See larger image Here Comes Everybody: The Story of the Pogues (Paperback) By (author) James Fearnley List Price: 14.99 GBP New From: 7.40 In Stock Used from: 7.29 In Stock

October, 1984: Wham!, Culture Club and Status Quo dominate the top ten when The Pogues barrel out from the backstreets of Kings Cross, a furious, pioneering mix of punk energy, traditional melodies and the powerfully poetic song-writing of Shane MacGowan.

Reviled by traditionalists for their frequently fast, often riotous interpretations of Irish folk songs, The Pogues rose from the sweaty chaos of backroom gigs in Camden pubs to world tours with the likes of Elvis Costello, U2 and Bob Dylan, and had huge commercial success with everyone’s favourite Christmas song, Fairytale of New York.

Yet, the exuberance of their live performances coupled with relentless touring spiralled into years of hard drinking and excess which eventually took their toll – most famously on Shane but also on the rest of the band – causing them to part ways seven years later.

Here, their story is told with beauty, lyricism and great candour by James Fearnley, founding member and accordion player. He brings to life the youthful friendships, the bust-ups, the amazing gigs, the terrible gigs, the fantastic highs and dramatic lows in a hugely compelling, humorous, moving and honest account of life in one of our most treasured and original bands.

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At the end of last summer, before the final gig of the European festivals we’d been doing – in the grounds of the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich – I picked up from the Faber offices enough typescripts of my memoir, Here Comes Everybody, to go round the band. I had five months ahead of me in which – among other things I hoped – to take part in the copy-editing and proof reading.

The Pogues had known I had been writing the book. Soon after signing the contract with Faber and Faber in the summer of 2009, I made a phone call to each of the band to let them know. To all of them, it came as no surprise, though when I described the book to Terry Woods, he said, in a dulcet, lispy, vaguely monitory voice, ‘Well, you know, Jamesy, there are things better left not written about.’ When I got Shane MacGowan on the phone and happened to mention Terry’s warning, he said: ‘I don’t give a fuck about that,’ and laughed his chip-frying laugh.

We were all strangers in 1982, when the Pogues started up. We all happened to live, or knew someone who lived, in Hillview Estate, the East End Dwellings Company tenements in the squatters’, drug dealers’ and whores’ hinterland south of Euston Road, Kings Cross. I knew Shane from auditioning as a guitar player for his punk band, the Nipple Erectors a couple of years before; Jem Finer from a bottle of lice treatment by the mattress the night I moved into Shane’s squat on Burton Street while Jem was away in France; Spider Stacy from a shouting argument I was audience to in the kitchen of the same house a few weeks later; Andrew Ranken by reputation as a doyen of Hillview and one of the last occupants of the Huntley Street squat, famously broken up by police and bulldozers in 1978; Cait, the original bass player, from her punching me in the stomach when I first met her; Philip Chevron from the sister record shop to the one Shane worked in; Terry Woods by other means; Darryl Hunt, Cait’s eventual replacement, through everybody else. We fused ourselves in the crucible of rehearsals in a friend’s back bedroom on Hillview Estate and in the Iveco Daily which Darryl drove through the British Isles for our tour supporting Elvis Costello in 1984.

After the gig at the Royal Naval College, I gave a copy of the typescript to those in the band I knew were leaving early the following morning for Dublin. I went to find Shane in his black tent by the side of the stage. He took the package, wrapped in brown paper, and, as he does when he’s confronted with something he’s not sure about, weighed it in his hands, tapping it.

‘It’s not very big,’ he said.
‘It’s printed on both sides,’ I said.
‘Hm,’ he said.

Over the next couple of days I travelled round London and put the rest of the band’s copies into their hands – before going home to Los Angeles and five months off which I couldn’t prevent myself thinking was escaping judgement somehow.

Over the next few months, Jem’s family took turns passing it round. Philip told me he read his copy on the train between Victoria and Chichester. Spider seemed to pick over his copy as if it were a fish full of bones. Andrew told me he stayed up until two in the morning. He cursed me for depriving him of sleep. Shane, not capable of keeping possession of a pair of glasses, had Victoria, his girlfriend of twenty-five years, read it out loud to him over a weekend.

