Authors know everything
After a week in which the fugitive Scottish macaque (MacAque?) was returned to its Highland compound...
“I learned the way a monkey learns – by watching its parents.”
King Charles, author of The Old Man of Lochnagar and Elements of Organic Gardening, on the role of monkeys in his preparation for the throne.
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Better Broken Than New by Lisa St Aubin de Terán. Amaurea Press £19.95
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As an eight-year-old, Lisa St Aubin used to walk out of her south London school after register most days, roll under a hedge and land on a railway platform, where she would take the train to Brighton and wander by the sea. That preference for excitement and novelty over other people's rules and regs has been a constant in her life, one that has led to decades of adventure and high drama among bank robbers, revolutionaries, madmen, poets and world class philanderers, including her father, Guyanese writer Jan Carew. Married to a Venezuelan plantation owner/ lunatic at 18, she spent seven wild years managing his Andean estate and its 52 families from a furniture-free mansion while her husband went mad. When it seemed he might kill her, she fled overseas with her daughter, making sure to keep the drama and bohemian eccentricity on a rolling boil, as she moved from empty Scottish castle to ruined Italian palazzo and eventually to the remote coast of northern Mozambique, where machete-wielding home invaders and direct-hit cyclones keep the adrenaline pulsing. Out there, magnificently. Buy this book
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The Strong Words Hot List Care for a story? Five new novels that set January on fire... |
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5. Wellness by Nathan Hill Picador, £20
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After twenty years together, Jack and Elizabeth's marriage is undergoing a possibly permanent drought of magic. Also short of active ingredients are the solutions she retails to clients at her clinic, called Wellness. Having spent years studying the uselessness of health fads, she's now marketing the sugar-water placebos that deliver exactly the same benefits. Can anything in modern life reconnect them? Sex clubs? Support groups? Or is everything now just fraudulent BS? Buy this book
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4. Normal Women by Ainslie Hogarth Atlantic, £16.99
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To Dani, former high school A-lister, the worst that could happen is to move back to her home town. And because her developer husband sees this as his big chance to get ahead, that's exactly what's happened. Feeling like a doomed housewife, she one day discovers “The Temple”. Are these women... prostitutes? But they seem to be enjoying themselves! Not at all sure what's going on, Dani stumbles in, nervously keen to learn more. Buy this book
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3. Rabbit Hole by Kate Brody Bloomsbury, £16.99
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On the tenth anniversary of the disappearance of her sister, Teddy's drug-troubled father takes his life. Cleaning out his “effects”, Teddy finds he may have been deeply enmeshed in conspiracy theories as to what happened to her. When Teddy checks in with the social media busybodies obsessing over the connection she finds they have plenty to say, and gradually finds herself pulled into the vortex of speculation herself. Buy this book
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2. Wild Houses by Colin Barrett Jonathan Cape, £16.99
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In Ballina, a speck of a town in Co. Mayo, Ireland, two hardnut brothers have improvised a business solution to extract a refund for a failed enterprise, by kidnapping the debtor's brother. With the forces of law and order entirely invisible, it is going to fall to sisters and mothers to come up with a counter-plan. For although all concerned appear most confident and belligerent, if this goes wrong there'll be worse than black eyes to show for it. Buy this book
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1. Piglet by Lottie Hazell Doubleday, £16.99
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Piglet has got herself in a right jam with her wedding day approaching. Both families are urging her on like jockeys toward the “happy” day, yet she has ample reason for doubting the calibre of her intended. And her best friend is unavailable for counsel. So as events develop an awful momentum, will Piglet's one true obsession – food – answer her Mayday call, or make everything even worse? Hopefully the latter, obvs. Buy this book
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The modern way, or the way things used to be? You decide...
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Readers will have noticed, and are doubtless dazzled by the technological ingenuity on display, that it is possible to link from this newsletter, via the Strong Words website, to the Amazon page for the specific books recommended, and then buy them immediately.
For providing this service, Strong Words receives a small percentage of the sale price.
One or two students of The Strong Words Sunday Book Club, however, have asked, why Amazon? Why aren't you supporting local bookstores and linking to them, instead of the feeding the giant that has made life for authors and retailers so much the poorer while greedy Jeff Bezos cavorts on his silly yacht?
