Guest Reviewer: Peter Kemp

We didn't dare to enter his bedroom so we asked Peter Kemp to come to the studio to give his book recommendations:

Toni Morrison: Mercy
In the 1680s the slave trade was still in its infancy. In the Americas, virulent religious and class division, prejudice and oppression were rife, providing the fertile soil in which slavery and race hatred were carefully planted and took root. Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a smallholding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for dealing in 'flesh', he takes a small slave girl, in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. A Mercy reveals what lies under the surface of slavery but at its heart, this is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother and a daughter in a violent ad-hoc world - a world where acts of mercy, like everything else, have unforeseen consequences.

A.A. Milne: The Red House Mystery
Far from the gentle slopes of the Hundred Acre Wood lies The Red House, the setting for A.A Milne’s only detective story, where secret passages, uninvited guests, a sinister valet and a puzzling murder lay the foundations for a classic crime caper. And when the local police prove baffled, it is up to a guest at a local inn to appoint himself ‘Sherlock Holmes’ and, together with his friend and loyal ‘Watson’, delve deeper into the mysteries of the dead man.

Simon Gray: Coda
Coda is Simon Gray's frank, profoundly moving and often painfully funny account of what he refers to as ‘the beginning of my dying’. During a holiday with his wife in Crete, Gray recalls the scans, consultations and biopsies that have dominated the previous months while offering unforgettable portraits of fellow tourists and digressions on everything from lying to the maître d’ and concerns about tipping to crimes of passion and his new-found obsession with obituaries.