Showing posts with label novel. Show all posts

Showing posts with label novel. Show all posts

Cockroaches: by Jo Nesbo

Cockroaches

by Jo Nesbo
Paperback, 400 pages

You may have heard me say this before. But I love Jo Nesbo!!!!

Stieg Larsson's books showed the world how dark and fascinating Nordic mysteries can be, but he was primarily a journalist and that shows in his writing. Jo Nesbo weaves a wonderful story and takes you down with him through dark twists and shadowy corners. I especially love his Harry Hole series. I have read all of them now, but not in order. That's okay, they are wonderful on their own but reading all of them really gives you insight into Hole and what made him such a dark mess.

Nesbo only got better as a writer, but he was wonderful to begin with. Get to know Harry Hole, he is fascinating.

From the back flap:
The thrilling sequel to Jo Nesbo's debut novel, The Bat, Cockroaches sees Harry Hole sent to Bangkok to investigate the murder of the Norwegian ambassador.
Detective Harry Hole arrives in a steaming hot Bangkok. But it's work, not pleasure. The Norwegian ambassador has been found dead in a seedy motel room, and no witnesses have come forward. The ambassador had close ties to the Norwegian prime minister, and to avoid a scandal Harry is sent there to hush up the case. But he quickly discovers that there is much more going on behind the scenes and very few people willing to talk. When Harry lays hands on some CCTV footage that will help him unravel what happened that night, things only get more complicated. The man who gave him the tape goes missing, and Harry realises that failing to solve a murder case is by no means the only danger in Bangkok.

Jo Nesbø’s books have sold more than twenty million copies worldwide, and have been translated into forty-seven languages. His Harry Hole novels include The Bat, The Redbreast, Nemesis, The Devil’s Star, The Redeemer, The Snowman, The Leopard, Phantom, and Police, and he is the author of Headhunters and several children’s books. He has received the Glass Key Award for best Nordic crime novel. He is also a musician, songwriter, and economist and lives in Oslo.

Perfect: A Novel By Rachel Joyce

Perfect
A Novel
By Rachel Joyce
Hardcover, 400 pages

From the author of the international bestseller, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, comes another exquisite and emotionally resonant novel about the search for the truth and unconditional love.

I really enjoyed The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and was super excited to know that Rachel Joyce has a new novel out. Joyce has a beautiful insight into human emotion and all the small tickings that go on in our hearts and souls.

Perfect is an achingly personal novel about a young boy and his obsessive drive to protect his mother.

The characters are unique and quirky and fascinating. This is a book that changes you while you read it. And that is my favourite kind of book.

From the back flap:

On a foggy spring morning in 1972, twelve-year-old Byron Hemming and his mother are driving to school in the English countryside. On the way, in a life-changing two seconds, an accident occurs. Or does it? Byron is sure it happened, but his mother, sitting right next to him in the car, has no reaction to it. Over the course of the days and weeks that follow, Byron embarks on a journey to discover what really happened--or didn't--that fateful morning when everything changed. It is a journey that will take him--a loveable and cloistered twelve-year-old boy with a loveable and cloistered twelve-year-old boy's perspective on life--into the murkier, more difficult realities of the adult world, where people lie, fathers and mothers fight without words, and even unwilling boys must become men. Byron will have to reconcile the dueling realities of that summer, a testament to the perseverance of the human spirit and the power of compassion.

Rachel Joyce is the author of the international bestseller The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. She is also the award-winning writer of more than twenty plays for BBC Radio 4. She started writing after a twenty-year acting career, in which she performed leading roles for the Royal Shakespeare Company and won multiple awards. Rachel Joyce lives with her family on a Gloucestershire farm.

Bellman & Black: A Ghost Story by Diane Setterfield

Bellman & Black

A Ghost Story

by Diane Setterfield

Trade Paperback, 320 pages

This is a unique story of love, loss, drive, madness, human folly and blackbirds.

An epic saga of one man's life, from thoughtless child to determined businessman with all the triumphs and sufferings along the way.

Rooted throughout the story is a dark feathery current of mystery, an invisible relationship with the rooks that populate this Victorian town. You will never look at birds the same way.

