The Guardian's Blog, page 225

Reader reviews roundup

A pearl without price and a gem from the orient – plus an outburst of musketeering

Lakis is in enthusiastic mood once more. After suggesting last week that Deborah Levy's Swimming Home is "as good as it gets" he's back this week to hail Kyung-Sook Shin's Please Look After Mother as simply "a masterpiece". But why's it so good?

"This is one of those books that are so full of grace that they take the reader's breath away; not only for their plot, but mostly because of their prose; a prose that's lyrical, dream-like, poetic, that sounds nostalgic and melancholic at the same time."

Shin unfolds the extraordinary story of an ordinary woman who vanishes while waiting for a train through the memories of a family which has always taken her for granted, "an unmovable presence in their reality who would remain there forever", Lakis continues, but gives much more than that.

"The author doesn't only offer the reader an amazing story but she also manages to speak directly to his soul. Wake up, she seems to say to him, and take a good look at life and the people that surround you. Recognise who you are and to whom you owe that."

It's no surprise that Please Look After Mother won the Man Asian literary prize, he continues, but he is puzzled that it received so little attention from the western media. "Is it because Shin is not Murakami?" he asks. "Or is it simply because our western arrogance doesn't allow us to recognise a gem when we see one?"

Another happy reader is Knight03, who returns to John Steinbeck's "beautifully lyrical" 1947 novella, The Pearl.

The story of a poor family whose lives are changed by the discovery of a pearl in the ocean, Knight03 risks a couple of spoilers in revealing that "like the tide coming in" evil follows in its wake. The modest aspirations of the family – a little education, a church wedding – make the conclusion "even more heartbreaking".

"They barely asked for anything at all. And they ended up with less than they started with."

The pearl is not evil in itself, nor does the wickedness reside in mankind, says Knight03. "It is the evil desires of those who lust after the pearl; it is the wrong actions men take in their lives which make them evil."

Now I don't know about evil, but it seems to me there have been a few "wrong actions" in this week's reader reviews. Glancing down the list of our latest reader reviews – complete with reviews for The Three Musketeers, The Man in the Iron Mask, The Count of Monte Cristo and all – I thought for a moment that we might be welcoming another Dumas fan to the site. But no ... "If you also enjoy Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo, have a look at the brilliant new sequels ... " Should anyone feel the need for further sequels beyond the heartbreaking Le Vicomte de Bragelonne they're available on Kindle, apparently ...

As ever, if I've mentioned your review in this article, please get in touch at richard.lea@guardian.co.uk and I'll send you a treat from the cupboards. Thanks for all your reviews.

Richard Lea
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

What book would you give away for World Book Night?

James Bond rubs shoulders with Long John Silver on the list of titles to be given away on World Book Night 2013

Love it or hate it, World Book Night is back, with a third book giveaway planned for Shakespeare's birthday on the 23 April.

There's an air of the event pulling in its horns a little, with organisers planning to distribute only 500,000 books in the UK in 2013 – half as many as in previous years. Book-givers, who can sign up at worldbooknight.org, are to receive only 20 copies of their chosen title. Only. That's still a hefty pile of books. And if survey results suggesting that 95% of givers felt they had been "quite or very successful" at reaching those "who don't regularly read", then that's a whole lot of new readers.

It's intriguing to compare the UK list (below), with the list in the US – though it doesn't look like the German list has been published yet. In the UK, blue chip fiction is represented by Sebastian Barry and Rose Tremain – in the US, it's Margaret Atwood and Jesmyn Ward. Britain has James Bond, but America has John Grisham. Treasure Island sits opposite Mark Twain.

Any list that puts Jeanette Winterson cheek by jowl with Judge Dredd must be doing something right, but if you could summon up 20 copies of any book under the sun, what would you choose to convince non-readers of the joys of reading?

