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V's Blabbateria (Free subscription) | 09/22/2009
In an interview with Kevin Rabalais published in Glimmer Train's Fall 2009 (Vol 72), historical fictioneer Barry Unsworth shares some basic crafting experience:"In writing fiction, you make the laws as you go along. The only basic law is that you have to be consistent to the elements within the world you create" (229)."Motivations are buried deep. They go back, and they start early....
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Beattie's Book Blog (Free subscription) | 09/09/2009
Booker Prize shortlist unveiled, but who wrote the 'stinker'? AS Byatt and JM Coetzee will battle it out for this year's Man Booker Prize, but several other former winners were dealt an embarrassing snub yesterday when the judges were less than complimentary about their latest literary endeavours. By Anita Singh, Showbusiness Editor, The Telegraph, 09 Sep 2009 Nine previous Booker winners submitted...
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Geranium Cat's Bookshelf (Free subscription) | 08/30/2009
"If brief enthusiasms can make independent booksellers seem fickle, some redemption may be found in our loyalty to individual authors. We often have longer memories than both chain retailers and publishers, and our customers’ support depends on our taste as much as our efficiency. Hot news quickly cools, but the favourites abide: Shirley Hazzard, Javier Marías, Robert Edric, William...
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92Y Blog (Free subscription) | 08/11/2009
Frank McCourt famously said: “an invitation to the 92nd Street Y is better than a tap on the shoulder from the Queen at Buckingham.” On Jan 19 of this year, author Anna Porter was invited to 92Y to tell the astonishing saga of Rezso Kasztner: The True Story of an Unknown Hero of the Holocaust . She recounts this for the Globe and Mail today in The Tuesday Essay and was sufficiently impressed:...
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The Independent (Free subscription) | 03/15/2009
There's something about Italy that brings out the best, and the worst, in novelists. DH Lawrence, EM Forster, Barry Unsworth, Matthew Kneale, Muriel Spark – and I need scarcely add, myself – have all succumbed to the delights and perils of its art and beauty. Now there is Rachel Cusk, whose first travel book comes in the wake of six prize-winning novels and one highly controversial, bestselling...
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Men's Journal (Free subscription) | 02/25/2009
Booker Prize finalist Barry Unsworth's latest is set in 1914 Baghdad. It has nothing to do with the current war in Iraq — which means it has everything to do with the current war in Iraq.
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Living Between the Pages (Free subscription) | 02/17/2009
Passion, mystery, history, espionage… what more could you want in a novel? I was unfamiliar with Barry Unsworth’s work before I was offered this novel to review. I have to say that I was not disappointed. At some points, it felt like this book was written directly according to my tastes. I’ve always been interested [...]
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At Home With Books (Free subscription) | 02/13/2009
I have an advance review copy of Land of Marvels by Barry Unsworth that I would like to pass along to someone who will review it on their blog. (Click on the title to read more about the book on Amazon.) I don't know why, but I had a really hard time getting into this book, and I'd like to let someone else give it a chance. I will mail this book to the first person who comments (and who is from the...
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Beattie's Book Blog (Free subscription) | 02/11/2009
LAND OF MARVELS Barry Unsworth – Hutchinson - $36.99 Although Barry Unsworth sometimes writes fiction with a contemporary setting most of his work, and he has 16 novels to his credit, has historical settings and in his wonderful 1985 novel Stone Virgin he combined the two when he told the story of an contemporary restorer working on a Venetian Madonna interpolated with episodes set in the 14th...
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92Y Blog (Free subscription) | 02/07/2009
If you haven’t been able to make it to the Y recently, take solace that others have provided a cheat sheet for you: “Memory is everything. Without it, we are nothing,” says Nobel Laureate Neuroscientist and Columbia professor Eric Kandel (pictured) in Petra Seeger’s documentary film In Search of Memory . The film premiered to a full audience on the Upper East Side last night...
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The Anniston Star Online (Free subscription) | 02/01/2009
What there is to marvel over in Barry Unsworth's new novel is what readers have come to expect from the Booker Prize winner. Unsworth's ability to seamlessly link the past to contemporary events is as timely as it was in his Booker-Prize-winning Sacred Hunger.
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New Statesman (Free subscription) | 01/22/2009
Land of Marvels Barry Unsworth Hutchinson, 304pp, £18.99 Barry Unsworth's last two novels, The Songs of the Kings and The Ruby in her Navel, were set in ancient Greece and medieval Sicily respectively, so, by setting Land of Marvels, his 16th book, in Mesopotamia under the Ottoman empire in 1914, he has returned to comparatively modern times. His main character, John Somerville, is a British...
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The Guardian (Free subscription) | 01/17/2009
Reading this novel is like watching an Olympic athlete about to win the gold: the seamless flow of action, the mastery of technique, seemingly effortless yet demanding attention and eliciting admiration as an end in itself. Not that Barry Unsworth's writing is morally neutral, like pole-vaulting or a foot-race; the book in fact bears a quite heavy burden of moral meaning. But the story is so thoroughly...
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The Independent (Free subscription) | 01/16/2009
For the best part of three decades, Barry Unsworth has excelled at the kind of period novel that not only makes history live again but confirmss the truth of William Faulkner's dictum: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." In 2006, with Islam's historic position in Europe a question that bred far more heat than light, he made a typically deft detour into – of all locations...
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