Authors know everythingIn a week in which Prince Andrew's toe-curling interview was sent roaring back into the headlines by a Netflix dramatisation...“Princes and governments are far more dangerous than other elements within society.”
So said the Renaissance's greatest political scientist and schemer, Niccolo Machiavelli in his bestseller The Prince (1532). Prince Andrew probably wishes he had a bit more of the Machiavellian about him.
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The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides. Michael Joseph, £25
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I didn't know an awful lot about Middlesbrough's Captain James Cook before reading this, in spite of his household-name status, but for a description of his last epic voyage, this is about as exciting an introduction as you'll get to anyone. By the time of this third “fatal adventure” in 1776 he was considered a bit past it to be circumnavigating anything more than the garden of the Greenwich hospital where he'd been rewarded with a cushy job. But after a dinner with the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Captain decided it unthinkable that anyone else should lead this giant expedition, and so set to sea again at 47, happy as a clam among storms, unwashed crew and leaking ships infested with the most revolting vermin. On the ocean he was a genius at navigation – the maps of the day were often little more than guesswork on paper – and had a gift for finding land where none but those there knew it existed. He was also humble and curious about whomever he found. His secret mission was to find the North-West Passage over Alaska – yet another terrifying journey into the unknown – until retreating to winter in Hawaii, he arrived just in time to be confused with the second coming of their great deity, Lono. It's a page-turner of such relentless drama to make you seriously consider having a go at seafaring. Buy this book And buy this one too (one of my favourites) Hampton Sides on James Earl Ray, assassin of Martin Luther King
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The Strong Words Hot List Feeling underseasoned by April? Try some exotic literature from overseas... |
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5. Anomaly by Andrej Nikolaidis Peirene Press, £12.99 (April 16)
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From Montenegro, a piece of eve-of-destruction lit, as this New Year's Eve is not just the last day of the year, but the last day ever, as recounted by a narrator who sounds delighted it will soon be over. While a number of apparently compromised – and even blood-stained – individuals address the moral dimension of their predicament, a mother and small daughter high in the Alps seek answers in an ancient musical score. If they can just find it... Buy this book
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4. The Hole by Hiroko Oyamada Granta, £12.99
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When not writing about cats, Japan's novelists seem obsessed with loneliness and alienation, and often feel surrealism is the best way to capture the experience. The Hole concerns a woman who has had to give up her job to accompany her husband in a move to a rural home next door to her in-laws. This new life is already starting to play havoc with her mental equilibrium, when out walking by a river one day she falls into a soggy hole, one that appears bespoke to her measurements. Buy this book
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3. And the Stones Cry Out by Clara Dupont-Monod MacLehose, £16.99 (April 11)
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I feel I read this a couple of years ago, so I'm a bit confused as to why it is only coming out now, but it's about a family in the French countryside who have a severely disabled child. The eldest boy becomes obsessed with caring for him, a sister finds his presence an absolute outrage and inconvenience, while the parents – lives turned upside down – live in dread of having another child and the story repeating itself. Buy this book
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2. The Lost Love Songs of Boysie Singh by Ingrid Persaud Faber, £18.99 (April 25)
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Boysie Singh was a real, ruthless gangster in post-war Trinidad who when not spreading terror through the population liked to work on his problematic and controlling relationships. Four women here describe how that arrangement worked from their perspective in the patois of the island. Buy this book
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1. Real Americans by Rachel Khong Hutchinson, £16.99 (April 30)
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The publishing industry grew quite hysterical bidding for this at auction, so expect to see castles of it on the tables in bookshops at the end of the month. Three Chinese-Americans tell their stories: a hard-up intern in New York who marries a millionaire; their alienated son; and the boy's grandmother, who chose a disastrous time to enrol in Peking University – just as the Cultural Revolution was deciding who would be better off in prison. Buy this book
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One of the greatest ever crime writers decides to leave the evidence markers to others
