Category: Books

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Penguin Lost is the sequel to Death and the Penguin and third of Andrey Kurkov’s translated works following The Case of the General’s Thumb. We rejoin Viktor, who has returned from the Antarctic where he fled in place of Misha the penguin at the end of the first novel. Things have changed, and he starts…

Snobs, by Julian Fellowes, is a story set in a world that I’ve not entered in contemporary fiction. Think the world of Jeeves and Wooster. Think the world of those people you’ve never heard of in the diary columns of Associated Newspapers’ publications. Think of the nonentities whose marriages are afforded lavage multi-page coverage in…

If you happen to buy The Shadow Of The Wind, there is one really important thing to do before you start reading it – peel off the Richard & Judy Bookclub sticker on the cover (You’ll probably also want to peel off the ‘3 for 2’ sticker that will almost certainly also adorn the front…

Last year, when the BBC started showing Hustle, I read a piece by one of the writers explaining where the inspiration came from. Obviously there’ve been plenty of films covering this area, more of which later. But one book he mentioned was The Big Con by David Maurer. It was first published in 1940, and…

When I was reading Good News, Bad News, one of the characters talked quite a lot about locked room mysteries. I decided that I probably hadn’t read enough of them myself. So I picked up this classic novel. John Dickson Carr is one of those people who turned out novels by the dozen, having to…

Over Christmas, I was thoroughly engaged by I Capture The Castle on BBC2. This film came out in 2003 and I must admit that it passed me by. The film stars the then newcomer Romola Garai (who I knew as Zoe from Attachments) as Cassandra as well as Tara Fitzgerald and Bill Nighy. I loved…

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A couple of weeks ago – on January 9 to be precise – The Observer recommended The Oxford Murders as its paperback of the week (incidentally, I can’t find the piece on The Observer’s website strangely!). I was intrigued as it was a book written by an Argentinian, but set in Oxford dealing with a…

In one of David Lodge’s campus novels, there’s a now very famous game where members of the English faculty have to admit to one another which books of monumental importance in English Literature that they haven’t read. I seem to remember that the trump book was Hamlet. My version is less likely to be books…

Having recently read The Dumas Club (not to be confused with the more recent Dante Club), it did occur to me that I probably had most of my knowledge of The Three Musketeers from Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds (altogether now). So I felt duty bound to read the original, and what a barnstorming read…