Good reads: Three books to look out for
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
“I feel as if I’m waiting for something dreadful to happen, and then I realise it already has.”
Ursula Todd, the heroine of Kate Atkinson’s gorgeous novel, is born only to die before she can take her first breath. Then she’s born again…and again and again. Each time she survives a little longer – until she grows up to assassinate Hitler before he can ever take power. A novel about rebirth rooted in a quiet life in the English countryside, it soon swells to encompass the fate of millions. You wouldn’t believe that Atkinson would pull off this plot – until she does.’ Life After Life’ is elegantly constructed – while Ursula’s early encounters with Hitler aren’t always satisfying, the book’s best moments are in the tender, sometimes disturbing portraits of family and relationships. Atkinson’s inventive premise might seem strange but don’t let it keep you from one of the most irrepressibly comic, truly moving novels to make it into bookstores this year.
How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid
“We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so we turn, among other things, to stories.”
All I needed to know about this book was that it was by the author of ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’. Mohsin Hamid cements his reputation for ingenious story telling with a third novel that dazzles. A love story at its heart, it follows the life of a poor boy from the slums who must run the gamut of obstacles in “rising Asia” as he promotes himself from petty salesman to corporate tycoon. As the title promises, the book’s form echoes that of a self-help book but its content is a great deal more ambiguous and ambitious. Hamid is a joy to read, engaging fully as he does with the complexities of contemporary life. Unflinchingly incisive, in equal parts playful and profound, ‘How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia’ is a story of the love that keeps one man going in a time of social and economic upheaval.
The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson
“In my experience, ghosts are made up only of the living, people you know are out there but are forever out of range.”
This Pulitzer Prize winning novel deserves more attention than its received so far. Johnson interviewed defectors, watched propaganda films and even visited North Korea as part of his research for the novel that manages to be both a literary heavy weight and a compulsive thriller. We follow him into an alternate, utterly bizarre world, one defined by an absolute dictator and an all but completed subjugated society. Trailing Johnson’s protagonist Pak Jun Do on an all-encompassing journey we meet the diggers of tunnels, the kidnappers who slip across borders, the labourers who slave without hope in the prison camps, the patriots who lurk in the torture chambers where dissidents are questioned and even receive entry into the flutter of high society around the Great Leader himself before the novel rushes to its triumphant, wrenching conclusion.