Strength in what remains

STRENGTH IN WHAT REMAINS

By Tracy Kidder

Random House. 277 pp.

In the summer of 2005, a villager walked into a district hospital in Rwanda complaining of abdominal pain. The cause was not difficult to diagnose: an acutely enlarged spleen resulting from untreated malaria. But the American doctors were unable to identify a series of angry rings, scored deep into the skin, that covered the patient's distended belly.

A medical student from Burundi recognized them at once: They were burns. Someone, possibly even a parent, had heated a metal pipe over a fire and pressed its red-hot tip into the very part of the body that hurt the most. "Distracting pain with pain," the young doctor called it -- a common practice among the people of Rwanda and Burundi, who know a good deal about agony and affliction.

That young medical student is the subject of Tracy Kidder's extraordinarily stirring new book, "Strength in What Remains"; and the gruesome business of numbing pain with pain is nothing less than a metaphor for the genocide that swept through Burundi and Rwanda in 1994, killing or displacing millions who had already suffered all the miseries of the damned.

The story of Deogratias, a 22-year-old who boarded a plane in Bujumbura at the peak of the violence and emerged, many stops later -- alone, disoriented and ill-prepared -- on the streets of New York City, is as harrowing an account of human suffering as you will ever read. But it is also a miracle of human courage. In it, a man rises against all odds to achieve his highest aspirations and help countless others along the way.

His road to success is hardly easy. The youth whom we first meet on Harlem's Malcolm X Boulevard in 1994 speaks no English. He is tormented by memories of brutality that beggar the imagination. He fears his family is dead. He would rather sleep under a bush in Central Park than in a drug-infested, abandoned tenement. When Deo finally finds work, it is for little more than a dollar an hour, carting groceries to the rich from the well-stocked storerooms of a tony Manhattan market. Perhaps because of his strikingly open face, perhaps because of his winning smile, he is taken in and helped -- first by a former nun with a persistent nature, then by a married couple committed to assisting students in need.

Kidder, most famously the author of "The Soul of a New Machine" and, more recently, "Mountains Beyond Mountains" and "My Detachment," is a veteran of the dramatic narrative, and the real story he spins out here -- raveling it little by little, alongside the rags-to-riches one -- is a man's terrible memory of war. As Kidder describes Deo's flight through the ravaged countryside, we get fleeting glimpses into the inferno: a dead family sprawled on the floor of a hut, a mother's mouth stuffed with a dismembered penis, a baby sucking at a cadaver's breast, a militiaman tossing a child into the campfire. "It was impossible to plan," Kidder writes, "because he never knew where the dangers lay until he got close to them. The signs were obvious by now. Rising smoke meant burning houses up ahead, and wheeling birds a place full of corpses. Swarms of flies meant killings nearby. Sometimes he saw a dog trotting past with a severed head or an arm in its mouth."

It's certainly not the first time we've heard heartbreaking accounts of the civil wars in Africa. But there is a touching intimacy about Deogratias's tale, and it forces us to look hard at the baffling history of the region. There have been so many wrong assertions about the area's ethnicities. According to Kidder, there is little discernible difference between the Hutus and Tutsis. They speak the same language, practice the same religions, share the same tastes in food. More to the point: They intermarry, making it difficult to tell them apart.

Contrary to popular belief, the Hutu and Tutsi thought of themselves as two before the colonizers arrived. But they understood the separation as being within a single people: The Tutsis were lords, the Hutus their subjects. The Europeans cemented the rift and called it aracial difference. The Tutsis, they insisted, had Caucasian ancestors, the Hutus did not.

But the colonizers were gone when the large-scale killing began. It started just after independence, as the Hutus and Tutsis fought one another for control. By the mid 1960s, hundreds of thousands were fleeing Rwanda in a panic. The violence spread to Burundi, where massacres broke out in 1972, and then again in 1988. An uneasy peace resumed, until 1994, when a cabal of Tutsi soldiers assassinated the Hutu president of Burundi. Almost immediately, Hutus began killing Tutsis. Deo, a Tutsi, was working as an intern in a rural hospital at the time. Thinking he would escape the frenzy, he slipped over the border to Rwanda, but there the killing was even worse. By the time it was over, 800,000 people were dead and more than 2 million were homeless. In a region already ravaged by poverty and hunger, the victims were distracting pain with pain.

