1 H Potter/Philosopher’s Stone JK Rowling/Bloomsbury pounds 4

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Published: July 30, 2010

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1 H Potter/Philosopher’s Stone JK Rowling/Bloomsbury pounds 4.99

First outing for the engaging apprentice sorcerer
2 H Potter/Chamber of Secrets JK Rowling/Bloomsbury/pounds 4.99Harry Potter goes back to Hogwarts Academy3 Charlotte Gray Sebastian Faulks/Vintage pounds 6.99SOE shenanigans in perfect period underwear4 Another World Pat Barker/Penguin pounds 6.99Magnificent, subtle ghost story with WWI flashbacks5 About a Boy Nick Hornby/Indigo pounds 6.99Feckless male makes friends with fatherless lad6 Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire A Foreman/Flamingo pounds 8.99That irrepressible Spencer woman7 The Loop Nicholas Evans/Corgi pounds 5.99The wolf whisperer8 The Tesseract Alex Garland/Penguin pounds 6.99Four complex, interlocking tales set in the Philippines9 Amsterdam Ian McEwan/Vintage pounds 6.99Below-par Booker winner picks up sales10 A Widow For One Year John Irving/Black Swan pounds 7.99Bereaved female novelist at three stages of her life. It is a philosophical novel, but much more than that, it is a brilliantly honest and personal rhapsody and memorial to a city and a people much missed.He defines this struggle between the real and the unreal by framing the narrative with the timetable of a drug addict’s need This is the central sadness of the book. Like Eliot, he sees the history of fiction as symbolic of the fiction of history. The ghosts that walk the streets of 19th century France and flow over London Bridge populate the ruins of Beirut, rendering the past irrelevant and only the present real.Thankfully, Hanania is prudent with the currency of his literary inheritance. The writer borrows his title and philosophical theme from Eliot’s The Wasteland, who in turn uses Baudelaire’s dream and ghost-populated urban visions to amplify his poem’s historical context.Hanania is doing the same thing. That gives us a possible interpretation of Unreal City: three parts fact to one part fiction. Perhaps though, the book is best described as an epic prose poem.

Toby, the main character in his first novel, Homesick, which deals with the same subject, is just one letter-change away from the author’s first name: Tony. Of course writers always draw on their own lives when fabricating their stories, but in Hanania’s case the relationship between creation and personal experience is more complex and revealing than most.Born in Beirut and educated in England, his life mirrors that of his narrator. The narrator’s remembered search for “the faces war and time had stolen” is reduced to a futile scrabble through the wreckage of his past.As much autobiography as invention, as much history as fiction, Unreal City is a novel by default. Beirut has become “a landscape without memory”, whose besieged population trap “rats and wild cats in cages baited with the flesh of the dead”. In real time, the novel lasts a bleak day’s length; in fictional terms it spans the whole bloody history of the Lebanese civil war.
As the day passes and the drugs fail to arrive, recollections of a childhood spent roaming olive groves and lemon orchards become increasingly corrupted by the escalation of the war.By the end of the novel, the nightmare is complete.

Our story-teller is a heroin addict holed up in a London squat awaiting his next fix. T his is a story told by a narrator without a name, about a group of friends and relatives that are no longer alive, set in a city so successfully ravaged by war that it barely exists beneath the weight of its horrific transformation. I would like to think that in a self-portrait I could show the humorous side; that there was a smile, in my eyes, or somewhere, in there.Annabel Cullen’s 1991 portrait of Baroness Blackstone hangs in the NPG, London WC2 (0171 306 0055). One or two people said they didn’t think I looked animated enough, but I didn’t agree. I think the stance and the expression on my face is quite subdued and understated, which is interesting. After this, I had another portrait painted, by Peter Edwards, for Birkbeck College. It’s a somewhat more forceful rendering of my personality and I’m wearing a red dress Different artists see different sides of you.

It forced me to relax and do nothing.I liked the result very much: I saw it as it slowly grew over the weeks. It shows a reflective and contemplative side of me, rather than the activity- oriented side. I became familiar with every bit of the mortar between the bricks, and the roof and the chimneys I did little architectural sketches in my mind. I am not very good at thinking without a piece of paper and a pen in front of me but it was good for me in a way. I said, “You’d better come and look at my clothes cupboard” and she came to choose something.
For the sittings, I sat looking at the brickwork of the house opposite.

She liked to work with her sitter in front of her, rather than doing sketches and going away She wanted me sitting in a chair in a natural position. We did it in a top-floor room because she was very clear about the light she wanted, and she had views about what she wanted me to wear: something simple without a collar, not a garish colour. I was really surprised; I thought, why do you want a painting of me? I said, “I suppose you’ll put it in the basement,” and he said, “Of course we won’t.” I was very flattered, but it suddenly occurred to me that Annabel Cullen might not want to paint me: it would have been a pretty horrible prize to paint somebody you didn’t have empathy with I said I’d do it if they asked her first Then she got in touch with me

We had about six sittings of two hours or more Annabel was extremely meticulous and worked quite slowly. I got a phone call from the director of the National Portrait Gallery, who asked if I would agree to be painted. She was influenced above all by her friend Picasso, whose avant-gardism she strained, with very middling success, to translate into linguistic terms, forgetting that one needs but a few minutes to study a Cubist painting and several weeks at least to wade through The Making of Americans.


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