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’ reflecting the [...]

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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 wacky, mildy [...]

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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 the Steinbeck [...]

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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 of the [...]

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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 harbours a [...]

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