Demob Happy

Season of bad will 7/10 I borrowed ‘A Season In The West’ on the recommendation of my mother-in-law [insert predictable joke here], who suggested I might find in it interesting parallels with Rose Tremain’s ‘The Road Home‘ which deals with similar themes. Both books concentrate on the migrant experience of London life, ‘The Road Home’ [...]

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Lucky charm 7.5/10 I have to admit my hopes for Happy-Go-Lucky were not particularly high, so unmoved was I by Mike Leigh’s portentious 2004 period piece ‘Vera Drake’. And for the first twenty minutes or so I felt vindicated, as the jokes come thick and fast and very very flat. Poppy (Sally Hawkins) is a [...]

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The road to salvation 7/10 Rose Tremain’s Orange Prize-winning ‘The Road Home‘ is a compassionate if somewhat conventional novel about a migrant worker from Eastern Europe who seeks a job in England to provide money for his family. Opening with a quote from The Grapes of Wrath, ‘The Road Home’ is a contemporary take on [...]

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A life in the mind of Mike “Toilet” Engleby 9/10 Setting aside the fact that ‘Engleby‘ is a gripping psychological thriller of sorts, Sebastian Faulks’ new novel is also a brilliant meditation on the unreliability of memory, on the things lost by the fallability of the human mind. It also examines the unattainability or brevity [...]

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London one Saturday in 2003 8/10 Saturday shows Ian McEwan is still at the top of his game. Brain surgeon Henry Perowne is caught up in a road rage incident with an unpredictable thug called Baxter, who he recognises as having a degenerative neurological disorder. Perowne’s prognosis saves him from an imminent beating, but Baxter [...]

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