The End of Apartheid: Diary of a Revolution by Robin Renwick, book review: Murky birth pangs of the rainbow nation

It was October 1989, shortly before Namibian independence. With the ballot boxes prepared for Namibia’s first free elections, and the South African troops there confined to barracks, Renwick was urgently summoned by Pretoria’s foreign minister, Pik Botha.

Namibian forces were about to launch an uprising, he was informed. Renwick refused to believe it and, with British soldiers controlling UN communications in Namibia, proved within three hours that the report was false, stopping a retaliatory South African mobilisation.

The claim of an attack, it emerged, had been invented by rogue elements in South African military intelligence wanting to re-ignite the Border War. It is a revelation, one of many from Renwick’s time as ambassador between 1987 and 1991, which underlines how fundamental double-dealing and betrayal were to this period.

The past can too easily appear inevitable in retrospect. But as this detailed, if overly dry, account of the end of apartheid makes clear, its peaceful demise appeared far from inevitable at the time, not least as the likelihood of a coup (one former army head warns he could take-over in “an afternoon”), or the ANC controlling its “necklacing” youth, was far from clear.

Renwick clearly had extraordinary access, bouncing in and out of the offices of PW Botha, FW de Klerk, and ultimately Nelson Mandela. The Foreign Office also waived its 30-year-rule to let him draw on official records, enabling him to provide considerable detail about the person he clearly considers his story’s most unsung hero: Margaret Thatcher.

Her involvement is as murky as anything occurring on the ground. She was pilloried for refusing to extend sanctions, but Renwick is insistent that in private his heroine was a leading light in petitioning South Africa’s white leadership to dismantle apartheid. He promises that this re-evaluation of her role will be backed-up as the official communiques are made public in coming years. For that, we will have to wait and see.

But what is clear now, is that Britain’s soft approach on sanctions was exactly why Renwick was welcome at apartheid-era Tuynhuys (the Cape Town office of the President), which did mean he was able to play the role of intermediary he so desired. What is less clear is if this role actually gave him the influence he believed he had with the wily Mandela, at a time when African nations were uniformly condemning Mrs Thatcher.

Repeatedly Renwick registers disappointment that the newly-freed leader would not say in public what he – and Britain – wanted, or had been told in private, complaining that Mandela could “be forgetful of what he owed” men like De Klerk. Double-talk, it seems, may not have only been reserved for use on men like Botha, but also on British ambassadors hoping to shape history.

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The Lovers of Amherst by William Nicholson, book review: Parallel passion and poetry in New England, then and now

The afterlife of the secretive recluse still ripples across academic circles and the popular imagination, but it is surprising nonetheless to learn that it was only as recently as 1984 that details about the illicit love affair between Emily Dickinson’s brother and their Amherst neighbour was first brought to public attention in Polly Longsworth’s sympathetic study, Austin and Mabel. More recently, Lyndall Gordon’s 2010 revisionist biography, Lives Like Loaded Guns, explored the facts in exhaustive detail.

But fiction has a truthful purpose, too. William Nicholson’s scrupulously researched story throws fresh light on the extraordinary love affair between Austin Dickinson, 55, and 24-year-old Mabel Todd. We cannot know for sure what they shared in the privacy of Emily Dickinson’s dining room, where they often met, or what she saw and heard, or the effect on her poetry. By interspersing his narrative with snippets of extant correspondence, diary entries, and secret notes, drawn, mostly, from Longsworth and his own research in the Sterling Memorial Archives at Yale, alongside some of Emily Dickinson’s passionate poems, Nicholson creates a solid historical base from which he imaginatively recreates the time period and personalities involved. Moreover, the physical act of researching “the very notes they sent each other with such secrecy” is an integral part of the story, adding an air of factual realism from which he speculates as plausibly as a biographer.

Mabel Loomis Todd (1856-1932) arrived in Amherst in 1881 with her husband, David, the new director of Amherst College Observatory. Entering into Amherst society, she first struck up a friendship with Susan, Austin’s wife, and then entertained the Dickinson household next door. By then, the “Homestead” was occupied by Austin’s sisters, Emily and Lavinia (Vinnie), and their invalid mother. Although Mabel never met Emily (she’d listen at the top of the stairs while she played piano and sang), they communicated through notes and gifts.

Running parallel to the story of Austin and Mabel is the modern-day story of Alice Dickinson (no relation) who arrives in New England to undertake background research for her screenplay about their affair. Through her lover-turned-friend, Jack Broad, Alice gets in touch with Nick Crocker, a visiting professor (with a reputation), and she accepts his offer of temporary accommodation. Alice, Jack, and Nick pull us back to previous books in Nicholson’s interconnected series: in The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life (2009) Nick has an affair with Laura Kinross (Broad), while in All the Hopeful Lovers (2010) Laura’s son, Jack, is put together with Alice through Facebook in much the same way that his response to her Facebook request for information about Emily Dickinson sends her to Nick’s door.

Rowing in Eden –

Ah, the sea!

Might I but moor tonight

In thee!

As she becomes caught up in her own affair, Alice reflects on romantic love and passion, and ponders the “I” in Dickinson’s poems, and the poet’s relationship to Mabel. “Something true and powerful is at work here. What if it’s something bigger than love? What is there that’s bigger than love?” In New England for just two weeks, her attachment to Nick is perhaps too quickly established, but it’s a necessary part of the storyline.

Emily Dickinson intrudes into the narrative: “Stand at the top of the stairs. Look down into the dark hallway below. She’s there with him, the one he loves, the one I need. A door opens. The rustle of a dress as a half-glimpsed woman passes quickly down the passage, and out of the back door.”

