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Don’t Look Left by Atef Abu Saif review – in the line of fire | Politics books
It is hard to describe the cumulative effect this devastating chronicle has over 280 pages. It describes a mounting toll of death and destruction, with each day bringing more heartrending news of homes demolished and relatives and colleagues killed. Gradually, it makes it clear that there is no safe place in the Gaza Strip. Danger is everywhere, like the low hum of a mosquito.Atef Abu Saif is an acclaimed Palestinian author and journalist as well as being minister for culture in the Palestinian Authority. On 7 October he…
The Painter’s Daughters by Emily Howes review – Gainsborough’s girls | Fiction
Many parents wish they could freeze a moment, preserve their children just as they are, but few have Thomas Gainsborough’s miraculous skill to achieve it. He painted his daughters Mary and Margaret – Molly and Peggy – with adoration, pride and sometimes anxiety, capturing, as Peggy, the narrator of The Painter’s Daughters puts it, a “closeness so thick you can feel it, our gaze always steady”.It’s ambitious to draw fiction from such beloved and well-known portraits, but Howes’s fictionalised Molly and Peggy don’t pale in…
Impossible Monsters by Michael Taylor review – fossil feuds | History books
During the English civil war, in hiding and in boredom, the Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher, set about pinning down the date of creation. A decade down the line, he publicised his research findings with breathtaking self-assurance: the world was a sprightly 6,000 years old. More specifically, God had created it on a Saturday night in October 4004BC. As it was, his hunch was a few zeros off the mark. The Earth was, in fact, formed 4.6bn years ago.Growing up in Ulster’s Bible belt, the historian Michael Taylor writes,…
Five of the best books inspired by classic novels | Books
Retellings of classic novels are having a bit of a moment: both Sandra Newman’s feminist take on Nineteen Eighty-Four, Julia, and Barbara Kingsolver’s Pulitzer-winning modernised David Copperfield, Demon Copperhead have made a splash in the last couple of years, while Percival Everett’s reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, James, will hit bookshops in April.If each work of art builds on what came before it, the novels below take indebtedness to the next level. With riffs and rewritings, playful challenges…
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood review – a quiet novel of immense power | Fiction
What are we going to do about global heating, about mass extinction, about our rivers? What ability do we have to change things, now that power lies mostly in the hands of unaccountable corporations and shameless demagogues? Is there even any point in trying? The narrator of Stone Yard Devotional, who has been working in species conservation, chooses that most seductive solution – despair. She leaves her life and marriage in Sydney and checks into the retreat house of an enclosed convent on the Monaro Plains in New South…
Kae Tempest: ‘I used to read David Icke. Imagine that’ | Books
My earliest reading memoryI was on the tube with my siblings when I was around seven. I was reading Sue Townsend’s The Queen and I, which is about the royal family relocating to a council estate. We had to change trains, but I was so absorbed, I only realised as the doors closed that my siblings were shouting at me from the platform and I was going on without them.My favourite book growing upUrsula K Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy. I reread it recently because I wanted to give a copy to my niece, and it struck me how many of…
Tommy Orange: ‘My whole family has had problems with addiction, including myself’ | Fiction
Tommy Orange was in Sweden, promoting a translated edition of his first novel, There There, when inspiration struck for a second time. Orange’s debut was published in 2018 to enormous acclaim: it was selected as one of Barack Obama’s books of the year, listed as a Pulitzer prize finalist and won the American Book award. The pressure to follow that early success must have been immense. But then, visiting a Swedish museum, “I saw this newspaper clipping about my tribe being in Florida in 1875. And I know enough about my…
The Rev Richard Coles: ‘I think my CV looks like the work of a fantasist’ | Books
After being a pop star in his 20s (as keyboard player in the Communards with Jimmy Somerville), Richard Coles became an Anglican vicar and then a broadcaster (notably as a co-presenter for 12 years on BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Live). The 61-year-old is now a bestselling novelist: his second “cosy crime” book, A Death in the Parish, featuring the country vicar and occasional sleuth Canon Daniel Clement, is out now in paperback; a third mystery follows this summer. He lives in East Sussex with his two dachshunds Pongo and…
Me and Mr Jones by Suzi Ronson review – Stardust memories of David Bowie’s hairdresser | Autobiography and memoir
This honest and troubled memoir belongs to a genre one may shorthand as I-was-Sinatra’s-valet: how an ordinary day jobber encountered a star and found life glitteringly transformed. Here it’s a 21-year-old hairdresser, Suzi Fussey, living at home with her parents in Bromley, south-east London, and working at a salon in neighbouring (“posher”) Beckenham. One day in 1970 a customer, Mrs Jones, mentions her “artistic” son, David, who plays in a band; the following week, she brings in David’s wife, Angie, who wants a haircut…
‘I don’t think I developed emotionally’: Earl Spencer on the pain of boarding-school abuse | Private schools
It was one thing writing about the abuses of his childhood, Charles Spencer tells me, with half an ironic laugh; it’s quite another talking about them with strangers. When we meet in an office at his publisher, he is reeling a bit from this new fact of his life. The more sensational chapters of his memoir of a deeply traumatic five years at the Northamptonshire prep school Maidwell Hall had been splashed all over the previous week’s Mail on Sunday. The following morning, he had been a guest on Lorraine Kelly’s mid-morning…