Welcome to the latest issue of Dust Jackets, where Team B reviews some great books from the archives.
This month, Sam’s been tackling Steinbeck with his men’s book group, Becky tackles a couple of contrasting tomes, and Ed is on familiar ground with the greatest dialogue writer of all time. All this and more below!
The late Elmore Leonard has long been considered the greatest crime writer of his generation, perhaps the greatest since Raymond Chandler. But it wasn’t crime he started out writing. After graduating from Detroit University in 1946 – which he attended on the GI Bill – and while working as an ad agency copywriter, Leonard began writing stories he knew people would pay for: westerns. This continued for almost two decades, until the American public grew weary of Old West stories and he switched to crime. During these years he penned dozens of stories and novels, many of which have gone on to be made into films of variable quality, including Hombre, The 3:10 to Yuma, and Valdez is Coming.
Our resident western aficionado Ed has been reading Last Stand at Saber River, the tall tale of a Confederate veteran who arrives back at his Arizona home to find it taken over by Yankee soldiers. Ed says: “As a person who already loved Elmore Leonard’s books, I can say this is one of his best. It has a beautiful arc, tight writing, a storming plot and great dialogue!”
Buy Last Stand at Saber River now!
Liv has been tucking into a 1980s bonkbusting classic: Jilly Cooper‘s Riders, the first in her notorious Rutshire Chronicles. Introducing us to such scandalous characters as Rupert Campbell-Black and Jake Lovell, it is as ludicrously fun now as the day it was published.
Liv says: “An epic, raunchy, horsey romp – I ripped through this 900 page bonkbuster, and could have happily read 900 pages more.”
John Steinbeck‘s work still hangs over much modern American fiction, and is even in many ways the bedrock of Mr B’s bookselling, what with his familiar characters, rich storytelling and deep sense of place. Our Non-Fiction Lead Sam has been reading Steinbeck’s charming Cannery Row for his neighbourhood’s man’s book club. One of the great writer’s shorter works, it concerns the shenanigans of an eccentric cast of characters in the Monterey, California canning district.
Sam says: “Cannery Row is one of those books that you read and it makes everything else seem amateurish. It is stark but so moving.”
Shirley Jackson is another American who still casts a huge shadow. Her novels, in particular The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, continue to inspire writers and readers more than half a century after her death. Their eerie disquiet have spawned many screen adaptations, and countless imitators. Our new bookseller Annabel has been reading one of her lesser known works, Hangsaman, about an adolescent girl who can’t escape the mounting darkness infecting her life.
Annabel says: “This was the first Shirley Jackson novel I have read and it was great. It is a campus novel filled with creeping dread. It’s very unsettling and really keeps you up at night.”
Becky has been devouring two very different tomes in recent weeks, swerving dramatically from the upper crust of Regency England to the tenement housing of 80s Glasgow.
The Other Bennet Sister has been flying off the shelves since the BBC adaptation, starring Richard E. Grant and Ruth Jones, premiered earlier this year, and Becky has raced through Janice Hadlow‘s novel. Reimagining the life of the middle Bennet sister from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, it sees Mary take centre stage as her life is upturned once her sisters leave Longbourn. Becky says: “This is a book that simply feels like it heals you, one of the loveliest reading experiences I have ever had. A perfect story!”
Buy The Other Bennet Sister now!
She is now preparing for some emotional upheavel of her own, as she has dived into Douglas Stuart‘s stupendous 2020 Booker Prize winning Shuggie Bain. An autobiographical novel of grinding poverty, alcoholism and queer identity, it is surely one of the greatest novels of the 21st century. Becky says: “Shuggie Bain is a novel that hits all the feelings, I almost have anxiety because I know I’ll feel changed by the time I finish.”
Mr B’s regular customer Susanne Laws has chipped in with another backlist review. She has been revisiting Quite Ugly One Morning, Scottish crime legend Chris Brookmyre‘s 1996 debut novel, in anticipation of the upcoming follow-up, Quite Ugly One Evening (out May 7).
She says: “I’d forgotten just how good it is, and how much fun. It’s also scary how well it stands up in the current day, given that this year is its 30th anniversary – it’s about corruption around the NHS (set when NHS Trusts were being set up) and, apart from the technology, you could believe it’s set today. Brookmyre/Parlabane at their best – funny, violent and thoughtful all at the same time.”
Buy Quite Ugly One Morning now!
Lastly, I have finally got round to reading some Karl Ove Knausgård… it was always going to happen some time!
Knausgård’s notorious My Struggle series had been on my list for years but, though I have always been sure I would love it, I could never quite push myself into the thousands of pages of minutiae it contains. Then, during a fascinating conversation with a customer at one of our reading spas a few weeks ago, the attendee told me not to bother: skip them and just head straight for his newer Morning Star series. Convinced by her enthusiasm (and her supreme taste in novels) I dived in. Well, what a refreshing surprise they are! Nowhere near as difficult and far more pleasurable than I expected, they manage to ask the biggest questions we all face. At the end of summer in southern Norway, families are packing up to head home, locals are looking forward to getting the place back to themselves. Then, from nowhere, a bright new star appears in the sky, and suddenly the world falls into existential crisis. Where a thousand years ago we had religion to explain everything, now we have science, which is no better really. We know nothing. And if we know nothing, what is possible?
Stunning, thought provoking, and hugely addictive, this series – which still has a couple of episodes yet to be published in English – is modern fiction at its very best.
Thanks for reading!
Tom