While fictional stage directions are a reminder of the writer of Shadowlands lurking in the background, something deeper is afoot. Alice’s problem (aside from tackling her first screenplay) is how to find a way into a story she doesn’t fully understand. With Nick, she discusses the process of storytelling; how to frame her fiction, and whether she needs to care about Mabel. The Lovers of Amherst is a rich writers’ resource.

Without Mabel Todd, we may never have known the extent of Dickinson’s creativity. It was Mabel who undertook the task of preserving the letters and poems that survive, bringing order to the 1,800 poems, and pushing forward to publication. Nicholson’s story continues on after the deaths of Emily and Austin to explore the motivations behind Mabel’s efforts. His greatest achievement, though, in The Lovers of Amherst, is to compel us to approach Emily Dickinson’s poetry with fresh eyes.

This is my letter to the World

That never wrote to Me –

The simple News that Nature told –

With tender Majesty –

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What Nature Does for Britain by Tony Juniper, book review: The compelling economic argument for going green

In essence, this encapsulates the message of Tony Juniper’s campaigning book, timed for the run-up to the 2015 election: that it is only by putting a financial value on nature that politicians and businessmen will be persuaded to protect it. This is a direction many leading green activists are deeply sceptical about. We cannot devolve our responsibility to defend the rural landscape to those driven by the profit motive, they argue. Once it is seen as a network of “ecosystem services” that landowners and others can be paid to deliver, nature has effectively been privatised, its fate subject to the shifting winds of the market.

Juniper provides an excellent summary of the UK’s evolving ecological crisis: degradation of the soil and the loss of carbon-trapping peat bogs; the decimation of bees and other insect pollinators through the use of insecticides; the loss of marine habitats through destructive fishing practices; pollution of the water supply through phosphates. Agrochemical intervention is nothing new: 19th-century British entrepreneurs scoured the battlefield of Waterloo in search of skeletons to grind for bone meal and imported thousands of mummified cats plundered from Egyptian tombs to boost nutrients in the over-exploited soil.

Even if David Cameron has told his aides to “get rid of this green crap”, Juniper argues, he is out of step with the times: 4.5 million people in the UK belong to organisations supporting nature. With an election looming, can they be ignored?

Juniper finds heartening examples of businesses working with local communities to address environmental challenges because, like the Asian forestry tycoon, they are convinced it makes financial sense. Meanwhile, the market is shifting towards renewables as research shows that, in order to avoid catastrophic warming, two thirds of remaining fossil fuel resources should be left in the ground.

Where the market leads, politicians of a certain hue generally follow. But, despite the excellent work done by Juniper and his peers making the argument for the benefits that would follow, can they really be trusted to deliver a sustainable future?

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Not Forgetting the Whale by John Ironmonger, book review: Now, that’s a proper crash

Joe Haak, an analyst at city traders Lane Kaufmann, has developed a piece of software that can see into the future. By combing through every piece of financial journalism, every scrap of knowledge of every last supply chain, and every piece of economic activity in recorded history, Cassie (the Computer Aided Share Selection and Investment Engine) can, apparently, look ahead by a few hours and forecast share prices.

Led by Cassie into a spectacularly disastrous trade, a terrified Joe flees to the remote Cornish fishing village of St Piran. Then, as he begins to find some peace, Cassie starts predicting the end of the world.

Ironmonger clearly enjoys the contrast between the City and St Piran, where time runs slow, and, as one character notes, “the tranquillity of the village was almost geological in its permanence”. The Cornish passages are fable-like and dreamy,  while in London, traders whoop and Louboutins click.

The narrative weaves between the past and present, London and Cornwall, creating a tension that hums beneath Joe’s attempts at settling into his new home. There’s an atmospheric encounter between the protagonist and his boss, the mysterious Lew Kaufmann, while down in St Piran’s, a whale appears in the bay. But whether it is a symbol of Hobbes’s Leviathan or of Jonah’s deliverance, well, there’s little time to find out.

When events start to unravel they’re wonderfully underplayed. I was reminded of Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now, when the narrator tells us that “something like seven or seventy thousand people got killed” in a London bombing. This is human tragedy beyond scale, yet our focus is entirely on the ark that is St Piran’s. 

For all its switches in time and glimmering prose, the last third of the book offers few surprises. And while Joe Haak, Lew Kauffmann, and St Piran’s stern vicar, the Reverend Alvin Hocking, are well-drawn, the female characters feel flimsy. Joe’s love interest, Polly Hocking, is a flirt and little else, while the romantic novelist Demelza veers perilously close to cliché.

That said, this is a tremendously enjoyable book. And as the front pages crowd with headlines that grow ever more grim, Not Forgetting The Whale offers a very welcome alternative.

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The First Bad Man by Miranda July, book review: Bitter, twisted ... and surprising

Written from the first-person perspective, July carefully lets us see just what a lonely, oddball loser her middle-aged protagonist, Cheryl, is. She lives alone; she only uses one set of dishes and has perfected a “smoother living” system of housekeeping: “after days and days alone it gets silky to the point where I can’t even feel myself anymore”. Cheryl has a globus hystericus, a hard lump in her throat that prevents her from crying. Childless, she nonetheless sees “her” baby in the eyes of strangers’ babies – a “special connection” with a child named Kubelko Bondy, endlessly reincarnated.

Cheryl also believes that the man she is infatuated with, Phillip, is a soulmate she has been married to thousands of times down the centuries; sadly, he is more keen on a 16-year-old girl .... Then, into her life walks Clee: the busty, blonde, surly, smelly 20-year-old daughter of a colleague, who needs somewhere to stay. Clee does not aid smooth living; simmering resentment rapidly builds into physical aggression, and July’s novel too takes increasingly weird swerves and slams.

