Looking for your next page-turner? Here’s our guide to the best books to read.
The Heart in Winter
Kevin Barry
This isn’t Barry at his best, but it can’t be faulted for not wanting to please. It’s a western set in 1890s Butte Montana, “a town of whores and chest infections”, and features two dodgy characters with debts to pay and no morals who fall for each other, then run off towards San Francisco with bounty hunters on their tail.
Stories of Ireland
Brian Friel
This is Friel as short story writer, a collection of his work, much of it for The New Yorker, selected by him and his widow. It’s a wonderful evocation of a vanished Ireland and for lovers of his plays there are sketches here of characters later realised in drama. What a wonderful writer he was.
Gabriel’s Moon
William Boyd
If you like a 1960s thriller — and there was no better backdrop than the Cold War — this one introduces a new Boyd hero, Gabriel Dax, whose taped interview
with the assassinated leader of the Democratic Republic of the Congo turns out to be very hot property indeed. Look, it’s not James Bond, but it’s set in 1960 and there’s sex, assassins and a hot hero. Okay?
On Wars
Michael Mann
This is not just an ambitious study of war through history but an attempt to work out how to avoid it. Dispiritingly, Mann notes that “civilisation makes killing easier, more organised, more legitimate and more efficient”. He doesn’t crack the problem but in trying, he’s given us a sobering account of a human trait that shows no sign of going out of fashion.
The History of England by a Partial, Prejudiced and Ignorant Historian
Jane Austen
This little edition of Jane Austen’s very subjective take on English history is an opportunity to (re)discover one of our author’s lesser-known works. She is very pro Mary Queen of Scots, so very anti Elizabeth I. Her prejudices are so sound. How I love this book.
