The blurb: August 9th, 1945, Nagasaki. Hiroko Tanaka steps out onto her veranda, taking in the view of the terraced slopes leading up to the sky. Wrapped in a kimono with three black cranes swooping across the back, she is twenty-one, in love with the man she is to marry, Konrad Weiss. In a split second, the world turns white. In the next, it explodes with the sound of fire and the horror of realisation. In the numbing aftermath of a bomb that obliterates everything she has known, all that remains are the bird-shaped burns on her back, an indelible reminder of the world she has lost. In search of new beginnings, she travels to Delhi to find Konrad’s relatives, and falls in love with their employee Sajjad Ashraf, from who she starts to learn Urdu.

As the years unravel, new homes replace those left behind and old wars are seamlessly usurped by new conflicts. But the shadows of history – personal, political – are cast over the entwined worlds of two families as they are transported from Pakistan to New York, and in the novel’s astonishing climax, to Afghanistan in the immediate wake of 9/11.

Beddoes called his play “A Dithyrambic in the florid Gothic style.” Modelled on the “revenge” tragedies of the Jacobeans it it sustained by a poetry of glittering surface with an ever-present undertow of death and destruction tempered by humour deriving out of a remorseless sense of absurdity and alienation. Beddoes was certainly “possessed by death” but death is a theme played in several keys, allowing startling reversals of common values and perspectives. “Dead and living, which are which?” Readers of Death’s Jest-Book cannot easily tell.

There are two first-person narrative voices in Sebastian Barry’s new novel, The Secret Scripture, and both of them are trying, in their different ways, to make sense of the past – their own and their country’s. The first, and most moving, belongs to Roseanne, an Irish woman who is 100 and who has spent most of her adult life in the Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital, which is just about to be closed down. Throughout her confinement, Roseanne has written her life story, the ‘secret scripture’ of the book’s title, a clandestine act of testimony and reclamation. ‘I am completely alone,’ she says, early on. ‘There is no one in the world that knows me outside of this place… I am only a thing left over, a remnant woman…’

The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim is the ninth novel by British author Jonathan Coe, first published in the UK on 27 May 2010. It has a picaresque plot, told by the title character in the first person as he journeys first from Australia to his home in Watford, England and then on a promotional race for a toothbrush manufacturer to a remote chemist in the Shetland Islands. The story includes narratives written by other characters that greatly impact on Maxwell Sim, who is also preoccupied and influenced by the life and death of yachtsman Donald Crowhurst.

In The Independent Robert Epstein commented “it takes real panache to write with such flowing comedic ease; his pacing throughout is superb and delivers realistic dialogue and, hence, believable characters”. Writing in The Observer the critic Jeremy Paxman wrote that Coe had “noticed something interesting about modern Britain, and fashioned an engaging parable from it”

While Dylan is the bedrock of her memoir—without him, would there be a book?—he isn’t the whole story.

Rotolo discusses her own background (Italian heritage, Communist parents, inability to fit in growing up in Queens, the craziness and sexism of the era), but the dominant setting is the Greenwich Village folk scene. In informal, conversational style, Rotolo recalls those who made that scene, many of them famous but none more so than the complicated Dylan. Given his formidable presence, Rotolo’s adamant refusal to be more than “a string on his guitar” in the book is admirable. The moments when she comes most alive in its pages are the most compelling. –June Sawyers

Synopsis from Blackwells:

Includes poems that use multiple viewpoints – from Darwin himself, to his beloved wife Emma, and even, at one point, the orangutang at London Zoo – and illuminates the development of Darwin’s thought, the drama of the discovery of evolution, and the fluctuating emotions of Darwin the husband, and the naturalist and the tender father.

Humanity has expanded into the stars but at the price of its freedom. An autocratic and overbearing Government now rigidly controls every technical and scientific advancement. Deviation is punishable by death. Out on the edges of space, criminals thwart the law, making money out of illegal tech, their ships jumping from galaxy to galaxy to avoid detection. Ex-soldier Frank Pak doesn’t care about politics or breaking the law, he just wants to keep his ship running. When he’s offered a contract to escort a runaway back home to his loving family he doesn’t ask questions. But his cargo is more dangerous than he realizes. Jeven Jones is no ordinary passenger. A result of illegal human experimentation, he’s a fast-tracked evolutionary leap into future. Thanks to his ability for perfect recall and a series of mental skills that he has no control over, Jones is a wanted man. The Government wants him dead. A fledgling revolution want to use him to unlock every advancement the Government has ever denied them. If Jones lives he’ll start a war. If he dies the entire future of humanity dies with him.