UK titles for World Book Night 2013

The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry (Faber)

Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman (RHCB)

The Girl with the Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier (HarperCollins)

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde (Hodder)

Casino Royale by Ian Fleming (Vintage)

A Little History of the World by EH Gombrich (Yale)

The White Queen by Philippa Gregory (Simon & Schuster)

Little Face by Sophie Hannah (Hodder)

Damage by Josephine Hart (Virago)

The Island by Victoria Hislop (Headline)

Red Dust Road by Jackie Kay (Picador)

Last Night Another Soldier… by Andy McNab (Transworld)

Me Before You by Jojo Moyes (Penguin)

Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness (Walker)

The Reader by Bernhard Schlink (Orion)

No 1 Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith (Little, Brown)

Treasure Island by RL Stevenson (Penguin)

The Road Home by Rose Tremain (Vintage)

Judge Dredd: The Dark Judges by John Wagner (Rebellion)

Why be Happy When You Could be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson (Vintage)

World Book NightFictionRichard Lea
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Why the 2012 World Fantasy awards are a triumph

When Osama beat Stephen King's 11/22/63 at this year's World Fantasy awards, it was not only a win for Lavie Tidhar, but a huge victory for his small book-publisher, PS Publishing, too

When the World Fantasy award for best novel went to Lavie Tidhar's groundbreaking Osama at the weekend, it was a triumph on a number of levels.

First, of course, getting the gong at the World Fantasy convention in Toronto was a validation of Tidhar's determination to stretch the boundaries of the genre. Osama is a stunning novel set in an alternate reality where Osama Bin Laden is the anti-hero of a series of thrillers penned by a reclusive writer. There are shades of Philip K Dick's The Man in the High Castle, a resonance also spotted by Damien G Walter who waxes effusive about Osama here.

But the success of Osama – it finished ahead of stiff competition from Stephen King's 11/22/63, George RR Martin's A Dance With Dragons, Jo Walton's Among Others and Christopher Buehlman's Those Across the River – also gives us cause to celebrate the great British small-press outfit that published it.

Presciently though picked up by Solaris for a mass-market edition, Osama was first published in October 2011 by PS Publishing, a house based on the East Yorkshire coast that has been putting out high-quality, limited-edition books by some of the biggest names in science fiction, fantasy and horror since 1999.

In an age where even precious books have been reduced to collections of digitised code to be transmitted across the ether at the touch of a button and stored, thousands at a time, as ephemeral concepts upon slim machines, PS Publishing delights in crafting books for the connoisseur. More than that, they bring to readers books that would not normally see the light of day – either because of their sheer edginess (in the case of Tidhar's Osama), or their size – PS Publishing has something of a specialisation in novellas, those not-quite-full books frowned upon by the mainstream publishing industry.

This willingness to take chances on two fronts has earned dividends for PS Publishing, which has an astonishing roster of big names on its back catalogue: China Miéville, Michael Moorcock, Adam Roberts, Ray Bradbury, Joe Hill ... and his dad, a chap called Stephen King.

In the interests of transparency, I confess to having a dog in this fight – though a much smaller one than the titans of the genre listed above. A few years ago, I submitted a short story on spec to PS Publishing's quarterly digest anthology, Postscripts. PS founder Peter Crowther emailed back within two hours to say he was not only taking the story, but he'd just been off to post the cheque. I doubt I'll ever get such a quick response again in my life.

Crowther should probably receive a personal award, for being one of the nicest, most enthusiastic people in the genre, alongside the slew of gongs PS Publishing has picked up in the past 13 years. Infectiously animated about his work, he comes across as what he is: a tireless promoter of quality fiction that would probably never see the light of day without him. He's also no slouch with the pen himself: his latest book, Darkness Falling, was published last year by Angry Robot.

In an age where bigger is said to be better, faster is foremost and commerciality is king, both readers and writers owe Crowther and PS Publishing a huge debt for his determination to step back and make quality a watchword, in the process bringing books such as Tidhar's Osama to public attention. And the best way to pay that debt is to go and buy something from them, to ensure the admirable ethos of this little house punching well above its weight continues for a long time to come.

FantasyDavid Barnett
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Ko Un's First Person Sorrowful offers a window into an extraordinary life | Alison Flood

Ko Un's highly personal brand of poetry has broken new ground in Korea – reading his first British collection, it's easy to see why

Ko Un, Korea's most famous poet, ended an interview on Saturday not with a poem, but a song. This octogenarian stood up in front of a room full of people and began to sing, at first quietly, then belting it out. There was absolute silence when he finished. It was an extraordinary ending to what had been a glimpse into a most extraordinary life.

