Daniel Glattauer - Gut gegen Nordwind

So here's one on a book that isn't available in English, I'm afraid. It's a nice love story in e-mail-format. I'm normally not so keen on these kind of modernizations of the good old novel in letters. The outcome is often a bit artificial, maybe even conceited. Not in this case: Glattauer pulls it off quite well. He makes beautiful use of e-mail-specifics as i.e. the exact time of a message being sent or the "Re:" as additional means to give insights into the two main character's psychology. Oh, I forgot to mention them: Emmi and Leo first make contact accidentally, but keep on sending each other e-mails until a fully fledged love story evolves. A number of unforseeable things happen and keep the storyline taught. The characters are quite 'sympatico' and one hopes to see them in a happy ending. O.k., it might not be exactly high literature, but the novel is unputdownable and I'm looking forward to reading the sequel that's already on the market.

Booker's best?

I must admit I hadn’t heard of Hilary Mantel before, but I’m quite impressed with “Wolf Hall” and might well read some of her other novels too. It’s basically a political novel and as such not an easy read, but her writing is fantastic and she manages to give a 16th century feel to it all, without heaping too much historical detail onto it. Quite often historical novelists tend to tell you too much of what they know about a period and that can make for a cumbersome reading. Mantel doesn’t do that at all; she conveys a feeling of time by the earthy language she uses and by the behaviour and psychology of her characters. And what characters these are: Henry VIII, Thomas Cromwell, Anne and Mary Boleyn, Thomas More and Cardinal Wolsey! I wouldn’t have expected this particular bunch of people to be quite so enjoyable and entertaining. So give it a go and read it, even if you don’t like historical novels normally – maybe especially then.