Vintage

Book Reviews

• Amsterdam: A Brief Life of the City (Geert Mak)
  - from polders to provocations
• Balthasar's Odyssey (Amin Maalouf)
  - a novel of signs and portents in the year 1666
• Bar Balto (Faïza Guène)
  - murder and everyday life in a Parisian banlieu
• Chance and Necessity (Jacques Monod)
  An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology
• Death Comes for the Archbishop (Willa Cather)
  - a novel of the Catholic Church in 19th century New Mexico
• Deterring Democracy (Noam Chomsky)
  - an indictment of American imperialism
• *Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation (Olivia Judson)
  The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex
• The End of A Family Story (Peter Nadas)
  - memories of childhood woven into a complex tapestry
• Fatelessness (Imre Kertesz)
  - a teenager in Buchenwald concentration camp
• The First Crusade (Peter Frankopan)
  The Call From the East
• In Praise of Walking (Shane O'Mara)
  The New Science of How We Walk and Why It's Good for Us
• *An Instance of the Fingerpost (Iain Pears)
  - murder, espionage and controversy in Restoration Oxford
• **Ka (Roberto Calasso)
  - a superb synthesis of Hindu mythology
• *The Leopard (Giuseppe di Lampedusa)
  - a Sicilian aristocrat faces change in 1860
• The Master of Go (Yasunari Kawabata)
  - individual and social tensions in a single game
• *Obabakoak (Bernardo Atxaga)
  - a metafictional short story collection
• The Pages (Murray Bail)
  - a story of philosophy, farming, and travel
• *The Prince (Hushang Golshiri)
  - a dark novel about the Qajari lords of Isfahan
• River of Time (Jon Swain)
  - a memoir of Cambodia and Vietnam at war
• The Secret History of Modernism (C.K. Stead)
  - looking back at life as a student in 1950s London
• The Sound of Waves (Yukio Mishima)
  - a simple love story set on a small Japanese island
• Tainted Blood (Arnaldur Indridason)
  - an Icelandic murder mystery
• The Tale of Genji (Murasaki Shikibu)
  - an abridgement of the 11th century Japanese classic
• The Untold History of the Potato (John Reader)
  - social history, agriculture, food
• Voyage to the End of the Room (Tibor Fischer)
  - an entertaining and inventive novel
• The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (Haruki Murakami)
  - a Japanese mix of fantasy and historical fiction
• Women in a River Landscape (Heinrich Böll)
  A Novel in Dialogues and Soliloquies
• The World of Nagaraj (R.K. Narayan)
  - a loveable but ineffectual dilettante in small-town India