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Class Trip by Emmanuel Carrere, translated by Linda Coverdale, Quartet pounds 6. Ten-year-old Nicolas, puny, shy and unpopular, is dreading the school ski-trip. His father, indifferent to his son's social unease, makes matters worse by refusing to let him travel on the school coach, and taking him to the chalet himself. Nicolas thus arrives a day late, and his father drives off before he can retrieve his suitcase from the boot. This wouldn't be so bad, but Nicolas is a bed-wetter, and is forced to borrow pyjamas from the school bully. From inauspicious beginnings, Carrere's disciplined, expertly paced novella (which won the prestigious Prix Femina in France) develops into the enthralling story of an unloved child and his deeply dysfunctional family. The injustices wrought upon a small boy are presented with a psychological acuity that renders the terrible events that take place amid the deep hush of a snowed-in village all the more sinister and convincing.
Virgin Islands: Essays 1992-1997 by Gore Vidal, Abacus pounds 7.99. Grand master of the thumbnail portrait Gore Vidal pronounces on presidential, sorry, prime ministerial candidate Tony Blair to great effect in this latest collection of essays. "The dark hair does not entirely convince ... Lips pressed tight together cause his nostrils to flare as he tries to get enough air in. The speech, his programme, was written, we have been told - as if it were from the hand of St John of Patmos - in his own garden in his own longhand. As it turns out he has no programme. But things will be better, he tells us." Other victims are...