Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey
Faber and Faber; Hardback;
464 pages; 9780571253296;
Price £18.99
Annie McDermott
First of all, this is not a book about America. The book about America is what the French aristocrat Olivier, sent to investigate the prisons of the new democracy, is dictating to his secretary Parrot. Peter Carey’s book is about what happens in the meantime.
Parrot and Olivier in America tells the story of Olivier-Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Garmont (Lord Migraine to his secretary), a short-sighted young nobleman living amidst the dangers of post-revolutionary Paris. …

Skippy Dies by Paul Murray
Hamish Hamilton; Boxed Set Paperbacks; 672 pages;
9780241141823; Price £18.99
Michael Sopp
It seems that if you open any novel written by a man in the last decade there’s a good chance its protagonist will be a prepubescent genius. It’s difficult to trace the origins of this phenomenon. In England at least it may have something to do with Mark Haddon’s best-selling The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and its autistic, prime-number-obsessed narrator, which seems to have spawned a literary virus that has since spread across …

Will Self is a prolific writer of both fiction and journalism. His most recent publication, Psycho Too, is a collection of the ‘Psychogeography’ columns he wrote for several years in The Independent, accompanied by drawings by Ralph Steadman.
Self has a daunting public persona, as his varied appearances on television and radio indicate. For this reason I was somewhat nervous on approaching his London home and made even more so at his startled, staring reaction on discovering that I don’t take sugar in my tea. However, once ensconced in his writing …

LIFELINES
Duncan Forbes
Enitharmon Press Paperback, pp126;
£10.99; ISBN 978-1-904634-65-2
Phil Sidney
‘Duncan Forbes writes civilised poetry in a civilised way,’ writes one Jim Burns in the blurb of Lifelines, a career-wide selection of Duncan Forbes’ poetry. The phrase is depressing in itself (it’s tempting to ask for Burns’ definition of ‘uncivilised poetry’), but even more so because it restricts the book’s appeal to certain types of reader. ‘Ah!’ they cry, ‘at last some civilised poetry! Let us read it around the tea-table, the better to augment our witty badinage.’ For Burns (and Enitharmon …

Archie Davies
Feathers float down my mind
white drifts in.
heat-hazed memories of unforgotten mornings
like lemon-cake drizzle drip through my thoughts.
a softness unequalled.
a joy, joys, remembered.
Fathomable, I find I can see those
hours
as if written in the light they were filled with.
A
Sifting
thought
hovers lower,
lovers embracing
sleeping
and waking.
Now, as we turn into this well-trod street
long ago planted with strong trees to last
and outlast
lives, we still know the step of four feet –
our strides inchiming entwining,
each enriching each.
your laugh plays in the echo of mine
our shadows mirror our sounds in mime.
the sun is low and weak,
but higher, warmer …