ITS COLOURS THEY ARE FINE
Alan Spence (Canongate, £9.99)
Forty years after its original publication, Alan Spence’s debut collection of short stories reads like the starting pistol for a bountiful new phase of Scottish writing. To revisit it after all this time is to be plunged into a Glasgow that feels much more distant now than it did then; a city of steamies, middens and outside toilets, an era of wary transition from tenements to new housing schemes, darkened by the twin shadows of alcohol and sectarianism. Spence’s stories of childhood are arguably the most evocative, built as they are around memories of roaming around on summer evenings, of friendship and misbehaving. But his characters also range from lads going up the dancing of an evening to the unemployed man who brings structure to his life by drifting around Glasgow landmarks and the aptly-named Billy from the title story, secure in his belief that God is a Protestant. They’re beautifully crafted tales, capturing a time and place and thronging with life.
EIBF: Thursday 16 August, 3.45pm
MAYHEM: A MEMOIR
Sigrid Rausing (Penguin, £9.99)
Sigrid is the sister of Hans Rausing, heir to the Tetra Pak fortune and former heroin addict, who hid his wife Eva’s dead body in a bedroom of their Belgravia mansion for two months before it was found by police. It’s a grim story of a family devastated by drugs, in which one of the main preoccupations is figuring out where to place the blame. At what point, Sigrid asks, can Hans no longer be considered responsible for his actions? To what extent is the author herself complicit in the tragic outcome? Having taken the couple to court for custody of their children when they relapsed, she now wonders if that hastened Eva’s death. And it nags away at her that the tone she took with them might have done more harm than good. It’s a thoughtful, reflective memoir, which nevertheless has a tendency to digress from the family tragedy and get bogged down in references to literature and research into addiction.
EIBF: Monday 20 August, 10.15am
EMILY BRONTE REAPPRAISED
Claire O’Callaghan (Saraband, £9.99)
It’s been exactly 200 years since the birth of Emily Brontë, and the image that’s come down to us of the Wuthering Heights author is that of a weirdo with some undefined personality disorder. O’Callaghan explains here why she rejects this view, pointing out that all we really know came from her sister Charlotte, who may have been trying to protect her by implying she was unstable, and Elizabeth Gaskell, who never even met her. She may have been shy, but O’Callaghan doesn’t recognise the Emily Brontë of myth, living in self-imposed isolation, and argues that she might have found the present day a far more congenial environment than the early 19th Century, a time when she could have flourished socially and maybe even become an environmentalist or animal rights activist. She’s written an accessible book aimed at the popular market, right down to the presentation of a numbered list of Bronte myths to be dispelled as “fake news”.
EIBF: Friday 17 August, 7pm
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