New Books - Fiction

I am elbow-deep in the latest chapter of my thesis, plus I have a mountain of review books to read. Then there are the new books of my wonderful and talented friends that require my immediate attention. How do I cope? By buying some new fiction. Well actually, it's all old fiction, and gives an indication of my taste in the obscure and the camp. Here's what I have bought in the last week or so:




Night Letters by Robert Dessaix - A wonderful novel posing as a travel memoir. Dessaix is playing all kinds of Nabokovian tricks here. I love Dessaix's writing, and have never read this one.




King of the Badgers by Philip Hensher - I simply had to read this one when it was slammed by a Peregrine Worsthorne (was there ever a more exquisitly named personage?) in the Spectator. He was disgusted by its explicit gay sex, and thought it brought ill-repute to all homosexuals. He thought its "unseemly anatomical accounts of group homosexual orgies...poison public opinion."



And No Man's Wit by Rose Macaulay




Corfu by Robert Dessaix - Another by the lovely Mr. Dessaix.



Running Backwards Over Sand by Stephanie Dowrick - I am currently writing about Dowrick's popular non-fiction, but have still never read any of her novels. I found a lovely signed hard-cover first edition.




Under Two Flags by Ouida - I adore Ouida as a character, though I have never actually read a single word of her fiction. I am about to remedy that.