"The Crossroads" by Niccolò Ammaniti

An audio book.

Cristiano (13) is woken by his drunk 37 y.o. father Reno Zena. The neighbour's dog is barking. His father gives Cristiano a gun and tells him to kill it - Reno doesn't like the owner Castordan anyway.

Quattro Formaggio, a bit slow, has assembled a giant nativity scene from found parts. Reno had protected Quattro Formaggi ("the idiot") from when they were in the chidren's home.

Teresa has left Dannilo because he's an alcoholic and he was responsible for their daughter's death. Danillo's planning a bankraid, crashing through the wall with a tractor. He works with Reno and Quattro Formaggio.

Christiano likes (and is teased by) 2 girls at school - Esmiralda and Fabiana. He sees them shop-lift. The girls fancy Tekkon. Christiano slashes his motorbike tyres. Tekkon and his mates attack him, and threaten him for 1000 euro. Cristiano's dad, thinking the attack unprovoked, makes Cristiano attack Tekkon with a bat. Quattro Formaggio fancies one of the girls as well - she reminds him of a porno favourite.

Reno wants to keep Cristiano, so he's careful to keep their social worker Beppe happy. Beppe's starting to go out with Ida, his best friends wife. They have sex in a campervan. The roof blows off. Ida wants to live with him. Later, Beppe runs over a foreigner while driving. He's not dead after all.

A thunderstorm messes up people's plans in several of the stories. Reno changes his mind about the bank raid. Fabiana is accosted on a remote road by Quattro Formaggio, who mixes up porn with reality. Quattro kills her, calls Reno for help, then accidentally wounds Reno and leaves. Reno calls Cristiano for help. Cristiano finds Fabiana dead and his father, dying and takes him home and he's rushed to hospital. He survives. Cristiano deals with the corpse.

Dannilo hears that Teresa is pregnant and that a faulty child-seat was responsible for his daughter's death. He wants to buy a painting of a crying clown. He tries to do the bank raid alone. He's not driven for years. He dies at the wheel, speeding into the wall.

Beppe offers to stay for a week with Cristiano so he needn't go into care. He had plea-bargained with God, promising to break with Ida if the foreigner wasn't dead. Quattro Formaggio seeks God's help to save the life of Reno, then decides he should kill him instead. He starts calling himself "Carrion Man".

In the end, there's a service for Fabiano. Her father can't understand how God could let it happen. Cristiano know his father, bad though he is, couldn't have killed the girl. Quattro Formaggio kills himself.

Other reviews

• Ian Thompson (Ammaniti's allusions to 1970s film and B-movie schlock place him at the vanguard of Italy's so-called giovani cannibali - young cannibals)
• Toby Litt (The novel's title in Italian was Come dio comanda ... sections and chapters are a page or half a page long. Almost every scene contains a twist - and, because of this, the reader soon starts second-guessing the action. If a scene begins with a character fearing impotence, it will end with them sexually triumphant. If a character seems to have died, they will be resurrected. Also, every scene has an explicit point. The characters are shunted around with no regard for plausibility. ... this isn't a realist novel at all, but an Italian version of Deep Southern Gothic - complete with white supremacist father, idiot rapist sidekick, loser alcoholic sidekick and - at the centre of it all - a traumatised but virtuous child)

"The Bullet That Missed" by Richard Osman

An audio book.

Connie Johnson (in her 30s) is in prison, awaiting trial. She is still running a drug ring. She's inside because of Bogden and Ron Richie. She plans to take revenge.

Ron Richie, Ibrahim (a psychologist), Joyce (78) and Elizabeth are old people who meet on Thursdays to solve cases that have stumped the police. They're interested in the Bethany Waites case. They think that talking to Mike Waghorn, a TV newsreader, might help. Pauline, his make-up artist, a widow for 6 months, joins in. Bethany was a TV reporter who uncovered VAT fraud. Her car went off a cliff. Her body was never found. She'd told her colleague Mike that she had discovered something important. Mike doesn't tell people that he suspects that Fiona (an ambitious colleague of Bethany then, now famous on TV) might have had something to do with it. Heather Garbut was imprisoned for the VAT fraud. Jack Mason, her boss, got away with it.

