All the Colours of the Town
by Liam McIlvanney
Faber and Faber,
Paperback; 390 pages,
ISBN 9780571239832
Price £12.99
Janette Currie
Such was the heightened state of political and religious tension in Scotland in 1975 that, when Peter McDougall’s ground-breaking drama Just Another Saturday depicted the violence and religious bigotry of a typical Orange Walk, Scottish police warned that its screening might ‘cause bloodshed on the streets’. Back then, Scots couldn’t bear to see themselves as others saw them. Thirty years on, post-Good Friday Agreement, post-disarmament, and with The Troubles concluded, the publication of Liam McIlvanney’s political …

Rain
by Don Paterson
Faber and Faber 2009
Hardback; 61 pages,
ISBN 0571249574
Price: £12.99
I.E. Sawmill

The fifth poem of Don Paterson’s Rain begins: ‘How me of me, I know’. It is a shy, self-conscious shrug of a line. Upon finishing Paterson’s earlier collection (Landing Light, 2003), A.S.Byatt described herself as ‘knocked sideways’; in Rain, however, readers constantly find themselves pulled-in tight against Paterson. His circumstances, and the relationships particular to his own experience, are crucial to this contemplative, personal and tender new book of poems.
Perhaps this sense of direct impartation, local to Dundee-born Paterson himself, …

AMULET
by Roberto Bolaño
Picador, Harcover, pp192, ISBN 0330510487
Price: £14.99
Lamees Al Mubarak

The Chilean writer, Roberto Bolaño, has been creeping up the lists of ‘most popular foreign language writer’ for several years now and Picador’s Amulet, his fifth novel to be translated and published in English, confirms Bolaño’s rise. He is best known in the English speaking world for Savage Detectives and the posthumously published 2666 for which he received the 2008 National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Fiction as well as critical acclaim in the US. Bolaño has also been immortalised as …

Psycho Too
By Will Self
Bloomsbury Publishing,
Hardback; 256 pages,
ISBN 9781408802281
Price: £20.00
Christine Fears
Will Self’s new collection, Psycho Too, intensifies the vast trek Self has taken through the places and mindsets of the globe over the past seven years; a trek made viscerally surreal by the scattered, explosive paintings of Ralph Steadman. ‘Psychogeography’ in Self’s conception takes a plethora of potential meanings, exploring the ability of place to impinge on the individual’s mind, and the individual’s creation of a place. He explores the interplay of the state or country and the citizen, ranging between …

The Book of Night Women
By Marlon James
Oneworld, Hardback; 417 pages, ISBN 978-1-85168-708-4
Price: £12.99
Hardeep Chohan
In this powerfully rendered novel, Marlon James leads the reader into the murky and traumatic world of slavery in the West Indies of the eighteenth century. Casting a sustained and unflinching gaze upon the inhumanity and aggression suffered by a workforce of black slaves at the hands of their white masters, the book does not follow the easy temptations of sanctimonious caricature, but rather treats with equally thoughtful attention the masters as they slowly degenerate into dark, …

Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy
by Arundhati Roy
Hamish Hamilton, Hardback, pp. 256, ISBN 0241144620
RRP: 14.99

Jane Stewart

Readers familiar with Arundhati Roy’s novel, The God of Small Things, which won the 1997 Booker Prize, may recall that the book is brought to life by the sheer vitality of Roy’s language and by the way she unflinchingly lays bare those human frailties of which we have cause to be most ashamed. In her latest book, Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy, a collection of articles and talks …

Ordinary Thunderstorms
William Boyd
Bloomsbury, paperback, 403pp.
ISBN 978 1 4088 0247 2
£11.99
Edward Randell
“He took out the relevant documents and printouts from what he found himself calling – though very aware of its thriller-esque pretensions – the ‘Zembla File’.”
This is the sentence that, for me, holds the key to why William Boyd’s latest novel Ordinary Thunderstorms doesn’t quite work. The phrase “though very aware of its thriller-esque pretensions” sounds uncannily like an apology from a writer who, torn between writing a genre thriller and a social commentary on life in 21st-century London, …

Dimitry Sayenko’s Absurd ABC

Ling Low
The Fine Press Book Association (FPBA) are a group of people dedicated to the art of fine printing.  Once every two years, they hold a fair, and then many people who know a lot about obscure, intricate printing techniques like “chromolithography” get together to display and discuss their publications.  As they were kind enough to invite The Literateur, I went along to have a look.
I very soon felt out of my depth.  I should have known even before I arrived that I was entering highly …

Noah’s Compass
by Anne Tyler
Chatto & Windus, Hardback, 288pp,  ISBN 978-0-701-18423-0
Price: £17.99

Janette Currie

Anne Tyler’s eighteenth novel picks a familiar path through the scattered debris of dislocated familial relationships. Like Tyler protagonists Jeremy Paulding (Celestial Navigation, 1975), Macon Leary (The Accidental Tourist, 1985), and Ian Bedloe (Saint Maybe, 1991) before him, the strong-willed Liam Pennywell is disconnected from his emotional life and floats through each day undisturbed by the trail of hurt feelings he leaves in his wake . Sixty years old and just recently ‘let go’ from his position …

There is a joy in realising
you are no longer
young, sitting in that chair
reading and smoking a beautiful cigarette
while your coffee cools
and the stovetop creaks.