need to be constantly doing something, or feeling guilty for being inactive…”

“…Any new Martin Amis book always comes with plenty of baggage, and House Of Meetings is no exception. As his first full-length fiction since 2003’s Yellow Dog, it comes complete with high expectations and the ugly face of his previous achievements leering over its shoulder. You can almost hear the critics sharpening their knives even before it hits the shelves…”

“…For decades the story of the American West has been told from the point of view of the white settlers, the ‘cowboys’ in all those childhood games of Cowboys and Indians. This novel sets out to redress that balance: it’s set in the American West, but it’s told from the point of view of the Lakota people, and is written by a surviving Lakota member…”

“…Indie pseudo-stoner bands are forever treating your average suburban Zep/Sabbath/GNR listener the way Lucy treats Charlie Brown, pulling the football away just when the potential record buyer is about to take the plunge…”

Eric Saeger

Eric Saeger

Eric Saeger

Eric Saeger

Eric Saeger

Eric Saeger

Eric Saeger

Eric Saeger

Eric Saeger

“…Arthur Nersesian’s The Fuck-Up, in addition to having one of the best slacker-lit titles ever to have been put down on paper, has garnered something of a cult following since its publication in 1997, and rightly so… In comparison, The Swing Voter Of Staten Island is a big disappointment…”

“…A young Pakistani-Muslim reared in Britain, Sarfraz Manzoor, once tried to convince his Pakistani-raised father, Muhammed Manzoor, about the wisdom of the young Manzoor spending a summer in the United States. “Why do you want to go to America anyway? Americans are unclean, immoral, look at how little their girls wear,” his father asked. And then Manzoor, whimsy not quite disguising hormonal honesty, notes “I did not want to confess that was one of the reasons why I was desperate to visit…”

“…Centre stage is given to a depiction of Barbara Strozzi herself, the seventeenth century Venetian singer and composer of the book’s title, but surrounding her is the paraphernalia of Hoban’s story. There are glass eyes, a baseball bat, the HMS Victory, an astrological constellation and a 24-hour pizza restaurant. And, of course, the basic steps to learn the tango…”

Eric Saeger

Eric Saeger

Eric Saeger

Eric Sager

Eric Saeger

Eric Sager

Eric Saeger

Eric Saeger

Eric Saeger

Eric Saeger

“… the plot sounds like a collaboration between George Orwell and Roald Dahl, but the large cast of curious characters gives the novel a tone that’s more in keeping with Kurt Vonnegut or Philip K Dick. They sometimes tread a fine line between caricature and outright fantasy, but once you buy into the slightly strange world that Dupont has crafted he takes you on a rollercoaster ride quite unlike anything else in modern fiction… “

“…The great cinematic martyr, he put life before film to the extent that it is believed he died from cancer having shot an entire film in an area contaminated by radiation (the film had needed a post-fallout look, you see). Tarkovsky didn’t give a damn about himself or money; it wasn’t important to him whether his film was a commercial success, only that he made what he intended…. “

“… Mosley is inexorably entwined with the story of twentieth century politics as a whole, mirroring the highs and the lows, ricocheting from the machinations of high society to the violent desperation of the underclass, and taking in every major Parliamentary player in between… ”

“… While there are surface similarities between Soon I Will Be Invincible and that TV show, however, the tone of the novel quickly shifts towards the more fantastical end of the spectrum. Grossman makes no attempt to explain the world that he describes – a world where superheroes, and supervillians, exist as a widely accepted everyday reality – but instead he takes this death-defying, spandex-wearing ball and runs with it… “

“…Relating the relatively humdrum tale of two ‘associates’ in a Staples stationary superstore, it often sounds like a soap opera rather than the latest offering from one of contemporary literature’s most intriguing voices. The Gum Thief’s relatively mundane surface hides an intriguing study of the epistolary form - and a commentary on the nature of the novel itself. “

“…It’s no hollow claim to compare his work with Joyce’s Dubliners, and in Cheating At Canasta he’s proved once again that there are few who can come close to him in terms of subtle nuances of feeling and understated epiphanies. “

This story is distressing and difficult. It contains no humour that I could detect. It is unstoppably depressing. And yet…”