| Eoin Colfer on returning to Artemis Fowl – books podcast |
[07 Jan 2020|07:00am] |
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2020/jan/07/eoin-colfer-on-returning-to-artemis-fowl-books-podcast When Eoin Colfer’s novel Artemis Fowl was tearing up the bestseller charts in 2001, it seemed as if the author had cracked the recipe for getting reluctant boys to read. Take one part adventure, one part tech, mix in some fairies and add farts. The eight-book series completed its arc in 2012, when the young villain Artemis found a kind of redemption. But Colfer has now returned to the Fowl universe with The Fowl Twins, following Artemis’s younger brothers, Myles and Beckett, as they go on the rampage with a troll and a fairy in training. He sits down with Sian to talk about comedy, how children’s literature has changed, and the forthcoming Disney adaptation of Artemis Fowl directed by Kenneth Branagh.
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| Wild Game by Adrienne Brodeur review – Mum’s little helper… with a difference |
[07 Jan 2020|07:00am] |
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/07/wild-game-by-adrienne-brodeur-review A daughter’s complicity in her mother’s secret adulterous affair is gruesomely fascinatingOne summer night in 1980, Adrienne Brodeur was woken up by her self-obsessed, larger-than-life mother, Malabar; Adrienne was then a 14-year-old schoolgirl, her mother a cookery writer in her late 40s. What was the problem? In a state of high excitement, Malabar whispered her confession: “Ben Souther just kissed me.” Sounding like a teenager, she repeated herself: “I still can’t believe it. He kissed me, Rennie.” In the seconds that followed, a Faustian pact was struck between parent and child. Brodeur tacitly agreed to help facilitate the affair on which her mother was about to embark, even though the man in question was her beloved stepfather’s best friend. “You deserve this,” she reassured Malabar, as if they were college friends talking of new boyfriends over a bottle of cheap chardonnay. In return, she was duly elevated to the position of Malabar’s confidante-in-chief, a role she longed for, in spite of the likelihood that it would involve lying to everyone. How else could she hope to get nearer to the centre of Malabar’s world? Continue reading...
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| 'Nobody in Tesco buys spy books by women': how female authors took on the genre |
[07 Jan 2020|09:00am] |
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/07/spy-books-by-women-stella-rimington-manda-scott-charlotte-philby Publishing’s long established boys’ club in espionage fiction is having its cover blown by a new school led by Stella Rimington, Manda Scott and Charlotte Philby When Stella Rimington, the former director general of MI5 and spy author, wrote a new foreword last year to The Spy’s Bedside Book, Graham Greene and his brother Hugh’s 1957 anthology, she was glowingly complimentary. She had just one complaint. “After everything we have done for spying, there is, apart from the obligatory reference to Mata Hari, hardly anything in this book about women!” she wrote. The Greene brothers aren’t alone in their short sight. Wikipedia lists 127 notable writers of spy fiction, dead and living, and only seven of them are women. (Rimington is one of them.) Pick any list of the best spy novels, and it will usually be peopled only by male writers such as John le Carré, John Buchan, Rudyard Kipling, Erskine Childers, Joseph Conrad, Len Deighton, Ian Fleming, Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum. Continue reading...
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| Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid – charming, authentic, entertaining |
[07 Jan 2020|09:00am] |
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/07/such-a-fun-age-by-kiley-reid-review Money, class and race are incisively observed in a razor-sharp debutAt the start of Kiley Reid’s standout first novel, a security guard accosts a young black babysitter as she strolls the aisles of an upscale Philadelphia supermarket with her pint-size white charge. It’s late, the babysitter having been summoned from a party so the child’s affluent parents can deal with a domestic emergency, and a meddlesome fellow shopper has decided that something about the pair doesn’t “feel right”. A tense standoff ensues, the guard refusing to let the babysitter leave and all but accusing her of kidnapping while a bystander films it on his phone. Eventually, the babysitter has to summon the child’s father to collect them. It’s a flawlessly paced scene, at once funny and menacing, its every rippling nuance captured with precision and acuity. It’s also a far more straightforward example of racism in action than anything that follows, because the focus of this book is an altogether more slippery and underexamined type of prejudice: liberal racism. Continue reading...