Not published in the UK before – although he's better known in America – Ko Un was at the Aldeburgh poetry festival launching his first British collection, First Person Sorrowful, just released by the admirable Bloodaxe Books. He's not a poet I'd previously known much of beyond his obligatory yearly mention as one of the frontrunners for the Nobel, but I've spent the past few days engrossed in First Person Sorrowful, and in what I've learned about the poet himself.

What a life. Ko Un told us about what first moved him to become a poet – and in particular to write the personal poetry which has broken new ground in Korea, and which includes the astonishing, 30-volume Maninbo (Ten Thousand Lives), part of an oath made in prison that every person he had ever met would be remembered with a short poem.

"Until I was in my later teens I had no idea I might be a writer," he said though his translators, Brother Anthony of Taizé and his wife, Lee Sang-Wha. "I was a child like all the children in my home village – I slept, woke up, ate, worked, just an ordinary kid." Then, walking home one evening, came a revelation: "It was already dark, when suddenly I saw something gleaming. It was a volume of modern poems."

The book was the leper-poet Han Ha-Un's first published volume, and it wrought a huge change in the boy who found it. "It was poems written by a leper," explained Ko Un. "He'd written these very sad, mournful poems as he roamed about the Korean countryside. Somebody had bought it and then abandoned it by the roadside. I felt it had been left there for me. I read it and read it all night through. That morning, I woke up and vowed to myself that I would write poetry like this man, and that's when I became somebody who was determined to write poems relating to my own life."

Then, the Korean war began. "Half of my generation died," Ko Un continued. "And I survived. So there was a sense of guilt, of culpability, at being a survivor. They had all died, and here I was, still alive. So from that time on I'm inhabited by a lament for the dead. I have this calling to bring back to life all those who have died. Freud says the dead have to be left dead. Derrida said the dead are and should be always with us, not abandoned. I'm on Derrida's side. I bear the dead within me still, and they write through me. Sometimes it's not me writing at all. It's they who are writing, they are there, ahead, a live presence in what lies ahead. This world of ours in the end is one huge cemetery."

In a newsletter given away at the festival, Brother Anthony revealed more about Ko Un's life. Witnessing the massacres of the Korean war at first hand "left him deeply traumatised. He tried to pour acid into his ears to block out the 'noise' of the world, leaving one ear permanently deaf." He became a Buddhist monk, publishing his first collection in 1960 and leaving the Buddhist clergy in 1962. He began drinking heavily, developed chronic insomnia, became a literary figure in Seoul.

In early 1970 he drank poison, but survived. Ko Un explained more about what moved him to the political activism that led to four periods in prison. "In earlier times I knew nothing except poetry," he said. "Then, in 1970, I read of how a young worker had set himself on fire and killed himself in the struggle for human rights, and for workers' rights. I had long longed to die, tried to die, and reading that account I compared the death I had been dreaming of with that young man's death, and I began to come in contact with and encounter the reality which brought about his death: dictatorship, and all the horrors related to such authoritarian regimes. So I began to cast away the kind of death I had been carrying with me. I began to go out into the streets, in demonstrations against the regime, so of course I ended up in prison."

His third period in prison, when he was accused of crimes including rebellion and conspiring to overthrow the state, was the "most critical", he said. "I was in prison, and confronted with the possibility I might die, so in that situation the only thing left to me was the past. That's when the idea of Maninbo began to arise."

Now 80, Ko Un has published more than 150 volumes of poetry, and you can read some of Brother Anthony's translations here, or take a look at the Bloodaxe collection. Andrew Motion, in his introduction, calls him "a major poet, who has absolutely compelling things to say about the entire history of South Korea, and equally engrossing things to say about his own exceptionally interesting life and sensibility", adding that he's "his own man, and a most eloquent citizen of the world".

Lucky us, then, to have the chance to read him at last.

PoetryAlison Flood
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Horror: a genre doomed to literary hell?

The status of the crime and SF genres is being raised by great modern writers. Why hasn't horror received the same treatment?