At the beginning of May, Tony Clayton-Lea in the Irish Times marvelled that I had not been quarantined for writing such a warts-and-all tale. He wrote that it ‘says much about the band and the bond formed across thirty fractious years’ that I hadn’t. ‘A band of brothers to the very end,’ he added.

We started out as strangers. Hillview Estate made us neighbours. I remember coming across a guy bowling through Somerstown in the early 80s. He was singing at the top of his voice.

Naybaz, evybody needs gun naybaz!
Wiv a li’w annerstayning
Yewken foin ve perfick blen!
Naybaz…shubby vairfer wananah ver!
Vatswen gun naybaz becahm goof wens!

As in the song, we were there for one another too. It made sense we should become good friends. But thirty years on – whether or not I’m heading for quarantine when I see them again this summer – we became family as well.

See larger image The Trapeze Artist (Paperback) By (author) Will Davis List Price: 12.99 GBP New From: 6.11 In Stock Used from: 10.25 In Stock

A man will endlessly torture his muscles until they shriek and complain. But he will not give in. He will take a hammer to his ceiling until neighbours begin to watch from the window and journalists knock at the door. He will continue to train and hack away at the house until it is finished and the trapeze is in place. Although his parents thought he was nice and kind-hearted and teachers saw him as a good boy, secretly he hated his drab, ordered world and longed for more. Then, when he was fourteen, a new boy arrived at his school. Edward exuded the coolness of a latter-day Oscar Wilde. Edward listened to Patti Smith, watched Fassbinder films and knew the writings of Gore Vidal, and one evening, would kiss him in the moonlight. Forty years old and fleeing from a life he can no longer handle, he stumbles upon the circus. Not knowing why, only that he must, he gets in his car and follows after it, refusing to listen to the doubts that plague him, determined to build a new home and family.

The Trapeze Artist draws together the past, present and future of one life to create a work of startling dexterity and vision – a haunting and heartbreaking account of a child, a boy, a man, desperate to free himself from the suffocating weight of his desires, his family and his grief. It speaks of what it is to grow up gay in a straight world, to be unable to communicate with those you love, of the sweat, passions and tempers of circus life, and above all, the longing to break free, and to swing higher and higher…

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See larger image Megacatastrophes!: Nine Strange Ways the World Could End (Paperback) By (author) David Darling, Dirk Schulze-Makuch List Price: 10.99 GBP New From: 3.01 In Stock Used from: 2.86 In Stock

Could it be the asteroid hurtling towards us from outer space, or a super-volcano covering the Earth under a cloud of ash; black holes gobbling up the solar system, or a tiny army of nanobots in a deranged feeding frenzy? Oh, and don’t forget – there’s always the risk of alien invasion.

Rating the likelihood of each potential disaster, David and Dirk provide the best guide to the worst that could happen, and explore what we could do to save our souls. So sit down, face the inevitable, and prepare to discover the nine weirdest ways we could all go to meet our maker.

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Later this year the world will come to an end – if you believe the rumours about an old Mayan calendar. December 21^st is the day when all hell is supposed to break loose. But before you blow your savings on one last outrageous Armageddon party, you might want to consider the facts. While it’s true there is such a thing as the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, which clicks over to its next 5,000-and-odd-year cycle this December, there’s nothing in the archaeological records to suggest the Mayans linked such an event with anything catastrophic.

What gives the doom-sayers a bit of traction is that our planet really is under threat from destructive forces, both natural and human-inspired. Giant rocks from space do sometimes careen into us. One that struck 65 million years ago was partly to blame for putting paid to the dinosaurs and many other groups of animals and plants. As recently as 1908 a huge explosion over Siberia flattened broad swathes of forest. Had it happened over a major city, the effects don’t bear thinking about. The intruder was most likely a fragment of a comet or possibly a small asteroid. And there’s plenty more where those cosmic missiles came from.

