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What has happened to biographies?
BIOGRAPHIES have boomed in recent years, bestowing wealth and acclaim on practitioners like Michael Holroyd and Richard Holmes, but according to Kathryn Hughes in the Guardian the business is in a critical state, and she knows whom to blame. Ten years ago Amanda Foreman published her biography of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Foreman was bright, ambitious and good-looking, and happy to pose naked behind a stack of her books, and nothing has been the same ever since.
According to Hughes (the biographer of Mrs Beeton) royal mistresses have proliferated at the expense of more worthwhile subjects: “Georgiana was the precursor of modern-day celebrity culture, in which Being Jordan which is surely a ghosted autobiography, rather than a biography sells 335,649 in hardback, while Hilary Spurling's life of Matisse splutters along on 12,451.
It seems a bit hard to blame it on the hapless Foreman: royal mistresses have always sold best in the biography stakes, and Nancy Mitford wasn¹t rapped across the knuckles half a century ago when she produced her biography of Madame de Pompadour. But Amanda F. is not the only villain of the piece: equally culpable, it seems, are publishers, who far prefer to commission a well-known name to write another unnecessary biography of Hitler or Napoleon rather than risk an untried author and an unfamiliar subject. There's some truth in the accusation, but again it¹s nothing new.
In the 1930s Jonathan Cape, the most distinguished literary publisher of the day, urged authors stuck for a subject to have another crack at Nelson; O G S Crawford is hardly a household name, yet Kitty Hauser found herself a publisher and was widely reviewed. Kathryn Hughes approves the Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate¹s suggestion of a 'paradigm shift', in that bright biographers now concentrate on an aspect of a life rather than a blow-by-blow account.
The truth is that too many biographies are boring and badly written: their authors may or may not be familiar with primary sources, but unlike Hesketh Pearson (who wasn¹t) they cannot tell a story, crack a joke, build up the subsidiary characters, or modulate between slow and fast, sad and funny. If some of them fail to find publishers, so much the better.
LE Carre's latest post-Cold War thriller tackles several of the pressing problems de nos jours – the threat of terrorism, immigration, human rights, surveillance and the subject of extraordinary rendition.
According to the Sunday Business Post, A Week in December, Sebastian Faulks’s sixth novel, ‘aspires to be a condition-of-England novel, a report on manners and mores, a jaunty romp through the information-sodden, ceaselessly changing, high-speed landscape of the early 21st century.
Sue Townsend’s famous fictional character, Adrian Mole, is now aged thirty-nine and a half, and this is the ninth volume of his diaries.
ALL OUR WORLDLY GOODS was originally published in France in 1947, five years after Irène Némirovsky died in Auschwitz.
Writer and broadcaster Joan Bakewell’s debut novel ‘is a charming glimpse into life during the Second World War,’ exclaimed an enthusiastic Jane Clinton in the Express on Sunday.
ISABEL Fonseca is married to Martin Amis, and her fictional debut garnered many reviews.
Aravind Adiga won the Booker Prize last year for The White Tiger, the story of an Indian slum boy who rises to riches by killing his boss.
FOR Allan Massie, in the Scotsman, an abiding curiosity about people makes Trevor ‘a master of the short story’.
COLD BLOOD is James Fleming’s fourth novel, and the sequel to White Blood.
‘SUPPOSE I took all the best of Fleming and none of the slow silly bits…’ wrote Sebastian Faulks in the Sunday Times on the eve of publication of his James Bond continuation novel, Devil May Care.
‘Rocca Battista was a lowlevel thug with an equine member, a heart of gilt and the brain of a quail’
THE death of Michael Dibdin earlier this year ended his more than 20-year career as the leading British murder-mystery writer of his generation.
THE RECEPTION for this ninth appearance of Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s now ageing and enfeebled alter ego, was mixed but muted.
AFTER 17 books, Rebus, Ian Rankin’s detective inspector, has reached retirement.
‘So Harry grew up, It’s startling how infrequently this happens in fiction’
THE last volume of the publishing phenomenon of our age drew blanket coverage in the media.
Amanda Craig’s latest novel opens with the body of a Russian au-pair being pulled from a London pond.
GEOFF DYER, as it’s by now no more than a truism to acknowledge, is a writer of rare and eccentric talents.
IN THIS NEW novel Elizabeth Jane Howard returns to familiar territory: childhood nostalgia, family ties and tensions, and the subtle and ambiguous twists of love – or the absence of it.
Love and Summer, William Trevor’s fourteenth novel and the first since The Story of Lucy Gault in 2002, is set in the Fifties in the small fictional Irish town of Rathmoye.
‘Aside from his murder investigation, Stringer’s job is to catch a “notorious” fare dodger’
JIM Stringer is the bluff railway detective hero of Andrew Martin’s series of crime novels set in Edwardian England, and in this, the fourth, as Nick Rennison observed in the Sunday Times, ‘the series…shows no sign of running out of steam’.
‘That such an eccentric book as Nazi Literature in the Americas should be translated at all,’ said Michael Jacobs in the Literary Review, ‘owes much to the belated success in the United States of Bolaño’s Savage Detectives and to the massive international hype surrounding his posthumously published masterpiece, 2666.
After six novels, Nocturnes is Ishiguro’s first collection of short stories – four about musicians and the fifth about friends who once bonded over music.
