Peter Høeg

For a moment today I thought I was hallucinating.
I saw - and very quickly got my sticky hands on - 
a new novel by Peter Høeg which I hadn’t known existed:

The Quiet Girl

It’s no wonder I had trouble believing my eyes – it’s been more than a decade since Høeg’s last novel (The Woman and the Ape).

The blurb describes The Quiet Girl as “a fast-paced philosophical thriller of rare quality.” I can’t wait to get stuck into it. This one is not going to be a book-I-haven’t-read-yet for very long…

The Works RIP

Sad to hear that The Works has gone into administration, although it does means the branches still open have been flogging off some of their stock dirt cheap – and it’s very hard to resist books when they are only 5p.

 

Embarrassingly, one I bought last week was Stuart (A Life Backwards) by Alexander Masters – a book I have previously borrowed and mentioned in this blog two years ago, but still haven’t read yet.

 

I also picked up a copy of The Catastrophist by Ronan Bennett, which I’ve heard is very good, although I think it was actually his second novel Havoc, In Its Third Year that I intended to read but haven’t, yet.

 

 

Impac 2008

The shortlist for the Impac awards was announced this week. As usual when I looked at the list there was one title that made me think: oh, yes – I was going to read that wasn’t I? Not so much a book-I-haven’t-read-yet as a book-I’d-forgotten-to-feel-guilty-about-not-having-read-yet:

Winterwood

 

by Patrick McCabe

And further inspection of my bookshelves reveals that copies of his novels The Butcher Boy and The Dead School also sit there unread.
I definitely did read – and enjoy - Breakfast on Pluto though.

The full shortlist for the 2008 Impac prize is:

Javier Cercas – The Speed of Light
Yasmine Gooneraratne – The Sweet and Simple Kind
Rawi Hage – De Niro’s Game
Gail Jones – Dreams of Speaking
Sayed Kashua – Let It Be Morning
Yasmina Khadra – The Attack
Andrei Makine – The Woman Who Waited
Patrick McCabe – Winterwood

The longlist ran to over a hundred titles and can be seen here.
I daren’t look.

The winner of the €100,000 prize will be announced on June 12th.