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Warlight by Michael Ondaatje
(Vintage, £8.99)
An extraordinary novel that makes you feel you’re entering a dream world. It kept reminding me of The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. Our narrator Nathaniel tells us about his teenage life in London. The war has just ended. Weirdly, his parents disappear. Nathaniel and his sister Rachel are looked after by very strange people.
There’s The Moth, with his loud sneezing and his “large though friendly stomach”. There’s an ex-boxer, “The Pimlico Darter”, who transports dodgy greyhounds up and down the Thames in a boat. Later, in his late twenties, Nathaniel tries to piece it all together. A superbly told story.
Rosie: Scenes From a Vanished Life by Rose Tremain
(Vintage, £9.99)
A posh life, laced with tragedy. To start with, the childhood. Tremain spent holidays at Linkenholt Manor, her grandparents’ house in Hampshire. These old folks had lost their two sons — one died of appendicitis at Harrow School, the other in “the last month of the war”.
The writing is clear and nicely paced. There’s a scene in which a dog is chewed up by a combine harvester. Tremain’s grandmother gets cancer. “Grief, cigarettes, sherry, arthritis and overeating had made her body slightly grotesque.” Tremain’s father, the playwright Keith Thomson, leaves the family. Worse things follow. All very well observed.
