The Unexpected Professor by John Carey
Faber £9.99/ebook £8.99
JOHN CAREY, The Sunday Times chief reviewer since 1977, has written a kind of memoir-in-books; or, as he puts it, “a history of English literature and me, how we met, how we got on, what came of it”. One of his heroes is George Orwell and he has Orwell’s mixture of political radicalism and social conservatism. He also has Orwell’s clear prose style, moral seriousness, detestation of luxury and intense love of the English countryside and of growing one’s own food.
There are wonderful portraits here of academics and writers such as JRR Tolkien and Dame Helen Gardner. Carey conveys with precision the sense of a young mind being opened by literature. Why would someone who hates public schools spend his entire career as a professor in Oxford, where Old Etonians are thick on the ground? But it is this personal complexity — of being perhaps half in love with that which he most despises — that makes Carey such an original critic and this memoir so entertaining.
Robert Harris
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The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World After an Apocalypse by Lewis Dartnell
Vintage £8.99/ebook £6.49
IMAGINE an apocalypse that has left 10,000 survivors on earth. That is the starting point for this book by a UK Space Agency research fellow and science writer. What follows is a breezy guide to the rebuilding of civilisation. Dartnell captures some of the difficulties involved, but it comes across as an increasingly boring list of how things work. It is how humans work that matters most and the biggest postapocalyptic problem of all — politics — is missing from this book.
Bryan Appleyard
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Look Who’s Back by Timur Vermes
MacLehose £8.99/ebook £6.49
NARRATED by one Adolf Hitler, this novel tells what happens when he wakes up one morning to find himself in contemporary Berlin, aged 56, hale and hearty and eager to get on with his life’s work. And it dares to tell it as a comedy. Vermes cleverly makes his Hitler sound just like the real thing: humourless, fastidious about his health and diet and preposterous and verbose. For English readers, it might lack the exhilarating shock value it had in Germany: more an amusing thought experiment than the outrageous firework of a book it appeared to be over there. Still, it’s good fun.
Christopher Hart
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After I’m Gone by Laura Lippman
Faber £7.99/ebook £3.99
IN 1976, a nightclub owner called Felix Brewer disappeared from Baltimore just before he was due to face gambling charges. He left behind a wife, three daughters, a girlfriend and a mystery about the whereabouts of his large fortune. Ten years later the girlfriend vanished and everyone assumed she had gone to join Brewer — until her body was found in a local park. A retired police officer, Sandy Sanchez, takes the murder on as a “cold” case. Lippman has created a compelling mystery, but the book is also about the devastation caused by the disappearance of a powerful man at a time when women had little autonomy.
Joan Smith
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