Kidder by no means tells a seamless story. He lurches recklessly between Africa and New York and from past to present, fragmenting the natural suspense. He quotes Deo too frequently in the early stages of language-learning, rendering him childish, even dim, when he is far from either. Kidder tells us too little and then too much, glossing over material he knows better than we do and then over-explaining things we know perfectly well. He inserts himself into the narrative and indulges in inane asides. But for all these flaws, the sheer power of Deo's story shines through. We cannot help but be in awe of this gentle cicerone who survives war's ghastly labyrinth to emerge a better man.

"Everyone has bad dreams," Kidder writes as he nears the close of this inspirational story. Indeed, Deo is still besieged by bad dreams, unable to free himself from specters that never seem far from mind: A farmer picks up a machete, a spear points toward a child's eye. Unlike the rest of us who have learned how to dismiss nightmares, he awakes knowing those terrible images are real.

Marie Arana is a writer at large for The Washington Post.

Stieg Larsson:novelist

Stieg Larsson: the man who created the girl

Stieg Larsson gave only one interview about his Millennium trilogy of crime novels featuring the brilliant but troubled Lisbeth Salander. Lasse Winkler, who conducted that interview, reveals what Larsson told him about the inspiration for his heroine and about the mysterious manuscript for a fourth novel.

It all started one sunny day in late September 2004, on a park bench outside the Gothenburg Book Fair. John-Henri Holmberg, a Swedish publisher, sat down next to me and told me about three manuscripts he had just read, written by a friend of his named Stieg Larsson. They would, he said, make their author the most famous Swedish writer in the world, “bigger than Henning Mankell”.

At that time, Mankell had conquered almost every market around the world, achieving international sales of around 20 million copies. Larsson, who was then working as an editor on an anti-racism magazine called Expo, hadn’t published a single word of fiction.

If it had come from anyone else, I would have laughed off Holmberg’s claim as a piece of far-fetched fantasy. But my faith in his judgment, and the fact that this Larsson character had waited until he had three manuscripts ready before even approaching a publisher, intrigued me. So the next day, I called Larsson and asked if he would let me interview him.

A few weeks later, on October 27 2004, we met in the Stockholm offices of Expo. The fading light of day seeped into a room furnished with a simple table, two plain chairs and a lamp. Larsson, a 50-year-old chain smoker, looked exhausted. After his death, much would be written about his indefatigable work rate, his superhuman capacity to write for hours without a break. It was clearly taking its toll. The only known fruits of his labour were, at that time, his exposés of racist and fascist organisations for Expo, a publication he had helped set up in 1995 in the wake of a spate of neo-Nazi murders. This work had drawn him into the public eye and provoked death threats.

Larsson lived with his long-term partner, Eva Gabrielsson, but his name was not on the doorbell of their flat and his address was not listed in any records or databases. The couple had several established routines whenever they left home: sometimes they would leave by the front door; at other times, they went out the back, via the basement. Larsson had a habit of glancing over his shoulder frequently, as if to check if anyone was following him.

Not long before our meeting, the police had informed him that photographs of him and Gabrielsson, as well as information about their address, had been found in connection with a murder investigation they were conducting in Stockholm.

I began our interview by inquiring about this aspect of his life, asking if he took any precautions to protect himself. It was a mistake. “Sure,” he snapped back, “but I’m hardly going to tell you about them, am I?”

When I suggested that he wouldn’t have to fear attacks by Right-wing extremists in the future, because his fame would protect him, his temper flared further: he didn’t believe that being a public figure would change a thing. “What I do foresee is that I will be able to be more choosy,” he said testily. “I have a job at Expo. I intend to keep it. It’s the publisher’s job to sell my books. My job is to produce them. I suspect I’ll have to make a few public appearances for them. But I’m already starting to dislike giving lectures, because I don’t really have the time.”

Thankfully, his ill humour evaporated when the conversation moved on to the subject of the Millennium series. What, I asked, was the source of his inspiration? The basic idea had been knocking around for a while, he said. He’d been toying with it back in his days at the Swedish TT news agency where he worked as a graphic designer and occasional writer, from 1977 to 1999. At some point in the early to mid-Nineties, he and a fellow journalist, Kenneth Ahlborn, were working on an article about the classic detective stories that were popular with young readers in Sweden in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies.

