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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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