From the Back Flap:

Bellman & Black is a heart-thumpingly perfect ghost story, beautifully and irresistibly written, its ratcheting tension exquisitely calibrated line by line. Its hero is William Bellman, who, as a boy of 11, killed a shiny black rook with a catapult, and who grew up to be someone, his neighbours think, who "could go to the good or the bad." And indeed, although William Bellman's life at first seems blessed--he has a happy marriage to a beautiful woman, becomes father to a brood of bright, strong children, and thrives in business--one by one, people around him die. And at each funeral, he is startled to see a strange man in black, smiling at him. At first, the dead are distant relatives, but eventually his own children die, and then his wife, leaving behind only one child, his favourite, Dora. Unhinged by grief, William gets drunk and stumbles to his wife's fresh grave--and who should be there waiting, but the smiling stranger in black. The stranger has a proposition for William--a mysterious business called "Bellman & Black" . . .

About the Author

DIANE SETTERFIELD is a former academic specializing in twentieth-century French literature. She lives in Oxford, England. Her first novel, The Thirteenth Tale, debuted at #1 on The New York Times besteller list. The author lives in Oxford, England.

Worst. Person. Ever.

Worst. Person. Ever.
by Douglas Coupland
Hardcover, 336 pages

Warning! Not for the feint of heart. Or the easily offended. Or the moderately offended.

This book is a hilarious, rollicking frenzy of highly inventing swearing, round the world travel, and liberal pokes at humanity in general and Americans in particular. All tongue in cheek of course. If you are a fan of experimental and edgy novels, you will love this.

I found myself reading paragraphs out loud to whomever would listen to me, amazed at the words this man can string together like fascinating yet fetid beads. All the cobwebs have been blown from my brain. I loved every minute of it.

From the Back Flap:

Worst. Person. Ever. is a deeply unworthy book about a dreadful human being with absolutely no redeeming social value. Raymond Gunt, in the words of the author, "is a living, walking, talking, hot steaming pile of pure id." He's a B-unit cameraman who enters an amusing downward failure spiral that takes him from London to Los Angeles and then on to an obscure island in the Pacific where a major American TV network is shooting a Survivor-style reality show. Along the way, Gunt suffers multiple comas and unjust imprisonment, is forced to reenact the "Angry Dance" from the movie Billy Elliot and finds himself at the centre of a nuclear war. We also meet Raymond's upwardly failing sidekick, Neal, as well as Raymond's ex-wife, Fiona, herself "an atomic bomb of pain."

Even though he really puts the "anti" in anti-hero, you may find Raymond Gunt an oddly likeable character.


Photo credit: D.J. Weir

Author

DOUGLAS COUPLAND was born on a NATO base in Germany in 1961. He is the author of the international bestsellers Generation A and JPod, and nine other novels including The Gum Thief, Hey Nostradamus!, All Families Are Psychotic and Generation X, along with non-fiction works including a recent short biography of Marshall McLuhan. His work has been translated into 35 languages and published in most countries around the world. He is also a visual artist, a furniture and fashion designer, and a screenwriter. He lives and works in Vancouver.

Books include: The Gum Thief * Generation A * Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People * Miss Wyoming * JPod * Hey Nostradamus! * All Families are Psychotic * Eleanor Rigby * Worst. Person. Ever.

Dexter's Final Cut: A Novel by Jeff Lindsay

Dexter's Final Cut
A Novel
by Jeff Lindsay
Hardcover, 368 pages

I love Dexter. I love the books, I love the show, I love the whole concept of this monster hero with the wry sense of humour. It satisfies my need for Dark.

This most recent book of the series is Dex at his best. Who else would he feel at home with than the seemingly soulless Hollywood machine?

Our poor dark hero is the model for a new TV show and finds himself being observed at his workplace by an overly interested actor. This makes it hard for Dexter to do his dark deeds, harder still to work on his cases while he has to babysit stars and duck paparazzi. Still, Dreamy Dex finds himself caught up in the machinations and romanticism of Hollywood life, even while the body count grows.

You can never get enough Dexter!

From the back flap:

Hollywood gets more than it bargained for when television's hottest star arrives at the Miami Police Department and develops an intense, professional interest in a camera-shy blood spatter analyst named Dexter Morgan.

