The period after an aircraft goes missing, and before any trace of it turns up, is known as "The Uncertainty Phase" – just one of many fascinating facts I learned from Ravi Somaiya’s forensically-researched book, and a term which perfectly sums up the cross-currents of conflict and conspiracy surrounding the mysterious death of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld in a plane crash near the Congo/Zambia border in 1961.
Published in the UK under the more obscure title Operation Morthor, Somaiya’s 2020 non-fiction debut draws on his journalism and documentary background, and on novelistic non-fiction classics in the courtroom drama and true crime genres, to produce one of the best-told true stories I’ve ever read, with a style and structure as sophisticated as the finest literary thriller.
LONGLISTED FOR THE ALCS "GOLD DAGGER" AWARD FOR NON-FICTION CRIME WRITING
Uncover the story behind the death of renowned diplomat and UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld in this true story of spies and intrigue surrounding one of the most enduring unsolved mysteries of the twentieth century.
On September 17, 1961, Dag Hammarskjöld boarded a Douglas DC6 propeller plane on the sweltering tarmac of the airport in Leopoldville, the capital of the Congo. Hours later, he would be found dead in an African jungle with an ace of spades playing card placed on his body.
Subtitled "A Novel in Seven Occasions" – from the VE Day celebrations in 1945 to their anniversary, mid-pandemic, 75 years later – Bournvilleis Jonathan Coe's latest and perhaps most ambitious entry in what's starting to look like a career-long, non-chronological chronicle of post-war British history and the national character: sometimes told as drama, sometimes as comedy, sometimes as satire, but always in a way which is both deeply perceptive and deceptively light touch.
Like his 2018 novel Middle England – possibly the only good thing to come out of Brexit, and certainly the only thing which has helped me understand it – Bournville is funny, angry, rueful, hopeful and, above all, empathetic, reaching the reassuring yet simultaneously unsettling conclusion that 'everything changes, and everything stays the same'.
From the bestselling, award-winning author of Middle England comes a profoundly moving, brutally funny and brilliantly true portrait of Britain told through four generations of one family.
'A wickedly funny, clever, but also tender and lyrical novel about Britain and Britishness and what we have become' Rachel Joyce
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In Bournville, a placid suburb of Birmingham, sits a famous chocolate factory. For eleven-year-old Mary and her family in 1945, it's the centre of the world. The reason their streets smell faintly of chocolate, the place where most of their friends and neighbours have worked for decades. Mary will go on…
Although published posthumously in 2021,Silverview was substantially written, then set aside, some time before John le Carré died. His son Nick Cornwell (aka novelist Nick Harkaway), who edited the book for publication, speculates in an afterword that this was because its view of British Intelligence was more disenchanted than any of Le Carré’s previous novels.
I wonder whether there were two further reasons, one profound and one prosaic: that the novel is suffused with death and would therefore make an appropriately elegiac swansong, and that as his shortest novel in nearly 40 years, it would better bookend his 1961 debut, Call for the Dead.
Whatever the reason, it’s a classic Le Carré tale of loyalty and betrayal - and a book that will always be one of my favorite reads in any given year.
Korean edition of [Silverview] by John Le Carre. An instant New York Times bestseller. In his last completed novel, John le Carré turns his focus to the world that occupied his writing for the past sixty years--the secret world itself. A mesmerizing story of an encounter between innocence and experience and between public duty and private morals. Korean edition translated by Jo Yeong Hak.
William Boyd is a defining author of our time, writing whole-life stories that have resonated with millions of passionate readers.
In this probing series of exclusive interviews, author and screenwriter Alistair Owen talks to Boyd about his works and the life that has inspired them, revealing the playfully intelligent and unfailingly eloquent man behind the novels.
Their conversations are a deep dive into film, art, theatre, literature, and the life of a writer. This is one of Britain’s most revered authors on what it is to write in a variety of forms.
