Read the back story of the Slow Horses series, created by ‘a laureate of decrepitude’
The Books Page
by Vivien Horler
4d ago
Review: Archie Henderson The Secret Hours, by Mick Herron (Baskerville) Mick Herron likes the private joke. In his latest novel, he has created a character who is said to be an heir to John le Carré –  “one of a long list”. Herron himself could not only be on that list, but near the top of it. The British spy writer has made his mark with a series of his Slow Horses, MI5 outcasts who are run by a dishevelled, objectionable but very smart Jackson Lamb. It is with Lamb that the Guardian has accurately summed up Herron as “something of a laureate of decrepitude”. But Herron can also do chic ..read more
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Stand-out debut novel about the heartbreak of partition in India
The Books Page
by Vivien Horler
1w ago
Review: Beryl Eichenberger Under the Tamarind Tree, by Nigar Alam (Bedford Square) Nigar Alam’s debut novel Under the Tamarind Tree is a rich, graceful narrative spanning more than 50 years, highlighting the tragedies of partition, patriarchy and personal loss. I did not know much about the partition of India and how it came about so this was an entrée into a new culture – one that I enjoyed immensely. It is 1947 and nine-year-old Rozeena is fleeing with her family to Pakistan. The creation of this country from British India was, for the Muslim community, their chance to have a homeland and a ..read more
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Turn every goddamned page
The Books Page
by Vivien Horler
2w ago
Review: Archie Henderson Working, by Robert  A Caro (Vintage) Robert Caro is 88 and readers are worried he won’t be around long enough to complete his monumental LBJ biographies. He has already written four, the last having been published in 2012. A fifth and final volume of the 36th US president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, is still in the works. He takes about 10 years to write a book, so the final one may be imminent. Five volumes of a US president who is now largely forgotten by many of us may seem like over-egging, but if you have the time and energy to read them all, I suspect the proof ..read more
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How would we cope if tested in this way?
The Books Page
by Vivien Horler
3w ago
Review: Vivien Horler Sisters Under the Rising Sun, by Heather Morris (Zaffre) My tears came at the line: “It’s time for you to have a break, Sister James, you’ve done your duty; your shift is over.” To which Nesta James replies to her friend and colleague Vivian Bullwinkel: “It’s been a bloody long shift, Bully, a bloody long one.” It had lasted three years and seven months, the time the members of the Australian Army Nursing Service were held as prisoners of war of the Japanese in Sumatra, ending on September 11, 1945. Heather Morris is the author of the best-selling The Tattooist of Auschwi ..read more
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The biographer strikes back
The Books Page
by Vivien Horler
1M ago
Review: Vivien Horler The Secret Life of John le Carré, by Adam Sisman (Profile Books) Most of us will never have biographies written of our lives, and just as well, judging from the tension and upset between John le Carré and his biographer Adam Sisman. John le Carré was published in 2015, and at least one reviewer complained there seemed to be a lot the reader was not being told. He was right, because it turned out Le Carré, whose real name was David Cornwell, had what he called “my own messy private life”, which he did not want made public. Although the biography was written with Le Carré’s ..read more
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Murder, racial injustice, greed and corruption – the extraordinary tale of the Osage people
The Books Page
by Vivien Horler
1M ago
Review: Vivien Horler Killers of the Flower Moon – Oil, money, murder and the birth of the FBI, by David Grann (Simon& Schuster) While few people would condone murder, many might understand how it could be committed in the heat of the moment. But to plan and arrange a series of killings over a number of years, of people who were fond of you, with an eye on the main prize, seems particularly abhorrent. This is at the centre of an extraordinary tale of greed and utter ruthlessness affecting members of the Native American Osage people in Osage County, Oklahoma, in the early 1920s. The baddie ..read more
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Bedside Table Books for January
The Books Page
by Vivien Horler
2M ago
These are among the books that landed on my desk this first month of 2024. The first four are from Exclusive Books’s top reads. Some will be reviewed in full later. – Vivien Horler Normal Women – 900 years of making history, by Philippa Gregory (William Collins) The Bayeux Tapestry, embroidered to embellish the newly built cathedral in Bayeux in 1077, tells the story of the conquest of England by William I, the French Duke of Normandy. It is 70m long and depicts an invasion force of 632 men, along with almost 200 horses, 55 dogs, 500 other animals and birds, and just five women – all of them t ..read more
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This story of a hero, told by a celebrated explorer and former soldier, makes for a great read
The Books Page
by Vivien Horler
2M ago
Review: Vivien Horler Lawrence of Arabia, by Ranulph Fiennes (Michael Joseph) Thomas Edward Lawrence was a history graduate with a first from Oxford when he first went to Arabia – in what is now southern Turkey – to supervise a British Museum archaeological dig in Carchemis, an ancient Hittite city. It was1909 and he was 25. Within four years he was fluent in Arabic as well as a number of dialects, and had travelled far and wide, learning much about Arab customs and earning the respect of differing and often warring tribes. He might have stayed there at the dig, had World War 1 not broken out ..read more
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Exploring the subleties, humour and pain of being coloured in SA
The Books Page
by Vivien Horler
2M ago
Review: Vivien Horler Coloured – How classification became culture, by Tessa Dooms and Lynsey Ebony Chutel (Jonathan Ball Publishers) Trevor Noah, the South African treasure and winner of an Emmy award this month for The Daily Show, isn’t coloured. That might surprise most South Africans, black and white, but perhaps not coloureds and almost certainly not Noah himself. In his book Born a Crime he describes how he is the child of a liaison, illegal at the time, between a Xhosa mother and a (white) Swiss father. He then grew up in Soweto. He’s not coloured, as the authors of this absorbing book ..read more
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Truth – the angel you cannot outrun
The Books Page
by Vivien Horler
2M ago
Review: Vivien Horler The Little Liar, by Mitch Albom (Sphere) The Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said once described Palestinians as “the victims of the victims, the refugees of the refugees”. This was a reference to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and how the establishment of the state of Israel, prompted in part by Western guilt that the Holocaust had happened at all, led to Palestinians losing homes, livelihoods and lives. The Little Liar, by the renowned Jewish-American writer Mitch Albom, is a Holocaust novel. It focuses on Greek Jews from Salonika (or Thessaloniki) who we ..read more
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