Albert, the Duke of York (Colin Firth), is the second son of King George V (Michael Gambon). Albert suffers from a paralyzing stammer. A speech in front of thousands at Wembley Stadium goes badly. Treatments don’t work. An exhausted, humiliated Albert is ready to give up trying until his wife Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter) persuades him to work with Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush). The two men strike up an unlikely friendship. King George V dies and Albert’s brother, David the Prince of Wales, abdicates from his role as King Edward VIII (Guy Pearce), leaving a terrified Albert to become King George VI.

Colin Firth has mastered the art of understatement. His performance in The King’s Speech is in his eyes. And the eyes reveal shame and fear. When he does speak the camera zooms in on his mouth. Firth’s lips twitch when Albert tries to hide a smile, they turn into a taut line when he’s frustrated. He’s paralyzed around his father, George V, a formidable old king who does not tolerate failure. Albert fights to get the words out when he does, it’s painful to watch him trip over every word. Firth’s performance is at once heartbreaking and elegant. But the Duke for all his elegance has his own expectations and feelings of entitlement. He fights Logue. To Albert’s horror, Logue insists on calling him “Bertie”. He is indignant, but deep down; he is amused in spite of it all. The final speech he gives is disguised as the pinnacle of Firth’s performance. It’s remarkable because it is so close to the real King George VI’s speech. It isn’t simply that the words are the same. It’s that Firth’s speech sounds almost identical to the real thing. The high, clipped accent. The inflections. The pauses between the words. It’s uncanny and terrific. The true pinnacle is when Firth isn’t the King, but merely Albert. He’s been crowned with history and expectation on his shoulders. He’s only king in British history to follow an abdicated king. His predecessor is alive, and Albert can’t hope to measure up to his handsome, debonair brother King Edward VIII. He breaks down in front of his wife – choking, gasping for breath as he weeps and stutters, “I’m not a king, I’m not a king.” It’s so heartbreaking, it’s almost intrusive, and it shows Firth’s ability to play any character – even a witty king – as an everyman.

Much of Lionel Logue’s methods in The King’s Speech are assumed. Despite the royal family’s affection for Logue, needing a therapist caused them enough embarrassment to rarely mention his methods in official documents. His movie methods are hilarious. Logue forces Albert to recite nursery rhymes, wave his arms about in pinwheels, and roll across his office floor. Logue appears to enjoy the indignity immensely, with Geoffrey Rush’s face twisted into a puckish grin for most of the film. In a twist of fate, the real Lionel Logue treated screenwriter David Seidler’s uncle, an uncle who thought his sessions with Logue were “absolutely rubbish”, though the uncle’s stutter did go away.

The King’s Speech is restricted by its script and is revisionist to the point of propaganda. David Seidler originally transformed his first draft into a play and it shows. Most scenes take place indoors, either in Logue’s office or Buckingham Palace, making the film claustrophobic. It makes sense. Royals are isolated from the world. Stammers make people even more isolated. But the isolation feeds the propaganda. Giving the audience a taste of the isolation is a stylish move, but isolation without a critical look at the outside world makes for oversimplified history. 2008’s Frost/Nixon also suffered from his.

For a film about a man who doesn’t speak, there’s an awful lot of talking, and an awful lot of it is trite. It’s a film that glorifies its subject’s courage. The King’s Speech speaks to your heart to the point that it sometimes screams at it. “Listen to me!” Albert insists in one of Firth’s thankfully few over-the-top moments. And the emotion is heavy-handed and manipulative even beyond its dialogue. The events themselves aren’t even in order. Lionel Logue helped Albert in 1926 – long before the outbreak of World War II, but despite that tricky timeline, The King’s Speech two-steps around dates and makes it seem as if Logue’s services were desperately needed during the abdication crisis, before the war began. In reality the king had little need for Logue by the time those crisis hit.

The King’s Speech is a throwback to Hollywood’s heyday. It’s dramatic weepie – Oscar bait. Some of it is saccharine, but it also genuinely stirring. The real events were inspiring enough to screenwriter David Seidler, who stammered as a child after the trauma of trying to escape the violence of World War II. It is a testament to Seidler’s witty and wistful dialogue, and King George’s own courage, that The King’s Speech manages to stay the course.

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Cara Lee Henson is the only schoolteacher in the all-black town of Henry Adams. The school might be run down and under-funded, but Cara still has to follow a strict moral code. If she breaks any of the rules set down by her boss, Virginia Sutton, and the school board, she will be dismissed. A single woman has a hard time earning an honest living out in the West and Midwest, and Cara is determined to stay employed. Without warning, Sergeant Chase Jefferson makes his way back into Cara’s life, putting an end to her mundane, happy existence. Chase can only stay in Henry Adams for 10 days and Cara refuses to be with him. Gallivanting with a man will cost her honour and her job. Sergeant Chase is attracted to her but the wandering, dangerous life of a soldier makes marriage totally out of the question.

