“How a lonely child came to fall in love with a monster,” says this book’s cover, which is rather a hyped-up summary. Cross’s stepfather Derek might be slightly foul in some ways, but “monster” is pushing it a bit. Heartland is the story of Neil’s horrible childhood, in which his unstable mother takes him from his working-class Bristol roots to Edinburgh: he is bullied there for being English, she meets Derek, and they all become Mormons. The heart of the book is the author’s mixed feelings about the awful Derek, but it is also extremely evocative of being young around about 1980, and the intelligence of the writing transmutes the ordinary grottiness of life into something moving and even exhilarating to read.
(Scribner £7.99). PhB
THE OXFORD MURDERS
by Guillermo Martinez
A young Argentinian mathematician arrives in Oxford on a scholarship and finds himself rapidly entangled in a series of murders in which the killer seems not only to be several steps ahead of the police but also a master of mathematical logic. Joining forces with one of Oxford’s great minds, the logician Arthur Seldom, the hero finally unravels the complicated truth about the killings. Garlanded with praises and prizes in the author’s native South America, The Oxford Murders is a cunningly contrived mystery story, but Martinez too often seems so self-consciously delighted by the cleverness of his mathematical conceits that the reader’s potential pleasure in more humdrum qualities such as plausible characterisation and credible dialogue has to be sacrificed.
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(Abacus £6.99). NR
SMASHED: Growing up a Drunk Girl
by Koren Zailckas
Zailckas had her first drink at 14, and didn’t look back;she found out how she lost her virginity only because someone happened to mention it, she had her stomach pumped, and she vomited until little black bits came up. Written by a now teetotal 24-year-old, Smashed is heavily attuned to the miseries of being female and young, and it takes the lid off middle-class youth in modern America. It isn’t quite the insightful classic that Carolyn Knapp’s Drinking is, but it is still gripping in its immediacy and self-exposure. It is further proof, if any were needed, that binge drinking isn’t glamorous, it isn’t amusing and it isn’t even much fun at the time.
(Ebury £7.99). PhB
ONLY SAY THE WORD
by Niall Williams
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Just as Orpheus descended into the underworld to find Eurydice, so Jim Foley, a widower in County Clare, tries to reclaim his late wife, Kate, by composing her a letter that gives voice to the aching void she has left in his life and those of their small children. Running parallel to this sorrowing narrative is a no less moving portrait of bereavement as experienced by the younger Jim, whose baby sister’s death hangs over his family like a curse. Although literature proves to be the boy’s salvation, the limitations of the fictional worlds in which he cocoons himself become more apparent during the course of his troubled journey from university to America and back to the west of Ireland. Honest, poignant and soulful, Williams’s words of love are emotionally raw yet strangely soothing.
(Picador £6.99). TL
IT’S ONLY A MOVIE: Alfred Hitchcock, a Personal Biography
by Charlotte Chandler
In life, as in his films, Hitchcock was a great tease and writing a biography such as this one, which is based so much on Chandler’s conversations with him, is a risky enterprise. How far should Hitchcock’s reminiscences be trusted? Was he telling her the truth or spinning yarns as misleading as the plots of his films? Chandler balances Hitchcock’s own words with interviews with dozens of the people, from famous stars to largely anonymous technicians, who worked with him. From this mixture, a convincing portrait emerges of the master of suspense at work, creating his illusions. If the man behind the movies remains a shadowy and elusive figure, this is probably what Hitchcock himself would have most wanted.
(Pocket Books £7.99). NR
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ON LITERATURE
by Umberto Eco
Eco’s criticism has always shown a rare combination of continental sophistication with common sense, ruling out perverse and wacky interpretations with the same reasonableness that he shows in his own careful readings. This interesting ragbag of pieces is as sane and lucid as ever, ranging over mist in the work of the 19th-century writer Gérard de Nerval, the value of Borges, literary style in The Communist Manifesto and more, including a canny piece on Oscar Wilde. Casting a cold eye over Wilde’s clever aphorisms and paradoxes, Eco discovers that most of them sound just as spuriously convincing if you put them the other way round.
(Vintage £8.99). PhB
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