Matthew Selwyn's Blog, page 11

Review: The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis

The Zone of Interest (2014) is Martin Amis’s second novel to tackle the Holocaust. His first, Time’s Arrow , was experimental fiction, but here the story is rooted firmly in the grim reality of Auschwitz; weaving together the lives of a small handful of characters, the novel is a very human look at the day-to-day life of an extermination camp. Three first-person narrators unfurl the story: Angelus ‘Golo’ Thompson (a womaniser and less than committed Nazi), Paul Doll (the largely inept camp Com...

Review: Ours are the Streets by Sunjeev Sahota

Imtiaz Raina is a happily married man, young father, moderate Muslim, and British Asian. He is also a suicide bomber. Well, almost. Ours are the Streets (2011) is Sunjeev Sahota’s debut novel, and the story of Imtiaz, a young man from Sheffield who, following the death of his father, tries to find an identity for himself back in Pakistan – from where his family originate, and some still live. His search for identity brings him to radical Islam, however, and when he returns to Britain he is a...

Review: Capitalism: A Ghost Story by Arundhati Roy

Capitalism: A Ghost Story (2014) is a short collection of polemical essays from Booker prize winning writer, Arundhati Roy. Though they vary in scope, each essay is a biting denouncement of the ravenous capitalism that is consuming modern India, sweeping aside the many that stand in its way. In a country where one hundred people own assets equivalent to a quarter of the country’s GDP, this is an important topic at an important time and, for Roy, everyone and everything is a target, from minin...

Review: Revolution by Russell Brand

Following on from Russell Brand’s now infamous Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman and the special issue of the New Statesman that he edited, Revolution (2014) is Brand’s book-length dissection of capitalist society – an answer to his critics who called for more than sound bites and sweeping statements. So here it is, Brand’s revolution laid out: from debt cancellation to Kundalini yoga, direct democracy to ecological sustainability, this is a sprawling stream of ideas spewed out by the mo...

List: Books Read 2014

Below is a list of all the books I read and reviewed in 2014, a total of 22 reads - a fair bit shorter than my normal count for a reading year. It has, however, been a year when my writing has overtaken my reading (debut novel anyone - have I mentioned it?) and, despite churning out over 100,000 words altogether this year, only a small percentage of those came in the form of book reviews.  Hopefully there's still something here to tickle your reading fancy, however - click on any of the...

Reading Plan: January 2015

It’s been quite a 2014 for me, and 2015 is looking just as big: I hope to have a second novel published to follow my first (out last month - did I not say?), not to mention beefing up the blog a bit with a few more posts over the coming months. I hope your 2015 is looking as rosy! I hope also that you’ve had a wonderful Christmas (it’s not too late to get in the festive mood with my little quiz featuring some of the bestselling books of this year).

So, turkey to one side, New Year’s eve a haz...

Interview: Guy Portman

Guy Portman is a British author. Born in London, he grew up in a world filled with Cold War propaganda. He would later go on to work in academic research and the sports industry, before turning his hand to authorship. His first novel, Charles Middleworth, was released in 2012.

His second novel, Necropolis – the darkly humorous story about a sociopathic council worker named Dyson – was published in April 2014.

You can read my review here: Necropolis by Guy Portman

Dyson is a sociopath very much...

Review: Necropolis by Guy Portman

Necropolis (2014) by Guy Portman is an unusual novel: a hybrid of both transgressive and thriller fiction. Dyson Devereux is the head of burials and cemeteries for Newton Borough council in a London suburb. He is also a sociopath, as the blurb – aping American Psycho ’s – tells us. Living a life detached, Dyson baulks at the painful lack of refinement he sees in all of his colleagues at the council, and – testament to the ubiquitous tastelessness evident in Dyson’s world – the gaudy tributes t...