Marian Keyes’ latest book, The Brightest Star in the Sky, is set in and around a multi-occupancy residential building, 66 Star Street, which as you’d expect is in Dublin. It follows the lives, loves, triumphs and disappointments of the residents, a mismatched bunch that I found hard to imagine sharing a roof. On the ground floor we find Maeve and Matt the young married couple who seem to be rather more clingy than might be expected and are harbouring a horrible secret that explains their rapidly revealed reliance on anti-depressants. Heading to the upper floors we meet Jemima, the elderly protestant who lives with her dog and is temporarily putting up her pretty-boy catholic foster-son Fionn whilst he makes a gardening programme for a television channel. Jemima is a part time telephone psychic, a complete fraud of course, but one with a good heart.

Marian Keyes

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Seymour is the least popular kid at Glendale school, a Manhattan fee-paying school that’s “small and getting smaller every year”. It’s a shame he’s not doing better because his parents can’t really afford the fees to send him there and he suspects they might have worked out that their investment in his education doesn’t look like paying off. Of the 41 children in his year at his Manhattan school, he ranks himself as the 41st in terms of popularity but on the whole he’s pretty cool about that. Yes, he wishes he had a bit more status and particularly wishes that Jessica, the ‘hot’ girl with the breasts who borrows his pencils during detention, would notice him but he’s pretty resigned to being the butt of class jokes and getting called names by Lance, the top dog in the school’s basketball team. When a 42nd pupil joins the school everything is set to change for Seymour. The ‘new boy’ is like nobody he’s ever met before. Elliot Allagash is wealthy beyond the imagination of most of us mere mortals and Elliot has his eye on Seymour.

Simon Rich

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Grayson Perry is the sort of person about whom it’s hard not to have an opinion. Mention his name and people fall into three broad camps; those who say ‘Grayson WHO?’, those who say “Ah yes, the controversial potter who won the 2003 Turner Prize” and everyone else smiles and says “The bloke in the dress”. As the wife of a man who’s utterly obsessed by ceramics and spends his life researching potters and stalking the older ones in order to ‘buy before they die’ I was aware of Perry quite a while before he hit the mainstream.

We were sitting in the kitchen of an elderly but very esteemed potter who’d just given us a very nice lunch when the gentleman concerned started to rant about Grayson Perry.

Grayson Perry, Wendy Jones

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When I read The Marriage Bureau for Rich People I was hooked immediately. I have an extensive collection of books set in India and whilst it’s a country I love to visit and to read about, I have to admit that happy light-hearted fiction set there is hard to find. I asked Vladimir to approach the author – Farahad Zama – and ask if we could interview him. Below you’ll find the results of that interview.

I’d certainly advice any of the Curious Book Fans reviewers to consider approaching writers as getting direct contact must surely be one of the most interesting ways to fulfil some of those ‘curious’ yearnings to learn more about a book or writer you’ve really enjoyed.

CBF: You grew up in Vizag and married a local girl. Was your marriage arranged and if so how did your experience compare with that of the marriage candidates in your book?

Farahad Zama: Yes, my wife’s uncle was our neighbour and that’s how the marriage was arranged. I met my wife for the first time in October and we were married on New Year’s eve, six weeks later.

Farahad Zama

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Imagine the situation

You are a refugee from war in your homeland. Your mother sold her body to raise the money to send you and your brother out of the country to the ‘safety’ of another land where you live with your uncle, a man who loathes his sister for what she’s had to do to keep her children alive.

You’re young, pretty and poor and the only way to get your residency paperwork renewed is to go to your ‘sponsor’ who holds the power of life or death (residency or deportation) over you and your brother. He tells you that the fee for processing the application is equivalent to 4 months of your uncle’s salary but he thinks that you should pay. You tell him you have no money and he says that you have something that’s ‘worth’ that much. He assaults you and you can’t sit down for days. Your uncle takes your brother and moves away leaving you homeless. You get a job in a café where the owner sells you to one of his customers, a fat ugly man who has sex with you in the back room of the building. You turn to sniffing glue and drinking perfume to escape the pain in your body and the sadness in your heart.

