In her comment on yesterday's post, Callmemadam mentions Wolf Hall. I am a fan, and I think Hilary Mantel is one of the few who can get away with the present tense, but I know the book's stylistic quirks irked many readers. For those who weren't keen (and indeed, those who were) may I recommend another novel of hers, the marvellous Fludd.
~~~~~
This collection of essays by Francis Spufford looks interesting; (Mr. C. speaks highly of his prize-winning Golden Hill).
~~~~~
Another Mr. C. recommendation is Minoo Dinshaw's Outlandish Knight: The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman which is currently up for the Sunday Times/Peters Fraser & Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award. The author is the son of Candia McWilliam, and he was with her at an Edinburgh Book Festival Frank Kermode/Shakespeare event I attended some time ago. He must then have been a sixth-former or thereabouts and yet he asked I question (which I no longer remember) indicative of knowledge and understanding well beyond his years. It looks as though that early promise is being fulfilled.
~~~~~
Have you read Leon Garfield? I have not, but Philip Pullman (in Daemon Voices again) says Garfield's The Pleasure Garden is "a book that should never be unavailable". He expands, "... open [him] where you like, you won't find a page of sober dullness anywhere. Fantastical gloom, yes; grimness illuminated by shafts of grotesque humour, certainly; a darkness as profound and velvety as the black of an old mezzotint, by all means; but nothing sober, nothing drab, nothing workaday. The exuberance is all of a piece; even a first paragraph that begins like a travel guide twirls upwards into a rococo curlicue of imagery." You can read that paragraph here, and like me may find yourself hooked.
