Sunday, November 8, 2009
Books
Conspiracy theories
There was a time when being called a mazun, a Freemason, had far more serious connotations than the irreligious tinge it still carries...
One stray Dogg
"Life couldn't get any better. And as bad as the world may have seemed to folks on the outside, from the inside it was perfect. Even in the worst...
Knocking on realism's door
Lina Brockdorff's last publication, which includes a detailed and erudite study by Pawlu Mizzi, has a long story to tell. And the author has a...
Judge dread
"The jury was ready." Just four words into his 21st book and the master of courtroom drama has already captivated the reader. The Appeal has...
The write thing for the right reason
The Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival provides the creative space for a dynamic, multilingual encounter. Roderick Mallia hears the word.
I...
An intelligent, compelling thriller
Steve Mosby hit the headlines in 2003 when his debut novel, The Third Person, was launched as part of Orion's, Britain's leading publisher of...
A knight in too much armour
Normally, I enjoy historical fiction. There's something engaging about being plunged into a particular period in history and experiencing life as...
Drop by drop, but never full
Meta Siket il-Baħar (When the Sea Was Still) is an exploration of poetic identity and the associations of eternity with the written word. In...
Shelf life
• Wise Owl Publications has just published Mowbajl: Tibda l-Avventura, a delightful adventure story by Andrew Borg with illustrations by Marija...
The Middle East on trial
Richard North Patterson is a former trial lawyer who has found his niche in the legal thriller genre. His fiction-mirroring-fact narratives allow...
Shelf life
• Devil May Care, the new James Bond novel by Sebastian Faulks, has become Penguin's fastest selling hardback fiction title ever with 44,093...
Lightning never strikes twice
Considered to be America's top true-crime writer, Ann Rule writes in depth about the kind of people most of us hope to never meet in this lifetime...
Lost books found
The allure of books is that they contain secrets. Some people argue that we're not reading so much any more. This is very possibly true though...
Write honourable politics
That the island teems with the political species and the relative antics is its blessing and its curse. Yet I will make an exception for Lino...
Smells like teens and spirits
Mario Azzopardi is best known as a poet and theatre director. In the late 1960s he must have been the most demonised representative of his...
Chain reactions
KULLANA GHAT-TFAL: Il-Letteraturaadapted by Charles BriffaPIN Publications, ISBN 978-99932-41-97-3
ID-DRAWWIETadapted by Tony C. CutajarPIN...
From here to lingering desperation
Chick lit is the bread and butter of those (I'm not mentioning any specific sub-class so no letters to the editor please) who after a heavy bout...
Shelf life
Written by Billy McGee, Ropner's Navy (Cormorant Publishing Hartlepool) is a complete history of the infamous Ropner Shipping company (1874-1997),...
When the levee breaks
With 27 books and two Edgar awards under his literary belt, James Lee Burke is no rookie in American literature. For readers unfamiliar with his...
A post-modern parable
The resilient Ring trilogy by Koji Suzuki - Ring, Spiral, and Loop - has seen its own remarkable growth. The story of dissemination and...
On being an inspiration
Opposites attract, the laws of physics have taught us. But then, what are opposites? The opposite of boy is girl, but they are both persons. The...
Period drama
Frock coats, cocked pistols, mail coaches, piracy, smugglers, highwaymen, French philosophy and Republicanism, politically defining movements,...
Family misfortunes
As Maltese we are lucky in having retained the close family ties that, in the process, keep the social fabric intact, even if there have been some...
Not the best medicine
Although both his parents are renowned authors, the anxiety of influence doesn't appear to hang too heavily over Jesse Kellerman. He has already...
The intrepid work of late style
I have fond memories of my first meeting with Achille Mizzi at the Grandmaster's Palace in 1997. Back then, we had just created our own literature...
My cup of tea
The world through the eyes of a child can be a fascinating place, but can easily run the risk of appearing unknown and rather frightening....