Wrestling with Clee triggers a release in Cheryl: she feels “exquisite”. Her globus disappears; she becomes lighthearted. Are these “adult games” sexual? At first it seems not, but soon – July slipping things along swiftly yet always bringing the reader, wide-eyed, with her – Cheryl is consumed by sexual desire. There are pages of feverish masturbatory fantasies. Yet Cheryl, we subtly pick up, may be missing the chance that’s really in front of her.

Convulsively readable, with a sideways wit, July’s novel is confidently out-there – and yet emotionally convincing. You yearn for a better life for Cheryl, who repulses and attracts the reader in the same way she repulses and attracts Clee. Then July swerves. Again. Clee becomes pregnant, and the birth changes things entirely. Not only does the plot blossom, but the tone does too.

Being pacily readable, The First Bad Man does not feel like a large book – but July’s writing actually covers a lot of ground. Relationships rapidly morph, and yet remain believable. The writing is tightly controlled, as it unabashedly peels back the layers of Cheryl’s oddness to serve up the beating heart within. The First Bad Man becomes a warm book – not a sentimental, tied-up-with-a-bow one, but a humane one.

July has a rare ability to pin down people’s faults, frailties, and eccentric compulsions, rather than squirm from them – and then to make us love them anyway.

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Like a Bomb Going Off: Leonid Yakobson and Ballet as Resistance in Soviet Russia by Janice Ross, book review

In Soviet Russia, daring and controversy were dangerous, with choreographers among the artists who were sidelined and silenced. Yakobson was unique in the way he managed to keep going, fighting to get his risky works on stage.

That fight is the subject of Janice Ross's Like a Bomb Going Off. Though it's roughly chronological, her book is a study rather than a biography, with the focus always on choreography and politics. It's an approach that works best with Yakobson's post-war work, where her research uncovers the bitter battle between artistry and labyrinthine state control. Earlier on, a stronger narrative of Yakobson's life, and fewer academic buzzwords, would have given the book more grounding. Yakobson was born in 1904. At 14, he was evacuated from post-revolutionary Petrograd to a children's colony, which collapsed in the civil war. Ross pieces together the extraordinary aftermath: the surviving children were found and supported by the American Red Cross, which eventually brought them home via America. With Russia in chaos, it was easier to travel round the world than to cross the country.

Back home, Yakobson started his dance training very late, which made him more suited to character roles than virtuoso leads. His own dances would explore character, often with elements of the grotesque and extreme. The 1920s, when he started his career, was a period of often radical experiment, which ended brutally in the 1930s, with Joseph Stalin in power. Ross underplays this contrast, stressing the repression of the USSR from the start.

She spends as much time on theoretical frameworks for understanding Yakobson as she does on the immediate historical context: some knowledge of the revolution is assumed. Ross is much subtler in the post-war period, when she explores how changes in the political climate could create moments of opportunity for artists.

Where writers and composers could work in secret, choreographers need public performance to create. Each shift – a rise in anti-Semitism, a moment of thaw – changed what was possible for Yakobson. At the same time, Ross shows, he became skilled at burying different meanings within his dances, hints that could be read underneath the Soviet-friendly surface.

She's particularly good on Yakobson's Jewish heritage, unpacking the way he fleetingly evokes Jewish imagery and performance traditions in his steps and style. Her own writing opens up, too, as she follows the drama of the state's cat-and-mouse games. Even now, some of Yakobson's supporters choose to speak anonymously, still nervous of repercussions for past activism.

Many of Yakobson's ballets were lost. He's little known in the West, where touring performances of his ballets were poorly received. Ross is a passionate advocate, ardently evoking his surviving ballets and why his work, and his courage, meant so much to Soviet audiences.

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Girl in a Band: A memoir by Kim Gordon, book review: Notes from the bass line

Nevertheless, it’s a question that she answers at length in her frank and bittersweet memoir. Along with chronicling her early life in the California suburbs, her art school days and her parallel careers as a visual artist, Gordon addresses head-on the demands foisted upon female musicians working in a largely male domain.

These demands came as much from Gordon herself as from others. What did people see when they saw her on stage? Should she be feminine or androgynous? Should she move centre-stage or lurk in the shadows? These were things that both irritated and intrigued her, and it’s this alertness that gives Girl in a Band its power.

It’s also, at times, stingingly funny. She doesn’t mince her words as she recalls working with Courtney Love and compares the singer’s narcissistic and sociopathic tendencies to those of her own brother, Keller, a paranoid schizophrenic who taunted Gordon as a child. She is properly hilarious about Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan whom she writes off as “a crybaby”.

Elsewhere, there’s a flavour of Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids in Gordon’s early years as a struggling visual artist in late Seventies New York. For a while she slept on Cindy Sherman’s floor and later sub-let a loft from Jenny Holzer. Like Smith, she took jobs in bookstores and diners to survive. Later came a receptionist’s job at an art gallery, which led to her moving in the same social circles as Julian Schnabel and Jeff Koons. Unlike many of her musical contemporaries, Gordon believed that art could encapsulate anything, whether dance, clothes, painting, or music. It’s this open-mindedness that yielded the colourful life recounted here.

It’s also a life recounted through the lens of her most significant relationship – that with her bandmate Thurston Moore. The disintegration of their 30-year marriage in 2011 also signalled the end of Sonic Youth, so it’s no wonder that anger and heartbreak spill from the pages. “I did feel some compassion for Thurston,” she notes in a devastating final chapter on his infidelity. “I was sorry for the way he had lost his marriage, his band, his daughter, his family, our life together – and himself. But that is a lot different from forgiveness.”