For a while now, so-called "literary" and "genre" fiction have been moving from outright opposition to a cautious rapprochement. Literary writers such as Jonathan Lethem, Donna Tartt and Michael Chabon increasingly deploy tropes and images from genre, while genre writers have upped their stakes considerably in terms of complexity, moral resonance and style. Sophie Hannah, Josh Bazell and Denise Mina have reinvented crime fiction; Charles Yu, Iain M Banks and M John Harrison have given a literary uplift to science fiction; while China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer and Kelly Link have done the same for fantasy. But horror – the third aspect of "speculative fiction" – has had markedly less success. Yet it might be the genre most tractable to our contemporary concerns.

Horror has its classics – Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker, for example, though both are better known from celluloid than paper. (Victor Frankenstein, in the novel, doesn't use lightning to animate the creature; Dracula is perfectly able to walk abroad at noon on the page.) Horror has its early 20th-century pioneers – MR James and HP Lovecraft, both, in their own way, traumatised by modernity itself. Look at James's "Casting the Runes", in which an advertisement in an "electric tram" brings the first shudder, or how a doll's house, a mezzotint or hotel bedsheets can become eldritch. This is even clearer in Lovecraft: in "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward", he writes: "He tried to drive them out, and repeated the Lord's Prayer to himself, eventually trailing off into a mnemonic hodge-podge like the modernistic Waste Land of Mr TS Eliot." Futurism, cubism, Einstein, Pluto, non-Euclidean geometry … all are entry points for the unspeakable. On top of this, Lovecraft possesses less-than-palatable racial beliefs, which are unfortunately not an isolated phenomenon. A great many horror novels are reactionary, prurient and misogynistic. A gradual detoxification has taken place, but the genre still languishes.

I am fond of Stephen King's novels, but he regularly fails to nail the dismount: Under he Dome was claustrophobic and compelling, but the final reveal was bathetic and frustratingly arbitrary: it didn't seem to matter whether a demon or an alien was responsible. Granta recently devoted an issue to horror, with work by Will Self, Roberto Bolaño and Don DeLillo, but its relationship with supernatural horror was at times (especially in the extract from Paul Auster's memoir) oblique. There have been a few worthy attempts at modern horror: I'd recommend Robert Jackson Bennett's Mr Shivers and Will Elliott's The Pilo Family Circus. Good as they are, though, clowns and hobos are almost nostalgically fearful. Perhaps the most successful attempt was Mark Z Danielewski's House of Leaves, a book which self-consciously integrated the "hauntology" of French theory into an avant-garde puzzle box. The person who comes closest to a "new horror", to my mind, is Brian Evenson: Altmann's Tongue is far more frightening than anything Bret Easton Ellis could create.

Nevertheless, I'm convinced horror can raise its game. Our postmodern, capitalism-in-crisis, media-saturated world is ripe to describe it anew. Our very language seems to demand it. A mortgage, literally, is a death grip. Negative equity means being haunted by your own house. Corporations have legal personhood: they can be held responsible for criminal actions and claim "human" rights, but ironically they have no body. PR and political spin are referred to as "dark arts". Your computer can be a zombie, "possessed" by a Trojan virus. Charley Douglass started to make canned laughter in 1953 – and it's still in use. Every episode of Friends is accompanied by the cachinnation of the dead.

Theodor Adorno, in Minima Moralia, wrote that "just as in a short-circuit, sparks are scattered, in reality one delusion communicates like lightning with another. The points of communication are the overwhelming confirmations of persecution fantasies which, mocking the invalid with being right, only plunge him deeper into them. The surface of life then at once closes together again, proving to him that things are not so bad and he is insane. He subjectively anticipates the state where objective madness and individual helplessness merge directly, as when fascism, a dictatorship by persecution maniacs, realises all the persecution fears of its victims. Whether exaggerated suspicions are paranoiac or true to reality, a faint echo of the turmoil of history, can therefore only be decided retrospectively. Horror is beyond the reach of psychology." Might this be a starting point for the redemption of the horror genre?

HorrorFictionStephen KingStuart Kelly
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Tips, links and suggestions: Our review list and the books you are reading today

Your space to tell us what you're reading and what you'd like to see covered on the books site, plus our review list

After a week's break, TLS is back. Here's our customary a roundup of the books you were reading last week and what you thought of them:
DanHolloway:

I have just finished Adelle Stripe's third solo poetry collection, Dark Corners of the Land. Rooted in her native Yorkshire, this is nature poetry but not as we usually see it in the UK (somewhat more like the dark writing of the land in Irish writers like Conor McPherson). Both beautifully evocative and deeply unsettling, it is a book that balances the tension of feeling totally rooted in a place that one both loves and is disgusted by, and feeling utterly adrift in the world.