Mega-star Robert Chase is famous for losing himself in his characters. When he and a group of actors descend on the Miami Police Department for "research," Chase becomes fixated on Dexter Morgan, the blood spatter analyst with a sweet tooth for doughnuts and a seemingly average life. To perfect his role, Chase is obsessed with shadowing Dexter's every move and learning what really makes him tick. There is just one tiny problem . . . Dexter's favorite hobby involves hunting down the worst killers to escape legal justice, and introducing them to his special brand of playtime. It's a secret best kept out of the spotlight and away from the prying eyes of bloated Hollywood egos if Dexter wants to stay out of the electric chair. The last thing he needs is bright lights and the paparazzi. . . but even Dexter isn't immune to the call of fame.

Jeff Lindsay's razor sharp, devilish wit, and immaculate pacing prove that he is in a class of his own, and this new novel is his most masterful creation yet.

Never Go Back: A Jack Reacher Novel by Lee Child

Never Go Back
A Jack Reacher Novel
by Lee Child
Hardcover, 416 pages

This is the eighteenth book in Lee Child's Jack Reacher series and the most personal one to date. We get to know a little more about our favourite ex military man when he heads back to his old unit to ask the mysterious woman on the phone for dinner.

But, as they say, you can't go home again. Jack finds himself in a tangled mess as soon as he hits town and he needs all of his wits and even his heart to sort out just what the hell is going on.

Our giant of the roads gets a little sentimental in this book and I love it. He doesn't break character, of course, we just get to see a bit more of his soft and chewy core underneath the hardened shell.

Reacher fans will love this new installment in the series. New fans will love this look into Reacher's life. Some of us might even develop a wee crush on the man. Not saying who....

From the Back Flap:

Former military cop Jack Reacher makes it all the way from snowbound South Dakota to his destination in northeastern Virginia, near Washington, D.C.: the headquarters of his old unit, the 110th MP. The old stone building is the closest thing to a home he ever had.

Reacher is there to meet—in person—the new commanding officer, Major Susan Turner, so far just a warm, intriguing voice on the phone.

But it isn’t Turner behind the CO’s desk. And Reacher is hit with two pieces of shocking news, one with serious criminal consequences, and one too personal to even think about.

When threatened, you can run or fight.

Reacher fights, aiming to find Turner and clear his name, barely a step ahead of the army, and the FBI, and the D.C. Metro police, and four unidentified thugs.

Combining an intricate puzzle of a plot and an exciting chase for truth and justice, Lee Child puts Reacher through his paces—and makes him question who he is, what he’s done, and the very future of his untethered life on the open road.

Photo credit: Sigrid Estrada

Lee Child

Lee Child is the author of seventeen previous Jack Reacher thrillers, including the New York Times bestsellers Persuader, The Enemy, One Shot, and The Hard Way, and the #1 bestsellers The Affair, Worth Dying For, 61 Hours, Gone Tomorrow, Bad Luck and Trouble, and Nothing to Lose, as well as the short stories “Second Son” and “Deep Down.” His debut, Killing Floor, won both the Anthony and the Barry awards for Best First Mystery, and The Enemy won both the Barry and Nero awards for Best Novel. Foreign rights in the Reacher series have sold in more than forty territories. All titles have been optioned for major motion pictures, the first of which - “Jack Reacher” - was released in December.
A native of England and a former television director, Child lives in New York City.

Night Film: A Novel by Marisha Pessl

Night Film
A Novel
by Marisha Pessl
Hardcover, 624 pages

Wow! This has got to be my favourite book this year. A mystery with so many layers, you will savour every page. And you get a lot of pages for your buck, topping at over 600.

The official synopsis:
On a damp October night, the body of young, beautiful Ashley Cordova is found in an abandoned warehouse in lower Manhattan. By all appearances her death is a suicide—but investigative journalist Scott McGrath suspects otherwise. Though much has been written about the dark and unsettling films of Ashley's father, Stanislas Cordova, very little is known about the man himself. As McGrath pieces together the mystery of Ashley's death, he is drawn deeper and deeper into the dark underbelly of New York City and the twisted world of Stanislas Cordova, and he begins to wonder—is he the next victim? In this novel, the dazzlingly inventive writer Marisha Pessl offers a breathtaking mystery that will hold you in suspense until the last page is turned.

