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Daily Mail
31-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
On Writing by Stephen King: How to write a bestseller by Stephen King
On Writing by Stephen King (Hodder & Stoughton £22, 416pp) Together with Grisham, Clancy and Crichton, Stephen King is one of the world's most successful authors, earning hundreds of millions of dollars from his stories, which are full of his trademark 'dread and wonder'. Even if you've never read one of his actual books, everyone has seen a film adaptation: Carrie, The Shining, The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, or Misery, in which an Academy Award-winning Kathy Bates smashes James Caan's ankles – Caan plays an author, Bates an over-besotted fan. In On Writing, and at the risk of sounding like 'a literary gasbag,' King promises to divulge the secrets of his craft. That's to say, how 'ambition, desire, luck and a little talent' blend with one's personal knowledge of 'life, friendship, relationships, sex' to create, if not works of literature for the ages, then bestsellers. King's lessons, originally published in 2000 and reprinted in this new edition, will hold few surprises to those of us taught English Language O-Level, back in the last century, when high standards pertained. Thus, delete extraneous verbiage, especially adverbs and clumsy exposition. 'Your main job is to take out all the things that are not the story.' Secondly, be plain and direct. A fancy vocabulary is pretentious. Don't ever say 'at this point in time' or 'at the end of the day,' or assume 'my angry lesbian breasts' is clever. Obscurity belongs solely with student poetry groups. King is correct to say writers must be compulsive readers. 'I take a book with me everywhere I go,' he asserts. If you want to pull the reader in and get them to keep turning the pages, focus is essential. 'Once I start work on a project, I don't stop and I don't slow down unless I absolutely have to.' There must be no distractions in the study, such as a television set, video games, or intrusive music. Which is all well and good – highly sensible. But in the end, King can't explain how he became Stephen King. Inspiration, to him, remains a complete mystery. 'It came from nowhere . . . It arrived whole and complete, in a single bright flash,' he says of a typical novel's gestation. It's what he lives for, it's what gives him joy, 'that sudden flash of insight when you see how everything connects', and the next thing we know, King is pouring out his fables about vampires invading New England, people being trapped in cars by rabid dogs, policemen going berserk and viruses wiping out 99 per cent of the human race. King was born in Portland, Maine, in 1947 and brought up in poverty by a hardworking single mother, Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King, 'a sharecropper living a largely cashless existence'. He never knew his father (who had walked out when he was a toddler) or had a father-figure, only horrible nannies, who'd 'just all of a sudden wind up and clout the kids'. Most of his childhood recollections involve acute pain: wasp stings, dropping a brick on his foot, 'mashing all five toes'. Taken short outside, King wiped his bottom with poison ivy. Gigantic blisters appeared, leaving 'deep divots of raw pink flesh'. There are terrifying descriptions of having an infected eardrum repeatedly lanced. 'The pain was beyond anything I have ever felt since . . . I screamed so long and so loud I can still hear it.' His mother Nellie's main memory was seeing a body fall from a building. 'He splattered. The stuff that came out of him was green.' Children don't forget being told things like that – King certainly didn't. For a year, King was bedbound with complications from tonsillitis. He read loads of comics, watched lots of television and began imagining his own macabre scenarios about robot monsters, teenage grave-robbers and 'radioactive corpses that came out of the ocean and ate surfers'. He also had a penchant for anything involving 'girls in black bras who looked like trailer trash' and for watching Vincent Price's screen victim Hazel Court 'wandering around in a lacy low-cut nightgown'. King became expert in fantasy-horror and science fiction. His own works would be notable for a 'hallucinatory eeriness', and, while at school – where he edited a magazine called The Village Vomit, which got him into trouble with his teachers – King was cranking out short stories for pulp magazines. He received heaps of rejection slips before getting