For many of us the news that there is an “Atlantis” off the coast of Yorkshire—a region best known for its tea, puddings, and the Brontë sisters—will come as some surprise. One might wonder what other metropolises, mythical and otherwise, lurk off the coastlines of the world’s countries.
The answer, an elementary search will reveal, is a lot. Some were destroyed by coastal erosion; a few were deliberately submerged by people; others were erased by weather events; and at least one was the stuff of legend before archaeologists uncovered evidence of its existence.
Now, at the age of 61, this period is nearly at an end. I know I’m not headed for the academic tenure track — my PhD is an end in itself. But I’d do it again. New knowledge enriches you, regardless of how old you are. My advice is: if you have the opportunity to dive into a new field, take it.
The writer of a successful first novel – and they don’t come much more successful than Douglas Stuart’s Booker-winning Shuggie Bain – has two choices when it comes to the follow-up. Either they seek to prove their range with something entirely different, or they capitalise on that early success, giving readers more of what pleased them first time around. Stuart has opted for the latter course: Young Mungo is set in the same world and at more-or-less the same time as Shuggie Bain. It turns around the same basic friction: a young man growing up in grinding poverty who, because of talent, temperament and sexuality, is particularly ill-suited to the hard-edged world of the Glasgow schemes.
If Young Mungo doesn’t raise the same immediate thrill as Shuggie Bain – the sense of discovering a new voice of coruscating brilliance – there’s a richer, deeper pleasure to be gleaned here. Young Mungo is a finer novel than its predecessor, offering many of the same pleasures, but with a more sure-footed approach to narrative and a finer grasp of prose. There are sentences here that gleam and shimmer, demanding to be read and reread for their beauty and their truth.
One striking feature of “Four Treasures of the Sky,” Jenny Tinghui Zhang’s engrossing, eventful first novel, takes the form of an absence: Although much of this epic late-19th-century tale unfolds in the American West, there is not a memorable moment involving a horse.
The dearth of pounding hooves and accompanying dust clouds is telling; Zhang has trained her gaze on an area of American history that has gone largely unnoticed in westerns, even revisionist ones: the Chinese immigrants who built railroads and worked in mines — only to be met with racist persecution when they tried to assimilate into American life.
The novel is a whodunit of sorts. But it is also a thought-provoking drama which routinely strikes a number of serious notes about man's inhumanity and the traumatic effects of conflict. As Edward reminds us, "War poisons everything that it does not destroy."
Throughout the book, Marron continues to challenge himself to toe that line, which is what makes the book far more interesting than if it merely showed him bonding with his trolls. The book shows that connecting with the "other side" is endlessly complex, a constant push and pull that requires significant work and emotional sacrifice. At the same time, he shows that doing so can be powerful, important, and in some cases, can actually change minds.
If you hadn’t heard of Coleg Harlech in Wales, an adult education college whose endangered brutalist structures are “probably the most sheerly convincing 20th-century buildings in the entire country”, don’t worry. You are not alone. And it is precisely because works like this are obscure that Modern Buildings in Britain had to be written. For one of its strengths is the devotion and persistence with which Owen Hatherley has sought out gems across the country: a radar station in Fleetwood, an experimental plastic classroom in Preston, the magical Pannier Market in Plymouth, the modest 1950s Edgbaston offices of the Engineering & Allied Employers’ Federation.