Category: Lit Review

We’ve read more than we’ve had in years since opening the bookshop this past year. Granted, it’s partly for research purposes, but whatever the reason, it’s also the most pleasure we’ve had in reading in quite some time. Here are some of our favourite books of 2018.

Min Hun’s Picks

Favourite Fiction: Ali Smith’s Winter. Smith has one of the most unique voices in literature today and I am a huge fan of her seasonal quartet beginning with Autumn the year prior. Winter is possibly just as twisty and irreverent as Autumn, and fine evidence of Smith’s appreciation of the pun. As with Autumn, the central theme to Winter is that of change with characters in reminiscent mood with the coming of Christmas (a la A Christmas Carol). As with Smith’s previous novels, it is impossible to say exactly what it is one has previously read but it nonetheless leaves you breathless and empty at the end.

 

Favourite Non-Fiction: GJ Meyer’s A World Undone. Meyer’s book is probably the best single-volume on WWI I’ve come across, and it stands up pretty well despite being published more than a decade ago in 2006. What comes across most clearly from Meyer’s account is just what a comedy of errors it was with the entire enterprise and yet inevitable at the same time. Providing sufficient history without bogging down the narrative, and present-minded enough to make for a ripping yarn, A World Undone is a must for any war history buffs.

 

Favourite Verse: Leonard Cohen’s The Flame. Cohen has been such a large part of my life — since my days of existential crisis at university to my now more sobered self — that it was impossible to pass on his last collection of poetry, self-portrait and lyric. The Flame is unabashedly romantic but also voiced from a place of resignation in recognition, at last, that all is vanity. This final collection of works was put together by his son and stands as a proper testimonial to a life of work and art.

Elaine’s Picks

Favourite Children’s Book: Jakob Wegelius’ The Murderer’s Ape. This middle-grade novel by Swedish award-winning writer and illustrator is an old-timey, epic adventure tale, with equal parts mystery, action, intrigue, and the exotic, but also imbued with a lot of heart. The protagonist is an extraordinary gorilla named Sally Jones who can understand human language, is able to read and write, and is a handy engineer to boot. The main plot of the novel is about how Sally Jones goes about trying to exonerate her Chief, Henry Koskela the sea captain, who becomes entangled in a chain of events that results in him becoming falsely accused of murder. Her efforts take her from Lisbon, Portugal to Bhapur, India and brings her in contact with a sea of colourful and fascinating characters.

There are various themes presented in the story, but what I found particularly moving is how it beautifully depicts the unbreakable bond formed between animals and humans. This is ultimately a tale of friendship and the lengths you would go for the ones you love. Rich in detail, the wonderfully imaginative story takes many unexpected turns, leaving the reader breathless as to what will happen next.

 

Favourite Fiction: John Boyne’s A Ladder to the Sky. A dark tale of literary ambition from a master storyteller, this novel chronicles the rise and fall of Maurice Swift and the depths of depravity he descends into to achieve his goal. I really enjoyed how the story is told from different perspectives with multiple narrators. The novel begins with Maurice as a young aspiring writer who has a fortuitous encounter with celebrated novelist Erich Ackerman with whom he ingratiates himself with — this is told from Erich’s perspective. Part two picks up a few years after Maurice’s successful debut but he is now experiencing a mid-career slump and getting desperate by the day. He is married to Edith, also a novelist, and the story is told from her point of view. In the third and final portion of the book, we finally get inside Maurice’s head and learn that his is a pattern of behaviour established from young. Riveting and brilliantly crafted, this thrilling and captivating book about people and their stories will stay with you long after you’re done.

 

Favourite Non-Fiction: Katherine Reid’s The Landscapes of Anne of Green Gables. The Anne of Green Gables series by Canadian author LM Montgomery is my all-time favourite childhood series. As such, I absolutely adored this gem of a book, as it brought new life and meaning to Montgomery’s novels. This coffeetable book portrays with stunning photography the gorgeous landscape of Prince Edward Island, the setting for all but one of Montgomery’s novels. What gives this book added substance are the biographical anecdotes of Montgomery’s life and writing career, seamlessly weaved into the descriptions of the land that so inspired her. There are also travel tips for those of us — including yours truly — who want to plan a trip to PEI. This is a truly beautiful tribute to Montgomery’s writings and the island she loved with all her heart.

