Tag: British Culture

London Falling —book review

London Falling, by Patrick Radden Keefe

Hard not to have The Clash in your head when reading this. Their iconic London Calling song was written some 30 years earlier, but I feel the same sense of urgency and high stakes: London is drowning / And I, I live by the river.

Radden Keefe’s London Falling from the outside looks like a cleverly constructed and wildly imaginative crime novel but in fact, is a meticulously researched and impeccable referenced true story of the Russian-financed underworld in London and a boy who gets sucked in.

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Absolutely and Forever–book review

Absolutely and Forever, by Rose Tremain

This is a slim book about first love, and Rose Tremain is at her absolute pitch-perfect best. Oh! That aching yearning of waiting for a boy and the need to know everything about him and be with him all the time. Marianne, at fifteen, has fallen in love with Simon. Her mother says: ‘Nobody falls in love at your age, Marianne. What they get are “crushes” on people’. But her mother could not be more wrong. I can’t think of any better description of love than Marianne’s: the narcissism and obsession, the fear and frenzy of it. She’s fizzing with love.

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