Category: Books

I was very impressed that the Åhleans department store stocked an entire section of books by Swedish authors. It was mainly made up of Henning Mankell novels, but having read all them, and wanting to read something Swedish I picked this up from the Stockholm based journalist Liza Marklund. This seems to be the third…

Yes – another Scandinavian novel. Does Iceland count as Scandinavia? Indriðason is the man who’s just won the CWA Gold Dagger, and inadvertently caused them to change their rules regarding the language of first publication. This wasn’t the book that won the award – that’s still only out in trade paperback. But this is his…

I believe that this is the thirtieth entry in the Discworld series, and that means that Pratchett has been publishing more than one title a year on average. I understand that he’s slowed down a bit more recently, but the guy’s a publishing phenomenon. This time around we meet Moist von Lipwig, who’s a cheat…

I guess that Hard Case Crime must have been over the moon when one of the kings of fiction deigned to write a novel for them. I’m also guessing that he’s so powerful a literary figure that he doesn’t have to worry about his publishers getting upset when he writes for another one. I’m not…

This is the third of the Fandorin novels to be published in English. I’m not all together convinced that they’ve been published over here in the same language as they were in Russia, since this one seems to follow on more from the first UK published novel than the last. In this instance our hero…

This time two years, Lynne Truss’ Eats, Shoots and Leaves was the de facto gift for those people you hadn’t already bought a Christmas gift for. And yes, I do know that we’re not in any way close to Christmas yet. It really annoyed me seeing the “gift” sections of Waterstones and WH Smiths today.…

I read this because it was slim, and came for just 99p with a copy of the Telegraph in WH Smiths this week. I knew next to nothing about the book, and having it read it now, I’m not entirely sure that I know a great deal more now. The book is presented from the…

My second Ian Rankin Rebus novel, and unlike the first, I liked this a lot more. A the theme of the novel is race, and we get everything from overt racism in our inner cities to Morecambe Bay-style cockel pickers. There are several stories going on simultaneously, that may, or may not be interlinked. A…

The latest Henning Mankell novel’s recently been published, but it’s not actually his latest book. It just happens to be one that’s out of sequence. Actually, we’ve had loads of Mankell novels out of sequence, but this one jumps back quite a few years and characters who were last known to be dead are suddenly…

The only Philip Roth book I’d read before this was The Human Stain, which ultimately I found unsatisfying. I haven’t been to see the film. But when this came out in hardback a year ago it was so well reviewed that I thought that the man who’s regarded as one of America’s greatest living novelists…

I stumbled across this slim volume by chance in the bookshop and it intrigued me. It’s a basic (very basic) introductory guide to probability. The trouble is that it’s just too small and light. While the author’s not afraid to include some equations in the text, he embarks on a chapter on, say the normal…

I thought I’d catch up with the books I’ve read recently. I’m quite a Michael Dibdin fan, and this is the latest Zen novel. He spoke to James Naughtie on the Radio 4 programme, Bookclub recently, and you can hear the conversation here (with Realplayer). On that occasion he spoke about Blood Rain which is…