Halloween is just around the corner! This inevitably starts us thinking about books with dark, haunting, chilling and macabre themes. As chilling as they are compelling, the horror novel compels us to gaze into the void to consider the extreme limits and consequences of events both natural and supernatural. But even as we do so, the void gazes back into us, and we are forced to confront just how much of the dark and the horror are found within us. Here are some of our choice reads this October:

 

We are Completely Fine by Daryl Gregory
This World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson Award Winner follows psychotherapist Dr. Jan Sayer who has a support group comprising of a group of misfits and outcasts whose mental states can only be described as ‘precarious’. The members of the group are hodge-podge and include the likes of Harrison, a Monster Detective and a storybook hero who is now in his mid-30s and spends most of his time popping pills and not sleeping. There is Stan whose only claim to fame comes from having been partially eaten by cannibals, Barbara who is haunted by unreadable messages carved on  her bones, and Greta who may or may not be a mass-murdering arsonist. No one believes the claims of these exceptional individuals except for Dr. Sayer who will help them uncover the monsters they face within and those which are lurking in plain sight. (Paperback, RM71.90)

The Hoarder by Jess Kidd
From the award-winning author of Himself comes the spellbinding tale of lonely caregiver Maud Drennan and a cranky hoarder with a house full of secrets, Cathal Flood. Maud is a caregiver whose sunny disposition masks a deep sadness. A tragic childhood has left her haunted by the company of a cast of prattling saints who pop in and out of her life like tourists. Meanwhile, Cathal is a menace by all accounts. The lone occupant of a Gothic mansion crawling with feral cats, he has been waging war against his son’s attempts to put him into an old-age home. Maud is this impossible man’s last chance: If she can help him get the house in order, he just might be able to stay. The unlikely pair begins to cooperate, bonding over their shared love of Irish folktales and mutual dislike of Cathal’s overbearing son.

But the cluttered corners of the mansion hint at buried family secrets,  reminding Maud that she doesn’t really know Cathal at all. When the forgotten case of a missing schoolgirl comes to light, her curiosity becomes a full-steam search for answers. Packed with eccentric charms, twisted comedy, and a whole lot of heart, The Hoarder is a mesmerising tale that examines the space between sin and sainthood, reminding us that often the most meaningful forgiveness that we can offer is to ourselves. (Paperback, RM69.90)

The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell
This deliciously creepy Gothic novel centres on newly widowed Elsie who is sent to see out her pregnancy at her late husband’s crumbling country estate, The Bridge. With her new servants resentful and the local villagers actively hostile, Elsie only has her husband’s awkward cousin for company — or so she thinks. For inside her new home lies a locked room, and beyond that door lies a 200-year-old diary and a deeply unsettling painted wooden figure — a Silent Companion — that bears a striking resemblance to Elsie herself. (Paperback, RM47.90)

Resin by Ane Riel
This award-winning novel is about Liv who died when she was six years old — or at least, that’s what the authorities think. Her father, wanting to keep her safe in this world, left the isolated house his little family called home one evening, pushed their boat out to sea and watched it ruin on the rocks. Then he went to report his only child missing. But behind the boxes and the baskets crowding her father’s workshop, Liv was hiding. This way, her father had said, she’d never have to go to school; she’d never have to leave her parents. She would be safe. Suspenseful and heart-breaking, Resin is the story of what can happen when you love someone too much — when your desire to keep them safe becomes the thing that could irrevocably harm them. (Paperback, RM79.90)

The Last Horror Novel in the History of the World by Brian Allen Carr
The setting for this novella is Scrape, Texas, a nowhere town near the Mexican border. Few people ever visit Scrape, and the unlucky ones who live there never seem to escape. They fill their days with fish fries, cheap beer, tobacco, firearms, and sex. But Scrape is about to be invaded by a plague of monsters unlike anything ever seen in the history of the world. First there’s La Llorona — the screaming woman in white — and her horde of ghost children. Then come the black, hairy hands. Thousands, millions, scurrying on fingers like spiders or crabs. But the hands are nothing to El Abuelo, a wicked creature with a magical bullwhip, and even El Abuelo mean even less when the devil comes to town. (Paperback, RM49.90)

