The Guardian's Blog, page 87

Guardian US picks: the books we most enjoyed in 2014

The staff of Guardian US share their most satisfying reads this year from mystery novels to memoirs to national security reportage

Who knew the United Nations could be so exciting? Murder, intrigue and a beguiling protagonist make Adam LeBor’s international thriller The Washington Stratagem a gripping and enticing read.

Ed Pilkington, chief reporter (@Edpilkington)

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Bestselling books of 2014: did the booksellers get it right?

What effect did Super Thursday have on book sales, and how well did eight leading retailers and pundits fare in predicting the top titles of the year?

• Readers turn over a new leaf as celebrity sales stutter

• ‘Amazon-free’ Christmas campaign diverts reported £5m worth of sales from online retailer

• Retailers’ predictions tracked through the autumn

Super Thursday, Black Friday, Panic Saturday, Cyber Monday: if you believe in the power of constructed celebrations of consumerism, almost every day of the week has been a major Christmas event this year. In particular, Black Friday – imported from the US this year as a major discounting day in the UK – promised a surge in Christmas sales.

In an attempt to monitor the Christmas market, we asked seven leading UK retailers – which included large chains and independents – plus the industry journal the Bookseller to predict the season’s bestsellers, and we’ve been monitoring their predictions through the autumn.

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Families in literature: The Nightingales in People for Lunch by Georgina Hammick

If ever there was a cautionary tale for Christmas it’s this classic story of a bereaved family preparing to host a meal for unwanted guests

It is almost thirty years since Georgina Hammick published People for Lunch. I picked it up recently and realised that if ever there were a sympathetic, bittersweet tale for Christmas, or for anyone flinching at the prospect of entertaining at any time of year, the title story in this best-selling debut collection is it.

The family is incomplete. Mrs Nightingale’s husband has died of a heart attack. We first meet her in bed with the family dog, Bone, slumped alongside. The dog is not officially allowed in her bed but is described with an accuracy that suggests she is used to scrutinising him at close quarters: “The left ear was open its flap splayed on the pillow to reveal an intricacy of shiny and waxy pink coils”. Her first pronouncements are: “I don’t like dogs” (untrue) and “I hate being a widow” (true). Her apron announces: “I Hate Cooking” (probably true).

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Reading group: Why The Maltese Falcon is built to last

The powerful prose and plot, the morality and the smouldering Spade … There are many reasons why Dashiell Hammett’s detective novel is such a classic

So said Dashiell Hammett in 1928, writing to the publisher Blanche Knopf. (Thanks to Reading Group contributor JulieRivett for supplying the quote.) That “some day” came around pretty soon. In 1929, he published The Maltese Falcon – and if that isn’t “literature”, I don’t know what is.

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Families in Literature: the Flytes in Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

The narrator of Waugh’s masterpiece falls in love not with a person, but with a whole family and their privileged way of life
• More families in literature

If you read Brideshead Revisited for the first time in your teens (as so many of us do) you can come away with the idea of a Cinderella story: middle-class Charles is scooped up by the happy aristocracy – the deserving poor boy looking longingly through the window is allowed in, gawps at the magnificence, is grateful for the attention, and of course falls in love with Sebastian.

But when you read it again, you see that Brideshead is not a book about Oxford, or homoerotic love, or social climbing: it’s a book about religion – and about families. It is Sebastian who is in love with Charles, jealously wanting to keep him to himself:

I’m not going to have you get mixed up with my family. They’re so madly charming. All my life they’ve been taking things away from me. If they once got hold of you with their charm, they’d make you their friend not mine, and I won’t let them.

I warned you expressly and in great detail of the Flyte family. Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.

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Baddies in books: Rosa Klebb, the spy filled with Ian Fleming's poison

This sinister Soviet agent may be a torturer and an assassin, but Fleming seems to have been most disturbed by Klebb’s sexuality

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You will almost certainly have first encountered Rosa Klebb in the form of Lotte Lenya, Kurt Weill’s muse and wife, now aged 65 but looking agelessly murderous, in the 1965 film of From Russia With Love. You will also, just as certainly, not have forgotten her, whether starched into her ribbon-bedecked military uniform, or, sinisterly disguised as a maid, trying to kick the life out of James Bond with the poison-tipped blades concealed in her shoes - the ultimate stilettoes. Either way, these are horribly kinky performances, although you may not quite be able to put your finger on why if you are watching the movie in the traditional manner (stuffed with turkey and the Queen’s Speech).

All was made frightfully clear, though, in Ian Fleming’s novel. The movie Klebb is a shadow of novel Klebb for the simple reason that the villain’s sexuality could not have been so directly addressed on the screen as on the page, even in 1957, when it was published.