A back full of daggers
Having recently been awarded the Cartier Diamond dagger prize for "sustained excellence in writing crime", John Harvey is the author of the moment...
Zero the hero
Much to this reviewer's joy and delight, Joe Friggieri is back with 20 new stories featuring ir-Ronnie, Maltese literature's most lovable underdog...
A lens in wonderland
As a medium, photography has always struggled to be considered as a fine art, as many still consider it to be a reproductive medium, sans a...
Mailer's lasting last
When, at the shrieking height of Beatlemania, John Lennon made his hotly misinterpreted declaration that The Beatles had become more famous than...
A saving account
Los Angeles is a surreal city which, to non-Americans, is filtered through CSI; shots of Britney's run-ins with the paps; and Paris's fully...
Low-battery chick
Considering just how popular Chick Lit is among Maltese readers of the female gender, I was always struck by the fact that no one ever thought of...
Face to face
Melvin Burgess, controversial author of Junk and Doing It, is back with a story of one troubled teenage girl, the eponymous Sara, and a rock 'n'...
A right royal drama
There are palpable historical reasons why the British monarchy is one of the most fascinating anthropological phenomena in the Western world. This...
Being straight about the curves
You cannot judge a book by its cover, but should you happen to pick up this book, then you are sure to be intrigued by both the title and the...
The A to Z of death and hope
As I sat down to write this review of Péter Zilahy's ingenious book, Le Monde announced the arrest, after over a decade defying the vagaries of...
In haunting memory
In her debut novel, Jennifer McMahon expertly unfolds a complex tale of murder and haunting with a touching and powerful coming of age...
The nail-polished finger of suspicion
T asmina Perry has written on celebrity and style for many magazines including Marie-Claire, Glamour and Heat and was most recently deputy editor...
Over the moon
Last weekend I was thinking how local television had made a sudden leap forward and was actually attracting at least two of my senses. Then I...
Flying the white flag
Chick-lit continues to be one of the fastest growing fiction genres today and publishers push this genre because of its viability as a sales...
The pleasures of shopping
Emily Prince is not having a good day. Or a good year for that matter. She is the 30-year-old, slightly overweight mother of six-month-old...
Not quite bad to the bone
Anton Grasso's name has, over the years, become synonymous with horror fiction, the paranormal and the macabre. Faithful readers have gone as far...
Shelf life
• Sir Salman Rushdie will be upstaged by Sir Sean Connery at this year's Edinburgh International book festival, as the former Bond star will be...
Past imperfect
David Hewson is perhaps best known for his popular Nic Costa series, an entertaining series of crime novels set in Rome. Hewson has also written a...
The Hillary show
As former US diplomat and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt aptly put it, "A woman is like a tea bag - you never know how strong she is until she gets...
Anger mismanagement
There is anger that bubbles naturally when either something makes a U-turn and starts driving in the opposite direction to where we want it to or...
The not-yets and no-longers
Philip Roth's latest novel is a follow-up to his 1979 novella The Ghost Writer. After 11 years of living in isolation in the Berkshires, Nathan...
Nosy parker
Dublin-based author John Connolly is known for his genre-bending novels in which he skilfully merges horror, the supernatural and crime. If you're...
Keeping the faith
Despite ethical and moral considerations, we often find excuses and justifications for altering versions of the truth in order to prevent worse...
Tale of the unexpected
When things seem to be going well, we tend to stop and wonder whether it will all last. Jonathan Tropper's Everything Changes explores this real...
The comander calls it a day
Well, there we have it. The comandante has stepped down. And what a timely resignation it is for Castro. Never have the whims of world power gone...
Taking shortcuts
Preamble number one is that this review seriously runs the risk of setting a world-first by attempting to be longer than the book itself. The...
More bricks in the wall
As part of a journalism course in the UK a few years back I attended a number of lectures at Oxford University's Queen Elizabeth House, where many...