EDWARD AND FLORENCE are newly-weds, honeymooning in a hotel near Chesil Beach.
Peter Carey, the Australian novelist who has twice won the Booker prize, ‘is a lyrebird of stunning prowess, a mimic par excellence,’ said Robert Epstein in the Independent on Sunday.
MONTEFIORE is already well known for his acclaimed history books on Stalin and his court.
‘AMITAV Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies,’ explained Shirley Chew in the Independent, ‘revisits in new, breathtakingly detailed and compelling ways some of the concerns of his earlier novels.
Solar is a ‘sly, sardonic novel about a dislikable English physicist and philanderer named Michael Beard,’ said Jason Cowley in the Observer.
HAROLD Davidson, the infamous Rector of Stiffkey, whose story has been turned into John Walsh’s first novel, was ‘an odd kind of missionary’, according to Carl Wilkinson in the Observer.
THERE WAS universal praise for the latest offering by Susan Hill, well-known writer of The Woman in Black.
THIS IS Zoë Heller’s third novel, and after the success of her 2003 Notes on a Scandal – which was nominated for the Booker Prize and turned into an Oscar-nominated film – it was eagerly awaited.
The Bradshaw Variations is Rachel Cusk’s seventh novel and is au fond about looking for what matters in life: Art? Friendship? The past? A career?
‘Thomas and Tonie have swapped roles,’ Kate Saunders in the Times summarised.
Rennie Airth ignores all the popular wisdom about how to maintain a detective series,’ declared Marilyn Stasio in the New York Times.
‘Surveillance is part of all our lives.
THIS LATEST highly-publicised thriller from Robert Harris is about a former Prime Minister accused of war crimes by the International Criminal Court.
In an interview in the Irish edition of the Daily Mail Gillian Greenwood admitted that the strength of feeling
between her and her widower fiancé took both of them by surprise, and made her look again at the draft of her second novel The Ghost Lover, which is in part the story of a man who has lost his wife.
In this retelling of the Gospel story, explained Nick Rennison in the Sunday Times, Mary produces twins.
THE KINDLY ONES has deeply divided the literary world.
Sarah Waters’s fifth novel is set in rural Warwickshire just after the Second World War.
Tim Gautreaux’s second novel, The Clearing, was highly praised: in the Guardian Annie Proulx called it ‘the finest American novel I’ve read in a long, long time.
On his deathbed Vladimir Nabokov asked that his unfinished novel The Original of Laura be destroyed.
‘Long ago derided as the creator of Aga sagas,’ declared Lucy Beresford in the Sunday Telegraph, ‘Joanna Trollope unfortunately still finds herself in that Marmite group of English novelists who are either loved unreservedly, or loathed for being too middle-class, too domestic, too safe.
In the Sunday Times Peter Kemp compared advance reports of Amis’s new novel to Met Office predictions of a tropical storm: ‘Readers have been alerted that something full of seething turbulence was heading their way.
THE PRIVATE PATIENT is P D James’s fourteenth Adam Dalgliesh story and she herself is now 88.
'A BOLD DEPARTURE' was how Toby Lichtig in the New Statesman styled Jonathan Coe's new novel straight-faced, pensive, steeped in understated turmoil.
‘VICTORIA HISLOP’s first novel, The Island, was a phenomenon,’ said Jane Shilling in the Evening Standard.
WE did wonder, reading Jason Goodwin’s early books on travel and history in and around the Ottoman empire, how he would ever use up all that enthusiastic research.
He succumbs, ‘just once, to her hand, “as hot as the flames of Hades”, and her mouth.
THE NARRATIVE centres on Erik Davidsen, a prosperous New York psychiatrist of Norwegian parentage who is grieving for his father.
‘William Styron was one of those quintessentially American writers capable of blending the rugged with the romantic, the macho with the tender,’ said Anthony Holden in the Daily Telegraph.
"OH, SUCH a fabulous premise for a book", said Sam Ruddock on amazon.
THE WIDOWS of the title first appeared in The Witches of Eastwick, John Updike’s 1984 novel set in the Sixties in a small Rhode Island coastal town and widely regarded as a misogynist morality tale.
DOUGLAS Kennedy’s eighth novel, according to Helen Brown in the Daily Telegraph, ‘is a genrebender, whirling elements of the thriller, romance and ghost story in the old tale of a starving artist in a Paris garret’.
Trespass is Rose Tremain’s twelfth novel and the third set in France.
Foden’s narrator is Henry Meadows, a young maths expert, sent by his Met Office superiors in 1944 to a remote coastal village in Scotland with the aim of befriending the reclusive Wallace Ryman, an eccentric genius and pacifist, known locally as ‘The Prophet’ on account of his uncanny powers of weather divination.
MARINA Lewycka’s sequel to the award-laden A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian centres on legal and illegal migrant workers in the strawberry fields of Kent.
Marina Lewycka’s latest novel, noted Amanda Craig in the Independent, shared many characteristics of the ‘madcap world’ of her celebrated first novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian.
THIS NOVEL concerns an imaginary love affair between Wagner’s English daughter-in-law and Adolf Hitler, known to the Wagner family as ‘Uncle Wolf’.
IN HILARY MANTEL’S ninth novel she ‘rewrites the history of England from 1527 to 1535 with Thomas Cromwell as the hero,’ said Claudia FitzHerbert in the Daily Telegraph.
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