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A Treacherous Paradise by Henning Mankell review

Henning Mankell in Mozambique. Photograph: Björn Lindgren

Henning "Wallander" Mankell takes a fascinating historical fragment as the basis for this tale of Portuguese Africa. In the early 20th century, one of the biggest brothels in Lourenço Marques (now Mozambique's capital, Maputo) was owned by a white Swedish woman.

She crops up in tax records, but we know nothing else about her. Mankell names her Hanna and gives her a thoughtful nature (she "radiates an aura suggesting she is a totally genuine human being") and a harsh backstory: she grew up in Sweden's remote north, was pushed out by her poor family and ended up on a boat to Australia but never got there. The most successful parts of the novel portray the brutal, segregated life of Lourenço Marques – the black population lower their gaze to whites who may beat them for a slight, while the whites fear that outward pliability hides defiance. Hanna's decency is undermined by the society she finds herself in; when she embarks on a personal crusade, the town closes ranks. Mankell's writing can be drab but he tells a good story, and this is a grimly believable picture of how colonialism denigrates both servant and master.

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A Questionable Shape by Bennett Sims review Zombies in Louisiana

'It’s a buffet out there' … Zombies from the TV series The Walking Dead. Photograph: AP

Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is at the centre of a zombie outbreak. For now the authorities are coping – just – rounding up the undead and quarantining them. But the imminent hurricane season threatens to unleash mayhem.

As the narrator, Michael, tells his girlfriend: "It's a buffet out there." Still, he risks being bitten to help his best friend look for his father, suspected of falling victim to undeath. There is very little gore in this highly unusual take on the zombie novel. Instead, Bennett Sims delivers a disquisition on the idea of the zombie, combining low and high culture in a firework display of extended metaphors, obscure vocabulary and intellectual sparks. With a heavy debt to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and vigorous nods to Nabokov, Heidegger, Tarkovsky, Shklovsky, Levinas and Proust, to mention a few, the book is ambitious and thought-provoking. Sims displays a positively Will Self-ish love of words (the illuminated head of the man on a "Walk" sign is "syncarpous and starlit, a perfect oval of refulgent drupelets") as he focuses in on the philosophical conundrum of undeath, seemingly yearning for its impossible state that is neither "Being" nor "Nothingness". An existentialist meditation.

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A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Reptile Room by Lemony Snicket - review

The Reptile Room really attracts the reader's attention. This book will make you confused about a bunch of things. When Stephano, who was really Count Olaf, came to Uncle Monty's house to be his assistant, it was the last thing I was expecting! Then when he murdered Uncle Monty, I knew it was him, but didn't know how or if he was going to be caught. So read this book, I highly recommend it to a person who likes mystery. It is a book that leaves you in suspense.

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Out of Control by Sarah Alderson - review

Wow, I did not expect to be hooked when I started to read Out of Control. It is fast-paced, super addictive and it feels like you've just watched a movie. I really enjoyed the mystery that was present in the book and I think Sarah Alderson did a great job keeping the reader in suspense. I literally didn't know what was going to happen in the next chapter which was what kept me going.

I think the character development was brilliant and what was really interesting was that the book is set in two days which was really cool in my opinion. It isn't one of my favourites but I think it's a good stand-alone to try after finishing a series or trilogy. If you're looking for a nice fast-paced and action-packed story then I really recommend this book! Especially if you have read Alderson's other books. I give it 4/5 stars.

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Arrowhead by Ruth Eastham review Vikings, magic and murder mystery

Class wars … Eastham's schoolmates become violent savages under a Viking curse. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

Two-thirds of the way through Ruth Eastham's powerful new thriller the story's hero, 13-year-old Jack, enters a museum and stands before the dragon prow of a restored Viking ship, gripped by its beauty and menace, his skin prickling with fear. At that point I was gripped myself. Jack is desperately searching for a way to defeat an ancient evil, but I was simply desperate to know what was going to happen next.

The museum is in a Norwegian town, a place to which Jack has been brought by his Norwegian mum after the accidental death of his English father. Grief has tipped Jack's mum into mental illness, and Jack isn't doing very well either. He's struggling with grief, too, and worrying about his mum, but he also has to deal with being the new boy in school. Jack chooses not to join the class bullies, and stands up for their victim instead, a boy called Skuli, a choice that has momentous consequences.

For Skuli has made a discovery that he wants to share with his new friend. The local glacier is shrinking, uncovering the preserved body of a boy murdered more than a thousand years ago, in the Viking age. Before he died, the boy carved a warning in runes on the ice with the mysterious and clearly magical arrowhead of the title. Its reappearance, however, is definitely A Bad Thing. Before long, Jack realises they have unleashed an ancient curse that could lead to the destruction of everything he loves.

The curse works on both people and the natural world, turning Jack's schoolmates into the kind of violent savages that would give the wild boys in Lord of the Flies a run for their money, while also causing storms, tidal waves and volcanic eruptions. There are time-slips, too: Jack suddenly finds himself in the past and a terrifying ghost warrior breaks into the present. And there is plenty of cool Viking stuff – magic runes and spooky ravens, quotes from Beowulf and references to Odin.

You could say that it's all been done before. Fans of Alan Garner will certainly feel they're on familiar territory – an ancient curse, contemporary children, creatures of myth and legend erupting into the modern world, a great battle between The Good Guys and The Forces of Darkness. There's nothing original, either, about other elements of the story – the struggles of a new boy in school, the impact of grief on a family, even an underdog called Jack taking on a much bigger opponent.

