With holiday season fast approaching, we reveal our top five Christmas reading recommendations:
1. A Street Cat Named Bob, James Bowen
Back in 2007, recovering drug addict James Bowen arrived at his Tottenham home to find a stray ginger cat on his doorstep. The author, who makes his living busking on the streets of Covent Garden and Islington, didn’t fancy looking after the ginger tom – by his own admission it was enough of a challenge looking after himself. But it soon became apparent that the moggie, which Bowen christened Bob, wasn’t any old cat – intelligent, loving and loyal, the pair quickly bonded and became inseparable. And rather than being a burden, Bob provided the encouragement and incentive James needed to stay clean.
A Street Cat Named Bob is Bowen’s heart-warming account of his five years and counting with Bob, who regularly accompanies him busking in central London and Angel. Not everything has been plain sailing for the pair – they’ve been separated twice and had to contend with yobbish drunks – but they’re now a regular sight on the streets of Covent Garden, with Bob – ever the crowd pleaser – providing the purrfect accompaniment to Bowen’s rock covers.
Above all, this is story of hope and a tribute to people’s bonds to their cats, even if this pair’s relationship doesn’t begin on the most conventional of footings.
> Buy A Street Cat Named Bob!
2. On The Map, Simon Garfield
Simon Garfield’s tribute to the map is one of the most lucid and accessible histories of cartography ever written, and almost certainly the most fun. He begins the journey in Egypt at the time of Claudius Ptolemy and his celebrated Geographia – a collection of what was known about the world’s geography in the second century, and a work that inspired generations of geographers and cartographers – before moving onto the discovery of the New World and the planet according to Gerardus Mercator, the Flemish cartographer whose 1569 projection of the planet is still widely used.
Garfield later brings the reader bang up to date with the development of the sat nav and the goings-on at California’s Googleplex, interspersed by visits to Hereford during the city’s Mappa Mundi crisis in the late 1980s, and a revealing insight into the life of Phyllis Pearsall, the woman responsible for the first London A-Z in the 1930s.
This breadth of cartographic history – and a visit or two to Stanfords’ Long Acre store – has allowed Garfield to take an objective view on the future of maps. Has the Apple Maps debacle encouraged a renewed appetite for paper maps? Or is it time for traditional cartographers to surrender to the digital mapping revolution?
> Buy On The Map!
3. Narcopolis, Jeet Thayil
Shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize, Jeet Thayil’s first novel is set in the squalor of 1970s Bombay – a city of gangsters, drug users and petty criminals. At the novel’s centre is Dimple, a eunuch who prepares pipes at Rashid’s, a notorious opium den. Her father figure is Mr Lee, a Chinese soldier who’s left the motherland in search of a better life. Thayil delves deep into the characters’ lives; his hallucinatory account of their personalities, ambitions and goals occasionally poetic. We’re also introduced to Rumi, an under-the-thumb husband with a penchant for drugs and violence, who’s forced to choose between rehab and prison – or in his words, “dying or death”.
All the while, Thayil uses his poetic proficiency to present a rich, vivid picture of Bombay’s underworld – a city that has since transformed into the subcontinent’s economic powerhouse. But in Narcopolis the gleaming high-rises are years away – instead the population have to contend with grinding poverty and the terrifying Pathar Maar, the stone killer, who ruthlessly slaughters his seemingly random victims under the cover of darkness.
Thayil certainly knows what he’s writing about – he’s quoted as saying that almost two decades of his life were lost to addiction. But his real-life experiences and poetic talent has resulted in arguably the most impressive debut novel of the year.
> Buy Narcopolis!
4. Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest, Wade Davis
In 1924, an expeditionary team headed by George Mallory attempted to climb Everest. Britain was reeling from the effects of the First World War, and there was a hope that scaling the world’s highest peak would hand a much-needed boost to the nation’s psyche.
It was to be the most challenging of expeditions – one in which the climbers suffered from frostbite and sunstroke at the same time, and in which the team’s Tibetan hosts couldn’t understand the point of climbing Everest for climbing’s sake – after all, the mountain was of huge spiritual significance and apparently capable of throwing them off the edge.
Sadly, it was to be a journey shrouded in mystery, for nobody knows if Mallory or Sandy Irvine, a fellow climber, made it. But rather than asking if Mallory and Irvine reached the summit, Into the Silence – the winner of this year’s Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction – contemplates what encouraged the pair to keep climbing on the day they lost their lives, when they must have known the perils that lay ahead.
Harking back to the Great War and its effects, Wade’s epic book – based on years of research – explains how Mallory and his disappearance became representative of the millions who died on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918, only a few years after Captain Scott and his companions lost their lives in the Antarctic.
> Buy Into the Silence!
5. The Casual Vacancy, JK Rowling
Forget any links to Harry Potter – this is JK Rowling’s first novel for adults, complete with swearing, sex and drugs. The setting, too, couldn’t be further removed – wave goodbye to Hogwarts and say hello to the quaint town of Pagford’s hosting of a small-scale parish council election.
But behind Pagford’s prettiness – it’s home to an ancient abbey and a cobbled market square – is a population at war with itself: rich versus poor, wives versus husbands, pupils (who, incidentally, get up to things Harry and co wouldn’t have dreamed of) versus teachers and teenagers versus parents. Things are bubbling up, but a catalyst is needed to make things bubble over. Step forward Barry Fairbrother, the book’s hero, who suddenly drops dead in the golf club car park. His departure leaves a ‘casual vacancy’ on the parish council; one that threatens to be taken over by the forces of darkness.
Dark it may be, but The Casual Vacancy is also funny – particularly when the passionate election campaign begins in earnest.
> Buy the Casual Vacancy!