Windeye by Brian Evenson
The characters in this collection of stories live as interlopers in a world shaped by mysterious disappearances and unfathomable discrepancies between the real and imagined: a woman falling out of sync with the world; a king’s servant hypnotised by his murderous horse; a transplanted ear with a mind of its own. Exploring how humans can persist in an increasingly unreal world, these tales are haunting, gripping, and psychologically fierce, and they illuminate a dark and unsettling side of humanity. (Paperback, RM75.90)

The Pan Book of Horror Stories selected by Herbet van Thal
Originally released in 1959, this book gathers 22 terrifying tales of horror by such famous authors as Peter Fleming, C. S. Forester, Bram Stoker, Angus Wilson, Noel Langley, Jack Finney and L. P. Hartley. Stories of the uncanny jostle with tales of the macabre. There are tales of subtle beastliness (Rasberry Jam); of sickening horror (The Fly or His Beautiful Hands); and of utter chilling terror (The Horror of the Museum). (Paperback, RM49.90)

Who: Australian author Carole Wilkinson started her writing career at 40, publishing her first book for young readers in 1996; she has been making up for lost time ever since. Over the past 20 years she has written more than 30 books, including the internationally award-winning and bestselling Dragonkeeper series. Inheritance is her latest historical fiction for young readers.

What: Fourteen-year-old Nic is sent to live with her reclusive grandfather at his remote property in the Australian countryside after her father signs up to work on a cruise ship. The homestead was once the childhood home of Nic’s mother who died the day she was born. The house has 30 rooms, sprawling grounds, three dogs but no mobile reception, Internet or functioning television. Left to her own devices, Nic explores the homestead, searching for clues about the mother she never knew. Things become interesting when she learns the ability to leap through a crack-in-time into the past — an ability passed down to the women in her family. With this newfound ability, Nic discovers the dark and shocking secret that haunts the land and the people who live there.

Why: Who among us hasn’t fantasised about being able to slip through time? The ability to glimpse what really took place centuries ago and change the course of history makes for a gripping narrative to be sure, and many authors, past and present, have explored this in their work. But the most impactful time-travel tales aren’t about changing the past but exploring it to better understand ourselves and our history. And this is largely the type of story that award-winning children’s book author Carole Wilkinson has written in her latest novel, Inheritance.

This compelling yarn confronts Australia’s shameful past in regards to the many instances of senseless, cold-blooded massacres of Aboriginals. It tackles this difficult subject with unflinchingly honesty without degenerating into a story of gory and wanton violence it easily could have. But the emotional scars left behind are very real, and very vividly captured in this authentic depiction of one of Australia’s darkest chapters. Wilkinson weaves the narrative into a story blending intrigue, adventure, supernatural elements and good old-fashioned sleuthing, with a curious, plucky teenage protagonist who has a penchant for the classics (Austen’s novels play a significant role in the plot). It’s a heady but thrilling mix.

Ultimately, though, it is an uplifting tale of coming to terms with one’s past — no matter how shocking or shameful — and how, even though you can’t change what happened, you can determine how you respond to it today.

Reading Level: Aged 11 and up

Verdict: A solid time-travel mystery and historical fiction that’s engaging and thought-provoking. (7/10)

Availability: Paperback, RM49.90

Special thanks to Pansing Distribution for a review copy of the book.

Who: Irish author John Boyne has written 11 novels for adults and five for younger readers, including the acclaimed and highly successful, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which was turned into a film. He is also the author of the short story collection, Beneath the Earth, and is a regular book reviewer for The Irish Times. Boyne has been awarded numerous Irish book awards and international literary awards, such as the Que Leer Award for Novel of the Year in Spain and the Gustav Heinemann Peace Prize in Germany. In 2012, he was awarded the Hennessy Literary ‘Hall of Fame’ Award for his body of work. In 2015, he received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of East Anglia. His latest adult fiction is A Ladder to the Sky.

What: Maurice Swift has harboured ambitions to be a writer since his teens. As a young man in post-war Berlin, Maurice has a fortuitous encounter with celebrated novelist Erich Ackerman with whom he ingratiates himself. Erich is lonely and has a tragic story to tell, and Maurice needs a story to write about. Maurice’s debut novel based on Erich’s life story is a hit and sets him on the path to literary stardom. But that only intensifies Maurice’s pursuit of other people’s stories, and he will stop at nothing to succeed.