his first acceptance in 1967, aged 20. There were plenty of dead-end jobs: in factories overrun by rats as big as dogs; in laundries, where tablecloths and motel bedsheets 'stank to high heaven and were often boiling with maggots'. King did his writing after work, in a cubicle in a caravan, where he couldn't afford a telephone. As a janitor in a high school, he noticed the tampon machine in the girls' showers. This, coupled with his awareness of bullying ('teasing became taunting'), and something he'd read in a newspaper about poltergeist activity and telekinetic phenomena, gave him the idea for Carrie – his thriller about a misfit traumatised by her first period. The book was published by Doubleday in 1974. Paperback rights were instantly sold for $400,000. There was a classic film in 1976, starring a blood-drenched Sissy Spacek. So, farewell cubicles in caravans. 'Do you do it for the money, honey?' King was asked by an interviewer. I absolutely disbelieve him when he answered, no, the work is always its own reward. None but a blockhead writes for anything other than money, and King is no blockhead. What he was, for a spell, was an alcoholic. 'By 1985, I had added drug addiction to my alcohol problem,' he recalls. He shoved cotton wool up his nose to stem the flow of cocaine-induced bleeding. Managing still to produce novels whilst stoned, King saw himself as belonging to that proud tradition of literary inebriates – Dylan Thomas, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway. Eventually, King saw sense: 'We all look pretty much the same when we're puking in the gutter.' It's a paradox that King came nearest to death when sober and clean. In 1999, he was knocked down by a minivan, which threw him 14 ft into the air. Before losing consciousness, he just about remembers 'wiping palmfuls of blood out of my eyes' from the lacerations in his scalp. King's lung collapsed. His leg was broken in nine places, the bones turned into Scrabble tiles. His right knee was split apart, his hip smashed, his spine chipped and four ribs cracked. There were to be many operations, much rehabilitation, but King (no stranger to agony) pulled through to write many more books, win many more Lifetime Achievement awards and earn lots more money. Such vivid slices of autobiography are what make this book vastly more than worthwhile.
Irish Times
20-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
A good spread of food memoirs: from the sanitised to the ‘slutty'
Picky Author : Jimi Famurewa ISBN-13 : 978-1399739542 Publisher : Hodder & Stoughton Guideline Price : £20 The Jackfruit Chronicles Author : Shahnaz Ahsan ISBN-13 : 978-0008683795 Publisher : Harper North Guideline Price : £16.99 Moveable Feasts: Paris in Twenty Meals Author : Chris Newens ISBN-13 : 978-1805224204 Publisher : Profile Books Guideline Price : £18.99 Tart: Misadventures of an Anonymous Chef Author : Slutty Cheff ISBN-13 : 978-1526682697 Publisher : Bloomsbury Guideline Price : £16.99 Care and Feeding Author : Laurie Woolever ISBN-13 : 978-0063327603 Publisher : Ecco Guideline Price : £22 Strong Roots: A Ukrainian Family Story of War, Exile and Hope Author : Olia Hercules ISBN-13 : 978-1526662927 Publisher : Bloomsbury Circus Guideline Price : £20 Early on in Picky, his ode to growing up second-generation British Nigerian and 1990s junk food, restaurant critic Jimi Famurewa unmasks the illusion that is food memoir. 'Working as a food writer,' he writes, 'can have a warping effect on childhood memories ... The past becomes an editable document.' It's provocative but risks spoiling the show. There's masterful writing, as Famurewa rhapsodises about a Twix 'scraped down to a soggy, denuded girder of a shortbread', the 'wincing remnants' of Brannigans crisps. It's refreshing to read an account of a reasonably happy existence – especially when it's of a single-parent son. Picky is also a significant meditation about the 'cultural performance of immigrant life', crucial to understanding the machinations of code-switching that is instinctive to multinational children. He is wonderful at expressing the heightened sensations of childhood, such as the giddiness of travelling to the US as an unaccompanied minor, 'a continent-hopping Paddington Bear of the sky'. His paean to McDonald's enlightened this second-generation immigrant reader why the 'slender, elegant uniformity of McDonald's fries in a pillar-box-red sleeve' held not only me, but my parents, in its sway. Famurewa, whose previous book was the eloquent Settlers, about the British black African experience – is a thoughtful, thorough writer. However, in a memoir the author must be the star, and even though he studied drama at Royal Holloway, Famurewa is reluctant. Out of respect, he never really delves into the people he loves, particularly his mother. Perhaps it's his British reserve coupled with the modesty of a 'Nice Nigerian Boy' but in Famurewa's conscientious refusal to manipulate his story, he and his characters never really take flight. READ MORE Shahnaz Ahsan. Photograph: Tracey Aiston If Famurewa is diffident about showcasing his immigrant family, Shahnaz Ahsan has no qualms about bragging about hers. Her cookbook memoir, The Jackfruit Chronicles, starts with her grandfather Habib, who arrives in Manchester from what is now Bangladesh in 1953 and starts a family that thrives despite Enoch Powell, Thatcher-era racism and post-9/11 anti-Muslim sentiment. British-Bangladeshis such as Habib created what we know as the 'Indian curry house', where one pot of house gravy is tailored into different dishes with proteins, vegetables and spices. Jackfruit's 'Benglish' recipes offer an intriguing glimpse of early immigrant adaptation: cheese and Patak pickle pinwheels, crumpets swapped for the flatbread chitoi pitha. Unfortunately, Ahsan's style is prone to cliched platitudes that emphasise the wonderfulness of a clan for whom 'food is the love language which we share'. 'Thank you,' she writes, 'to Aneesa and all the other aunties who pass on their wisdom both in and out of the kitchen.' Ahsan grew up on Enid Blyton, and Winona Ryder's Little Women, and it shows in her relentlessly heartwarming prose. Her characters lack nuance; her jokes fall flat. There's a touch of preachiness to Ahsan, who as a teenager would hide 'lads' mags' such as Zoo (where Jimi Famuwera once worked) 'in the belief that if we could, somehow, limit the availability of this media, women would actually be regarded with a modicum of respect one day'. In some families there is a refrain: Someone should write about how marvellous we are. The Jackfruit Chronicles is exactly the kind of saga that your grandma would bless. Food writer Olia Hercules , from London, must stand by as the landscape and people of her idyllic Ukrainian childhood are demolished. Her parents' home, built 'to retire in, to grow weathered in, alongside the creased riverbank that stretches below' is occupied by the Russian military. However, as she realises in Strong Roots, the war opens up another past, one whose wounds had been covered over during more halcyon days. 'When I was growing up, I never questioned why we talked about certain things in half-whispers,' she writes. 'My grandparents' memories were 'mined' and had to be trodden on lightly for a long time.' The irony is that the tales that Hercules gathers – horrifying, hilarious – might have been discarded were it not for the current terror. She's not alone; hordes of Ukrainians, since the war began, have been scrambling to preserve their heritage. However, such stories come with a cost, as Hercules realises when she prods her grandmother Vera for what is ancient and unendurable. '(F)rom out of her stiff body came a stiff voice ... I understood that her stiffness was a barrier, a barrier against the past, perhaps to shield her from things that she might have never discussed before.' There are some overripe moments. (For example: 'A list of occasions when I see my ancestors' smiles' that includes 'my children's eyes'.) However, Hercules knows how to mix lushness with crisp, unyielding fact; what's more, instead of explaining her characters, she describes them. Her grandmother Vera excitedly gets ready for a 'foto sessiya' with a crinoline blouse and 'huge lacquered hair'. 'I need you to be natural, grandma!' Hercules shrieks, and makes her change. The people in Hercules's book have been maturing inside her for a lifetime, gathering richness. They can be stubborn, quick to anger and vain; she conveys the way they talk over each other, and how their punchlines falter. Hercules's people may be strong, but she has also rendered them so vividly so that they will endure. They are blood, breath and bone – shut your eyes and they resound with exuberant cacophony. Slutty Cheff Slutty Cheff , the anonymous author of Tart, is a few years shy of 30. As her name suggests, she's a horny workaholic in an esteemed London restaurant, and bangs many a dish, on and off the line. She's white, socially privileged and loves her parents; she's at the sweet spot in life when things are on the cusp. In short, you'd hate her if she weren't