Colin Thubron
MY travel book of the year is V. S. Naipaul's A Turn in the South (Viking, £14.95), which recounts a journey through the Deep South of the United States. In a region haunted by its past — slavery, the trauma of defeat in the Civil War, the forced desegregation of the Fifties — Naipaul charts the ways in which its com- munities evade or adapt to a changed world. A fastidiously intellectual quest, which goes in deep. In Gabriel Josipovici's The Book of God (Yale, £19.95), a study of the bible as `literature', the author transforms the worn disciplines of textual analysis to illuminate not only the nature of narrative and speech, but the conception of character and even the role of memory. A subtle and beautiful book.
The most interesting novel I've read this year is Gillian Tindall's Give Them All My Love (Hutchinson, £12.95), a story of revenge whose fascination lies above all in its play of imaginative intelligence. As so often with this author's work, the book's characters move in such a rich social context that most other novels seem skelet- al by comparison.
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