Zakelius:

I halfway through The Twelve by Justin Cronin and yes, it's just as infuriating with its time-line as the Passage was. Still compelling reading, though.

conedison:

I'm currently slaloming in and out of Wallace Stegner's and Saul Bellow's so-called 'lesser works' - just finished Bellow's, A Theft, and have just begun Stegner's, Recapitulation. The pure pleasure of being in such sure hands - each page, whether quiet or dazzling - sheer quality. In literary terms, with them, I feel as secure as if I were again a child, sleeping on my father's tummy.

mullets:

Well I began re-reading Le Carre's Tinker, Tailor..' (shamefully, for the 3rd time) after reading an article on the Guardian about genre and whether it matters; because I'm a bit of a war nerd I hunkered down and tried desperately to get into Tim O'Brien's 'If I Die in a Combat Zone' after I'd finished 'Despatches' by Michael Herr but I find it - if I'm honest - a little dull, it's on hiatus; I'm quite happy and thoroughly enjoying Jonathan Franzen's 'Freedom' (the newest book I'm reading at 2 years old) and hated every minute of the most recent novel I finished James Frey's 'Bright Shiny Morning'. It's been out a long while but if you stumble across it, don't bother. Rather irritating and prose and half-baked stories that are as cliche as.. er.. sliced bread.

Tell us what you're reading at the moment in the thread below, or if you've an idea for something we should cover on the site, please let us know.

Here's a list of some of the books we'll be writing about and reviewing this week with the usual caveat that it's of course subject to last minute changes.

Non fiction

• How Music Works by David Bryne
• A World at War by Taylor Downing
• The Influencing Machine by Mike Jay
• The Eagle Unbowed by H Kochanski
• The Million Death Quake by R Musson
• Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks
• Dickens Scandal by Michael Slater
• Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-doctors in Victorian England by Sarah Wise
• Rod by Rod Stewart

Fiction

• Astray by Emma Donoghue
• Two Brothers by Ben Elton
• Dear Life by Alice Munro
• The Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally

Hannah FreemanGuardian readers
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Has Barack Obama rediscovered the poetry of his 2008 campaign in time?

After failing to find a presidential language to match the inspiring rhetoric of his first tilt at the White House, Obama has found his voice again in the closing days of the 2012 campaign

On the eve of the 2008 US primary campaign, I wrote an Observer piece about "the most open, volatile (and exciting) race [for Republicans and Democrats] in years".

Republicans were split between Romney, Giuliani and the maverick outsider, John McCain. Democrats had a choice between Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and the more or less unknown Barack Obama. For both parties, the race was so close that, as I put it, "even a book could make a difference".

So I sat down and read – well, skimmed – 14 campaign memoirs. It was not an uplifting experience.

What, you might ask, did you think? Indeed, what do books have to do with politics? The interesting thing is that, in the US, quite a bit. Almost all presidential contenders publish some autobiography or other, to tell their "personal story".

Some 13 of these titles, many of them ghosted, made grim reading, a horrible mixture of posturing, tubthumping and outright mendacity. Even Clinton's Living History was a big disappointment.

But there was an exception. The unknown Barack Obama was the author of not one, but two, bestselling titles: Dreams from My Father (1995) and The Audacity of Hope (2006). I described the former as "fearless, moving, and beautifully written", and the latter as possessing "authenticity and freshness", even though it had obviously been put together in a hurry for the campaign.

About Obama's writing, I wrote he had a gift for language "equal to Jefferson, Kennedy and, yes, Lincoln". That was too much, of course – in those heady days, hyperbole and Obama went together like ham and eggs – but I'm not ashamed to recall that I tipped Obama as one who "may yet be in their company". Perhaps, I said in the New Year of 2008, "the American people will decide that Barack Obama should be the next resident of the White House".

A year later, he was.