so winningly self-deprecating. Tart is not strict memoir. As Slutty told British Vogue, 'Stories are based on my stories, and stories of my chef friends,' which makes it all the more entertaining, an updated 18th-century picaresque where the rogue hero is a woman 'who will feed your desire, like a Tesco meal deal'. Plus, although Tart has plenty of fat-and-sugar stoked steam, its author knows that the cardinal rule for both culinary and erotic writing is to stay crisp and dry. She observes, 'The other reason why I don't want people to know about my lover is far more important than gender politics: the man I'm sleeping with has a topknot.' There are darker aspects of Tart, like panic attacks and a sleazy co-worker, and Slutty confesses, 'Whenever I lose the sense of who I am or what I do, or I spin into disassociation or fall into a sense of depression I feel scared and worry that I'll never be happy again. There are two things in my life that are a constant reminder that pleasure exists: food and sex.' Anthony Bourdain. Photograph: Alex Welsh/The New York Times The kitchen, touted by many as an artistic vocation, can also be a form of self-medication, its mania an addictive panacea for people too terrified to stop. Laurie Woolever is 22 when Care and Feeding begins. She has a lot in common with Slutty, except instead of present-day London, she lives in 1996 New York. A blond Ivy League graduate who can cook and write, she will become assistant to the two chefs synonymous with that era's culinary machismo – the not-yet #MeToo'ed, evangelist of Italian cuisine Mario Batali, and Kitchen Confidential author Anthony Bourdain. Much as in Tart, what unfolds is a heady rush of alcohol, food, dirty sex and high-calibre work, proving that whoever said drink and drugs were counterproductive was wrong. Except. Let's just say that we hope Slutty doesn't suffer like Woolever in 20 years. This raw, scalding book is about what happens when one's career is ascendant while one's personal life unravels. Some events are spectacularly badly timed; shortly after Woolever gets sober, her husband leaves her and Bourdain kills himself. Woolever is briskly inventive, like when she describes a lamb tongue's salad as 'intriguing because of the truffles and provocative because of the tongue'. She's deadpan about Ferran Adria, pink limousines and a writer who 'had a revolting Humbert Humbert-ish way with wine descriptors ... bottles were 'sexy babies' and 'flirtatious teens'. Still, an attraction of the book is the two outsized men with whom she was affiliated, and on this Woolever delivers, sometimes reconfiguring their signature swaggers in unexpected ways. About Batali (who concluded a written apology about his misconduct with a recipe for cinnamon rolls) she's gentle – he's an erudite, generous monster who's a surprisingly astute observer of her spiralling behaviour. Regarding Bourdain, whose kindness she paints in many lights, Woolever gives him a remarkable send-off. 'He had,' she states, 'made the colossally stupid, but somehow wholly plausible decision to die of a broken heart.' If only she wasn't so excruciatingly hard on herself. Woolever details every embarrassing incident in her life, and reprints her journal extracts and emails with every blemish – they're broken and sloppy, the sort of thing a vainer writer would want permanently erased. However, much of Care and Feeding makes you crave reckless behaviour, such as that 'woozy punch-in-the-face feeling' of a gin-and-tonic at a Sri Lanka bar. You can't forget the brilliant accomplishments – in kitchens and elsewhere – that were fuelled by the admittedly toxic adrenaline of that time. Compare Woolever and Slutty to the more virtuous recollections of Famurewa, Ahsan, and Hercules; consider that there won't be a Batali autobiography any time soon, and it seems that, at least for now, in the world of food memoir, it will still be the white girls who have the most fun. Chris Newens. Photograph: Sabine Dundure In Moveable Feasts , Chris Newens seeks, in each of Paris's arrondissements, a dish that encapsulates something of the city's soul. Methodical and charming, Newens starts his research the old-fashioned way, by talking to strangers, waylaying Sri Lankan plongeurs on a sleeper train and sniffy haute bourgeoises after church. In the world, Paris is the city most famously defined by its outsiders. As his title suggests, Newens's teenage hero was Ernest Hemingway, and he is caught between the schoolboy fancies that lured him there, and the mercurial, multinational Paris that keeps