“We were kidding around, talking about how you could write about those characters in their forties, when they were facing one last mystery,” he said. “That planted the seed, but nothing materialised back then.”

It was not until 2001 that Larsson stumbled upon the spark that would bring the Millennium trilogy into being. “I considered Pippi Longstocking,” he said, referring to the most famous creation of the Swedish children’s author Astrid Lindgren, a girl so strong she could carry a horse. “What would she be like today? What would she be like as an adult? What would you call a person like that, a sociopath? Hyperactive? Wrong. She simply sees society in a different light. I’ll make her 25 years old and an outcast. She has no friends and is deficient in social skills. That was my original thought.” That thought evolved into Larsson’s formidable heroine, Lisbeth Salander.

But he felt Salander needed a counterweight if his story was to be a success. Once again he turned to one of Lindgren’s characters, this time to Kalle Blomkvist, boy detective. “Only now he’s 45 years old and a journalist [called Mikael Blomkvist]. An altruistic know-it-all who publishes a magazine called Millennium. The story will revolve around the people who work there.”

Larsson was well-versed in the mechanics of crime fiction. Every spring and autumn, back when he worked for the news agency, he was assigned to write reviews that summed up the season’s releases of translated crime fiction. “I’d include the top five crime novels at that particular time,” he said. “Some of the writers I’ve praised are Sara Paretsky, Val McDermid, Elisabeth George and Minette Walters. Strangely enough, almost all are women.”

In his trilogy, he plays with the conventions of the genre. The first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, is a traditional whodunit with a caper thrown in. The second, The Girl Who Played with Fire, has a “lone avenger” feel, and the third, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest is a fusion of spy novel and legal thriller. “I’ve read crime fiction all my life. A thing that’s bothered me about crime fiction is that it’s generally about one or two people, but there’s not much about society,” he told me. “I want to get away from that particular pattern: a lead, a supporting role and backdrop characters. In real life, people are integrated into society. That’s what happens in my books, as well. Minor characters don’t just walk in and spout lines, they interact and have an effect on the events. It’s not an isolated universe.”

When Larsson had finished his manuscripts he didn’t initially send them to Norstedts, the company that would eventually publish them. They went first to Piratförlaget, a Swedish publishing house that focuses on bestsellers: they didn’t even bother to open the package. So a friend of Larsson’s, a well-known Swedish journalist and the chairman of the Expo board, took the three books over to Norstedts instead. And the rest, as they say, is history.

I asked him what his expectations were when he submitted the manuscripts to the publishers. “If I wanted to be sarcastic, I’d say expectations don’t enter into it,” he said. “But anyone who writes for a living believes their material has commercial value, right? I believe that my books have that quality. That’s why I submitted them for publication. I know they’re good. I knew that someone would want to publish them. This is my retirement fund.”

Many people have wondered why Larsson, like most authors, didn’t tout the first book around as soon as he was finished with it. Why wait until he had three? “Why not?” he said. “I wrote them for fun. I didn’t write them with the conviction that they would be published. And things don’t really all come together until you get to the third book. Now the foundation is in place. And I can go on to write as many books as I like about these characters.” Then he added: “My original synopsis was for five books.”

I asked if it was true what I’d heard that he’d almost finished work on a fourth. “Yes,” he replied, “I’m a fast writer and crime novels are easy to do. It’s much harder to write a 1,000 word article, where everything has to be 100 per cent correct.”

He told me that at least 150 pages of the fourth book existed.

At the time of our meeting, Larsson had also sold the rights to his books in Germany. It was his first foreign sale, the smallest hint of things to come. He hadn’t seen any money as yet, but he knew that “a cheque that will pay for my apartment” was on its way.

I asked about Larsson’s future plans. How many Millennium novels did he want to write? “I can produce a hundred books in this series,” he said. “That won’t be a problem as long as someone wants to publish them and people want to read them.”

Three weeks after the interview, I was standing on a crowded platform in Stockholm, waiting for a train, when my phone rang. It was Åke Edwardson, a fellow crime writer of Larssons also published by Norstedts.

“Have you heard the news?” he asked me. “Stieg Larsson is dead.”

Time stood still and the noise around me faded into a hush. Was this some kind of joke, I wondered. If so, it was a bad one. How could Stieg Larsson be dead? I had just talked to him. Our magazine had just published an article about his bright future.

When I hung up I thought about the German advance, the money that would have opened up a whole new life for Larsson. It all seemed so unfair. So pointless.

