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TAKING YOU ON A LITERARY JOURNEY

December 2012 Issue Four

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THE UNDERGROUND BOOK CLUB

4 December 2012

Andy BrownFounder of the Underground Book [email protected]

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Dear Reader,

Welcome to the Christmas special edition of the Underground Book Club! It’s been a fair while since our issues over the Summer and there will be a couple

of months until we launch as a regular monthly publication in the Spring. To keep up to date with future issues, distribution locations and general literary ramblings follow us on Twitter.

I’m particularly proud to have been involved in this edition, Christmas being one of the most important periods for the book industry and book lovers alike. We’ve got a great line up of books, and as always, if you don’t believe me, read the extracts and fi nd out for yourselves! We’ve also included our pick of book based Christmas gifts, check it out on page 12. I’d also like to direct you to our readership survey on our website. We are offering a chance to win signed copies of our featured books to those that fi ll out the survey.

The National Book Awards took place on the 4th of December and we’ve taken a look at some of the winners on page 20.

Talking of book prizes, Costa Book Awards revealed their shortlist recently and we were extremely excited to see that Life! Death! Prizes! by Stephen May has been shortlisted in the Novel category. For those of you who didn’t pick up our fi rst issue (it’s available on iTunes through our App), Stephen was the fi rst author who ever agreed to be in our magazine and we knew then we had a great book on our hands. We wish Stephen good luck for Tuesday 29th of January when the winners will be

announced. He’s up against this year’s Man Booker winner, Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel … should be a piece of cake.

So it might be a little diffi cult to break out the mulled wine on your commute, but at the very least you can sit back and start a literary journey….

Editor: Andy Brown

Design: e-Digital Design Ltd

Head of Editorial: Beth Hughes

Sales: Abdul Haaq

Editorial Research: Ben Jones

Special advisor: Jim Banting

Contributors

T

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5December 2012

Contents

5December 2012

MY BRILLIANT FRIENDElena Ferrante (Page 6)

A modern masterpiece from one of Italy’s most acclaimed authors, My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense and generous hearted story about

two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante’s inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship. Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighbourhood, a city and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her two protagonists.

WOLF’S GOLDAnthony Riches (Page 22)

Fresh from their victory in Germania, Marcus Aquila and the Tungrians have been sent to Dacia, on the north-eastern edge of the Roman Empire, with the

mission to safeguard a major source of imperial power. The mines of Alburnus Major contain enough gold to pave the road to Rome.

They would make a mighty prize for the marauding Sarmatae tribesmen who threaten the province, and the outnumbered auxiliaries are entrusted with their safety in the face of a barbarian invasion.

They will have to fi ght to the death to save the honour of the empire – and their own skins.

VANISHEDTim Weaver (Page 28)

GIFTS FOR CHRISTMAS (Page 12)

The Underground Book Club reveals what books we’d like to see under the Christmas Tree this year.

NBAs (Page 20)

We take a peek at the nominees and winners of three categories at this year’s National Book Awards

For millions of Londoners, the morning of 17 December is just like any other. But not for Sam Wren. An hour after leaving home, he gets onto a tube

train – and never gets off again. No eyewitnesses. No trace of him on security cameras. Six months later, he’s still missing.

Out of options and desperate for answers, Sam’s wife Julia hires David Raker to track him down. Raker has made a career out of fi nding the lost. He knows how they think. And in missing person cases, the only certainty is that everyone has something to hide.

PROLOGUEEliminating All the Traces

This morning Rino telephoned. I thought he wanted money again and I was ready to say no. But that was not the reason for the phone call:

his mother was gone.“Since when?”“Since two weeks ago.”“And you’re calling me now?”My tone must have seemed hostile, even though

I wasn’t angry or offended; there was just a touch of sarcasm. He tried to respond but he did so in an awkward, muddled way, half in dialect, half in Italian. He said he was sure that his mother was wandering around Naples as usual.

“Even at night?”“You know how she is.”“I do, but does two weeks of absence seem normal?”“Yes. You haven’t seen her for a while, Elena, she’s

gotten worse: she’s never sleepy, she comes in, goes out, does what she likes.”

Anyway, in the end he had started to get worried. He had asked everyone, made the rounds of the hospitals: he had even gone to the police. Nothing, his mother wasn’t anywhere.