Elizabeth (ex MI6) and slightly demented husband Steve are kidnapped by "the Viking", an expert on money-laundering. Elizabeth is told to kill Victor (his money laundering rival) else Joyce will die. Victor, ex KGB now living in London, was nicknamed the Bullet. He and Elizabeth had been almost lovers. Elizabeth fakes his death, firing into the ceiling instead of into Victor. He stays in hiding with Joyce.

Bogdan and Donna (a policewomen) have sex on their first night. Bogdan does jobs for Elizabeth and plays chess with Steve. Donna's colleague is Chris. The Kent boss of police is Andrew (who writes novels).

Ron starts dating Pauline. Ibrahim visits Connie in jail and gets her to interview Heather. Soon after, Heather's dead. Ibrahim becomes Connie's therapist. Elizabeth and Joyce entertainingly interview Fiona. Ron chats with Jack. The Viking, by looking at the bullet-hole that in Victor's penthouse, realises that Elizabeth has tried to fool him. He tries to kill Victor, but is drugged by Joyce. He agrees to help Elizabeth. Mike has always been grateful to Bethany for helping him come to terms with being gay. Jack is found dead.

Ibrahim et al realise that the laundered money had gone to people with the names of characters in Andrew's story. 2 days later, Andrew is set up to meet The Viking. He'd been told that the Viking could recover the laundered money (£10 million). The meeting is broadcast live on Fiona's feed. Victor appears, and then Mike. Andrew confesses.

We then get Bethany's PoV from Dubai. She faked her death (with the unknowing help of Pauline) when she received a bullet in the post. She used some of the illicit money.

I like the style. Osman handles old people's loves, dementia, etc, with understanding, and can do man-talk. He can switch the tone convincingly. Plot credibility and entertainment are well balanced. He uses fewer intellectual/literary allusions than Kate Atkinson does.

Other reviews

• Alison Flood

"When Will There Be Good News?" by Kate Atkinson

An audio book.

30 years after her novelist father left and the rest of her family were savagely killed, Joanna is a married doctor in Edinburgh with a 1 y.o. child. Reggie Chase (a clever 16 y.o. girl, who lives alone) helps with childcare. She lies about her mother being alive (she died on holiday with her new lover). Her brother Billie, 19, misbehaves. She's tutored by the dying Miss McDonald.

Jackson Brodie (ex-army, rich from an inheritance) gets a hair from Nathan, 2 y.o. who's at nursery school in Yorkshire. His ex-wife is Josie. Their 12 y.o. daughter is Marly. His ex-girlfriend is Julia, who claims that Nathan isn't his.

Louise (40 - a chief inspector with son Archie, 16. She used to work with Jackson) has re-married Patrick (surgeon, with a Ph.D son). An amusement arcade owned by Joanna's husband has burnt down - not the first of his places that has burnt down. Louise investigates, discovering that Neil's struggling financially. She has to visit Joanna anyway, to tell her that the killer, Decker, is about to be released. She cares about Alison Needler too, whose husband went crazy and has gone missing.

Neil says that Joanna's gone to stay with an aunt in Yorkshire until the press stories about the killer's release calm down. Brodie misses her - she was her confidante. She's suspicious - Joanna's car and phone haven't gone, and the baby's comforter (bloodied) is found by the dog.

A train crash is caused by Miss McDonald's driving. She dies. Reggie saves the life of Brodie, who was in the train. When Brodie wakes in hospital, he has the ID of Andrew Decker. Later he recalls who he is.