Back in crime
Fiorella De Maria's novel is fuelled by the imperfections of point of view and dual narrative. A fictional auto-biography takes on a...
Something is rotten
A book which blows its trumpet too loudly to boast a "sensational plot" and "gripping adventure" already had my eyebrows flying north. And the...
The simple of life
GI Joe Special Missions are all one-shots that are full of everything you would expect from a GI Joe comic. Most of the popular characters make an...
Write back in anger
Most of the so-called 1960s poets have recently been marking, happily without too much razzamatazz, the 40th anniversary of their founding of the...
Bond back on the beat
It is not easy for those nurtured on the best creative juice to be satisfied by the work of imitators. But then it takes a present-day genius to...
Sea hello, wave goodbye
Second novels are tricky, to say the least. There is always the danger of failing to live up to expectations or, worse, being downright bland....
A main course in the desert
With more action than a Bond film, Empire of Sand will probably be turned into a film at the drop of a dime. Mr Ryan's choice of character must...
Homegrown terror
Paul Grech's highly readable work brought back vivid memories of two meetings I had with Yasser Arafat way back in the early 1980s, during the...
Twisted novel of suspense
From the continent where we stand, Japanese culture looks like a classic case of Orientalism. Yet rather than the pattern of misrepresentation of...
A compulsively readable novel
The searing African sun, the mysterious and threatening witch doctor, corruption, smuggling and brutal murders - if you can only read one book...
Sun, sea and text
The sand is sizzling like a revved-up barbecue, the thermometer is cranked up a few notches above comfortable while half-days, for those lucky...
The man with the child in his lines
Exclamation marks are the prawn cocktail of print; the literary parallel of canned laughter. It is as if the writer is explaining a joke to the...
In through the back door
When in late 2006 Donald Sassoon published The Culture of the Europeans: From 1800 to the Present (HarperCollins), it was received with critical...
A web of literary conceit
Everything's on internet and I quite like it. With regards to books, I can order them, read about them and sometimes even read the original texts...
Spotlight on Philip Roth
Born in 1933, the oldest child of a first generation Jewish-American family in Newark, New Jersey, Philip Roth's first novella Goodbye Columbus...
A bitter taste of things to come
Rhodesia 1965. Ian Smith has declared independence from Britain. Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia, faces an uncertain future and by the late 1970s,...
In the valley of the shadow of death
And there I stood, for a full five minutes, with my vision sliding down the wall like lazy glue and my mind telling me things, and me pretending...
Read your greens
Guido Lanfranco is my mother's hero (I am her hero too, but that's only because she is biased). He probably has no idea, but I'll bet that at his...
Literary gem
When I was asked to review a book, I was already about to answer, "Sorry; too busy!", but when I heard the name Giovanni Bonello, I immediately...
Extra time in literary space
Like blue moons and four-leaf clovers, February 29 has a certain mystery to it; an air of expectation. The reasoning behind it is perfectly...
Blood diamonds
This being Martin Meredith's third book about South Africa, one would think that by now, the author's pen would have run dry. This couldn't be...
The write to be different
The Milly, Molly series, for children up to the age of nine, has been endorsed for child development by some of the world's leading experts in...
In good company
Some 30 plus years ago, when Andrew Muscat was just starting his journey in the law, Joseph A. Micallef published what then was considered a...
Set in stone
It is impossible to run out of superlatives when it comes to the Maltese islands' prehistoric heritage, the importance and uniqueness of which, in...
A self-critical indictment of America
I have to confess that I found the hushed stillness of fiction in the aftermath of 9/11 almost as daunting as the very sight of the falling...
Rebel with plenty of causes
Travelling Between Shadows proved to be a unique experience, in the sense that you are asked to collaborate with an author who is virtually...
Strong on humour
Jeremy Strong's Puffin books come with the warning, or guarantee, "Laugh Your Socks off with Jeremy Strong". And indeed, lifting children's life...
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