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Book Reviews: Irishman with murky past among BBC man's eerie cast

BBC reporter John Sweeney's fiction debut features an Irishman with a murky past involving training in North Korea
BBC reporter John Sweeney's fiction debut features an Irishman with a murky past involving training in North Korea BBC reporter John Sweeney's fiction debut features an Irishman with a murky past involving training in North Korea

BOOK OF THE WEEK

Cold by John Sweeney, published in paperback by Thomas & Mercer

RARELY is a book so engrossing and pacey that it makes me miss my train stop. But such is the case with BBC Newsnight reporter John Sweeney's first thriller, Cold. Irishman Joe Tiplady has a murky past involving training in North Korea, but now enjoys a quiet life as a special needs teacher in London – and walking his dog Reilly. When Reilly is dognapped, Joe finds himself drawn into the world of Russian beauty Katya Koremedova, who's on the run from her psychopathic boyfriend Reikhman. The action shifts effortlessly across the globe and between Sweeney's cast of eerily convincing characters – many based on real experiences he had as an investigative reporter for Panorama. We follow former CIA chief and Mormon Zeke Chandler in Utah, Reikhman on a grisly mission in southern Russia, and return to Joe hunting for Reilly in London. Lurking behind them all is Russian ruler Zoba, an all-powerful puppet-master who's pulling the strings.

Kate Whiting

Thirst by Benjamin Warner, published in hardback by Bloomsbury

FANS of post-Apocalyptic fiction will welcome Benjamin Warner's debut novel. It's a disturbing, enigmatic book, all the more troubling for its humdrum setting. The nightmare scenario Warner conjures up is of a sudden and total lack of water. Inexplicably, rivers and reservoirs have combusted, leaving only beds of ash and charred foliage. We don't know how far this disaster extends, only that food and drink is rapidly running out in the sprawling suburb where unhappy young couple Eddie and Laura live. The situation becomes increasingly desperate as the temperature soars and the inhabitants wait passively for help that never comes. Warner has something to say about dependence on authority and lack of meaningful community. But really this is a visceral book and where it excels is in its gut-wrenching descriptions of how dehydration ravages the body and mind. Stock up on bottled water before you read it.

Jackie Kingsley

Umami by Laia Jufresa, published in hardback by Oneworld Publications

ON THE face of it, fans of contemporary fiction are in for a treat. Laia Jufresa's novel, which won an English PEN Award, is constructed around a group of middle-class – verging on bohemian – families in Mexico City. It offers the enticing prospect of a vast, filthy and overcrowded megatropolis being opened up. Jufresa herself is well-travelled. She was raised in the cloud forests of Veracruz and also grew up in Paris. But the Mexican households she writes about encircle a small courtyard in a modern housing complex. The estate has been designed by the landlord, a semi-retired anthropologist who is an expert on pre-Spanish cultivation habits and the recently discovered "fifth taste" of umami. And that shut-off-ness from the hum and throb of street life is reflected in the preoccupations of Jufresa's inward-looking characters, as the story moves backwards in time to excavate a narrative that is mostly about death, absence, and loss.

Liz Ryan

Straight Jacket: How To Be Gay And Happy by Matthew Todd, published in hardback by Bantam Press

IN THE watershed 1970 film The Boys In The Band, a character remarks, "Show me a happy homosexual and I'll show you a gay corpse." These sardonic words reverberate through Matthew Todd's sobering assessment of the mental health crisis impacting the LGBT community, which the author candidly refracts through the prism of his self-destructive behaviour before and during his editorship of gay lifestyle magazine, Attitude. Straight Jacket is a cri de coeur for a rainbow flag generation living under a dark cloud of self-loathing and body dysmorphia, for which Todd accepts some blame by promoting images of gym-toned perfection on Attitude's front cover. In his enthusiasm to share a polemic of exhaustively researched argument about toxic shame, addiction and escapism, Todd overloads early chapters with quotations from estimable sources. Clambering through dense paragraphs of expert opinion reaps rewards, including shocking accounts of bullying at school and young people dying by suicide. Todd's call to arms strikes an undeniably moving chord.

Damon Smith

Dead To Me by Lesley Pearse, published in hardback by Michael Joseph

SET in London and Devon before and during the Second World War, Dead To Me follows the unlikely friendship of two young girls whose lives are poles apart – privately educated Verity, and Ruby, who grew up in extreme poverty. Written from their perspectives, the story draws on themes of relationships, class and feminism, beginning with the moment the girls meet, to a pivotal event that threatens to tear them apart. From the first page, the novel hints at darker undertones, and in her usual style, author Lesley Pearse crafts a gripping plot that twists and turns, leaving the reader second guessing right up until the heart-racing climax. With a compelling mix of history and drama, it is definitely one to be read in as few sittings as possible.

Anna Hinchcliffe

The Meaning Of Cricket: Or How To Waste Your Life On An Inconsequential Sportby Jon Hotten, published in hardback by Yellow Jersey Press

THE Meaning Of Cricket is one man's journey through a game that has captured his imagination for a lifetime. Jon Hotten is a respected cricket writer and author who has been in love with the game from an early age. It charts his sporting journey - from his personal playing perspective through to the heroes he has been lucky enough to encounter along the way. Hotten also includew such luminaries of the game as WG Grace and Don Bradman, and even the story of when a team of one-armed players took on a team of one-legged players. With chapters on the art of making a cricket bat and the careers of former players such as Mark Ramprakash, it delves beyond the mere covers of the sport, examining what motivated the former England and Middlesex batsman to continue playing in pursuit of his one hundredth hundred.

Roddy Brooks