Chapters & Verse

Hardbacks, beach reads and great new music

LIFE’S A BEACH
Angelika Taschen and Ian Phillips
New Seaside Interiors
If you’ve ever dreamt of your own beachfront property, have plans to redecorate your own holiday home, or simply want to gawp at views enjoyed by a fortunate few, leaf through Taschen’s latest pictorial volume – dedicated to divine seaside abodes. Featuring properties from Iceland to Chile, sea views don’t get much beter than this.

RACE REVERSAL
Bernardine Evaristo
Blonde Roots
This British poet and author turns race relations on its head, with a fictionalised account of the slave trade in which Africans enslave Europeans. Told from the point of view of a young English girl, Blonde Roots forces readers to rethink the colour divide.

BOHO VS HOODY
Richard Price
Lush Life
Price, a native New Yorker, writes clear and convincing crime novels that are affecting long after you know “whodunit”. Lush Life takes a look at Manhattan’s gentrifying neighbourhoods, where hood rats rub up against “Bohèmers”.

Now Playing
Kid Carpet
Casio Royale
What do you get if you cross Britain’s great pop heritage with its punk past, and give it a load of crapped-out keyboards? Kid Carpet, Bristol’s one-man, brokendown computer band. He combines old-school digital bleeps with children’s organ sounds and a brutally honest vocal delivery, to turn out the kind of warped pop that brings to mind Captain Sensible, Wreckless Eric or, perhaps a deeply dysfunctional Kraftwerk. It might sound downmarket, yet if you take a punt on Casio Royale we’re sure you won’t be disappointed.

Travellers’ Tales
Paris, 1839
The general effect of Paris is wholly engrossing at first. The wealth in the shop windows, the high houses, the streams of traffic, the contrast everywhere between the last extremes of luxury and want struck him more than anything else. In his astonishment at the crowds of strange faces, the man of imaginative temper felt as if he himself had shrunk, as it were, immensely. A man of any consequence in his native place, where he cannot go out but he meets with some recognition of his importance at every step, does not readily accustom himself to the sudden and total extinction of his consequence.
Honoré de balzac, a distinguished provincial at paris (1839)