The day of reckoning
US District Court, Tampa, Florida March 26, 1990 Armed guards led me into a tiny, windowless room in Tampa’s US District Courthouse. Through the glossy mahogany walls came the muffled voices of lawyers arguing and the response of an unruly crowd. On the other side of the door, I was about to do battle with...
Whit Stillman: All there
You’d be forgiven for not exactly jumping with joy at the news that yet another Jane Austen adaptation has hit the big screen. This year alone has seen the release of both Burr Steer’s irreverent and rather dubious Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and the publication of Curtis Sittenfeld’s contemporary reimagining of the original, Eligible....
Riad Sattouf: Tykes and tyrants
In The Arab of the Future, his first book to be published in English, bestselling French comics artist and former Charlie Hebdo contributor Riad Sattouf begins an epic five-volume graphic memoir about his formative years as the son of a volatile but vulnerable Syrian father and a forbearing French mother. Told with childlike wonder and...
Vendela Vida: Other people
Vendela Vida’s latest novel The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty thrusts a nameless narrator into a maelstrom of mishaps in Morocco in which she loses her luggage, money and proof of identity and dives headlong into a random hiring as a cranky and needy Hollywood actress’s double. Her delirious dissembling is fuelled by a determined indifference...
Jill Ciment: Not sentimental
Jill Ciment’s bittersweet comic novel Heroic Measures – just published for the first time in the UK – tells the story of an elderly Jewish couple in the midst of a bidding war over their prime Brooklyn apartment as their beloved dachshund lies sick in a hospital cage on the other side of town. The...
High life and dirty boulevards
The films in this list may range widely in style and subject, from brooding dramas to spectacular action movies, from French New Wave masterpieces to slightly dated 80s thrillers; some are French productions while others are American movies filmed in Paris, but one thing is true of all of them: they couldn’t have been set...
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen untamed
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s debut novel One Night, Markovitch is a dazzlingly funny and tender story about love, betrayal and mythmaking. Set before, during and after the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, it centres around an unremarkable man who agrees to an arranged marriage to a beautiful woman to help her escape Nazi Europe for the emerging Jewish homeland...
Day 38
Jean-Marc Vallée’s adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, scripted by Nick Hornby and starring Reese Witherspoon, is now out in UK cinemas. It tells the story of Strayed’s 1,100-mile wilderness walk towards personal discovery along the Pacific Crest Trail. Witherspoon has been nominated for Best Actress in the Screen Actors’ Guild, the Golden Globes, the BAFTA Awards...
Sitting tight
Publication week, and surfing the exhilarated, semi-anxious state of having a book launched into the world. We cracked a bottle – okay, more than one – across the bows of Getting Colder on Monday… marking the beginning of the uncertain voyage any book takes. In my other job, as a screenwriter, seeing your work go out...
Damaged hero
Based on Jussi Adler-Olsen’s award-winning novel Mercy, the first in the bestselling Department Q crime fiction series, The Keeper of Lost Causes is a powerful and gripping thriller starring Nicolaj Lie Kaas (The Killing), Sonja Richter (The Homesman) and Fares Fares (Zero Dark Thirty, Safe House). Carl Mørck (Kaas) is a troubled detective who is...
