North America and the Caribbean

 

A selection of books on Canada, the United States and the Caribbean Islands

Time Out 1000 Things to do in New York

Packed with 1,000 original and inspirational ideas of what to do in the city that never sleeps. This is a wonderful book for first timers to the city as well as seasoned visitors. With unusual takes on well known hotspots, legendary New Yorkers favourite things to do, top views, secret eats and must visit bars.

Time Out 2008

ISBN 9781846700859

Pbk £12.99

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Raymond Carver

This is a wonderful collection of stories which, with both grimness and affection, depicts the Northwest. 

There has been much controversy surrounding this book since the unedited version, Beginners, was published last year.  It was noted that the style of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love was what seemed to make it a landmark book, and distinct from Carver's other books because of its sparseness, and yet this style was largely a result of Gordon Lish's - then editor of Albert A. Knopf  -  editing.

I would go out on a limb and say that both books are utterly superb and deserve to be read in tandem.  This provides a fascinating study of the exercise of writing, and of how what one includes or leaves out can completely change out perception of the characters and the author's motives.

Carver never flinched from the potential of people to destroy and cause pain, or the possibility that life for some is an endless series of missed chances and mistakes.  The drama caused by misunderstandings and infidelities is dark and deeply compelling.  However, a warmth always seeps into the stories too.  It is a joy to encounter the love and magic, as well as the danger, behind the apparently banal surface of these characters' lives.

Vinatage 2009

(First published in the USA in 1981 by Alfred A. knopf)

ISBN 9780099530329

Pbk £6.99

Philip Roth - American Pastoral

Christian Rutherford writes:

American Pastoral is a story ultimately about the decay of old-fashioned American idealism as the hero, 'Swede' Levov, is thwarted in his striving to pursue the perfect life for which he seemed destined by his beloved daughter Merry who, having become radicalized by militant opponents of the war in Vietnam, carries out an act of terrorism and subsequently disappears.  This one event has repercussions that affect every aspect of his life and brings him to the brink of confused despair.  In the background of the story runs the analogous decay of his home town of  Newark, New Jersey where his glove-making company, founded and nurtured by his father in more prosperous times has become surrounded by an urban wasteland.  The vivid evocation of this setting as well as that of the small-town bourgeois atmosphere of Old Rimrock where Swede raises his young family  justifies the inclusion of this title in the Travel Bookshop's stocklist.  This is a ruminative and often dark book but ultimately its vision is as compassionate as it is powerful.

Vintage 1998

ISBN 0099771810

Pbk £7.99

In America

Stephen Fry

In his chariot of Englishness - a black London cab - Stephen starts his epic journey on the east coast and zig-zags across America, stopping in every state from Maine to Hawaii.  En route hes discovers the South Side of Chicago, with blues legend Buddy Guy, marches with Zulus in New Orleans' Mardi Gras, and drums with the Sioux Nation in South Dakota; joins a Georgia family for Thanksgiving, "picks" bluegrass hillbillies , and find himself in a Tennessee garden full of dead bodies.

Harper 2009

ISBN 9780007266357

Pbk £8.99

Routledge Atlas of American History, The

Martin Gilbert

The Routledge Atlas of American History presents a series of 163 graphic and detailed maps, accompanied by informative captions, facts and figures.  The complete history of America is unravelled through vivid representations of all the significant landmarks be concerned with politics, military events, social history, transport or economics.

Routledge 2009

(Sixth Edition. First published in 1968 and updated since at regular intervals)

ISBN 9780415488396

Pbk £16.99

Theatre of Fish: Travels Through Newfoundland and Labrador

John Gimlette

John Gimlette's travels through this harsh and awesome landscape, the eastern extreme of the Americas, broadly mirrors that of Dr Eliot Curwen, his great-grandfather, who spent a summer there as a doctor in 1893, and who was witness to some of the most beautiful ice and cruelest poverty in the British Empire. Using Curwen's extraordinarily frank journal, John Gimlette revisits the places his great-grandfather encountered and along the way explores his own links with this brutal land.

