To the Hermitage
Malcolm Bradbury
Picador
£6.99
Buy it at a discount at BOL
Unhappily, what turned out to be Bradbury's last novel comes with valedictory prefaces from his friend, David Lodge, and his student, Ian McEwan, that lend an air of solemnity to a fleet-footed, humorous piece of historical fiction. In his own preface Bradbury tells us he will play Baron Haussman with people and geography. Thus he sends Enlightement philosopher Denis Diderot to the court of Catherine the Great and keeps a bunch of modern academics at sea for an unfeasibly long 250 page ferry trip from Stockholm to St Petersburg. Bradbury's digressions do not make for a trim read, but his historical and contemporary tableaux vivants always amuse.
Blackberry Wine
Joanne Harris
Black Swan
£6.99
Buy it at a discount at BOL
Jay Mackintosh is a blocked writer living, unsatisfactorily, with the slightly shrewish Kelly. He hasn't written a decent sentence in years until the day he opens a bottle of home-brewed blackberry wine that invokes Proustian remembrances and renewed creative impulses. Narrated by a bottle of 1962 Fleurie, Blackberry Wine alternates between Jay's childhood adventures on a Yorkshire allotment tilled by Joe, ex-miner, adventurer and wine-maker, and his decision to up sticks for Lansquenet, that fantastical French village where another of Harris inventions runs a sweetshop. Thickly sensuous, wildly indulgent magical escapism: Chocolat lovers will drink deeply.
The Man Who Rode Ampersand
Ferdinand Mount
Vintage
£6.99
Buy it at a discount at BOL
This first part of Mount's "Chronicle of Modern Twilight" has been republished to coincide with the appearance of Fairness, the fifth instalment. Mount, when not delving into history, is a keen observer of the post-war Englishman in gentle decline, and a wonderfully slow-paced descriptive writer. Harry, an amateur jockey who once rode Ampersand to Gold Cup victory, now lives from pub to pub and from bet to bet. As he falls further into his cups, his son, Aldous, watches on with amused, occasionally shocked, detachment. There is nothing attention-grabbing about Mount's style, but that is its dependable charm.
Five Miles from Outer Hope
Nicola Barker
Faber
£6.99
Buy it at a discount at BOL
Medve is a six-foot-plus lump of adolescent angst who lives in a half-derelict art-deco hotel off the Devon coast. She is full of tricks and tropes as she describes the summer of 1981 when Soft Cell were in the charts and a ginger-haired stranger turned up in her life. Yes, this is a coming-of-age novel, but Barker gets away with her retelling. Medve is not just physically huge, but also full of the hyperbole that makes teenage feelings and reactions so disproportionate. Sharing her pop culture references does help, but her perversity, bad temper and weird, distorted view of the world, contain immediately recognisable features.
