PARIS IN THE DARK
Robert Olen Butler (No Exit, £11.99)
It’s November 1915, and as Paris braces itself for aerial attack by Zeppelins the real threat comes from saboteurs sneaking into the city and planting bombs. During this period of ambivalence and uncertainty, before the USA has committed itself to the war, Christopher Marlowe (Kit) Cobb lives on the Left Bank, leading a double life as an American war correspondent and a spy. At the same time as he’s befriending American ambulance drivers to write a story on them, he’s trying to track down bombers by trawling Paris’s refugee and immigrant population, on the orders of two separate spymasters. But is he looking in the right place? And how much can he really trust his own judgement? With its wartime setting, spare prose and leading character’s love affair with a nurse (it is the city of romance, after all), Paris in the Dark has a distinct Hemingway feel to it, supplementing the enjoyment of its intelligence, solid plot and brisk pacing.
THE RELIVE BOX
T.C. Boyle (Bloomsbury, £8.99)
The short stories in Boyle’s eleventh collection are largely set in an America a few years down the road, his characters dealing with floods and droughts caused by climate change or an invasion by a new and tenacious species of ant. Couples plan designer babies while transgenic pets, like crowparrots and dogcats, spark neighbourhood disputes. In the title story, a father gets hooked on a console that allows people to relive memories, spending so much time in the past that his resentful daughter never gets a chance to relive her memories of her mother. Others are less futuristic but still quietly disturbing, such as the story about a schoolgirl so nervous about her graduation ceremony that making a hoax bomb threat to get it cancelled seems like a reasonable course of action. It’s a predictably well-crafted and imaginative collection in which a masterful storyteller looks to the future, if not with dread then at least a sceptically raised eyebrow.
NINE PINTS
Rose George (Portobello, £14.99)
Blood is a source of endless fascination for Rose George, and in the course of reading this wide-ranging, well-travelled book, we learn about the history of leeches and transfusion in medicine, discover that Britons are still blood pariahs long after the CJD scare and find out why Japanese workers’ blood types can cost them their jobs. While covering menstrual taboos in Nepal and the policies that failed to beat back HIV in South Africa, she is also interested in the way blood becomes a commodity once it’s been siphoned out of the body, leading to discussions of blood donation services and the horrifying scandal of contaminated plasma and blood products in the ‘70s and ‘80s. For all the advances made by medical science, comparatively little is known about blood. Rose George’s lively, often urgent and frequently shocking account is underscored by the excitement of communicating what blood does, how we feel about it and the industries that have grown up around it.
ALASTAIR MABBOTT
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