March books
Spring , anthology edited by Melissa Harrison
While the World is Still Asleep , PetraDurst-Benning
Devil’s Sonata: Evil Never Dies, Elizabeth Edmondson
Rush Oh!, Shirley Barrett
Calamity in Kent, John Rowland
The Button Box , Lynn Knight
The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper, Phaedra Patrick
A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding , Jackie Copleton
Better than Fiction: Travel Writing by Great Fiction Writers
Richardson’s First Case, Basil Thomson
The Course of Love, Alain de Botton
Four of these books haven’t been published yet and I’ll review them over the next few days. That only leaves two books without reviews.
Devil’s Sonata: Evil Never Dies is an absolutely brilliant novel about the supernatural. I loved the school setting, the clever, cynical students and staff and the bonkers headmaster. Plus of course, the atmosphere of fear in the boarding school.
Better than Fiction is from Lonely Planet. It’s an ideal bedside book as two or three short essays are about the right length to read before sleep. I’d strike out ‘great’ from the title; some of the writing is not great at all. It’s a strange mixture; some normal chatty travel stories, others which would make you agree with Uncle Matthew that ‘abroad is unutterably bloody and foreigners are fiends.’ Perhaps the most interesting point is made by the Australian writer Bryce Courtenay, who wonders whether his grandsons will be able to have the travel adventures he has experienced because, ‘We have collectively allowed a handful of fanatics and zealots who by no means represent the values of the various races to which they belong to effectively deny travellers access to large parts of the world.’
