Алан Джонсон0.0
Alan Johnson's childhood was not so much difficult as unusual, particularly for a man who was destined to become Home Secretary. Not in respect of the poverty, which was shared with many of those living in the slums of post-war Britain, but in its transition from two-parent family to single mother and then to no parents at all...
This is essentially the story of two incredible women: Alan's mother, Lily, who battled against poor health, poverty, domestic violence and loneliness to try to ensure a better life for her children; and his sister, Linda, who had to assume an enormous amount of responsibility at a very young age and who fought to keep the family together and out of care when she herself was still only a child.
Played out against the background of a vanishing community living in condemned housing, the story moves from post-war austerity in pre-gentrified Notting Hill, through the race riots, school on the Kings Road, Chelsea in the Swinging 60s, to the rock-and-roll years, making a record in Denmark Street and becoming a husband and father whilst still in his teens.
This Boy is one man's story, but it is also a story of England and the West London slums which are so hard to imagine in the capital today. No matter how harsh the details, Alan Johnson writes with a spirit of generous acceptance, of humour and openness which makes his book anything but a grim catalogue of miseries.
Bondi beach, the Burma railway, Jewish humour, a boy from a broken home… Put the ingredients in a mixer, give them a good shake and you have a literary cocktail of rare originality. It is not hard to see why Mark Dapin’s stylish novel, set in Nineties Sydney, was such a critical success in Australia. The writing has real freshness and, apart from the odd hiccup, the story glides effortlessly from an intriguing start to a heart-warming resolution.
David, who narrates, is a bright 13 year-old from Sydney whose parents have just split up. While his father gets his jollies with the “Woman in White”, and his mother experiences teething problems with the “Dark Man”, David is parked on his Jewish grandmother and her eccentric husband Jimmy, a war veteran haunted by his experiences in south-east Asia during the Second World War. It is an education in life that makes the classroom seem very dull.
Jimmy and his grizzled Jewish cronies – Solomon the tailor, Myer the optician and Ernie the former war artist – are worth the cover price of the book in their own right, wisecracking their way non-stop through the day, as if to avoid dwelling on the horrors of the past. “Ernie is an aesthete,” Solomon explains to David. “That means he doesn’t believe in God.” “You’re thinking of an anaesthetist,” says Myer. Without emotional ballast, the friends’ badinage would quickly pall; but there is ballast aplenty in the harrowing stories of the war, which David coaxes out of his initially reluctant grandfather.
The descriptions of life in Japanese captivity are beautifully done. Accounts of brutal beatings pull no punches, but there is also room for tenderness and humour. One of the strongest strands features Townsville Jack, a cussed so-and-so who is damned if he is going to let the war stop him organising frog-racing and other entertainments. He is a figure built on such a heroic scale that his downfall, when it comes, has tragic resonance.
The spirit house of the title is an altar that Jimmy erects in his Bondi bungalow, with help from David, as his way of laying to rest the ghosts of the past. It does just that, bringing acceptance after years of troubled nights. As he does throughout the book, Dapin impresses with the understated authority of his storytelling.
Тим Ди0.0 In his first book since the acclaimed The Running Sky Tim Dee tells the story of four green fields. Four fields spread around the world: their grasses, their hedges, their birds, their skies, and their natural and human histories. Four real fields – walkable, mappable, man-made, mowable and knowable, but also secretive, mysterious, wild, contested and changing. Four fields – the oldest and simplest and truest measure of what a man needs in life – looked at, thought about, worked in, lived with, written.
Dee’s four fields, which he has known for more than twenty years, are the fen field at the bottom of his Cambridgeshire garden, a field in southern Zambia, a prairie field in Little Bighorn, Montana, USA, and a grass meadow in the exclusion zone at Chernobyl, Ukraine. Meditating on these four fields, Dee makes us look anew at where we live and how. He argues that we must attend to what we have made of the wild, to look at and think about the way we have messed things up but also to notice how we have kept going alongside nature, to listen to the conversation we have had with grass and fields.
Four Fields is a profound, lyrical book by one of Britain’s very best writers about nature.
Эстер Вулфсон0.0 Against the background of austere and beautiful Aberdeen, Woolfson observes the seasons, the streets and the quiet places of her city over the course of a year. She considers the geographic, atmospheric and environmental elements which bring diverse life forms together in close proximity, and in absorbing prose writes of the animals among us: the birds, the rats and squirrels, the spiders and the insects. Her close examination of the natural world leads her to question our prevailing attitudes to urban and non-urban wildlife, and to look again at the values we place on the lives of individual species.
Nadeem Aslam0.0 The acclaimed author of The Wasted Vigil now gives us a searing, exquisitely written novel set in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the months following 9/11: a story of war, of one family’s losses, and of the simplest, most enduring human impulses.
Jeo and Mikal are foster brothers from a small town in Pakistan. Though they were inseparable as children, their adult lives have diverged: Jeo is a dedicated medical student, married a year; Mikal has been a vagabond since he was fifteen, in love with a woman he can’t have. But when Jeo decides to sneak across the border into Afghanistan—not to fight with the Taliban against the Americans, rather to help care for wounded civilians—Mikal determines to go with him, to protect him.
Yet Jeo’s and Mikal’s good intentions cannot keep them out of harm’s way. As the narrative takes us from the wilds of Afghanistan to the heart of the family left behind—their blind father, haunted by the death of his wife and by the mistakes he may have made in the name of Islam and nationhood; Mikal’s beloved brother and sister-in-law; Jeo’s wife, whose increasing resolve helps keep the household running, and her superstitious mother—we see all of these lives upended by the turmoil of war.
In language as lyrical as it is piercing, in scenes at once beautiful and harrowing, The Blind Man’s Garden unflinchingly describes a crucially contemporary yet timeless world in which the line between enemy and ally is indistinct, and where the desire to return home burns brightest of all.
Патрик Баркем0.0 Britain is the home of the badger - there are more badgers per square kilometre in this country than in any other. And yet many of us have never seen one. They are nocturnal creatures, who vanish into their labyrinthine underground setts at the first hint of a human. Accompanied by the eccentrics and scientists who feed and study badgers, Barkham explores Badgerland; a nocturnal world in which sounds and scents are amplified, and Britain seems a much stranger place, one in which these low slung, snuffling, distinctively striped creatures gambol and dig, and live out their complex social lives. Patrick Barkham's grandmother won their trust enough to feed and nurse them, and was responsible for a Parliamentary bill that prohibited their slaughter. Today, over 40 years later, the badger is once again set to be culled. Barkham delves into the fascinating natural and rich cultural history of the animal - from their prehistoric arrival in Britain, to their savage persecution over the centuries, to their change of fortunes in the 20th century, when Kenneth Grahame's Badger spurred a growing fondness for them. Barkham's affection for the stubborn, striped-nose creatures is infectious and Badgerlands will cement his reputation as one of our most vivid, witty and curious nature writers.
