Andrew’s Brain by El Doctorow
Abacus £8.99/ebook £6.49
DOCTOROW achieved fame with novels such as Ragtime that captured broad sweeps of American history. On the face of it, his latest novel turns inward. It features an academic called Andrew speaking to his therapist. We can’t tell why he is doing so or where he is, for Andrew’s outpourings are not easy to decode. Cunningly, Doctorow leads us into the intricate recursions of Andrew’s mind. It is a journey worth taking, for by the end of the book some extraordinary vistas have been opened.
Presenting himself as a clownish klutz, Andrew is estranged from his wife because he accidentally killed their baby; he also feels partly responsible for the death of his beloved second partner. A depressive, he has considered suicide, and might be confusing fantasy and fact. He is clearly a ripe case for psychoanalysis. Here, though, is another complication, for Andrew is a cognitive scientist: his perspective is that of brain graphs, computers, mechanistic explanation, not psychoanalysis. With exhilarating brio, the novel plays off these two contrasting takes on mind and brain. What is more, through speculations on artificial intelligence, cog science allows the book to expand into satire on the “government brain” in the era of George W Bush. Written by a novelist in his eighties, it fizzes with intellectual energy and satiric flair. It is a late-career tour de force.
David Grylls
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The Fortune Hunter by Daisy Goodwin
Headline £7.99/ebook £7.49
SET IN the 1870s, Goodwin’s second novel is a comfort read that mixes historical fact with themes of love, duty, betrayal and passion. Charlotte Baird, a youthful English heiress, has fallen for the dashing Captain Bay Middleton, but neither Charlotte nor Bay has bargained on Sisi, the emotional Empress of Austria (in England for the hunting) who becomes enraptured by Bay. They begin an affair that scandalises Europe and inevitably ends rather untidily. The novel is a lively trot down an indulgently historical path. If you are up for the ride you will enjoy a superior melodrama: flattery, flirting and the erotic charge of the hunt.
Helen Davies
Buy for £7.59 (including p&p) from the ST Bookshop
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Jonathan Swift by Leo Damrosch
Yale £10.99/ebook £10.99
SWIFT, the greatest satirist ever to write in English, is a biographer’s nightmare. He was obsessively secretive, and most of what we know about him is gossip or hearsay. Damrosch, though, is incisive about Swift’s personality. His default mode was resentment — about money, about not getting preferment in the English church, and about the end of his political career in 1714. In his darkest satire, A Modest Proposal, Swift suggests that the children of the Irish poor should be sold as food for the English middle classes; though clearly meant ironically, his interest in the culinary details is disturbing. But being able to horrify is integral to his satirical power. Damrosch writes with fine Swiftian clarity, seeing him, rightly, not just as contradictory and tragic but as a fearless thinker whose works are an antidote to optimism’s happy lies.
John Carey
Buy for £9.89 (including p&p) from the ST Bookshop
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The Quick by Lauren Owen
Vintage £7.99/ebook £7.99
OWEN’S debut novel follows the fortunes of James Norbury, a would-be poet in 1890s London who embarks on a passionate relationship with his dissipated flatmate Christopher. One night, as the two men walk to Chelsea, Christopher is killed in a frenzied attack. James passes out, and awakes to find himself a prisoner in the Aegolius Club, a meeting place for socially prominent vampires. Its members have plans for him, and only his sister can save him. Energetically mixing history and gothic fantasy, this is a macabre, readable and atmospheric novel.
Nick Rennison
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Olivier by Philip Ziegler
Maclehose £10.99
ON THE set of the 1972 film Sleuth, Laurence Olivier told Michael Caine: “I can’t act with my own face.” In this zippy, arch life of the actor, Ziegler makes the man behind the masks monstrously human. A compulsive liar from childhood, Olivier never stopped raging, from his savage turn as Brutus aged 12, to grousing (aged 73) on Brideshead Revisited that John Gielgud had been given a better part than him. Ziegler reveals the obsessiveness of the man who left drama school declaring his aim “to be the greatest actor in the world”.
Robert Collins
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The Devil in the Marshalsea by Antonia Hodgson
Hodder £7.99/ebook £7.49
TOM HAWKINS is the hero of Hodgson’s satisfyingly convoluted debut crime story set in 1727. Imprisoned in the Southwark debtors’ prison of the title, Hawkins is forced to investigate a murder, in a desperate attempt to win his freedom. Under threat from the brutal governor, he forms an uneasy alliance with the enigmatic Samuel Fleet, and gradually unearths the prison’s secrets. Hodgson takes a risk in killing off her most compelling character before the conclusion but this is a well-constructed and enjoyable novel.
Nick Rennison