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August Book Round Up

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August Book Round Up August Book Round Up CRIME: THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER'S WEB - DAVID LAGERCRANTZ Steig Larsson's 'Girl with a Dragon Tattoo' trilogy was a publishing (and film) phenomenon back in 2008/2009, partly because of Larsson's untimely death just before the first book was published. Now the story of Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist is continued in new novels by David Lagercrantz, a former crime reporter from Sweden, with the blessing of Larsson's family but not his partner, Eva Gabrielsson, who has said "It's about a publishing house that needs money, [and] a writer who doesn't have anything to write so he copies someone else." For fans it'll be interesting to discover how the story is continued, for bookshops it'll be intriguing to see if anyone is still interested! Published 27th August. YA: ASKING FOR IT – LOUISE O’NEILL This is a new Young Adult book that everyone is talking about – adults and teens alike. It’s from Irish author Louise O’Neill, whose previous book Only Ever Yours, a satire about how women look and behave, caused a real stir (it was kind of a modern-day Stepford Wives, commenting on physical expectations on young women). Asking For It is about sexual consent in the age of the smartphone. Emma lives in a small town in Ireland. She’s eighteen and beautiful, the most popular girl in school. After a party, she wakes up on her porch and can’t remember what happened. When she goes to school the next day, everything has changed. Photographs were taken at the party and they show, in explicit detail, what happened to Emma that night. It deals with the issue of consent, and consent if you have a promiscuous background. Louise O’Neill grew up in Clonakilty, West Cork. She’s a real talent to be watched. Published 3rd September FICTION: THE GINGER MAN 60TH ANNIVERSARY - J P DONLEAVY Since its first publication in 1955, but banned in Ireland until 1968, more than 40 million copies of J P Donleavy's 'The Ginger Man' have been sold. To celebrate its sixtieth year of publication, and as its author approaches his ninetieth, Dublin publisher, The Lilliput Press, marks the occasion with a new, beautifully enhanced hardback edition. As well as the original text it has a foreword by the actor and director Johnny Depp, who plans to produce a film version; an introduction by novelist Sean O'Reilly; an exchange of letters between Donleavy and the late Arland Ussher; a selection of archival photographs from Dublin and TCD in the early 1950s, and features pages from the original manuscript. The Ginger Man is simply one of the great comic novels of post-war Europe – an anarchic, light-hearted, rambunctious twentieth-century classic following the social and sexual adventures of a footloose American student on the streets and in the pubs of Dublin. CRIME: PRESERVE THE DEAD – BRIAN MCGILLOWAY Detective Sergeant Lucy Black is visiting her father, a patient in a secure unit in Gransha Hospital on the banks of the River Foyle. He's been hurt badly in an altercation with another patient, and Lucy is shocked to discover him chained to the bed for safety. But she barely has time to take it all in, before an orderly raises the alarm - a body has been spotted floating in the river below. The body of an elderly man in a grey suit is hauled ashore: he is cold dead. He has been dead for several days. In fact a closer examination reveals that he has already been embalmed. Troubled and exhausted, Lucy goes back to her father's shell of a house to get some sleep; but there'll be no rest for her tonight. She's barely in the front door when a neighbour knocks, in total distress - his wife's sister has turned up badly beaten. Brian McGilloway is the New York Times bestselling author of the critically acclaimed Inspector Benedict Devlin and DS Lucy Black series. He was born in Derry and is a teacher at St Columb’s College in Derry, where he was Head of English until 2013. An underrated but really brilliant crime writer. His books have been NYTimes best sellers. This is the third Lucy Black novel. FICTION: GENERATION - PAULA MCGRATH The debut book from a new Irish writer, 'Generation' is a short novel that contains a huge amount, taking place over eighty years, three continents and three generations. At its heart is Aine, a recently divorced woman in her thirties who wants some kind of escape from her life in Ireland: from her ex-husband and his pregnant girlfriend, her mundane job and unexciting love life. So she goes to stay for a few weeks on an organic farm near Chicago, with her six-year-old daughter Daisy. The trip doesn't turn out as she imagined it would, and that summer will have unforeseeable consequences for everyone involved. FICTION: A LITTLE LIFE – HANYA YANAGIHARA This is a biggie but it is the one to read this year, whether it wins the Booker Prize or not (it’s the bookie’s favourite). Fits right into the returning trend of ‘the long read’, big big novels that you can fully immerse yourself in. This 800-page book about a group of four friends and follows them over 30 years from their mid-20s into their early 50s in New York. The characters and how they progress through their personal and professional worlds (law, art, acting, and architecture) make up the body of the book. It begins with the four as classmates moving from a small Massachusetts college to New York to make their way. They're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick- witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever. An unsettling meditation on sexual abuse and the difficulties of recovery. NON-FICTION: THE RICH : FROM SLAVES TO SUPER- YACHTS: A 2,000-YEAR HISTORY - JOHN KAMPFNER The Rich is the fascinating history of how economic elites from ancient Egypt to the present day have gained and spent their money. Starting with the Romans and Ancient Egypt and culminating with the oligarchies of modern Russia and China, it compares and contrasts the rich and powerful down the ages and around the world. What unites them? Have the same instincts of entrepreneurship, ambition, vanity, greed and philanthropy applied throughout? As contemporary politicians, economists and the public wrestle with the inequities of our time - the parallel world inhabited by the ultra-wealthy at a time of broader hardship - it is salutary to look to history for explanations. This book synthesises thousands of years of human behaviour and asks the question: is the development of the globalised super-rich over the past twenty years anything new? HISTORY: FRACTURE: LIFE AND CULTURE IN THE WEST 1918-1938 BY PHILIPP BLOM This book is for all the history buffs out there and takes a fascinating approach to the two great wars in that it looks at the Western crisis of values in the interwar years. It creates a dystopian opening talking of dust storms and 100mph winds, and a drought that parched cities and plains of the United States in the early 1930s. In the Soviet Union, things were worse still. There was a famine in Ukraine thought to have killed eight million people. Philipp Blom writes ‘these were not so much years of peace as a continuation of war by other means”. He writes about the inevitability of the Second World War following on from those interwar years. Unexpected details emerge - and Blom has a talent for finding the detail – such as Hollywood producer Sam Goldwyn trying to get Sigmund Freud to write a love story for a movie. Wouldn’t you love to have read that love story? The picture of chaos and misery mixed with the fast-paced lives of the Bright Young Things of the era creates a nightmarish quality that is frightening. SCI-FI: Armada - Ernest Cline Zack Lightman is staring out of his classroom window when he spots a UFO. But when he realises that the UFO is an exact replica of one that features in a popular computer game he realises that something very strange is going on. Ernest Cline made his name with clever pop-culture sci-fi novel 'Ready Player One' and if you like science-fiction with a dash of quirky humour then you'll enjoy this. TRUE CRIME: WHITEY – DICK LEHR AND GERARD O’NEILL A definitive overview of the mafia boss Whitey Bolger, from the writers of Black Mass, which is released as a film starring Johnny Depp as Bolger next month. The authors draw on previously classified material here, telling Bolger’s story from his hell-raising childhood on the streets of South Boston to his pact with the FBI and then 15 years on the run as one of the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted people.
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