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A new guide to Greek hotels makes Bridget Hourican want to stay in every one.
Who’s reading what?
THE ImaRET, KavaLa
Tipperary-born novelist Donal Ryan.
TELL US ABOUT YOUR NEW NOVEL, THE THING ABOUT DECEMBER? It’s a year in the life of Johnsey Cunliffe, who has inherited farmland with a notional value in the tens of millions due to a dodgy rezoning decision. The narrative is in the third person but is delivered as a thoughtby-thought exposition of Johnsey’s soul. DID YOU SUFFER FROM “SECOND BOOK” SYNDROME? Luckily, The Thing About December was written before The Spinning Heart, so I was under no pressure. The decision to publish in reverse was made by my publishers, and has proven to be the right one. WHERE’S THE MOST UNUSUAL PLACE JACOLINE’S SMALL HOTELS YOU’VE WRITTEN? In my car, parked in IN GREECE the gateway of a house at the side of a busy by Jacoline Vinke road with a German Shepherd who seemed This is the Dutch writer and longGLOBAL to want to eat me, barking and slavering at time Greek resident’s third book on WARNING my passenger-side window. I had an idea Greek hotels, and I haven’t found Eco warriors – and that I knew I’d forget so I pulled over and a better guide (Papasotiriou worriers – take heart: Paddy wrote it out on a scrap of paper. Publishing, €17.91). Her choices Woodworth, author of Our Once BEST BOOK FOR A JOURNEY? The are “personal and totally and Future Planet (University last time I was on a plane I took The subjective” – she likes hotels to be small (no more than of Chicago Press, €30), talked to Good Father by Noah Hawley and it 20 rooms), comfortable, hospitable, characterful and scientists, activists and policy was a perfect companion. For nervous well-located; and she doesn’t make value-for-money makers working to find flyers I’d recommend A Confederacy of judgments. She covers all Greece, finding hotels in solutions to climate change. Dunces by John Kennedy Toole because converted seminaries, historic town houses, working Doom, gloom and it’s absorbing and hilarious. farms and Renaissance palazzos. Most are between €70 hope ... and €150 per room per night; the cheapest €45, the most
expensive €340, and between the gorgeous photos (taken by Dutchman André Bakker) and Jacoline’s warm, pithy descriptions, you feel like staying in every one.
Donal Ryan’s debut novel, The Spinning Heart was long-listed for the Booker Prize. The Thing About December, is published by Doubleday Ireland.
Three women, three cities How Now Brown Frau (A (Allen & Unwin, £14.62). Mo Months after meeting a “t “tall, attractive Bavarian, with impressively straight wi teeth”, Australia’s Merridy te Eastman Ea went to live with him in Munich Mu – pregnant, and speaking no German. Cue charming, if sometimes over-detailed account of motherhood and Bavarian mores. 28 |
December 2013/January 2014
Breathless: An American Girl in Paris (Seal Press, £9.88). Bittersweet tale of £9 author Nancy K. Miller’s au “escape” to Paris in the “e ea early 1960s. She hopes to sa sample Paris breathlessly à la Jean Seberg Seberg, but finds more disappointment than romance ... A very funny, cautionary memoir, by the feminist and literary professor.
My Venice and Other Essays (Atlantic Press Monthly, £16.05, out Mo December De 3). Crime writer wr Donna Leon, creator cr of Commissario Gu Guido Brunetti, muses on her adopted city of 25 years in 50 short, sharp essays. Of course it’s all canals and beautiful walkways ... but mind the garbage and dog dirt.