Why: I have a confession to make: This is my first John Boyne novel, and it is a great introduction to Boyne’s storytelling prowess. A Ladder to the Sky is a brilliantly crafted, riveting tale of dark ambition and of the extremes that a man would go to attain his goal. It’s a familiar trope to be sure: an ambitious, psychopathic protagonist with a bit of talent but not quite enough to become one of the greats, and thus resorts to manipulation and theft. What makes A Ladder to the Sky intriguing is the setting of the tale, which takes place in the literary world; I wouldn’t be surprised if Boyne drew from his personal experiences in the industry to pen this tale.

By turns salacious, scandalous and shocking, the story is told in a non-traditional way using multiple narrators. Far from it being distracting, however, I enjoyed the manner in which this thrilling, plot-driven tale unfolded. The novel is divided into three parts that span three stages of Maurice’s career, with each successive stage seeing him become increasingly ruthless. In between the three main chapters are two shorter, third-person interludes that serve to enhance the overall narrative.

The novel begins with Maurice as a young man with only aspirations of being a writer, and this is told from Erich’s perspective, the veteran novelist he befriends. Part two picks up a few years after Maurice’s successful debut but he is now experiencing a mid-career slump and getting desperate by the day. He is married to Edith, also a novelist, and the story is told from her point of view. In the third and final portion of the book, we finally get inside Maurice’s head and learn that his is a pattern of behaviour established from young.

Does Maurice get his comeuppance? All I will say about this is that the novel is satisfactorily resolved at the end.

Verdict: A page-turner on the pitfalls of ambition. (8/10)

Availability: Trade paperback, RM81.50

Special thanks to Times Distribution for an advance copy of the book.

Who: Michael Ondaatje is a Sri Lanka-born Canadian poet and novelist. He is the recipient of multiple literary awards including the Governor General’s Award, the Giller Prize, the Booker Prize, and the Prix Médicis étranger. His 1992 Booker winner, The English Patient, won the  Golden Man Booker Prize in 2018. Warlight is his latest novel, and it is longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018.

What: It is 1945 Britain. Siblings Nathaniel and Rachel Williams are told one day after breakfast that their parents will be moving to Singapore for their father to take up a new post at one of Unilever’s regional headquarters. They will  remain in Britain under the care of a family friend, whom they know as The Moth. Their father leaves first before their mother, Rose,  is to join him later. In the last few days with their mother, Nathaniel and Rachel — or Stitch and Wren, their mother’s nicknames for them — learn that Rose, code-named Viola (“Ours was a family with a habit for nicknames, which meant it was also a family of disguises”), may not have been entirely truthful with them.

Dropped hints of her wartime contributions with the Moth suggest a mercurial, can-do intelligence agent that belies her current guise as a quiet, retiring homemaker. These suspicions are validated when, upon her departure, the children discover her travelling trunk hidden in the cellar of their home. Effectively abandoned, the children then turn to the enigmatic Moth and his group of eccentrics including a former beekeeper, botanist and welterweight boxer known only as The Pimlico Darter.

Narrated by Nathaniel years later, a significant portion of the first part of the book has to do with his coming-of-age under the tutelage of these people, chiefly the Darter. The Darter, a former boxer and small-time greyhound smuggler and tout working the local racing grounds, introduces Nathaniel to the backwaters and byways of post-war London and engages his help in smuggling racing dogs from France on a modified mussel boat through the Thames. Then there’s Olive “Not Just an Ethnographer” Lawrence who was instrumental in plotting the Normandy landings of D-Day, and a spy haberdasher filling out the Moth’s motley crew responsible for overlooking the Williams siblings.

But there is intrigue afoot, and everything comes to a head one evening at the Bark Theatre when he and Rachel are kidnapped. Rose re-emerges to save the children, but the encounter does not end without loss. Rachel, still smarting from their abandonment, severs ties with her mother while Nathaniel, perhaps more sanguine in his personality, remains with Rose. The rest of the novel sees Nathaniel slowly unravelling more of his mother’s background while he comes to terms with his own history.

