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  • Great books this spring

  • By Time Out editors

    Posted: Tue Feb 7 2006

  • Our recommendations of great stuff to read this spring, from taxi driver‘s bigoted rantings to the mathematics of love

    Great books this spring

  • ‘Ludmila’s Broken English’
    DBC Pierre (Faber) March
    An unlikely meeting between East and West follows Ludmila Derev’s appearance on a Russian brides website.

    ‘The Brief History of the Dead’
    Kevin Brockmeier (John Murray) February
    Sort-of sci-fi set partly on Earth in the near future and partly in ‘the city’ where the dead live…

    ‘The Book of Dave’
    Will Self (Viking) March
    A new religion forms around a taxi driver’s bigoted rantings.

    ‘A Lie About My Father’
    John Burnside (Cape) March
    A son’s remarkable story of his emotional exile from his father, ‘a morose, threatening drinker who was quick
    with his hands’. Feature continues

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    ‘The King’s Last Song’
    Geoff Ryman (HarperCollins) March
    The writings of a twelfth-century Cambodian king bring hope to the war-torn country in the latest from the author of ‘253’.

    ‘Relative Stranger’
    Mary Loudon (Canongate) March
    When Catherine, the schizophrenic sister Mary Loudon hadn’t seen for 12 years, died, it was under an invented identity – a man called Stevie.

    ‘The House by the Thames’
    Gillian Tindall (Chatto) March
    A history of everyone who has ever lived in or on the site of 49 Bankside.

    ‘Electricity’
    Ray Robinson (Picador) March
    Strongly tipped first novel narrated by a 30-year-old epileptic woman from Blackpool.

    ‘The Burning’
    Thomas Legendre (Little, Brown) March
    A wild weekend in Las Vegas proves life-changing for a struggling academic.

    ‘Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era’
    Ken Emerson (Fourth Estate) March
    Instructive portraits of 14 songwriters who helped to define the modern pop song, including Carole King, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, and Neil Sedaka.

    ‘The Tent’ Margaret Atwood
    (Bloomsbury) March
    A short collection of short stories, punctuated by the author’s own illustrations.

    ‘The Gardens of the Dead’
    William Brodrick (Little, Brown) March
    A new thriller from the author of the ‘Richard and Judy’-boosted ‘The Sixth Lamentation’.

    ‘White Blood’
    James Fleming (Cape) April
    An English naturalist is stranded in Russia when World War I breaks out.

    ‘The Observations’
    Jane Harris (Faber) April
    Madness, ghosts, sex, lies… Faux-Victorian shenanigans, this time set in Glasgow in 1863.

    ‘The Amnesia Clinic’
    James Scudamore (Harvill Secker) April
    Two mismatched friends take a road trip in Ecuador-set first novel.

    ‘The War of the World: 1914-1989’
    Niall Ferguson (Allen Lane) April
    New interpretation of the twentieth century drawing on economics and evolutionary biology to explain the ‘age of hatred’.

    ‘Tourism’
    Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal (Vintage) April
    A Sikh rake’s progress through upscale London set in the long, hot summer of 2002.

    ‘Bad Faith’
    Carmen Callil (Cape) April
    An account of the Vichy regime by the founder of Virago which focuses on ‘Commissioner for Jewish Affairs’ Louis Darquier de Pellepoix.

    ‘On Trying to Keep Still’
    Jenny Diski (Little, Brown) April
    A bad-tempered ‘non-travel travel book’ by the award-winning author and memoirist.

    ‘Black Swan Green’
    David Mitchell (Sceptre) May
    Keenly awaited new novel from ‘Cloud Atlas’ author – 13 months in the life of a 13-year-old stammerer.

    ‘House of Orphans’
    Helen Dunmore (Fig Tree) February
    A widowed doctor in Helsinki in 1901 unsettles his household with a new appointment.

    ‘The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven’
    Alan Warner (Cape) May
    An ageing Spanish roué prepares to tell his sundry lovers that he is HIV positive.

    ‘A Death in Belmont’
    Sebastian Junger (Fourth Estate) May
    ‘Perfect Storm’ author refracts notorious early-’60s murder through prism of his childhood in upscale Boston suburb.

    ‘The Story of You’
    Julie Myerson (Cape) June
    A woman is drawn back into a 20-year-old student relationship after she loses a child in an accident.

    ‘The Mathematics of Love’
    Emma Darwin (Headline Review) July
    We’ve had ‘The History of Love’; now this. What’s next? ‘The Geography of Love’? ‘The Axiomatic Set Theory of Love’? The lives of a teenager in mid-’70s Suffolk and a Battle of Waterloo veteran intertwine mysteriously in this compelling debut.


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