I link to Amazon because they offer the best affiliate deal, because it's easiest to set up, because that's how most people buy their books and because while I'm sympathetic to the difficulties of the independent bookshop, their travails are no more my problem than my travails are theirs.
However, if the Strong Words community feels they would prefer these links to take them to the local option, rather than the convenient and best-price, but also gluttonous, yacht-funding, author-starving Amazon, then you need to let me know, and I'll apply my technical solution-finding brilliance to switching over.
I'm not faffing with both, so which would you prefer? Make your case at info@strong-words.co.uk.
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Fresh thought on the dreadful first lines in literature debate...
Ed, clearly there's no such thing as a dreadful first line. At least, the line so bad that readers give up straight away hasn't yet been written, has it? Maybe among some of the manuscripts that never made it into print there might be something so appalling or boring or incomprehensible that the person who had to sit through it felt like quitting right there on the first page (and beginning the search for another job), but I bet even they kept going. Anyway, my suspicion is that there is no combination of words sufficiently mediocre to torpedo an entire novel before the first full stop.
David C, (subscriber)
Challenge laid down, readers – have you ever checked out of a book by the end of the first sentence? And do you at least remember what that book was? Offenders, please, to info@strong-words.co.uk
Dear Ed, on your request for examples of “good” and “bad” writing, I don't have any to share. But I do think people who make a point of letting you know that they know the difference and are right every time are sharing an insight into what obnoxious people they are. That awful mixture of snobbishness, conviction that they are an expert and condescension really puts me off such people. And as I think you once said, doesn't it really just boil down to whether you like something or not?
Emily M, (whereabouts unknown)
I quite agree, Emily. Do you like it or don't you is all that really matters. The last thing you need is someone making a display of themselves by getting all connoisseurial over anything. I once wrote a piece of freelance marketing guff for such an individual, who came back and said it was one of the worst pieces of writing he'd ever seen, and knew as much because he had shown it to someone with an English degree. He may have been right, but putting forward “someone with an English degree” didn't reflect too well on his own standards of evidence. And he had the most terrible breath. Ed.
More suggestions on how to tell the difference between “good” and “bad” writing, whether it matters and the correct way to tell someone their breath is way off, please, to info@strong-words.co.uk. Plus! We are still looking for anyone who has found a practical use for poetry.
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Valuable life lessons from an old gangster...From a book lying around on my desk, Michael Shnayerson's biography of Bugsy Siegel, the man who “built Las Vegas”. 1. Why it's so important to keep an eye on your builders, who fear no one: Siegel became so frustrated with the slow pace of construction of the Flamingo Hotel in 1945 that he took personal charge of the building site. Yet not even his reputation as a psychopathic murderer deterred the builders from their quest for “profit margins”... “Trucks rolled past the front gate, got their deliveries checked in by Siegel himself then rolled out the back gates an hour or two later, to come through the front gates all over again. Siegel had no idea he was checking in his supply trucks twice, and so paying double or triple for the precious postwar supplies.” 2. Why you should never put all your faith in a Plan B to save the day: When the Flamingo opened, unfinished, over budget and with Siegel having sold 150% of the shares, he'd got one important feature installed. In his penthouse suite, “an escape route starting from the coat closet [that] led to a labyrinth of secret passageways and staircases.” Even though most led nowhere, if you knew the layout “it was possible to descend to the garage and a waiting getaway car in less than a minute.” Yet again, Siegel had overestimated his genius, and his rivals shot him anyway – on the sofa in his Los Angeles front room. Buy this book
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There's a new Strong Words heading for the printers late next week, so if not you (because you're already a subscriber), but everyone you've ever met would like to sign up to receive it as part of an irresistible subscription deal, please point them towards the subscription window here, immediately. Strong Words makes a great gift, everybody knows they should be reading more books, and in almost deranged defiance of economic orthodoxy, the price for new subscribers is STILL just £40 for a whole year's issues. The Premier League wouldn't give you ninety minutes of their time for that. And once you've factored in their disgusting food, the cinema wouldn't give you much change from £40 after just two hours of their often generic “product”. A decent restaurant could perhaps stretch to a bottle of house red and a starter for £40. Point being, Strong Words is great value – don't let anyone miss out!
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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
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