Cara and Chase don’t spend the entire novel loathing each other only to suddenly discover that they’re hopelessly in love. Night Song is a slow burn, and though Cara and Chase are attracted to each other from the beginning, there are varying degrees of denial throughout the novel. Sparks fly and heads lock, but both have doubts and fears that keep them apart. Frivolous misunderstandings don’t make their way into Night Song. Jenkins doesn’t confuse conflict with shouting matches.

Both characters are alone in the world and have no living relatives. They are therefore tied to their passions – Cara to teaching and learning, and Chase to the segregated, racist United States Army. Within these passions, rise apprehensions about their romance. Chase reminds Cara of the white Civil War era Union soldiers who destroyed her family and home. Subconsciously she is afraid of soldiers, even black ones. Her contract with the school board only helps to legitimize her fears; so taking on a lover is the last choice she’ll make. Chase has no family, and creating a new one in a post-emancipation America is more than he can bear. A serious relationship would either tie him down, or if he remained a soldier, would tear his heart between his love of a woman and his love of his country.

For all their genuine chemistry and tense conflict, most of it unravels by the third act. While Cara is a sympathetic heroine, Chase turns into a bully by the end. Cara remains spunky, headstrong, kind, and intelligent throughout the book. This doesn’t mean she is without flaws. She can be a harsh, stubborn, know-it-all. Sometimes she openly challenges violent people she could easily walk away from. But at her core is a genuinely gracious woman. Chase, however, forces Cara into a situation that merely internally hints at wanting, but never actually agrees to. It makes his character almost irredeemable and it’s difficult to find him totally heroic by Night Song’s end.

The Midwestern town of Henry Adams is modeled after Kansas towns that blacks established after fleeing a post-Reconstruction South. Beaten down by the racist violence of the Ku Klux Klan and the White League, and fears that slavery would be re-instated, tens of thousands of these black Exodusters headed to Kansas – one of the newest states in the Union. Night Song also focuses on the history of the Sioux, specifically the Lakota, in the form of Chase’s best friend, Dreamer of Eagles. Dreamer’s nation is being decimated by military action from the United States Army, and those who survive these brutal attacks are forced onto reservations. The army is slaughtering their livelihood – the buffalo. Jenkins’ extreme attention to detail is what separates Night Song from so many historical romances. Many are nothing more than costume dramas, but Jenkins packs her Night Song with rich, fascinating history that doesn’t distract from the story. It helps that Jenkins places her characters in the middle of some of this history instead of the fringes of it. Cara is an Exoduster and a Southerner, chase is a Union soldier and an ex-slave, and newspaper men and scholars populate the novel’s background.

Night Song at the time of its publication was a novelty. It’s less of a novelty now, though black romance (and multicultural romance in general) is more of a contemporary and paranormal game than a historical one. It does drag in the middle, where Jenkins provides unnecessary filler of parties and outings. And its hero is tough to love, but its heroine and its history are at one engaging, fascinating, and difficult to forget.

This book is available online – @Amazon

After a reported few therapeutic trips, “going shopping in Milan”, and touring Japan on his sabbatical, West returns My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, an album that, if only through the cover art, is decidedly provocative. Apparently, through teetering on the brink, West goes off the edge for his fifth studio album. The album is steeped in his ideologies of perceived and, well, actual supremacy as a rapper and producer. His audiovisual sensibilities are at their highest ever and with its many turns at whimsy, romance, social commentary, apology and introspection, Twisted Fantasy is an exorcism, albeit with little gore, that is indubitably entertaining. The album, which is light at a lean 13 tracks, conquers more ground for a rapper for whom the world seems to be getting smaller and smaller (if only in his mind) and picks up where West’s last album 808s and Heartbreak left off in experimentation and soul searching. All the parts of the jigsaw that was that last album are fitted and fused here and the product is the machinery of a mind that, although often times affected by his own ego-formative celebrity, remains cognizant of a need to explore wounds from which so many (seemingly) self-destructive actions emanate. And while West is still figuring himself out, it is at least obvious that he is not Martian, as rap peer Lil Wayne likes to describe himself, but is in fact completely human – at times gaudy, self-serving and egotistical but at others guarded, insecure and completely vulnerable.

West’s songs, and his personality, are very relatable for many: That may be the reason his fans love him as much as they do. The rapper seems to be genuinely grappling with his good fortune – still – and learning to cope with success under the microscope. He wears his heart on his sleeve, and hence fans are sure to follow his instructions, “stick around, some real feelings might surface”, which he aims at figuratively or likely literal love on Blame Game, yet still understand the cold shoulder he dishes out with “Address me as your highness, high as United/30,000 feet up and are not invited” on So Appalled. Ironically, Pusha T sums up West’s viewpoint best for the rapper with the stellar verse: “Success is what you make it/take it how it comes/a half a mill in twenties is like a bill where I’m from/an arrogant dealer, the legend I’ve become/ [and seeing] CNN said I’d be dead by 21/blackjack I am pulling all aces.

