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Book
choice for Christmas
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| The Blind Assassin | English Passengers | |||||||||
| by Margaret Atwood
Even at the age of 82, Iris lives in the shadow cast by her sister. Poor and trying to cope with a failing body, Iris reflects on her far from exemplary life, in particular the events surrounding her sister Laura's tragic death and the novel which earned her such notoriety... |
Like Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety, Matthew Kneale's English Passengers is a dashing historical novel, grand in conception but carefully and steadily executed... |
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| Super-Cannes | Norwegian Wood | |||||||||
| by J.G. Ballard The plot of J. G. Ballard's latest novel may seem familiar to anyone who has read his previous work... |
There can't be many famous novels that begin with a muzak scene. Toru Watanabe is touching down at a European airport when a synth version of Norwegian Wood begins to play over the loudspeakers... |
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| In The Shape of a Boar | The Human Stain | |||||||||
| by Lawrence Norfolk
The hunt for the great boar of Kalydon is re-enacted in the last days of World War II, only this time an SS officer is the quarry and Greek partisans the hunters... |
For all his worldliness, Philip Roth is no cynic - and for that, at the beginning of a new century, we must be very grateful indeed. |
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| Bellocq's Women | Love, etc | |||||||||
| by Peter Everett In 1912 the photographer E.J. Bellocq took a series of pictures in the brothels of Storyville in New Orleans... |
In Love, etc. Julian Barnes revisits the familiar territory of jealousy and betrayal that he first explored in Talking it Over... |
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| The Book of Prefaces | ||||||||||
| edited by Alasdair
Gray This is a volume of beginnings, a collection of literary prefaces which five centuries ago might have been used as a rhetorical handbook... |
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