Quite night in The Nobodies album Carolyn Parkhurst The invisible bridge Julie Orringer flaws Bombay Bicycle Club Leap Year Butterfly house The Coral My name is Khan Two for Sorrow
WORDS��MARISSA�COX
R E V I E W S
QUIET� N I G HT IN
An intelligent
and emotive
thriller
The Nobodies Album by
Carolyn Parkhurst, out 8 July
(published by Sceptre, £17.99)
Art imitates life in this
emotionally charged novel
from the bestselling
author of Lorelei’s
Secret and Lost
And Found.
The book’s
protagonist, Olivia
Frost, is also an
author, who has just
finished writing her
latest novel, called ‘The
Nobodies Album’. It’s an
ambitious project that has
involved rewriting the endings of all
the books she has ever published. These
new endings are included within Pankhurst’s
novel, forming miniature ‘book within a book’
excerpts which are at first confusing, but build
towards a fascinating end. Just as Olivia is about to
deliver the final manuscript (which includes her
re-written endings) to her publisher, she hears that
her estranged son Milo – a famous musician in a
band – has been arrested for the murder of his
girlfriend. For four years she has only seen her son
in the pages of magazines after a family tragedy
led to their estrangement but in that moment she
cancels her lunch and rushes to his rescue in the
hope that she can help prove his innocence.
The Nobodies Album is on one level a murder
mystery, on another a testament to the bond
between a mother and her child, while at the same
BOOK
THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE
BY JULIE ORRINGER
Out now, published by
Viking, £12.99 Set in
Hungary and Paris in the
lead up to the Second
World War, The Invisible
Bridge follows Andras,
battling poverty and
striving to be an architect.
He falls in love with Klara, a widow connected to
a letter his family asked him to deliver before he
left home. A heart-wrenching story of love.
Stylist’s
book of the
week
time it succeeds as a meditation on the blurred
lines between fact and fiction – something which
Parkhurst pulls off thanks in no small part to the
book’s sheer strength of drama.
You might find yourself occasionally skipping
over the rewritten endings which punctuate the
main narrative, but eventually you see how
important they are. The books that Olivia has
written deal with loss – the loss of a loved one,
childhood or memory – which all in some way relate
to her own family tragedy. Is her compulsion to
rewrite these happier endings an attempt to revise
her own ending? A moving and poignant book.
MUSIC
FLAWS BY BOMBAY
BICYCLE CLUB
Out 12 July, £11.99 Every
song on this album has
laid-back soul written all
over it. An entirely
acoustic follow up to the Bombay Bicycle Club’s
debut album last year, Flaws is an eclectic mix
of folksy ballads and skittering guitar melodies,
including the ethereal My God and the dainty
Leaving Blues. Rinse Me Down and Many Ways
will get your garden party up and dancing, rounding
off one of the best second albums of 2010.
MY NAME IS KHAN
Out now, £10.99 Cross
Bollywood with Forrest
Gump and you’ll get the most
moving film of the year.
Muslim Asperger’s syndrome
sufferer Rizwan Khan moves
to America in search of
a better life. There he falls
in love with a single Hindu
mother and settles with her and her son. Following
9/11, he is forced on an odyssey across the USA to
clear his name and win back the woman he loves.
BUTTERFLY HOUSE
BY THE CORAL
Out 12 July, £8.95 This guitar
band from Merseyside have
released some of the mostplayed
singles of the past
decade, namely Dreaming Of You, which made its
way onto TV’s Scrubs. This fifth album is produced by
John Leckie, famous for working with The Stone
Roses and Radiohead. Listen out for upcoming single
1,000 Years – sure to be a radio favourite this summer.
TWO FOR SORROW
BY NICOLA UPSON
Out now, published by Faber
and Faber, £12.99 The third
in a series that fictionalises
real-life wartime crime writer
Josephine Tey. Here she sets
out to write a book about
Amelia Sach and Annie
Walters – serial baby killers
and the first women to be hanged at Holloway Prison.
Upson expertly weaves fact with fiction in this
haunting and brilliantly executed book.
LEAP YEAR
DVD
BOOK
DVD
TURN�ON��TUNE�IN�
AND�CHILL�OUT
MUSIC
Out 12 July, £19.99 Amy
Adams proves herself as the
princess of romantic comedy
in this quirky flick. Spurred
on by the idea of proposing
to her boyfriend on leap day
(when it’s traditional for
women to ask men to marry
them), Anna Brady (Adams)
travels across Ireland to get to him. On the way, she
falls for rugged innkeeper Declan (Matthew Goode),
resulting in a charming (if a little silly) feel-good film.
WWW�STYLIST�CO�UK����
To view a Ceros magazine you need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser and have the flash player 8 or higher installed. To install the latest flash player, click the icon above, install the flash plugin and then click here to refresh this page.