Why: Warlight is a story of memory: of the things we remember and the things we choose not to remember for the sake of self-preservation and of making sense of who we are. It is a story of the consequences of the choices we make and the consequences of the choices made for us, all taking place within the backdrop of a post-war world where intrigue remains the watchword for the day. Warlight is also a reminder that ‘truth’ is always a heavily edited narrative, and that competing narratives can result in antagonism and division.

The novelist Yiyun Li admits that she has a troublesome relationship with time as memories “tell more about now than then”. Memories are thus untrustworthy companions, especially as, Nathaniel says, “I know how to fill in a story from a grain of sand or a fragment of discovered truth… We order our lives with such barely held stories.” Nathaniel’s “barely held” stories, which make up the first third of the book, are remarkable, but are perhaps incomplete as there “was just warlight and only blind barges were allowed to move along this stretch of river”.

The lack of continuity and the dramatic slowing of the momentum in the final two thirds of the book smothers the high adventure of the first third with nostalgia and sentimentality. Nathaniel takes a back seat, and the main characters seem to shrink into caricatures. But it is perhaps precisely because he consciously occludes himself from the narrative that we see Ondaatje’s world with greater acuity, where the world is lit with more than just warlight. But this clearer world is not necessarily a more enlightening one, nor it is particularly interesting one even though Nathaniel successfully pieces together his mother’s intelligence intrigues.

The Guardian’s Alex Preston describes the progression as a “knit into a work of fiction as rich, as beautiful, as melancholy as life itself, written in the visionary language of memory”, but more striking to me was the imbalance in the book. The shift in gears from first to second to third was jolting, as if Ondaatje could hardly wait to get done with the genre-fictionesque spy thriller to get back to slow, overwritten sepia-toned reminiscences of the past.

While the heart of the story is in the second and third parts of the book, it is the first part of the book where Ondaatje shows, unlike his previous writing, that he is no slouch in creating rich textured environments and characters, and pacey action sequences.

Verdict: While intriguing at times, the book feels imbalanced overall. (6.5/10)

Availability: Trade paperback, RM77.90

Special thanks to Times Distribution for an advance reading copy of the book. 

Who: Leïla Slimani is a Franco-Moroccan writer and journalist. Lullaby, or Chanson douce in the original French, is her second novel. In 2016, Chanson douce was awarded the Prix Goncourt. The story is based on the 2012 killings of the Krim siblings in New York. Lullaby was translated into English by Sam Taylor.

What: The cover of the book tells all: the baby is dead; it only took a few seconds. A grisly opening awaits on the first page. A mother has returned to her apartment. She finds her children dead and the nanny bleeding out from a self-inflicted wound. It is a parent’s worst nightmare.

The story then turns to parents Myriam and Paul Massè’s decision to hire a nanny. Myriam, a promising lawyer, had put her career on hold to be a full-time mother to Maya and Adam. But the joys of motherhood had soured to resentment over the years, and when an opportunity to resume her role as a legal eagle emerged, she made the difficult but perfectly understandable decision to put her children under care.

Enter Louise, an experienced nanny with with superb references and an almost preternatural ability to be helpful. She immediately becomes an indispensable member of the family going so far as to join them on their family vacations. But it quickly becomes apparent that Louise, for all her benevolence and proficiency with the children, is not the heaven-sent angel everyone assumes her to be.

Why: Slimani’s Lullaby is not a whodunnit, but a why-she-gone-and-done-it. Neither is it a work of redemption, but a visceral attempt at tying together seemingly disparate themes to provide an explanation.

The prose in the book is explosive and Sam Taylor’s translation greatly heightens the fraught tension in the book. Slimani’s dispassionate and clinical observations throughout — it is evident she has done some journalistic work — intensifies the atmospheric feelings of horror and foreshadowing: Yes, the reader is always waiting for the other (nanny’s) shoe to drop. And because we know she’d gone and done it from the beginning, every action, no matter how innocent, is tinged with murderous intent (or perhaps they were never innocent to begin with).

“Myriam doesn’t  know this, but Louise’s favourite game [with the children] is hide-and-seek. Except that nobody counts and there are no rules. The game is based on the element of surprise. Without warning, Louise disappears. She nestles in a corner and lets the children search for her. She often chooses hiding places where she can continue to observe them. She hides under the bed or behind a door and doesn’t move. She holds her breath.”