him. His city hovers between unconventional and stereotype, with diaspora dishes that are also predictably Parisian (bahn-mi in the 13th), croissants and Congolese-style malangwa fish. As a white English man with fluent French, Newens can navigate the homeless in the Bois des Vincennes and a 1993 Saint-Émilion with equanimity. More than Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, Newens recalls another culinary Paris chestnut, George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London. Like Orwell, Newens is at his best when he is observing individuals where they work, like the employees at the smoothly functioning colossus of decent-priced dining, Bouillon République. Many memoirs touch on home, that mysterious place where you belong. A Paris expat like Newens, however, decides to settle in a place where he will forever be foreign. It's not a choice all Paris immigrants make. For the Sri Lankan waiter at La Fontaine de Mars or the Peruvian-American student at the Cordon Bleu, there's a yearning for geographical and emotional permanence, to become an indelible part of the city's history. It is our sincere, if somewhat naive, hope that they will.
Daily Mail
09-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Picky by Jimi Famurewa: One critic's journey from mash and McDonalds to Michelin Stars
Picky by Jimi Famurewa (Hodder & Stoughton £20, 384pp) There are few more formative memories in life than the school dinner you hated. Congealed custard, brown broccoli that rather than resembling a green tree looks closer to a wizened bramble bush, and chicken so dry that the Sahara would seem an oasis. For journalist and food critic Jimi Famurewa, his primary school nemesis was smash... otherwise known as mashed potato. Cold with a 'gloopy mouthfeel', young Famurewa felt strongly that it belonged anywhere but on his plate – preferably in the bin. However, when faced by the dinner lady guarding said bin, Famurewa did what any young child faced with adversity would: wadded the starchy mixture up, shoved it in his pocket and delivered his empty tray to the expectant dinner lady. This is one of the early instances where Famurewa's 'pickiness' shines through. Charming and instantly likeable, he has the uncanny and rare ability to reflect and reminisce without the rose-tinted (and grating) impression so many memoirs have. Growing up in a traditional Nigerian household in south-east London, with a father still in Nigeria, a mother who worked full-time and two brothers, Famurewa learned pretty quickly how to make it on his own. The ingenuity seen in pocketed-potato gate was not a one-time occurrence. During a particularly influential Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle faze, Famurewa became obsessed with their favourite food, pizza. Knowing the tomato and mozzerella holy grail awaited his tastebuds in the freezer, but not knowing how to use the oven, he decided to get the family's toaster involved. The result? Billowing smoke, half blackened, half frozen dough and a surprisingly understanding mother. What stands out in this engaging memoir that spans toddlerdom to adulthood, huge Nigerian family gatherings to bustling Soho streets, is Famurewa's refreshing honesty about his Nigerian heritage. In his picky early years he had little interest in Nigerian cooking beyond the tried-and-true favourites he had enjoyed in Lagos. Instead, McDonalds, KFC and TGI Fridays were the foods he craved. Having grown up in a household that viewed 'independent' restaurants with a decree of caution and the suspicion that they might be scams, the irony of his future career as a food critic is not lost on Famurewa. Yet his love of food shines through in this book. There is a palpable hunger (pardon the pun) within the pages that expresses a love of any cuisine. Whether it is the jealousy felt towards a coworker's 'ghee-simmered onions' or the fact that on a date with his now wife, he made fish and chips from scratch… a far cry from toasted pizza, a real love for food had always been within him. Poignantly, towards the end of his book, Famurewa realises there is a wealth of knowledge to be gleaned from watching his powerhouse of a mother in the kitchen. Knowledge that can be combined, not separated as in youth, with the path his own appetites have taken, 'I am the cultural inheritance that I have been given but I am also what I have given myself.' Life and food are about finding balance: don't force something that doesn't fit and don't be afraid of the pickiness that helps you discover what is right for you.