Obama campaigned in poetry, and gave the American people both a vision and a narrative. But he governed in prose and, despite some notable achievements, failed to find a presidential language to equal his campaigning rhetoric. Obama's words of hope – "Yes, We Can" – were simple and uplifting, universally intelligible and plugged into the American Dream. He moved people to tears, but only as a candidate. As president, the tears have been of frustration.

Obama's Rose Garden comments and his presidential-bully pulpit speeches have occasionally soared – for example, after the assassination attempt on Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. In general, however, Obama has not managed, or perhaps not bothered, to sell his presidency in the way he sold his campaign – on a thermal of uplifting prose. Possibly, the reality of power was too complex, or too absorbing, to be reduced to the kind of narrative that plays well to the American people. That was Bill Clinton's gift. Obama did not master it.

For four years, then, Obama the writer became lost in the travails of Obama the Democrat politician. His absolute low point, rhetorically speaking, was the Denver debate in which he appeared bored, listless, irritated and unfocused. It was almost as if he knew that campaign poetry was a blind alley he would not go down again.

But his gifts as a writer and a speaker remain. His response to superstorm Sandy shows he can still rise to the occasion, with thrilling language. That, I think, is why Europeans especially cherish him. I am probably not alone in wondering what his presidential memoirs will be like, when the time comes to put pen to paper.

Today, thankfully, it looks as if that moment is still four years away. On the eve of his probable re-election, as one of his English admirers, who has not had to live in the poisoned atmosphere of Tea Party America, I hope that, in a second term, in the service of "common hopes and common dreams", he will remind us that literature and politics can become bipartisan allies, not bitter adversaries. Yes, it would be nice to see a bit of poetry in the president's second term. It would be nice if Obama would devote some time to giving some rhetorical uplift to the gritty business of everyday life.

Autobiography and memoirBarack ObamaUS elections 2012United StatesUS politicsDemocratsRobert McCrum
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Reader reviews roundup

Praise for Jonas Jonasson's tall tale and a 'masterful' novel from Deborah Levy

"I am not a laugh-out-loud reader of funny books," announces AnnSkea, adding that "this book is not my usual sort of reading", but she's clearly delighted with Jonas Jonasson's The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared.

"The plot is, like the title, ingenious. Allan Karlsson is about to celebrate his 100th birthday in an Old Folks home in Sweden but he doesn't want a party. 'The Mayor will be there. The press will be there. But, as it turns out, Allan will not...' As it turns out, too, Allan has never in his life done anything he didn't want to do. Not for long, anyway. So he climbs out of his bedroom window, heads for the local bus-station, buys himself a fifty-crown ticket on the next bus out and, taking a suitcase with him which has been left in his charge by a young man who urgently needed to use the rest-room, he rides off into the sunset (so to speak)."

Of course the suitcase is full of money, Ann continues, "And so the chase begins." Jonasson weaves Karlsson's amazing life story into a pursuit full of gangsters, thieves and baffled policemen – it turns out that Karlsson has played a part in the major events of the 20th century "including the Spanish Civil War and the Manhattan project".

It's "ingenious, cleverly done and fast-paced", but will this tall tale be enough to convert Ann to comic fiction? She's not saying ...

Another satisfied reader is Lakis, who reckons Deborah Levy's Booker-shortlisted novel Swimming Home is "As good as it gets."

"What did I like about this novel?" he asks. "Well, it would be easier to say what I did not like: the fact that I wasn't the one to write it."

The story seems quite simple at first, he continues, but there's more to Levy's group of holidaymakers than meets the eye.

"To start with the poet he is an egocentric man who's in love with his own voice and a womanizer. His wife doesn't really like him anymore, and seems to be looking for a way to break up the marriage. The other couple hides a big secret, and as for the daughter, well, to put it in a Chinese proverb way: she was cursed to be born in interesting times, and under unusual circumstances."

The arrival of the "almost ethereal" Kitty Finch makes things even more complicated, the tension ratcheting up with every "masterful" turn of phrase. But it's not just the "beautiful language" which makes Swimming Home "one of the best books of the year", according to Lakis. Levy builds towards a climax which takes Lakis completely by surprise, leaving him wistfully thinking "That's how you write a story; a very good story".

Thanks for all your reviews. As always, if your review has been mentioned in this article, please get in touch with Sarah Crown at sarah.crown@guardian.co.uk and we'll send you a treat from the cupboards.

