Tag: Books for Blokes

The Anomaly–book review

The Anomaly, by Hervé Le Tellier

Such a brilliant premise. An Air France flight from Paris to New York hits unexpected and severe turbulence on a routine flight, dramatically bumps through towering cumulonimbus, and lands with shaken passengers, but nothing seemingly untoward. This is in March. In June, the plane lands again. The same plane. Exactly. Flight 006, with Captain Markle at the controls and the passengers: writer Victor Miesel, French hitman Blake, a gay Nigerian singer called Slimboy, emotionally complex Lucie and others. All duplicates. WTF? asks the control tower.

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Under a Big Sky–book review

Under a Big Sky, by Tim Saunders

I’ve been back with Tim and his family for another farm holiday and it’s been great. I spent about a week in the book this time, not much has changed since I met them all in This Farming Life, but I think I will always enjoy the shepherds dragging astonished sheep from their pens for a morning shear and the way the magpies gargle with laughter when his dad tells a joke, and the big bird, Kāhu, who clutches the new day in rust coloured talons. These are the author’s expressions, of course. Who else could write so evocatively about daily life on a farm?

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Light Perpetual – book review

Light Perpetual, by Thomas Spufford

Francis Spufford has surprised and delighted me once again. How do you follow a remarkable book like Golden Hill? By writing something completely different, it seems – different genre, different voice and style, different format. You’d imagine that would point to a different audience but I realise it is the integrity of Spufford’s writing that I love every bit as much as the rollicking story that made Golden Hill such a hit for me. I’m sure Light Perpetual will reach all Spufford’s previous fans and garner a legion of new ones.

This is not a rollicking story. It is dysfunctional as a story, if you expect (as I do) a story to follow the adventures and psychological development of one or two main characters. Spufford kills off all his characters in the first chapter.

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