Penelope Fitzgerald: The Bookshop It is 1959, and widowed Florence Green opens a bookshop in the sleepy Suffolk town of Hardborough. Discovering a strain of quiet obstinacy she doesn’t know she has, she ignores or attempts to sidestep the polite yet determinedly ruthless opposition of a town with minefields of unwritten social rules and hierarchies that will not be gainsaid. I left this in a state of righteous indignation on Mrs Green’s part, for all that she appears to have brought much of her woes upon herself.
Neil Gaiman (ed). Unnatural Creatures Having run out of original Neil Gaiman books to read (though one or two might have escaped my notice) imagine my pleasure at running across this anthology of tales curated by the man himself. It’s hard to pick favourites from a diversity of authors that includes Anthony Boucher and Saki, Nalo Hopkinson and Gahan Wilson, but I feel bound to reserve that honour for Gaiman’s own story The Sunbird, which he says was inspired by E. Nesbit but written in the style of R. A. Lafferty. If the tales have anything in common it is that if the tales themselves do not always have the air of fairy-tale whimsy, it lurks not too far beneath. Delightful.
Peter Frankopan: The New Silk Roads It must be awfully frustrating, being a modern historian like Peter Frankopan. No sooner than you publish a revised version of your 2015 best-seller The Silk Roads, than the world changes again. For this snapshot of the world in 2019 seems already out of date. His analysis of geopolitics centres on the ‘spine’ of Eurasia (between the eastern Mediteranean and China) and contrasts the ‘Belt and Road’ initiatives of China with the chaos of the Trump administration. But that was then. Trump has now been replaced with Biden, and the world has been reshaped once more by COVID. The New Silk Roads reads like a three-year-old feature in The Economist. Nothing wrong with that, but I expected more from a book that promises a glimpse into the future to say more than it was unpredictable and volatile. Because I knew that already.
Carl Chinn: Peaky Blinders The Real Story You will both probably be familiar with Peaky Blinders, a stylish and violent televisual emission dealing with the fictional Birmingham bookmaker and gangster Tommy Shelby and his family in the years after the First World War. Shelby leads a gang called the Peaky Blinders, called after their habit of seeing razors into the brims of their peaked caps for use as weapons. Social historian Carl Chinn, descendant of Brummie backstreet bookies himself, shows that almost everything in the TV series is a myth. The peaky blinders were assorted Birmingham toughs who terrorised the poorer districts of Brum in the 1890s (by 1918 they were all but extinct); nobody sewed razors into peaked caps; and the real story is one of social deprivation, squalor and general thuggery, told here as one long litany of barely digested gobbets of court reports from contemporary newspapers.
Gary Gibson: Stealing Light I was in the mood for a good old-fashioned space opera, and, having read everything that Iain M. Banks and Alastair Reynolds have had to offer, was casting around for something new but in that similar post-gothic vein. Glasgow-based Gary Gibson is a new author for me and on the strength of Stealing Light I’ll be in the market for more. The author has clearly thrown everything into the sensawunda electric kitchen sink — apocalyptic weapons, incomprehensibly ancient alien civilisations, amazing technology, a majestic plot, exotic sex, lashings of violence, and a feisty but flawed heroine who never gives up. Wonderful stuff. If you like that sort of thing. Which I do.
