"By turns hilariously funny, achingly morose, densely erudite and eye-rollingly hip, it’s tragi-comic tale of tech workers striving for meaning within the buzzy world of the mid-nineties software boom fizzes with ideas but never at the expense of its characters."
Stephen Kelman
Stephen Kelman's debut novel, Pigeon English, is described by the Times as 'a book to fall in love with, a funny book, a true book, a shattering book'. It has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2011, the Guardian First Book Award and the Desmond Elliot Prize.
Patrick deWitt: The Sisters Brothers 
I read this after being shortlisted along with Patrick for the Man Booker prize, and for my money it would have been a worthy winner. A Western in the mould of Charles Portis or the Coen brothers, this story of a pair of sibling killers chasing down their fate crackles with dry wit, its brutal violence studded with moments of heartbreaking humanity. In Eli Sisters, DeWitt creates a narrator who lives and breathes; a monster with whom the reader sympathises, a lost soul searching for virtue in the compassionless world of gold rushes and gunfights. A wise, funny, startling book about dreams both noble and ragged, and of the lengths we'll go to fulfil them.
Patrick Lane: Red Dog, Red Dog
Another Canadian writer named Patrick, and another book that sings with the husky, Steinbeck-esque voice of wisdom hard-earned. The Stark family are a clan united by a legacy of hardship and squalor; they eke a life out of the unyielding landscape of rural 1950s British Columbia, finding consolation from losses past and present in drinking and fighting. Again the story focuses on two brothers - one wayward and remorseless, one quietly planning a desperate escape - and on the consequences of loyalty. Lane paints a portrait of life's defiant losers with compassion and insight, his unflinchingly beautiful prose both lacerating and illuminating at once.
Douglas Coupland: Microserfs
Another Canadian! Not that I'm angling for a freedom pass from the Canadian tourist board or anything...but for me, Microserfs represents Coupland at the peak of his powers. By turns hilariously funny, achingly morose, densely erudite and eye-rollingly hip, it's tragi-comic tale of tech workers striving for meaning within the buzzy world of the mid-nineties software boom fizzes with ideas but never at the expense of its characters. A warm human heart beats beneath the sleek fabricated chassis of a novel that is as concerned with the deeper implications of modern life as it is inquisitive of its surface minutiae.
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Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman published by Bloomsbury is now out in paperback.
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Thursday, 12 January, 2012
In What I'm reading
- Stephen Kelman
- Dag Solstad
- Adam Thorpe
- Sarah Hall
- Yvvette Edwards
- Marika Cobbold
- Aatish Taseer
- Julie Myerson
- Annalena McAfee
- Meaghan Delahunt
- Colin Thubron
- Sunjeev Sahota
- Polly Samson
- Lydia Davis
- Rebecca Hunt
- Emma Donoghue
- Adam O'Riordan
- Robert McCrum
- John Simpson
- D. J. Taylor
- Thomas Trofimuk
- Robin Robertson
- The Editors
- Mary-Kay Wilmers
- Robert Service
- Penelope Lively
- Daniel Metcalfe
- Anna Richards
- Ross Raisin
- Charles Elton
- Melvyn Bragg
- Anita Shreve
- Steven Galloway
- Tom Hodgkinson
- Damon Galgut
- James Meek
- David Leavitt
- Diana Athill
- Gerald Martin
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