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| ‘We’ve always been honest about our weight loss’: the Pinch of Nom chefs on their recipe for success |
[07 Jan 2020|12:00pm] |
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https://www.theguardian.com/food/2020/jan/07/weve-always-been-honest-about-our-weight-loss-the-pinch-of-nom-chefs-on-their-recipe-for-success From posting healthy meal ideas on Facebook and running a restaurant, Kay Featherstone and Kate Allinson went on to write bestselling slimming books that grew out of their own efforts to lose weight – and started a global phenomenon Kay Featherstone and Kate Allinson were at a Spice Girls concert last spring, just two figures in a sea of people. As they gazed around the stadium, Kay broke down in tears. Not because of anything the Spice Girls were singing, but because the two chefs were consumed by the thought of their own followers; they have more than 900,000 on Facebook. “When we go to a gig, it’s like: ‘We could fill this space so many times!’ It becomes very, very scary,” Featherstone says. They got the same feeling at Fleetwood Mac. Featherstone has sweaty palms just thinking about it. She and Allinson, who are business as well as life partners, try to “forget the noughts” and imagine a community of 900, but it’s still a long way from the days when they had their own restaurant with customers who came in every Sunday and even brought the pair presents if they went on a cruise. Continue reading...
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| The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas author defends work from criticism by Auschwitz memorial |
[07 Jan 2020|04:49pm] |
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/07/john-boyne-defends-work-from-criticism-by-auschwitz-memorial After airing his worries about ‘Holocaust genre’ fiction, John Boyne has been accused of ‘perpetuating dangerous myths’ himself The Auschwitz-Birkenau Holocaust memorial museum has said that John Boyne’s children’s novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas “should be avoided by anyone who studies or teaches the history of the Holocaust”, after the author criticised the spate of recent novels set in the concentration camp. The museum made the comment after Boyne criticised the current ubiquity of novels with names such as The Tattooist of Auschwitz, The Saboteur of Auschwitz, The Librarian of Auschwitz and The Brothers of Auschwitz. Boyne had tweeted: “I can’t help but feel that by constantly using the same three words, & then inserting a noun, publishers & writers are effectively building a genre that sells well, when in reality the subject matter, & their titles, should be treated with a little more thought & consideration.” Continue reading...
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| Elizabeth Wurtzel, journalist and author of Prozac Nation, dies aged 52 |
[07 Jan 2020|04:51pm] |
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/07/elizabeth-wurtzel-journalist-and-author-of-prozac-nation-dead-at-52 Author of bestselling memoir about clinical depression, which made her ‘a hashtag before there was Twitter’, died from metastatic breast cancer Elizabeth Wurtzel, the journalist and author who chronicled her life with depression in the bestselling memoir Prozac Nation, has died at the age of 52. Writer David Samuels, Wurtzel’s friend since childhood, told the New York Times that Wurtzel had died in New York from metastatic breast cancer on Tuesday. Wurtzel, who tested positively for the BRCA genetic mutation, was a vocal advocate for BRCA testing in her journalism, while refusing pity for herself. Writing in the Guardian in 2018, she noted: “I hate it when people say that they are sorry about my cancer. Really? Have they met me? I am not someone that you feel sorry for. I am the original mean girl. I now have stage-four upgrade privileges. I can go right to the front. But it’s always been like this. I am a line-cutter. Which is to say, I was precocious. I was early for history.” Continue reading...
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| Half of a Yellow Sun summons a gilded age as well as an atrocious war |
[07 Jan 2020|06:00pm] |
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/jan/07/half-of-a-yellow-sun-summons-a-gilded-age-as-well-as-an-atrocious-war Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel turns to the the tragedy of war only after conjuring the ‘marvellous complexity’ of intellectuals’ lives in early 60s Nigeria There’s an agonising social exchange towards the end of the first part of Half of a Yellow Sun. Richard, a British man, is talking to a Nigerian poet called Okeoma about his interest in Igbo-Ukwu artefacts. “I’ve been fascinated by the bronzes since I first read about them,” says the eager and enthusiastic white writer. “The details are stunning. It’s quite incredible that these people had perfected the complicated art of lost-wax during the time of the Viking raids. There is such marvellous complexity in the bronzes, just marvellous.” Continue reading...
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