Happy New Year! Welcome back everybody. Welcome back to the Waterstones vlog.
My name is Will and I decided for the first vlog of 2018 that I would talk to you
about some of the books that I am excited about, that are coming up in the future.
I admit that obviously these will
conform to my reading bias, these are all authors that I have read previously in
my life and that's why I'm excited about what's coming up. Throughout the year
we'll be sort of delving beyond my usual reading taste and finding new and
exciting things but for this week I want to tell you about a selection of books
and also talk about one of them in detail because I have already read it
and it's an absolute cracker. So I'm gonna talk about that one straight away.
This is the book it's called Lullaby by Leila Slimani and this is not an
author I've read before previously actually. This is the winner of the Prix Goncourt
in France, the big literary prize over there, and it is an absolutely
stonking sort of literary thriller I guess is what you could call it
that's maybe not the right word but it's got a tagline on the front: 'The baby is dead.
It took only a few seconds.' and that gives away, it's not a spoiler, because you find
out right at the beginning that this character on the front here, which as you
can see with a Peter Pan collar is a nanny of two children and you know at
the very beginning of the book that she kills these two children and so of
course the question is why? Why has she killed these children and that is what
you discover as you read through the book. I say discover, it's a really
complex, wonderfully complex book and that's why I'm calling it a literary
thriller because it's not a sort of slasher book it's not really about sort
of the procedural of how these things happen, it's about the relationship
between a relatively successful Parisian couple, the mother wants to
return to work after having looked after her children and wants to find the right
nanny to look after them. She does so, she finds this woman who appears to be
absolutely perfect and indeed they have this fantastic
sort of symbiotic relationship. They become very reliant on this nanny who is
brilliant with the children but then very subtly, and this is why I love this
book, Leila Slimani sort of charts the very subtle
power struggles and the very subtle changes in relationships to how people
relate to each other and you can see the sort of tectonic plates starting to
shift underneath and you're wondering all the time how it could possibly end
with these children being killed. Because it seems to be a sort of very, very slow
process. That's one of the masterful things about this book. The relationships
are brilliantly, brilliantly drawn and the psychology is what makes this book
completely fascinating. You have a real insight into somebody's mind and in fact
it reminded me of books I've read in the past. There's an amazing book called
Beside the Sea by Veronique Olmi which, another book in translation from French,
and that is about a mother taking her two children to the seaside
but again underneath that there is an extraordinary psychology at play. I would
heartily recommend that book and I would definitely recommend Lullaby. It's an
absolutely brilliant beginning to my reading in 2018 so do check it out.
That's that one, so now looking ahead to some of the books that are be coming up
in the coming weeks and indeed months. One author who is a favourite of mine who
unfortunately died in 2017 was an American writer called Denis Johnson.
He's very famous for a collection of short stories called Jesus's Son. I was
very excited to hear that there was going to be another collection of short
stories coming up and that was very swiftly followed by the very sad news of
his death. So this is actually going to be of course his final collection of
stories. This is the book, it's called The Largesse of the Sea Maiden. It has a
stunning cover. Cover design by Susan Dean over at Vintage who is of course a
design genius. And it's exactly what you would expect from a story collection
from Denis Johnson. He writes about people living on the margins, he writes
about total fuck-ups frankly, but he writes about them with this incredible
mixture of sort of brutality and honesty and poetry
it is sort of both brutal and beautiful at the same time, he is just an amazing
short story writer so I have devoured this over Christmas
and I just loved it. It's a real shame that he will not be writing anymore because
he writes about people whose stories you don't usually get to hear
and that's what I really like about him. So there you go, a story collection if you're
interested in short stories for this year: The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson
is well worth your time. Moving on now to Samantha Harvey. She has a new
book called The Western Wind. Samantha Harvey is an amazing writer.
She is the kind of author, so when you read one of her books
you just sort of marvel from page to page at how good the writing is. And what I
mean, is that every word is absolutely perfect. It's not the word that you would
have thought of, she has great mastery of the English language,
she's a prose stylist, she has written this
book which is completely different to previous books, each of her books are
very different actually, but this is set in the sort of medieval period, 1491, set
in a very small rural community. We have a priest as our sort of narrator figure
and it is about a man who has supposedly fallen into a river, possibly drowned, we
don't know and we need to understand how that's happened, how it relates to
everybody else in this village. And what she does is she tells the story
backwards, so that you start off with what you think you know and then you
kind of go backwards through the days that lead up to that moment and you
discover more and more about what has actually happened. Loved the structure,
loved the writing, did not expect to enjoy a novel set in 1491 because
historical fiction is not really my thing
but of course Samantha Harvey is far too good for me to be worried about stuff
like that. So if you're looking for a really wonderful sort of historical
literary novel The Western Wind by Samantha Harvey is one to look out for.
This is a proof of The Only Story which is the new novel from Julian Barnes.
I don't really need to say much more than that. There's a new Julian Barnes novel. End of.
Julian Barnes is just a brilliant writer. If you want to challenge me on
that, I dare you. I think he is writing now with
a confidence and an assurance which of course comes at being at that stage
in your life. This is a brilliant story about a young man having an affair with
an older woman and their relationship together through sort of early 60s
England and it is a brilliant portrait of that relationship but also of
alcoholism and marriage, infidelity and English society actually in that period.
Just fantastic, that's all I'm gonna say. Julian Barnes. Full stop.
Moving on now to Their Brilliant Careers which is published by Lightning Books and it's by
the Australian author called Ryan O'Neil. I heard about this on Twitter and I was
intrigued immediately because I believe that when it was published in Australia
it was published sort of straight, by which I mean that it appears to tell the
fantastic lives of 16 extraordinary Australian writers and many people read
it as being a non-fiction book about some real people. It's not. He's made them all up.
It's a novel and it's actually a book about books, it's a book about
writers, it's a book about publishing and so that has got all my little antennae
going off. That sounds like my kind of book so I haven't read it yet, I'm
intrigued, I think it'll probably be very funny and very interesting so I have my
fingers crossed for Their Brilliant Careers by Ryan O'Neil. And finally...
It's got a lovely big quote on the front from Margaret Atwood. The book is The Overstory
the author is Richard Powers. Richard Powers is, I think, a vastly
underrated writer. He has had some success but he writes these big novels
that are often filled with quite complex ideas. He's written about artificial
intelligence, he's written books that are sort of set in various periods of time.
He writes these really ambitious books because they're often structurally based
on what he's writing about - there's an amazing book called The Goldbug Variations
which is seemingly about sort of the human genome and our
genetic structure but also about the nuclear - it's just an amazing,
amazing book. I don't know what The Overstory is about, I just know that
whenever Richard Powers writes a book I'm interested. Because he is really smart,
really clever and sometimes really successfully translates that into great
fiction. His books are varied actually, I think some are better than others if I'm
being fair. But I have high hopes of this because it's been a while since I've had
a chance to read anything by him so I have again fingers crossed for The
Overstory. So there we go, there is a little preview of what's coming up in
2018. Hopefully you'll be intrigued by some of those books, there'll be links in
the description below so you can find them on the website but as I said, if
you're looking for something to read very soon then Lullaby by Leila Slimani
is a fantastic, fantastic book, published by Faber and available I think now I
might regret saying that but anyway you'll find a link below. That is all for
this week. Next week you'll be able to hear from Sia,n she'll be telling you
about another exciting book. Until then, take care.