Vibrant, fascinating characters, a completely fresh and intriguing sleuthing team, and enough twists and turns to keep you guessing until the last page. And possibly even after that. Seriously, you will want to think about the book, talk about the book and make sure your best friends all get to read it so you can talk about it with them.

Author
MARISHA PESSL grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, and now lives in New York City. Special Topics in Calamity Physics, her debut novel, was a bestseller in both hardcover and paperback. It won the 2006 John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize (now the Center for Fiction's Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize), and was selected as one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review. The author lives in New York, NY.

Kelley Armstrong - Omens

Omens
The Cainsville Series
by Kelley Armstrong
Hardcover, 496 pages

Welcome to Cainsville!

Kelley Armstrong is best known for her internationally bestselling Women of the Otherworld series and hot on its heels is another fantastic series starting with Omens - our first look into Cainsville and what lurks therein.

Olivia Taylor Jones is the daughter of a wealthy family; beautiful, educated, and busy doing volunteer work until her marriage to equally suitable CEO, James Morgan.

This bubble is ripped apart almost immediately by an avalanche of reporters and speculations on her heritage. A fine way to find out you were adopted. And may be the birth daughter of serial killers.

In the frantic need to find out who she is and what all this means, Olivia sets out on a new life path. One in which she must fend for herself and use what little life experience she has to find out who she really is - and who her parents really are.

This novel has it all - mystery, thriller, romance, and a creepy town that just starts to unfold in this debut book of the series. Once you read this one, you'll be longing for the next.

Photo credit: Kathryn Hollinrake

KELLEY ARMSTRONG is the bestselling author of the Women of the Otherworld series, the Nadia Stafford crime series, and two bestselling YA trilogies, Darkest Powers and Darkness Rising. She lives in rural Ontario.

Linwood Barclay - A Tap on the Window

A Tap on the Window
by Linwood Barclay
Trade Paperback, 512 pages

Cal Weaver is a broken man. No longer a cop, the private investigator finds his reason and humanity crumbling down around him after the death of his teenage son. His wife is in a world of her own pain, constantly sketching pictures of her lost child, while Cal clings to the idea of finding out who was the catalyst in his son's death.

One rainy night he picks up a hitchhiker. It's a small town and she recognizes him. This is enough to sway his better judgement and let the wet teen into his car.

From there he finds himself in a baffling body switch and missing persons case in which his own innocence is questioned.

Something is greatly wrong with the town he lives in, and the more he discovers, the more convoluted and corrupt things seem.

Cal has to find out the truth and bring it to light before the body count rises. Nobody is innocent, and nothing is what it seems.

A great puzzle of a book by the master of the mystery thriller.

Put this on your reading list!

Photo credit: Michael Rafelson

Author
LINWOOD BARCLAY, former columnist for the Toronto Star, is the #1 international bestselling author of nine critically acclaimed novels, including Trust Your Eyes, The Accident, Never Look Away, and No Time for Goodbye, which has been optioned for film. He lives near Toronto with his wife and has two grown children. The author lives in Oakville, ON.

Fiend: A Novel by Peter Stenson

Fiend
A Novel
by Peter Stenson

Hardcover, 304 pages

There’s more than one kind of monster.

Can you ever have too many zombie books? No. Do they have to have a twist to really capture your attention? Yep, absolutely.

And what a twist we have here. Chase Daniels finds himself coming down from a weekend drug bender and has the worst hallucination ever. Outside the window an innocent child and a dog are playing. Or, rather wrestling. In fact the child is eating the dog. Blood runs from her face as she looks at him. He really needs to get off the drugs.

But this is no dream - Something happened to the world that weekend. And it will never be the same. Run with Chase through this drug-fueled adventure of horror, heart-ache, redemption and humanity.

Think Trainspotting meets The Walking Dead.

Not for the faint of heart, but truly exciting for us bold readers.

Photo credit: Robbie Lane

Peter Stenson

PETER STENSON received his MFA from Colorado State University in 2012. His stories and essays have been published in The Sun, The Bellevue Literary Review, The Greensboro Review, Confrontation, Post Road, Fugue, Harpur Palate, The Pinch, Blue Mesa Review, and elsewhere. He is also a recovering addict and has been sober for 10 years. He lives with his wife and daughter in Denver.

