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The home front Ken Kalfus' latest novel, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, is a penetrating satire on our domestic responses to the events of September 11 and the ongoing war on terror. To their mutual regret, Marshall and Joyce, a divorcing New York couple, both survive the attacks, but as the months pass, and events at home begin to echo those on the international stage, it seems unlikely that they will be as fortunate in the battle of their separation. |
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The promise As a nine-year-old boy, John McGahern promised his desperately ill mother that he would become a priest. After her death he was sent to live with his brutal father and found salvation in another dream. |
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Things I never knew about my father Would the discovery of a novel that had been lost for years help Hanif Kureishi piece together his dad's history, and his own place in it? |
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Ooh La Lancashire OK, he's a Lancastrian, but this is Charles Nevin's clear-eyed, unbiased account of the county's abundant comedy, its fatally romantic streak and the debt it is owed by Paris. |
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Love and the Master Henry James's private life has been the subject of much speculation. In this extract from his new novel, David Lodge weaves fact and fiction to explore the truth about the most reticent of writers. |
Soham: A Story of Our Times by Nicci Gerrard
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For whom the bells don't toll Murders and mysterious disappearances are always chilling, but nothing unites us in grief as much as the killing of a child. Yet not all victims make the news, not even the young - not if it means relinquishing our ideal of childhood itself. Nicci Gerrard on the faces we forgot to mourn. |
Into the Silent Land by Paul Broks
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Into the Silent Land by Paul Broks 'Why does raw meat give me a hard-on?' This is Michael, chopping sirloin ready for the stir-fry. Typically, he is going to the trouble of preparing a good lunch: beef in hoi-sin sauce. He's bought some beer, too. We're drinking straight from the can. Amy, his girlfriend, sits at the kitchen table reading a magazine.'Michael,' she says, without looking up. Michael slides the diced beef into the wok where it sizzles in the hot oil.'Easy, Amy. Only a twitch.' |
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A death in the family Paul stood perfectly still for a moment or two, looking at his brother. He wished they were all dead, all the Morels. At that moment he learned that not death, but life, is fearful. We die several times during life, most of us. Paul died distinctly at that moment - as his mother, his father, his brother, all were tasting death |
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Discovering a New Toy Defiantly welcoming the grandees were 200 demonstrators standing in the square in front of the Opera House. Mostly young with scruffy clothes and punky haircuts, they whistled and booed, angry that the Opera House had been sold out, allowed for the first time to be taken over by a rich patron. They were also chanting slogans about the inequity of Swiss society and the wealth of Spross's guests. The glittering horde did their very best to ignore the disturbance. |
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Chapter one She steps from the taxi, pushing at the metal weight of the door, clutching cigarettes, change and the thorned stems of roses. Sarah says something to her over the taxi roof and she half turns. She's aware too late of her foot catching on the granite curve of the kerb, and the next moment she is airborne, falling upwards. |
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Here's It happens that I am going through a period of great unhappiness and loss just now. All my life I've heard people speak of finding themselves in acute pain, bankrupt in spirit and body, but I've never understood what they meant. To lose. To have lost. I believed these visitations of darkness lasted only a few minutes or hours and that these saddened people, in between bouts, were occupied, as we all were, with the useful monotony of happiness. But happiness is not what I thought. |
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Spandex as a Second Language It takes me several tries to get the bunny head thing just right. As with much in life, it's a matter of positioning. You have to make sure you place the decal in the exact same spot every time, or you'll muck up the whole enterprise. I learned this the hard way. Careless application brought me, in succession, a three-eared bunny, then a bunny with too many eyes, then a blobby bunny with a club-ear and no distinct presence. |
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Danger: nature at work We live on an extraordinarily fragile place that is fraught with danger: a tiny rock hurtling through space, wracked by violent movements of its crust and subject to dramatic climatic changes. Bill McGuire, professor of geohazards at University College, London, considers the threats to humanity from our own planet - and from Space |
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Life on Grand Avenue This is the belly of the beast, the ulcerous stomach of the nation's book publishing-world, and Edwin de Valu, crossing Grand Avenue en route to his cubicle at Panderic Books Incorporated, is smack dab in the swampy middle of the quagmire. |
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Chapter one The sound of fountains came in stereo. A deep splash from the courtyard below and a lighter trickle from the next room, where open arches cut in a wall that over-looked the courtyard had marble balustrades stretched between supporting pillars. |
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The White Flag on the Mosque 27 September 1996: I've heard and read so much about the Taliban that I want to ignore the reports, pretend they're not true. Radio Kabul has told us they're locking up the women, preventing them from going to work or school. Women don't have lives any more. |
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Chapter one The convent was a squat, ramshackle building, its roof more corrugated iron than Gothic pinnacle. It was set among high walls spiked with shards of glass, forbidding enough to repel voyeurs, religious obsessives, nun-stalkers, sex offenders, militant Protestants, enraged atheists. But the walls were also there to keep the occupants in. For this was a convent of enclosed Carmelite nuns, who once the gate had slammed behind them would see nobody but their fellow nuns and a few priests and altar boys for the rest of their lives. |
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Chapter one The play - for which Briony had designed the posters, programmes and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crepe paper - was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch. |
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Chapter one Before the Chinese burned Jyeko village, a tax-official from Lhasa stayed there. For years no revenue had reached the capital from that remote corner of Tibet's eastern province of Kham. So, in 1948, Lhasa sent its own collector. It was a four-month journey into ever-more resentful districts. But the zealous young man brought his wife and baby daughter, declared his intention to stay for as many years as it took - and was generally hated. |
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St Jude The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end. No children in the yards here. Shadows lengthened on yellowing zoysia. Red oaks and pin oaks and swamp white oaks rained acorns on houses with no mortgage. |
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The Butterfly Simultaneously coveting affluence and influence were confusing ambitions for a traditional socialist in the Seventies, but for Geoffrey Robinson, the son of a furniture manufacturer, born in Sheffield on 25 May 1938, the journey from Labour's left wing was unusually comfortable. |
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Chapter one Solitary nights were to be feared, for when darkness fell, the mind, like the eye, saw things less clearly than by day and confusions and perversions of the brain manufactured black thoughts. Which is why he contrived to stay out into the small hours, to shrink the time left until the light came back. |
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Chapter one Minty knew it was a ghost sitting in the chair because she was frightened. If it were only something she'd imagined, she wouldn't have been afraid. You couldn't be when it was something that came out of your own mind. |
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Chapter one Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were closer than they knew, before either of them had any thought of politics. In Edinburgh in the winter of 1967 they were only a couple of miles from each other, doing what they would enjoy most in their teenage years. Brown was submerging himself in the quiet excitements of Edinburgh University library, discovering history. Blair was wrapping himself into a toga to take to the stage at Fettes College as Mark Antony in Julius Caesar. |