Fiction
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Dress like a fictional hero? I can't find my place

Banana Republic has launched an Anna Karenina collection for the autumn season. Is it time to throw out last year's Miss Marple tweeds?

Love Tolstoy? Enamoured, like Vronsky, with Anna Karenina? Then you will be relieved to know that Banana Republic's Anna Karenina collection, based on the film starring Keira Knightley as the (spoiler alert) doomed heroine, has just launched. Now we can all channel 19th-century Russian high society by wearing a bit of fake fur.

Not me, though. I've always found Anna Karenina impossible to like. This is I'm sure part of Tolstoy's point, but I've no desire to dress like her. Ditto Miss Marple – apparently the inspiration behind a popular Japanese clothing line, and good god, scrolling down the Flavorwire piece shows the Brontës, the Marquis de Sade and even Ayn Rand have proved inspirational to fashion designers. And so has Márquez. To stand out among the phoney fashionistas, meanwhile, you can also pick out a pair of Catcher in the Rye sneakers.

Rejecting all of these, it makes me wonder if there is a novel that I'd like to be inspired by, sartorially. I'm in the middle of Ian Rankin's latest, Standing in Another Man's Grave, but I'm not sure John Rebus's look is the one for me. Neither are the corsets and frills of the past, the jewels and fur of 19th-century Russia. So I wonder – and I write this from home, in an old T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms – if there's a certain post-apocalyptic chic I might be able to pull off, inspired, perhaps, by The Road or The Stand? Or, in honour of the upcoming film, if there's a hobbit look I could attempt? Going bare foot doesn't seem like a good idea in this weather, but I could certainly go for a camouflaging elven cloak …

Leo TolstoyAlison Flood
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

The meaning of Random Penguin

Why is everyone so hot under the collar about 'Random Penguin'?

Publishers swallowing other publishers is nothing new. In the 1980s, you couldn't move for acquisitions – Penguin bought Michael Joseph and Hamish Hamilton; in the 90s, Random House consumed a raft of august lists – Secker & Warburg, Heinemann, Methuen in a fire sale by Reed Elsevier. Tindal Street Press, the independent champion of Booker shortlisted authors, was bought by Profile Books only this week. So why is everyone so hot under the collar about "Random Penguin" (as it is now known in the trade), announced this week?

Because it's a game-changer. Or it's business as usual. It depends on whose side of the fence you are on. The CEOs are selling us the vision of sharing costs in order to "invest more for their author and reader constituencies and to be more adventurous in trying new models". Publishers have been criticised for doing neither for too long, so forgive me if I wait to see the results before applauding this promise. Big publishers do not make bad publishers, they tend to manage projects in small teams, working on individual titles, but the consequence of a merger is always a rationalisation of the business – a way to cut costs (warehouses combined and sold off, staff doubling-ups eliminated, skills pooled). Authors will be watching carefully for any dilution of the very things for which Penguin and Random are known: excellence in copy editing, design and innovative marketing.

Will the merger increase the leverage with Amazon? Perhaps. But, global bestsellers are not the preserve of the conglomerates, as Quercus's successful publishing of Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy proved (and before that, Bloomsbury's Harry Potter series). However big you are, you can't publish everything. Since the eruption of 50 Shades and Pearson's acquisition this year of self-publishing giant Author Solutions, cracks in the model have began to show. Self-publishing turned from ugly cousin to favourite step-son overnight. The positive upshot is that, finally, publishing has turned its attention back towards the author. They can come from anywhere!

I expect more talk of consolidation in the coming months as the challenge from Amazon grows, the decline of high street chains becomes too hard to ignore and ebook pricing drops even further (can it?). Agencies will also consolidate and provide a bigger platform for their clients in response to this changing scene. At Curtis Brown we have doubled in size, produced two in-house movies and set up a creative writing school; United Agents acquired AP Watt this month and smaller agencies are looking for safe harbour in the storm. If the new publisher decides it is too big to listen to the author, too powerful to hear new voices and too profit driven to understand risk, the publishing community may well witness another seismic event before long – the demise of the publisher.

• Jonny Geller is an agent at Curtis Brown

PenguinRandom HousePublishingJonny Geller
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds