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<%-- Page Title--%> Book Review <%-- End Page Title--%>

<%-- Volume Number --%> Vol 1 Num 122 <%-- End Volume Number --%>

September 12, 2003

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The Guardian First Book Prize 2003: The Long-list

RACHEL HORE on A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies | A Party in San Niccolò | All This is Mine | Elegance

A Few Short Notes on Tropical
Butterflies,
By John Murray (Viking, £14.99)

An American scientist visits a cholera hospital in Bombay and makes a decision that cuts her loose from her past. The teenage son of Indian immigrant watches the fissures fracturing his family grow, and tells a destructive secret. A carpenter sits in the Cliffside house he built for his adored but absconding wife... The stories in this powerful debut from a young Australian (not to be confused with his Cumbrian doppelgänger) wander the globe -- Africa, the Antipodes and India, as well as his adoptive America.
Dealing exquisitely with subjects less often tackled in fiction (surgery, butterfly collecting, mountaineering), they address great moral issues: the past's hold on the present, relationships in crisis, the powerlessness of individuals in the face of mass poverty and brutal civil war. We engage with the characters at the deepest levels of feeling while connecting with some startling views of reality; for once the term "Chekhovian" really is warranted.


A Party in San Niccolò,
By Christobel Kent (Penguin, £6.99)

A romantic murder mystery set in Florence and its environs is just the thing to pack for your Tuscan villa holiday - and this one doesn't disappoint. The cast, as so often in these excursions, are English expats: charming elderly Frances, who every birthday hosts the bash of the title; brittle, elegant Jane, neglected trophy wife of the famous but sinister architect Nicky; bachelor journalist Frank; a nouvelle riche divorcée, Vivienne, and her brattish son Ned; and two spoilt teenage girls.

One of the latter is found shoved through a shop window in the first chapter. A 14-year-old Nigerian prostitute swiftly becomes victim number two. Into this rich stew of intrigue is dropped that archetypal innocent abroad -- Jane's old friend Gina has been granted a week away from her young family, and what a week it turns out to be. In Florence she helps uncover the perpetrator of these crimes -- but also, crucially, rediscovers herself. As you do.


All This is Mine,
By Ray French (Secker & Warburg, £10)


In urban south Wales in 1969, 10-year-old Liam fights for his place in life every day, both at home - his family are Irish immigrants - and in the world outside. His war-vet father is a hero to him, but Liam is out of his depth with the old boy's increasingly pathological fear of the red menace. Liam resents sharing his mother's attention with his whingeing little brother, Michael, who shadows him constantly, while each morning at school he must re-establish his rank in the playground jungle.
Then one day Marek arrives on the scene - a glamorous, fearless, passionate Pole, who sizes up to the school bully and marshals Liam and his friend Colin in pursuit of an agenda based on blood, politics and delinquency: to drive communism from Wales. French's hilarious dialogue brings the world of this late 1960s community to life, as with a sure hand he sketches in poignant views of the joys, sadness and sheer ghastliness of childhood. (And children.)


Elegance,
By Kathleen Tessaro (HarperCollins, £10)

Another one for the holiday pile. Even better, this charming and unusual romance for readers of Marian Keyes will also advise you on your summer wardrobe. Louise Canova, a young American in London, lives a half-life - stifling marriage to an actor who is more passionate about the dé
cor than his wife, mundane job in a theatre box office, tragic, dysfunctional childhood shadows and so on... Although she's in therapy for her depression, what gradually brings her to life and self-knowledge is a dusty volume turned up in a second-hand bookshop.

Written in the early 1960s by a formidable Gallic fashion expert, Madame Dariaux, Elegance is a Frenchified style bible, of the sort that advises you to wear a girdle of the same colour as your brassiere and holds vulgarity to be the eighth deadly sin. Just Louise's kind of thing, in fact. Is a style manual a rock on which to build your life, I ask myself? No matter, the elegant Madame proves more successful than Louise's god-awful therapist.


 
         

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