Tips, links and suggestions: what are you reading this week?

It’s many years since I read it, but already I’m engrossed. The blurb on the front, from the Indie, states “A brilliant, literary mystery”. So since I read it, and memory being mush I’ve no idea of the denouement. An added bonus.

Her description of one character, “The ebullient Daisy Hart, a broad-busted woman in her bristly mid-fifties, snugged into her seersucker - she would have called it a two-piece” illustrates the skills which make me return to her novels. She is sadly missed.

Easy to read, very often laugh out loud funny, and with a huge cast of memorable characters. Viewed through the narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, it’s a sort of rift on themes from Proust, art/time/love/death and all that, every life lived out as both a comedy and a tragedy. It’s easier on the brain than Proust, and is a social history of England from the early 1920s to the 1970s, from aristos to Fitzrovian demi-monde, with lots of lesbians and gay men: all of their time. It also has one of the greatest monsters in English literature, up there with any of Dickens’s horrors: Kenneth Widmerpool - a socially inept, utterly selfish, pompous man, devoid of talent and driven only by the will to power, who claws his way up to positions of power and influence. Will he or won’t he get his comeuppance?

I already miss this version of Cromwell. What an accomplishment the trilogy is, to me anyway. I practically see the ghosts of Tom, Anne, Wolsey etc. lurking in the corner of my room. Just bloody brilliant storytelling and wonderful prose.

Of course it has The Machine Stops, which I hadn’t read in years - decades, even. What a stone-cold classic of Edwardian scientific romance, with its population of shut-ins all preoccupied with what is clearly some form of social media...

I’m totally buying his alternative world set in a very different 1957 because he seamlessly blends together many disparate elements and handles several plots with great ease. A page turner with rich characters.

Set in the months just before the declaration of war in September 1939, this focuses on a group of Londoners who drift from pub to pub, either drunk or hungover, feckless, disaffected and without a care for society, waiting for the end, both their end and that of their way of life …  It’s a complicated plot, and rarely an easy read, but a rewarding one. The writing is atmospheric and compelling, ensnaring the reader by the steadily unravelling of the characters.

Absolutely wonderful character study; the kind of prose you can just wallow in.

It was a family (extended) saga. Went from India to Ethiopia to the US … there are several main characters but the main-main are the identical twin boys Shiva and Marion. Their relationship, being able to read each other’s minds, their closeness takes up a lot of the book at all stages in the story. All the characters are vivid and complex. The book at no time deviates from a spirit of goodheartedness. And that’s Verghese.

An account of the author’s experiences as a member of the Polish underground resistance during the second world war. The book was first published in English in 1944, written while Karski was in America as part of his mission to provide testimony to the Allies, and, as its subordinate title suggests, it was intended to be a document of record. In the Penguin Modern Classics edition there is a photograph of the author dictating the text to his bilingual secretary/translator Krystyna Sokolowska in a Manhattan hotel room.

The book opens with a sumptuous party in Warsaw in August 1939 (“The lights were subdued and everywhere were ornate vases of long-stemmed flowers that added their scent to the perfumes of the gayly dressed women”), but within only a few pages the narrator has been mobilised and deployed to the south of the country, where his division suffers a swift military defeat and he is taken prisoner. His escape, his return to Warsaw, his recruitment into the underground resistance movement, and his subsequent missions (including his capture and interrogation by the Gestapo) are detailed in an unadorned, unsentimental prose that suggests both his steely resolve and his vast reserves of courage.