New Releases Reporter, Lucy Porter takes a look at the books on sale this month. What does March have to offer? Plenty of crime fiction, chick-lit, and supernatural novellas…
Venice, murder, crime… and Italy’s shady meat industry. If the horse meat scandal got you hooked, Donna Leon’s Beastly Things (7th March) takes you away from the drizzly grey of England and into the decaying cool of Venice’s waterways where a corpse is found floating in the canals displaying multiple stab wounds and a familiar face that Inspector Brunetti just can’t put his finger on. With every page soaked in murder, this is a wonderfully ghoulish bit of escapism for the more morbid minded reader.
Next Javier Marías, who is regarded by some as the greatest writer alive in Spain today, releases The Infatuations (7th March) into the English language. The metaphysical narrative weaves love, life, death and murder into the life of María Dolz who takes breakfast at the same cafe every day, becoming more entangled in the lives of the people she observes curiously than she first realises. This much anticipated novel mixes a myriad of existential questions into the skillful language of a master of the trade.
The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris (14th March) by Jenny Colgan caught my attention due to its deliciously tempting title. It is of course less gritty than the murder mysteries listed above yet like dipping into a box of chocolates (or devouring the lot in one go), there’s no harm in indulging in delightful sweetness every now and then. Here we follow ex-pat Brit Anna in an uplifting tale of new life found across the water in (wait for it) Paris as she discovers more about herself and her past than she ever could have done in England whilst simultaneously drooling over the delights of real, handmade chocolate. Yum!
Meanwhile in J M Coetzee’s latest offering The Childhood of Jesus (7th March), a makeshift family are thrown together by their shifting world before bonding and then fleeing the authorities who say that the boy must be sent away to a school in the mountains to correct his rebellious streak. It is a tale of lost childhood and banality, one that leaves you curious and unsure but which stays with you all the same.
There is a chilling, supernatural edge to the tale of The Ghost Riders of Ordebec (7th March) by Fred Vargas in which a seemingly fulfilled premonition linked to ancient legends of ghostly horsemen pulls myth into the modern world. It’s an intriguing tale in which the ordinary fear the criminal and the criminal fear the supernatural and nothing is quite as it initially seems. As the evenings of Spring begin to lengthen, this is a perfectly creepy book to explore in the last shadows of the day.
Finally, Kate Atkinson has hit the nail on the head with a beautifully written novel which asks the poignant question; what if you could live your life again and again until you got it right? Life After Life (14th March) explores this question through the life of Ursula Todd who dies as soon as she is born on a harsh Winter’s night – and then is instantly born again. She lives through many important events of the twentieth century with the wisdom of an old soul in this lovely tale made from the same cloth as Behind the Scenes at the Museum (same author). Read it and ask yourself; given the chance, would you want to do it all again?
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By Lucy Porter – New Releases Reporter
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