Kiss Me First by Lottie Moggach

Kiss Me First
by Lottie Moggach
Trade Paperback, 320 pages

Wow. The novel meets the new world of online lives.

A sheltered, intelligent yet socially stunted young women lives for her mother and her World of Warcraft, spending most of her time indoors. When her mother dies, she holes up in a new apartment and discovers a new online world - one of ethics, philosophy and new kinds of thinking.

As she gets deeper into the new Red Pill Forum (named after the choice made in The Matrix, to not be asleep to reality anymore), she is convinced to take over the online persona of a beautiful and vibrant somewhat older woman. One who wants to disappear.

Leila learns everything she can about enigmatic Tess in order to become her online. Soon she is responding and corresponding as Tess, her new persona becoming second nature.

But as she gets deeper into Tess's life, Leila forms her own attachments and finds herself embroiled in a new world of love, lies, depression and obsession.

A nothing-is-quite-like-it-seems novel that does a marvelous job of revealing human hopes and flaws along a fascinating new storyline.

Author

A London native from a family of acclaimed writers, LOTTIE MOGGACH attended Sussex University before she began a career in journalism at The Times. There, she worked as a feature writer, book reviewer, and columnist for several years. She currently publishes in a variety of newspapers and magazines including the Financial Times, Time Out, ELLE, GQ, and others.

Kiss Me First is her first novel.

The Fire Witness by Lars Kepler

The Fire Witness

A Joona Linna Thriller
by Lars Kepler
Hardcover, 512 pages

Psychologically tense and as fast-paced as The Hypnotist, the third book in the Joona Linna series by Lars Kepler is already a worldwide sensation, appealing to fans of Stieg Larsson and Jo Nesbo.

I don't know how they do it, but these Lars Kepler books just keep getting more dark, more intense and more deeply disturbing. I love them! You don't just read them and walk away, you go through every psychological twist and turn and are left contemplating what you have just read for days. Maybe weeks.

In this third Joona Linna novel, Detective Inspector Linna is facing sanctions for his previous behaviours and may even be looking at losing his job. Not one to rest for too long, he finds himself acting as observer in a brutal and complicated murder in a home for troubled young women.

His unofficial status both hampers and helps his ability to weave his way into the investigation and tries to figure out just what the hell happened and stop it from happening again.

Dark. Distubing. Brilliant.

Author
Lars Kepler is the pseudonym of Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril & Alexander Ahndoril, both critically-acclaimed writers under their own names. Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril's first novel Stjärneborg (Castle of Stars) has been translated in several languages while Alexander Ahndoril's novel The Director, about Ingmar Bergman, was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. The Fire Witness is the third book in a series featuring Detective Inspector Joona Linna. The author lives in Sweden.

Also by Lars Kepler: The Hypnotist and The Nightmare

The Summer of Dead Toys by Antonio Hill

The Summer of Dead Toys
by Antonio Hill
Trade Paperback, 368 pages

Under a hot Barcelona sun,
a killer is feeling the heat.

When the death of a vulnerable young witness in a case of human trafficking and voodoo causes the normally calm Police Inspector Hector Salgado to beat someone up, he is moved off the project and sent instead to investigate a teenager's fall to his death in one of Barcelona's uptown areas. As Salgado begins to uncover the inconvenient truths behind the city's most powerful families, two seemingly unsolvable cases are set to implode under the hot Barcelona sun.

This is a hot and sultry and fascinating and passionate novel set in an exotic locale. Antonio Hill had me at hello.

There is something about a mystery novel being set in a foreign country that adds so much to my experience. The setting becomes as much a character as any others in the book.

And these characters are deep, fully faceted and intense. Inspector Salgado immediately grabs your interest as he works this case. Expect to see more of this less than perfect hero in the future. This is going to be a great series.

Photo credit: Jaime Recoder

Antonio Hill

ANTONIO HILL lives in Barcelona. He is a professional translator of English-language fiction into Spanish and speaks fluent English.

The Heist: A Novel by Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg

The Heist
A Novel
by Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg
Hardcover, 320 pages

From Janet Evanovich, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Stephanie Plum novels, and Lee Goldberg, bestselling author and television writer for Monk, comes the first adventure in an electrifying new series featuring an FBI agent who always gets her man, and a fearless con artist who lives for the chase.

