Category: Recommended books

I received a copy of The Afterparty from its publishers, Jonathan Cape, but as I have little interest in celebrity culture or the newspaper industry, the blurb held little appeal. I then saw a glowing review from Kim, and although our taste in books usually matches I assumed that her career in publishing accounted for her love of this book. A few weeks later intriguing debates started to crop up all over the place and I decided that I’d have to give this book a try. I fully expected to hate it, but I was wrong. I was quickly drawn in to it’s clever narrative and this book has become one of my favourites of 2011.

The Afterparty follows a struggling journalist who is asked to attend a celebrity party. His job is to get as much gossip as possible in order to write a column, but he doesn’t find integrating with the other party guests easy. I don’t want to spoil anything for you, so I’ll reveal no more about the plot other than to say that are affairs, a death and all the bitchiness you’d expect to find in this cut-throat world – it is a gripping read with numerous twists and turns.

It also has an original structure – the main narrative is interspersed with email correspondence between the “author” and his “agent”. This allows the reader to see changes in the book’s construction as it is written, adding an unusually entertaining depth to the story.

One of the things that impressed me most was the use of real “celebrities”. I often find books frustrating because the characters are based on real people, but I can’t quite work out which ones. This didn’t have the same problem as numerous real celebrities appear and actually interact with each other. I wondered how the author could get away with the (often controversial) conversations these people had, but the Vintage podcast revealed that all the conversations were taken from transcripts of things they’d actually said and so (fingers crossed) he can’t get into trouble for it.

The Afterparty is extremely timely and (after the recent phone hacking scandal) I was amused to find that Rebekah Wade makes an appearance. The book ends by giving a thought provoking insight into celebrity culture and achieved the almost impossible task of making me feel a little bit sorry for them and their non-stop glittery life.

The Afterparty is like nothing I’ve ever read before, but if I have to draw comparisons then it would be with another of my favourite books of the year, The Nobodies Album. Both are original, of the moment, and cover both celebrity culture and novel writing.

This book will divide opinion, but the great thing is that it will get everyone talking. I highly recommend that you give it a try, if only so that you can join in the debate.

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Five words from the blurb: write, bestseller, succeeds, fame, gleeful

How I Became A Famous Novelist is a satire of the publishing industry. The central character, Pete Tarslaw, decides to become an author in order to impress his ex-girlfriend. He doesn’t have any idea what to write about and so researches the bestseller lists with the aim of creating a book that will appeal to as many people as possible. He comes up with a series of rules for his book and shapes the plot around them – leading to a novel that contains a ridiculous number of themes and plot threads.

Rule 4: Must include a murder
Sixty percent of that week’s bestselling novels involved killings. Glancing around the bookstore, I estimated that fifty thousand fictional characters are murdered each year. Not including a murder in your book is like insisting on playing tennis with a wooden racket. Noble perhaps in some stubborn way, but why handicap yourself?

I normally struggle with satirical novels, but this book had me laughing out loud on several occasions. It is an insightful parody of the current publishing industry and no-one is safe from mockery – I particularly enjoyed reading the sections about bloggers.

The only downside to this book is that everything he writes is true – the title could easily be changed to How to Become a Famous Novelist, and the text taken literally by an aspiring author to create a publishable book.

I flew through this entertaining story, finding several sections so amusing that I made my friends and family read them too.

Writing a novel – actually picking the words and filling in paragraphs – is a tremendous pain in the ass. Now that TV’s so good and the Internet is an endless forest of distraction, it’s damn near impossible. That should be taken into account when ranking the all-time greats. Somebody like Charles Dickens, for example, who had nothing better to do except eat mutton and attend public hangings, should get very little credit.

I highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the publishing industry.

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The thoughts of other bloggers:

I can’t see why anyone who likes to read wouldn’t want to check out this hilariously funny, spot-on satire of popular fiction. Life With Books

However, it can feel a bit light and fluffy due to its readability and how neatly everything is squared away at the end. The Literary Omnivore

Part of the fun in reading this story is seeing if you can guess who the real life models might be for those authors that he critiques. At Home With Books

The Nobodies Album is described as a murder mystery, but it is so much more than that. It is an insightful look into the relationship between a mother and her grown-up child, but it is also a clever piece of meta-fiction – questioning whether a story ever really ends and what rights an author has to a book once it has been published.

The Nobodies Album begins with Octavia Frost, a famous novelist, discovering that her son has been arrested for murdering his girlfriend. She dashes across the country to be with him, despite the fact that they haven’t seen each other for years. Scared and emotional she waits to see if she will be accepted back into his life and begins the painful process of discovering whether or not he is guilty of the crime. I thought that the book perfectly captured the emotions of parenthood – covering the nature versus nurture debate as well as the guilt experienced when a child behaves inappropriately. The meta-fictional style made these emotions seem all the more honest and realistic.

Now that the moment is here, it’s not what I expected at all. That’s the fundamental flaw in the illusion that writers like to maintain, the idea that we can craft anything approaching truth. No matter how richly we imagine, no matter how vividly we set the scene, we never come close to the unambiguous realness of the moment itself.

Interwoven with the narrative are snippets from Octavia Frost’s novels. Life experiences have altered the way she views the world and so she has decided to create a new book in which she rewrites the ending to all her previous novels. The snippets didn’t come across as realistic endings as each contained the sort of information that normally begins a novel, but I’m willing to forgive this because each of the stories was so interesting in its own right. I could easily have read full-length versions of most of them – especially the one in which people forget everything that is too traumatic.

It is difficult to explain just how clever this novel is. There is so much going on, but Carolyn Parkhurst’s skill as a writer ensures that the reader is never lost. It could easily have felt gimmicky, but the emotional rawness of the text lent an authenticity to it.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in parental responsibilty or how the writing process changes with experience, but also to anyone looking for a gripping narrative with an original, thought provoking style.

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The thoughts of other bloggers:

….the writing is stellar. It is smart, insightful, and real. You’ve Gotta Read This!

….an incredibly creative novel that I definitely recommend. S. Krishna’s Books

……accessible and thoughtful. The Literate Housewife

I think I may have discovered a new favourite novelist!

Have you read any of Carolyn Parkhurst’s earlier books?