Nige recommends Jonathan Raban's account of the praire homesteaders... Mixing history with reportage, travelogue, reconstruction and personal narrative, Jonathan Raban's wonderful book Bad Land (available for 1p here) tells the story of the homesteaders who came to settle on the all but unpopulated prairies of Montana in the teens of the 20th ... Read More...
The 1p Book Review
Books for a penny
Nige recommends a lesser known novel by My Antonia author Willa Cather... A Lost Lady by Willa Cather [available for a penny from Amazon] is an apparently slight novel of some 160 pages that achieves the kind of depth and makes the kind of impact you'd expect from something twice the length. It's ... Read More...
ZMKC is captivated by a romantic comedy which is also a 'remorseless satire of the eighties and nineties'... The action of One Day (available for 1p on Amazon) takes place over twenty years and follows the lives of two characters - Emma and Dexter. These two spend the night together at ... Read More...
ZMKC recommends the often hilarious memoirs of Deborah, Duchess of Deveonshire and youngest of the notorious Mitford sisters... Wait for Me!, the autobiography of Deborah Devonshire, is worth at least 1p for its first section alone. This part of the book – an account of the author’s childhood surrounded by a ... Read More...
Michael ‘Peter Simple’ Wharton’s The Missing Will and A Dubious Codicil can be bought for a penny in a single volume, but, as Brit writes, it’s very much an autobiography of two halves... The Missing Will is a hoot, covering with deadpan wit Wharton’s childhood in 1920s Yorkshire, his remarkably indolent, drunken Oxford ... Read More...
There are countless overlooked books that deserve greater recognition - and many of them can be snapped up for a penny online. Here Nige recommends a classic novella... Janet Loxley Lewis was the wife of the eminent critic Yvor Winters, and a considerable poet and novelist in her own right. The Wife of ... Read More...
The more Nige reads of Violet Trefusis, Vita Sackville West and Virginia Woolf in this excellent group biography, the more appalling they seem... The biography business - driven by modern research and documentation methods, publishers' demand for fat volumes, and the ever-grinding mills of Academe - does have a tendency to ... Read More...
Today we suggest you seek out the works of the representative of a long-lost tribe - many of them available for a mere penny on the web... Despite being prolific and successful, (twice winner of the Whitbread, winner of the Heywood Hill lifetime achievement prize et cetera), Jane Gardam is not ... Read More...
Nige revisits Beckett's first novel - 'very Irish, very clever', and prefiguring the great works that came after.. His troubles had begun early. To go back no farther than the vagitus. It had not been the proper A of international concert pitch, with 435 double vibrations per second, but the double ... Read More...
Nige marvels at the 'practically perfect' short stories of Canadian author Alice Munro... It took me a long time to finally get round to reading Alice Munro - perhaps I was put off by the sheer volume of praise for her 'practically perfect' work, or by the fact that she won ... Read More...
