Paperback reviews

Sunday 1 July 2012

Life, Death And Vanilla Slices by Jenny Eclair (Sphere, £12.99)

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Nothing very surprising here: comedienne Eclair takes some time to get her tale of middle-aged Anne and her suddenly poorly mother Jean going, given how wedded she is to making comic observations about life for older women. Heavily reliant on the recognition factor for laughs from her readers.

All Made Up by Janice Galloway (Granta, £8.99)The superb sequel to her first memoir, This Is Not About Me, traces Galloway's teenage years, her flowering away from terrifying sister Cora's steely gaze and discovery of her own ambitions and what it means to be a young woman. Galloway's idiosyncratic feminism can be clearly traced in her relationships with the women in her family. The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco (Vintage, £8.99)Luxuriate in the fine detail and wicked games of Eco's hate-filled, bigoted, fin-de-siecle narrator and professional Parisian forger who is rapidly losing his short-term memory and can't quite locate his own identity among the many disguises in his apartment. A splendidly claustrophobic atmosphere helps build up necessary tension. The Edinburgh Companion To James Hogg edited by Ian Duncan and Douglas S Mack (Edinburgh University Press, £19.99)The shepherd poet is given as wide a focus as possible in this volume which ranges among his contemporaneous reputation and reception, to his politics and attitudes to the church, and questions of gender and sexuality. An appropriately wide gaze for a man best known for one novel, but who wrote in many forms.Lesley McDowell

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