In the years since his death, I’ve repeatedly revisited in my mind my one encounter with Larsson. I continue to marvel at his conviction that his books would be a success – and can’t help wondering what further treasures he might have bestowed on the world had he stayed with us a little longer.

• Lasse Winkler is the editor-in-chief of the Swedish book trade magazine Svensk Bokhandel

• The books in the Millennium trilogy – The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, The Girl Who Played with Fire – are available from Telegraph Books for £7.99 each plus £1.25 p&p, or £21.99 for three plus £1.25 p&p.

Vatican Archives

The Vatican opens its Secret Archives to dispel Dan Brown myths

After centuries of being kept under lock and key, the Vatican has started opening its Secret Archives to outsiders in a bid to dispel the myths and mystique created by works of fiction such as Dan Brown's Angels and Demons.

The archives, until now jealously guarded from prying eyes, provide one of the key settings in Brown's thriller, in which Harvard "symbologist" Robert Langdon, played in the 2009 film by Tom Hanks, races against time to stop a secret religious order, the Illuminati, from destroying Vatican City.

In the movie, the Secret Archives are portrayed as a hi-tech cross between the Pentagon and the lair of a James Bond baddy, complete with bullet proof glass and swish steel elevators.In reality, the archives rely on disarmingly old-fashioned technology, with a creaking metal lift connecting different floors and millions of documents catalogued in 1,300 parchment-bound inventories dating back centuries.

They have been open to carefully vetted academic researchers for more than 100 years, but in the last few months the Vatican has granted tours to select groups of journalists and members of the public, allowing a glimpse into one of its inner most sanctums.

The Daily Telegraph was invited on the most recent tour this week, along with about 25 enthusiasts from around the world who earned their places by buying a recently published, lavishly illustrated book on the archives.

The archives are housed in a fortress-like wing of the Vatican behind St Peter's Basilica, with the avenue leading to the building watched over by a phalanx of Swiss Guards in ceremonial uniform and officers from the city state's own police force, the Gendarmerie.

The two-hour visit revealed more than 52 miles of shelving in an underground, concrete- walled bunker, as well as exquisite 16th century wooden cabinets packed with priceless parchment letters sent by princes, potentates, heretics and heathens to the Holy See.

They include correspondence between the Vatican and some of the most prominent figures in history, including Erasmus, Charlemagne, Michelangelo, Queen Elizabeth I, Mozart, Voltaire and Adolf Hitler.

One of the most elaborate is a letter sent by English peers and bishops to Rome in 1530 demanding to know why Pope Clement VII was taking so long to annul the marriage of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. It bears 83 signatures, below which dangle 81 official seals on red cord.

The oldest document in the archives dates back to the 8th century, while others relate to the trials of the Knights Templar from 1308-1310 and the enrolment of the first contingent of the Swiss Guard in 1505.

The archives' custodians are at pains to dispel the conspiracy theories and aura of intrigue fostered by Brown's hugely popular page-turners.

"The word 'secret' is not quite right – it comes from the Latin 'secretum' which in fact translates more accurately as 'private'. These documents are the private archives of the popes. We really don't have many secrets," insisted Marco Grilli, the secretary to the prefecture of the archives.

When pressed, however, he admitted that there is a section which really is secret and that remains off-limits to historians and academics.

It contains papers relating to the personal affairs of cardinals from 1922 onwards, as well as centuries of annulment of marriages. Whether there are any bombshells lurking in these confidential files is a matter known only to the Vatican.

Nor do scholars have access to any papal papers from after 1939 – the beginning of the papacy of the controversial wartime pontiff Pius XII, who has been accused of turning a blind eye to the Nazis' extermination of the Jews.

While the recent scandals over clerical sex abuse have only confirmed the Vatican's centuries-old bunker mentality, the Secret Archives seem to be forging a different approach.

"We were amazed by the access we were given and the speed with which the whole project was completed," said Paul Van den Heuvel, of VdH Books, the Belgian firm which published the glossy volume of high-quality reproductions of 105 documents. "The Vatican is beginning to realise what an incredible asset it has."

Farthings Publishing

We publish and sell our own books, and we publish books on behalf of clients. We are also happy to sell books for clients through this website.

