author:
CHARLIE OWEN

Fiction
448 pages
Headline Books

The third in Charlie Owen’s series of excellent police procedurals, Bravo Jubilee is set in the seventies—Owen’s “golden age of vocational policing”—and the fictional North Manchester district of Handstead: a penurious council dumping ground for the city’s most malevolent social housing tenants. Known by the bastardised phonetic “Horse’s Arse,” the division functions as a kind of police penal colony, where officers are transferred “if they had really fucked up somewhere else.” Consequently, Handstead’s cops constitute “an extraordinary collection of misfits, alcoholics, psychopaths, sociopaths, delinquents, sexual deviants, criminal masterminds and violent renegades.” The books chart a running turf war between cops and robbers that have more in common than either side would like to think.

Relentlessly scatological, Owen’s books seem at first like nothing more than a parade of anecdotes, loosely strung together. Uniformed coppers spike their colleagues’ drinks with acid, kill time on the late turn by taking blowjobs from prostitutes, and set fire to people’s cars. The reaction in the reader is that of hysterical and horrified disbelief. Yet Owen, a retired police inspector, adds enough procedural detail to keep you convinced and turning the pages, and what feels like a chaotic mess turns into disciplined storytelling.

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authors:
SANDRA NEWMAN
and HOWARD MITTELMARK

Non-fiction
272 pages
Collins

At sixteen years old I was sent a rejection letter containing the immortal lines “That there is a vast reservoir of undiscovered talent out there is a delusion.” It is a view with which, I suspect, the authors of How Not To Write a Novel would agree. Sandra Newman has taught fiction at numerous American universities: you dread to think how much terrible craft she’s ploughed through, how much clumsy laundry-list exposition, lumbering description, scattered exclamation marks and capitalisations like a Victorian adolescent’s diary…

This book begins with the premise that you cannot tell aspiring writers what to write: You can only tell them what not to write. And so begin 250 pages of hilarious dissections of bad writing. Highlights—and there is a highlight in every paragraph—include “Zeno’s Manuscript” (where everything a character does is lavishly described, from mundanities to bathroom functions); “Asseverated the Man,” (where authors use elaborate and contrived forms of dialogue attribution) “The Auto-Hagiography” (where the protagonist is nothing more than an idealised version of the author, tall, handsome and sensitive, and inexplicably attractive to women). Newman and Mittelmark break up the text with fictitious examples featuring absurd plots and recurring characters.

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author:
JOHN NIVEN

Fiction
352 pages
Harper Perennial

Not for the faint hearted, easily offended, or politically correct, John Niven’s Kill Your Friends is as much a vision of depravity and self-obsession as I’ve ever read, and deserves comparison to American Psycho. The 1990s British music industry is the setting for the novel, which uses months as its chapters and begins each with a report on successful records and professional movements.

Niven’s narrator is one Steven Stelfox, an A&R man for a big record company. Despite mounting debts and a lack of successful acts, Stelfox is moved to do very little actual work to change his situation. What he is willing to do is to drug and murder those who threaten to make him look bad. Despite the title, Stelfox is no one’s friend. He briefly wonders if the forced domesticity associated with having a girlfriend might be helpful in taming his penchant for cocaine and prostitutes, but dismisses the prospect when he remembers that this would require conversation. Women want so much to talk. This is a problem.

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author:
TIM WINTON

Fiction
224 pages
FSG

Still water runs deep, it’s said, whereas the kind of water one surfs—curling, glass-walled water, a hollow of serenity tucked inside a roaring snarl—apparently runs turbulently and dangerously over shark-populated reefs. On the fraught knife-edge between surface and turmoil is where characters live in Tim Winton’s Breath, a lean and taut novel with prose that crests and crashes in impressive resonance with its promising but ultimately tragic subjects.

Bruce Pike, the novel’s narrator, and Loonie, his best friend (yes, he’s pretty loony), ride their bikes to the Australian coast and discover surfing. “How strange it was to see men do something beautiful,” Bruce writes, “Something pointless and elegant, as though nobody saw or cared.” And it’s not long before Bruce and Loonie are both hooked by the rush and smitten by Sanbo, a veteran of worldwide big waves, who takes the boys under his wing and takes their boards under his beach house.

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