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The Mark of Cain

For me as a teenager, reading voraciously on the Natal sugar farm that was then my home, what gave Herman Charles Bosman an edge over other writers was that he was a murderer. That he was also one of a handful of South African writers who could confidently be called ‘major’ seemed incidental. From my adolescent perspective, lounging in a rattan chair on the veranda, with the sea of sugarcane swaying in the distance, it was his infamy that was beguiling.
SF magazine subscribers only
Romance of the Road

Romance of the Road

For anyone interested in places and their associations And So to Bath (1940) is a gem. Writing at the end of the 1930s under the shadow of war and in a succession of stages along the road’s hundred miles, Roberts conjures up a fascinating historical panorama from prehistoric times to Rome, the Plantagenets, the Tudors and Stuarts, the cultural glories (and social misdemeanours) of Georgian England and the Victorian prosperity and reforms that followed it, through to a philistine twentieth century which he laments. With a magpie’s zeal Roberts has gathered it all for us. For occasional fellow travellers he has the scholarly and spinsterly Miss Whissett, and Rudolf, an enthusiastic young Austrian student of English literature whose companionship may have held more than a passing charm for the bachelor author.
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London at War

London at War

Year by year literature of and about the First World War mounts –  books on its campaigns, causes, politics and economics; memoirs by politicians and generals; diaries and letters written by ordinary ‘Tommies’, by nurses in the front line and those involved on the Home Front, from the ‘Munitionettes’ who filled shells and assembled guns to the society ladies who rolled bandages and handed out tea and buns to departing soldiers. The catalogue of the London Library currently lists 1,475 titles on the First World War, and there will be many more to come during the remaining centenary years . . .
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Casting Out Fear

Man’s Search for Meaning has apparently sold more than 10 million copies and been published in 24 languages. It is, according to the Library of Congress, one of the ‘ten most influential books in the United States’. When you are happy, E. F. Benson or some other undemanding text is enough; when you torture yourself, you need to find ways of coping. Frankl’s book is unlike any other Holocaust memoir I have read. From the darkest degradation he brings hope. He finds meaning amid the meaningless. It would be an exaggeration to say that his book saved my life – but it did help me find meaning.
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To Hell and Back

Do you know the novels of Dan Rhodes? I ask because his books would appeal, I believe, to many readers. But he avoids journalism, does not belong to any literary groups or contemporary schools of writing and is very much an individual novelist. He neither pursues fame nor patronizes his readers. What he believes is what you get: sensitivity, humour, sadness and devastating shock. Sometimes I have been so saddened, so shocked, that I have stopped reading and put the book aside. But before long I am compelled to pick it up again and read on. And what I have read has found a place in my imagination.
SF magazine subscribers only
Gateway to the East

Gateway to the East

Grunty Fen has long been a source of mystery. For years it lurked in the dusty lumber-room of memory, unvisited and all but forgotten, its faint miasma lingering slightly, if unpleasantly, until all that was left was the name, only the name. Like Adelstrop, you might think, as immortalized by Edward Thomas; though until recently, all the two places had in common was that once, long ago and for a short time only, each boasted a small, branch-line railway station.
SF magazine subscribers only

Distance & Desire

Close Range collects eleven of Proulx’s short stories, all set at various points in the previous century on the ‘dangerous and indifferent ground’ of the author’s home state of Wyoming. It is a book echoing with the voices of hard-rolling, rusty-trucked ranching communities, inhabited by men and women who plod and plough and geld and herd for a living on isolated dots of farmsteads and in one-street towns. The characters don’t talk much, though occasionally they might talk too much: like a river in spate, this is when they tend to do most damage.
SF magazine subscribers only
Bookshop of the Quarter: Summer 2016

Bookshop of the Quarter: Summer 2016

Wenlock Books has been the beating heart of the high street in the ancient market town of Much Wenlock since 1987. Loved by locals and visitors alike, customers include regulars from South Africa, France, the USA and New Zealand, as well as UK customers from Manchester, Birmingham, London and Edinburgh. Some visit every year, some pop in two or three times a week: the bookshop has a large family! At the head of this family is shop owner and bookseller Anna Dreda, and we happily quizzed her on life at Wenlock Books.

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