Natalia Ginzburg’s novella The Dry Heart starts brilliantly with a woman shooting her husband in the face - then loses all momentum as Ginzburg takes us back to the beginning where we have to see the woman meet the man, go through the courtship, get married, blah blah blah. Boo!
Chinese-American kid gets magic monkey powers because book. He’s in Gotham so Batman. Penguin - because this awful new character needs established characters to make anyone remotely interested in his awful adventures - gets possessed by a Chinese demon. Dumb fighting. Cringe YA “humour”. And so on. It’s DC’s latest embarrassment, Monkey Prince!
A rogue priest has stolen the fabled Red Book from the Vatican - a book that decries the gospels, one of the earliest acts of heresy in the church - and has fortuitously holed up in Galway, Jack Taylor’s part of the world. Jack’s wealthy employer has tasked him with retrieving it for him - but others are on its trail. Elsewhere, a protest/terrorist group calling themselves The Ghosts of Galway has moved up from dumping animal carcasses in public areas to shooting coppers - and the bane of Jack’s life, Emily/Emerald/Em, is involved and has dragged him into the mess.
Shirtless Bear-Fighter returns in an unheralded, and frankly unnecessary, sequel. Bear puns abound as Shirtless battles still more bears including a bear god and an evil clone, and finds out who his real parents were. Yay…?
Neutral Milk Hotel’s second album, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, was released in February 1998 - and turned out to be the band’s final album. Singer/songwriter Jeff Mangum quietly walked away from the group just as they were hitting their creative, and potentially commercial, stride. It’s now 25 years later and it doesn’t seem like there will ever be a follow-up. The album though has gone on to be recognised as one of the best albums of the 1990s (which it definitely is) and remains as brilliant today as it did to the smaller audience who first heard it when it was initially released.
Steve Martin shares some showbiz stories from his long career in movies, beautifully illustrated by New Yorker cartoonist Harry Bliss, in Number One is Walking: My Life in the Movies and Other Diversions (gah, Americans and their bloody subtitles!).
Alex is the twentysomething girlfriend of an older wealthy businessman, enjoying the summer in a rich neighbourhood of Long Island. Following a faux pas, she is banished from the estate for a few days until the Labor Day party on Sunday. But Alex has burned too many bridges and can’t go back to the city - where someone she stole a lot of money from is trying to find out where she is. So she decides to hang around Long Island for the rest of the week, homeless, and attempts to get by, as she always does, on her looks.
Jonathan Webb is an American publisher on a business trip to Italy in the summer of 1978. But he finds he can’t sleep when he arrives and, on a whim one night, follows a costumed couple to a subterranean Eyes Wide Shut-type party, and there meets the mysterious Rainer. Now with Rainer in his life, Webb’s mundane world is going to get a whole lot stranger…
A seeming miracle happens by two refugee kids, flooding Galway with believers. Among them is a Californian con artist, hoping to start a new religion, and a serial arsonist. Jack is roped into finding the miracle kids by the Church but soon discovers that nothing about them is what they seem…
I’m not sure what this book’s about. It’s set in a small rural Japanese town and follows the lives of various kids in a home. What sort of home? Good question - it’s never explained! It’s not quite an orphanage but the kids don’t live with their parents because of their circumstances (absence, addiction, other reasons) - so a kind of social care home? It’s not a stumbling block to reading this book but it’d be useful to at least understand the framing of the story, particularly as it highlights a negative side to Japanese society that most people don’t see.
John Niven’s debut novel from 2005 is about The Band’s debut album from 1968, Music From Big Pink, titled after the pink house in Woodstock, New York, where they wrote the record. It’s part of the 33 ⅓ series of books about landmark records which are usually journalistic nonfiction pieces though Niven’s approach is unusual, taking the form of a novel told from the perspective of a young drug dealer called Greg who hovers around the band while they’re making their album.
Colin is the top salesman at Python and finally, after years of hard work, he’s going to get what he always wanted: his own business and an office in London. All he’s got to do is put in one more week of sales to push out his rival and then he’ll be rich enough to get that Porsche Boxster. But he’ll need to motivate his team to meet the new target set by head office. It’s only one more week. And then, one fateful night in Hastings as the rain comes down, the realities of Colin’s life come crashing down with it…
You know a novel’s bad when, after reading it, you have to go back to the book’s ad copy to find out what the damn thing was meant to be about!
A couple of young girls become friends over their shared love of fantasy. But as they grow older, they grow apart, with one friend choosing partying and boys, leaving the other behind. And then the party girl disappears. Years pass, the surviving girl grows up, moves away and becomes a bestselling horror author, haunted forever by her friend’s unsolved disappearance. Now that she’s back in her childhood town she’s starting to suspect… maybe her friend’s somehow still alive…?
Still reeling from the events of the last book, Jack Taylor emerges from a months-long drunk to find he’s become the target of a whackjob calling herself Jericho. Recruiting cop killers and thieves, Jericho’s arrived in Galway to kill Jack for revenge - and funsies. Except Jack’s also being framed for child murder - life’s never dull for this guy, and he’s not ready for death yet, so it’s time to grab his falcon and take on the latest nightmare!
SPOILERS
In comics, it seems that any quality artist can get a book published regardless of their, more often than not, lack of writing ability because they can at least draw real good and that’s the main sticking point with publishers as big as DC. That’s the only explanation for the countless books I see both written and drawn by great artists who can’t write a coherent comic to save their lives. Case in point: Cliff Chiang’s Catwoman: Lonely City, which is a complete mess, story-wise, but, hey, it looks great! That’s enough, right… ? Nope!
1944, Burma, and the war in the Pacific rages on between the Allies and the Japanese. As Japan prepares to mount an offensive into India, a plan is formed to drop soldiers - a unit called the Chindits, named after the mythical Burmese creature that’s half lion and half eagle - behind enemy lines via plane to cause as much havoc to the Japanese Imperial Army as possible. Except things never go according to plan, eh…
Private Investigator Jack Taylor is approached by wealthy French businessman Pierre Renaud to find the killer of his twin sons. Jack quickly discovers the pair were nasty pieces of work but that their murderer is even more so: a Punisher-lookalike going by The Silence. Only now he has the vigilante lunatic’s attention and who could make Jack’s bleak life find a new level of misery…
This is the manga version of Edge of Tomorrow aka Live. Die. Repeat, the Tom Cruise movie from a few years ago. Didn’t see it because you’re not so coco on Tommy boy? Aliens invade, Some Guy gets caught in a time loop where he lives the same day over and over, and, because he knows what’s going to happen, gradually goes from instantly-killable soldier to elite ninja alien-slaughtering killmachine. A single battle is won after nearly a year’s worth of the same day replayed - only an entire planet to save through this laborious process! But, y’know, love and stuff - it’s futuristic manga Groundhog Day!
Affairs, murders, cockroaches, dances, pregnancies, the complexities of marriage, sibling relationships, and the view of the world from a child’s eye: it’s all here in Claire Keegan’s first short story collection Antarctica!
