Venice by Peter Ackroyd
The Venetians’ language and way of thinking set them aside from the rest of Italy. They are an island people, linked to the sea and to the tides rather than the land. This latest work from the incomparable Peter Ackroyd, like a magic gondola, transports its readers to that sensual and surprising city.
His account embraces facts and romance, conjuring up the atmosphere of the canals, bridges, and sunlit squares, the churches and the markets, the festivals and the flowers. He leads us through the history of the city, from the first refugees arriving in the mists of the lagoon in the fourth century to the rise of a great mercantile state and its trading empire, the wars against Napoleon, and the tourist invasions of today. Everything is here: the merchants on the Rialto and the Jews in the ghetto; the glassblowers of Murano; the carnival masks and the sad colonies of lepers; the artists—Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto, Tiepolo. And the ever-present undertone of Venice’s shadowy corners and dead ends, of prisons and punishment, wars and sieges, scandals and seductions.
Ackroyd’s Venice: Pure City is a study of Venice much in the vein of his lauded London: The Biography. Like London, Venice is a fluid, writerly exploration organized around a number of themes. History and context are provided in each chapter, but Ackroyd’s portrait of Venice is a particularly novelistic one, both beautiful and rapturous. We could have no better guide—reading Venice: Pure City is, in itself, a glorious journey to the ultimate city.
A Very Irregular Head: The Life of Syd Barrett by Rob Chapman
Roger Keith “Syd” Barrett (1946–2006) was the very definition of a golden boy. Along with three school chums he formed what would soon become Pink Floyd, and rock and roll was never the same.
But there was a dark side. Barrett, who fell in with a hardcore group of communal-living, squatter hippies, soon began ingesting vast quantities of a new drug—LSD—and his already-tenuous mental state began to unravel. Syd Barrett became perhaps rock and roll’s first “acid casualty.”
In A Very Irregular Head, journalist Rob Chapman lifts the veil of secrecy that has surrounded the legend of Syd Barrett for decades, drawing on exclusive access to family, friends, archives, journals, letters, and artwork to create the definitive portrait of this brilliant and tragic artist.
The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
In a surprising departure from the traditional view of cyberpunk’s bleak future, Gibson (Mona Lisa Overdrive) and Sterling (Islands in the Net) render with elan and colorful detail a scientifically advanced London, circa 1855, where computers (“Engines”) have been developed. Fierce summer heat and pollution have driven out the ruling class, and ensuing anarchy allows the subversive, technology-hating Luddites to surface and battle the intellectual elite. Much of the problem centers on a set of perforated cards, once in the possession of an executed Luddite leader’s daughter, later in the hands of “Queen of Engines” Ada Byron (daughter of prime minister Lord Byron), finally given to Edward Mallory, a scientist. Mallory, who knows the cards are a gambling device that can be read with a specialized Engine, is soon threatened and libeled by the Luddites, and he and his associates confront the scoundrels in a violent showdown. (from Publisher’s Weekly)
Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
The first volume of Proust’s seven-part novel “In Search of Lost Time,” also known as “A Remembrance of Things Past,” “Swann’s Way” is the auspicious beginning of Proust’s most prominent work. A mature, unnamed man recalls the details of his commonplace, idyllic existence as a sensitive and intuitive boy in Combray. For a time, the story is narrated through his younger mind in beautiful, almost dream-like prose. In a subsequent section of the volume, the narrator tells of the excruciating romance of his country neighbor, Monsieur Swann. The narrator reverts to his childhood, where he begins a similarly hopeless infatuation with Swann’s little daughter, Gilberte. More than this apparently fragmented narrative, however, is the importance of the themes of memory, time, and art that connect and interweave the man’s memories. Considered to be one of the twentieth century’s major novels, Proust ultimately portrays the volatility of human life in this sweeping contemplation of reality and time.