What a good son: a large man, forty years old, who

hadn’t worked in his life, just a small-time crook and spendthrift. I could imagine how carefully he had done his searching. Not at all. He had no brain, and in his heart he had only himself.

“She’s not with you?” he asked suddenly.His mother? Here in Turin? He knew the situation

perfectly well, he was speaking only to speak. Yes, he liked to travel, he had come to my house at least a dozen times, without being invited. His mother, whom I would have welcomed with pleasure, had never left Naples in her life. I answered:

“No, she’s not with me.”“You’re sure?”“Rino, please, I told you she’s not here.”“Then where has she gone?”He began to cry and I let him act out his desperation,

sobs that began fake and became real. When he stopped I said:

“Please, for once behave as she would like: don’t look for her.”

“What do you mean?”“Just what I said. It’s pointless. Learn to stand on

your own two feet and don’t call me again, either.”I hung up.

Rino’s mother is named Raffaella Cerullo, but everyone has always called her Lina. Not me, I’ve


MY BRILLIANT FRIENDElena Ferrante

6 December 2012

My Brilliant Friend, a translation from Italian, tells the story of the intricacies of friendship through the relationship

between the narrator, Elena, and her childhood friend Lila. This book is the fi rst in what promises to be a compelling trilogy.

For the full review of My Brilliant Friend please visit www.undergroundbookclub.co.uk

My Brilliant Friend

7December 2012

never used either her fi rst name or her last. To me, for more than sixty years, she’s been Lila. If I were to call her Lina or Raffaella, suddenly, like that, she would think our friendship was over.

It’s been at least three decades since she told me that she wanted to disappear without leaving a trace, and I’m the only one who knows what she means. She never had in mind any sort of fl ight, a change of identity, the dream of making a new life somewhere else. And she never thought of suicide, repulsed by the idea that Rino would have anything to do with her body, and be forced to attend to the details. She meant something different: she wanted to vanish; she wanted every one of her cells to disappear, nothing of her ever to be found. And since I know her well, or at least I think I know her, I take it for granted that she has found a way to disappear, to leave not so much as a hair anywhere in this world.

Days passed. I looked at my e-mail, at my regular mail, but not with any hope. I often wrote to her, and she almost never responded: this was her habit. She preferred the telephone or long nights of talk when I went to Naples.

I opened my drawers, the metal boxes where I keep all kinds of things. Not much there. I’ve thrown away a lot of stuff, especially anything that had to do with her, and she knows it. I discovered that I have nothing of hers, not a picture, not a note, not a little gift. I was surprised myself. Is it possible that in all those years she left me nothing of herself, or, worse, that I didn’t want to keep anything of her? It is.

This time I telephoned Rino; I did it unwillingly. He didn’t answer on the house phone or on his cell phone. He called me in the evening, when it was convenient. He spoke in the tone of voice he uses to arouse pity.

“I saw that you called. Do you have any news?”“No. Do you?”“Nothing.”He rambled incoherently. He wanted to go on TV,

on the show that looks for missing persons, make an appeal, ask his mamma’s forgiveness for everything, beg her to return.

I listened patiently, then asked him: “Did you look in her closet?”

“What for?”Naturally the most obvious thing would never

occur to him.“Go and look.”He went, and he realized that there was nothing

there, not one of his mother’s dresses, summer or winter, only old hangers.

I sent him to search the whole house. Her shoes were gone. The few books: gone. All the photographs: gone.

The movies: gone. Her computer had disappeared, including the old-fashioned diskettes and everything, everything to do with her experience as an electronics wizard who had begun to operate computers in the late sixties, in the days of punch cards. Rino was astonished. I said to him:

“Take as much time as you want, but then call and tell me if you’ve found even a single hairpin that belongs to her.”

He called the next day, greatly agitated.“There’s nothing.”“Nothing at all?”“No. She cut herself out of all the photographs of

the two of us, even those from when I was little.”“You looked carefully?”“Everywhere.”“Even in the cellar?”“I told you, everywhere. And the box with her

papers is gone: I don’t know, old birth certifi cates, telephone bills, receipts. What does it mean? Did someone steal everything? What are they looking for? What do they want from my mother and me?”

I reassured him, I told him to calm down. It was unlikely that anyone wanted anything, especially from him.

“Can I come and stay with you for a while?”“No.”“Please, I can’t sleep.”“That’s your problem, Rino, I don’t know what to

do about it.”I hung up and when he called back I didn’t answer.

I sat down at my desk. Lila is overdoing it as usual, I thought. She was expanding the concept of trace out of all proportion. She wanted not only to disappear herself, now, at the age of sixty-six, but also to eliminate the entire life that she had left behind.

I was really angry.We’ll see who wins this time, I said to myself. I

turned on the computer and began to write—all the details of our story, everything that still remained in my memory.

CHILDHOODThe Story of Don Achille

My friendship with Lila began the day we decided to go up the dark stairs that led, step after step, fl ight after fl ight, to the door of

Don Achille’s apartment.I remember the violet light of the courtyard, the

smells of a warm spring evening. The mothers were making dinner, it was time to go home, but we delayed,


8 December 2012

challenging each other, without ever saying a word, testing our courage. For some time, in school and outside of it, that was what we had been doing. Lila would thrust her hand and then her whole arm into the black mouth of a manhole, and I, in turn, immediately did the same, my heart pounding, hoping that the cockroaches wouldn’t run over my skin, that the rats wouldn’t bite me. Lila climbed up to Signora Spagnuolo’s ground-fl oor window, and, hanging from the iron bar that the clothesline was attached to, swung back and forth, then lowered herself down to the sidewalk, and I immediately did the same, although I was afraid of falling and hurting myself. Lila stuck into her skin the rusted safety pin that she had found on the street somewhere but kept in her pocket like the gift of a fairy godmother; I watched the metal point as it dug a whitish tunnel into her palm, and then, when she pulled it out and handed it to me, I did the same.

At some point she gave me one of her fi rm looks, eyes narrowed, and headed toward the building where Don Achille lived. I was frozen with fear. Don Achille was the ogre of fairy tales, I was absolutely forbidden to go near him, speak to him, look at him, spy on him, I was to act as if neither he nor his family existed. Regarding him there was, in my house but not only mine, a fear and a hatred whose origin I didn’t know. The way my father talked about him, I imagined a huge man, covered with purple boils, violent in spite of the “don,” which to me suggested a calm authority. He was a being created out of some unidentifi able material, iron, glass, nettles, but alive, alive, the hot breath streaming from his nose and mouth. I thought that if I merely saw him from a distance he would drive something sharp and burning into my eyes. So if I was mad enough to approach the door of his house he would kill me.

I waited to see if Lila would have second thoughts and turn back. I knew what she wanted to do, I had hoped that she would forget about it, but in vain. The street lamps were not yet lighted, nor were the lights on the stairs. From the apartments came irritable voices. To follow Lila I had to leave the bluish light of the courtyard and enter the black of the doorway. When I fi nally made up my mind, I saw nothing at fi rst, there was only an odor of old junk and DDT. Then I got used to the darkness and found Lila sitting on the fi rst step of the fi rst fl ight of stairs. She got up and we began to climb.

We kept to the side where the wall was, she two steps ahead, I two steps behind, torn between shortening the distance or letting it increase. I can still feel my shoulder inching along the fl aking wall and the idea that the steps were very high, higher than those in the building where I lived. I was trembling. Every footfall, every voice was Don Achille creeping up behind us or coming down toward us with a long knife, the kind used for slicing open a chicken

breast. There was an odor of sautéing garlic. Maria, Don Achille’s wife, would put me in the pan of boiling oil, the children would eat me, he would suck my head the way my father did with mullets. We stopped often, and each time I hoped that Lila would decide to turn back. I was all sweaty, I don’t know about her.

Every so often she looked up, but I couldn’t tell at what, all that was visible was the gray areas of the big windows at every landing. Suddenly the lights came on, but they were faint, dusty, leaving broad zones of shadow, full of dangers. We waited to see if it was Don Achille who had turned the switch, but we heard nothing, neither footsteps nor the opening or closing of a door. Then Lila continued on, and I followed.

She thought that what we were doing was just and necessary; I had forgotten every good reason, and certainly was there only because she was. We climbed slowly toward the greatest of our terrors of that time, we went to expose ourselves to fear and interrogate it.

At the fourth fl ight Lila did something unexpected. She stopped to wait for me, and when I reached her she gave me her hand. This gesture changed everything between us forever.