Twisted Fantasy is chock-full of memorable lines, too. On Dark Fantasy, West raps “I fantasized about this back in Chicago/mercy, mercy me that Murcielago/that’s me the first year that I blow/how you say broke in Spanish”. Also, coming up with lines like “That was a little joke, viola/praises due to the most high, Allah/praises due to the most fly, Prada/baby I’m magic, ‘Tada’”, West turns phrases to good effect. On Devil in a New Dress, a torn West, coming to terms with loneliness, raps: “She putting on her make-up/she casually allure/text message break up, the casualty of tour/how she gone wake up and not love me no more/I thought I was the asshole/I guess it’s rubbing off”. With reverse psychology rife on Runaway West reveals: “She finds pictures in my email/I sent this girl a picture of my hey/I don’t know what it is with females/But I’m not too good with that, hey/See, I could have me a good girl/And I just blame everything on you/At least you know that’s what I’m good at.” Consequently, he advises in the chorus: “Runaway from me baby…runaway as fast as you can”. Fittingly, the track Power highlights West’s Moorean Paradox: he knows he’s a jerk but he doesn’t believe he’s a jerk.

The jungle aesthetic of Monster expectedly wouldn’t make much sense without monster metaphors; and so I assume with this in mind, Jay-Z (maybe after a quick internet search) name-checks all relevant creatures from Sasquatch to Godzilla to King Kong; but this is about as dark as it gets on Twisted Fantasy. Although West, like it or not, gets lost in the roars, drums and frenzied verses of Nicki Minaj and Jay-Z who, frankly, steal the track, he features strongly on the production which is brilliantly honed to accentuate each rapper’s flow pattern, rhyme scheme and swagger. In fact, the production is commendable over the entire album, which deviates generally from conventional rap beats, infusing alternative rock, soul and aesthetics of gospel. But by the time the bionic voices and African drums disappear on the Lost in the World epilogue, the feeling is one of regret that the album has finished. However, West pits a somber concept against what is surprisingly a celebratory song, considering the title, and uses it to tie the entire album together. He tributes his mother briefly using a refrain from one of his favourite focal points, singer Michael Jackson, and in contrast to the song All of the Lights, asks for the lights instead to be turned down in closing.

As the fantasy ends and it is time for the curtains, for the private jet back home or to some exotic city, and for a time to contend with his demons, who is to tell whether Kanye West has gotten it all out of his system. Nonetheless, Twisted Fantasy is a thrilling ride through smoke: there is not much to see but there’s many a glimpse and “pulling of strings for the dramatic”. It is a rapt ride through the neurotic rapper since Slim Shady but, all in all, the twists are not the kind you’d expect; the darkness is not malevolent but necessary, without the spotlights, for a moment of reflection. West’s fantasy, as it turns out, is to continue to be the jerk that he is without wearing out our patience. But, thankfully, that time is not yet because he has crafted another beautiful album.

Get this album online – Amazon | iTunes

The Girl with the dragon tattoo, published in Sweden in 2005, is the first volume in the “Millennium” trilogy, named after the magazine where the protagonist Michael Blomkvist works. It quickly became an international bestseller. In Sweden alone, the trilogy’s sales have topped two million, while In Denmark it has reportedly outsold everything except the Bible. Tragically, Larsson did not live to enjoy this success; he died of a heart attack in 2004, aged 50, before the novels were published.

Given all this, it is hard not to approach the novel with heighted expectations.

The Girl with the dragon Tattoo opens with an intriguing mystery. Henrik vanger, an octogenarian industrialist, hires Michael Blomkvist, a journalist who has just lost a libel case under murky circumstances, to investigate the disappearance of his great-niece, Harriet. Nearly 40 years earlier, Harriet vanished from a small island mostly owned by the Vanger family, and Henrik has never gotten over it.

Blomvist takes on the case, despite serious misgivings, after Henrik promise him a huge sum for a year’s work. Henrik says he’s certain that someone in his family murdered Harriet. “I detest most of the members of my family,” he tells Blomkvist. ‘They are for the most part thieves, miser, bullies and incompetents” – a description that will prove to be, if anything, too king.

The story begins at a low point in Blomkvist’s career, as head of the powerful Wennerstorm Group; he faces a short prison sentence. His reputation is in tatters and the future of his magazine in jeopardy. The girl of the title of isn’t Hattiet but Lisbeth Salander, a 24-year-old computer hacker with a photographic memory, a violent temper and some serious intimacy issues. After a nasty plot detour involving a lawyer foolish enough to try take advantage of her, Slander teams with Blomvist to solve the mystery of Harriet’s disappearance.

As crime-fiction fans will quickly recognize, Harrit’s disappearance is a classic locked-room mystery. The Vanger family lives on Hedeby Island, which is linked to the nearby town of Hedestad by a single bridge. On the day that 16 year-old Harriet went missing, a car collided with an oil tanker on the bridge, cutting off the island for several hours. Harriet was last seen shortly before the crash and it was only much later that day, when the debris was removed, that her absence from the island was noted. An increasingly frantic search took place, but her body was never found.