You are from Eritrea, sent to live in Saudi Arabia and you are a fifteen year old boy.

If this is ‘sanctuary’ what does hell look like?

Saudi Arabia, Sulaiman Addonia

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“The first time I met Wonderboy, he pissed on me. I suppose he was trying to warn me off, which was quite prescient when you consider how things turned out”

The singer Moby claimed that “We are all made of stars” whereas writer Marina Lewycka’s third book is a little more down to earth. We are all – according to Lewycka – made of glue. Quite what she means by this is open to the interpretation of the reader and there are plenty of different directions your interpretation can take. If you want to look on the dark side, it’s hinted in places that it could be a reference to the Nazis making glue from the bodies of their gas chamber victims.

Marina Lewycka

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When teenager Jennifer Maidment is murdered and her mutilated body is found dumped by the roadside near Worcester, West Mercia Police have little to go on and call in the support of criminal profiler, Tony Hill. Hill has time on his hands since back in Bradfield – the Sheffield/Bradford fictional location where Hill lives and usually plies his trade – his friend and lodger, policewoman Carol Jordan has been banned from using Hill’s services. Hill has other personal reasons for thinking that an excuse to go to Worcester is very timely too.

When a teen-aged boy goes missing on Carol’s patch, it’s only a matter of time before his mutilated body will be found and another boy will be reported missing. With Tony in Worcester and Carol banned from talking to him, neither knows that the other is involved with a similar case.

Val McDermid

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I travel a lot and so it’s not surprising that my bookshelves are filled with guidebooks from all over the world. The guidebooks I choose have changed as I’ve got older (and better off) and as technology has opened up a whole world of additional information available for free. The guidebooks I needed as a student backpacker were very different from those I need today in the era of the internet with all the access it offers to hotel and transport booking and the myriad homepages of attractions all over the world. Twenty years ago I favoured Rough Guide or Lonely Planet with their back-packer insights and listings for cheap accommodation and cheap eats. Today I mostly want guidebooks that will inspire me rather than tell me everything I could ever want to know about a place. I don’t need detailed prices and opening times – if I am interested enough to want to visit a museum or aquarium, then I’ll go and look it up on the internet for absolute up to date info.

Sydney, Travel guides

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“Like a barber who shaves the cat for want of something to do” – Mrs Ali

Mr Hyder Ali, Government Clerk (retired) has been struggling to fill his days since he gave up work. It’s not easy for his wife either. She’s going crazy at him fussing around the house and wishes he’d get out from under her feet and find something to do. You might suppose he’d take up golf, collect stamps or spend more time at the mosque but instead he comes up with the unlikely idea of starting a marriage bureau. With decades of his own happy marriage behind him and a keen understanding of human nature, it’s just the job for a man in need of distraction. Of course it’s not just ‘any’ marriage bureau because Mr Ali is smart enough to know that all good businesses need a point of difference, something to make it stand out in a busy marketplace. His business is thus the “Marriage Bureau for Rich People“. Oh if only we could be so blatant in our branding!

Farahad Zama

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When I saw the award winning film “Hotel Rwanda” as an in-flight movie it made me want to know more about the Rwandan genocide. I was ashamed that I’d not paid more attention and felt that in order to make some kind of retribution for that ignorance, the least I could do was to look for books on the topic. “A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali” went onto my Amazon wish-list along with another called “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families“. Both stayed on the list forgotten for a while until my periodic review of the wish list (otherwise known the ‘what’s cheap this time?’ check) meant I spotted a bargain copy through one of Amazon’s private sellers and I snapped it up.

Gil Courtemanche, Rwanda

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The slippery slope of deceit and bad behaviour is a steep one and one on which it’s hard to turn back once you’re heading down hill. Bob Dylan once wrote a song about an affair and described is as :

“A bad motorcycle with the devil in the seat, Going ninety miles an hour down a dead end street”

It starts gently – in Julia’s case it’s a simple case of mixing her glass bottles in with the plastics in the recycling bin. Then it accelerates through illegally down-loading music off the internet and not telling cashiers who make a mistake in her favour. Of course there’s nowhere else it could possibly end up than in the arms of a professor of Medieval literature.

Debra Kent

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