· If you wish us to act for you, we prefer your manuscript to be submitted in digital form - and sent to us as a computer file; by e-mail, or on memory-stick or CD. However, if your manuscript is handwritten, or typed on an old-style typewriter, we can still publish it for you but the cost may be higher as we shall need to retype it or scan it into digital form.

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· A proof copy of your manuscript will then be sent to you for final approval. This will be a professionally finished, Perfect bound book. Whilst minor amendments can be made at that stage, most should have been picked in earlier stages.

· The price up to this stage, is inclusive in the quotation we give you at the outset. This is likely to undercut competitors as we are retired professionals and our overheads are lower.

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· The price per copy will depend on your choice of binding, format, number of pages and so on, but for a standard black and white printed book with colour Perfect bound cover, with, say 150 pages, the cost could be in the region of £7 a copy. Before you order we will give you a firm price.

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Book Recommendation 3

(Leslie loan - friend of SJT - Ayckbourn enthusiast)

New Ayckbourn book exclusively at the SJT Shop

23 September 2009

Sight Unseen: The Unseen Ayckbourn Guide is a new book by Alan Ayckbourn’s archivist, Simon Murgatroyd. It looks at concepts and ideas for plays, unpublished and unproduced plays, alternative versions and titles, screenplay concepts, early writing and rarely seen Ayckbourn plays such as his very first play The Square Cat.

The book has more than 100 entries ranging from Alan’s first play written at school to his latest play My Wonderful Day, with practically every subject accompanied with quotes from Alan Ayckbourn as well as extracts from a number of the plays.

Although available on the internet, Sight Unseen is being sold exclusively offline at the Stephen Joseph Theatre Shop. It costs £7 with all proceeds from the book going towards the theatre

Sight Unseen

The Unseen Ayckbourn Guide

by Simon Murgatroyd

Format: Free download or paid for softcover edition (£4.00)

Pages: 120 pages

Click here for the Free Download or click here for details of the paid-for published edition

(Note: There is no difference in content between the free download or paid-for edition)

A preview of Sight Unseen can also be found at lulu.com here.

Entries discussed include Alan Ayckbourn's work on:

> Unpublished canon plays such as The Square Cat, Love After All, Dad's Tale, Christmas V Mastermind, Standing Room Only, The Sparrow, Jeeves, Making Tracks & Virtual Reality.

> Unacknowledged, unproduced and unpublished plays such as Bedside Manners, Board Game,The Party Game, Relative Values, The Season.

> Early alternative versions of Absurd Person Singular, A Chorus Of Disapproval, FlatSpin,Henceforward..., The Jollies & Life & Beth.

> Screenplays and TV concepts such as the movie Cluedo, Bedroom Farce spin-off Ernest & Delia, Hark At Barker & Mind Over Murder.

> Alternative titles such as Am I Famous Yet, I To I, Meeting Like This, Sight Unseen, The Silver Collection, Take It Or Leave It & Taken For Granted & Winnie's Wonderful Day.

> The 'Grey' plays - produced but never published and now withdrawn.

> Concepts for various unwritten plays.

> Previously unacknowledged ephemera such as Cinderella's Star Night, The Ghost Of 'Enry Albert, Scarborough's Millennium attraction and a West End version of The Wizard Of Oz.

> Early writing during his school and teenage years

> Also includes a definitive & up-to-date official play list, a guide to who's who and all entries are fully referenced.

And more...

The entries are discussed in historical context and include quotes by Alan Ayckbourn himself as well as rarely, if ever, seen extracts from many of the plays.

Book Recommendation 2

(Leslie loan - Scarborough born author - 'Woman in Black' seen at West End theatre)

Reviewed by Sarah Vine of The Times

In a world full of gruesome, graphic and all too often sadistic literary violence, Susan Hill's old-fashioned ghost story is a welcome reminder of the more noble origins of the horror genre.

Like her earlier novel, The Woman in Black, it harks back to a time when terror was as much a product of the reader's imagination, expertly planted there by the author, as it was spelt out on the page. In cinematic terms, it is The Shining versus Saw III; Don't Look Now v I Know What You Did Last Summer; The Omen v Scream. It has class, it has style and it has pedigree.

In many respects The Man in the Picture owes a considerable debt to the father of the fireside chiller, M.R. James, probably best known for his 1925 collection A Warning to the Curious and Other Stories.

