I\u2019ve been looking forward to this week for many, many months. If you follow me on Twitter (aka X) you can\u2019t help but have noticed my continued insistence that people should read Dominic Nolan\u2019s excellent Vine Street.<\/p>\n
Vine Street utterly blew me when I listened to the audiobook, it was like no story I had read and it put me through an emotional spin cycle.\u00a0 I described it as a serial killer story which spanned several decades. When I saw Dom at Aye Write and also at Bloody Scotland he described Vine Street as a book about the dance halls of Soho in the 1920s. It\u2019s both those things and so much more.<\/p>\n
Why have I been looking forward to this week when Vine Street has been on my mind for the last two years?\u00a0 Simply because this week sees the publication of White City, Dominic\u2019s new book and I am actively avoiding all spoilers so I can read it on release this week.\u00a0 The excitment is real people \u2013 this is what I blog for, to share my reading highights.<\/p>\n
With White City looming into view I asked Dom if he would take on my Decades challenge and add some new books to my Ultimate Library. I was delighted he agreed and I am really excited to share his selections with you.<\/p>\n
Before we get to the books I shall quickly recap the Decades Challenge and why these books are being added to my Decades Library:<\/p>\n
I am trying to assemble the best collection of unmissable books. In January 2021 I opened the Library with no books on the virtual shelves. I have invited authors, publishers, bloggers and journalists to add their favourite books to my Library shelves so I can ensure visitors to my Decades Library will only have the very best books to choose from.\u00a0 Why is it a Decades Library?<\/p>\n
Two rules govern the selection process:<\/p>\n
1 \u2013 You May Choose Any Five Books
2 \u2013 You May Only Choose One Book Per Decade From Five Consecutive Decades<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a Decades Library as each book which is added to the Library by my guests must be contained wihin a fifty-year publication span. As you will see, this week\u2019s selections begin in the 1960s. It\u2019s time to let Dom take over \u2013 brace your TBR, this is going to challenge your book buying willpower\u2026<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
In WHITE CITY, his fourth novel, two broken families, unknowingly connected by the biggest heist in British history, fight to get by in a ruined city blighted by crime, corruption, and the fanning of racial tensions among the working poor. It is out November 7th from Headline.<\/p>\n https:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/White-City-stunning-unforgettable-historical\/dp\/1035416751<\/a><\/p>\n Sometimes he\u2019s on twitter @NolanDom, usually when he\u2019s supposed to be writing.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n THE LOWLIFE \u2013 ALEXANDER BARON (1963)<\/span><\/u><\/b><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI am full of knots that are going to get tighter and tighter unless I put the money on.\u201d<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Baron was one of the great London novelists, a bard of the poor and downtrodden. WR Burnett said, \u201cI humanize people that other writers don\u2019t even write about,\u201d which could have been Baron\u2019s epitaph. A born loser, a survivor, a dogtrack player, Harryboy is always on the scheme and always in debt, living through the postwar reconstruction of a Hackney of poverty, crime, and gentrification. A slum picaresque. <\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Baron wrote other fine novels, but the sequel to The Lowlife, Strip Jack Naked<\/i>, was not one of them. A preposterous Euro-jaunt where Harryboy trails after a rich woman from Paris to Venice. For a genuine French-flavoured companion to The Lowlife<\/i>, track down Jean Cayrol\u2019s Foreign Bodies<\/i>, published in English the same year.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cChicago isn\u2019t a city. Just the raw materials for a city.\u201d<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Howland\u2019s second book (following 1974\u2019s W-3<\/i>, a memoir about her attempted suicide and subsequent spell in a psychiatric facility) is a sharply observed collection of autobiographical stories about a working class Jewish family in Chicago. Her world is dilapidated, but not grim; compassionate, but not sentimental; angry, but not cold-hearted. It brims with vitality, and is told in her own off-beat cadence, which might wrongfoot you, but is always honest. <\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Howland was well-received critically on publication, and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship \u2013 the so-called \u201cGenius Grant\u201d \u2013 in 1984, a year after her third book, Things to Come and Go<\/i>, a triptych of long stories. She never published again; praise is nothing in the face of expectation. In recent years she has been rediscovered to some minor fanfare, and Picador have published gorgeous new editions of her books. Buy them, please. <\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cA man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house.\u201d<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n A family friend, a librarian, gifted me my first volume of Carver\u2019s stories for my eighteenth birthday. For the first time, I became consumed not by what a writer was saying, but how they were saying it. Carver\u2019s brief, pared down stories of working class purgatory are elliptical. Precarious. His silences have sharp edges. His characters live in fear and expectation. Of what exactly, on either count, they are unsure, other than the certainty it will be a catastrophe. Marriage, infidelity, financial woes, the lethally quiet domestication of bad intentions; sleights of the human heart by which we change out of our own sight. A gallery of blue collar characters sketched in potent prose you catch just out of the corner of your eye. Plant workers and waitresses haunting depressed towns in the death rattle of industry. Travelling salesmen with no place to go and nothing to sell. Good people, surely, doing the best they can. Like all of us, none of them are getting out alive. <\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI can neither excuse nor blame my father. I can do nothing, it seems, but resemble him.\u201d<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n A writer who loved words, who wielded language bizarrely, Costello couched comedy in despair. Seventeen years after his debut, Murphy Stories<\/i>, he returned with another collection of connected stories about his eponymous working class protagonist from Decatur, Illinois. The tales almost cohere novelistically, are perhaps something more than a collection but not quite a novel. They require the space between them that the shorter form grants. \u201cMy aesthetics when it comes to writing are novels that read like short stories, short stories that read like poems, and poems that read like prayers.\u201d I would say he was a writer\u2019s writer, but he\u2019s so woefully underread even by his published peers that he was more like a writer\u2019s writer\u2019s writer. Joy Williams passed Costello\u2019s work to Gary Fisketjon in the 1980s, but the editor showed no interest. Tastemakers often lack requisite taste. Costello remained obscure until his death, and now beyond it. His books have never been reprinted, but old University of Illinois editions can be spotted by eagle-eyed hunters. Go find them. <\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/grabthisbook.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/Dominic-Nolan.jpg\")
<\/a>Dominic Nolan lives in London and is the author of the widely acclaimed VINE STREET, AFTER DARK, and PAST LIFE.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>BLUE IN CHICAGO \u2013 BETTE HOWLAND (1978)<\/span><\/u><\/b><\/p>\n<\/a>WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LOVE \u2013 RAYMOND CARVER (1981)<\/span><\/u><\/b><\/p>\n<\/a>MIDDLE MURPHY \u2013 MARK COSTELLO (1991)<\/span><\/u><\/b><\/p>\n<\/a>TREE OF SMOKE \u2013 DENIS JOHNSON (2007)<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n