Cinico by Allan Cameron (Vagabond Voices, £10.95)
Novelist, poet and translator Cameron is writing here in the guise of Cinico de Oblivii, an Italian journalist who comes to Scotland to report for his paper on the 2014 referendum. Cinico is at that stage in his life where he’s ready to accept he’s a vacuous person. His sojourn to Scotland convinces him that some of his preferred opinions are “shallow and destructive” too. After spending a dozen years in London without giving the Scots a thought, he’s taken aback by the effect they have on him. Cameron makes no attempt to disguise his own sympathies – parts of this book are shamelessly polemical and the fictional No campaigners encountered by de Oblivii are not shown in a flattering light – but looking at the referendum through the eyes of an Italian, whose country’s history is far more fragmented than the UK’s, is a new angle, which throws up interesting comparisons. Cinico won’t be in bookshops until September but is available online now.
Dead Cat Bounce by Kevin Scott (ThunderPoint, £9.99)
It’s already the stuff of nightmares. A young boy has been killed crossing the road, and his grieving mother and brother are mentally preparing themselves for the following day’s funeral. But it’s about to get even worse. Matt gets a phone call telling him that his little brother’s body has been snatched from the undertaker’s, and won’t be returned until he pays a local gangster the £15,000 he owes. Hapless, unmotivated Matt and his wealthy City banker brother Peter have to overcome, at least temporarily, their mutual hatred to try to recover the body without their mother finding out what’s amiss. It sounds like a morbid caper, and on one level it is, but Kevin Scott never lets the absurdity of the situation overwhelm the seriousness and horror of it all, underplaying the comic potential to highlight the troubled relationship between the equally flawed brothers. It’s one of those books that keep the reader hooked right to the end.
The Fermented Man by Derek Dellinger (Duckworth Overlook, £13.99)
Having had some experience of home brewing beer and cider, Derek Dellinger decided that for the duration of 2014 he would only consume food and drink which had fermented. “I would make myself the embodiment of the preservational and nutritional power of microbe-made foods,” he writes. It was a diet that included obvious candidates like sauerkraut and yoghurt, but also prosciutto, salami and Tabasco sauce, and eventually led to a climactic meal of rotten shark meat in Iceland. He lived to tell the tale, but admits it was the hardest year of his life, during which he was constantly hungry and failed to notice the collapse of a long-term relationship. Dellinger is not a diet guru, and doesn’t recommend anyone else follow his example. But fermented food has, as he says, a long history and can be found in many diverse societies. In an increasingly homogenised world, it’s worth bringing some attention back to one of the oldest culinary traditions.
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