by Harold Hillman
We will resist the urge to simply chuckle at a business book with a funny title, and instead give you this snippet from the publisher’s blurb: “It is an essential read for anyone who: * is leading a team through a particularly tough challenge * wants to master the art of connection with staff more effectively * is keen to build a diverse and inclusive team culture * runs a company and wants to grow a culture where there is a strong sense of belonging.”
Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks
Snow Country is the second in a loose trilogy of novels set in Austria. It opened with 2005’s Human Traces, in which two 19th-century psychiatrists open an ambitious sanatorium, hoping to discover the secrets of the human psyche. Snow Country follows a new cast of characters and steps ahead to 1914. One of the psychiatrists is dead and the other has long retired; the hope of Human Traces has dispersed.
The Guardian says, “It is a love story that doubts the nature of love, an exploration of the redemptive capacity of psychiatry that grapples with the possibility that the self might not be real but only the ‘flickering wave of some electromagnetic field’.”
Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen
Franzen is a literary mammoth, and his specialty is the Screwed up Midwestern American Family. (Remember The Corrections? Freedom? His slightly less beloved last novel, Purity?) Crossroads is the first of a trilogy about a pastor and his family, set in 1970s Idaho, but the Guardian says “in the best possible way, it feels less like a beginning than like the latest yield of a familiar crop, or a newly discovered branch of a big Midwestern family.”
The Storyteller: Tales of life and Music by Dave Grohl
From the publisher’s blurb: “From hitting the road with Scream at 18 years old, to my time in Nirvana and the Foo Fighters, jamming with Iggy Pop or playing at the Academy Awards or dancing with AC/DC and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, drumming for Tom Petty or meeting Sir Paul McCartney at Royal Albert Hall, bedtime stories with Joan Jett or a chance meeting with Little Richard, to flying halfway around the world for one epic night with my daughters … the list goes on.”
Now, that’s a lot of name-dropping, but if you’re Dave Grohl’s memoir blurb … you probably can’t help it.
Silverview by John le Carré
John le Carré’s last complete Lawndsley novel has finally been released. The publisher’s blurb entices: “Silverview is the mesmerising story of an encounter between innocence and experience and between public duty and private morals. In this last complete masterwork from the greatest chronicler of our age, John le Carré asks what you owe to your country when you no longer recognise it.”
She’s a Killer by Kirsten McDougall
New local novel from the wonderful author of Tess and The Invisible Rider. Elizabeth Knox says, “Equipped with an exhilaratingly badly-behaved protagonist, She’s a Killer builds from a slice of very strange life into a thriller by way of a succession of stunning comic set pieces. You’ll laugh – a lot. And then you’ll cry and be really surprised about it since you were laughing so much.” We loved it,
