…we must never make peace with evil. We must never become indifferent to others or undemanding of ourselves. Vasily Grossman.
Stalingrad provides the in-depth back story to Grossman’s masterpiece ‘Life and Fate’, a narrative that is built around the members and associates of a single extended Russian family, the Shaposhnikovs, whose world is torn apart by the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The book draws parallels between Hitler and Stalin, the Soviet penal system, Russian nationalism and official antisemitism. The original manuscript was seized by the Soviet authorities and remained unpublished until 1984, more than twenty years after Grossman’s death.
First published in Russian in 1952 (titled, ‘For A Just Cause’) Stalingrad is now available for the first time in English and the translators have utilised the politically riskier manuscript versions and given the book Grossman’s preferred title. The afterword details the extent of censorship the text suffered under Stalin.
Marcel Theroux states: even with the restored passages, it would be impossible to claim [Stalingrad] is a subversive or even historically reliable novel, but that it is a haunting, tender and intimate rendering of the havoc that befalls it’s characters. The books clearly form a diptych and the symphonic structure of the whole becomes clear.
Theroux continues: As a work of art it’s significantly flawed
But even the flaws are fascinating: An astonishing example of the compromises between creativity and censorship.
War is what happens when language fails. Margaret Atwood.
What do we mean when we say that someone is a writer? Is he or she an entertainer? Or, an improver of readers’ minds and morals? And who, for that matter, are these mysterious readers? Margaret Atwood.
Atwood announces The Handmaid's Tale sequel, The Testaments. It will be published in September 2019, you can pre-order it now on the Boffins website. It will be set 15 years after Offred’s final scene in The Handmaid’s Tale and narrated by three female characters. It will not be connected to the television version, which has extended beyond Atwood’s 1985 novel to continue Offred’s story.
Men are afraid that women will laugh at them.
The Handmaid’s Tale follows one woman’s struggle to survive in a dystopian future America, renamed Gilead, where women possess few rights, are used as breeding vessels and are not allowed to read or write. The novel was first published in 1985, and quickly recognised as a modern classic.
Boffins have a great range of Margaret Atwood titles in stock, including the Graphic Novel Adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale.
Empathy is the key! Last Tango in Cyberspace - the title is simply irresistible. Zorn is an em-tracker with a hyper-developed sense of empathy and pattern recognition. Corporations utilise his skills to trace cultural and linguistic shifts, data that can be used to exploit the next trend in - amongst other things - product demand (retailer’s dream, this guy). A contract with a pharmaceutical company takes a turn when he becomes involved in a culture war involving an empathy drug.
In amongst a plethora of pop-culture references, cyberpunk shenanigans and techno-jive in an imagined society built on heightened empathy the author examines the ways in which corporations and future technologies will shape our world. It’s happening now!
Take a peek at these two from the iconic Penguin Classics collection at Boffins:
Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima is the story of a young woman living alone in Tokyo with her two year old daughter. Its twelve sublime chapters follow the first year of her separation from her husband.
Under The Volcano - Malcolm Lowry’s masterpiece about the last hours of an alcoholic ex-diplomat in Mexico…
From the sublime to The Nancys…Who hasn’t denied (I certainly know nothing about cucumber sandwiches or lashings of lemonade) reading The Famous five, Trixie Belden or even Nancy Drew?
Eleven year old Tippy Chan seems to have a charmed life, surrounded by strange happenings and an eclectic group of family, friends and associates (a little bit like Nancy). When her teacher is murdered, Tippy, her uncle Pike and his new boyfriend Devon, all Nancy Drew fans, form their own detective agency, The Nancys (It shouldn’t work at all, should it?) so they can get to the bottom of things. ‘Hectic’!
Highly commended for an unpublished manuscript in the 2017 Victorian Premiers Literary Awards, R.W.R. McDonald’s The Nancys cleverly, colourfully and delightfully reveals how mystifying everything is but that ultimately it’s best to confront your fears, embrace your family and combat those conspiring against you. I think it might be a hoot!
Tayari Jones has disarmed readers with her wisdom and compassion since her debut ‘Leaving Atlanta’ (2003), a coming of age story set against the backdrop of the Atlanta child murders of 1979-81.
Her new work, An American Marriage has won the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction from a stellar and diverse shortlist including: Milkman by Anna Burns, Ordinary People by Diana Evans, My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite, The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker and Circe by Madeline Miller.
An American Marriage focuses on a recently married, educated, African-American couple, whose plans and ambitions for the ‘good life’ are undermined when the husband is convicted for a crime he didn’t commit and sentenced to twelve years in prison. The couple’s journey is, largely, revealed through the letters they write to each other, both during and after his release.
With Jones’ deft touch this social injustice provides the background for an intricate examination of the way in which personal and cultural expectations, loyalties and aspirations clash and then shift.
Whilst we get a clear sense of the inequity of the system and the negative impact that results from having a criminal record, Jones deftly hones in on the relationship and explores what it is that these characters are really made up of, what it is they will forge out of the adversity.
When the Library of Congress released a report stating that 75 percent of early American silent film reels have been lost forever, That really got my attention, Dominic Smith says. The analogy I thought of is, What if three quarters of all the books published in a 30-year time period disappeared? What would that mean for storytelling?
