Book Reviews

Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) made his name as a film theorist. His critical writings have long been available in English, and now his fiction is finally getting its due. The first of his two novels – published in Germany in 1928, five years before Kracauer fled the rise of Nazism – uses as its title his journalistic pseudonym. The protagonist inherits other autobiographical details, too, starting from the opening sentence: ‘When the war broke out, Ginster, a young man of 25, found himself in the provincial capital of M.’ Germany’s descent into the Great War is sketched in vividly cubist images. One character ‘consisted of three spheres stacked on top of

No one who flies into Afghanistan’s capital is left indifferent. In one of the many deftly drawn scenes in The Finest Hotel in Kabul, Lyse Doucet describes a snowy Hindu Kush on the skyline, the packed homes of the poor on the brown hills, a steep corkscrew descent carried out while firing flares, ‘bursting outward with white-hot fire’ to avoid missiles. Once safely on the ground, she decides to make her way to Kabul’s Intercontinental Hotel, drawn by ‘better telephone and telex links, food worth eating and a certain faded splendour’. Doucet, a deservedly respected journalist who is now the BBC’s chief international correspondent, made that first trip in the

Valentine Low is an old-school royal journalist; less muckraking reporter, more Establishment eye (the Times for 15 years) across our nation’s oldest institution. It is his disarming charm (I’ve had the pleasure of televised royal parley with him) that has guaranteed him access to the great and occasionally ghastly in the higher echelons of British society. His previous book, the innocuously titled Courtiers, published just at the point of the Sussexes’ scandal-ridden departure, skipped nimbly over accusations of bullying and impropriety and became a bestseller. Expectations were high for Power and the Palace. The publisher insisted on an NDA. I waded through tranches of 19th-century history in the knowledge that

Before the second world war, the Croydon-born cricketer C.B. Fry was offered the throne of Albania. It’s not certain why. Possibly because his splendid party piece involved leaping from a stationary position backwards on to a mantelpiece. Or because, historically, the Balkan nation has been so inexplicably Anglophile as to appreciate the pratfalling funnyman Norman Wisdom. Sadly Fry declined the role and it was later taken by the fabulously named if catastrophic ruler King Zog (real name Ahmed Muhtar Zogolli). Had Fry accepted, history, that capricious monster mixed of chance and fate, would have been very different. In reality, Zog was toppled in 1939 by Mussolini’s invading fascists, who turned

Yarnton, Oxfordshire. A teenage girl is dumped face down in a pit, her legs bent and tethered. Around her lie the crania, jawbones and ribs of several children. Taken alone, this scene of 9th-century carnage puzzles as much as it horrifies. When placed in the wider context of a seemingly universal need to ensure that the dead stay in their graves, it’s highly suggestive. The subtitle of the medieval historian John Blair’s Killing the Dead is a tease, since vampire fiction is almost an afterthought. Folklore and imaginative literature are carefully separated from archaeological evidence. Rather than flamboyant bloodsuckers, Blair’s subject is the widespread activity of ‘corpse-killing’: bodies that needed

Twenty years on from winning the Booker Prize with The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai returns with a vast masterpiece of a love story which has been longlisted for this year’s prize. Our two protagonists, Sonia and Sunny, come from wealthy neighbouring families in Allahabad, but both are in America when the novel begins. Sonia is in Vermont, working for the college library while finishing her studies, and Sunny is in New York, as a reporter for the Associated Press. When Sonia flees a coercive relationship after suffering depression and Sunny agrees to help a childhood friend choose a bride, they both return to India, where they encounter one another