Tongues of Serpents by Naomi Novik
The sixth installment of Novik’s fantastic series introduces Temeraire and former captain Laurence to New South Wales. Laurence, technically a transported prisoner, is escorting three eggs to form a covert in the colony there. The eggs are destined for such second-rate officers willing to make the long trip to the remote colony, including Captain Rankin, whose cruelty killed his former dragon. On arrival, the ship is met by former governor William Bligh, deposed through mutiny by the New South Wales Corps. Bligh wants the dragons to reinstate him in his post; the mutineers are determined to retain the upper hand. Discipline is lax and quarrels are the order of the day, including those between Temeraire and Iskerria, a snobbish beast. To escape all this, Laurence and Temeraire take a mission to find a way through the Blue Mountains and explore the interior of the continent. But one of the dragon eggs is stolen, and the exploration turns into a desperate rescue mission. Temeraire fans have waited two years for this book but should find themselves richly rewarded. The characters are as riveting as ever, the setting is new but convincing, and the plot, with its first-class balancing of Laurence’s and Temeraire’s internal and external struggles, shows Novik’s continued excellence as a novelist. –Frieda Murray/Booklist magazine
Thirteen Hours by Deon Meyer
In South African author Meyer’s impressive second thriller to feature Cape Town Det. Insp. Benny Griessel (after Devil’s Peak), which spans just 13 hours in a single day, Benny lands a pair of explosive cases: the gang slaying of an American tourist and the murder of the husband of a washed-up, alcoholic popular singer. After teenager Erin Russel turns up on the street with her throat cut, her traveling companion, Rachel Anderson, goes on the run. Rachel, who fears the police are connected to her friend’s slaying, is trying to stay ahead of her pursuers without the help of the authorities. A few hours later, Benny interviews Alexandra Barnard about the death of her husband, Adam, a record company owner. Alexandra was found next to Adam’s body and to the firearm used to kill him. While the windup doesn’t match the pulse-pounding opening scenes, this crime novel does further enhance Meyer’s reputation as a deft storyteller.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved
The Calcutta Chromosome by Amitav Ghosh
From Victorian India to near-future New York, The Calcutta Chromosome takes listeners on a wondrous journey through time as a computer programmer trapped in a mind-numbing job hits upon a curious item that will forever change his life. When Antar discovers the battered I.D. card of a long-lost acquaintance, he is suddenly drawn into a spellbinding adventure across centuries and around the globe, into the strange life of L. Murugan, a man obsessed with the medical history of malaria, and into a magnificently complex world where conspiracy hangs in the air like mosquitoes on a summer night. Winner of the 1997 Arthur C.Clarke Award.
The Sugar King of Havana by John Paul Rathbone
The rise and fall of sugar trader Julio Lobo becomes a window into pre-revolutionary Cuba, the mechanics of building an economic empire–and the author’s own personal history–in this atmospheric biography by Rathbone, deputy head of the Financial Times’s Lex column and former World Bank economist. Lobo, “Cuba’s richest man and one of the world’s greatest speculators,” is an intriguing subject (“friends nicknamed him El Veneno, the poisonous one, for his charm and sibylline tongue”), and Rathbone handles his volte face, from hobnobbing with Bette Davis to the loss of his fortune and death in exile in Spain, with finesse. Ample drama–multiple divorces, audacious hostile takeovers, assassination attempts–is given gravity by Rathbone’s parallels with and personal connections to his subject: his family traveled in Lobo’s social circle in Cuba during the first half of the 20th century. An exceptionally rich portrait not only of an empire and its progenitor but Cuba itself, and the economic legacy of Castro’s revolution, the loss of capital, and the end of Cuba’s “great age of sugar.”
From Publisher’s Weekly. Copyright © Reed Business Information
Blood Safari by Deon Meyer
Set mainly in the game preserves of South Africa, Meyer’s stellar stand-alone thriller delivers muscular prose with a hero to match. When three masked men break into the Cape Town home of Emma le Roux on Christmas Eve, Emma manages to escape over the wall into her neighbor’s yard. Emma fears the attack may be connected to recent evidence that her brother, Jacobus, who she thought died 20 years before while serving as a temporary game ranger, is actually alive. She hires professional bodyguard Martin Lemmer to protect her while she investigates. Lemmer is a true original, tough, with a checkered past, a restless inquiring mind and the skills to thwart the masked thugs who are determined to kill his client. After Emma is severely injured, Lemmer goes on the offensive, bent on revenge and determined to solve the ever-widening mystery that threatens to kill them both. Once again, Meyer (Devil’s Peak) shows he’s a writer not to be missed.
From Publishers Weekly. Copyright © Reed Business Information
A Secret Kept by Tatiana de Rosnay
From AudioFile Magazine:
Simon Vance is an ideal performer for this tightly plotted and beautifully made story about a French family whose stress fractures have widened into chasms. Antoine Rey still loves his wife, who has left him for a younger man. His beautiful sister, Melanie, is turning 40 alone after a romantic breakup. On a weekend trip to a place they haven’t seen since childhood, memories of their long-dead mother surface, and suddenly both are haunted by unanswered questions. Vance’s French accent is elegant and assured, but more important, his sympathy for these complex and interesting characters keeps the drama from crossing into melodrama. He is particularly strong with women’s voices and Antoine’s teenaged children, using deft changes of register that never feel forced. A performance to savor. B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2010
Publisher’s notes: Antoine Rey thought he had the perfect surprise for his sister’s birthday: a weekend by the sea, at Noirmoutier, where he and Mélanie used to spend their childhood holidays and where they had never returned. Antoine is at a fragile point in his existence: his job no longer holds any excitement, his children are surly teenagers, and he hates being a divorced, single Dad. Noirmoutier triggers off a flock of forgotten memories and Mélanie has a shocking flashback. Trapped between a taboo family secret and a new crisis when his daughter is confronted with the death of her best friend, nothing is easy for Antoine as a son, a husband, a brother and a father. But then he meets streetwise, sexy Angèle, a mortician who will give new meanings to the words life, love and death.