Irish Times
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Never Flinch by Stephen King: Prolific author in crime thriller mode
Never Flinch Author : Stephen King ISBN-13 : 978-1399744331 Publisher : Hodder & Stoughton Guideline Price : £25 You don't write more than 70 novels without knowing how to follow your muse, and the muse that Stephen King is following is called Holly Gibney. She has now featured in seven novels or novellas for King, and she takes centre stage here again. Since we met her first 11 years ago as a mousy, repressed character in Mr Mercedes , Holly has found her confidence and blossomed into a smart and resourceful private detective. This story kicks off when the Buckeye City police department receives a letter from someone threatening to kill 'thirteen innocents and one guilty' in an act of atonement for the death of an innocent man. Holly is initially drawn into the investigation when the murders start, but then finds herself on the road acting as security for a controversial women's rights activist who is bringing her pro-choice rally from city to city, and has attracted the attention of a stalker with murderous intent. [ How Stephen King unlocks our imagination with every scare Opens in new window ] This is King in crime thriller mode, although elements of supernatural horror do occasionally push their way into Holly stories, where they seem ill at ease. The evil that Holly is chasing in Never Flinch is strictly flesh and blood, yet oddly the story feels less plausible than many of King's flights of fancy. READ MORE The idea that a shrinking violet such as Holly would take on a job as a bodyguard is utterly nonsensical – the character is far too smart and self-aware to put herself in that position – and is one of several elements that feel like parts from a different jigsaw. King takes aim at anti-abortion protests, queries the legal system, and there is a character that may or may not be trans, but is definitely problematic. It's a shame, as there are sections in here that work perfectly – the stalker gradually closing in on his prey could easily have been its own separate story, there are some heart-breaking father-son dynamics, and the murders in the serial killer story are genuinely chilling for how utterly senseless they are. King is simply too good at this not to make it a page turner but ultimately the whole novel seems to add up to slightly less than the sum of its parts.
Yahoo
01-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Stephen King, the king of horror, is back with another gem...5 new books to read
Fiction The Retirement Plan by Sue Hincenbergs is published by Sphere in hardback, priced £18.99 (ebook £7.99). Available June 3 If crazy, switcheroo mysteries with a dark comic edge are your thing, then The Retirement Plan is the summer read for you. Sue Hincenbergs' story of disappointment, grief, deceit, murder and casinos is based around the friendship of a group of women. After the death of one of their husbands in a freak accident (or was it a hitman catching up with him for past misdeeds?), his widow is left a million-dollar life insurance payout, sparking a Golden Girls' retirement dream for the other wives. But cleverly, this isn't just their tale. The husbands also have a retirement plan, and a suspicion that someone is about to find out about it. The three remaining husbands reach out to their barber to help 'fix' the problem. A triumphant crime caper that is funny and exciting. 9/10 Review by Rachel Howdle Never Flinch by Stephen King is published in hardback by Hodder & Stoughton, priced £25. Available now A brutal murderer seeks revenge for a wrongly convicted man, taunting police with a letter threatening to kill '13 innocents and one guilty.' Meanwhile, outspoken feminist activist Kate McKay launches a lecture tour, packing venues with her noisy fans, angry opponents and unwittingly, a stalker intent on killing her. Two dramatic storylines in one book by award-winning, master-crime writer Stephen King, Never Flinch is a double treat for his army of fans. Detective Izzy Jaynes leads the hunt for the letter writer, made urgent when the promised killings start. She asks for help from her friend, private investigator Holly Gibney, who is suddenly hired by McKay to be her bodyguard amid increasing threats to her safety. The hunt for the killer and the stalker merge into one as time runs out to avert a bloodbath. King says it was a difficult book to write as he had surgery on his hip, revealing it went through multiple rewrites and three title changes after his wife told him he could "do better." The author of more than 70 books proves yet again he doesn't flinch from writing best-sellers. 