Three of Vanger’s brother is eventually exposed as Nazis, supporting Per Engdahl’s fascist movement, and the rest of the family is also unsavory on one way or another. But Larsson’s other great preoccupation is violence against women, and the scarcely believable horrors Blomvist unearths are as rooted in misogyny as they are in fascism. This is reflected in the novel’s original Swedish title, Men Who Hate Women.

But back to Lisbeth Salander.

But back to Blomvist’s investigation, she is slight, serially abused, little autistic but a brilliant computer hacker. Originally employed to investigate Blomvist, she attaches herself to him the ferocious loyalty of a tamed feral animal and plays a crucial role in uncovering Harriet’s startling fate. It’s not hard to see why Larrson invented her; if Blomvist is his fictional alter ego, Salander seems to be confirmation of his belief in a woman’s capacity to survive the most dreadful abuse. She isn’t so much a character as a sort of revenge fantasy comes to life, powering her way through the novel like the heroine of a computer game and undermining its gritty realism. The issue that most saturates The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is that of shocking sexual violence primarily against women, but not excluding men. Salander and Blovist both confront prima facie evidence of such crimes. Larsson, who take his time establishing this theme in his text, never wants the reader to lose sight of this topic even if it isn’t floating on top, so he introduces each of the book’s four parts with statistics on the subject. For instance, for Part 1, he informs, “Eighteen per cent of the women of Sweden have at one time been threatened by a man.”

The novel perks up as their investigation gains speed, though readers will need some time to sort through the cousins and nephews and half-brothers and – sisters who populate the Vanger family. Harrirt’s case turns out to be connected to a series of murders in the 1950s and “60s. When a cat is killed and its tortured corpse is left outside the cottage where Blomvist is living, he and Salander realize they may not be working on a cold after all. Can imagine that the novel is dense, and indeed it is. Slow to reveal its won’t be finished quickly. However, it does remain a fascinating read throughout. Structured as a methodical procedural that proceeds on a generally tight trajectory; this is no humdrum, predictable novel. It is not without some really suspenseful and chillingly ugly sense. It take Blomkvist almost half the book to make any kind of breakthrough, when he spots something odd in a photograph of Harriet taken on the morning of her vanishing, and a series of coded numbers are revealed to him as references to biblical chapter and verse. At over 500 pages, there are minor flaws here and there perhaps has to do with Larsson’s tackling a serious and complicated topic – hatred and abused of woman – in a genre that isn’t serious to begin with.

It’s surprising to note that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was published in the US the same week in September 2008 that Lehman Brothers collapsed. In the many dissections of this literary phenomenon, much has been said about Salander, Larsson’s heroine. Strangely, far less attention has been paid to the equally prominent villains in this novel – without exception, bankers and industrialists. At the of its American release, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was far more topical than most anyone could imagine. “A bank direction who blows millions on foolhardy speculations should not keep his job,” writes Larsson in one typical passage. “A managing director who plays shell company games should do time.” Larsson is no less lacerating about influential journalists who treat “mediocre financial whelps like rock stars” and who docilely “regurgitate the statements issued by CEOs and stock-market speculors.” He  pleads for some “tough report” to “identify and expose as traitors the financial players who have “systematically and perhaps deliberately” damaged their  country’s economy “to satisfy the interests of their clients”

“What’s remarkable is that Larsson wrote all this in a book completed years before the financial meltdown of 2008 – and was referring only to Sweden. And yet the overlap with our recent history is profound – so much so that surely both his prescience and the universal resonance of his novel’s marathon ride through the zeitgeist and its ability to connect with so many readers in America and throughout the West.

Larsson’s prose is bright and functional, like Sweden, with barely a hint of poetry and, while not all the characters are exactly multifaceted, the plotting and pacing at turns quite masterful. It’s not all literary games, though. In keeping with recent Swedish fiction in this genre, Larsson has lacerating comments to make about contemporary Swedish society. His theme, in addition to violence against women, concern the incompetence and cowardice of investigation journalists, the moral bankruptcy of big capital and the virulent strain of Nazism still festering away beneath everyday life. Even more daringly, he broaches the touchy subject of how responsible a criminal is for his or her crimes. Once upon a time we blamed inborn rottenness of some kind. Nowadays we tend to blame poverty, social injustice, parental abuse, a difficult childhood – anything and anyone except the criminal. As Salander says, it’s as if we no longer believe anyone has a will of his or her own.

Memorable and timely, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is deserving of most of the hype and accolades with which it has been greeted with since its publication in Sweden and America. Intelligent and epic, it’s a largely adult read, the antithesis, perhaps, to the manufactured juvenilia of James Patterson, and the like. Crime fiction has seldom needed to salute and mourn a stellar talent such as Larsson’s in the breath.

Get this book online @Amazon

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On the interminable bus journey, bound for London, Lev practices his English: ‘Excuse me for troubling you.’ Do you have anything you could give me?’ ‘I’am legal. ‘Lev home country has just entered the EU and now he, like so many others, is heading west. His wife, Marina, has died of leukemia, his five-year-old daughter, Maya, is living with her grandmother and 42-year-old Lev – a farmer lumberyard worker, now one of Eastern Europe’s long-term unemployed – is traveling to London to find work.

