Fiction

Thank you David Simon and Kate Atkinson. Two books one after the other that have given my brain an escape from the mundane.

Homicide – A Year on the Killing Streets written by the creative genius behind the tv drama ‘The Wire‘ was a brick of a book that paid tribute to the work of Baltimore’s homicide detectives. Totally lacking in sentiment it details a year in the life of the department’s struggle to solve a growing tide of murders. It took me a few hundred pages to realise that it was not a work of fiction, but a faithful account of the lives of a special bunch of people fully documented by their ‘detective intern’.

Life after Life skips backwards and forwards in time to present different narratives in the lives of the Todd family where chance events or choices create very different outcomes in the first half of 20th century Europe. I thought that it might have become irritating skipping around in time, but the story is carefully crafted and the pieces hang together without any awkwardness.

Let’s hope can make it a hat-trick – I’ve nearly finished Life after Life.

Any suggestions?