James was a master of understated horror and dramatic tension. The fear and foreboding in his stories is palpable, the doom-laden action no less exciting for being so darn obvious. That sense of inviting disaster which characterises some of the greatest Gothic horror — why must the hero venture into the cellar when he knows it contains a foul fiend; why does the heroine leave her window open when she knows a “vampyre” is on the loose? — is ever present in his work. Yet his protagonists, and the reader, are glued to a narrative that is devilishly, hypnotically elegant.

James had certain themes, and they are present in The Man in the Picture. Here is the eminent academic, nearing the end of his life, living out his days in comfortable penury. Here is the naive pupil, in awe of his mentor's intellect but unaware of the true depths of the dark secret that he harbours. Here is the bright promise of happiness, a romantic idyll, doomed to destruction.

At the centre of everything is a supernatural black hole, an object of extreme malevolence (in this case, a painting) that, while not necessarily intrinsically terrifying, is tenaciously successful in its evil purpose. And there is no happy ending, no redemption — the only escape for its unfortunate victims is the grave, or worse.

But The Man in the Picture is no mere carbon copy. It has real, defining qualities of its own. Hill brings her unique take to a somewhat careworn framework and produces a tale brimming with excitement, mystery and vitality.

Her language is crisp, concise and elegant, and, although she makes concessions to a more old-fashioned style, she does so knowingly and with verve. The story unfolds at a thriller's pace, and the setting is reassuringly contemporary.

Thanks to this, Hill can lure the modern reader in with a sense of the brightly familiar. Not until it is too late – both for the hero and for the hooked reader – does the realisation dawn that everything, even a plate of piping hot buttered crumpets, has been contaminated by an intangible, insatiable evil. In the capable hands of Hill, the Gothic novel, that venerable but undeniably pensionable genre, finds a new lease of life.

The Man in the Picture by Susan Hill
Profile, £9.99; 160pp

Book Recommendation 1

(from Nina's library)

KAZUO ISHIGURO

BIOGRAPHY

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, on 8 November 1954. He came to Britain in 1960 when his father began research at the National Institute of Oceanography, and was educated at a grammar school for boys in Surrey. Afterwards he worked as a grouse-beater for the Queen Mother at Balmoral before enrolling at the University of Kent, Canterbury, where he read English and Philosophy. He was also employed as a community worker in Glasgow (1976), and after graduating worked as a residential social worker in London. He studied Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, a member of the postgraduate course run by Malcolm Bradbury, where he met Angela Carter, who became an early mentor. He has been writing full-time since 1982. In 1983, shortly after the publication of his first novel, Kazuo Ishiguro was nominated by Grantamagazine as one of the 20 'Best of Young British Writers'. He was also included in the same promotion when it was repeated in 1993.

In 1981 three of his short stories were published in Introductions 7: Stories by New Writers. His first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), narrated by a Japanese widow living in England, draws on the destruction and rehabilitation of Nagasaki. It was awarded the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. It was followed by An Artist of the Floating World (1986), which explores Japanese national attitudes to the Second World War through the story of former artist Masuji Ono, haunted by his military past. It won the Whitbread Book of the Year award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction.

Ishiguro's third novel, The Remains of the Day (1989), is set in post-war England, and tells the story of an elderly English butler confronting disillusionment as he recalls a life spent in service, memories viewed against a backdrop of war and the rise of Fascism. It was awarded the Booker Prize for Fiction, and was subsequently made into an award-winning film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. His next novel, The Unconsoled (1995), a formally inventive narrative in which a concert pianist struggles to fulfil a schedule of rehearsals and performances in an unnamed European city, was awarded the Cheltenham Prize in 1995.

Kazuo Ishiguro's fifth novel, When We Were Orphans (2000), is set in Shanghai in the early part of the twentieth century, and is narrated by a private detective investigating his parents' disappearance in the city some 20 years earlier. It was shortlisted for both the Whitbread Novel Award and the Booker Prize for Fiction.

He has also written two original screenplays for Channel 4 Television, A Profile of Arthur J. Mason, broadcast in 1984, and The Gourmet, broadcast in 1986. He was awarded the OBE in 1995 for services to literature and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 1998. His work has been translated into over 30 languages.

Kazuo Ishiguro lives in London with his wife and daughter. His latest novel is Never Let Me Go (2005) and he has also completed his first full-length screenplay for The Saddest Music in the World, a melodrama set in the 1930s, starring Isabella Rossellini. In 2009, his first short story collection, Noctures: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, was published.