But it's done with terrific verve and great skill, the action zipping along with plenty of cliffhangers and surprises. A complex backstory can be a curse itself in this kind of tale, with characters delivering large chunks of exposition to each other, but here it's all handled well, information being imparted in the right amounts to keep the mystery alive. The language is crisp, precise and unshowy and better for it, a hard-edged prose that does a solid job and sometimes soars.

There's a sketchiness about the characters, but that's often the case in stories with a mythological feel where action predominates. I'd also be a bit worried about the effect the story might have on school parties who visit Viking exhibitions at museums. No spoilers, but the climax is thrilling and can be summed up in two words – "Viking funeral".

• Tony Bradman's most recent book is an anthology, Stories of World War One. To order Arrowhead for £6.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk.

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Touched by Joanna Briscoe review who or what is taking the children?

'Instagrammed intensity' … Joanna Briscoe. Photograph: Jason Alden

Hammer is the new imprint from Random House, working in association with the recently revived British film company, adored and deplored for its lurid 60s horror movies. The object is to bring out new tales of the eerie and macabre from literary authors, and the latest is by Joanna Briscoe. Touched is a gripping novella, a waking nightmare in the home counties that is both erotic and claustrophobic. There's a woozy atmosphere of menace, a satirical stab at Britain's postwar commuter-belt aspirations, and an elegant, postmodern, cine-literate twist.

The book is set in the early 1960s in the picture-perfect Hertfordshire village of Letchmore Heath – here renamed Crowsley Beck – which was used for filming by nearby Elstree studios, and became known as the "village of the damned" when it was the location for a 1960 sci-fi movie of that name, based on John Wyndham's novel The Midwich Cuckoos, about alien blond children appearing in a cosy rural community. I myself was brought up there, and Briscoe brings a brilliant, Instagrammed intensity to the leafy lanes, pub and village green, which did indeed look faintly sinister once you'd seen the film; I felt about it the way I imagine inhabitants of Portmeirion felt after The Prisoner appeared on TV.

Rowena is the beautiful, harassed mother of five young children who has been chivvied by her husband into moving away from London to this sweet little village, a convenient half-hour drive from the capital. They have turfed Rowena's ailing mother-in-law out of her cottage, bought the one next door and are now trying to knock them through to create a family house and commuter base. But the cottage itself seems to resist this proto-yuppification. Haunted with resentment, the walls groan and bulge. Rowena's children start behaving oddly, forming a friendship with the local builder and his wife, Mr and Mrs Pollard – and then they begin to disappear. Rowena finds herself faint with desire for her handsome neighbour Gregory and begins to sense the presence of Freddie, the imaginary friend of her disturbed daughter Evangelina.

Is Rowena having a breakdown – or is it something else? This stifling situation reaches a climax when Rowena's daughter Jennifer gets a small role in a film with the unimprovable title of Blush, being shot on the village green. Rowena gets to visit nearby Elstree studios and watch the rushes in the dark projection room: her daughter's calm loveliness is reduced on celluloid to an alien blankness as her stilted line is repeated over and over again with each take. Rowena's cottage is visible in shot and, in some takes, Rowena can see an unexplained face at the window. It is as if the ghostly qualities of film have spread outwards into the fabric of the real world.

Touched has something of The Turn of the Screw, certainly, but with it, the brasher influence of Ira Levin, or Anthony Shaffer, screenwriter of The Wicker Man. And Briscoe is, of course, influenced by that strange and fascinating B-movie, the Twilight Zone chiller Village of the Damned. She is not influenced, thank heavens, by the exasperatingly obtuse and dull original novel by Wyndham, with its burbling Shavian speeches about mankind's future. This is a haunting and disquieting parable of children's safety set in an era when society was less troubled by this issue – when their vulnerability was less publicly visible. Briscoe has a shrewd sense of the sometimes featureless suburban Hertfordshire landscape, derided by EM Forster in Howards End as neither country nor city, a place in which an insidious malign force comes to flourish. Touched would make a terrific 1960s black-and-white film.

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Engineers of Victory by Paul Kennedy review

Victory is achieved because one side has more capable personnel … Wrens at Bletchley Park during the second world war. Photograph: Rex Features

In this impressive historical study of five campaigns in the second world war, including the Battle of the Atlantic and Operation Overlord, Paul Kennedy's aim is to direct attention away from the high-profile leaders (the generals and politicians) and instead to highlight the vital contribution of the middle personnel – the problem solvers – and the systems they managed: "What happened to Caesar's cook is lost to history, but, assuredly, he played a role."

Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers who Turned the Tide in the Second World Warby Paul Kennedy Tell us what you think: Star-rate and review this book

He also agrees with Correlli Barnett who has said war is the "great auditor of institutions". As Kennedy's examples demonstrate, victory is achieved not just because one side has superior intelligence or more bombers than the other, but because one side is better organised: it has more capable, can-do personnel at all levels working in efficient and responsive systems that encourage a culture of innovation. For, as he shows, new weapons, processes and tactics are often decisive. Out of the fog of war, Kennedy distills the crucial elements in each campaign that brought final victory to the Allies. A masterly analysis of grand strategy.

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Upstairs at the Party by Linda Grant review when Bowie ruled the world

Captures the absurdity of the times … Linda Grant. Photograph: Geraint Lewis/Rexv

This is the story of friendships that cohere at a northern university in the 70s. The narrator, Adele, was born and brought up in a Jewish family in Liverpool: "I grew up to be the leader of a circle of schoolgirls, bolshy, sophisticated, ambitious, supercilious, a little bit cynical already, who smoked and wore plum-coloured lipstick and very short skirts."