Super-volcanoes are a different kind of nightmare. These vast eruptions, which dwarf ordinary volcanoes, pump out so much molten lava and dust that they can blanket a continent, making life there almost impossible. The thousand cubic kilometres or more of debris pumped into the atmosphere can trigger deep volcanic winters, lasting years, which seriously inconvenience the entire globe. Maybe the super-volcano that lies dormant beneath Yellowstone won’t erupt this year or next, or in our children’s children’s lifetimes, but at some point, like other sleeping giants of its ilk, it will stir.

Ice ages, Snowball Earth episodes, reversals of the magnetic poles, and nearby exploding stars, are among the other apocalyptic phenomena which have happened in the past and will happen again.

On top of this we now have to worry about a whole slew of potential disasters of our own making. Some of these are far-fetched, such as the suggestion that the Large Hadron Collider might be able to spawn black holes capable of devouring the Earth or even open up a rift in the fabric of spacetime into which our entire universe could plunge. Others aren’t as easy to ignore. New technologies are developing so fast that we can’t be sure of their side-effects. Computers might very well eclipse our biological brains in the decades ahead. And what then? Will we somehow merge with our machine inventions or become subservient to them? Nanotechnology offers the promise of new materials and devices manufactured at the molecular level. But it might also spin out of control, converting everything to “grey goo” or exposing us all to insidious toxins.

For much of history, people have speculated, often wildly, about how the world might end. Now we have science – and a new selection of more realistic catastrophes to choose from.

See larger image The Spider King's Daughter (Paperback) By (author) Chibundu Onuzo List Price: 12.99 GBP New From: 2.50 In Stock Used from: 3.52 In Stock

Seventeen-year-old Abike Johnson is the favourite child of her wealthy father. She lives in a sprawling mansion in Lagos, protected by armed guards and ferried everywhere in a huge black jeep.

A world away from Abike’s mansion, in the city’s slums, lives an eighteen-year-old hawker struggling to make sense of the world. His family lost everything after his father’s death and now he sells ice cream at the side of the road to support his mother and sister.

When Abike buys ice cream from the hawker one afternoon, they strike up a tentative and unlikely romance. But as they grow closer, revelations from the past threaten their relationship and both Abike and the hawker must decide where their loyalties lie.

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I started writing The Spider King’s Daughter when I was 17, got an agent at 18, signed with Faber at 19, finished editing while 20 and got published at 21. Condensed into this sentence, the whole thing looks incredibly neat and simple. That’s what summarising things does and this is why in my first cover letter to my agent, I refused to write a synopsis of my book. With only thirty-three pages written, I technically couldn’t have produced a summary. However, as I was also ideologically opposed to the synopsis, I informed my future agent: “I usually miss the point of summaries so I have enclosed the first three chapters for you to read and find out what the novel is about.” I am quoting from memory but the obnoxious sentiment is accurately transcribed.

Luckily, the lady who read it, Rosie Apponyi, liked what I’d sent and asked for more. At which point I emailed back, ‘I regret to say that I cannot send you a complete copy of my manuscript because I haven’t finished it yet.’ Rosie was kind enough to give me a few pointers, including her feeling that the story had lost momentum by the end of the extract. What followed was six months of writing where I added another narrative voice and eventually completed the novel. Again this summary of those six months does not include the prep I handed in late or the moment of 2am madness when I suddenly had the urge to delete the novel or the constipated toil of squeezing out an eight line paragraph. Suffice it to say that the first draft was completed in those six months and sent off to Rosie at Capel and Land accordingly.

Now somewhere along the line I had gotten the idea that since August 2008 when Rosie read the extract and June 2009 when I sent the complete manuscript, she had been sitting at her desk and painting her nails, waiting for The Spider King’s Daughter to arrive. So accompanying my posted manuscript, I sent an email saying:

—-

‘Dear Ms Apponyi,
I have sent the full manuscript to your agency’s address and it should be arriving, latest, on Monday.’