The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro 0-679-73587-9 544 pp About the Book

This mysterious and infinitely provocative new novel from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day. With superb control and a masterly ear for the accents of repression, Ishiguro has created a work that is both farce and nightmare and that explores the terrible wounds that families inflict on their members and societies on their citizens, the cult of culture, and the straightjacket of celebrity, and dramatizes these themes within the arena of an imaginary city that might be located in today's Germany, in Kafka's haunted Central Europe, or in the maddeningly elastic landscape of our dreams. Into that city comes Ryder, a musician acclaimed as "the world's finest living pianist...perhaps the very greatest of the century". He has been summoned to give a performance that may be the most important of his life. But the exact nature of the impending performance eludes him, since Ryder is afflicted with large gaps of memory. He seems to have visited this place before- he soon discovers that he has a wife or mistress here and a little boy who may be his son- but he cannot remember when. He has forgotten the details of the Herculean schedule that his handlers have prepared for him. And he is repeatedly startled by figures from his English past who appear surreally in the town's winding streets, on its trams, and in the houses that Ryder visits on a geometrically increasing series of cryptic and outlandish errands. Ryder cannot remember what he or these people are doing here, but everyone remembers him. And everyone wants something from him. In the course of the next three days, Ryder is called on to visit childhood friends, peruse albums of clippings, judge musical rehearsals, reconcile estranged families, plead the cause of a disgraced orchestra conductor, and even serve as the guest of honor at the funeral of a total stranger. Behind all these requests is the omnipresent expectation that he somehow restore the morale of a community gripped by a profound despair. It is a despair that is expressed in terms of culture, but that infects the most intimate corners of its victims' lives. For this is a town that idolizes its artists and suffers a collective breakdown when its idols fail. It is Ryder's crippling defect of character that he can refuse none of the requests that are made of him- except, perhaps, for the ones that truly matter. Even as the pianist desperately tries to meet his "responsibilities"- and to grasp the situation that he is supposed to salvage- it becomes clear that he is both a flawed messiah and a tragically limited human being. With his exaggerated sense of public duty and his stifled, self-deluding voice, Ryder is reminiscent of another Ishiguro character, the butler Stevens who narrates The Remains of the Day. Ryder, too, is at once the beneficiary of a social order and its uncomprehending victim, a man who has sacrificed his life on the altar of a particular kind of service. And as he did in his earlier novel, Ishiguro here creates a densely populated and fully realized world, at once unrecognizable and familiar, vivid yet soul-sick, from which we come away with an altered awareness of our own.

Samuel Johnson Prize

Named in honour of the renowned writer and lexicographer, the original Samuel Johnson Prize was established in 1999 to recognise the best work of non-fiction in the previous year. It is the UK’s richest prize for non-fiction and, in the space of a few years has grown in popularity and prestige to become one of the country’s leading book awards.

The UK's most prestigious non-fiction literary award returns for 2008. Now in its tenth year, the prize is open to books in the areas of current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts. All books published in the UK by writers of any nationality are eligible.

The judges for the 2008 BBC FOUR Samuel Johnson Prize announced the shortlist today, 15th May. Now in its tenth year the prize is the world’s richest non-fiction prize and is worth £30,000 to the winner.

Below are the current odds from William Hill:
The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S Naipaul by Patrick French (Picador) 5/2 FAVOURITE
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher Or The Murder at Road Hill House by Kate Summerscale (Bloomsbury) – 3/1
Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart by Tim Butcher (Vintage) - 4/1
The Whisperers by Orlando Figes (Allen Lane) – 4/1
Crow Country by Mark Cocker (Jonathan Cape) – 5/1
The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross (Fourth Estate) – 6/1

“Absolutely riveting”account of 19th century detective wins the 10th Anniversary Prize

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: or The Murder at Road Hill House
by Kate Summerscale,

a pacy analysis of a murder case in a Wiltshire country house in 1860 which inspired detective genre writers including Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, was tonight named the winner of the BBC FOUR Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2008. The author, Kate Summerscale, the tenth winner of the Prize, wins £30,000.

