Highly recommended: The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Read this stunning novel!
See the New York Times Review of Books for a review.

Het koningsboek ("literair thriller")

"De jonge IJslander Valdemar reist in 1955 naar Denemarken, waar hij een aan lagerwal geraakte hoogleraar ontmoet, die een groot geheim met zich meedraagt. Tijdens de oorlogsjaren is hij een kostbaar manuscript uit het oog verloren: de Codex Regius, een onderdeel van de Edda, het manuscript uit 1271 waaraan het IJslandse volk zijn identiteit ontleent. Als de hoogleraar hem in vertrouwen neemt, maakt Valdemar zich op voor een reis door Europa. Zijn doel is het manuscript terug te vinden - en in leven te blijven. Want, zo blijkt, voor deze schat zijn mensen bereid over lijken te gaan.
Het koningsboek is een faction-thriller over de waarde van cultureel erfgoed. Toen de Deense regering in 1971 besloot de Codex Regius per boot terug te brengen naar IJsland, een voormalige Deense kolonie, stond het op de kade in Reykjavík zwart van de mensen. Twaalf pagina's van het middeleeuwse manuscript ontbraken echter - en zijn nog steeds niet teruggevonden." (Recensie: www.bol.com)

Beautiful prose in "Little Bee"

I heartily recommend "Little Bee" - on order for the library. Review and excerpt follow:

"Ten pages into Little Bee, I decided there's no reason to write again - not even an e-mail. There's no reason to read again, either. Chris Cleave has done something truly stunning with language in this book, but it's not just the language. The story is fascinating and utterly believable".

"Little Bee is a Nigerian girl who has learned to talk like the Queen. She's a refugee who has been detained in an immigration detention center forty miles east of London for two years. I've never heard a Nigerian woman speaking the Queen's English, so I can't vouch for the accuracy of the dialogue. But I believed in Little Bee from the first paragraph, and I loved her by page eighteen, (where Cleave has Little Bee say):

"I looked back at the detention officer, but he would not look up at me. While I looked, he moved his arm over the page to cover the headline. He made it look like he needed to scratch his elbow. Or maybe he really did need to scratch his elbow. I realized I knew nothing about men apart from the fear. A uniform that is too big for you, a desk that is too small for you, an eight-hour shift that is too long for you, and suddenly here comes a girl with three kilos of documents and no motivation, another one with jelly-green eyes and a yellow sari who is so beautiful you cannot look at her for too long in case your eyeballs go ploof, a third girl from Nigeria who is named after a honeybee, and a noisy woman from Jamaica who laughs like the pirate Bluebeard. Perhaps this is exactly the type of circumstance that makes a man's elbow itch." [By Jessica Gribble @ http://contemporarylit.about.com/od/fiction/fr/little-bee.htm]

Brilliant read: Incendiary by Chris Cleave

"The un-named narrator of this book certainly feels like writing a letter - she has got a lot of patience to pour out 300 pages in the direction of Osama bin Laden. An Islamic terrorist attack demolished one quarter of a football stadium while her husband and four year old lad were having an innocent time of watching their team beat their greatest rivals.
She has her own narrative style - as she says at one point, she's not sure on where to put commas, so hardly uses them. She has a unique way with metaphors and similes, and breaks often into tabloidese, headline-style capitalised nouns like a TRUE ORIGINAL. (A) brilliantly astute look at life with guilt, incrimination, love and the lack thereof, and more, after tragedy." (From: the Bookbag, John Lloyd)

We Recommend: Wolf Hall

"It's a story (...) about power."
"Though set in Henry's court and, overwhelmingly, about his long, panting battle to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn, Wolf Hall is really the story of Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith's boy who became the king's right-hand man. When we first meet Thomas, he is sprawled on the floor, bloody and beaten. His father, drunken Walter, has just put the boot in and not for the first time. "Inch by inch forward," he orders himself, as he crawls, spewing and fainting, resolutely out of the life he was born to."
"Immune to the courtiers' disgust, this pirate from the Putney riverbank ascends through the ranks to become Henry's most trusted guide. Eventually, even the bitter Duke of Norfolk comes to rely on him. After all, what can't he do? He knows the whole New Testament by heart; "He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury." If anyone can free the king from the trusses of his marriage, it is the blacksmith's son."
"The church protects its interests by murdering dissenters; reading the Bible in English is a crime punishable by death. This is what lies behind Henry's struggle with the Pope: the England of the common man, who can be ripped limb from limb for daring to suggest that "God on the altar is a piece of bread". By centring her narrative on the humane and free-thinking Thomas Cromwell, who believes in kindness, tolerance and education, Mantel has found a way to reconfigure the tired tale of Henry's lust and what it led to. Henry might want a son so desperately that he is willing to make war with the Pope, but Cromwell, who dreams of a nation that can talk and learn and worship freely, is revealed as the true author of England's independence."
It won both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
(Review by Olivia Laing in The Guardian, 26 April 2009)

We recommend: Killer country

"Mike Nicol's Killer Country, which has been compared to Cormac McCarthy's classic No Country For Old Men, is the second of his bleak and powerful Revenge trilogy. Pylon and Mace are struggle veterans now working in Cape Town's security business, while many of their old comrades are on the opposite side of the fence, cheerfully looting the country they helped liberate." (Sunday Times review, 16 Jan 2011, by William Saunderson-Meyer)
The UP library also has the first book, "Payback", in stock.

We recommend: Green-eyed thieves

"Firoze and Ashraf Peer, the novel’s twin protagonists, have the potential to become literary heroes – characters created so compellingly that their lives and evils and triumphs reach well beyond the vehicles that house them.

You know the kind I mean: Hannibal Lecter. Dr Evil. Captain Jack Sparrow. The Yebo Gogo guys and Mo the Meerkat, from Vodacom. Bigger than their books, better than their movies and often brighter than their brands.

The crooked Peer brothers who wreak havoc from Sun City to the USA have the potential to wield that type of power. Indeed, their story is so fascinating, exquisitely penned, intelligent and rich in surprise as to warrant becoming a classic.

Green-Eyed Thieves speaks of inspired crime and brotherly betrayal; philosophy and family business – even introducing cameos for worthies like Mohammed Atta (of 9/11 fame) and President George Bush. It’s a wild romp. Read it."

(Review excerpts from: bookreviewsouthafrica.blogspot.com, by Tiffany Markman)