My town was set ablaze on 7 December, after all four thousand inhabitants had been evacuated, except for me. I was born here, had live here all my life and couldn't imagine living anywhere else ... There is always one, at least one, who doesn't follow the crowd, he doesn't even need to know why, and here in Suomussalmi it was me.
Fourteen years after independence, the enduring friendship of three women has carried them through times of violence and loss in Kenya, their chosen homeland.
'More delinquent than Nobokov, more gung-ho than Hemingway, more verbose than Kerouac, and more self-obsessed than Kafka, the writer Kleinboer introduces himself as probably the weirdest activist ever to rise up - in an absolutely literal sense - against the bigoted laws of the apartheid regime.' Koos Kombuis
Frank Machianno is the guy, a late-middle-aged ex-surf bum who runs a bait shack on the San Diego waterfront. He's a beloved fixture of the community, a stand-up businessman, a devoted father to his daughter. Frank's also a hit man, a retired hit man ...
EVEN Boston has its tender- loin districts. One of them slopes off the fringes of Beacon Hill and is known as Scollay Square. Scollay was a "liberty town" through World War II, and it is of this time in this place that Pearl Schiff writes in a first novel at once distin- guished for its brutal candor and reportorial skill.
Scollay Square is "a catchy tune with dirty lyrics," and among those singing it within the taverns, movies and penny arcades sprawling along its brightly lit course are derelicts, bookies, short-order cooks, bar- tenders, drunks, sailors and girls. Especially sailors and girls. Not all the liberties in- volved come free, of course, and sometimes the price is to be measured in heartaches and despair rather than money. But some of the temporary attach- ments of the square come to bloom. It is to Miss Schiff's credit that she sees the humani-ties as well as the nihilisms of her scene.
