D.J. Taylor
I enjoyed Joan Brady's Theory of War (Deutsch, £14.99), a first novel drawing on the author's own family history. Brady's hero is her grandfather, sold into slavery as a :bounden boy' in the aftermath of the Civil War; the treatment, though original, awakens all sorts of welcome ghosts from great American writers such as Dreiser and Dos Passos.
Elsewhere, some of the stories collected in Peter Taylor's The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court (Chatto & Windus, £14.99) were as good as anything he has written in a career that now extends over almost half a centu- ry: Predictably, politically correct American critics have now caught up with Taylor: apparently it is unacceptable to write about a black chauffeur without revealing that he belongs to an oppressed minority. Among a heap of paperback reissues it was good to see the first UK publication of Nelson Algren's classic Somebody in Boots (Flamingo, £5.99), an unsparing account of the 1930s US hobo trail, and a snapshot of the American Depression to rank with Steinbeck.
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