Bad Behavior was published in 1988 and it marked a striking debut from Mary Gaitskill. This collection of nine stories features tales of sexual obsession, drug addiction, and the darkest sides of human relationships. Several of the stories feature young women working as prostitutes, through either choice or necessity, most with a striking naïveté despite…
Read more No 566 Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill #20booksofsummer
Richard Lloyd Parry was the Tokyo bureau chief of The Times of London, when, in 2000 he was assigned to cover the disappearance of a 21-year old British woman from the streets of Tokyo. Lucie Blackman was a former British Airways flight attendant who had travelled to Tokyo with her best friend Louise to work…
Read more No 567 People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry #20booksofsummer
As a massive Tom Waits fan, I’m a sucker for a book that uses his lyrics as an epigraph so The Cold Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty won me over before I even started reading. Thankfully though, the book itself did not disappoint. The story is set in 1981 in Northern Ireland during The Troubles.…
Read more No 568 The Cold Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty #20booksofsummer
Jeet Thayil has poured his experience of his years as a drug addict in Mumbai into Narcopolis, a sprawling, hallucinatory journey through Bombay from the 1970s to the present day. The novel opens with an astonishing Prologue that features one sentence that is over six pages long and sets out Thayil’s goal of creating a…
1 summer. 94 Days. 20 Books. 5166 pages. 55 pages a day. Will this year finally be the year I complete my 20 Books of Summer challenge? From now until 3 September I will be attempting to read my 20 Books of Summer. Why not join in with your own 20 (or 10, or 15!),…
I can’t believe we’re talking about the coffee again. How many times have we gone over this? Coffee gets talked about a lot in Salvation of A Saint, the follow up to phenomenally successful The Devotion of Suspect X. Once again Keigo Higashino’s novel involves Tokyo Detective Kusanago and his friend and sometime colleague Dr…
COLONEL EVANSON: Why did you place your wife in the fire? CLEARY: I would not have done that. I would sooner put myself in the fire than put my wife in it. Carlo Gebler’s The Cure is based on the true story of Bridget Cleary, an Irish woman who was burned to death by her…
Michel Faber’s epic novel The Crimson Petal and the White takes on the Victorian novel at its own game, telling the story of Sugar, a teenage prostitute with a biting intellect and the married industrialist who buys her out of her mother’s brothel to be his exclusive mistress. As befits a Victorian novel, it is…
Read more No 572 The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber
