Paul Auster - "Travels in the Scriptorium"

By far the best thing about this book is the cover picture!

An old man awakens, disoriented, in an unfamiliar chamber. With no memory of who he is or how he has arrived there, he pores over the relics on the desk, examining the circumstances of his confinement and searching his own hazy mind for clues. Determining that he is locked in, the man—identified only as Mr. Blank—begins reading a manuscript he finds on the desk, the story of another prisoner, set in an alternate world the man doesn't recognize. Nevertheless, the pages seem to have been left for him, along with a haunting set of photographs. One hundred and twenty pages later we are at the end of the book but really no further forward....
I have generally endeavoured in these reviews to avoid 'spoiling' the plot for anyone who might want to read the work. I'm not sure one could spoil this! If you are ever on a desert island with only half a dozen books read the other five first - with luck you may be rescued before you get to this one...

PAUL AUSTER was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1947 to middle class parents. After attending Columbia University he lived in France for four years. Since returning to America in 1974, he has published poems, essays, novels and translations.

Lisa See - "The Flower Net"

 

A better than average thriller. Not only an excellent plot but a great insight into the last days of the Mao Tse Tung dybasty. The first body was found in ice: the U.S. ambassador's son, entombed in a frozen lake outside Beijing's Forbidden City. Thousands of miles away, in the heat-baked hold of a Chinese smuggling ship, another corpse is uncovered, this one a red Prince, a scion of China's political elite. Suspecting the deaths are linked, the American and Chinese governments pair ambitious attorney David Stark and brilliant detective Liu Hulan to uncover a killer and a conspiracy. From the teeming streets of Beijing to Los Angeles and back, David and Liu are caught in a perilous net of politics, organized crime, family loyalties, and their own passion. As, one by one, those close to the investigation are killed, David and Hulan face a firestorm of evil, while the killer they seek is as close as the secrets they keep from each other.

LISA SEE has been a journalist for many years writing for, among others, the LA Times, the Washington Post and Cosmopolitan, and was, until recently, the West Coast correspondent for Publishers Weekly.

Alexander McCall Smith - "The Careful Use of Compliments"

 

Isabel Dalhousie is back in her fourth book, published in 2007, the latest installment of this enchanting, already beloved, best-selling series.

In addition to being the nosiest and most sypathetic philosopher you are likely to meet, Isabel is now a mother. Charlies, her newborn son, presents her with a myriad wonders of a new life, and doting father Jamie presents her with an intriguing proposal: marriage. In the midst of all this, she receives a disturbing letter announcing that she has been ousted as editor of the Review of Applied Ethics by the ambitious Professor Dove.

None of these things, however, in any way diminshes Isabel's curiosity. And when she attends an art auction, she finds an irresistable puzzle: two paintings attributed to a now-deceased artist appear on the market at the same time, and both of them exhibit some unusual characteristics. Are these paintings forgeries? This proves to be sufficient fodder for Isabel's inquisitiveness. So she begins an investigation... and soon finds herself diverging from her philosophical musings about fatherhood onto a path that leads her into the mysteries of the art world and the soul of an artist.

For some earlier Alexander McCall Smith entries see -
http://bookeverysixdays.blogspot.com/2008/01/alexander-mccall-smith-right-attitude.html

A couple of quotes:-

"She looked at the room around her, at her desk, at her books. None of this would belong to her for ever; it would change hands and somebody new would be here, somebody who would not even know who she had been, somebody who would look at her with astonishment if she came back, in some thought experiment, and said: That’s my desk – I want it. Our possessing of our world is a temporary matter: we stamp our ownership upon our surroundings, give familiar names to the land about us, erect statues of ourselves, but all of this is swept away, so quickly, so easily. We think the world is ours for ever, but we are little more than squatters."

"There were two horses in the soul. she thought, as Socrates had said, in the Phaedrus – the one, unruly, governed by passions, pulling in the direction of self-indulgence; the other, restrained, dutiful, governed by a sense of shame.... "

"They stood at the front door; Peter pressed the small white button in the middle of a brass fitting to the right: PLEASE PUSH was written on the porcelain; olds Edinburgh – modern buttons just said PUSH, the simple imperative, not the polite cousin."

Clive Egleton - "The Renegades"

 

The Renegades is book twelve in the Peter Ashton spy thriller series. A way of amusing oneself and escaping from the world but not the most brilliant of stories I have read.

When an SIS Operative is killed in a London restaurant shootout, police initially suspect no more than a robbery with drug gangster overtones. But it soon becomes apparent that one of the corpses has more than one name, and a previous misdemeanour was covered from within the depths of Britain's Secret Services. As British Council offices in Pakistan and then Russia are attacked by suicide bombers, it soon becomes apparent that there is a link between an apparently ordinary working lunch and world terrorism. The British Secret Services set about sorting the problems out....


CLIVE EGLETON was born in Middlesex in 1927 and educated at Haberdashers Aske's school. He enlisted under age in the Royal Armoured Corps in 1945 to train as a tank driver and was subsequently commissioned into the South Staffordshire Regiment for whom he served in India, Hong Kong, Germany, Egypt, Cyprus, the Persian Gulf and East Africa before retiring in 1975 in the rank of Lt Colonel.

Widely regarded as one of Britain's leading thriller writers, he brings years of experience in the Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence fields to his books and has more than thirty novels to his credit, most recently the highly successful spy series featuring Peter Ashton. His books have been translated into fifteen languages. His fourth novel, Seven Days to a Killing, was made into a film starring Michael Caine and released under the title The Black Windmill.

Clive Egleton died in March 2006.

Simon Scarrow – “The Eagle in the Sand”

 

Trouble is brewing in Judaea, on the eastern frontier of the Roman Empire. With the troops in a deplorable state, centurions Macro and Cato are despatched to restore the competence of the cohort. But another challenge faces them as, Bannus, a local tribesman and disciple of refently deceased Jehoshua (aka Jesus), is brewing up trouble and preaching violent opposition to Rome. As the local revolt grows in scale, Macro and Cato must stamp out corruption in the cohort and restore it to fighting fitness to quash Bannus -- before the eastern provinces are lost to the Empire forever! A fun, rip-roaring yarn.

Simon Scarrow concentrates on two things – the rip-roaring yarn and the background area. About life and culture of the times there is little depth but that doesn’t matter the setting is all in this story and Scarrow was invited to the area by the King of Jordan who had admired his previous stories. He has made the most of his visit!

I have read a couple of the earlier ones in thios series but which ones I cannot now recall.
Cato and Macro
1. Under the Eagle (2000)
2. The Eagle's Conquest (2001)
3. When the Eagle Hunts (2002)
4. The Eagle and the Wolves (2003)
5. The Eagle's Prey (2004)
6. The Eagle's Prophecy (2005)
7. The Eagle in the Sand (2006)
8. Centurion (2007)


SIMON SCARROW, (b. UK 1962) teaches at a leading Sixth Form College. He has run a Roman History programme taking parties of students to a number of ruins and museums across Britain.