Reviewed by Mark Woollams
Trouble is Patrick Somerville’s first novel and on its pages the modern man stands awkwardly on display. Trouble is a complicated case study on the male perspective, it is one that is never seen on any television channel, read in any magazine or heard on any album. Instead, Somerville is real. Free of the false pretenses which seem to pervade the other, off base, perspectives, Somerville is “right on” in so many of these stories. (more…)
Reviewed by Heidi Immesberger
Peter Mayle’s A Good Year follows several months in the life of Max Skinner. After losing his job in London, Max serendipitously receives notice that he has inherited his uncle’s house in Provence, including a vineyard. Max travels to France to take over the estate and to plan how to best use it to eliminate his debts. What follows are Max’s attempts at relationships with two French women, an investigation into whether Max is the legal heir to the estate, and intrigue surrounding the vineyard’s wine. (more…)
Reviewed by Nisha Bhat
IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK by James Baldwin is the story of a young black couple separated when the man, Fonny, is falsely accused of rape and imprisoned. The story is largely narrated by Fonny’s lover and soon-to-be-mother Tish, and it unfolds through a set of disconnected scenes in the present and the past. (more…)
Traumatized by an accident that involves something falling from the sky, which leaves him eight and a half million pounds richer, our hero spends his time and money obsessively reconstructing and re-enacting memories and situations from his past: a large building with piano music in the distance, the familiar smells and sounds of liver frying and spluttering, lethargic cats lounging on roofs until they tumble off… But when this fails to quench his thirst for authenticity, he starts reconstructing more and more violent events.
With stories on puberty, first love, and fatherhood, it’s easy to see how one might think that Patrick Somerville’s TROUBLE is an ode to the condition of the modern American male. But what does dear Patrick think of all this?
Check out this feature on him from The Chicago Reader :
Patrick Somerville makes his debut with a collection about masculinity and control
By Martha Bayne
November 3, 2006
“I NEVER HAD a huge accident that put me in the hospital,” says Patrick Somerville. “But I feel like I got hurt so many times when I was a kid—minor to midlevel injuries like breaking my arm, breaking my arm another time, broken fingers. I fell off my bike all the time, and I crashed on skis a bunch too. I had this weirdly violent childhood.” (more. . .)
On the eve of his ninetieth birthday a bachelor decides to give himself a wild night of love with a virgin. As is his habit–he has purchased hundreds of women–he asks a madam for her assistance. The fourteen-year-old girl who is procured for him is enchanting, but exhausted as she is from caring for siblings and her job sewing buttons, she can do little but sleep. Yet with this sleeping beauty at his side, it is he who awakens to a romance he has never known. (more…)
Lydia Kilkenny is eager to move beyond her South Boston childhood, and when she marries Henry Wickett, a shy Boston Brahmin who plans to become a doctor, her future seems assured. That path changes when Henry abandons his medical studies and enlists Lydia to help him invent a mail-order medicine called Wickett’s Remedy. Then the 1918 influenza epidemic sweeps through Boston, and in a world turned upside down Lydia must forge her own path through the tragedy unfolding around her. (more…)
Reviewed by Andrew Seal
Stanley Kubrick, the director of incredible film adaptations of books as varied and complex as Lolita, The Shining, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, once remarked that Patrick Süskind’s Perfume was simply unfilmable. Of course, such judgments have been of little use in preventing directors from trying their hand at adapting other supposedly “unfilmable” novels, such as Ulysses or Tristram Shandy, and so I now find myself anticipating the release of Tom Tykwer’s attempt to prove Kubrick wrong. (more…)
by Jeff Lindsay
Meet Dexter Morgan, a polite wolf in sheep’s clothing. He’s handsome and charming, but something in his past has made him abide by a different set of rules. He’s a serial killer whose one golden rule makes him immensely likeable: he only kills bad people. And his job as a blood splatter expert for the Miami police department puts him in the perfect position to identify his victims. But when a series of brutal murders bearing a striking similarity to his own style start turning up, Dexter is caught between being flattered and being frightened — of himself or some other fiend. (more…)
by Giles Foden
Shortly after his arrival in Uganda, Scottish doctor Nicholas Garrigan is called to the scene of a bizarre accident: Idi Amin, careening down a dirt road in his red Maserati, has run over a cow. When Garrigan tends to Amin, the dictator, in his obsession for all things Scottish, appoints him as his personal physician. And so begins a fateful dalliance with the central African leader whose Emperor Jones-style autocracy would transform into a reign of terror. (more…)