The three books here represent three very different approaches to food, but they share a purpose: joy in eating. You might hope that all cookbooks would have that in common, but unfortunately you’d be very wrong.
Exciting Food for Southern Types (Penguin Great Food)
Pellegrino ArtusiPenguin 2011, Paperback, 128 pages, £6.99
Exciting Food For Southern Types is a gourmet’s book. [...]
Richard Brautigan was, at various times in his life, poet in residence at MIT, homeless, a best-selling novelist, a compulsory patient at a hospital for the insane and suicidally depressed.
Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster
Richard BrautiganDelacorte Pr 1969, Paperback, £1.60
He found fame writing prose – particularly his 1967 novel Trout Fishing in America – but he [...]
Yet more detective fiction, this time in the guise of espionage and the Secret Service.
Diamonds are Forever
Ian FlemingPenguin 2009, Paperback, 304 pages, £7.99
Oddly for a secret agent, James Bond has been roped in to investigating a diamond smuggling operation. A dentist in Africa gives the stones to a man in a helicopter who takes them to London [...]
Whoosh, away from Italy, north to Sweden and another detective, Kurt Wallander.
The White Lioness (Inspector Wallander Mysteries)
Henning MankellVintage 2009, Paperback, 576 pages, £7.99
The crime story here is more ambitious and international in scope, involving an assassination plot of famous real-life South African political figures, fictional contract killers and the landcapes of two radically different countries.
Another Italian detective, but this one’s home grown. Salvo Montalbano is a Sicilian police inspector and this is his first appearance in print.
The Shape of Water (Montalbano 1)
Andrea CamilleriPicador 2005, Paperback, 256 pages, £7.99
The story concerns a man found dead in a car in a wasteground well known as a trading place for prostitutes and drug dealers. [...]
Modern crime fiction doesn’t go in for humanity all that much. There are faults, for sure, but fondness and family bonds that aren’t late ripped apart from a threat from an avenging psychopath are rare.
A Venetian Reckoning
Donna LeonPan Books 1996, Mass Market Paperback, 240 pages, £6.99
Donna Leon’s Inspector Brunetti is the most human detective I’ve come across, [...]
It’s an odd book, this. Smeeth’s grandmother was a young girl working in the kitchens of a big house shortly before the first world war with ambitions to be a cook.
Edwardian Entertaining
Christine SmeethFCA Cooperative Resources Centre Ltd 1989, Paperback, 112 pages, £3.99
To achieve her aim, she wrote down all the recipes she could persuade the house’s cook [...]
It’s easy to get historical fiction wrong. An over-abundance of research that you just can’t bear to throw away, too little or a setting that feels too close to modern circumstances or characters that appear as excuses to write about a period all rob the work of any drama it might [...]
It’s happened before, I should know better. A book is recommended to me as a masterpiece unbowed by the heavy baggage that normally kills any work in a particular genre (in this case science fiction). Authors that I admire write of their love for it, so I pick up a copy and start to read, [...]
Slightly disillusioned with fiction, I turn to poetry. It’s rather good, I’m glad I did.
The Lost Leader
Mick ImlahFaber and Faber 2008, Paperback, 144 pages, £9.99
Imlah grew up in Scotland until he was 10 years old, when he moved to England, where he stayed until he died. He clearly felt that he was a Scot though as his [...]