It was her fault. Not too long before—ten days, a month, who can say, we knew nothing about time, in those days—she had treacherously taken my doll and thrown her down into a cellar. Now we were climbing toward fear; then we had felt obliged to descend, quickly, into the unknown. Up or down, it seemed to us that we were always going toward something terrible that had existed before us yet had always been waiting for us, just for us. When you haven’t been in the world long, it’s hard to comprehend what disasters are at the origin of a sense of disaster: maybe you don’t even feel the need to. Adults, waiting for tomorrow, move in a present behind which is yesterday or the day before yesterday or at most last week: they don’t want to think about the rest. Children don’t know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this the night. I was small and really my doll knew more than I did. I talked to her, she talked to me. She had a plastic face and plastic hair and plastic eyes. She wore a blue dress that my mother had made for her in a rare moment of happiness, and she was beautiful. Lila’s doll, on the other hand, had a cloth body of a yellowish color, fi lled with sawdust, and she seemed to me ugly and grimy. The two spied on each other, they sized each other up, they were ready to fl ee into our arms if a storm burst, if there was thunder, if someone bigger and stronger, with sharp teeth, wanted to snatch them away.


10 December 2012

We played in the courtyard but as if we weren’t playing together. Lila sat on the ground, on one side of a small barred basement window, I on the other. We liked that place, especially because behind the bars was a metal grating and, against the grating, on the cement ledge between the bars, we could arrange the things that belonged to Tina, my doll, and those of Nu, Lila’s doll. There we put rocks, bottle tops, little fl owers, nails, splinters of glass. I overheard what Lila said to Nu and repeated it in a low voice to Tina, slightly modifi ed. If she took a bottle top and put it on her doll’s head, like a hat, I said to mine, in dialect, Tina, put on your queen’s crown or you’ll catch cold. If Nu played hopscotch in Lila’s arms, I soon afterward made Tina do the same. Still, it never happened that we decided on a game and began playing together. Even that place we chose without explicit agreement. Lila sat down there, and I strolled around, pretending to go somewhere else. Then, as if I’d given it no thought, I, too, settled next to the cellar window, but on the opposite side.

The thing that attracted us most was the cold air that came from the cellar, a breath that refreshed us in spring and summer. And then we liked the bars with their spiderwebs, the darkness, and the tight mesh of the grating that, reddish with rust, curled up both on my side and on Lila’s, creating two parallel holes through which we could drop rocks into obscurity and hear the sound when they hit bottom. It was all beautiful and frightening then. Through those openings the darkness might suddenly seize the dolls, who sometimes were safe in our arms, but more often were placed deliberately next to the twisted grating and thus exposed to the cellar’s cold breath, to its threatening noises, rustling, squeaking, scraping.

Nu and Tina weren’t happy. The terrors that we tasted every day were theirs. We didn’t trust the light on the stones, on the buildings, on the scrubland beyond the neighborhood, on the people inside and outside their

houses. We imagined the dark corners, the feelings repressed but always close to exploding. And to those shadowy mouths, the caverns that opened beyond them under the buildings, we attributed everything that frightened us in the light of day. Don Achille, for example, was not only in his apartment on the top fl oor but also down below, a spider among spiders, a rat among rats, a shape that assumed all shapes. I imagined him with his mouth open because of his long animal fangs, his body of glazed stone and poisonous grasses, always ready to pick up in an enormous black bag anything we dropped through the torn corners of the grate. That bag was a fundamental feature of Don Achille, he always had it, even at home, and into it he put material both living and dead.

Lila knew that I had that fear, my doll talked about it out loud. And so, on the day we exchanged our dolls for the fi rst time—with no discussion, only looks and gestures—as soon as she had Tina, she pushed her through the grate and let her fall into the darkness.

About The Author

ELENA FERRANTE Elena was born in Naples. She is the bestselling author of The Days of Abandonment, which the New York Times described as “stunning,” Troubling Love, and The Lost Daughter. She has chosen to remain out of the public eye and writes anonymously.

My Brilliant Friend is available now from most good book stores. All work is subject to copyright.

Publisher: Europa EditionsFormat: PaperbackRRP: £11.99

Thanks to Europa Editions for providing the sample.

“Stunning…The raging, torrential voice of the author is something rare.”

—The New York Times

“Gutsy and compulsively readable.”—Vogue

Find out moreeuropaeditions.co.uk/mbf

and download your digital copy at the special price of £4.99

www.europaeditions.co.uk

Show this copy of UBC to any bookseller at Foyles on Charing Cross Road for £2 off the RRP on My Brilliant Friend*

*Terms & Conditions Apply. