FICTION

Girl, Girl, Girl, Girl, Girl, Girl, Girl, Girl. On the Train

– I’m Rachel. I’m on a train. I wanted to call this book Rachel on the Train but the publishers insisted I call it Girl on the Train. They said it would cash in on the Gone Girl market. I asked if they could persuade Gillian Flynn to change the name of her book to Gone Rachel. They said that was unlikely. Sorry, I’m rambling. I’m a bit pissed as usual. Oh look, the train has stopped and there’s the house I used to live in with Tom who’s now run off with that bitch Anna. Fuck me! Some new people have moved in down the road. They look well fit. I bet they are called Jason and Jess.

– I’m not called Jess, I’m called Megan. And I think I’m about to disappear. Yup, there I go. Going, going, gone girl.

The Girl on the Train. Photograph: PR

– Anna, here. I’m sick of that fat pissed slag coming round and bothering me and Tom. It’s not nice of me to say that, but I feel I must be honest.

– Steady on girls. Girls! See what I did there. Anyway, I know it’s meant to be a three-way narrative but it’s basically my book, right? So why don’t you two shut up for a moment? Bloody hell, I’m sure I’d be able to remember more about Megan’s disappearance if only I hadn’t blacked out.

– I’m not as reliable as I first suggested.

– Me neither.

– I’ve stopped drinking and am having a bit of therapy. I guess my memory might come back soon.

– I’m losing the will to live.

– Just as well.

– Yay! I now remember everything. I’ve solved the mystery.

The Buried Giant

Kazuo Ishiguro

Think of a world as full of magical creatures as Middle-Earth. Then make it really dull

In the years after the Romans left, the land was full of ogres. I do not want to give the impression there were no fine-dining experiences to be had, but most endured miserable lives underground.

Let us now turn to Axl and Beatrice, two elderly Britons. A deep growl rent the air. “That’s just Oliver the Not-Very-Scary Ogre,” said Axl. “Now where was I? I forget.”

“That’s the trouble with this mist sent to us by Querig the Queer She-Dragon – it makes us forget everything.”

The Buried Giant. Photograph: PR

“I seem to remember, though, Princess, that we might have once had a son.”

Verily, Beatrice and Axl set out on their awfully big adventure, even though they knowest not what they were doing due to the mist. Ere long, they chanced upon Brian the Boatman, who took them across the river. A large young man appeared before them. “I am Wistan the Warrior,” he said. “And you must leave now with me and this young boy, Edwin the Eejit, who has been bitten by an ogre.” The four slipped away through the mist until they came across an elderly knight with Horace the Horse.

“Who goes there?” said Sir Gawain, for it was he. “Bugger me,” Axl replied. “Didn’t you once sleep with my Princess when I was off killing someone?”

Sir Gawain and Wistan the Warrior engaged in mortal combat. Sir Gawain fell. “You know what, Axl?” he said as he lay dying. “I think I did shag your wife. This remembering lark isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

“We’d give anything to forget this,” said the readers.

Go Set A Watchman

Harper Lee

The unwanted, unloved elder sibling of To Kill A Mockingbird

It was an elegantly written first sentence worthy of the most earnest unpublished first novel. Jean Louise settled back into a sophisticated New York silence, breathing in the fragrance of the heavy southern air as the train reached Maycomb.

“Please can we just sit down and talk about how you defended the Negro Tom Robinson 20 years ago, Atticus,” she said. “It’s not ringing any bells.” Only the singing of a few startled finches broke the heavily pregnant silence.

The next morning a desperate Negro came running to the door. “My son has run over and killed a white man. Please help.”

“Sure.”

Jean Louise’s heart filled with joy. Atticus was a good man after all!

“Thing is, Scout,” Atticus said later. “It’s far better for me to come along and take the case than leave it to some civil rights lawyer. Them lawyers are causin’ a whole heap of trouble round here.”

“If you won’t defend a Negro properly then come to the aid of an 89-year-old lady who has had a stroke and is almost totally deaf and blind. Poor Miss Nelle was determined not to let anyone read another word she’d written and now her lawyer and publishers have decided to cash in on a piss-poor, first-draft manuscript.”

Atticus yawned. His rheumatoid arthritis was tiring him out. “It’s not one for me, Scout. I hate geriatrics even more than I hate Negros. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got a Klu Klux Klan meeting to go to.” Racialism was more difficult than Jean Louise had initially thought.

Grey

EL James

Come again? If you insist ...

I can’t get away from that recurring dream where I’m rewriting the same book as before. The thought of the pain on readers’ faces when they realise just how badly they’ve been screwed makes my enormous cock harden.

“Hello,” says a young woman called Anastasia. “I’m here to interview you. Are you gay?”

“No,” I say. “But I do have a sudden insatiable desire to mercilessly fist-fuck you.”

“I’m only a virgin,” Anna replies. “Can we take things more slowly?

I instruct her in the basic rules of our relationship. I will buy her a laptop and in return she will allow me to abuse her in whatever way I want.

“Sounds reasonable,” she says, “though I’d like to go easy on the crucifixions early doors. What happens now?”

“While I am wondering whether to fall in love with you, I shall take you off on pointless trips while my enormous cock continues to explode inside you at regular intervals.”

Grey. Photograph: PR

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

“You could always let me be steadily more abusive.”

“Very well,” she sobs. “Flog me until I yelp because I understand this is the only way you can be emotionally healed.”

I am so proud of her as she literally explodes into the biggest orgasm anyone has ever had.

“I love you so much, but I’m not sure I can do this again,” she cries, running out the room.

I am distraught. I think about my Mum.

“Let’s give it another go,” she says. My enormous cock erupts in delight.

My Brilliant Friend

Elena Ferrante

The first part of the Neapolitan trilogy in which almost nothing happens

Rino called in the fetid heat of the Neapolitan night. His mother had gone missing. Everyone else called her Lina. Not me. I call her Lila. Two weeks passed. The fetid heat became more fetid. Where was she?

We had met more than 60 years ago. I feel no nostalgia for my childhood. Life was brutal. Blood flowed like rivers through the backstreets. Characters wandered in and out of the novel so randomly it was hard to remember who they were. Or care.

I was lucky. I was allowed to carry on going to school. Each day I made my way past strangers stabbing one another and the bloated carcasses of rotting cats. Lila wasn’t so lucky. She had to leave school and work in the family shoe factory.

Blood poured from my vagina. “I’m having my period too,” Lila told me. That knowledge made us feel close.

My Brilliant Friend. Photograph: PR

“Why are people reading this book?” she asked one day. “I’ve no idea. Apparently someone from the New Yorker thought it was a masterpiece. I’m told it’s brilliantly translated.”

“Shame we don’t speak English then.”

Life became hard. Someone I had barely mentioned died. Blood, dirt and dust was everywhere. We were living in the real Naples. “I’m getting married to Stefano,” Lila said, her cuts and bruises coated in dried blood.

“I’ve got some new shoes.”

I was jealous. I was also 14 and wanted to be married.

“So where is my mother, then?” asked Rino.

“I’ve no idea. This is only the first book in a trilogy and I’ve reached my word count. You’ll have to go and buy the others.”

“You might have told me.”





The Green Road

Anne Enright

The relentlessly downbeat family saga that puts your own miserable holiday in perspective

Hanna trudged wearily along the country road. This was an Ireland deeply evocative of the 1980s, she thought. Mainly because that’s where this opening section of the novel was set. “Has the old matriarch got a headache?” the chemist asked. “To be sure,” she replied. “Rosaleen is very upset Dan is going to be a priest.”

The Green Road. Photograph: PR

It was now 1991 and Dan was living in New York and had become one of the most cliched gay men in literature. “I love cock me, oh my you’ve got a big one, I will try and fit you in. Though I am worried about Aids because it is 1991.”

“Phew,” said Emmet, “thank God I’ve got away from the lot of them by moving to Mali.”

Ireland was becoming more modern, though Constance was still five years behind the rest of her siblings in 1997. She couldn’t help thinking she ought to get out more. “Happy fucking Christmas,” Rosaleen shouted in 2005. “Now you’ve all finally come home, I’m going to sell the house.” Hanna, Dan, Emmet and Constance all pondered this deeply and felt they had learned something about the nature of fractured family life in Ireland.

NON-FICTION

Napoleon the Great

Andrew Roberts

Little man writes big book about a little man

Although only 5ft 4¾in tall, Napoleon was actually a giant among men considering the standards of the day. Obviously he was a bit smaller than that when he was born in Corsica in 1769, but he quickly grew to his full height and went on to become the greatest person to have ever lived. It is a little – I use that word advisedly – known fact that many British people actually quite admired Napoleon despite him being a Frenchie, though obviously they drew the line at all that revolutionary nonsense.

Napoleon the Great. Photograph: PR

Despite being only 5ft 4¾in tall, Napoloeon was also an incredibly attractive man whom no woman could resist. This was an immense burden to him all his life; one that he bore stoically. It was hugely disappointing that, after winning so many battles, he should have lost the one that really mattered at Waterloo. It is my belief that Wellington cheated by taking away Napoleon’s ladder, thereby ensuring he couldn’t see properly. Andrew Roberts is 5ft ¾in tall.

Hot Feminist

Polly Vernon

Every other columnist has written a book about being a cool feminist, so why not me?

Hot Feminist. Photograph: PR

I ain’t going to tell a lie. I think about the way I look, like, a lot. Like maybe all the time. Because, let’s face it, who wouldn’t if they were as hot as me? Even modern feminism – with all its CAPITAL LETTERS, being totally prescriptive about how hairy your bush can be and what you can and can’t do ironically – is just totes dullssville when you’re really hot. Look, I’m not saying you can’t be a hot feminist if you’re chubby but, like, take a reality check. Yes you, fatso in the size 10. So what is hot? Hot is when you look like me. Hot is when you just have the slutty urge to wear next to nothing and you are so waxed there is not a pube in sight. Hot is when you are over 40 and you can just tell every male half your age is still gagging to fuck you but you let them down ever so gently by reminding them you’re already in a relationship with someone who picks up your clothes. So that’s it; hot feminsism is about being ME and not being pushed into a corner by everyone in the sisterhood who is a bit uglier than me.

