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 Bausch’s novel is imbued with an awareness of what war can do to people, and especially to the men who are sent out to fight. You are surrounded with death, always, and you may be required to kill. You need to exercise constant vigilance and to have an abiding mistrust - a ‘wariness’ in fact - of the native civilians to survive.
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 Pattillo does an admirable job of writing the fictional First Impressions manuscript (nothing with this title by Austen is known to exist) and keeps with the nature of the writer herself, but the larger storyline of Mr. Darcy Broke My Heart could have used a bit more development.
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 Political Correctness: A History of Semantics and Culture is an entertaining, thought-provoking foray into an interesting and important area. Hughes focuses mainly on the effect of P.C. in contemporary Britain, America and South Africa, but he looks at earlier historical periods (such as the Reformation) too.
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 The story has elements of horror to it, the psychological play between desire for a dream and the day to day need to deal with reality. For the young woman, that means turning toward other man that she dates and beds, for Anton, it means dealing with what his marriage means to him while seeking someone to talk to via email.
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 It's a rich, linguistic treasure whose fast and fancy plot belies the depth. I read it once for the pleasure of the story, which did seem to get a little kooky towards the end, and then, a second time, for the sheer beauty and complexity of it where the ultimate ambition of Ruiz Zafón's creation became clearer. It is the sort of novel that keeps on revealing something different, the more you explore it.
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 There is much more to The Mermaid’s Tale than this sketch indicates and Medlock is a talented stylist able to evocatively capture both mood and surroundings. She writes lucidly in the registers of both realism and mythology, bringing these layers together in a unified novel of great interest to both men and women, for all of us are working to be able to learn to sign our own names in the name of the larger world.
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 Time to get organised! Here is our annual review of a broad selection of diaries. The review includes Granta, Eyes Over Africa Poster Calendar, The New Yorker Dads Diary, The Jacqueline Wilson Diary, Mslexia Writer's Diary, and Ed Hardy 2010 Magneto Diary.
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 These are not new themes. Literature is filled with characters that talk and talk, but never seem to understand. Literature is filled with characters that have it all, but still can't find happiness. What Rouss does is to take these stock themes and rework them for the contemporary world.
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 The poetry is dense, with inventive imagery, uncompromisingly charting female experience, rage, love, tenderness, hunger and fear, across the human body and through imagination. Even at its most painful, in the midst of Cancer or nuclear annihilation, there is a wry humour and detachment – a leaning in towards precision in meaning.
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 The television talking heads monitoring the possible terrorist threat sometimes seem less conscious, having as they do an inclination to say anything at all rather than nothing (even a wise nothing), sometimes presenting authoritative guests who articulate convoluted obscurities or obvious banalities (such a presentation of the news media seems both documentary and hilarious).
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We have 3 copies of Next by James Hynes to giveaway. To win, just sign up for our Free Newsletter.
The winners will be drawn on the first of April from subscribers. If you are a subscriber you are already in the draw. Good luck! 