Inside Jacket

The Independent has Booker Prize-winner Aravind Adiga writing about Mumbai. Adiga has a new novel coming out, Last Man in Tower.

I first saw the city in 1985 with my mother. We were the guests of my grand-uncle Suresh, a lawyer who lived in Bandra. Many in my family had migrated from Mangalore to practise law in Bangalore or Madras. Suresh, a feisty, affectionate, beak-nosed man, was the only one who had chosen Mumbai – a far-away, Hindi-speaking place where south Indians were reportedly attacked by the right-wing movement Shiv Sena. He drove us up to see the Queen’s Necklace seafront; I had paani puris near the Gateway of India, and puked them into the ocean. And though 18 years passed before I came back, Mumbai always found ingenious ways to remind me of its existence.

The Daily Telegraph reprints the new introduction to Complete Stories by Kingsley Amis, published this week by Penguin Modern Classics.

In Lucky Jim, Amis reprised the black comedy of Evelyn Waugh and reclothed it in the provincial workaday garb of the ordinary middle classes, and if in doing so he belied something of his artistic seriousness, he was rewarded for it with instant acclaim. His story of a young provincial university lecturer’s sufferings at the hands of academic bores, pretentious snobs, prissy disapproving women and spoiled, culturally elitist young men was a huge commercial and critical success. It laughed at everyone who needed laughing at in that cramped, class-bound decade; it gave a likeable validity to the new forms of life, to social and sexual freedoms which were shown as modest, funny, authentic.

Cornell Woolrich was an incredibly successful crime writer, who also wrote under the pseudonyms of William Irish and George Hopley. Even though his novels and short stories sold in huge numbers and were adapted into numerous Hollywood thrillers, Woolrich led a sad life and most of his books are now out-of-print.

Rediscover one of the true masters of murder and mystery writing, and some of the fantastic, dark and pulpy covers of his books.

If you are a fan of Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger or Wally Lamb’s I Know This Much is True, then you might enjoy our latest selection of reading recommendations relating to twins.

It was actually surprisingly easy to find twin-themed fiction – Pat Conroy, Ken Follett, Arundhati Roy, V.C. Andrews and Madeleine L’Engle all appear on our list. Browsing through these books, you will see twins often get a bad rap and I’ve already had an email from a twin telling me that we missed off Edward Carey’s Alva & Irva or Linda Gillard’s A Lifetime Burning.

Here’s my review of At Work by photographer Annie Leibovitz. It’s half memoir, half photography book. She describes her career from a young snapper on Rolling Stone magazine to become one of the world’s most prestigious photographers. Lots of great photos of Hunter S. Thompson, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Demi Moore, Whoopi Goldberg, the Blues Brothers, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mikhail Baryshnikov, William S. Burroughs, Kate Moss and Queen Elizabeth II.