A long-retired filmmaker recalls the early days of silent films in Smith’s atmospheric follow-up to The Last Painting of Sara De Vos (2016). A film-maker fallen from grace, Claude Ballard, living on the outskirts of Los Angeles is tracked down by a film history student who wants to interview him about his lost masterpiece. In The Electric Hotel the narrative moves between past and present as we learn about the rise and fall of an obsessive artist and ultimately a film studio. A sweeping drama that reflects on a life experienced through art (Orson Welles loomed large for me reading through this novel. All those rolls of film under the bed).
Smith’s narrative considers the significance of storytelling – what’s forgotten, remembered, lost – and asks how we should deal with the incompleteness of our memories and our lives when we realise we can’t necessarily control or ‘restore’ them. Beguiling!
Quarrytown, a run-down mining area, provides the backdrop for Tony Birch’s new work set in the post-World War II era. The White Girl examines the devastating impact of government policy, particularly the ‘Aborigines Protection Act’, on community and families. The launch, last week, of the new biography A Stolen Life: The Bruce Trevorrow Case by Antonio Buti, about the only successful plaintiff in a stolen generation case, really brought home the themes Birch is addressing.
In The White Girl, Odette Brown manages to keep her granddaughter away from the clutches of the authorities until a new lawman comes to town. The police target the remaining Aboriginal families in the area and the threat of separation seems inevitable.
Whilst Birch’s characters are fictional the threat from the malevolent sergeant seems very real. The author’s juxtaposition of the environment with the characters establishes a haunting atmosphere layered with menace.
In Kate Atkinson’s highly anticipated Big Sky, the fifth instalment featuring Jackson Brodie, ex-military, ex-Cambridge, ex-cop, now private investigator, the ‘hero’ becomes to a large degree sidelined as he finds himself in the middle of a sex trade conspiracy.
The real heroes in this narrative are the women. One of the conspirators’ wives, two young police women and one of the victims are the key and ultimately responsible for taking the cabal down.
Atkinson has all the skills required to spin the tale from multiple perspectives-investigators, criminals, family members and victims. A consummate storyteller. Also on the shelves at Boffins is Atkinson’s Brodie backlist and her World War Two espionage novel, Transcription.
Donna Leon’s new work reflects her favourite writers - Charles Dickens, and in particular Ross McDonald (The Goodbye Look, The Drowning Pool, The Blue Hammer). Leon pens number 28 in the Venetian crime series with Unto Us A Son Is Given, and doesn’t disappoint.
How entertaining can a book that revolves around the inheritance laws of Italy be? Well, in Leon’s capable hands, enormously. There’s been some conjecture over at what point the first murder occurs in this mystery- too late for some, at approximately two thirds of the way through. So unkind.
Leon’s hero, Brunetti, an astute, reasonably clean living detective (they can’t all be boozers), takes us on a journey that actually reveals something interesting about the intricacies of Italian Society.
In Maigret Hesitates, Georges Simenon’s, (the great Belgian writer who calmly, and one would imagine methodically, wrote approximately 500 novels in between smoking his pipe) titular character Inspector Maigret receives a series of letters warning of a murder that is going to take place. The letters do not reveal who will die, when it will happen or who will do it. Maigret must trace the letters back to their source before it is too late. Clue number one is in the paper it’s written on. Get cracking Jules!
In Identity Crisis, Ben Elton throws up a thought provoking, humorous story, with some dark undertones, on life, identity and murder in the ‘trolling’ age.
Ben Aaronovitch, former bookseller and writer for the Doctor Who Series introduces us to Tobias Winter, a German police officer who practices magic in The October Man, a stand alone, upstanding, outstanding component of the Rivers of London series. Set before the main series, this is a great place to start with Ben’s writing.
Winter is teamed with Vanessa Sommer, an expert in wine-related crime, after his boss learns of a “suspicious death with unusual biological characteristics” in Trier. The body of an unidentified man had been found in a culvert, covered in what appeared to be grey fur but was actually a fungal infection that had suffocated him. Sommer is able to identify the fatal fungus as noble rot, used to intentionally infect wine grapes by some vintners, including Jacqueline Stracker, whose vineyard is located on a slope above where the corpse was discovered. Winter’s and Sommer’s interview of Stracker leads to suspicions that Kelly, goddess of the River Kyll, is somehow involved. I get the feeling The October Man may be trying to outdo The Nancys?
It’s not going to happen. (:
Before doomsday grab a copy of Good Omens. What an opportunity to see how it all went down. Judgment Day is almost upon us (gracious), the world is going to end in a week (oh, the suspense). Crowley, a demon who has grown to be rather fond of life on earth, is asked to plant the baby Anti-Christ with a powerful American family (need I continue) –Go with it, It’s Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman in cohorts for goodness sake.
The inciteful Mr Howard Jacobson immerses us in the questions that confront us as we mature. What paths have we taken? Is it ever to late for love? Tender, humorous and a little confronting. In Live a Little, ninety-something year old Beryl will torment you in all the best ways possible and tug a little at your heart.
Would be amiss not to mention Epic Continent, travel writer Nicholas Jubber’s journey from the Mediterranean to Iceland on which he investigates Europe’s greatest epic poems, from the Odyssey to Beowulf, the Song of Roland to the Nibelungenlied, and their impact on European identity in these turbulent times.