2 men wreck Reggie's flat, saying they're looking for a guy called Reggie Chase. She reports her suspicions about Joanna to Louise, and tells her the name of the man whose life she saved. Reggie visits him, and helps him out of hospital by claiming she's his daughter. He wants to get back to London to meet his wife Tessa (a museum curator; they've known each other for 4 months) at the airport. He has an accident in a rented car with Reggie. Louise picks them up. Meeting Jackson again has made her have doubts about her marriage. She's investigated Joanna's aunt - she's been dead a fortnight. Joanna had recently met Decker in prison.

Reggie enlists Jackson to track down Joanna. She's being held hostage by people who Neil owes money to. She kills her imprisoners. Reggie and Jackson give her and the baby a lift home. The police track down Decker who shoots a colleague of Louise then kills himself. Nobody finds out who killed the kipnappers. Tessa turns out to be a fake who's gone off with Jackson's money. Louises is about to leave her husband.

The main characters engage in entertaining internal monologue, dropping literary allusions and asking themselves questions. They have an interest in language and figures of speech. There are many observations and fun phrases -

• "who looked as if she'd knitted herself"
• "dressed in a uniform that would have allowed her to drown in a vat of Heinz tomato soup without anyone noticing""

Other reviews

• Patrick Ness (Atkinson began tackling life and death and fate and love with a freedom and fluency unseen in her earlier novels. By becoming a crime writer, she has - in a way that other "literary" types may wish to note - become a better literary writer than ever: funny, bracingly intelligent and delightfully prickly. ... Lovers of the crime genre have given Atkinson a hard time for her use of coincidence, and truth be told, the first half of When Will There Be Good News? can be a little hard to swallow ... By putting coincidence so firmly in control of her plot - all the way through to its very last page, where two protagonists are revealed to have an even deeper connection - she starts to raise larger questions of destiny and fate)

"New British Poetry", Don Paterson and Charles Simic (eds), (Graywolf, 2004)

It's taken me over 20 years to catch up with this. It was written to show Americans what British poetry is like. Here are extracts from the front matter -

From the Preface by Simic - Until thirty years ago, one could still find ample selections of British poetry in North American school books. ... What [my professors] liked about the British was their reluctance to innovate ... Reacting to such views, the poets of my generation, and I imagine other readers of poetry, began to ignore what went on in Britain ... The rediscovery of British poetry on this continent in the last few years has a lot to do with the popularity of Irish poetry ... If the Irish poets were so good, one thought, then what about poets in the British Isles? ...
It was contemporary North American poetry that I now found wanting ... formulaic. The favourite kind of poem was a first-person, realistic narrative that told of some momentous or perfectly trivial experience ... The chief strategy of these poems was to conceal that they were poems by avoiding anything that seemed too imaginative or too irreverent ... Americans prefer to dwell on the future rather than the past. We are wary of traditions, closed intellectual systems, and ideas that do not come from experience

From the Introduction by Paterson -

• Modernism fed into British poetry as a new, invigorating tributary to the river of the old tradition. In the main ... it did not present itself as the revolutionary alternative it was for the US
• There is still a powerful sense in the UK that, despite having lost much of its core readership, poetry can and should matter
• the self-absorbed, closed-system expressionism of the Po-mos mark them out as some kind of final Romantic. In the end, they probably do deserve to inherit the earth, being the first literary movement to have conceived the masterstroke of eliminating the reader entirely
• the Mainstream insist on a talented minority, and a democracy of readership; the Postmoderns on an elite readership, and a democracy of talent

36 poets each get 5 pages or so. They're my age, more or less. I grew up with them. Some (Jo Shapcott?) have fallen away. Others (Armitage) have kept going. Any surprise inclusions? Not especially, even with the advantage of hindsight. Allnutt, Bhatt, Didsbury, Mark Ford, Glenday, McKendrick, Motion, Reading, and Anne Rouse are there.