She has a terrible secret: her father, Harry, a petty criminal, killed himself when he was exposed as the organiser of a small Ponzi scheme. The family and their world are changed for ever. But, like her mother, Adele is a strong woman. She takes a job at the perfume counter of Lewis's in Liverpool. She quickly finds it stultifying, but is determined to do better and talks herself into one of the new universities in Yorkshire by pretending to be Allen Ginsberg's cousin.

At university she is soon involved with a new group of friends, and the novel revolves around their fates. It is an era when students believed that they could change the world; that false consciousness was a blight to be overcome; that people could elect to be gay or straight; that socialism, along the lines of Marcuse, would triumph; and that mental illness should be understood, as RD Laing prescribed, as an aspect of normality. On the campus there is a vogue, no doubt influenced by David and Angie Bowie, of dressing up to suggest that there are no absolutes of sexual orientation. Adele takes none of these notions seriously.

The centre of the story is Evie, who arrived at the university as Lorraine, but changed her name when she took up with Stevie, also known as Stephen Platt. They swap clothes, and in some ways became one androgynous person, but their relationship breaks down. Stevie leaves after a few terms – and dies on the night of Adele's 20th birthday.

"If you go back and look at your life there are certain scenes, acts, or maybe just incidents on which everything that follows seems to depend," muses Adele, many years later. "If only you could narrate them, then you might be understood. I mean the part of yourself that you don't know how to explain."

Linda Grant gives the impression of looking for an organising principle for the novel: the mystery of Evie's demise. For many years after they have all left university, Adele is obsessed by what happened on the fatal night. Who saw her last? Who could have helped? Who is to blame? But the problem with this otherwise fine novel is that there is not much of a mystery to be solved. Her family secrets, revealed in some handy notebooks, are not really very significant. Evie was a troubled child, ethereally beautiful, and caught up in something she didn't fully understand.

But Grant excels in capturing the absurdity of the times, and the phenomenon of a university consciously trying to introduce societal change through exposure to brutal architecture and experimental teaching. She is also brilliant on the naivety and vulnerability of the young students, from flamboyantly gay Bobby to Gillian, the viola player turned revolutionary. Rose, who becomes a successful barrister, acknowledges at the friends' final meeting that she was exactly the graduate the university was trying to produce: "My life has never departed from the plan. It all worked, didn't it? It worked terribly, terribly well."

You could read into this Grant's feeling that the higher banalities have come to roost and have not left us. "There was a revolution," says Adele, "just not the one they had in mind."

It is a great talent to be able to keep afloat so vividly and so plausibly this many characters. While not exactly a feelgood book, Upstairs at the Party has the great virtue of being a wonderfully and perceptively written story, which rings utterly true, and as a consequence lifts the spirits.

• Justin Cartwright's latest novel is Lion Heart (Bloomsbury). To order Upstairs at the Party for £11.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk.

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The Joshua Files: Apocalypse Moon by M.G. Harris - review

This book is about the apocalyptic surge that Joshua goes forward in time to see and then has to prevent, using clues from the four books.

Joshua is by far the best character and I like him as he is very mysterious, talented and brave because of his Dad dying, his long-lost sister being killed, and the long, hard journey to get the IX Codex.

This series is awesome and I have really enjoyed it. I would definitely recommend this to anybody. 5/5 stars!!!

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The Fault in Our Stars by John Green - review

This is a gripping and captivating novel that I enjoyed reading very much. The characters were believable and interesting, and I found there was a lot of symbolism and depth in the book too, which accounted for the sadness of it. The poems that Hazel recited were amusing as well.

However, despite how much I liked the book, there was one thing that bugged me as I read: the subject matter of it. To me, glamorizing illness and sensationalizing cancer is even more heartbreaking than the sadness that hangs over the book. At my school, you can hear people all day every day yelling things like, 'Have you seen The Fault in Our Stars yet? Did you cry? I cried!' and, 'I'm trying to draw a cannula but it just won't work.' And also, 'I have to find a cannula for sale so I can dress up as Hazel for Halloween.'

Why is this so distressing? you ask. What about the poor people who actually have cancer? If they saw somebody dressed up with a cannula, they would think, 'Well, they can take that off at any point – but I can't.' Also, I despise the way The Fault in Our Stars has been made into an acronym. There is even a #TFIOS. It's like saying, #cancer. It is just like news corporations sensationalizing news stories.

One day, this book will go out of fashion and so will cancer. How depressing for people with cancer. The book has been made trendy by hashtags and Twitter accounts.

Even though I disliked the subject of the book, I would recommend it to anybody who is sensible enough to realize that cancer and illness is not a fashion.

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Get the Scoop: Justin Bieber by Ronny Bloom - review

The Scoop tells the story of a boy named Justin Bieber. He was sixteen years old and he wanted to be famous.

He started off in a magazine by putting pictures of himself playing the guitar and singing, and then he began putting videos on YouTube. He put videos of himself playing the guitar and singing, and he got a lot of followers so he made a new album called My World.

If you want to know more about Justin Bieber and who he met, read this book! I think that it is cool to read a biography about a famous person and get to know Justin Bieber more deeply.

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The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins by Irvine Welsh review

Irvine Welsh: being a 'sadist'. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

As we've come to expect from an Irvine Welsh hero, Lucy Brennan, the narrator of The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins, is an unrepentant sadist and narcissist. A fitness trainer in the bikini-clad, ab-obsessed world of South Beach, Miami, she becomes an unlikely hero when she disarms a gunman who has chased two men in front of her car on the highway. Lucy's exploit makes her a star on local news – and inspires infatuation in a witness to the incident, the overweight, pathologically lonely Lena Sorensen. Lena tracks Lucy down the following day to schedule a personal training session.