The Power Broker

Robert A Caro

Pulitzer-winning 1974 biography of a man you’ve never heard of now finally published here

The Power Broker. Photograph: PR

It was an overcast morning in late March 1974 when Robert Caro pronounced himself happy with the 1,174 page manuscript. It had just been confirmed to him by three independent witnesses that, as he had suspected, the legal notebook Robert Moses had used in his planning depositions of 1937 had, indeed, been yellow and not pale orange and the final alterations had been made.

Caro felt sure that Moses would have approved: the man who had risen from obscurity to build and reshape the New York landscape had never left anything to chance. The power lay in the detail and power was Caro’s subject, every bit as much as Moses. Surely it was only a matter of time before a future president would come to cite his work as a seminal influence.

No matter then that by the time this book would be published in Britain more than 40 years later, almost no one outside America would have a clue who Moses was. This was not a book to be read on a summer holiday. Had he intended it to be, Caro would have made sure it was published on Kindle to save using up one-third of the Ryanair baggage allowance. Nor was it a book he necessarily ever imagined anyone having the time to read, as the print was so small.

No, this was a book worthy to stand shoulder to shoulder with Moses. An object to be admired every bit as much as the Triborough bridge. And just as visible.

More Human

Steve Hilton

I’ve got this really big idea about how politics should really be a bit, like, more human

When I was working as David Cameron’s director of strategy at No 10, I had this moment of revelation. Deep down, we are all human and if only we could get away from some of the things that make us less human then we could all be a bit more human. That is the circle of life.

More Human. Photograph: PR

Education is a really big subject, one that is at the heart of becoming more human. That’s why I was happy to help Michael Gove start a profound revolution to test children ever more rigorously in profit-making schools that are free to do whatever they want as long as they get good results and if it just so happens that all the middle-class children end up learning Latin in the same school then that’s cool because the market can be more human too.

Health is a really big subject, one that is at the heart of becoming more human. Food is a really big subject, one that is at the heart of becoming more human. Inequality is a really big subject, one that is at the heart of becoming more human. Too much of big business and government depends on nepotism and unfair life chances. I know this as well as anyone. That needs to change, which is why I would like to be Mayor of London. Being more human means loving nature and ourselves and recognising that deep down we are simultaneously both the same and completely different and that we must embrace our humanity in a good way, not a bad way. Vote Steve. A better world is a Hiltworld.

How Music got Free

Stephen Witt

How stealing became sharing

How Music Got Free. Photograph: PR

At 9.33am on 23 May 1995 Dell Glover parked his Cherokee jeep in the parking lot numbered 36G at the North Carolina record processing plant where he worked. He was perspiring, though not freely, because the ambient outside temperature was still only 19.52C. He went into his office, helped himself to several new CDs and took them home. At 17.08 he parked his Cherokee jeep outside his nextdoor neighbour’s house because the spot outside his own house was being used. Dell went indoors and switched on his computer, a Dell 4000 running the latest Windows 95 operating system. He put the CDs into an external CD drive, because the internal drive wasn’t working, and then downloaded some music.

Almost at the same time in Germany, where the ambient temperature was several degrees lower, Karlheinz Brandenburg cunningly invented the MP3 file in a process described at length over 30,000 pages. This was the single most exciting thing that had ever happened in world history since Pink Floyd accidentally turned up the red dial in Abbey road’s studio at 11.17pm on 23 April 23 1974, as it meant that no one had to pay for their music any more.

How to be an MP

Paul Flynn

Bloody SNP. They come down to Westminster, sit in the wrong seats and start clapping. I ask you. They should read this

When I was first elected to the house, Maggie was in her pomp in 1984 and I just didn’t have a clue how to fiddle my expenses properly or even which lobby to walk through during a division. I was reminded of all this just after this year’s general election when you couldn’t have a quiet G&T in the Stranger’s bar without some new Scots Nat MP spoiling things by getting rather rowdy. Some of them even clapped in the chamber and tried to steal other members’ seats. Poor show, really. If only they’d read this marvellous little book that some chappy called Flynn – he’s a decent sort even though he is Labour – wrote back in the 90s about how to survive as an MP.

How to be an MP. Photograph: PR

It’s really frightfully good, if a little sardonic at times for my liking, as it tells you everything you need to know about how to get round the party whips, how to ask the prime minister the kind of question he doesn’t mind being asked, how to keep your annoying constituents at arm’s length – I mean, happy – how to make sure you get your name in the local paper, how to make sure you are re-elected (clearly not enough Lib Dems read this bit) and climb the jolly old greasy pole if that’s your sort of thing. Obviously I’m not going to read it myself as it’s all terribly old hat to an old lag like me, but I’m told it hasn’t dated at all and would be of tremendous value to a new MP. What’s that? There’s a chapter on how to get a bunk up to the Lords. Hmm. I might just have a look at that. Bring on the dissolution honours list, I say.