—-

She kindly wrote that she was looking forward to reading it. When nothing more had been heard for a week, I wrote again:

Dear Ms Apponyi,
Please could you tell me if your agency sends rejection slips to applicants?

—-

To which the long-suffering Rosie replied:

No, we don’t send rejection slips. However, I can tell you that we have received The Spider King’s Daughter and it is in my ‘to be read’ pile – this pile is very big but I will get to it eventually!

—-

Like Job, the thing which I had feared had come upon me. Despite the highlighted letters in which I had written THE SPIDER KING’S DAUGHTER on the envelope to show that this was the novel everyone at Capel and Land had been waiting for, I was back where I started: on the slush pile. And there I sat for a few more weeks, in which I lost faith in Capel and Land and sent off the opening chapters to two other agencies. One politely rejected me. As for the other, I still eagerly await a response with kind regards.

Rosie got back to me eventually and we started work on the novel. Those were the heady days of my first edit. I received the first set of notes on the 4th August 2009. By the next day, I had responded with some changes. As editing progressed, my response time slowed but in the six months I worked with Rosie, rarely a week went by in which I didn’t submit something for her to read.

When she felt the book was ready to be sent to editors at publishing houses, she did. Rosie never told me which publishers she submitted to in order to spare me the crushing feeling that accompanies rejections. Once in while she would emerge from the murky world of the ‘submission process’ and ask for a new prologue, a rewritten scene and once, a recent picture. This last shocked me. Hitherto, I had thought of the world of publishing as a higher plane where words were discussed by vegetarian intellectuals who did not care what an author looked like. Sad, sad day of teenage disillusionment.

Sarah Savitt at Faber made an offer (without a photo) we accepted and then I had a publisher and an editor. I didn’t really know what an editor did. I kind of had this vague idea that he/she would make all the changes they wanted in the manuscript, then I the author would look at these alterations and patiently point out where he/she had strayed from my voice. I was wrong. Editing with an editor was just like editing with an agent, but longer.

People always ask me why the editing process at Faber took so long. The only way I can explain it is I needed to think about the book. There were no massive alterations made. After a year and half of editing, Abike and the hawker’s story still followed the same trajectory; only two minor characters had been added; even the title had remained the same. But I had thought about my characters and made them more real in parts where my desire for a sharp plot had rendered them wooden. I had thought about the place I was trying to capture, driving round Lagos, looking for the scenes that encapsulated the chaos and creativity of my city. I had learnt about the usefulness of dialogue and replaced ‘we talked’ with actual conversations. And most important of all, I had learnt patience. To sit and go over the same paragraph. To examine a sentence’s rhythm. To be a little more of that pedantic, precise thing called a writer.

So here we are at publication date. I am thoroughly sick of the thing. I am for the most part pleased with the thing. It’s a funny contradiction.

See larger image The Gods of Gotham (Hardcover) By (author) Lyndsay Faye List Price: 14.99 GBP New From: 4.99 In Stock Used from: 3.73 In Stock Release date March 15, 2012.

August 1845 in New York; enter the dark, unforgiving city underworld of the legendary Five Points…

After a fire decimates a swathe of lower Manhattan, and following years of passionate political dispute, New York City at long last forms an official Police Department. That same summer, the great potato famine hits Ireland. These events will change the city of New York for ever.

Timothy Wilde hadn’t wanted to be a copper star.  On the night of August 21st, on his way home from the Tombs defeated and disgusted, he is plotting his resignation, when a young girl who has escaped from a nearby brothel, crashes into him; she wears only a nightdress and is covered from head to toe in blood. Searching out the truth in the child’s wild stories, Timothy soon finds himself on the trail of a brutal killer, seemingly hell bent on fanning the flames of anti-Irish immigrant sentiment and threatening chaos in a city already in the midst of social upheaval. But his fight for justice could cost him the woman he loves, his brother and ultimately his life…

• Read the extract

OK, that’s ridiculous, there are some fantastic longer novels out there. I admit that. But there is also a shitload of oversized, flabby, longwinded, baggy tomes creaking under the weight of their own self-importance.

