The Amalgamation Polka by Stephen Wright
This book was bought randomly because it was cheap and I liked the cover (UK cover is different to the US one). My initial reaction was that there was some very interesting use of words and language, and I was concerned that I would find it all too difficult, but it turned out that once you got used to it the writing was more like poetry than prose. There are some wonderful turns of phrases throughout and the descriptions can be very evocative. Not a lot happens in the traditional sense of action and reaction, but there is a greater internal journey for the reader as we follow the changes that happen to the main character and his beloved America.
This is a highly recommended book.
‘Born in 1844 in bucolic upstate New York, Liberty Fish is the son of fervent abolitionists as well as the grandson of Carolina slaveholders even more dedicated to their cause. Thus follows a childhood limned with fugitive slaves moving through hidden passageways in the house, his Uncle Potter’s free-soil adventure stories whose remarkable violence sets the tone of the mounting national crisis, and the inevitable distress that befalls his mother whenever letters arrive from her parents—a conflict that ultimately costs her life and compels Liberty, in hopes of reconciling the familial disunion, to escape first into the cauldron of war and then into a bedlam more disturbing still.
Rich in characters both heartbreaking and bloodcurdling, comic and horrific, The Amalgamation Polka is shot through with politics and dreams, and it captures great swaths of the American experience, from village to metropolis to plantation, from the Erie Canal to the Bahamas, from Bloody Kansas to the fulfillment of the killing fields. Yet for all the brutality and tragedy, this novel is exuberant in the telling and its wide compassion, brimming with the language, manners, hopes, and fears of its time—all of this so transformed by Stephen Wright’s imaginative compass that places and events previously familiar are rendered new and strange, terrifying and stirring. Instantly revelatory, constantly mesmerizing, this is the work of a major writer at the top of his form.’
Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett
This is another great book from the great man and is much in the same vein as the rest of the Discworld series.
‘Football has come to the ancient city of Ankh-Morpork. And now the wizards of Unseen University must win a football match, without using magic, so they're in the mood for trying everything else.
The prospect of the Big Match draws in a street urchin with a wonderful talent for kicking a tin can, a maker of jolly good pies, a dim but beautiful young woman, who might just turn out to be the greatest fashion model there has ever been, and the mysterious Mr Nutt (and no one knows anything much about Mr Nutt, not even Mr Nutt, which worries him, too). As the match approaches, four lives are entangled and changed for ever.
Because the thing about football – the important thing about football - is that it is not just about football.
Here we go! Here we go! Here we go!’