Grey with exhaustion, Lev arrives in a dustry, midsummer city. Hope and envy jostle within him. As he told Lydia, his companion on the journey: ‘I’m going to their country now and I’m going to make them share it with me: their infernal luck. ‘Things, however, do not start well: almost all his savings are used up on his first night in the city, spent in an Earl’s Court B & B. on his upper after only 24 hours, he gate a job delivering leaflets for a kebab shop, for which he’s paid £2 a leaflet. He sleeps on the street. Desperate,lonely and grieving, he slips into poignant, wishful dreaminess.

Bit by bit, Lev gets himself on his feet and so begins a peripatetic, somes comic, often painful, journey through London, which it really feels to be a foreigner and the rage that being dependent on other can in duce. Lev is rescued from the streets by Lydia, who is now staying in the comparative paradise of Muswell Hill with Tom, an English psychotherapist, and Tom’s girlfriend, Larissa a yoga teacher from Lev and Lydia’s country. Tremain handless this culture clash with adroitness and humor: sitting on Tom’s lavatory, Lev relieves himself “as quietly as he could. The idea the he was taking a sh-t in the flat of an English psychotherapist made him feel very mildly afraid’.

Through Lev’s eyes, we see London as the newcomer views it and it is not an attractive sight: alternately moneyed and poverty-stricken its inhabitations obsessed by status and success. As Lev’s Irish landlord Christy says, with some prescience: ‘Life’s didn’t used to be like this, but now they are. If you can’t get your ball in the back of the net, you’re no one. Which is pretty much how Lev, working as a kitchen porter, is made to feel. At Lydia’s invitation, he goes to a concert at the Festival Hall, but is force to flee when his new mobile phone goes off in the expectant silence just as the conductor, for whom Lydia is working, takes the podium. On another occasion, his girlfriend takes him to the opening night of a friend’s feted new play, only to shame Lev for leaving the price tag on his new suede jacket.

As Lev fearfully and tentatively navigates this strange new city still mourning his wife, who died at only 36, he get know other Londoners. Ahmed, is a Muslim kebab-shop owner struggling to keep his business afloat in the post-9/11 world. Christy is a divorced Irish plumber who resents his upwardly mobile ex-wife and pines for his daughter; and Sophie is a young chef with a lizard tattoo who flirts with the restaurant’s celebrity guests but fusses over elderly people on Sundays at a retirement home called Ferndale Heights. Rudy, one of the Ferndale residents, is a rich old woman whose grown children neglect her. When Lev accompanies Sophie on her visits, Rudy confides her “guilt at how useless my life has been” and share memories of the childhood in India, particularly a school pageant for the British viceroy, when she held half of the letter “O” in a welcome sign. “I sometimes think,” she confides, “that’s all your life has amounted to, Ruby Constant, being half of something.”

Lev meets other economic migrants: a Russian woman on her own path to self-reinvention, who looks “determinedly straight ahead, like a gymnast trying to balance on a beam”; a teenage Russian kitchen worker; and two Chinese field laborers, Jimmy and Sonny, who laugh as they harvest asparagus, offering living proof that you can create your own happiness, even in far-from- happy circumstances. Tremain understands there’s heroism in the everyday act of survival, and she gradually brings Lev to the point where he can see this for himself.

After sleeping under tree and behind bushes to conserve his meager store of £20 note, Lev moves into an apartment in a “street of choky little houses. Called Belisha Road,” with the lonely Irishman, Christy. He takes a bunk bed in the room Christy’s young daughter had previously Slane, to have been given a child’s room. He wasn’t too embarrassed or proud to lay his head on a pillowcase. “They both longed,” Tremain writes, “to return to a time before the people they loved most were lost.”

After Lev finds a menial job in the chic restaurant where Sophie works, he slowly moves up the chain to vegetable preparer, taking baby steps toward a career as a chef. “I should feel grateful that sawmill closed,” he tells himself. Other – wise he might have ended up like his father, “enslaved to a lumberyard until I died and to the same lunch each day, and to the snow falling and drifting, year on year, falling and drifting in the same remote and backward places”.

Curious baffled, angry honorable, rash and passionate, Lev is a tremendous creation, and to identification, although he is a 40-plus widower and father , with burdens of memory and guilt at his back, Tremain, through her Voltaire’s candied; strange, for Lev is no ingénue, nor is the interested in the strangeness of the British to an outsider.

The novel, too also skewers the character-twisting distortion of celebrity culture; the infantile greed, materialism and success-worship of so much of contemporary life. Sophie, the sassy, sexy and generous colleague in the modish kitchen of “GK Ashe” who becomes Lev’s lovers, forsakes him in the end for an up-and-coming Brit-art git, “They didn’t used to be like this, but now they are,” says Lev’s Stewart, tea-brewing Irish landlord Chrisy, about these result-fixated modern “Brits”. “If you can’t get your ball in the back of the net, you’re no one.”

