New Arrival: The Given Day by Dennis Lehane

For once I didn't have any new arrivals to post about today, which was doubtless something of a relief for my groaning bookshelves. But I happened to pop in British Bookshops up the road when I was out and about just now, and there on the shelf (where on the shelf? right there) was this:













A UK first edition hardback of Dennis Lehane's The Given Day, published by Doubleday in 2008, and at a bargain price too. Good old British Bookshops. Every now and again they come up trumps (witness the signed first edition of Peter Hook's The Hacienda I picked up for a song at the start of the year). And in an ironic twist, The Given Day is... historical fiction, set, as it is, in Boston after World War I. Which rather makes a mockery of my mini-rant in the previous post. Sigh. What a tool. Anyway, it's a weighty old tome, clocking in at 700-plus pages, so gawd knows when I'll get round to reading it. I really liked Shutter Island, and I've got Mystic River to read still (and something else on the way...), but this does look good. Here's wot The Guardian said:

Dennis Lehane, who put in shift work as a writer on The Wire, does here for historical Boston what David Simon did for contemporary Baltimore, creating a cross-section of society within a police framework to show city corruption infiltrating every level from the highest down to the street. His sprawling epic is set at a volatile time in Boston's history, 1918, and is peppered with real-life cameos, Bolsheviks, anarchists, labour strikes, a nascent FBI and a poorly paid police force treated so pejoratively by its command that a strike is on the cards.

So there you go.