Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts
Christopher de Hamel
Allen Lane, £12.99, pp656
Christopher de Hamel once had the pope and the archbishop of Canterbury bowing before him on live television, though as he wryly explains, he was holding the venerated sixth century Gospels of St Augustine at the time. Over the course of this brilliant globe-trotting study of 12 medieval manuscripts, De Hamel, the librarian of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, brings us into close proximity with treasures as diverse as the Book of Kells and The Carmina Burana. A richly learned yet hugely accessible work.
House of Names
Colm Tóibín
Viking, £8.99, pp272
In Colm Tóibín’s retelling of the Greek myth of Clytemnestra, the fateful opening line she is given – “I have been acquainted with the smell of death” – says everything about the savagery that will follow. The landscape of ancient familial murder remains the same, but Tóibín finds modern – or perhaps timeless – resonances in language, tone and narrative: House of Names is a thriller, an investigation of friendship and exile, even a domestic psychological drama. As always, Tóibín’s fantastic writing is evocative without a trace of flashiness, offering generous, even empathetic motivations for the villainy, without dialling down the vengefulness, tragedy or anger.
The Chameleon
Samuel Fisher
Salt, £9.99, pp192
You might expect a debut by a bookseller to be a hymn to the joy of books, but writing from the actual viewpoint of a book (here the narrator, who can transform himself into any combination of words, places himself at the centre of various events over the past 800 years) takes that love to a whole new level. Fisher has so much fun with this tricksy conceit that the very human story he settles on (amid nods to Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges and Dylan Thomas), of a cold war spy looking back on a life, takes time to hit home. That it eventually does is testament to his infectious enthusiasm for the power of the novel.
To order Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts for £11.04, House of Names for £7.64, or The Chameleon for £8.49, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
