Page-turners
Hot new releases for long hauls, short trips and layovers. Reviews by
The Nothing
Hanif Kureishi | Faber Fiction | $25 He made acclaimed movies, won awards and counted rock stars as friends. His sex life was a merry-go-round. Now, his body eroded by years of excess, eightysomething Waldo is confined to his “chariot of ire” wheelchair, dependent on his much younger wife, Zee. But Zee, weary of his perverse manipulations, has begun an affair with Eddie, a film industry hanger-on who’s supposedly crafting Waldo’s biography. Initially content to torment himself with imagined salacious details of the betrayal, Waldo decides to make his final movie, to create a narrative of adultery – whether to save his marriage or for malevolent pleasure, he hasn’t decided. Hanif Kureishi’s novella pilfers elements of noir cinema; as Waldo tries to determine if his cuckolding is real or fantasy, he likens himself to the trapped, paranoid James Stewart character in Rear Window. There are also nods to Shakespearean tragedy, particularly Hamlet, as Waldo fades into obscurity, raging against the vanishing of his gilded youth in tandem with the death of liberal Britain. Kureishi’s language is a joy – vivid, explicitly visceral and sprinkled with one-liners. Waldo is petty, pathetic and unlikeable but his struggle to cling to relevance is compelling and darkly hilarious.
E WITH BOB
ul | Henry Holt | $37 ournal, aka Book of Books. Begun in a ea aul’s teenage years, Bob is both a memoir of a life in books and a list chronicling every book that the editor of The New York
Times Book Review has read over the past three decades. By default, it’s also a geographical and psychological record of the chapters in her life as well as a reflection on why, how and what we read. Each of Bob’s chapters is titled after the book that influenced that stage in Paul’s life; for “Wild Swans” relates to backpacking By the way, Paul reads only print d courageously admits to disliking Catcher in the Rye and On the Road.
EOPLE PROBLEMS
an | Doubleday | $30 h Su Yi is about to breathe her last a dt e Shang-Young clan has rushed to her deathbed from all corners of the globe, each member frantic to stake a bulletproof claim to a piece of the mega pie that is the family fortune. Cue much sophisticated infighting and bitchery in this final instalment of Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich trilogy about the travails of an extended family of Singapore squillionaires so obscenely rich that governments and multinationals scurry to do their bidding. The g author has discovered his own o with this savagely funny soap opera, ovie of Crazy Rich Asians is currently tion.
ORCE
ow | HarperCollins | $33 d detective Denny Malone leads a task o ce c arged with sweeping gangs, drugs and guns off New York’s streets. But the NYPD hero is a dirty cop who’s on the take, ripping off dealers and dispensing “justice” that’s less about protecting the community than safeguarding his own corrupt deeds. He has been given the green light by the equally corrupt upper echelons but as racial unrest spills onto the streets, Malone’s house of cards begins to topple. Moving at a relentless pace and packed with police procedural detail, Don Winslow’s powerful thriller explores the moral bankruptcy that becomes legal tender when the good guys are indistinguishable from the bad.