By William Boyd
I have something of a strange relationship with Boyd.
I first encountered him via a booklet from Costa which provided excerpts from each of the winners in the five categories of their 2006 book awards. Boyd’s Restless won the accolade for best novel, so I bought it and greatly enjoyed it.
And that was that.
But, like a missing sock, he turned up in the most unexpected of places.
Football’s Tabloid Tales by Harry Harris
The author is an award-winning sports writer. I recognised his name (complete with obligatory grainy photo image) from his time with the Daily Mirror from when I was a paperboy in the early nineties.
The book promises a lot: “The bungs, the court cases, the inside stories.”
By Bernard Cornwell
Sharpe and his team are well established by this point. He’s Wellington’s favourite and captain of the 95th. They’ve recently secured famous victories at Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz (Sharpe personally storming the third breach), and are now looking at kicking the French out of Salamanca, a university town which was apparently as beautiful then as it was when I visited it in 2000.
By Frederick Forsyth
The fourth book by Frederick Forsyth, who has fast become an author of high renown with me.
I picked up The ODESSA File in February, read it in a couple of days, loved it, and watched the film.
I picked up The Day Of The Jackal in May, read it in a couple of days, loved it, and watched the film.
I picked up The Dogs Of War in June, read it in a couple of days, loved it, and hang my head in shame that I’ve just had to use Wikipedia to confirm that there is a film. That’s one to watch later.
Anyway, it seems that there’s a running theme. And it continued with this one, minus the ‘couple of days’ reading time. Stretch to three for this badboy.
By Robert Harris
Yet another Harris book. I’m working my way through them now, like the lava of Vesuvius through the streets of the Bay of Neapolis.
This story is a little different, though. It’s not a mere historical account. Indeed, it’s a story told through the eyes of several people in the four days leading up to the destruction wrought.
By C. J. Sansom
The return of the hunchback Poirot Matthew Shardlake.
Three years have elapsed since our initial meeting with him at the behest of Thomas Cromwell.
The story is set in London, and we start off with what could very much be a modern theme: Trial by media. The printing press means that the common people have access to reading materials including newspapers that are hawked in the street, sold by soundbite vendors. “Girl murders boy and throws him down a well!” Shardlake reflects that this girl cannot have a fair trial. The jury will not be impartial since they are drawn from the public who pass these vendors and read these papers.
By Robert Harris
Something of a surprise for me, since I’d never heard of it before. I had been hunting Harris’s first work of fiction, Fatherland, on eBay when I came upon an excellent offer: That book (used) + three others by the same author (new) for, I think, a starting bid of £2 plus postage.
I watched the item over the course of a few days, amazed that no-one had made a bid on it. It came down to the last couple of minutes still untouched, so I bid the minimum and snapped myself up a bargain.
One of my work colleagues asked me what I’d been reading lately, and I mentioned Fatherland. She asked me whether I’d tried Archangel yet. I hadn’t, she suggested I might like to read it sooner than later. I followed her advice.
By Mike Gayle
This looks like chick-lit. I mean, consider that this was the first sight I had of it:
So there was no reason in the world for me to look at it, right? Yet I read the thing in two days …
This was the first of the prequels but was later prequelled itself. It makes sense to me.
The Sharpe series originally began in 1981 with Sharpe’s Eagle, set during the Talavera campaign of July 1809. More books followed in sequence up to 1814 (still a year away from Waterloo) until a change occurred in 1998, when Cornwell wrote a book set a few months before the initial one that kickstarted the series. This is that book.
By C. J. Sansom
I tell you, C. J. Sansom stumbled on greatness when he came up with the idea of his Shardlake books, as did I when I chanced upon one in a discount bookstore and purchased it.
The premise is simple; somebody should have done this years ago. He has his version of Hercule Poirot, Matthew Shardlake. Whereas Poirot is a dandified, short Belgian with a distinctive upturned moustache and persistant stomach ailments, Shardlake is a self-conscious hunchback with anti-Papist beliefs. The real genius, however, is that he lives during the reign of King Henry VIII. There’s so much to play around with, a rich tapestry of history to weave during a time of great turbulence in England.
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