The Road Home on occasion switches from sad clique to Swiftian satire. The follies of conceptual art and avant-garde drama both draw raking fire. At the Royal Court, Lev storms righteously out of the press night of a fashionable shock-fest laden with viciously-parodied scenes of cruelty and abuse: “it’s probably my age, but I just feel weary with’ “he says.

On reading a novel by Rose Tremain, one suspect that what is torture for so many writers comes naturally to her. She has written about a dozen novels, set in different eras and places. Tremain writes as effortlessly and rhythmically as she breathes, tackling the serious misery of a hidden homesickness with a light and humane touch but with a firm grasp of the day-to-day realize and a rare ability to enter into the complex emotional world of the stranger. She’s on Lev’s side. English has made him a chef, but when is gratitude ever enough to overcome the longing to go back to one’s own country? Tremain writes so beautifully about Lev’s passage from near-destitution to success that it seems perverse to complain that she hasn’t made her book uglier. If The Road Home seems a slightly idealized version of a migrant worker’s journey (half through, Lev takes to reading Hamlet), it is a version filled with emotional richness, complex sensibility and a passionate insistence on the humanity of the poor, the unattractive, the flawed and the dispossessed.

This book is available online @Amazon.

The Social Network might be remembered as a film that came out too early. Its real-life drama is still ongoing. The film’s drama centre sod Facebook’s founding and the Internet revolution that followed. Two of its four founders – Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) and Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) – get most of the screen time. Reportedly, Zuckerberg wished filmmakers wouldn’t make his biopic while he was still alive. Not an unreasonable wish considering that The Social Network is character assassination masquerading as compelling social commentary. Story is far more important to director David Fincher and writer Aaron Sorkin. A good story outweighs everything else, the truth especially.

Within the first five minutes of The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg is unceremoniously dumped by his girlfriend Erica Albright (Rooney Mara). After posts a few bitchy blog comments about Erica, and hacks Harvard University’s databases with Eduardo Saverin’s help. His hacking creates Face Mash, a website where Harvard woman can be ranked by their hotness. The site gets so much traffic it crashes Harvard’s network in a few hours. Impressed, twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Armie Hammer and Josh Pence) and their associate Divya Narendra (Max Minghella) offer Mark the chance to program their own social networking site, Harvard Connection. Mark agrees to work with them, but never does. Instead, he goes to Eduardo with a social networking idea of his own, and after Eduardo’s thousand-dollar investment, facebook is born. The website’s popularity explodes in weeks and when the Winklevoss twins and Divya get wind of it, they’re ready to sure to sue Mark for stealing their idea. As Facebook grows it acquires a president – Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), the founder of Napster. it turns into an online empire as Parker’s influence on the company grows. And the inevitable break down of Mark and Eduardo’s partnership turns into one of the most infamous break-ups in corporate history.

Most of the performances in The Social Network are solid enough. Jesse Eisenberg has made a career of playing likeable nerd. Here he plays an unlikeable one. As Mark he talks a mile a minute, spewing pretentious, snarky observations. It’s sometimes hard to see the genius underneath all the dialogue. But Zuckerberg is more than just a whiz kid who understands codes. He can see the future because he will be friend to get there, then that’s just part of the journey. While Eisenberg plays Mark with an irritating energy, Andrew Garfield’s job is to play Eduardo with more calm. Unfortunately, this calm makes Garfield blend in with the wallpaper for most of the film. Eduardo does have one incredible moment, though you have to wait until almost the end of The Social Eduardo confronts Mark and their friendship finally crumbles, he breaks down. Garfield isn’t scenery chewing. It’s the kind of surprising scene that redeems flawed films.

The most arresting performances come from Armie Hammer and Josh Pence. The faces of the Winklevoss twins are played by Armie Hammer while Josh Pence body doubles as Tyler Winklevoss. You won’t spot the body double, but the seamless face technology may well become David Fincher’s trademark, since he also digitally aged Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Technology aside, Hammer plays the Winklevoss twins as polished preps with easy charm. Hammer will probably spend his career playing senator and blue bloods. While the Winklevoss twins are privileged brats, they also inject an absurd humor into The Social Network. Zuckerberg’s theft was probably the best thing that ever happened to them – it’s likely nobody would have heard of the Winklevosses otherwise.

While The Social Network features an ensemble cast, it really rises and falls with Sorkin’s screenplay. The dialogue feels written, if such a thing is possible. It grates on the ears and reads better than it sounds. The story itself barrels on and on, nearly going off the rails until the third and final act. Basically, The Social Network feels like two separate films. The first two-thirds give you little room to reflect and the last third is a slowly unraveling tragedy. The ending is stunning and surprisingly silent. Its triumphant and tragic as a billionaire inventor is held emotionally captive by his own creation. The surprising thing about The Social Network is how hard and fast the nerd live. Harvard life is a string of parties filled with dot-com groupies. The film isn’t an endorsement of Ivy League schools, Silicon Valley, on the geeks who infest them. These upstarts are made out as possible no matter how charming some of them may be. It’s as if the film is indicting an entire generation. This is one of its problems. The Social Network has been marked as the film that defines a generation. A film about the internet isn’t enough to pull off that feat. The Social Network isn’t great enough, and the generation it tries to capture can’t only be defined by the websites it uses.

