The Bookshelf
On Mark Brandi's The Rip, Dervla McTiernan's The Scholar, Leïla Slimani's Adèle and Mohammed Hanif's Red Birds
The opening words are, Adele has been good.
The Bookshelf
On Mark Brandi's The Rip, Dervla McTiernan's The Scholar, Leïla Slimani's Adèle and Mohammed Hanif's Red Birds
But a few paragraphs later, you see her getting into the shower, saying she wants to scratch herself to rip her body in two.
The Bookshelf
On Mark Brandi's The Rip, Dervla McTiernan's The Scholar, Leïla Slimani's Adèle and Mohammed Hanif's Red Birds
She wants someone to grab her and smash her skull into the glass door.
The Bookshelf
On Mark Brandi's The Rip, Dervla McTiernan's The Scholar, Leïla Slimani's Adèle and Mohammed Hanif's Red Birds
She wants to be devoured, sucked, swallowed whole.
The Bookshelf
On Mark Brandi's The Rip, Dervla McTiernan's The Scholar, Leïla Slimani's Adèle and Mohammed Hanif's Red Birds
So right from the beginning, we have this paradox.
The Bookshelf
On Mark Brandi's The Rip, Dervla McTiernan's The Scholar, Leïla Slimani's Adèle and Mohammed Hanif's Red Birds
She's been good and then we hear these descriptions of what she wants to happen.
The Bookshelf
On Mark Brandi's The Rip, Dervla McTiernan's The Scholar, Leïla Slimani's Adèle and Mohammed Hanif's Red Birds
Something that's quite striking, just a small point, is that after one of these scenes in which she has this reckless sex with a stranger in an alley, her girlfriend Lauren comes out and Adele says, can you walk me home?
The Bookshelf
On Mark Brandi's The Rip, Dervla McTiernan's The Scholar, Leïla Slimani's Adèle and Mohammed Hanif's Red Birds
I'm too scared to walk home by myself at night.
The Bookshelf
On Mark Brandi's The Rip, Dervla McTiernan's The Scholar, Leïla Slimani's Adèle and Mohammed Hanif's Red Birds
Given what she's just done, it's hard to see what she could actually be more scared of, having just engaged in reckless sex with a man she's just found on the street.
The Bookshelf
On Mark Brandi's The Rip, Dervla McTiernan's The Scholar, Leïla Slimani's Adèle and Mohammed Hanif's Red Birds
Interesting.
The Bookshelf
On Mark Brandi's The Rip, Dervla McTiernan's The Scholar, Leïla Slimani's Adèle and Mohammed Hanif's Red Birds
I haven't read that book recently.
The Bookshelf
On Mark Brandi's The Rip, Dervla McTiernan's The Scholar, Leïla Slimani's Adèle and Mohammed Hanif's Red Birds
I probably read it about 30 years ago, if not more, and it was one of my favourite books ever at the time.
The Bookshelf
On Mark Brandi's The Rip, Dervla McTiernan's The Scholar, Leïla Slimani's Adèle and Mohammed Hanif's Red Birds
I don't recall if there is the same sort of writing.
The Bookshelf
On Mark Brandi's The Rip, Dervla McTiernan's The Scholar, Leïla Slimani's Adèle and Mohammed Hanif's Red Birds
Certainly I didn't feel as engaged or enraptured by this book as I did by The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
The Bookshelf
On Mark Brandi's The Rip, Dervla McTiernan's The Scholar, Leïla Slimani's Adèle and Mohammed Hanif's Red Birds
I saw that he had described it, Kate, as a book that was funny about sad things, and I can't think of a better way to describe it.
The Bookshelf
On Mark Brandi's The Rip, Dervla McTiernan's The Scholar, Leïla Slimani's Adèle and Mohammed Hanif's Red Birds
At the time that he started writing it,
The Bookshelf
On Mark Brandi's The Rip, Dervla McTiernan's The Scholar, Leïla Slimani's Adèle and Mohammed Hanif's Red Birds
He was grieving for some lost friends, including a friend who ran a bookshop and had held an event there and was shortly after murdered, as have a number of other journalists been murdered.
The Bookshelf
On Mark Brandi's The Rip, Dervla McTiernan's The Scholar, Leïla Slimani's Adèle and Mohammed Hanif's Red Birds
He was also reporting in his role as a journalist on people who'd been abducted by intelligence agencies.
The Bookshelf
On Mark Brandi's The Rip, Dervla McTiernan's The Scholar, Leïla Slimani's Adèle and Mohammed Hanif's Red Birds
So he was starting from a dark place when he wrote it.
The Bookshelf
On Mark Brandi's The Rip, Dervla McTiernan's The Scholar, Leïla Slimani's Adèle and Mohammed Hanif's Red Birds
It took him seven years to write.