Each poet has a few lines of blurby introduction -

• "Armitage is a poet of terrific rhetorical power and control"
• Bhatt's "translucent, weightless line cleverly disguises a rigorous technique"
• Burnside's "radiant meditations have been perhaps the most quietly and pervasively influential voice to have emerged in British poetry in the last twenty years"
• "In their flawless technique, [Donaghy's poems] seem, perhaps, built to last in a way few other poets in the language can currently rival"
• Selima "Hill has been one of the very few poets to have contributed something wholly original to the feminist debate in the last twenty years"
• Maxwell's "voice has developed into one of the most original of the last fifty years"
• "O'Brien is the UK's leading poet-critic"
• Oswald "often seems - against the grain of contemporary British practise - to wholly tell, and not show"
• "Reading is an impossible poet to represent fairly by extracts"

I liked "Scheherazade" (Allnutt), "Machines" (Donaghy), "Shibboleth" (Donaghy), "Prayer" (Carol Ann Duffy), "The Hill-track" (Kathleen Jamie), "April" (Alice Oswald), "Testament" (Anne Rouse), "Phrase book" (Jo Shapcott).

I was puzzled by "The sky my husband" (John Ash), "What the uneducated old woman told me" (Christopher Reid).

Other reviews

• James Rother (At first blush, it must be said, a skimming of New British Poetry’s innards proves not all that enticing. A majority of its inclusions seem, despite the occasional lurch into the memorable, to lack assuredness and in some cases even basic skills. ... two Americans and an Irishman attempted to put English poetry back into the mainstream of European culture. The effect of those generations who have succeeded to the heritage of Eliot, Pound, and Yeats has been to largely squander the awareness those three gave us of our place in world literature, and to retreat into a self-congratulatory parochialism. ... Simon Armitage, Christopher Reid, and Michael Hoffmann, all of whose unassuming and accomplished work stands head and shoulders above much of the whatever filling out the anthology’s body of text. Of their poems, the most outstanding are, respectively, “The Dead Sea Poems,” “Mermaids Explained,” and “Lament for Crassus.”)
• Todd Swift (The plain truth is, there is no poet currently writing (Edwin Morgan excepted and he is in his 80s) in England, Scotland, or Wales, with the gravitas, humanity, intelligence, or craft, of Heaney; nor one to better the cavalier verve of Muldoon; or learned elegance of Mahon, for that matter. ... It is unusual for anthologies to be fronted by so many pages of sheer nonsense ... There are perhaps twenty-five very good poems in the collection. There seems to have been a tendency to go for the ones that American readers will "get", and this means a lot of local flavour has been drained. Some of the best include: Armitage's "Poem"; Dongahy's "The Bacchae"; Carol Ann Duffy's "Warming Her Pearls"; The three from Fenton; Michael Hoffman's "Lament for Crassus"; Jenkins's "Visiting"; "Pentecost" from Lewis; Lumsden's "An Older Woman"; and the five from Motion.)
• John Drexel (American readers (and American poets) ought to discover, if they haven’t already, Mark Ford and Carol Ann Duffy and Michael Hoffmann.)

"Progress report" by Connie Bensley (Peterloo, 1981)

Poems from TLS, Poetry Review, Agenda, Cosmopolitan, BBC radio 3, etc.

In the first 25 page I didn't find any poems to impress me. "Body Check", "Dig" and "Permissive Society" surely aren't from the TLS. "Guru", "Hiatus" and "A Rare Success" are better.

"Verity" by Colleen Hoover

The first-person protagonist, Loren, has been looking after her mother (now dead) for months. She's a not very successful novelist who had an affair with her agent who'd been attracted to her because he thought she was like the main character in her first novel. She's offered a lucrative deal to complete a series of novels written by Verity Crawford. Verity's twin daughters died in 2 accidents. She has a remaining son. She had a car accident which looked like a suicide attempt. She's barely conscious now, only reflexes left. She's married to Jeremy. Jeremy invites Loren to stay and do some research. She finds an autobiography describing Verity's first night with Jeremy, her attempts to have a miscarriage when Jeremy seemed to love the unborn twins more than her, and her liking of Jeremy's body.

