Marion McLeod revels in the return of Olive Kitteridge, the compassionate curmudgeon who won Elizabeth Strout a Pulitzer Prize. It’s the year of the sequel: My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3, Toy Story 4, Rambo 5 … Do movies ever make it to double figures? Books and miniseries certainly do. Genre fiction spawns sequels: much-loved … Read more
As Wellington and Waikanae face a winter without two beloved libraries, Marion McLeod reviews The Library Book, a hymn to a library that burned. This is a book for Wellingtonians. I don’t usually adhere to the geographical school of reviewing but this book, sadly, is published at a perfect time for Wellington, for its librarians, … Read more
Marion McLeod reviews Late in the Day, a “smooth and sinuous and subtle” new novel by Tessa Hadley We begin with a death, a very good place to start. Where better to assemble and introduce family and friends? What more useful springboard for exploring their relationships? Tessa Hadley does all this superbly, with economy, elegance … Read more
Marion McLeod reviews the new memoir by English novelist Rose Tremain, who summons up memories of a girls’ boarding school smelling of “unwashed armpits, dirty hair and menstrual blood.” It’s not strictly relevant, I know, but 10 years ago I interviewed Rose Tremain at her flat in Tufnell Park. I liked her enormously, and not only because she … Read more
Marion McLeod reviews a memoir by author Claire Tomalin, who is candid about her affair with Martin Amis but maintains a classic English reserve. Sixties London. Claire Tomalin is the wife of Nick Tomalin, a brilliant, handsome young journalist and war correspondent. Claire is too modest to say so in her autobiography, but the photos show … Read more
Marion McLeod is baffled and somewhat bored to sobs by the eagerly awaited second novel by Indian superstar novelist Arundhati Roy. It’s 20 years since Arundhati Roy published her first novel, The God of Small Things, and won the Booker. She was the first Indian actually resident in India to do so. A few months … Read more
Marion McLeod reviews an ‘icy-cold’ account of a Scottish serial killer by the brilliant Denise Mina. Scottish writer Denise Mina has been dubbed Glasgow’s answer to Edinburgh’s Ian Rankin. Having written a dozen crime novels, several plays and films, a comic (Hellblazer) and three graphic novels (adaptations of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy), she has decided to … Read more
“I need to be extraordinary,” said English writer Angela Carter, and her biography attests that she got her wish. Marion McLeod reviews the life story of a woman who described her anorexia as “attempted suicide by narcissism”. AS Byatt recalls first meeting Angela Carter in 1969. “A very disagreeable woman stomped up to me, and said, … Read more
Marion McLeod reviews a new biography of the great novelist Beryl Bainbridge – which reveals that she wrote an unpublished manuscript inspired by the Parker-Hulme murder in Christchurch. This is the first full-length biography of Beryl Bainbridge, the brilliant Liverpudlian novelist, born a decade before the Beatles, died 2010. I’m leaving the birth date vague: … Read more
Marion McLeod reviews In Gratitude by Jenny Diski, which she began writing when she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Her given name was Jennifer Simmonds, which always makes me laugh. A name from Tunbridge Wells or Teddington. That’s what her mother wanted – a nice, well-behaved, middle-class daughter. The daughter didn’t oblige, though she did … Read more
Marion McLeod reviews Before the War by Fay Weldon. I threw away all my Fay Weldons last year. Well, I didn’t actually throw them. I piled them into a rusting supermarket trolley and pushed them across the road to Arty Bees. All of them – about two dozen novels (mostly hardback), a few collections of … Read more