Fiction - T - V
In this section we'll keep you up to date with news of books you might be interested in. The information will come from the publishers' website and we will add our reviews as often as we can.
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Darkness Rising
 
Frank Tallis
Arrow ISBN
9780099519744
July 2009
Vienna 1903. Outside one of the city’s most splendid baroque churches the decapitated body of a monk is found. Then, the remains of a municipal councillor are discovered in the grounds of another church – his head also ripped from his body. Both men were rabid anti-Semites and suspicions fall on Vienna’s close-knit community of Hassidic Jews. In a city riven by racial tensions and extremism, the situation is potentially explosive.
Detective Inspector Rheinhardt turns to his trusted friend, the young psychoanalyst Doctor Max Liebermann, for assistance. As the investigation progresses, Liebermann is drawn into the world of Jewish mysticism. Amid the atmosphere of threat and fear, Liebermann’s life is in crisis. Political forces conspire against him, and the object of his romantic desires, the unreachable Miss Lydgate, is becoming an unhealthy obsession.
The Escape
Adam Thirlwell
Jonathan Cape ISBN
9780224089111
August 2009
 Haffner is charming, morally suspect, sexually omnivorous, vain. He is British and Jewish and a widower. But when was Haffner ever really married? Or Jewish? When was he ever attached? There are so many stories of Haffner: but this, the most secret, is the greatest of them all.
In a spa town snug in the Alps, at the end of the twentieth century, the 78-year-old Haffner is seeking a cure, redress, more women; and ignoring the will of his wife.
He is there to claim her inheritance: a villa on the outskirts of a forgotten spa town. But Haffner never does what he is told. On his arrival in the town, he has checked into the spa hotel – and tried to develop two affairs: a mildly successful affair with a younger woman whose breasts are lavish, and a much less successful affair with an even younger woman, whose breasts are the smallest he has ever known. And, intermittently, he has tried to secure the paperwork for the villa he never wanted.
But gradually, in the tribulations of bureaucracy, he discovers that he wants this villa, very much. Now that he has to fight for it, he wants it.
There are two character notes to Haffner: he is an egotist, and he adores women. A mediocre man, but a man of singular appetite.
And so it is that, harried by his family, pursued by his women, menaced by bureaucrats, negotiating with the mafia, riven by his memory of the dead and of the missing, Haffner endures his many humiliations, as he tries to orchestrate his final escape, in the forgotten centre of Europe.
Through the story of his couplings and uncouplings, emerge the stories of Haffner’s Twentieth Century. How can you ever desert from your past, your family, your history? That has been the problem of Haffner’s life. How do you remain a libertine?
A novel about the fall of empires, and the beauty of defeat, The Escape is a swift, sad farce of sexual mayhem.
A Fraction of the Whole
Steve Tolz
Hamish Hamilton ISBN
9780241015285
March 2008
Most of his life, Jasper Dean couldn’t decide whether to pity, hate, love, or murder his certifiably paranoid father, Martin, a man who overanalyzed anything and everything and imparted his self-garnered wisdom to his only son. But now that Martin is dead, Jasper can fully reflect on the crackpot who raised him in intellectual captivity, and what he realizes is that, for all its lunacy, theirs was a grand adventure.
As he recollects the events that led to his father’s demise, Jasper recounts a boyhood of outrageous schemes and shocking discoveries—about his infamous outlaw uncle Terry, his mysteriously absent European mother, and Martin’s constant losing battle to make a lasting mark on the world he so disdains. It’s a story that takes them from the Australian bush to the cafes of bohemian Paris, from the Thai jungle to strip clubs, asylums, labyrinths, and criminal lairs, and from the highs of first love to the lows of failed ambition. The result is a rollicking rollercoaster ride from obscurity to infamy, and the moving, memorable story of a father and son whose spiritual symmetry transcends all their many shortcomings.
A Fraction of the Whole is an uproarious indictment of the modern world and its mores and the epic debut of the blisteringly funny and talented Steve Toltz.
The Informers
Juan Gabriel Vasquez
Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean
Bloomsbury ISBN: 9780747596516
April 2009
 Shortlisted for The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.
'Juan Gabriel Vásquez is one of the most original new voices of Latin American literature. His first novel, The Informers, a very powerful story about the shadowy years immediately following World War II, is testimony to the richness of his imagination as well as the subtlety and elegance of his prose' Mario Vargas Llosa
When Gabriel Santoro publishes his first book, a biography of a Jewish family friend who fled Germany for Colombia shortly before World War Two, it never occurs to him that his father will write a devastating review in a national newspaper. Why does he attack him so viciously? Do the pages of his book unwittingly hide some dangerous secret? As Gabriel sets out to discover what lies behind his father’s anger, he finds himself undertaking an examination of the guilt and complicity at the heart of Colombian society, as one treacherous act perpetrated in those dark days returns with a vengeance half a century later.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez was born in Bogotá in 1973. He studied Latin American literature at the Sorbonne and now lives in Barcelona. His stories have appeared in anthologies in Germany, France, Spain, and Colombia, and he has translated works by E.M. Forster and Victor Hugo, amongst others, into Spanish. His essays, reviews and reportage have appeared in various magazines and literary supplements. He was recently nominated as one of the Bogota 39, South America’s most promising writers of the new generation.
Omega Minor
Paul Verhaeghen
Dalkey Archive ISBN 9781564784773
November 2007
 Berlin, Spring of 1995. While a group of neo-Nazis are preparing an anniversary bash of disastrous proportions, an old physics professor returns to Potsdam to atone for his sins, an Italian postdoc designs an experiment that will determine the fate of the universe, and, in a room at Le Charité, a Holocaust survivor tells his tale to the willing ear of a young psychologist. Who is that talking cat, why do ghosts of SS soldiers roam the city, and what is Speer’s favorite actress up to?
Moving back and forth between the main stages of the past century—Berlin united and divided, Boston, Los Alamos, Auschwitz—Omega Minor is a novel of big ideas, a tale of survival of the soul cast in a whirlwind plot that is in turns smart, inquisitive, funny, violent, nutty, pornographic, moving, deeply compassionate, and profoundly moral. Or not.
Do scars ever heal? Can history be transcended? And will love, for once, save the world? Welcome to Omega Minor, where nothing is ever what it seems and nothing ever ends.
Omega Minor is Paul Verhaeghen’s second novel, the first to be translated into English from his native Dutch. In 2006, the Flemish Government awarded it their Culture Award as the best work of Flemish fiction published between 2003 and 2005; the book also received the Dutch Bordewijk Award for Fiction. Verhaeghen has donated the money associated with these awards to civil and human rights organizations. Verhaeghen is also a cognitive psychologist; he is currently an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
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