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 Mrs Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady (Hardcover) By (author) Kate Summerscale List Price: 16.99 GBP New From: 9.20 In Stock Used from: 9.00 In Stock Release date April 30, 2012.

On a mild winter’s evening in 1850, Isabella Robinson set out for a party. Her carriage bumped across the wide cobbled streets of Edinburgh’s Georgian New Town and drew up at 8 Royal Circus, a grand sandstone house lit by gas lamps. This was the home of the rich widow Lady Drysdale, a vivacious hostess whose soirees were the centre of an energetic intellectual scene.

Lady Drysdale’s guests were gathered in the high, airy drawing rooms on the first floor, the ladies in dresses of glinting silk and satin, bodices pulled tight over boned corsets; the gentlemen in tailcoats, waistcoats, neckties and pleated shirt fronts, dark narrow trousers and shining shoes. When Mrs Robinson joined the throng she was introduced to Lady Drysdale’s daughter and son-in-law, Mary and Edward Lane. She was at once enchanted by the handsome Mr Lane, a medical student ten years her junior. He was ‘fascinating’, she told her diary, before chastising herself for being so susceptible to a man’s charms. But a wish had taken hold of her, which she was to find hard to shake…

See larger image How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 (Paperback) By (author) Richard King List Price: 17.99 GBP New From: 9.00 In Stock Used from: 8.67 In Stock

One of the most tangible aftershocks of punk was its urgency to prompt individuals into action. Document your reality: do it yourself. From this, a generation was inspired and, with often zero financial planning or business sense, in bedrooms, garages and sheds, labels such as Factory, Rough Trade, Mute, 4AD, Beggars Banquet, Warp, Creation and Domino began, shifting the musical landscape and trading on an ethos and identity no brand consultant would now dare dream of.

Musicians were encouraged to do whatever the hell they wanted and damn the consequences. From humble beginnings, some of our most influential artists were allowed to thrive: Orange Juice, New Order, Cocteau Twins, Depeche Mode, Happy Mondays, The Smiths, Sonic Youth, Primal Scream, My Bloody Valentine, Aphex Twin, Autechre, Teenage Fanclub, Broadcast, The White Stripes, Franz Ferdinand, and Arctic Monkeys, to name but a handful.

This is the story, set to an incredible soundtrack, of the enormous scale of the passions, the size of the egos, and the true extent of the madness of the mavericks who had the vision and bloody-mindedness to turn the music world on its head.

See larger image The Street Sweeper (Paperback) By (author) Elliot Perlman List Price: 14.99 GBP New From: 6.96 In Stock Used from: 7.28 In Stock

On the crowded streets of New York City there are even more stories than there are people passing each other every day… only some of these stories survive to become history. Lamont Williams, recently released from prison and working as a hospital janitor, strikes up an unlikely friendship with a patient, an elderly Jewish Holocaust survivor who starts to tell him of his extraordinary past.

Meanwhile Adam Zignelik, the son of a prominent Jewish civil rights lawyer, is facing a personal crisis: almost 40-years-old, his long-term relationship is faltering and his academic career has stalled. It’s only when one of his late father’s closest friends, the civil rights activist William McCray, suggests a promising research topic that the possibility of some kind of redemption arises.

Dealing with memory, racism and the human capacity for guilt, resilience, heroism, and unexpected kindness, The Street Sweeper spans over fifty years, and ranges from New York to Melbourne, Chicago, Warsaw and Auschwitz, as these two very different paths – Adam’s and Lamont’s – lead to one greater story.

See larger image Sandstorm (Hardcover) By (author) Lindsey Hilsum List Price: 17.99 GBP New From: 5.97 In Stock Used from: 6.04 In Stock

Sandstorm is the best kind of reportage: humane, historically-informed and full of details that only a writer close to the action could have noticed. The overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi has been one of the twenty-first century’s defining moments: the Arab world’s most bizarre dictator brought down by his own people with the aid of NATO aircraft. Lindsey Hilsum was in Libya when Gaddafi met his squalid end. She traces the history of his strange regime from its beginnings – when Gaddafi had looks, charisma and popular appeal – to its paranoid, corrupt final state. At the heart of her book, however, is a brilliant narrative of Libyan people overcoming fear and disillusionment and finding the strength to rebel. Hilsum follows five of them through months of terror and tragedy. This is the Libyan revolution as it was made and lived. Sandstorm will take its place in a library of classic books about turning points of history.