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This week saw the publication of Don Winslow's “retirement” novel, City In Ruins. It's the final book in a trilogy about a Rhode Island crime family, and while it's not quite as spectacular as his Power of the Dog trilogy, about the Mexican drug cartels, it's still in a league of its own for mayhem on an epic scale. But it's not the first time he's tried to quit. After writing many well-received books that nobody bought, a little over a decade ago Winslow was planning to throw it all in and return to his previous profession – taking tourists on safari in Kenya and on panda sightseeing tours in China. (He was also a private detective for 15 years, where one of his tasks was to be the bait for muggers. He once got stabbed in the buttocks for his trouble.) He complained to his friend Shane Salerno, a hotshot Hollywood screenwriter, “I’m tired of writing these books that get all this acclaim, and no sales, no marketing, no promotion, no support from my publisher.” Salerno was so outraged that the world of supercharged crime fiction was about to lose one if its finest craftsmen to the panda viewing circuit, that he said, in a crossroads moment for literature: “Don, we can get a lot of people to be safari guides, but only you can write the books you do.” He then decided he would represent Winslow himself, applied his whirlwind approach to deal-making to building an agency that sold authors to Hollywood as much as to publishers, and made a Winslow a multi-millionaire. (Mark Twain, very much in the news at the moment thanks to Percival Everett's much-discussed James, also had a major financial sliding doors experience. Only he got the wrong door. He put all his vast earnings into a typesetting invention and went broke. Once bitten, when another great investment opportunity came along he turned it down, and Alexander Graham Bell had to take his search for backers for his “telephone” elsewhere.) Not sure what the conclusion for authors who feel they are shouting into the void should be from all this, but suspect you'll carry on regardless. And if you were one of the people who didn't get to see the pandas you would have done had Winslow been your guide, I hope fortune keeps you in her thoughts too. Buy City in RuinsBuy James
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Discussion of wine prices has rattled the cage of the Book Club this week... “Dear Ed, on the subject of the fragile relationship between customer and wine-seller, I really recommend Rebecca Gibb's Vintage Crime, A Short History of Wine Fraud. She covers “some of the most high-profile wine scams and lesser known duplicitous behaviours”, but it also reminded me of what your correspondent said (see last week's Book Club), about high prices making wine enthusiasts think their wine was tastier. In the introduction to her book, Rebecca shows how vulnerable to deception the wine drinker is: “With the exception of wines adulterated by substances hazardous to the drinker's health, consumers are not necessarily hurt by wine fraud. As long as they believe the wine in their glass to be of satisfactory quality, they may also perceive it to be so” – this comment is from a law professor. So basically, if you think your wine is great, it's great. Apart from that, there's no way of knowing. Martin O.As I mentioned Martin, I'm perfectly at home at the cheaper end of a wine list, but even that is relative. When the lowest priced bottle in the local pub costs upward of thirty quid, it's hard not to feel someone has their hand deep in my pocket. So why bother designing elaborate frauds when you can get away with it in broad daylight? EdBuy Rebecca's book hereAnd also on the strange things the grape makes people do...Hi Ed, I don't know the first thing about wine, but I really enjoyed a book you once recommended in Strong Words on the subject. It's called Cork Dork by Bianca Bosker. She tries to see if she can learn how to become a wine expert and eventually finds herself coming out with the exact same nonsense that made her so suspicious of it in the first place. Claire.Bianca has a new book out called Get the Picture, in which she tries to repeat the trick with the art industry, another field where the customer is at a massive disadvantage when trying to guess the value of something. Buy Bianca's wine book Buy Bianca's art bookReaders – have you ever read a book that has made you “come out with nonsense”? Please share the details at info@strong-words.co.uk
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The people who know no boundaries when it comes to losing a few pounds fast...
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One book that seems unable to keep out of the news is Kathryn Scanlan's brilliant Kick the Latch, about small town horse racing in America. It was one of Strong Words' books of the year in 2022. It's told in short bursts by a woman who came from an unimaginably hard background, but discovered she had a feel for horses and whatever it took to withstand the tough world of the track with its violence and 16-hour days. Writers may not have to get up in a leaky caravan at 3 am every day to start putting the 4 am feed in buckets, but they also tend to do their thing for virtually no financial reward, so congratulations to Kathryn for winning one of the big prizes: the Windham-Campbell prize for literature. A mysterious body, the Windham-Campbell people do everything anonymously, so no one knows who nominates or judges the books they consider. At the end of their clandestine deliberations they award eight prizes, and one went to Kathyrn Scanlan. She is now $175,000 better off. But while imagining what that looks like stacked on a table, let's not forget the challenges of one of the world's toughest jobs. Jockeys not only put themselves in great danger several times a day, but have to starve themselves to do it, as Kathryn's narrator reminds us... “I met the jockeys and seen what they did to make weight. They slap on glycerin and cling-wrap and sit in their cars with the heater blasting when it’s a hundred in the shade – they pass out. They go in the hot-box – it’s like a refrigerator with a spot on top for your head to stick out. Once, a jock caught on fire when the hotbox short-circuited. He had terrible burns all over his body.”
Buy Kick the Latch
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If you're a subscriber, please be aware that this work of art has now been entrusted to the printers, where their finest craftsmen are trying to recreate it in ink on glossy paper. It will be with you the week after next. Stand by. If you're not yet a subscriber, and would like to sign up to receive this milestone fiftieth issue, then follow this link to its conclusion. If you have any friends who are David Bowie obsessives, why not gift them a subscription too? If you're struggling to get off the fence because you've never committed to a literary magazine before, perhaps this selection of pages from some previous issues here might calm your nerves. And if you still prefer to conduct your business by talking to a real person, you can call on weekdays on 01442 820580.
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