Top 5 Book Titles - October 2014

Month of October 2014

Ranking	Fiction - Title
	Sep	Oct	Amazon Current
1	The Revenge of Seven by Pittacus	Shopaholic to the stars by Sophie Kinsella	The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
2	Adultery by Paulo Coelho	Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
3	Inferno by Dan Brown	The Best of me by Nicholas Sparks
4	And The Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini	Adultery by Paulo Coelho
5	The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith	The First phone call from heaven by Mitch Albom

 

Ranking	Non-Fiction - Title
	Sep	Oct	Amazon Current
1	Stand Strong by Nick Vujicic	I am Malala by Malala & Christina Lamb	A Bill Cosby biography
2	How Life Works by Andrew Matthews	The Art Of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli
3	The Art Of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli	Stand Strong by Nick Vujicic
4	Lean In For Graduates by Sheryl Sandberg	How Life Works by Andrew Matthews
5	Hard choices by Hillary Clinton	Lean in for graduates by Sheryl Sandberg

 

The Glow

British novelist Ned Beauman has been touted as one of the most promising young authors by the likes of London's The Guardian newspaper.

The prolific writer has churned out a new novel every two years - from his debut Boxer, Beetle (2010) to The Teleportation Accident (2012), which made the Man Booker Prize long-list.

Yet, the fiction wunderkind is only 29 years old.  His imagination knows no boundaries and there is no better word to describe his style than eclectic.

After flitting with time and space across parallel story arcs in his first two novels, Beauman proves he is no one trick pony with Glow.  This is his story to be completely chronological and to be set solely in contemporary times.

This even as he tackes the trite genre of an international conspiracy thriller.  The novel is named after the elusive and lucrative fictional drug that is sought after by pracically everybody in the story.

This includes lead character Raf, hipster type whom we first meet at  a rave party in south London laundrette.  Raf suffers from the very real condition called the non-24 hour sleep/wake syndrome, which affects his body's circadian rhythm and makes it impossible to sleep at normal times.

After his friend mysteriously disappears, he takes on - with the help of an unlikely band of allies - a multi-national corporation named Lacebark, in the red from its core business of mining and look for alternative sources of revenue.

In 249 pages, the story flits from London to Myanmar and Iceland to Pakistan, and includes kidnaps, guerrilla warfare and betrayal.

The result is a caper that occasionally feels threadbare, while the curveballs at practically every corner lessen the impact of the eventual sucker punch.

Despite the lamentably average plot, Beauman is an extraordinarily gifted writer, painting vivid pictures on almost every page.  His delightfully scrupulous play on words lead s to original bon mots, such as the spilled strawberry milkshake trying to "ooze away to safety" from a waiter's mop.  Or a woman whose cheekbones are tantamount to an 1980s 3-D computer graphic, based on the "economical number of sharp, flat planes".

Reading Glow, like the drug the story is centred on, is the psychedelic experience that might well get you on a confuddled high.