Tips, links and suggestions: what are you reading this week?

I really loved this book, read it feverishly at first and then deliberately slowed down to savour it. There is a lot of darkness, and a lot of disgust: you feel almost sticky and dirty when you read it. But it’s alive and electric - there’s a charge running through it all. Reactions are always dialled up to eleven. Agitation, passion, sexual desire… If you like Ferrante novels, there isn’t anything new here and you will find further exploration of the ideas and themes that you already like. If you can’t get on with Ferrante, this won’t be the one to convince you. But I loved it.

What can I say? Magnificent. Majestic. Superb. Certainly contenders for the finest English language novels of the 21stcentury (thus far). Mantel’s achievement in these novels (or, as she thinks of them – as do I -, a single novel in three parts) is astounding. She manages to re-create what you imagine would be the feel of living in Tudor England close to Henry VIII and his court with vivid detail and imagination. … but the finest thing is the sheer quality of the writing. Terse (she invests a lot of meaning in a very few words), intelligent and prosily poetic, it’s unlike anything else - the final two chapters on Cromwell’s arrest, incarceration and execution are the finest writing I’ve ever read. These are must-reads that will surely be read for as long as human beings read books.

I thought it was really strong. Nothing original about having a drugged up, narcissist as the unreliable narrator, but this was still a whip-smart take on the female gaze that made me think of Lolita as much as anything. Perhaps my favourite debut novel since Emma Cline’s The Girls.

A page turner of an unlikely adventure story… Chibundu has used a whole lot of slices of Nigerian life as the setting for our heroes, two army deserters, two women fleeing domestic violence and exploitation and a dreamy fortune seeker. Corruption is everywhere. Violence an ever present threat. But in a typically Nigerian fashion there’s always a way through. Networks of family and friends with interlocking mutual obligations are important. Amongst the hard life on the streets there is good will and good humour.

A good story well told even if the plot does stretch credulity a bit here and there. But suspend cynicism, sit back and enjoy the ride.

A dense and vivid account of life in Jerusalem at the end of the British mandate in Palestine and the origins and experiences of different family members coming from Lithuania, Ukraine...

It’s a story about Mal Kershaw who runs a secondhand mystery book shop on Beacon Hill and what happens when he is approached by the FBI for help with unsolved murders which seem to follow the pattern of a list he made years ago of his Eight Perfect Murders in the murder/mystery genre. It’s definitely a page turner so I recommend it to anyone who like this kind of story.

An interesting crime novel from the late 1960s that really evokes a sense of the New York neighbourhood at that time. I believe this book and some of Himes’s other works helped inspire the blaxploitation film movement which was incredibly popular during the 70s. For anyone who enjoys hardboiled or pulp crime fiction this book is a must. Unlike many other novels of that type, however, this is much more nuanced in its portrayal of race (although not women, I should add), and is based around a scam involving a fictionalised version of a Back to Africa movement. This is an entertaining read, often crudely funny with a rather silly plot, but a sense of genuine and righteous anger about the racial divide at that time.

One curious story, Mind Over Murder, written in 1941, has a psychologist, Dr Paul Prye, marooned on an island that loomed out of Lake Huron “like a huge bloated ghost” with a group of ‘neurotics’ in an attempt to cure them by ‘letting them struggle with the fundamentals of life’ in his ‘Colony for Mental Hygiene’. Very interesting as a reminder where psychiatry was in the early 1940s – one woman’s problems are said by Prye to be caused by ‘nymphomania’, for example – though I think I’d be more disturbed than the colony seems to be when one of their number is stabbed in the back and scalped. Haven’t finished it yet so not sure whodunnit. Millar herself was prolific and something of an ecologist and birdwatcher too. Though admired by Christie, Waugh and countless modern-day writers, with a few of her novels recently reissued by Pushkin Vertigo, when I mention her to well-read friends I seem to draw a blank. Her husband, the crime writer Kenneth Millar, changed his name to Ross MacDonald to avoid confusion/comparison with his wife, so he joked. However, there seems to be no biography of her though Wiki says she features prominently in her husband’s biography! As someone said, Millar ‘doesn’t attract fans, she creates addicts’.