Tom Fleming
This Pointless Life
SINCE HE LEFT high school, Lewis Miner, class of ’89, has seen his fellow alumni go on to become notable members of society. He, though, considers himself lucky when he gets work doing menial research for a cola company. When Principal Fontana sends him the Eastern Valley High School Alumni Newsletter, Catamount Notes, Lewis is stirred into writing his own updates, of which Home Land is composed; his is an anti-fable, the confessions of a dangerous mind and a feckless body, the story of a man who did not pan out.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
This 'jaunty narrative raises fundamental questions about the role of popular history. Should this just be a matter of telling tales, as the general public often seems to think?'
@DrLRoach weighs up Charles Spencer's account of the White Ship Disaster.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/wholl-take-the-helm
'Amis clearly belongs to the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do school of pedagogy. More or less everything he says is demonstrably contradicted by elements of his own work, be they here or elsewhere.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/never-without-a-hitch
'The bar is set high at the outset, and readers are primed to wonder if Mikhail can make his case.'
Does Alan Mikhail's new life of the Sultan Selim I really overturn 'shibboleths that have held sway for a millennium'? Caroline Finkel investigates.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-of-the-universe-3