There are few surprises in this story, but Slimani nevertheless manages to create a compelling page-turner. Louise, despite her stabby madness, does elicit alternate feelings of sympathy and horror as more of her history is revealed. Lullaby, properly, is her story, her descent into madness and her devolution into a properly mechanistic creature who has lost the last vestiges of humanity.

Nevertheless there is a niggling sense that Slimani begs the question somewhat, and this may have to do with the “inverted-pyramid” reporting style of the book. The book opens with the headline — the “big news”: The children are dead and the nanny grievously hurt from a self-inflicted wound. We then go back to answer the next question: How did it come to this?

Myriam and Paul are modern, conscientious parents, and have been more than considerate and generous to the nanny. We conclude, early on, that Louise must either be comic-book evil or insane. But since this is not a comic book, we are really left with only insanity as the only explanation for her actions. Interestingly, this is not what the court concluded in the real-life Krim siblings case with their murderer-nanny Yoselyn Ortega deemed fit to stand trial (we never get to the trial phase in Slimani’s book so it may very well be the case that she receives the same judgement). Indeed, in the Ortega case, the judge, in pronouncing her sentence, described her as “pure evil”, thereby eliminating the latter fork of the evil/mad characterisation.

It’s by no means a vicious argument to say that a caregiver who murders her wards on the basis of unjustified beliefs is mad or evil, and we could say that Lullaby is really about the particular flavour of Louise’s articulation. It doesn’t take away from the Slimani’s accomplishments to say that we know off the bat that Louise must be mad or crazy or worse. But given the slippery nature of madness, perhaps I was looking for something for a bit more to explain the stabbiness.

Verdict: Probably shouldn’t read this if you’re a jumpy parent. The writing is sublime and the plot well-developed, but I have a feeling Slimani missed a trick although I’m not sure what. (7.5/10)

Availability: Paperback, RM47.50

Writing more than 400 years ago in a land and culture far removed from our own, the question is worth asking: Is Shakespeare, or has Shakespeare ever been, relevant to us? While the bard’s continued grip on the West can certainly be attributable to historicity and the need for cultural continuity — we have our own legends and stories here both local and carried upon the shoulders of our ancestors — can we make the same argument in all earnestness? Or perhaps Shakespeare is so inseparable from English literature that to read the English story is to doff one’s cap to him?

It is not within the remit of this article to question the validity of the claim, i.e. that “Shakespeare reveals a different face to different cultures and different people at different times”, but it is sufficient for our purposes to agree that Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets remain an integral part of our cultural imagination, even as far removed away as we are from Stratford-upon-Avon. Romeo and Juliet is still the love story par excellence, Hamlet remains the tragic existentialist, and Caesar’s Brutus the betrayer above all other betrayers, Judas notwithstanding.

It is these characters, these faces, these ideas —arguably so foundationally representative of the  human psyche — that keep the bard relevant. And it is these ideas also that have inspired a new generation of writers to reimagine and retell the stories in contexts that find greater resonance with the contemporary reader.

Enter the Hogarth Shakespeare project, which invites modern novelists to reimagine some of his most celebrated plays.

 

Dunbar by Edward St Aubyn
A reimagining of one of Shakespeare’s most well-read tragedies, King Lear, Dunbar is an excoriating novel for and of our times — an examination of power, money and the value of forgiveness.

Henry Dunbar, the once all-powerful head of a global media corporation, is not having a good day. In his dotage he hands over care of the corporation to his two eldest daughters, Abby and Megan, but as relations sour, he starts to doubt the wisdom of past decisions. Now imprisoned in Meadowmeade, an upscale sanatorium in rural England, with only a demented alcoholic comedian as company, Dunbar starts planning his escape. As he flees into the hills, his family is hot on his heels. But who will find him first, his beloved youngest daughter, Florence, or the tigresses Abby and Megan, so keen to divest him of his estate? (RM52.90)

 

The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterson
The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s “late plays” that tells the story of a king whose jealousy results in the banishment of his baby daughter and the death of his beautiful wife. His daughter is found and brought up by a shepherd on the Bohemian coast, but through a series of extraordinary events, father and daughter, and eventually mother too, are reunited.