See larger image Double Cross (Hardcover) By (author) Ben Macintyre List Price: 16.99 GBP New From: 7.49 In Stock Used from: 9.97 In Stock Release date March 27, 2012.

D-Day, 6 June 1944, the turning point of the Second World War, was a victory of arms. But it was also a triumph for a different kind of operation: one of deceit, aimed at convincing the Nazis that Calais and Norway, not Normandy, were the targets of the 150,000-strong invasion force.

The deception involved every branch of Allied wartime intelligence – the Bletchley Park code-breakers, MI5, MI6, SOE, Scientific Intelligence, the FBI and the French Resistance. But at its heart was the ‘Double Cross System’, a team of double agents controlled by the secret Twenty Committee, so named because twenty in Roman numerals forms a double cross.

The key D-Day spies were just five in number, and one of the oddest military units ever assembled: a bisexual Peruvian playgirl, a tiny Polish fighter pilot, a Serbian seducer, a wildly imaginative Spaniard with a diploma in chicken farming, and a hysterical Frenchwoman whose obsessive love for her pet dog very nearly wrecked the entire deception. Their enterprise was saved from catastrophe by a shadowy sixth spy whose heroic sacrifice is here revealed for the first time. Under the direction of an eccentric but brilliant intelligence officer in tartan trousers, working from a smoky lair in St James’s, these spies would weave a web of deception so intricate that it ensnared Hitler’s army and helped to carry thousands of troops across the Channel in safety.

These double agents were, variously, brave, treacherous, fickle, greedy and inspired. They were not conventional warriors, but their masterpiece of deceit saved countless lives. Their codenames were Bronx, Brutus, Treasure, Tricycle and Garbo. This is their story.

See larger image The Coward's Tale (Paperback) By (author) Vanessa Gebbie List Price: 7.99 GBP New From: 2.05 In Stock Used from: 2.05 In Stock

The boy Laddy Merridew, sent to live with his grandmother, stumbles off the bus into a small Welsh mining community, where he begins an unlikely friendship with Ianto Passchendaele Jenkins, the town beggar-storyteller.

Ianto is watchman over the legacy of the collapse many years ago of Kindly Light Pit, a disaster whose echoes reverberate down the generations and blight the lives of many in the town. Through Ianto’s stories Laddy Merridew is drawn into both the town’s history and the conundrums of the present.

Why has woodwork teacher Icarus Evans striven most of his life to carve wooden feathers that will float on an updraft? Why is the undertaker Tutt Bevan trying to find a straight path through the town? Why does James Little, the old gas-meter emptier, dig his allotment by moonlight? And why does window cleaner Judah Jones take autumn leaves into a disused chapel?

These and other men of the town, both past and present, and the women who mothered them, married them and mourned them, are bound together by the echoes of the Kindly Light tragedy and by the mysterious figure of Ianto Passchendaele Jenkins, whose stories of loyalty and betrayal, loss and love, form an unforgettable, spellbinding tapestry.

See larger image Phoenix from the Ashes: The boat that rebuilt our lives (Paperback) By (author) Justin Ruthven-Tyers List Price: 8.99 GBP New From: 3.38 In Stock Used from: 6.20 In Stock

‘Good will come of this.’ I don’t know why I said that…the fire crew walked back down the hill – there was nothing they could do. As we stood there watching the house collapse in flames, I put my arms around Linda, who was sobbing uncontrollably. All we owned now were the old clothes in which we stood, and an old car for which we no longer had a key. After a fire destroyed their house, Justin and his wife Linda irrationally decided to build a 15-ton classic yacht, as complete amateurs – starting with the trees. Working under the watchful eye of local sheep farmers who gave freely of their advice, how could they possibly fail? Once built, they set off for seven years aboard the prettiest boat you’ve ever seen to search out the hidden paradises and wildernesses in Scotland, France, Cornwall and Ireland, meeting the quirky, sometimes odd, but always entertaining characters who inhabit the shoreline. Told through his beautiful narrative and exquisite illustrations, Justin Ruthven-Tyers’ story is unexpected and extraordinary.

