Anna Towers

I’m onto my third cup of coffee.  Penny still hasn’t decided what she’s going to have.
‘The Prawn Cocktail jacket potato filling,’ she says, licking her lips and biting her thumbnail, ‘will be at least four Weight Watcher’s points.’
I ate at home.  A tuna and sweetcorn baguette.  I’m still hungry now.  But I shouldn’t have two lunches.  It would be greedy.
I rip the top off another tubular packet of brown raw cane sugar.
‘Forget bloody Weight Watchers,’ I say, then close my mouth around the hole in the top of the …

STRENGTH IN WHAT REMAINS
Tracy Kidder
Profile Books, Paperback, pp.304, ISBN 978 1 86197 857 8, March 2010.
Price: £15.00
Mardi Stewart
Strength in What Remains is the true story of Deogratis, a young African medical student from Burundi, who survived the genocides of 1993/4 in Burundi and Rwanda and escaped to New York. The hardship of Deo’s story does not simply end with his escape from Africa. When he arrived in New York, he spoke only French and learned to speak English by haunting bookshops and libraries. His refugee status led to …

THE PREGNANT WIDOW
by Martin Amis
Random House; Hardback; 470 pages; Price £18.99; ISBN 9780224076128
Annie McDermott
On the terrace of the Italian castle where they’re spending the summer, the characters of Martin Amis’ new novel are discussing a problem. If, on the ideal woman, ‘the tits and the arse should be on the same side’, which side should it be? The front, ‘to get the face’? Or the back, so she could still walk forwards?
Martin Amis is back where he belongs. The Pregnant Widow stages the sexual …

The Flanders Road
by Claude Simon
Oneworld Classics; Paperback;
224 pages; Price £7.99;
ISBN 9781847491510
Chris Woolfrey
Not one for those scoping a quick and easy read, The Flanders Road is a book concerning the death of one aristocratic and thoroughly idiosyncratic World War II cavalry captain named de Reixach (pronounced, central character Georges informs his counterparts on more than one occasion, as ‘Reishach x like sch, ch like k’), and looks to piece together an account of the mysterious captain through the shared and personal memories of his war-time subordinates.
It’s a difficult process. Readers encounter …

Alex Christofi
And when the light came, the darkness was confused and flew under the skirting. We tried to get it out with a broom handle and a ruler but it was like the time my friend’s room was infested with ladybirds which bred like ladybirds in her wainscot. I made the others leave and tried to coax it out. We talked about everything the moon and space what the darkness wanted to be when it grew up but still it hugged the insulation between the walls like a blanket. Eventually …

THE BREAKFAST ROOM
Stewart Conn
Bloodaxe Books, Paperback, 24th February 2010, pp64;
ISBN 978-1-85224-856-7
Price £8.95
Phil Sidney
The geniality and generosity of Stewart Conn as a narrator is established right from the beginning. ‘Invitation’ welcomes the reader into The Breakfast Room where, proffering an umbrella, he solicitously advises her to keep ‘a lookout // for tripwires or briers that might snag your hair’ and to ‘Reassure yourself regarding small carnivores.’ Although appreciated, these warnings are unnecessary, for The Breakfast Room is more well-tended garden than wild wood. Flowers proliferate, from the eponymous blooms in ‘The …

Alan Fielden
Throw,
the first stone, lover.
Who brought me from nothing
and to whom I have given less.
If I lie and promise sunlight,
would you understand.
And when I flail, through glassy words and porous silence.
Can I smile and say,
“That wasn’t me”?
Whilst the moon, calm and bare, reflects the inferno so honestly?
That three-tier phrase, the pyrrhic one,
that means one to the mouth
and two to the ear,
how far can you throw it?
Trust it thus.
Before love there was a feeling that needed a name.
We gathered today to live and love;
ever after there will be nothing ever was …

Reality Hunger
by David Shields
Hamish Hamilton; Hardback;
240 pages; Price £17.99;
ISBN 9780241144992
Dan Eltringham
First, a series of radical pronouncements: narrative prose fiction has ‘never seemed less central to the culture’s sense of itself’; the ‘novel qua novel is a form of nostalgia’; and, more generally, ‘forms serve the culture; when they die, they die for a good reason: because they’re no longer embodying what it’s like to be alive.’ Having disposed of the novel Reality Hunger then announces, with a further valedictory flourish, that the writer as writer is dead, to be replaced …

The Loss Adjustor
Aifric Campbell
Demy Hardback
250 pages
ISBN: 9781846687303
Daniel Hudspith
The Loss Adjustor is a novel about disconnection, about how occurrences in one’s life can cause fissures in relationships, in perception and, ultimately, in oneself. The titular character, Caroline, is haunted by events in her childhood and has retreated to the relative safety of a mundane existence low on the ladder at an insurance firm. Her childhood sweetheart is now a rock superstar, while her mother exists only to read books about history and arctic exploration, abnegating herself from any normal child-parent relationship. …

THE LAST PATRIARCH
Najat El-Hachmi
Serpent’s Tail; Paperback; 306 pages; ISBN 9781846687174; RRP £9.99
Published April 29th 2010
Alice Kelly
Najat El-Hachmi’s debut novel, The Last Patriarch (L’últim patriarca in Catalan), is effectively three stories in one: simultaneously a trauma narrative of abuse, an immigration narrative and a female bildungsroman. As a bestseller in Spain and the worthy winner of the prestigious Ramon Llull Prize in 2008 – which, at ninety thousand Euros last year, is the most renumerative prize in Catalan letters –its UK publishers, Serpent’s Tail, are keen to repeat that success over …