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Families in literature: the March sisters in Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

This classic portrait of an American family living in genteel poverty throws a comfortable quilt over the hardships of Alcott’s own childhood
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We meet the March family just before Christmas of 1862. Mother March – Marmee – works sewing Union Army uniforms. Her 16-year-old daughter Meg is a governess to a wealthy family and her 15-year-old sister Jo is a companion for a rich old relative. Beth, who is 13, has severe social anxiety and is home-schooled, while 12-year-old Amy attends a school of modern mean-girlness. The family employs a cook who does all kinds of household work, but the Marches share the chores. The house is big enough, though shabby, for the family has been genteelly poor since Mr March lost all his money in an unwise loan to a friend; moreover he has volunteered as a chaplain in the Civil War, and is far away in camp. Still, Marmee, who exhorts her daughters to modest virtue, humility, self-sacrifice and sisterly love, will hold them together until Father’s return. The year’s worth of sprightly incidents that follows barely amounts to a plot, the novel reading more like a US television comedy – complete with recurring characters, limited sets, badinage and chat, episodes often ending with a tag-scene moral homily.

I didn’t like the March household at seven, when they were pressed on me as a warm refuge from my own family’s ungenteel poverty – I had a bad reaction to Marmee’s sentimentalised religion, and her belief that the only female vocation is marriage before devoted service to husband and children. It was impossible to dislike Jo, who is author Louisa May Alcott’s self-insertion as a talented literary nerd stomping through a narrow domestic environment. Amy is sharply drawn as a girl who will grow worldly if given the experience; Meg, bound for matrimony, and Beth, doomed to a sanctified death in part two, felt insubstantial, even if they were – as I discovered later – based on Alcott’s sisters. There are a few glimpses of a harsher world outside, as in the opening, when Marmee inspires the girls to give their Christmas breakfast to the children of a destitute immigrant (three of whom later die of scarlet fever offstage), but Alcott pulled a quilt of cosiness – a comforter, as the Americans say – over the Marches. As a child, I couldn’t have explained exactly why they felt phoney, but I was sure there was something much darker to Marmee/Abigail Alcott, and that Jo/Louisa faced more than trivial tribulations.

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Families in literature: finding relations in Redbird Christmas by Fannie Flagg

A heartwarming tale of Alabama life finds an unconventional family in the community of Lost River
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On a wet August afternoon in Brussels nine years ago my husband suggested returning to the English bookshop – there were some science books he had yet to peruse. The shop also bought and sold secondhand books so I took along two novels to sell, and with my three euros bought a nearly-new copy of Fannie Flagg’s Redbird Christmas.

It may have looked like a book for Christmas, but when I dipped into the first couple of chapters on the journey home I was hooked. I barely spoke to my husband until I had finished the novel back home in London that evening. The next day I started reading it again.

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Families in literature: The Chance and Hazard twins in Wise Children by Angela Carter

With its five sets of twins, its mistaken identities and its unlikely coincidences, Carter’s final novel puts the magic into family life

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Two households, both in questionable and vacillating states of dignity. The first is the grand theatrical Hazard dynasty, whose patriarch is the roaring, brooding Melchior Hazard, a Shakespearian ham with a voice “as hot and strong as Bovril”. The second is the scrappy family cobbled together around the identical Chance twins, Melchior’s illegitimate daughters. Dismissed by their celebrity father, they are raised in Brixton by their dead mother’s landlady - a vegan naturist they call Grandma.

In his second household, the heart of the novel, the sisters caper along the breadline through sheer stubbornness. As Dora and Nora Chance grow up, they learn to sing and dance for their supper, and are watched over by a fairy godfather in the form of Peregrine Hazard, their father’s fraternal twin but emotional opposite. An impossibly affable giant of a man, he is the fatherless child’s dream, smothering the girls in gifts and kisses before disappearing on exotic and arcane adventures.

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Amazon 'suppresses' book with too many hyphens

Graeme Reynolds’s novel High Moor 2: Moonstruck was withdrawn when the site decided 100 hyphenated words in 90,000 ‘impacted the readability’ of the book

What is your favourite form of punctuation? Mine is the semicolon. It wouldn’t be my desert island choice – that’d have to be something more boringly prosaic, such as the full stop. But a nice semicolon, properly used, is delicious.

I ask because I am almost too tickled to type at the discovery that an author, one Graeme Reynolds, found his novel withdrawn from Amazon because of his excessive use of the hyphen. Reynolds has written about his inexplicable experience on his blog, but in summary: he released his werewolf novel, High Moor 2: Moonstruck, last March, after paying over £1,000 for professional editing. It’s had over 100 almost entirely positive reviews on Amazon.

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