I review books for a number of newspapers and magazines, and I’m continually bombarded by obese novels full of dreary, self-conscious, sanctimonious overwriting. Not one of them says anything about the human condition that isn’t covered infinitely better in 116 pages by James M. Cain in The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Economy is the key. Authors, blurt out your big first draft, by all means. But then you must edit until your eyeballs piss blood out the sockets, carve away until the essence of the story is all that’s left. Boil your novel down like the severed head of a tribal enemy, until only the clean skull remains to drink your victory toast from.

Some readers seem to equate a large number of pages with both intellectual weight and value for money. They are wrong on both counts. Long books are just showing off. And I despise writing that shows off. Look at me, the author! How clever am I! Fuck off and tell the story.

Writers of long novels, a pox on you all! Unless, of course, you’re one of the few great ones who can pull it off without boring the arse off your readers. Reading should be a joy, not an endurance test. Sort it out, people.

I’ll finish with two arbitrary lists of short classics. Needless to say, I’m not equating my work with any of these, Christ, I’m not a total dickhead. These are all works of genius, I’m just a two-bit story scribbler.

Five Short Noir Classics (with page count)

Horace McCoy, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (122)
Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts (58)
James Sallis, Drive (178)
James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice (116)
John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps (103)

Five More Short Classics

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (157)
Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (149)
Albert Camus, The Outsider (117)
George Orwell, Animal Farm (95)
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (96)

Doug Johnstone is the author of Tombstoning, The Ossians and Smokeheads – all available in paperback. For everything Doug-related visit his website. His latest novel is Hit & Run.

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Driving home from a party with his girlfriend and brother, all of them drunk and high on stolen pills, Billy Blackmore accidentally hits someone in the night …

In a panic, they all decide to drive off. But the next day Billy wakes to find he has to cover the story for the local paper. It turns out the dead man was Edinburgh’s biggest crime lord and, as Billy struggles with what he’s done, he is sucked into a nightmare of guilt, retribution and violence …

Provinces of Night, The Long Home & Twilight

Playing catch-up, we published his second novel, Provinces of Night in 2001 and followed it in 2002 with The Long Home (his US debut). Both novels met with great critical acclaim, here and in Ireland (‘his slurred, sublime lyricism is indivisible from the land’s brooding beauty or the baleful souls who roam it’ Sunday Times), but facing that frustrating and too-often-encountered problem in UK publishing, we didn’t feel able to publish his story collection I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down. I would recommend tracking this down however, with its wonderfully atmospheric stories – the title story, ‘Death in the Woods’, ‘The Paperhanger’ to pick out just a few – which all display his unique gift for writing about place and character (as well as his love for local, old-time music). Some of these stories were the first things he ever published and, as with all his work, they are solely written in the third person.

We then had our most successful publication with his 2007 novel, Twilight. Blurbed for us by George Pelecanos, among others, it was superbly reviewed on publication and went on to be named by Stephen King in Entertainment Weekly as his novel of the year (‘think No Country for Old Men crossed with Deliverance, then double the impact’). It’s the easiest of his novels in many respects, with a glint of genre and wickedness in its eye, but it’s also perhaps his most soulful piece of writing, due to the empathy and compassion you feel for its teenage hero, Kenneth Tyler, and his sister, Corrie, as they try to face down Fenton Breece (the misbehaving local undertaker) and then, more ominously, Granville Sutter (the demonic hitman Fenton puts on their trail). For me this is a true cult classic, and includes a sublimely enigmatic ending, that you will have to read again and again.

‘Quite a Life’

His was quite a life too: the son of Tennessee sharecroppers, he reportedly began writing at the age of fifteen, but as a Vietnam veteran who served in the Navy, and later worked for most of his adult life as a carpenter and drywall-hanger, it wasn’t until 1998 that he published those first short stories, at the age of fifty-five.