When I think of books I’d like to spend an eternity reading, I think of food I’d like to spend an eternity eating: rich, filling complex dishes like pastas, curries, and gumbo. If these dishes were books they’d be big, complicated novels full of interesting characters and beautiful writing like Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, and William Faulkner’s Light in August.

Book Hell

When I think of books I’d hate to spend an eternity reading, I think of food I’d hate to spend an eternity eating: sweet, sugary food like ice cream, cake, and pie. Don’t get me wrong; I like a little cake and ice cream every now and then, but I don’t want to eat it every day. I feel the same way about books that are full of slick writing, high emotion, and predictable plots. Those books have their place, and I often enjoy picking them up and reading them once. But they’re not getting stuffed into the suitcase I’m packing for eternity. There’s not enough room.

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A Land More Kind Than Home is a southern noir set in an isolated community in North Carolina. Wiley Cash has gone back to his roots in the deep south of America to reveal how religious faith can permeate a community, have a powerful effect on the families within that community and also tear them apart. Inspired by the true story of a boy smothered during a healing service in Chicago, Wiley shows how evil this influence can be on a tight knit community. Wiley grew up in North Carolina and explored his own experiences of orthodox Christianity as a child in this, his first novel.

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See larger image A Land More Kind Than Home (Hardcover) By (author) Wiley Cash List Price: 12.99 GBP New From: 2.47 In Stock Used from: 2.48 In Stock

Religion is supposed to shield children from the evil of the world…

One Sunday, nine-year-old Jess Hall watches in horror as his autistic brother is smothered during a healing service in the mountains of North Carolina.

The unimaginable violence that follows must be untangled by a local sheriff with his own tragic past.

A Land More Kind Than Home is a spellbinding, heartbreaking story about cruelty and innocence, and the failure of religion and family to protect a child.

It is a novel thick with stories and characters connected by faith, infidelity, and a sense of hope that is both tragic and unforgettable.

]]> http://bookhugger.co.uk/2012/04/book-heaven-hell-wiley-cash/feed/ 0 http://bookhugger.co.uk/2012/03/justin-cartwight-on-other-peoples-money/ http://bookhugger.co.uk/2012/03/justin-cartwight-on-other-peoples-money/#comments Tue, 27 Mar 2012 08:00:53 +0000 Bloomsbury http://bookhugger.co.uk/?p=11214

See larger image Other People's Money (Paperback) By (author) Justin Cartwright List Price: 7.99 GBP New From: 2.72 In Stock Used from: 2.64 In Stock

The venerable bank of Tubal & Co is in trouble. It’s not the first time in its three-hundred-year history – it was bailed out by Rothschilds’ in 1847 – but this time will be the last. A sale is under way, and a number of rather important facts need to be kept hidden, especially from any potential buyer. Hundreds of millions of pounds are being diverted – temporarily – to shore it up, masterminded by the bank’s chairman, Julian Trevelyan-Tubal. His aging father Sir Henry would be horrified, but fortunately he is in the early stages of dementia, writing admonitory letters that all say the same thing to Julian from the sunny climes of Antibes. His letters instruct his son to stick to the time-honoured traditions of the bank, and, indeed, had his son taken his advice the bank might still be solvent. Great families have all sorts of secrets, though, and this one is no exception. And whether they are lovers, old partners, or retainers who resent not being part of the family, they have a nasty habit of turning awkward. When an alimony payment from the bank to an abandoned husband, the penniless, quixotic director (currently putting on Thomas the Tank Engine, hoping to woo Daniel Day-Lewis for his new playscript), a trickle of consequences turns into a tsunami of potential catastrophe for the family, the bank and all who sail in her. Other People’s Money is both a subtle thriller and an acutely delineated portrait of a world and a class. Justin Cartwright manipulates our sympathies with masterly ease, unwinding the story with gentle satire, and, as ever, acute and beautifully phrased insights into the eccentricities and weaknesses of the human condition.