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Long Bright River by Liz Moore review – startlingly fresh [03 Feb 2020|07:00am]
A novel about a killer targeting sex workers amid America’s opioid crisis offers a memorable portrait of devastation

In 2009, Liz Moore accompanied photographer Jeffrey Stockbridge to the Philadephia neighbourhood of Kensington, where he was documenting the human cost of the area’s high rate of opioid addiction. The interviews and sketches she began to write on the subject laid the foundations of her fourth book, Long Bright River, a novel 10 years in the making that bears witness to the author’s extensive research and first-hand experience of the lives of those who fall through the cracks.

Long Bright River is being marketed as a thriller, but, as with the best crime novels, its scope defies the constraints of genre; it is family drama, history and social commentary wrapped up in the compelling format of a police procedural. There’s a serial killer targeting young sex workers in Kensington; there’s police corruption and a good but unorthodox cop defying orders to pursue justice. But although the tropes are familiar to the point of cliche, the result feels startlingly fresh.

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A Small Revolution in Germany by Philip Hensher – review [03 Feb 2020|09:00am]
Youthful radicalism gone to seed in a tale that is diverting to a fault

It’s sometimes hard not to picture Philip Hensher’s non-writing hand stroking a cat as he comes up with sly ways to throw shade. Here’s Spike, the narrator of his new novel, who has nothing to read on holiday: “The only books on the hotel’s meagre bookshelf were tawdry German thrillers and the equivalent of joke books for children, and the teenage love story someone had left on the reception desk, the book that was everywhere this year.”

So much for Sally Rooney, but let’s not get distracted, despite Hensher’s evident fondness for drive-by scorn. As Spike says, “this is a story about politics”: specifically, about the hard left in early 80s Sheffield, where he falls in with sixth-form radicals who graduate from showing off about reading Das Kapital to dropping fake bombs through letterboxes. Now he’s a middle-aged lecturer, quietly awaiting revolution while others in his set – including the Tory home secretary and a prominent rightwing journalist – have long dropped their ideals, if they ever had any.

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Poem of the week: In the Rose Garden by Helen Tookey [03 Feb 2020|10:05am]

This elliptical story of a young woman is rich with possible readings

In the Rose Garden

She’s in the rose garden again, staring
at her right arm, its pale soft underside
that never gets the sun, never gets tanned.

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'These stories don't get told': a paramedic's notes from inside the ambulance [03 Feb 2020|10:59am]

‘Jake Jones’ explains what’s revealed – and what’s hidden – in his memoir of private dramas on the emergency services’ front line

As a paramedic, Jake Jones sees a lot. Writing under a pseudonym, this serving emergency worker offers snapshots of people’s lives at the point of crisis in his engaging memoir, Can You Hear Me?

“When I started writing it, I wasn’t really in it,” he says. “I was writing episodes about patients – not just their clinical experiences, but their lifestyles, their social settings, their family scenarios and all the struggles that people have, because I feel that we get these insights into people’s situations which are quite intimate, really. It’s quite a privilege but it’s also eye-opening and I thought that a lot of those stories don’t get told.”

With poignancy, humour and compassion, Jones invites us into “the invigorating chaos of pre-hospital care”. The encounters are fleeting – average patient contact is about an hour – and the stories stop at handover.

The lottery of callouts offers a panorama of experiences: the mundane, the ridiculous, the heartbreaking and the tragic. From the desperate drug addict who urinates on the ambulance floor when denied a fix, to the woman who would rather call an ambulance than read the back of a packet of paracetamol; from Reggie, a frail and disabled 46-year-old man, lying in the dark on his bathroom floor for two hours after a fall, to Sharon, difficult to the core, but ultimately calling an ambulance because she is incredibly lonely. Jones evokes the controlled sprint to a heart attack victim on a football pitch and the desperate sadness of the call that “no one wants to receive”: the infant who doesn’t wake up.

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'Queen of Suspense' Mary Higgins Clark dies aged 92 [03 Feb 2020|11:54am]

Each of the American author’s 56 novels was a bestseller and her fiction was extolled by writers from Scott Turow to David Foster Wallace

Mary Higgins Clark, the “Queen of Suspense” who topped charts with each of her 56 novels, has died at the age of 92.

Simon & Schuster president Carolyn Reidy said that Higgins Clark died on 31 January in Naples, Florida, from complications of old age. The author published her first novel, Where Are the Children? in 1975, going on to sell more than 100m copies of her compulsive suspense novels in the US alone. She published her most recent thriller, Kiss the Girls and Make Them Cry, about a journalist investigating sexual misconduct at a television news network, in November.

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Tips, links and suggestions: what are you reading this week? [03 Feb 2020|01:00pm]

Your space to discuss the books you are reading and what you think of them

Welcome to this week’s blogpost. Here’s our roundup of your comments and photos from the last week.

First, let’s hear it for union. BrendaTwisse has just finished Pat Barker’s Union Street.

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Stephen King quits Facebook over false claims in political ads [03 Feb 2020|01:43pm]

Horror novelist says that the social network has allowed false information to be disseminated, and that he is also concerned about users’ privacy

Stephen King has quit Facebook, saying that he is not comfortable with the “flood of false information allowed in its political advertising”.

The bestselling horror novelist, a prolific user of social media, also said he was not “confident in [Facebook’s] ability to protect its users’ privacy”. King made the announcement on Twitter, where he has 5.6m followers. His Facebook page has been deleted.

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American Dirt publisher agrees to increase Latinx inclusion amid controversy [03 Feb 2020|11:28pm]

Coalition that formed in response to controversy around the new novel met with Macmillan Publishers on Monday

Members of the #DignidadLiteraria movement, a coalition that formed in response to the controversy around the new novel American Dirt, gathered outside the offices of Macmillan Publishers in New York on Monday to announce an agreement made with the publisher in the wake of heavy criticism about the book and the publishing industry.

Macmillan agreed to committing to substantially increasing Latinx representation, from authors to staff, at the publisher. The company agreed to write up an action plan within 90 days and meet with representatives from the movement in 30 days, said David Bowles, a writer and cofounder of the #DignidadLiteraria movement, at a press conference held moments after a private meeting with the publisher.

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