DeBooks

This week I visited the future, and it looks bleak. As Leonard Cohen said: “I have seen the future. It is murder.” I always thought I wasn’t particularly fond of dystopian fiction. It’s so inhospitable and hostile at the end of the world, when the hourglass has run

This week, among other things, I read a book from Japan, one from Korea and one from America. The Final Six by Akinari Asakura Shogo Hatanu has finished his studies and is looking for work. In Japan, this is a deadly serious matter. The competition is fierce and only a

In a house growing emptier by the day, as memories are packed into boxes and beauty is covered in bubble wrap, I still managed to get some reading done this week. Besides manuscripts and books for review, I read two domestic noirs that made the hairs on the back of

Over the past week I read only one book purely for pleasure, and to write about here. The rest I read because reviews had been commissioned, and for a judging panel on which I serve as one of the judges. That meant reading a mountain of books to compile a

The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett The courier delivers a parcel of books. Weighty. Aha, two or three books, I think. It can barely fit through the gap between the gate and the post. But no, it’s one book, 638 pages long. I am a bit deflated. We no

Departure(s) by Julian Barnes At university we read Great Expectations and The Mill on the Floss, but only afterwards did I discover Julian Barnes—along with other British writers such as John Fowles, Hilary Mantel, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith and others. Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot impressed me immensely;

Last One Out by Jane Harper Few writers can depict small towns in Australia better than Jane Harper - the eucalyptus trees, the wind, the heat and boredom. Patrick White, an Australian author who received the Nobel Prize for Literature. also wrote about small-town Oz, and about people's

Crux by Gabriel Tallent In rock climbing, “crux” refers to the most difficult part of a climb—the crux of the matter. This is the exceptionally talented Gabriel Tallent’s second novel. His first, My Absolute Darling, drew considerable attention. I didn’t expect to enjoy a novel about teenagers

It’s holiday and we’re at the coast. In the shade, on the warm sand, I like reading pitch-black noirs as a delicious contrast to the bright sky and blue sea. The Inmate by Freida McFadden If Freida writes a domestic noir, I know I’m going to

Lee Child lives in England’s Lake District. It is said that one of his Jack Reacher novels is sold somewhere in the world every nine seconds. He has already sold more than a hundred million books and has received many awards. He received an OBE from the Queen. These