BOOK OF THE WEEK
One Morning in March: Dunblane and the Shooting That Changed Britain by Stephen McGinty
On 13 March 1996, Thomas Hamilton walked into Dunblane primary school with two semi-automatic pistols and two revolvers. He shot dead 16 primary one children – aged five and six – and their class teacher, before killing himself. Nicola Sturgeon’s office was a few miles down the road and, revisiting the events of those days, she writes that she can still hear the screams of a mother who worked in her building and had just heard the news that her child’s school had become the site of a massacre. Reviewing a painstaking and engrossing new book about Dunblane and its legacy, Sturgeon finds she is appalled anew by the warning signs that were missed: it’s hard not to conclude that this was a tragedy that was entirely preventable.
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WHAT TO READ NEXT
As If by Isabel Waidner
Isabel Waidner’s breakthrough came after winning the Goldsmiths prize in 2021 for Sterling Karat Gold – a novel that juggled time travel, Iraqi history and performance art. But her new book, As If, turns away from the surrealist style that Waidner made her own: it is, writes Anthony Cummins, a “taut psychological puzzler forged out of the fevered thoughts of two lookalike strangers who become dizzyingly entangled in one another’s life”. It’s witty and pacy as well as very enjoyable: The Comedy of Errors by way of Samuel Beckett.
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END NOTES
It’s an awful reality that it is often war and conflict that make us seek a deeper understanding of a country. If you’re looking for some eye-opening reading on Iran, then here are a couple of entry points. Ruth Michaelson, The Observer’s Middle East correspondent, has put together a reading list of three books, including Marjane Satrapi’s wonderful graphic novel Persepolis, about the 1979 revolution, and a memoir of 544 days spent in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison. And Chris Power’s paperback of the week is Women Without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur: an Iranian masterpiece first published in 1989 and long banned by the Iranian regime, its first British edition, in a translation by Faridoun Farrokh, has been longlisted for the International Booker prize. With a backdrop of Iran’s 1953 coup, Parsipur’s novel is short, strange and compulsively readable.
Illustration by Charlotte Durance
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