Authors know everything
On the brass-necked return of a former prime minister...
“A man must not be without shame, for the shame of being without shame is shamelessness indeed.”
Ancient Chinese philosopher, Mencius (second only to Confucius as a sage). I think I know what he's getting at.
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Fire Weather by John Vaillant Sceptre £25
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Not actually out this week – it first appeared on shelves in August – but all over the headlines for winning the coveted Baillie Gifford non-fiction prize on Thursday, Fire Weather is a dramatic education into things that fire has recently taught itself it do using materials found lying around on the climate-warmed floor. The town of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada (pop. 90,000), exists for the sole purpose of petro-chemical extraction from "tar sands" (pretty much what they sound like). In the sub-Arctic, it is supposed to be too cold and damp for local forest fires to receive much encouragement, but in May 2016, what were supposed to be temperatures of fifty degrees or so were more often well over eighty. The boreal forest was also dry from dismal snowfall, and a blaze took hold that defied everything in the firefighting skillset. Fire Weather not only guides readers pulse-quickeningly through the ways in which the flames turned Fort McMurray to debris, but also the new atmospheric tricks it has developed (lightning generation, super-heat that turns cars and houses into bombs, roaring winds that can carry flames and embers over rivers of any width) in order to spread evidence of its ingenuity throughout the region. As author John Vaillant reassured an audience on receiving his £50k prize, "if it can happen there, it can happen anywhere."
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The Strong Words Hot List New cloak and dagger from European crime and thriller specialists |
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5 The Wolf by Samuel Bjork Bantam, £18.99
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Bjork (a singer/songwriter when not writing crime or for the stage), resurrects his classic duo Munch and Kruger (him: older, seasoned; her: young, a good out-of-the-box thinker; both: have demons), to set out the evidence markers on a psycho-returns case. Eight years ago in Sweden, two boys were murdered and their bodies ritually arranged. No one was caught. Now the pattern has been repeated in Norway.
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4 The Snow Girl by Javier Castillo Penguin, £8.99
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From Malaga (a city not known for its snow), Castillo is a former finance guy who felt he'd be better off in thrillers. And seems to be – Netflix have found this. A small child is abducted from the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade in New York. A tenacious investigative journalist (with demons) stays with the case. A big clue – a video of the girl, now eight – arrives five years later.
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3 Yule Island by Johana Gustawsson Orenda, £16.99
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Gustawsson, from Marseille, is a "French-Swedish crime writer", and here shows us an island in Sweden, the ancestral home of a rich family where a woman was murdered nine years ago. An art expert (*spoiler* has demons) arrives to appraise their valuables, but the family avoids her. When another corpse is spotted in the water, a detective (with, yes, demons – he failed to solve the first case) arrives. Art expert and cop pool their investigative talents.
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2 Not Russian by Mikhail Shevelev Europa Editions, £14.99
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One evening in 2015, journalist Pavel Vladimirovich (the author is also a Russian journalist) sits down to watch television reports of a hostage crisis in a church outside Moscow. His blood runs cold when he hears his name read out by one of the terrorists – an old acquaintance who wants to Pavel to negotiate. Their respective paths into the print and terror industries are backfilled to reveal the paucity of routes to stand up against the soul-sapping Kremlin.
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1 Snow Fall by Jørn Lier Horst Michael Joseph, £18.99
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Former cop Horst recalls to duty the conscientious (and largely demon-free) Norwegian detective William Wisting to investigate the disappearance of a young compatriot called Astri. She is an armchair detective and part of an online community that was studying the clues surrounding the death of an Australian backpacker in Spain. Astri had got closer than anyone to solving the mystery, then vanished, sending Wisting to ask questions of people operating in a truly lawless environment: the internet.
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The people of Milan say that books are bigger than football. Che idioti!
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Books bigger than football? Don't be ridiculous – nothing is bigger than football. Yet in a new report from BookCity Milan, an event to promote books and reading, the Milanese in 2022 spent €167.2 million on books and "book-related things" (bookmarks?), and just €104.4 million on football.
Unwilling to process this information, I looked up expenditure on books in the UK in 2022, which was £4.3bn (source: Statista), while matchday spending on football in the 2022/23 season was just £807m (source: Deloitte). If you add in broadcasting (largely fan-funded), that adds another £3.156bn, and then commercial revenue is £1.787bn more, but some of that will be shirts (ie bought by fans), and some will be corporate weirdness like official team noodle sponsor.
So you don't need to massage the numbers too violently to make a case that books are at least keeping up with football in terms of consumer expenditure, which I find staggering, especially when you consider that football is never off the telly or out of the news, while books get half an hour or so a week on Radio 4.
How to rectify this promotional imbalance? The book business could really do with getting behind a glossy, six-times-a-year magazine that does nothing but bang on about books with every ounce of enthusiasm available.
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Dear Ed, I completely agree with your choice of The Race to the Future (by Kassia St Clair, John Murray, £20), about the 1907 Peking-Paris rally, as your book of the week. The fact that they were several years too early (no roads, no petrol stations, no tyres etc) didn't deter them, neither did some people's suspicions that this car fad thing wouldn't last. As she writes, "An article in The Economist castigated those who had ‘rushed with such luckless enthusiasm to invest in motor-bus companies’, arguing instead that ‘the horse is coming triumphantly through the ordeal’." Do you have any news on whether the horse will be here any time soon? Alan M, (subscriber)
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(Following the thread that began in Roger Lewis' book Erotic Vagrancy with Richard Burton's father recommending "a spoonful of Vaseline before bed" as a hangover cure, and a subscriber informing us her grandfather used same for his sore throat...)
Ed, my mother also used to use Vaseline as a treatment for sore throats, and said her mother had used it on her when she was at school. She'd put a small amount of Vaseline on a teaspoon, and take another teaspoon of honey and mix them together. Then you'd try and swallow it in a way that sort of coated your throat with the mixture. I don't remember it working, to be honest, but neither do I remember it making me worse. And some people are constantly smearing similar products on their lips, some even made by Vaseline, so it can't be that dangerous. Karen K, London
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Any sightings of horses returning to the transport pool, family stories of petrol -based cold remedies, or other thoughts prompted by recent books, please share them at info@strong-words.co.uk ( Ed)
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How to generate buzz for your latest piece of musical genius...
One of the convictions of the young is that fame and wealth is at hand – if only the public would wake up and notice their musical talent. Yet the shop window is hopelessly crowded – according to Statista, 100,000 new songs are uploaded to Spotify, the market-leading music platform, every single day.
The tremendous new title A Book of Noises, by Caspar Henderson (Granta, £16.99), explains how in 1922 the avant-garde Russian composer Arseny Avraamov ensured that no one would sleep through his most recent composition. At least not in Baku, Azerbaijan, then part of the Soviet Union.
His Symphony of Factory Sirens “deployed several large choirs, the fog-horns of the Soviet Caspian flotilla, two batteries of artillery guns, several infantry regiments, including a machine-gun division, hydroplanes, and all the factory sirens of the city.”
(In other Russian news, if you've not been able to get through to Vladimir Putin... "supposedly Putin himself doesn’t carry a cell phone, so the surest way to get in touch with him is via his bodyguards." From What's Cooking in the Kremlin?, by Witold Szabłowski, Icon Books, £20)
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How to subscribe to Strong Words
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There's a new issue of Strong Words currently standing by to be inked at the printers. It should be with UK subscribers around a week on Wednesday, (although obviously the Royal Mail work to a schedule of their own logic, so let's see what happens.) It's magnificently useful, featuring both the Christmas gift guide and the fifty best books of the year, so if you know of anyone in need of that kind of assistance around the house, get them signed up here: strong-words.co.uk.
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Got a story you’d like to share? Or a question that's bothering you? Send your gossip, tips, literary sightings and intel to info@strong-words.co.uk
For all advertising enquiries info@strong-words.co.ukMost importantly of all, please share this email with anyone you think might like a weekly shot of lively book recommendations. Strong Words needs readers, so use this link to pass it on. Or to sign up to it, go to the website at www.strong-words.co.uk.
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