BookTalk
BookTalk
Book Talk
with Smiffs book & card store, Nerja
Man Booker Prize winner
Julian Barnes’ latest work, The
Only Story (l), begins in the
early 1960s in a staid suburb of
London, England, as Paul, 19,
who is home from university
for the holidays, is urged by
his mother to join the tennis
club. At the mixed-doubles
tournament he is partnered
with a Mrs Susan Macleod. She
is 48, confident, ironic, and
married with two grown-up
daughters. Paul and Susan
become lovers and, in the
novel, he looks back at how
they fell in love, how he freed
her from a sterile marriage,
how they set up together and
how, very slowly, everything fell apart. This is a deep novel
about love by one of fiction’s greatest mappers of the human
heart and its vagaries.
of his larder. Busi is convinced
that what assaulted him was no
animal, but a child, ‘innocent
and wild’, and his words fan
the flames of old rumour - of
an ancient race of people living
in the woods surrounding the
town.
The Cow (l), by Beat Sterchi, is
the story of Spanish farm
labourer Ambrosio. It begins
when he goes to a village in the
Swiss highlands to work for
Farmer Knuchel. It ends in the
abattoir of the neighbouring
city, at the end of the seven
hard years of labour that have
destroyed Ambrosio. There he
sees Blosch, the once magnificent lead cow on Knuchel’s farm,
now a sad, condemned creature in the abattoir. This Swiss-
German novel, acclaimed as a contemporary classic on first
publication, is a book of power
about man, his work, and his
food; and, most importantly, a
damning indictment of the
relationship between man and
the animal world.
Barnes’ novel leads off this
month’s Soltalk Hotlist of
titles, some entirely new,
others moving into small
paperback format for the first
time or being reissued,
sometimes after a long time
out of print. All are due for
publication on various dates in
February with availability in
print this month or the first
half of March. The Soltalk
Hotlist helps readers to plan
and budget for book ordering.
Other non-crime fiction
catching our attention
includes: We Own The Sky (l),
by Luke Allnutt; The Golden
Legend (p), by Nadeem Aslam;
Home (l), by Amanda
Berriman; Our Little Secret (p),
by Claudia Carroll; Darke (p),
by Rick Gekoski; Folk (l), by
Zoe Gilbert; Sight (l), by Jessie
Greengrass; The Woman At
1,000 Degrees (l), a hilarious
and heart-tugging novel by
Hallgrimur Helgason; Sail Away (l), by Celia Imrie; the
Granada, Andalucía-based tale Court Of Lions (p), by Jane
Johnson; Shadow Land (p), by Elizabeth Kostova; The Patriots
(p), by Sana Krasikov; The Year That Changed Everything (l),
by Cathy Kelly; Edgar & Lucy
(l), by Victor Lodato; Reservoir
13 (p), by John McGregor; The
Last Of The Greenwoods (l), by
Clare Morrall; The Image Of
You (p), by Adele Parks; The
Woman In The Wood (p), by
Lesley Pearse; Restless Souls (l),
by Dan Sheehan; and, An
Unsuitable Match (l), by Joanna
Trollope.
In a very long list of appealing
new general fiction titles,
Midwinter Break (p), by
Northern Ireland’s Bernard
MacLaverty, also stands out as an intense exploration of love
and uncertainty when a long-married couple take a break in
Amsterdam. Some in the book trade say that four decades on
from his first book in a canon
that includes Lamb, and Cal,
Scotland-based MacLaverty
has written his masterpiece.
The Melody (l), by the ever-
original Jim Crace, centres on
Alfred Busi, famed and
beloved in his town for his
music and songs, now in his
sixties, mourning the recent
death of his wife and quietly
living out his days alone in the
large villa he has always called
home. The night before he is
due to attend a ceremony at
the local avenue of fame, he is
attacked by a creature he
disturbs as it raids the contents
In the crime fiction lists, details
and availability of new author
Paul Bradley’s debut, Darkness
In Málaga (p), are covered fully
elsewhere in this month’s
Soltalk. It is the start of what
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