9/10 Review by Alan Jones Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid. Photo: Hutchinson Heinemann/PAAtmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid is published in hardback by Hutchinson Heinemann, priced £20 (ebook £10.99). Available June 3 Taylor Jenkins Reid - author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - is back with Atmosphere. Set amid the 1980s space shuttle programme, it explores female empowerment, space and science, queer love and everything in between. From the beginning of the emotional rollercoaster that the novel takes you on, Jenkins Reid hits at every heart string imaginable. Astronomy professor Joan Goodwin leaps at a chance to work for NASA, embarking on a celestial and scientific dream that brings her into the orbit of fellow astronaut candidate Vanessa Ford. Atmosphere jumps from past to present, examining NASA culture, and readers are also given a great view of the kind of training needed to be part of the Space Shuttle program. Moving, pacey and a read that will stick with you. 8/10 Review by Sara Keenan Year of the Rat: Undercover in the British Far Right by Harry Shukman is published in hardback by Chatto & Windus, priced £20 (ebook £10.99). Available now Year of the Rat: Undercover in the British Far Right by Harry Shukman. Photo: Chatto & Windus/PA Harry Shukman's brave delve into the dark recesses of Britain's Far Right feels especially timely. He spent a year undercover, infiltrating a series of extremist groups in the hope of understanding - and exposing - their dreams and ambitions. That Shukman's book provides few surprises is less a slight on his quest than an admission of the extent to which the ideas he encounters have been allowed to infiltrate the mainstream. The people Shukman meets are not, for the most part, big-booted skinheads swathed in Nazi tattoos, or white-hooded American backwoodsmen. They are normal people - men, mostly - who espouse their beliefs in pubs and clubs, or on specially-arranged camping trips. Some members of the lower-ranked orders appear so gullible as to inspire a tinge of sympathy. But such moments of light relief - there's an excruciatingly funny incident involving a notorious football hooligan being caught short - don't mask the real power and threat posed by extremist groups. The strength of Year of the Rat is not so much the tales of low-level loudmouths, but the inferences to the shady puppet-masters who continue to shape world politics for the worse. 6/10 Review by Mark Staniforth Audre & Bash Are Just Friends by Tia Williams is published in paperback by Quercus priced £9.95 (ebook £4.99). Available now A super-summery YA rom com, Audre & Bash Are Just Friends is a spin-off from US writer Tia Williams' page-turner of an adult romance, Seven Days In June. Audre is the highly-motivated, thoroughly ambitious, incredibly well-behaved daughter of best-selling erotica novelist Eva Mercy (the heroine of Seven Days), and it's the last day of school when Audre's summer plans disintegrate. Audre & Dash Are Just Friends by Tia Williams. Photo: Quercus/PA Sick of her mum doting on her new baby sister and sleeping on the sofa while their apartment gets a remodel, Audre decides to hire a 'fun-consultant' to help her let loose a bit and give her material for a project that could help her get into college - enter new kid, Croc-wearer and expert partier, Bash. While the trajectory of this pair's relationship is to be expected (yes, sparks do fly), Williams' characters are suffused with anxieties and family angst that feel wholly real. A flirty, entertaining read that should hit a nerve with lots of teens. 8/10 Review by Ella Walker 1. The Knight and the Moth by Rachel Gillig 2. By Your Side by Ruth Jones 3. Nightshade by Michael Connelly 4. Silver Elite by Dani Francis 5. The Devils by Joe Abercrombie 6. This House of Burning Bones by Stuart MacBride 7. The Cardinal by Alison Weir 8. Tyrant:The Nero Trilogy by Conn Iggulden 9. Vianne by Joanne Harris 10 The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (Compiled by Waterstones)