Arrow 2005

ISBN 9780099453253

Pbk £7.99

Sunnyside

Glen David Gold

With a cast of enthralling characters both historical and fictional, Sunnyside is a heart-rending, spell-binding novel about dreams, ambition and the dawn of the modern age.

Sceptre 2009

(Signed Copies Available)

ISBN 9780340995631

Hbk £17.99

Through the Children's Gate: A Home in New York

Adam Gopnik

Adam Gopnik, the highly esteemed, prize winning New Yorker writer, moved

his young family back to New York City in 2000. This is a chronicle, by turns tender and hilarious, about raising a family in the middle of Manhattan.

On every page of this delicious book you will meet characters  and  situations  that tell

you this could only be New York. The parents  who are determined to get their

children literally to fly at the  school production of Peter Pan - the Cambodian cashier

at the local deli who is  more Jewi sh than Gopnik' s grandfather - his gloriously

peculiar analyst who argue  that a name can be damaging to the human psyche,

saying Adam's name is very ugly - the birder who take  Adam to  see the huge flock

of feral parrots that have taken over Flatbush.  No one knows how they got there or

how they survive the brutal winter, but they do. And flourish on it.

Through the Children's Gate is written with Gopnik's   signature mix of mind and heart,

elegantly and exultantly alert to the minute miracles  that bring a place to life.

 

Adam Gopnik is also the author of Paris to the Moon

Quercus 2007

ISBN 9781847243249

Pbk £8.99

Next Exit Magic Kingdom: Florida Accidentally

Rory Maclean

Rory Maclean, author of Stalin's Nose (1992) and The Magic Bus (2007) amongst others, did not mean to go to Florida. A mistake cause the wrong newspaper to be delivered to his door and twenty-four hours later he found himself bound for the Sunshine State. Abandoning himself to the winds of chance, Maclean stumbled across an alternative Florida spending time in the Psychic Centre of the world and meetingthe Saint of Palatka and Wanda Flip, the head mermaid of Weeki Wachee. He paid $5 to drink from the fountain of youth and visited the Garden of Eden.
Travel writing for those who like to see the unusual side of the world.

Tauris Parke Paperbacks 2000

ISBN 9781845116200

Pbk £9.99

Siri Hustvedt - What I loved

Natasha Shafi writes:

From the outset, Siri Husvedt in her novel "What I Loved" instantly creates an air of mystery making us aware this will be a story far deeper than what is said on the surface.

We are transported to the New York art scene where a story is told of the daily routines, lives and relationships of friends, artists, partners, lovers and sons, and how each of these relationships moulds the life of Leo the narrator. Husdvedt has the magical quality of making the narrative both subjective and objective at almost the very same time- it is almost as if the narrator is a spectator far removed, reliving his life with the reader standing next to him. Yet Husvedt assimilates touching and raw emotional details that instantly shift us to the particular moment in time that is described.

As the story unfolds, so does the brooding dark quality behind the story, which increases the deeper we get, illustrating the simplicities of life that are often taken for granted. This is best described through the young character of Mark. The subtle details of his character that Husvedt incorporates throughout the novel eventually become the novel's premise overtaking the dramatic and tragic events that had occurred previously.

There are moments in the novel where Husvedt interjects vivid details of a New Yorker feeling displaced in various states in America and also characterises the strong sense of place in which the novel in set. 

This becomes a novel that superseded my expectation. Yes it is a novel that describes the New York art scene, the concept of art history, the lives of artists, their partners, living and working closely to such people as well as dissecting the mundane, the tragic, the complex concept of love; but it essentially makes you think outside of the subject matter, it grips you and presents twists and turns that you would not expect. The eloquence and potency of the Husvedt's written word is only justified by reading the novel itself. This most certainly is a book one will learn from and be enchanted by.

Sceptre 2003

ISBN 0340682388

Pbk £7.99

 

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