Loren begins to wonder if the twins' deaths were accidental. Given that Jemery's the model for the male characters in the novel series, she wonders if sleeping with him is part of the necessary research. She begins to think that Verity can move - her son lets slip that she can talk.

In the autobiography, Verity describes how she killed the second twin. Loren sleeps with Jeremy and shows him the manuscript. She hears him confront Verity with it. He tries to kill Verity. Loren suggests how he could do it to make it look like an accident.

7 months later Loren is pregnant with Jeremy's child. Loren finds a letter hidden in what was Verity's room, written by Verity to Jeremy. It says how she'd written an untrue story with true details to help her write a novel, how Jeremy had found it, believed it, and had tried to kill her, how she'd faked her paralysis and had planned to leave with her son as soon as she could get enough money. Loren destroys the letter, wondering whether it's a fake.

I'd assumed that the manuscript was a fiction (written by Verity or maybe Jeremy). The faking of the paralysis seems unlikely.

Other reviews

• Sarah O'Connor (it tries to be a thriller, it tries to be a horror story, it tries to be a creepy mystery but it only slightly hits the mark on all these things ... One of the main themes that gets repeated by Lowen at the beginning of Verity is how an author is not their words, how she is mistaken for being a worse person than she is because of the books she writes and that the voice she writes in isn’t who she is as a person. Hoover did this intentionally so that when we read Verity’s manuscript, reader’s are supposed to think like Lowen that that is who Verity is, especially because what she’s reading is an apparent autobiography. And then of course the letter, which is supposed to turn that on it’s head and bring about the theme of writing vs writer and how we only ever had Verity’s words, we have no idea who she was as a person. I get it. But Hoover just doesn’t do this well.)

"Dark is the grave" by T.G. Reid

An audio book set in/near Glasgow.

Prologue: Hazel Garvey is tied up. She recalls a pub, Fiona's birthday party. She's buried alive.

DCI Duncan Bone suffered brain damage in the Peek-a-boo case - the main suspect John Mickeljohn caused an explosion killing himself and injuring Bone. His wife Alice and son Michael have left him because of behaviour issues - PTSD. He's on sick leave.

He's sent a memory stick with a video on it showing a copy-cat scene from the Peek-a-boo case, with details never made public. The woman on the video is identified as Hazel Garvey - a police officer, wife of McLean, the state prosecutor. She might still be alive. Bone's boss wants him to lead the search. He starts work. The location in the video is identified. They dig there and find Garvey's body.

Garvey had talked to a friend about problems in her marriage. Her husband is cross rather than sad. He has a mistress and a child. He accuses Bone of unprofessionalism. He's investigated by Tenison. He gets angry.

A man with records is strangled. Turns out he's Harper, a policeman with something to hide. Bone's framed (video evidence) and suspended. He tells Alice to send Michael away to her mother. He suspects Tenison. He searches her house, works out where a missing policeman is being kept, saves him. Tenison drives away. He follows her to his ex's mother's farm. Tenison is holding his ex captive. His wife escapes.

Tenison was Mickeljohn's girlfriend while he was in jail. She wanted to make Bone pay for Mickeljohn's death. She had access to police records, and had army training.

It's all too linear for me. Too little use is made of the secondary characters.

Other reviews

• betweenthelines (My pet peeve. Non speech based dialogue tags such as sneered and smirked and especially those that are equivalent to animal sounds such as snarled and barked. They always pull me right out of a story and make the dialogue and speaker seem unnatural and forced. Other than that the plot, although gruesome in parts, was good. I didn’t have the slightest idea of the perpetrator until well into the story which is always a bonus. There’s a diverse group of characters, both in Bone’s team and generally—most likeable, others not so much, so a good mix. And I always enjoy short chapters when they build tension and suspense.)