At this point, the reader anticipates a stalking narrative. And when Lena turns out to be an artist who constructs distorted human figures from animal bones, our suspicions seem to be confirmed. But it's Lucy who gradually becomes obsessed with Lena, and specifically with carving the fat off her body. When Lena continues to gobble key lime pies on the sly, Lucy's tactics become increasingly abusive, while her interest in Lena grows perversely sexual. At last, losing patience, she drugs Lena and imprisons her in an empty apartment building. Fed by her captor on blueberries and protein shakes, with only a treadmill and a home gym for company, Lena at last loses weight. She is chained to a pillar, she is defecating into a bucket – but she looks fantastic.

As a concept, this is brilliant. It powerfully encapsulates the book's themes of body obsession, co-dependency, and the American cult of willpower. And, for anyone who's ever tried to diet, it's a twisted wish fulfilment fantasy. But the pleasure of the book is spoiled by a radically misjudged narrator.

Welsh has a history of testing the limits of his readers' capacity for empathy. No one can write about a sociopath in love with so much heart. But his Lucy not only lacks any sympathetic qualities, she lacks any interesting qualities. She has one-night-stands with people she despises and mistreats; personal training sessions with people she despises and mistreats; lunch with her mother, whom she despises and mistreats. Here, all overweight women are beachballs, lard-asses, blimps. An older woman is a "crinkled, leather-faced, old scrotum". Whatever else they are, women are bitches. In a typical passage, Lucy describes the Democratic and Republican candidates for governor: "Thorpe is a well-meaning but flatulent-mouthed, carpetbagging Ivy League asshole, while Quist is a rabid, fascist, sanctimonious, Bible-bashing prick ... It's hard to work out which one I hate the most." When the venom recedes, we're left with passages like this: "Sorenson weighed in at 197.5 ... I decided that I was going to cardio her ass and burn shit off her. I started her on the elliptical, and doing a 4 x 15 minute workout, increasing the resistance level from 8 to 10 to 12 to 14." Meanwhile, in his rendering of American speech, Welsh succeeds a little too dramatically. He conveys not just American English, but the way American English can grate on the English ear. And it does grate, and continues to grate, page after remorseless page.

Of course, it's reasonable to suppose that a South Beach fitness trainer would tediously count calories, itemise her meals, and assess every passerby on his physical appearance. And presumably there are some people whose responses to others are uniformly hateful. Some Americans really do abuse the English language. But choosing to write a 460-page novel in the voice of such a person is crossing a line. Welsh is not just portraying a sadist here; he is being a sadist.

As the novel progresses, Welsh introduces Lena as a secondary narrator. Lena is certainly less loathsome than Lucy, and she's convincing as a Midwestern girl who loves Cute Overload and doughnuts. But she's too leadenly ordinary to be credible as the world-class artist we're told she is, much less as the focus of a stranger's erotic obsession, while her bovine capitulation to Lucy's bullying doesn't seem to be grounded in anything but the author's convenience.

Ultimately, this novel is simply frustrating. Its plot is not only cleverly conceived but genuinely, hauntingly, transgressive. It could have been a powerful and profound book, with just a bit more thought. One reads it wishing vainly for Welsh to humanise some of Lucy's reactions; to motivate some of Lena's decisions; to allow any character the range of expression of Welsh's best creations. Most of all, The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins would have been a great, page-turning read if it were narrated not by Lucy and Lena, but by someone with the intelligence and expressiveness of Irvine Welsh.

• Sandra Newman's The Country of Ice Cream Star will be published by Chatto in June

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Odd Job Man and Language! by Jonathon Green review

Jonathon Green, as per the title of his not-quite-memoir, has a very odd job indeed. He is the world's foremost slang lexicographer. He collects slang. He makes dictionaries of slang. He has spent 30 years doing more or less nothing but. "I can no longer remember when life and work were still easily distinguishable. When, to render it in as simple a way as possible, I didn't work or aim to work 24/7/365. When I didn't live in terror of the abyss of inactivity. Of 'relaxing', of the 'day off'. I find no joy in the list of popular gap-fillers – popular culture, hobbies, travel. It all, ultimately, bores."

The results of his labour are three slang dictionaries (62,00 pages, 110,000 headwords, 415,000 citations) – of which his Summa Theologica, 17 years in the making, is Green's Dictionary of Slang (2010). After its publication, he writes, "I wept". His subject is narrow in scope but deep in synonymy. "I have written the two words 'the penis' 1,351 times (from 'Aaron's rod' to 'zubrick'); 'the vagina' 1,180 ('abc' to 'zum-zum') and 'sexual intercourse', by which I mean the heterosexual variety, 1,740 ('action' to 'zot'). I allow for detail as it is necessary to be precise: sometimes it is a large penis, sometimes a small one, sometimes flaccid, sometimes erect. Sometimes a penis is just a penis."

Does this benign monomania make him happy? The impression you get reading Odd Job Man is slightly different: that, rather, it makes him less unhappy. It gives a solitary, bookish only child – sensitive to his outsiderdom as a Jew in the English public-school system – a means of retreating from the world, of controlling it, of engaging with its vulgar pleasures at a safe remove. He writes repeatedly of himself that he is a "voyeur", and of his "cowardice". To be a lexicographer, he writes, is to be a drudge (as per Dr Johnson) but also (since you define and prescribe) a "tinpot deity".

