One of the most pitiful sights in conflict areas is the local prosthetics store, with its rows of artificial limbs, sized from adult down to tiny child. A poignant reminder that, whether fleeing a war or injured in one, the human body and mind are subjected to extreme damage. Imagine triggering an improvised explosive device
Described by the publisher as a ‘moving and personal account of what it is to be a police officer today’, John Sutherland’s memoir is most to be admired for its frank depiction of mental breakdown. Sutherland has spent more than 20 years in the Met and this memoir, presented in a sequence of short, staccato
‘I do not like the idea of the biographical book,’ F. Scott Fitzgerald told his editor Max Perkins in 1936. Fitzgerald may not have liked it, but he certainly let himself in for it. As he wrote, with a grin, in 1937: ‘Most of what has happened to me is in my novels and short
In many ways this is a very old-fashioned novel. Jerome is 53, and a lacklustre professor at Columbia; his wife, Sylvie, 35, is a former topless dancer and aspiring film-maker. Sylvie has a dog but wants a baby. Together they will cross the former Soviet bloc looking for a child of their own, despite Sylvie
Giles Udy did not start out with the intention of writing this book. He was in Russia about 15 years ago and happened to hear about Norilsk, a remote, frozen part of Siberia where the Soviet Union had established forced labour camps. Udy managed to get permission to visit the place. The temperature there could
This is the story of a 16th-century Portuguese knight and mariner who survived alone on a lump of volcanic rock in the South Atlantic for 26 years. The island was St Helena, and Fernão Lopes is the ‘other exile’ of the book’s title, in contrast to Napoleon, who pitched up 300 years later. But Lopes’s
Early one summer’s morning in 1994, Paul Jennings Hill, a defrocked Presbyterian minister, gunned down a doctor, John Britton, as he arrived for work at an abortion clinic in Florida. Unrepentant by the time of his execution nine years later, Hill (who I really don’t recommend Googling) was associated with the Army of God (ditto),
Molly Brodak, a fair, young Polish-American born in Michigan, is a winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. Iowa: that hotbed of academic creative writing! Her poems, published in A Little Middle of the Night, are intensely private, pointillist compositions of unconnected images. Now, teaching at Emory University in Atlanta, she has written her first book
Rumour will run wild about a society of warrior women, somehow free from the world of men. We all feel we know the Amazons, even if we struggle to connect them with the planet’s largest rainforest, river and internet company. But the historical reality of that thrilling and threatening tribe proves to be elusive. Even
As a food writer Patience Gray (1917–2005) merits shelf-space with M.F.K. Fisher, Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson. Fleeing from the dreary predictability of her Home Counties upbringing, Gray became, among other things, the first women’s page editor of the Observer; co-author of a bestselling cookery book (the 1957 Plats du Jour with Primrose Boyd); and,
Adam Thorpe’s latest novel, Missing Fay, examines the lives of a disparate group of people in Lincolnshire, all touched in some way by the disappearance of the titular Fay, a sparky, gobby 14-year-old girl from a council estate. This is an England of motorways, dull campsites, immigrants and nursing homes: where transience is the norm,
‘There is room for a very interesting work,’ Gibbon observed in a footnote, ‘which should lay open the connection between the languages and manners of nations.’ The manners of the peoples of the United Kingdom and of the United States are very different, although not always in the way that received prejudices have it: any
There must be any number of self-respecting gemmologists out there on first-name terms with other diamonds, but for most of us the Koh-i-Noor is pretty well it. Most of what we think we know might be myth, guesswork or just plain wrong, and yet in spite of — or perhaps because of — that, the