This is the second win in a row for publisher Bloomsbury whose startling account of Baghdad’s Green Zone, Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran won the 2007 Prize.
Rosie Boycott, Chair of the judges, made the announcement at an awards ceremony held in the Ballroom at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre. She commented:

“The Suspicions of Mr Whicher is a dramatic page-turning detective yarn of a real-life murder that inspired the birth of modern detective fiction. Kate Summerscale has brilliantly merged scrupulous archival research with vivid storytelling that reads with the pace of a Victorian thriller. The book is a rare work of non-fiction that mimics suspense genre and leaves one gripped until the final paragraph. Jack Whicher of Scotland Yard, who became the most celebrated detective of his day, is a complex, shabby character who immediately conjures up images of the scruffy looking LA cop, Columbo and even of Rebus. The Road Hill murder case was to dominate newspaper headlines and caused national hysteria, and inspired a generation of novelists from Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins to Conan Doyle. We can’t think of a better winner for the 10th year of the Prize.”

World Book Day

The main aim of World Book Day (WBD) is to encourage people to explore the pleasures of books and reading by providing them with the opportunity to have a book of their own.

For ideas on what schools can do for WBD go to Reading Connects pages For information on WBD visit www.worldbookday.com or call the World Book Day helpline: 01634 729810, wbd@education.co.uk

Spread the Word is the adult strand of WBD. The campaign focuses on adults recommending books to each other via postcards and email. In 2008 the public will be asked to vote on a longlist of 100 titles of fiction by living authors who have not won a major award. Ten shortlisted titles will then become the focus of Spread the Word: Talk about Books reading groups which will be held in libraries and bookshops on or around WBD. For more information, to add your vote, or enter the competition, visit www.worldbookday.com/spreadtheword/Quick Reads is a major initiative from leading publishers, booksellers and writers that was launched in 2006.

Quick Reads 2008
For more information view details on the Vital Link pages or www.niace.org.uk/QuickReads/

An 'Apprentice'-style reality TV show which will turn one of six celebrities into a crime author, mentored by Minette Walters and published by Pan Macmillan, in celebration of World Book Day 2008.


"Murder Most Famous", will be broadcast on BBC2 during the week of World Book Day. The series will be broadcast in five daily 45-minute episodes, and pits six celebrities - dancer Brendan Cole, actresses Sherrie Hewson and Angela Griffin, former tabloid editor Kelvin MacKenzie, presenter Matt Allwright and gardener Diarmuid Gavin - against each other.
They will be mentored by Walters, who will set a series of challenges to inspire the celebrities' daily writing tasks. Training will include dog tracking, resisting a violent attack, an autopsy, crime scene investigation, interrogation techniques and rapid pursuit of a suspect. Walters will judge the celebrities' writing efforts and eliminate one candidate each day.

The winner will turn their plot and central characters into a novel, to be published with Pan as a Quick Read on WBD 2009, in conjunction with the BBC's adult literacy campaign RaW. The proceeds will go towards BBC Children in Need.

The day has finally arrived and we are proud to annouce that Boy A by Jonathan Trigell has been voted The Book To Talk About! For more details and to see where the other titles came in the top ten please download our press release. Happy World Book Day and thanks to all you who voted.

Boy A
by Jonathan Trigell
published by Serpent’s Tailprice £7.99

Jack has spent most of his life in juvenile prisons, but he’s about to be released with a new name, a new job and a new life. At 24, he is utterly innocent of the world, yet guilty of a monstrous childhood crime.To his new friends, he is a good guy with occasional flashes of unexplained violence. To his girlfriend, he is strangely naïve and unreachable. To his case worker, he’s a victim of the system and of media driven hysteria. To himself, Jack is on permanent trial: he struggles to start from scratch, forget the past, become someone else. A searing and heartfelt novel, Boy A won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.The perfect novel for book groups and anyone who enjoys getting to grips with difficult issues in their reading, Boy A is about whether the rehabilitation of children who commit crime is the right thing for society, how we fail such children, and whether it is ever really possible to change the path of a disturbed child. In a world where the media artificially ages photographs in order to try to locate released perpetrators who are hiding under a new identity, and where tabloid campaigns result in vigilante groups pursuing people they believe are guilty of terrible crimes, Boy A examines whether in fact it is us who owe a debt to such children, and whether they deserve our sympathy or our scorn. Though it did win the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, Boy A is still a very low profile book, which we firmly believe deserves wider attention. As controversial as Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, it has the potential to engage readers in lively moral discussions and encourage them to examine their own attitudes to such situations.