So it was always a frustration that, despite our best efforts, we could never manage to get anyone from the UK press to interview William. Here’s a great clip of an interview with William via Oxford American:

Hoisting the ‘Heavy Wet’

If you’ve never read William, he will be a treat to discover, truly, and definitely one for any fans of the great rural American writers, from William Faulkner to Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy to James Lee Burke. As Daniel Woodrell wrote in an email to me around the time we published Twilight, ‘He’s one of the big talents in the dark Americana vein, that is for certain sure. I run into William once in a while in Memphis or Oxford, Mississippi, and he is always interesting to hoist a bit of “the heavy wet” with, as well.’

Amid such fantasies, delusions and sometimes lies, I suddenly realised what authors mean when they say that they need to write a book. I’ve been lucky, obsessed or foolish enough to travel to Afghanistan – almost always to Helmand, the country’s most violent province – repeatedly over the last five years. As all hope evaporated, casualties on all sides continued to rise and it became obvious that the Afghan government was neither willing nor able to protect or improve the lives of its citizens. The gulf between what we are told is happening and what I kept seeing with my own eyes was so great that I suddenly felt compelled to get everything down on paper.

I’ve read most of the books about the current war in Afghanistan and they generally seem to fall into two categories – breathless accounts of allied bravery and struggle, with little or no mention of what it was all supposed to be for, or brilliant, but dense academic books that will only ever get read by the few who study Afghanistan and our policy there for a living. I wanted to bridge that gap, to show what we’re supposed to be doing there and why we’re not achieving it, but also offer a readable and exciting account of what modern war looks and feels like. Apart from the soldier’s own accounts, too many of the other books are written by people who haven’t actually witnessed what they are writing about. Everything in No Worse Enemy I saw for myself. Apart from a handful of quotes, every word is transcribed from my tapes. So if nothing else, it’s authentic.

I was there for a lot of the major operations, and because I can carry everything I need on my back (and as a documentary filmmaker I’m not chained to deadlines or daily feeds) I could spend weeks on end with a single unit of soldiers or marines. They respect that too, and open up to you, so I like to think that what I saw was as close to unadulterated as any outsider can get. I stood on a 7 IED daisy chain for too long, had a sniper miss me by inches, and was in the middle of close-quarters battles and ambushes that lasted for entire days and nights, so I don’t think there’s much I haven’t seen.

I don’t offer any solutions in No Worse Enemy, just a simple and honest portrait of what the war looks like on the ground. I couldn’t think of anything more important to offer than that. A lie is easily sold when the public have become tired of a war they no longer understand. I’m afraid that as long as that’s the case, the focus of our policy will be to get the hell out, making sure that from the breakfast tables of America and Europe at least, it doesn’t look too much like a failure. I hope my book makes it more difficult for us to once again abandon the people of Afghanistan.

You can watch clips from Ben’s award-winning documentaries and other footage from his time in Afghanistan on the book’s website, www.noworseenemy.com.

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Detailing battles that last for days, only to be fought again weeks later, Anderson survives IED explosions and sniper fire, and witnesses the disturbing incompetence among the Afghan army and police. Also revealing the daily struggle to win over the long-suffering local population, who often express open support for the Taliban, No Worse Enemy is a heartbreaking insight into the daily struggles facing our troops.

Raising urgent questions about our recent and current strategies in Afghanistan, Anderson highlights the vast gulf that exists between what we are told and what is actually happening on the ground. A product of five years’ unrivalled access to UK forces and US Marines – often for months at a time and amidst the worst violence the conflict has seen – this is the most intimate and horrifying account of the Afghan war you will read.

• “Ben Anderson is the bravest journalist I know. Anyone interested in what life is really like on the front line in Afghanistan should read this book.” – Louis Theroux
• “A tour de force. Ben Anderson plunges the reader into the reality of the war in Afghanistan in all its horror. The stories he brings back are as vivid an account of the war and its almost insurmountable difficulties as any I have read.” – David Dimbleby
• “The truth about the Afghan war, from a brave and exceptionally honest reporter… Essential reading for anyone who wants to know what is really going on in Helmand.” – Sherard Cowper-Coles, Former British Ambassador to Afghanistan

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