I can see a tv show or movie coming out of this new series already. Think early Castle meets Mission Impossible. This unlikely team shares witty, flirty hot banter while attempting a take-down that no other organization dares to do. Off the books of course, if they get caught they will be charged and prisoned like common criminals. Okay. One of the team is a criminal, but the other is a cop who - until given this assignment - had spent her career chasing the very man she is now paired up with.

Sexy and exciting, The Heist is a great beach blanket read!

The hardcover edition of The Heist contains stickers—“I ‘Heart’ Plum” and “The Con Is On”—and a sneak peek from the next Stephanie Plum novel!

Photo credit: Roland Scarpa

Authors
Janet Evanovich is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Stephanie Plum series, the Lizzy and Diesel series, twelve romance novels, the Alexandra Barnaby novels and Trouble Maker graphic novel, and How I Write: Secrets of a Bestselling Author.

Lee Goldberg is a screenwriter, TV producer, and the author of several books, including King City, The Walk, and the bestselling Monk series of mysteries. He has earned two Edgar Award nominations and was the 2012 recipient of the Poirot Award from Malice Domestic.

Bad Monkey by Carl Hiaasen

Bad Monkey
by Carl Hiaasen
Hardcover, 336 pages

Carl Hiaasen is gloriously insane. I mean this in the best possible way. His careening, breakneck novels twist and turn and flip upside-down with oddballs and bad guys galore. Oh. And a monkey.

Andrew Yancy has been demoted to Roach Inspector after sodomizing girlfriend's husband with a small vacuum attachment, in a decidedly less than private setting.

You can't keep a cop down though, and Yancy begins his own investigation into the death of a big-time swindler and the family he left behind. One things lead to a million and we are brought along for a hurkey-jerky ride through Florida to the Bahamas and back. The cast of characters also includes a Voodoo Queen, a lover running from the law, and a frozen arm. Kinda reminds me of the sketch comedies in which they are given a few random words and have to do a scene incorporating them all.

And he pulls it off. The book is gripping and a riot. You'll love it.

Here is Hiaasen doing what he does better than anyone else: spinning a tale at once fiercely pointed and wickedly funny in which the greedy, the corrupt, and the degraders of what’s left of pristine Florida—now, of the Bahamas as well—get their comeuppance in mordantly ingenious, diabolically entertaining fashion.

Photo credit: Tim Chapman

Carl Hiaasen
Carl Hiaasen was born and raised in Florida. He is the author of eleven previous novels, including the best-selling Nature Girl, Skinny Dip, Sick Puppy, and Lucky You, and three best-selling children’s books, Hoot, Flush, and Scat. His most recent work of nonfiction is The Downhill Lie: A Hacker’s Return to a Ruinous Sport. He also writes a weekly column for The Miami Herald.

Trains and Lovers by Alexander McCall Smith

Trains and Lovers
by Alexander McCall Smith
Hardcover, 256 pages

This is by far Alexander McCall Smith's most wonderful book. Usually we love him for his candid and quirky character sketches and humourous insight into human emotion and interaction, but in Trains and Lovers he takes his talent so much deeper to offer us a poetic and romantic look at the private lives of four strangers who meet on a train.

Trains, trainrides, missed trains and train stations feature in every tale, some spoken aloud and some quietly remembered, as this small group opens up their lives to one another and in return receive deeper understanding themselves.

An absolutely wonderful small volume, destined to my treasure shelf with:

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach
Now We Are Six by A.A. Milne
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran

Books that I shall read again and again throughout my life.

Alexander McCall Smith is the author of the international phenomenon The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, and of the Isabel Dalhousie series, the Portuguese Irregular Verbs series, the 44 Scotland Street series and the Corduroy Mansions series. He is professor emeritus of medical law at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and has served with many national and international organizations concerned with bioethics. He was born in what is now known as Zimbabwe and he was a law professor at the University of Botswana.

Trains and Lovers
Excerpt

1

“I think that’s a fishing boat.”

It was. He saw it from the train, but not for more than a minute or two, as the line followed that bit of coastline only for a short time before it suddenly swerved off, as railway lines will do. The view of the North Sea was lost, and trees closed in; there was the blue of the sea one moment and then the blurred green of foliage rapidly passing the window; there was slanting morning sun, like an intermittent signal flashed through the trees.

