The Burnt-Out Town of Miracles By Roy Jacobson, trs Don Barlett & Don Shaw

The Burnt-Out Town of Miracles


By Roy Jacobsen, trs Don Bartlett & Don Shaw


John Murray Stg£7.99


This intimate novel by one of Norway's leading writers begins on 7 December 1939, when Russian troops invade the small Finnish town of Suomussalmi and find it evacuated but for one man: Timo the woodcutter, who finds he has a bond to the place that he cannot sever. As the distant drone of engines approaches, he vows that he will never go anywhere else. He watches the town go up in black smoke: homes, school, the church where he was christened.


Jacobsen excels in his portrait of what it means to be an outsider. When captured by the Russians, Timo is not killed, for despite declaring himself the "village idiot", his logging skills prove useful. In sparse, imagistic language filled with soot, sores, fire, frost and a recurring nightmare of being lost in a forest stumbling about like a "confused animal", the novel paints a powerful portrait of Timo's toughness and turmoil, and those qualities that separate wood from flesh and blood. Anita Sethi


At Large and at Small: Confessions of a Literary Hedonist


By Anne Fadiman


Penguin Stg£8.99


Charles Lamb dreamt up his Essays under the influence of brandy and tobacco; under the influence of tea William Hazlitt dashed off Table-Talk; and it is under the influence of both the brain and heart that the "familiar essay" is written, as opposed to the critical essay (more brain) or the personal essay (more heart). Many writers have mourned the imminent death of the "familiar essay", but in this collection, Anne Fadiman testifies to its endurance. She is a self-confessed "enthusiastic amateur" rather then scholar. Childhood memories of butterfly collecting are interspersed with musings about Nabokov's passion for lepidoptera; and reminiscences of university coffee drinking interwoven with statistics. Fadiman reveals her own influences: Häagen-Dazs, caffeine, the hours between midnight and dawn, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. With an eloquent voice and controlled style she expresses – and incites – a deep pleasure in life and literature. AS


The Choice of Hercules


By A C Grayling


Phoenix Stg£7.99


Hercules was watching over his cattle when a woman in a white robe approached him from one side and a woman with plunging decolletage from the other; the former offering him struggle and labour rewarded by immortal fame, the latter offering sex, entertainment and ease. The choice of Hercules is between Duty and Pleasure, the Good Life or the good life. A C Grayling dismantles this "spurious dichotomy". He explores Aristotelian ideas of "eudemonia", well-doing and well-being, using the analogy of the "musical notes" needed to create a harmonious life: intimacy, endeavour, truth, freedom, beauty and fulfilment. He also posits his own engaging arguments about Practical Morality. In striving towards good we might often fail, but the endeavour is crucial. The Choice of Hercules best succeeds in Grayling's account of his African childhood, during which he witnessed inequity and iniquity, an experience which influenced his lucid advocation of global human rights. AS


Where Shall We Go For Dinner?: A food romance


By Tamasin Day-Lewis


Phoenix Stg£8.99


"I come from a long line of greedy women," admits Tamasin Day-Lewis. An hour after the death of her father, Cecil Day-Lewis, with whom she was staying in the country home of Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard, 18-year-old Tamasin and "Jane" were unsure what to do. Is thinking about being hungry obscene, she wondered? Afflicted by a "sudden storm of hunger", they devoured doughnuts. In this beguiling fusion of memoir, food and travel writing, peppered with recipes, Day-Lewis and her American partner, Rob, set off in search of the perfect dinner, sampling road-kill badger in Somerset and bacon sarnies in San Francisco. Day-Lewis is at her best in some acute and humorous dissections of the differences – and essential similiarities – between transatlantic culinary customs, and of how food might conjure buried emotion and memory, uniting as well as dividing. AS


I Once Met... Compiled and Introduced by Richard Ingrams


Oldie Publications Stg£7.99


One of the more impressive things about this quirky collection, put together from 15 years of The Oldie magazine's "I Once Met..." column, is the cohesiveness of its tone. Whether meeting comedians or killers, or queens of all shapes and sizes, Oldie contributors are witty and irreverent; impressed but not too impressed – just like the magazine itself. The theory behind the column was that celebrities – in the old sense of the word – will let their guard down among harmless "civilians". Thus we discover that Larkin's early humour had "a strong excremental bias", EM Forster was rude to ladies with prams, and LS Lowry drew houses and people because "I can't draw trees at all". A charming collection. Katy Guest