The Facebook saga isn’t over: the Winklevosses have since been hit with their own lawsuit for theft, and they apparently plan to sue Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg all over again. While this emotional drama plays out, the film still feels cold. Caring about these characters is a tough sell. Real or on celluloid, they aren’t likeable enough to love, or evil enough to love to hate.

Watch the movie or get the DVD online @Amazon.

Jillian Larkin’s Vixen is the first novel in The Flapper series, a young adult series set during the Roaring Twenties. The novel is akin to the Luxe and Bright Young Things series by Anna Godbersen, and though it’s Larkin’s debut, it’s smoother and more readable than many other debuts. Considering the rise of paranormals in the young adult market, Vixen gives the impression that Larkin has downright invented the wheel. Regardless of previous work, Vixen is, at the very least a fun scandalous, page-turner.

It’s 1923, and American women have just gotten the right to vote. Booze is illegal, but speakeasies are everywhere. Dresses are short, and hairstyles even shorter. There’s a flapper on every gangster’s arm, and the new music is terrifying old people. This is the Jazz Age. Three young women and the boys who chase them are at the centre of it all in Chicago. Schoolgirl Gloria Carmody dreams of being a fierce flapper, instead of a poor little rich girl about to marry Sebastian Grey, the high-society man of every girl’s dream. She’s been sneaking off to the Green Mill, Chicago’s hottest speakeasy. Her best friend, Lorraine Dyer, is hopelessly in love with Gloria’s other best friend, Marcus. Lorraine’s desperate, jealous scheming threatens to destroy Gloria’s plans of keeping her man and her double life as a flapper all at the same time. In breezes Clara Knowles, Gloria’s sweet-as-pie cousin, who is far more of a dangerous dame than she lets on.

The fun thing about Vixen is that each chapter is a glimpse into each girl’s head. Gloria is the de-facto leader of the entire outfit, and for the first half of Vixen, it is very hard to feel too sorry for her. She comes from one of the wealthiest families in the Windy City and attends the fanciest of private schools. Her biggest problem in life is that she is bored out of her mind and – gasp – about to be married off to an even wealthier version of herself. But the one luxury in life Gloria can’t afford is love. Even the best teenagers want to be bad and for 1920s Gloria, guzzling booze, wearing way too short skirts, chopping off her hair, and dancing the Charleston to scary music with men is shock to high society. Eventually, her new double life forces Gloria to see a part of society she never even noticed, forcing her to re-evaluate the things she values in life. It’s a very subtle character arc and by Vixen’s end, you can’t help but cheer Gloria on.

Lorraine is equally rich, but it is a pity you feel for her by the end, not sympathy. Most of her troubles she’s brought on herself, though Lorraine acts like a victim. It’s Gloria’s and Clara’s fault that she can’t get Marcus. Of course, it’s nobody’s fault. Lorraine still hasn’t figured out that sometimes the object of your affection simply doesn’t care if you exist.

As for Clara Knowles, she’s the biggest mystery of all. Her parents have sent her to Chicago after she ran off to New York City to become a flapper. She’s put in charge of her cousin Gloria’s wedding, and her aunt has threatened her with reform school if she doesn’t shape up. So Clara has to play at being the good girl despite being tempted by Marcus’ charms. Which means she’s left to watch Gloria play at being a flapper, knowing that Gloria is on the same path of destruction. But exactly what Clara’s destruction is remains deliciously unclear.

Stripping down the 1920s into an enjoyable read for the young adult crowd is no easy task. There’s heavy stuff like feminism, race, and class. Tackling those subjects can lead to automatic preachiness, but Larkin has admirably packed all that density into one book. She makes all these issues centre stage at the Green Mill without ever making it obvious. What reads as a dance between races is likely more allegorical than Vixen would ever let on. Young women putting off marriage and chasing their own dreams while their mothers wither away in loveless marriages is statement enough about the changing times. But Vixen is also an irreverent send-up to Jazz Age pop culture. There’s the endlessly entertaining 1920s slang, and the swishy, fabulous outfits, which are described in stunning detail. There are references to the icons of the era: Buster Keaton and Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It’s better than a history lesson, and a thousand times more fun.

There are boys to die for – high-society beaus and broody bandleaders. The 1920s were fun and fabulous, but also dangerous. The gun molls were deadlier than the hired guns. Vixen’s plot reads a lot like previous 1920s series, which can be a little stale if you’re already a fan of books set in the era. But Larkin’s work is still the cat’s meow, an addictive addition to the glitzy historical Gossip Girl hybrid genre. Its sequel, Ingénue, was released recently too.

“Ye who are weary, come home.”

