Tower and Town, April 2019

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A Good Read

When a book is titled The Killing of Butterfly Joe you have to expect that things won’t end well for Joe, whoever he may be. He is in fact an exasperating, iconoclastic, slightly exhausting maverick with the knack of “making you feel your life could be so much more interesting if you dropped everything and followed him”. So our narrator and hero, Llew Jones does just that in this hugely enjoyable though hard-to-classify book – it’s partly a road trip that’s skidded horribly off-piste, a little bit crime fiction  (not really whodunnit, more whatdunnit, or did?do-it), and a slightly skewed look at the tragi-comedy of the American Dream.  The author, Rhidian Brook also wrote The Aftermath, on which the recently released film is based, and which I also recommend. (The book, not the film, haven’t seen it. Yet.)

Last summer an Australian couple came into the shop hoping to buy a book that had received a glowing review in the Quantas inflight magazine. They couldn’t remember what it was called, or who wrote it, so I was delighted at the cleverness of me when I identified it as The Plotters by Un-su Kim “the hottest new voice in Korean fiction” Alas for my customers, it hadn’t yet been published in the UK. But now it has, and I moved it to the top of my to-read list. It’s about organized crime, hit-men, and corruption,  a deceptively simply written, darkly funny and original novel.

Finally, a book I haven’t read but which has received a lot of coverage, and sounds intriguing, even though it’s “fantasy” which isn’t everyone’s goblet of potion. From all the reviews it sounds as though Marlon James has taken the genre in a new direction in Black Leopard, Red Wolf. If anyone out there would like to read it and report back to me, I’d be delighted.

Debby Guest