Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Today

24 Nov 2022
Andrew Rosenheim
The latest crime fiction: women provide their own take on sexual violence

Having long escaped their relegation to the softer margins of the thriller genre, women writers have provided their own take on grimmer themes, including the sexual violence that has become such a staple of crime writing today. In The Eye of the Beholder by Margie Orford (Canongate, £16.99), Cora Berger is a South African painter who moved to London after her parents were killed in a car accident. Outwardly formidable, she has a penchant for creepy, dominating men, and finds herself under the spell of a wealthy art collector named Fournier, who has a cabin tucked away deep in the Canadian wilderness. We are also introduced to Angel, a much younger woman who has a violent history – the result of horrendous sexual exploitation at the hands of her stepfather.

The latest crime fiction: women provide their own take on sexual violence

Thursday

17 Nov 2022
P. F. King
The long arm of police corruption

Are all institutions basically corrupt? If company directors snaffle pencils from the stationery cupboard for their own use, are they corrupt? Is there a sliding scale of corruption, from ‘whatever’, through to ‘well I wouldn’t do it myself’, all the way to ‘summon the rozzers’? And does it matter what the organisation is? Is it worse to steal from your employer if you work for Nestlé or for Oxfam? Are some small corruptions are basically all right? Of course if we accept the small corruptions, the bigger ones creep in at the edges. And once they’ve entered an organisation’s culture, it is well nigh impossible to root them out. In essence, Tom Harper’s book is a thoroughly depressing account of the Metropolitan Police’s corruptibility.

The long arm of police corruption

Wednesday

16 Nov 2022

Thursday

10 Nov 2022
Allan Mallinson
A young soldier’s noble vision: creating the Western Front Way

This profound and emotion-laden book ends, as did the first world war, in hope, and no little catharsis. It begins, though, in overpowering grief, not just that of the Western Front’s bereaved, but the author’s. In 2016 Sir Anthony Seldon’s wife died of cancer, diagnosed five years earlier. They had met at Oxford, she was ‘dark-eyed and beautiful, preternaturally clever and knowing’, and when they married, his father, whose own people had been refugees from the pogroms in Ukraine, was delighted that he’d found a Jewish girl. After her death, which ‘ripped me in two’, writes Seldon, he threw himself into his work – his prodigious writing and the vice-chancellorship of Buckingham University, which his father had helped found.

A young soldier’s noble vision: creating the Western Front Way
Melanie McDonagh
Melanie McDonagh
Imprisoned on the whim of Enver Hoxha

Nowhere in this extraordinary prison memoir do we find out why Fatos Lubonja was sentenced to imprisonment in Spaç, the Albanian jail where some inmates worked the copper mines. He’s written about it elsewhere. His first seven years there were for ‘agitation and propaganda’, after police found his diaries, with criticisms of the Albanian tyrant Enver Hoxha, in his uncle’s attic. While he was in prison he was re-sentenced to a further 25 years for involvement in a counter-revolutionary organisation.

Wednesday

9 Nov 2022

Thursday

3 Nov 2022
Claudia Gold
The cruel legacy of the She-Wolf of France

The 14th century was ‘a bad time for humanity’. In the words of the Pulitzer prize-winning historian Barbara Tuchman: If [those years] seemed full of brilliance and adventure to a few at the top, to most they were a succession of wayward dangers; of the three galloping evils, pillage, plague and taxes; of fierce and tragic conflicts, bizarre fates, capricious money, sorcery, betrayals, insurrections, murder, madness and the downfall of princes; of dwindling labour for the fields... and always the recurring black shadow of pestilence carrying its message of guilt and sin and the hostility of God. It was a century when the four horsemen of St John’s apocalyptic vision – Death, Famine, War and Conquest – became a miserable band of seven, joined by Taxes, Bad Government and Schism in the Church.

The cruel legacy of the She-Wolf of France