In The Gap of Time, Jeanette Winterson’s cover version of The Winter’s Tale, we move from London, a city reeling after the 2008 financial crisis, to a storm-ravaged American city called New Bohemia. Her story is one of childhood friendship, money, status, technology and the elliptical nature of time. Written with energy and wit, this is a story of the consuming power of jealousy on the one hand, and redemption and the enduring love of a lost child on the other. (RM59.90)

 

Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood
William Shakespeare’s The Tempest is retold as Hag-Seed by master storyteller, Margaret Atwood.

Felix is at the top of his game as artistic director of the Makeshiweg Theatre Festival. His productions have amazed and confounded. Now he’s staging a Tempest like no other: Not only will it boost his reputation, it will heal emotional wounds. Or that was the plan. Instead, after an act of unforeseen treachery, Felix is living in exile in a backwoods hovel, haunted by memories of his beloved lost daughter, Miranda. He’s also plotting revenge.

After 12 years, revenge finally arrives in the shape of a theatre course at a nearby prison. Here, Felix and his inmate actors will put on his Tempest and snare the traitors who destroyed him. It’s magic! But will it remake Felix as his enemies fall? Atwood’s novel take on Shakespeare’s play of enchantment, retribution, and second chances leads us on an interactive, illusion-ridden journey filled with new surprises and wonders of its own. (RM55.90)

 

Shylock is My Name by Howard Jacobson
Man Booker Prize-winner Howard Jacobson brings his singular brilliance to this modern re-imagining of one of Shakespeare’s most unforgettable characters: Shylock

Winter, a cemetery, Shylock. In this provocative and profound interpretation of The Merchant of Venice, Shylock is juxtaposed against his present-day counterpart in the character of art dealer and conflicted father Simon Strulovitch. With characteristic irony, Jacobson presents Shylock as a man of incisive wit and passion, concerned still with questions of identity, parenthood, anti-Semitism and revenge.

While Strulovich struggles to reconcile himself to his daughter Beatrice’s “betrayal” of her family and heritage — as she is carried away by the excitement of Manchester high society, and into the arms of a footballer notorious for giving a Nazi salute on the field — Shylock alternates grief for his beloved wife with rage against his own daughter’s rejection of her Jewish upbringing. Culminating in a shocking twist on Shylock’s demand for the infamous pound of flesh, Jacobson’s insightful retelling examines contemporary, acutely relevant questions of Jewish identity while maintaining a poignant sympathy for its characters and a genuine spiritual kinship with its antecedent — a drama which Jacobson himself considers to be “the most troubling of Shakespeare’s plays for anyone, but, for an English novelist who happens to be Jewish, also the most challenging”. (RM59.90)

 

New Boy by Tracy Chevalier
Tracy Chevalier brings Shakespeare’s harrowing drama of jealousy and revenge, Othello, to a 1970s era elementary school playground.

Arriving at his fifth school in as many years, diplomat’s son, Osei Kokote, knows he needs an ally if he is to survive his first day — so he’s lucky to hit it off with Dee, the most popular girl in school. But one student can’t stand to witness this budding relationship: Ian decides to destroy the friendship between the black boy and the golden girl. By the end of the day, the school and its key players — teachers and pupils alike — will never be the same again. Chevalier’s powerful drama of friends torn apart by jealousy, bullying and betrayal will leave you reeling. (RM52.90)

 

Macbeth by Jo Nesbo
Set in the 1970s in a run-down, rainy industrial town, Jo Nesbo’s Macbeth centres around a police force struggling to shed an incessant drug problem. Duncan, chief of police, is idealistic and visionary, a dream to the townspeople but a nightmare for criminals. The drug trade is ruled by two drug lords, one of whom — a master of manipulation named Hecate — has connections with the highest in power, and plans to use them to get his way.

Hecate’s plot hinges on steadily, insidiously manipulating Inspector Macbeth: the head of SWAT and a man already susceptible to violent and paranoid tendencies. What follows is an unputdownable story of love and guilt, political ambition, and greed for more, exploring the darkest corners of human nature, and the aspirations of the criminal mind. (Trade paperback, RM79.90)