PAPERBACKS
Gail Honeyman won the Costa first novel award with Eleanor Oliphant
Is Completely Fine (Harper Collins, 400pp, £8.99, Oldie price £7.24 inc p&p), which then shot to the number one slot in the bestseller lists. Eleanor ‘is in some ways a classic unreliable narrator’ and she is ‘immediately revealed as an eccentric, pratfalling her way through the early chapters, apparently oblivious to the way her foibles appear to those around her’, according to Claire Armistead in the Guardian. Eleanor ‘is nearly 30. She lives alone, enjoys doing crosswords, has a dull job, and everything in her life is perfectly under control, thank you very much. When anyone asks, she’s “fine”. Except that she’s anything but fine,’ explained Kate Saunders in the
Times. ‘Gail Honeyman’s first novel is about the modern scourge of urban loneliness, and it’s not long before Eleanor drops various ghastly revelations casually into her story.’ Allan Massie in the Scotsman found many things about it surprising: a ‘surprising first novel’ but a ‘surprisingly good one’. ‘Coming of age novels are common,’ he continued; ‘this is less usual, a coming to life one. Equally unusually, it’s a Glasgow novel without violence (though there is violence of a peculiarly distressing sort in Eleanor’s past); instead it’s a Glasgow novel suffused with kindness. Indeed, he continued ‘what is remarkable is the emphasis Honeyman places on the importance of kindness, something met more often in real life than in novels…this is an uncommonly intelligent and sympathetic novel.’ The Springwatch presenter Chris Packham’s Fingers in the Sparkle
Jar (Ebury, 384pp, £8.99, Oldie price £7.70 inc p&p) is ‘as far from a celebrity memoir (or joy-inflected hour of nature telly) as a buzzard is from a budgie. It is fierce, disturbing and surprising – about the man himself and as a piece of writing. Both, frankly, are on the edge,’ wrote James Mcconnachie in the Times. ‘The biggest surprise about a television presenter known for his outspoken views on conservation,’ he continued, ‘is that he was and presumably still is a deep introvert, borderline sociopath, even… The book’s emotional core is the story of how as a young, troubled teenager Packham tamed, trained, loved and lost a kestrel. He adores that bird with an intensity rarely captured on the page: “He hung there on a heavenly thread just for me.”’ The book is ‘a beautiful, riveting and disturbing read with many echoes of the social rejection personified in the film Kes by Ken Loach’, confirmed Nicholas Milton in the Guardian. ‘The reason Packham seems to divide opinion so starkly is precisely because he is passionate, speaks his mind and is willing to stand up for what he believes in. In the pressured and unforgiving world of television those are rare qualities,’ he concluded. Rick Gekoski, broadcaster and rare book dealer, has at the age of 70 written his first novel, James Darke (Canongate, 299pp, £8.99). His eponymous hero is a reclusive bibliophile, whose ‘pet unfinished project is a study of Dickens and disaffection’. ‘It is clear that there is nothing Darke loathes more deeply and comprehensively than himself,’ Alfred Hickling wrote in the
Guardian. ‘If the first third of the novel is downbeat, the second becomes truly bleak as Darke describes in unsparing detail the loss of his wife to cancer….’ Stuart Kelly in the Scotsman explained how Gekoski shows how ‘gradual accommodation with one’s sadnesses might be, and to what lengths a good man might go to in order to be decent, kind and honourable. That he finds the result of that to be nothing but psychological self-scarification is horrendous. Yet his fumes and furies, his ire and anger are hilarious…’ Kelly ended his review: ‘It is, in a way, a book about beginnings as much as it is about endings. I have never laughed as much at a book that made me weep so copiously.’ Melissa Katsoulis in the
Times summed up: ‘This novel is stuffed with more wisdom, bile, wit and tenderness than many writers create in a lifetime.’
Graeme Wood’s The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the
Islamic State (Penguin, 352pp, £10.99, Oldie price £7.31 inc p&p) is a rethinking of what Isis is and what it wants. In the Times, David Aaronovitch wrote that it is the author’s ‘contention that one of the West’s problems is that we didn’t take the supporters of the Islamic State and their beliefs seriously... His book is about encountering Isis supporters and listening carefully to what they say to themselves and to others.’ Anthony Sattin in the Guardian confirmed that Wood has ‘extensive knowledge of both the people and the issue…what becomes clear from Wood’s interviews is that for many supporters of Abu Bakr al-baghdadi, the self-styled caliph, the end justifies the means and those means, however brutal or brutalising, can always be justified by Islamic texts or traditions. Hard to argue with that.’ And Tom Holland in the New Statesman called the book ‘gripping, sobering and revelatory’.
The Lie of the Land (Abacus, 464pp, £8.99, Oldie price £7.42 inc p&p) is Amanda Craig’s seventh full-length work of fiction and, according to Henry Hitchings in the
FT, ‘it delivers her usual mix of domestic conflict and social satire, with a timely emphasis on the ways in which economic change has fractured traditional notions of identity’. The novel focuses on the dying marriage of Lottie and Quentin, who move from London to rural Devon to save money. ‘Certainly Craig’s image of rural living would be enough to deter most naive urbanites drunk on fantasies of bucolic innocence,’ continued Hitchings. ‘There may be gorgeous views and lush epiphanies, and the Devonian burr may be as comforting as a thick blanket, but mostly life in the sticks is hard, and the residents treat newcomers as foolish interlopers.’ Francesca Angelini in the
Sunday Times believed that Craig ‘has produced a gripping, compassionate and often funny take on a cross-section of Britain that fiction tends to overlook. In the end, it is good to get out of London.’