Once described as the third most powerful person in Britain, the still formidable Alastair Campbell was in Belfast on as part of the Belfast Book Festival to talk about his new novel Saturday Bloody Saturday. During the Q&A he confirmed his support for the Iraq War and talked about The Thick Of It.
A fresh novel about the travails of a struggling musician on L.A.’s indie-rock fringe, this sequel to The King of Good Intentions continues the story of John and his jangle-pop band, The Weird Sisters. Likely at least semi-autobiographical, narrated after all by John with frequent asides to us, this takes up the tale on the 5th of April, 1994, the day Kurt Cobain died. While only Raleigh, the new drummer, feels bereft by this news as the band ends its …
We can all think of memorable novels that have had their conceptual and narrative core located within ‘the troubles’ in Northern Ireland. Still more material has been mined through adaptations of autobiographies or memoirs from ‘combatants’ of the conflict. Plots have generally been driven by tense dénouement involving betrayal and counter -betrayal by security forces and terrorists. Wars don’t end when the fighting stops of course. And there have been a number of more recent crime novels that have sought …
So it’s World Book Day, and all the kids around here have gone off to school in character costume from their favourite book from Girl Online to The Pirates Next Door. On foot of that I’ve put a few of my favourite Children’s books in a separate section of the Slugger Bookstore. My own favourite book of the last year would be Paul Burgess’ White Church, Black Mountain. Other highlights are Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate (which I …
A skilled chronicler in travel narratives and documentaries of those who wander the fringes, Manchán Magan’s debut novel follows four characters on the fringe. Two of them, teenaged Rachel and her quasi-aunt Charlotte, collide after a long estrangement in New Hampshire, and take off on Charlotte’s Wiccan pilgrimage to ye olde England of, as a bemused or bitter Rachel puts it, ‘Merlin and Voldemort’. After a few detours, they wind up on a quasi-borrowed yacht that lands them off Co …
There’s a great piece in today’s Guardian Books section, Greil Marcus on his new book Listening to Van Morrison. Here’s an extract from the article It’s a short book, not a biography or a career survey, but an attempt to follow those moments in Morrison’s music, as he’s made it from his first records with Them, from Belfast in 1965 to the present day, when something happens that breaks through the boundaries of ordinary communication, of ordinary art speech. In this …