Home is a tender and profoundly nostalgic text about family and the passing of generations. It is set in the 1950s in the town of Gilead, Iowa, and told mainly from the point of view of Glory Boughton, a school teacher who has returned home to nurse her ailing father after her five-year-long romance has failed. She is 38 years old. Her older brother Jack, something of a renegade, shows up also. He has not been home for 20 years. Jack has a history of alcoholism and petty theft but is a charming and endearing character. Glory undertakes to please him too, and the Boughtons spend some weeks together that are written about with simplicity and extraordinary detail. Old Mr. Boughton is a Presbyterian Reverend and the text accommodates some meditations on love and death and faith.

This book has something retro about it since it is set in the fifties and centres on the problems of dealing with an alcoholic family member. Some beautiful passages evoke the prairies. Robinson writes:

The next morning Jack was out in the garden early, cutting back weeds head high, gaunt shafts of plants with masses of tiny flowers on them, dusty lavender, droning with bees. And there would be black-eyed Susan, and nettles and milkweed and jewelweed and brambles and some avid vine that wilted in sunlight and broke at the slightest touch, leaving tiny whiskers of thorn in the hand that touched it.

Robinson’s previous novel Gilead won the Pulitzer Prize. It told the story of Reverend Boughton’s neighbour John Ames and evoked the prairie town with luminous prose. These passages about the natural world of the Iowa town are some of the loveliest in the latest novel, and Robinson’s careful depiction of the relationship between the two old men is brilliantly handled. Home continues where Gilead left off, zoning in on relationships in the Boughton family and the weariness that brings wounded family members to seek out their childhood place of nurturing. Robinson says:

She felt sorry for her father, happy as he was. It was hard work talking to jack. So little in his childhood and youth could be mentioned without discomfort, his twenty-year silence was his to speak about if he chose to, but they were prepared to appreciate his discretion if any account of it might have caused more discomfort still. Then there was the question “Why are you here?” which they would never ask. Glory thought, why am I here? How cruel it would be to ask me that.

The deft touches of prairie life across the years are welcome in this tale of minute emotional crises. They help to balance the main narrative and keep the reader’s focus tuned to the suffering of the adult characters. Memories abound and are beautifully recorded. For example, Robinson writes joyously of the Gilead of old when she says:

The sky was blue, the terraced hills glittered with new corn, and the pastures the cows were standing with their calves or lying in the mingled, muddied shade of oak trees. “Well, I’d almost forgotten it all,” the old man said. “It’s good to get out of the house from time to time. Ames will enjoy it.” He talked for a while about the old Gilead. It was the smell that reminded him. There used to be chicken coops and rabbit hutches behind every house almost, and people kept milk cows, and there was enough open land right in town to be plowed with a horse or a mule and planted corn. You knew the animals around town just like you knew the children, and if some old she-goat was grazing in the flower garden, well, you knew you her and she knew you and you could just walk her home.

These passages add to the retro feel of the novel.

Robinson writes with an eye to the fine detail and her text is a pleasure to read simply for the sheer joy of the writing. However, I found the story a bit slow and repetitive and the character Jack somewhat tedious in his forever excuses and self-detracting statements. He wants to be the centre of attention always, it would seem, and speaks with his hand to his face most of the time, a gesture that gets annoying in its repetition. I believe he is intended to be an anti-hero of some proportions, but if this be the case, he is really not sufficiently interesting to pull it off.

On the other hand, Glory and her housewifely ways are always a pleasure. She cooks chicken and dumplings in order to fill the house with a familiar childhood aroma and so comfort the old father and Jack. She makes pots of coffee to warm them, and pancakes to treat them to special breakfasts. Glory is a pious woman (though she rejects the word as applied to herself), and the old Reverend will leave the house to her when he dies. Glory is surprised by this gesture, and deeply conflicted. Does she want the old house to have a place for herself that is home also to other siblings, or is she frightened to be trapped in the old house? Only the future can tell as it manifests itself.

Glory, meanwhile, is caught up in memories of the past that made the old house home. She thinks of her grandmother:

She’d eat kidney when she find it. Tongue. Mutton. In spring she’d be out in the fields, along the fences, picking dandelion greens as soon as the sun was up. She’d come in with her apron full of purslane. My mother thought it was embarrassing. She’d say, “You’d think we didn’t feed her” but she always did what she wanted to do.

The healing of these two characters in the home is the real subject of this glowing text, and if it is a bit slow and repetitive, it does not really detract from the moving aspect of the telling. This is a woman’s book, about nature of family and the healing power of love.

Marilynne Robinson has also written Housekeeping and two books of nonfiction, Mother Country and The Death of Adam. She teaches at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

This book is available online @Amazon.

Undoubtedly, this book is perfect for anyone who dreams of “putting up” their favorite fruits for future use (in the kitchen). It’s arranged by season for the ‘freshest results’. For example, Spring is time for rhubarb, strawberries, apricots and other eagerly anticipated fruits inventively combined into rosemary-scented marmalades, orange-blossom jams and good old solid preserves.

Also included are marmalades of bergamot, pink grapefruit and Meyer lemons, with Saunders providing in-depth explanations and many recipe variations, including information on rare as well as common fruits.

This cookbook is available online @Amazon.