This is the story of four people, all strangers to one another, who met on that train, and of how love touched their lives, in very different ways. Love is nothing out of the ordinary, even if we think it is; even if we idealise it, celebrate it in poetry, sentimentalise it in coy valentines. Love happens to just about everyone; it is like measles or the diseases of childhood; it is as predictable as the losing of milk teeth, or the breaking of a boy’s voice. It may visit us at any time, in our youth but also when we are much older and believe we are beyond its reach; but we are not. It has been described as a toothache, a madness, a divine intoxication—metaphors that reflect the disturbing effect it has on our lives. It may bring surprise, joy, despair and, occasionally, perfect happiness.

But for each person who is made happy by love, there will be many for whom it turns out to be a cause of regret. That is because it can be so fleeting; one moment it may take our breath away, the next it may leave us bereft. When it does that, love can be like a haunting, staying with us for year after year; we know that it is gone, but somehow we persuade ourselves that it is still there. The heart has more than its fair share of ghosts, and these ghosts may be love, in any of its many forms. I knew one who fell deeply in love at nineteen—smitten, overwhelmed; astonished to find that all he wanted to think about was the other; unbelieving, at first, that this had happened to him. Thirty years later, he found the person he had loved, to whom timidity, if not shame itself, had prevented him from declaring his feelings, regularly coming to him in his dreams. So much had happened in those intervening years, but none of it had been shared, as life had taken them in very different directions. Nobody would choose to be in love like that, to hold on so strongly to something that was no longer there. Yet we admire such instances of tenacity, finding nobility in loss and in the way in which some people bear it.

If it were not for the train journey on that day, these four would never have met. Journeys may be like that, may bring together people who would otherwise never have known of each other’s existence. In that respect, long journeys have something in common with military service or boarding school, or even the shared experience of some natural disaster. Such things bring us into contact with people we would never have encountered but for the sharing of danger or unhappiness.

Journeys are not only about places, they are also about people, and it may be the people, rather than the places, that we remember. Those with whom one shares a carriage on the Trans-Siberian Railway may well be remembered, even if the names of the places in which the train stops are soon lost. Of Kirov, Perm, Omsk and Ussuriysk, all of them stops on that long journey, most travellers, other than the locals, will probably remember only Omsk—for its sheer, prosaic finality, and for the fact that of all possible railway stations in the world, we are here in one called Omsk. I know nothing of Omsk, but it seems to me that its name is redolent of ending, a full stop; not a place for honeymoons or rhapsodies. Omsk.

Or Adelstrop. Yes, I remember Adelstrop, for the train stopped there in the heat—that is Edward Thomas. The poet was on a train journey into rural Oxfordshire, at a time when there was still an England of quiet villages and hedge-bound fields, and when a train might unexpectedly draw to a halt at a small place and there might be birdsong audible behind the hissing of steam. Nothing happens there, other than the stopping of a train and the escape of pent-up steam, but it brings home how suddenly and surprisingly we may be struck by the beauty of a particular place and moment.

Edward Thomas was not alone in sensing the poetic possibilities of the train. Auden’s “Night Mail” is entirely concerned with a rail journey: This is the Night Mail crossing the border / Bringing the cheque and the postal order. You can hear the train in those lines; you can feel its rocking motion.

And then there is the poet Kenneth Koch, who while travelling in Kenya came to a railroad crossing at which this sign was posted: One train may hide another. This was meant, of course, as a warning to drivers of the fact that the train you see may not be the only train to reckon with, but it also meant, as Koch points out in his poem, that there are many things in this life that conceal other things. One letter may mean another is on the way; one hitch-hiker may deliberately hide another one by the side of the road; offer to carry one bag and you may find there is another one hidden behind it, with the result that you must carry two. And so on through life. Do not count on things coming in ones.

Trains may hide one another, but they may also hide from us what they have in store—the meetings, the disclosures, the exchanged glances, the decisions we make or the insights that strike us on a journey. Trains are everyday, prosaic things, but they can be involved in, be the agents of, so much else, including that part of our human life that for so many far outweighs any other—our need for love—to give it and to receive it in that familiar battle that all of us fight with loneliness.