MARIA DUARTE recommends a remarkable study of the friendship between a Palestinian and a Pakistani, broken by a hostile state
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The language of the working class soldier
MARTIN HALL steps gingerly through a fragmentary novel about WWI by one of France’s greatest prose stylists, and most notorious fascist sympathisers
TRENCH HUMOUR: World War I soldiers of 3rd Battalion, New Zealand Rifle Brigade, reading jokes from the publication "NZ at the Front" in muddy conditions at "Clapham Junction" in the Ypres Salient, Belgium. 20 November 1917
[Henry Armytage Sanders/CC]
MATTHEW HAWKINS rakes through un-fancy words and flair-free summaries to find who and what might be flamboyant
PETER MASON is exhilarated by an exciting, well-considered and historically minded tribute to the great Trinidadian instrument
Reducing historical lives to ‘male’ and ‘female’ roles, we lose the nuance of those lives and a clearer understanding of past societies, suggests CLAIRE ISABELLA GILMOUR
CHRIS SEARLE relishes the genius of pianist Alexander Hawkins, his many ensembles, and his new album
War
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, translated by Sander Berg, Alma Classics, £14.99
A NEWLY discovered novel by one of France’s most celebrated writers is not a common occurrence. When that writer is Louis-Ferdinand Celine, anti-semite, collaborator and friend of fascists, there may be some readers who would prefer that it had been left lost.
However, War, written in 1934 but only discovered in 2021, is very much worth your time.
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JOHN CALLOW introduces the work of Geoffrey Trease, who placed ordinary people at the centre of his historical fiction for children, creating adventurous stories to inspire the possibilities of social change
GORDON PARSONS is intrigued by a biography of the Marxist intellectual and author, made from the point of view of his son
The book feels like a writer working within his limits and not breaking any new ground, believes KEN COCKBURN