April Reading List

Everyone had a quick look at the books Pam’s shortlisted for April last night. To help make the selection for the book we most want to read in April we’ve gathered them all together with links through to recent press reviews.

Perhaps the best way to go and keep it open for those who couldn’t make it last night and any new people who want to join in is to have a vote. Just post a comment with your first, second and third choice (eg 1 Fraction of the Whole, 2 Nights of Villjamur, 3 Pagan and her Parents) and we’ll count up the votes received by the next book club and then announce the selection.

The April Book Club Shortlist

Beside the Sea, By Véronique Olmi

First published in France in 2001, Bord de Mer was Véronique Olmi’s debut novel, and became a bestseller. It has been made available in English thanks to its superb translator, Adriana Hunter, and the publisher, Peirene Press. At a time when publishing houses are battening down the hatches against the wintry economic climate, Peirene are to be congratulated for choosing this gem of a novel as their first venture.
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Tinkers, by Paul Harding

Tinkers, a first novel by Paul Harding, was the surprise literary success of 2009 in the US. Rejected by several major houses, it was published by a small independent, and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Perhaps the biggest surprise is the nature of the book that has achieved all this. Much American fiction is still written in a stripped-down, offhand, monochrome prose that has become the default style of a thousand college writing courses. Tinkers is about as far as you can get from that. Its prose is complex, sometimes convoluted, but at its best suffused with brilliantly realised imagery and a reminder of how rich the written language can still be.
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The Crimson Petal and the White
by Michel Faber

Michel Faber has produced the novel that Dickens might have written had he been allowed to speak freely. All the familiar tropes of high-Victorian fiction are here – the mad wife, the cut-above prostitute, the almost-artist, the opaque governess – but they are presented to us by a narrator with the mind and mouth of the 21st century. Where once the Victorian novel was lace-like with decorous gaps and tactful silences, now it is packed hard with crude fact and dirty detail.
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A Fraction of the Whole, by Steve Toltz

A 700-page debut novel will always generate a certain amount of attention. The special appeal of the Big Book is that it is going to achieve something greater than the sum of its many parts. To do all that with your first book shows ambition of potentially megalomaniac proportions. And megalomania is the defining characteristic of Steve Toltz’s book, set largely in his native Australia (“our demented country”). It is the story of one man, a sufferer from that very disease, Martin Dean, as told by his son, Jasper.
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Pagan and Her Parents
by Michael Arditti

Candida Mulliner and Leo Young have been the closest of friends since university, living together but loving separately. When Candida dies after a long illness, she leaves her five year old daughter, Pagan, in Leo’s care.
Candida’s adoptive parents are horrified; they refuse to accept that a single man is a suitable person to bring up a child and challenge Leo’s guardianship in the courts. The ensuing hearings are complicated by tabloid exposure of Leo’s homosexuality, which threatens not only his position with Pagan but also his job as a television chat-show host.