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 …

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 …

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 …

AMERICAN RUST
by Philipp Meyer
Simon and Schuster, Paperback; 384 Pages
ISBN: 9781847373960
Price:£12.99
James Tanner
A surprising amount of art, for want of a better word, is entitled ‘American…’ To name but a few: in film, we have Grafitti and Gangster; in literature, Pastoral and Psycho; in music, both Girl and Woman (not to mention Pie). It is a cliché of sorts. Why? Well, “American” is a big word with many emotionally charged meanings, both for Americans and for the rest of the world. Like all big words, it can be used cheaply. It …

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 …

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 …

THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE
By Orhan Pamuk
Faber and Faber, Paperback, pp. 532, ISBN: 978-0-571-23699-2
Price: £12.99
AM Griffin
Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Museum of Innocence is an unnerving tale of one man’s attempt to stay both on and off the beaten track, and a demonstration that to step outside the rules of society is to step outside humanity itself.
For Pamuk’s protagonist, Kemal Bey, Istanbul becomes a place where dignity causes suffering, shame brings relief, and imagination and desire form the basis of his reality. Kemal is concerned with two things- love and time.  He …