Christopher Gatefield
I have always maintained that I have a touch of genius; nothing will demonstrate this fact better than if I tell you of my decision, at the tender age of seventeen, to taste of the whole range of human experience.
I duly fell in love with an intensity that is, I suspect, unrivalled in recent years with a beautiful, solemn, grey-eyed girl who cared nothing for me. In this way I also managed to experience heartbreak in one efficient affair. Afterwards, I contrived to experience the other side and set …

Gordon Weetman
1.
Starving people on TV: a sight so familiar it verges on cliché. These appeals are becoming ever more frequent, global weather conditions having recently taken a turn for the worst. Stick men – skeletal beings moving through a parched landscape. Children with pregnant bellies, visible ribs.
The narrator announces that the problem is one of distribution. I’m not sure if I should believe him. Is it possible in an era in which a message can traverse the earth at the click of a mouse, in which I can choose between …

Tom Clucas
A flock of doves haphazardly align
along the roof, before a couple curve
in upward flight. As other birds observe
them and pursue, their spreading wings incline
towards the sunset. Now their feathers shine
and almost dazzle, brilliant as they swerve
throughout the dusk, till they alone preserve
a wreath of light against the day’s decline.
Their backs are silver, but their bellies glow
with orange warmth still borrowed from the sky;
they weave a halo high above the lawn,
and circle, till the sun has sunk so low,
that darkness forces them to roost nearby,
returning with the reddening of dawn.

Niall Campbell
boy, you know nothing of love,
nothing of how it’s proved:
there’s the kiss; the kiss
returned; the nights awake,
consoling what needs consoled;
and then there’s you.
And I swear, by her,
that should we ever meet
I’ll prove my serious heart
by your broken teeth,
the blood on your red, red lips.

Simon Armitage
I play Solitaire on the computer and sweep the floor with myself.
To enhance the mood, I’ve strung fairy lights across the bookcase
and pinned a sprig of mistletoe over the door.
It’s fancy dress, and I’ve come as Björn Borg circa 1978 –
the trademark headband keeping my straggly blond fringe out of my eyes.
I pull down my tight white shorts,
sit on the flatbed scanner and photocopy my bits. Hilarious.
Swigged from the cap of the bottle a small tot of single malt
eases the mind, yet these flashing reindeer antlers
feel like a …

Simon Armitage
“Let’s get married at the zoo!” exclaimed Scott.
“Perfect,” said Charlene. They found the name
of a humanist minister in the Yellow Pages
and he arranged to meet them at 15.30 by the elephant house.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer the glass wall of the penguin tank
as a background?” asked the minister. “They’re so vivacious and life-affirming.”
“No, here’s fine,” said Scott. “Perfect,” agreed Charlene.
“Then let’s begin. Do you, Scott, believe that friendship and decency
underpin the essence of humanity?”
“I do,” said Scott, removing a stray hair clinging to Charlene’s …

BLUE BAY PALACE
Nathacha Appanah
Translator: Alexandra Stanton
Aflame Books, Paperback, 102 pp., ISBN: 9781906300074, Price 7.99
Ling Low
I started reading Blue Bay Palace while trapped in an airport terminal. Being jetlagged and hungry put me in no mood to indulge what I thought I would find: a romantic story set in a romanticised Mauritius. But Blue Bay Palace turned out to be much more than I expected. At just over a hundred pages, this novella leaves an impression beguiling for its size and simple storyline.
Francophone readers may already be familiar …

The Song is You
Arthur Phillips
Duckworth, Paperback, 272 pp., ISBN 978 0 7156 3873 6, Price: £8.99
Janette Currie
A song is a magical time-travelling machine. The opening bars of a familiar melody can transport us across time and space, conjuring memories of Christmases-past, first loves, birthdays, weddings and funerals. In his fourth novel, The Song is You, Arthur Phillips enacts the melancholy of mourning through the random play list of an i-pod shuffle. The protagonist, Julian Donahue, is disconnected emotionally from the world. His infant son has died and his marriage has …

UNACCUSTOMED EARTH
Jhumpa Lahuri
Bloomsbury, Paperback, 352pp.,ISBN 978-0747596592, Price: £7.99
Dan Eltringham
Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri’s second collection of stories, follows the award-winning success of her novel The Namesake with more decoration, having recently scooped the 2009 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best Book. As such it needs to be taken as a representative of what can be achieved with a certain sort of literary fiction. This sort is what Zadie Smith calls “lyrical realism,” in her recent essay ‘Two Paths For The Novel,’ which she defines against more avant-garde approaches.
One of the most immediately …

TURBULENCE
Giles Foden
Faber and Faber, hardback, 368 pp, ISBN-10: 0571205224
Price: £16.99
Preti Taneja
Meet Henry Meadows. He’s a sexually naive and frustrated sort of chap, dreaming of greatness while seeking oblivion at the bottom of quite a few whisky glasses and several pints. How should such a young man make his way in the world? When that world is at war and he knows how to predict the weather, he might do pretty well it seems.
War creates upheaval, which might be described as turbulence, catching society in a whirl and churning it …