Wasted Calories and Ruined Nights

Jay Rayner
Faber, £5, pp112

The subtitle to this enjoyable new collection of Jay Rayner’s most aggrieved restaurant reviews is A Journey Deeper Into Dining Hell and the Observer food critic really does make a kind of blood sport out of destroying culinary reputations. But Rayner argues in the introduction – with some justification – that he doesn’t deliberately revel in the negative: his view is that spending hundreds of pounds on dinner should buy you the “sublime, not the stupid”. All of which comes together in his brilliant review of Paris restaurant Le Cinq last year; at the time it was read by more than 2.2m people who, as Rayner suggests now, were “luxuriating in vicarious displeasure”. We suggest it was just a good, entertaining kicking.

Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants

Mathias Énard
Fitzcarraldo, £10.99, pp160

In Zone, Mathius Énard told an epic story in a single sentence. Compass, shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize last year, was structured as a disordered stream of consciousness. So to discover that Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants is a novella with paragraphs, chapters and the semblance of a thriller narrative is something of a surprise – and probably a relief to his excellent translator Charlotte Mandell. This “what if” retelling of history explores what might have happened had Michelangelo fled to Constantinople to design a bridge across the Golden Horn for the sultan. Thick on the atmosphere of the 16th-century Ottoman empire, it’s a far easier, more obviously satisfying route into Énard’s ongoing fascination with the connections between east and west.

Land of the Living

Georgina Harding
Bloomsbury, £16.99, pp240

Back in Norfolk after the last war, with a farm to look after and a new wife, Claire, to get to know, Charlie cannot put aside his horrific experiences in the remote jungles of northern India. His quietness is stifling, claustrophobic, isolating, and daily life lies plainly ahead. “But that was peace…” argues Claire. “One settled down and learned to cook and started a family, and made the world a steady place.” It’s this juxtaposition that makes Land of the Living such a quietly powerful novel; it doesn’t particularly explore anything new about trauma in the aftermath of war, but Harding has drawn two exquisite characters to care about within a story of survival, and, in the end, hope.

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