Green doesn't tell you all that much about his life ("some confessions" is right). After he got stuck into slang, the suggestion perhaps is, there's not that much to tell. He owns many books and lives between London and Paris. He has children. He can afford to do his job thanks to a large and unexpected legacy, and was dunned out of another one in a bruising encounter with the law. His hero is Lenny Bruce. He kicked around as an underground journalist in the 1960s (he edited Oz while Richard Neville was in the dock), wrote a porn book, tried heroin ("Yum-my!"), compiled a number of hack books of quotations and had a lightbulb moment reading Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. Partridge defined "nafka" right – it means "whore" – but didn't know it was Yiddish. It made Green think: I can do this. And he was off.

But what is it, exactly, that Green is doing? Slang is a pretty fugitive category. The word itself (first print appearance: 1756) is of unknown etymology and remains resistant to definition. Slang isn't a language (it doesn't have a grammar) but a set of vocabulary items, and it lives in a territory adjoining and overlapping but not coterminous with (among other things) colloquialism, dialect, euphemism, abbreviation, professional jargon and various forms of figurative speech. For his purposes, "slang" is anything Green says is slang.

There's no doubt we've had slang as long as we've had registers of language. But slang as we know it begins, in his account, with late-medieval thieves' cant – collected in the titillating pamphlets of "rogue literature" and "beggar books" then percolating into the general population. Slang, to Green, is "counter-language". It is distinctively of the city. It is the lexicon of outsiders and rebels, constantly on the move, patricidal and mocking, and yet plugged into the most basic human activities: fucking, fighting, shitting, stealing stuff and getting fucked up. Slang has no word for love. And it's very male (Green touches on this here and there but one longs for him to develop it): "in this most manmade of languages women are always objects, never subjects".

But that isn't Green's main concern. He's not a sociolinguist or, as he freely admits, a linguist of any sort. He is an amateur (in the best sense: he does it for love) – not an entomologist but a butterfly collector. Not quite even that, perhaps. Slang is basically oral, and Green doesn't do fieldwork. What he's looking for is written or literary evidence (and that would include everything from Chaucer to The A-Team, which yielded 155 citations). It is quixotic: the traces of slang in the written language are the shadows those butterflies cast on the wall. Hard to net!

Green is a good enough sport to be upfront about how heavily each glossary of slang over the years perforce leans on its predecessors. In Language! he even quotes a party-pooping don who puts doubt at the very root of the discipline: "there is little evidence that real vagrants spoke thieves' cant, a notion fostered by rogue literature". Green says that her theory – that thieves' cant was simply made up, like Dothraki or brown windsor soup – is "as unprovable as the contrary thesis that she is at pains to decry". The absence of evidence, in other words, is not evidence of absence. Still.

Green has a faintly chippy relationship with the OED, to which he is a consultant but also (in his smaller field) a rival. He publishes first, and then, "distrusting the abilities even of one whom they claim to respect, the legions of Little Clarendon Street have reresearched my efforts and displayed them online as if their own". One-upping their first citations is a point of pride. When he finds an instance of the word "fuckadoodle" somewhere predating the OED's, one imagines him doing a little air-punch in his lonely room.

But Green and the legions of Little Clarendon Street are in roughly the same game. He has some starchier things to say about Urban Dictionary, which looks likely to shoot his fox. It's not actually a dictionary, as he rightly points out: it's more like a sort of linguistic wiki with its guts on the floor. And yet – while it forsakes the lexicographer's authority (any fool can add an entry and authority is a matter of accruing thumbs-ups) – it has the advantage of contemporaneity and, however messily corralled, the potential evidence of a massive body of current slang users.

Language! is a very interesting survey of the history of slang and the history of its collectors, taking in everything from the early literature of criminality to the Broadway backchat of Walter Winchell and Damon Runyon, from Soho's Polari to the black slangs emerging from slavery in the American south. What it declines to address, perhaps tellingly, is internet "leetspeak".

One of the book's virtues is that, by taking a step back from the lexis, Green is able to tease out family resemblances in the metaphors that lead us from the act to the slang word: the way that sex is often cast as violence, and so on. Language! bursts with linguistic interest and fun historical nuggets. Did you know that Swift may have been the first to use "blue" to mean obscene? Or that Smollett (though elsewhere Green says Cleland) minted the phrase "birthday suit"?

A fair amount of content is repeated between the two books, but there's a noticeable difference in the prose. That might be down to the author finding it more difficult to write about himself than about his subject (again and again, Odd Job Man skitters away into Green's safe zone). But the books also have different publishers.

Language! is, for the most part, limpidly written. Reading Odd Job Man is like paddling through mud.The autobiographical sections zip between first and third person, present tense and past narration, and are prone to tedious periphrasis when they spell things out at all. "Motherfucker" is "the Oedipal polysyllable". Tom Wolfe shows up, but – unnamed – is identifiable only by his white suit. A "well-known figure" is glimpsed off his face on booze, and the clue that his son-in-law would eventually "rule our waves" leads you to identify him as Tony Booth; but why not say so?

Yet Odd Job Man is also the more unusual and the more moving of the two books. Here is somebody whose life's work is not complete, and can never be complete: Green is a man swimming against an ever stronger tide. But it's a life's work that has – with the publication of his dictionary – passed its climacteric. And thanks to the internet, like a vocational concordance-maker in the age of digital search, Green is living through his own obsolescence: "It appears that I have spent my life becoming good at the wrong thing."

Incoherent though his achievement may be, however, it is also magnificent: a cathedral of bin lids built on foundations of quicksand. What's to be done? What he undoubtedly will do, until he drops dead at his desk: keep buggering on.

• To order Language! 500 Years of the Vulgar Tongue (Atlantic, £25) by Jonathon Green for £18.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk.

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