Michael Johnston's Blog, page 6

‘The Transmigration of Bodies’ by Yuri Herrera

The title of The Transmigration of Bodies by Yuri Herrera is a neat joke that the reader will latch on to as they work their way through this novella [High Wycombe: & Other Stories, 2016, translated by Lisa Dellman]. It’s a short book and worth reading despite it being another sort of apocalyptic vision like …

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‘The Malice of Waves’ by Mark Douglas-Home

The tide has been too long coming in with The Malice of Waves by Mark Douglas-Home [London: Penguin, Michael Joseph, 2016] but he has taken this story at the flood. It’s a cracking yarn with the perfect combination of remote locality, small and suspicious community, jealousy, fear, love and loathing, and a great cast of …

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‘Humboldt’s Gift’ by Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976, the year after Humboldt’s Gift was published [London: Secker & Warburg, 1975] and the two events are certainly connected. However, among many tall American novelists of the 20th century, Bellow was already a towering giant, at least as high as William Faulkner. Our UK …

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Taking a ruler over ‘Sovereign’ by C J Sansom

Sovereign [London: Macmillan, 2006] is book three of the now six-book Shardlake series from the enterprising pen of C J Sansom and it matches up in every way to the others I have read. I still have to get through five and six but I have a feeling I shall do so later this year. …

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‘Letting Go’ by Philip Roth never lets go!

Philip Roth’s writing career extends over more than fifty years but Letting Go was his first full length novel, published in 1962. I have been reading the Penguin edition from 1984. This first novel shows that, way back then, Roth was, as he still is, a talented and versatile writer in complete control of his …

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‘Dark Fire’ by C J Sansom

Sansom’s Tudor thrillers are too tempting to stay away from and Dark Fire [London: Macmillan, 2003] lives up to expectations, indeed goes beyond them. Sansom skilfully interweaves the political and private lives of the 1540s with the imagined rediscovery of dark fire, otherwise known as Greek fire, and the sort of heart-stopping and bloody adventures …

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‘Lunatics, Lovers and Poets’: Twelve Stories after Cervantes and Shakespeare

Lunatics, Lovers and Poets, according to Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, are ‘of imagination all compact’; cut from the same tree, hewn from the same rock, hard to tell apart, who knows! To mark the 400th anniversary year of the deaths of both Shakespeare and Cervantes, the ever-enterprising publisher & Other Stories has published …

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‘The Robber Bride’ by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood demonstrates her many talents in The Robber Bride [London: Virago, 1994] which follows the fortunes of three friends, completely different characters yet who have one thing in common, a mutual friend who has betrayed them all and then, conveniently, got herself blown up and killed in the Lebanon. They attend the funeral ceremony …

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‘Cold Heaven’ by Brian Moore

Cold Heaven [London: Jonathan Cape, 1983] is another of these fascinating and out-of-the-ordinary tales that Brian Moore delivers with great style. Marie is on holiday in France with her doctor husband who has delivered a paper to an international conference. As they relax in the sea off the beach at Nice; she in the pedalo …

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‘A Widow for One Year’ by John Irving

John Irving published A Widow for One Year in 1998 [Random House] so my apologies for not getting round to it sooner. It was certainly worth the wait. The novel is about sex, love and writers but not necessarily in that order. There is a fairly steady flow of sex; some undying and even some …

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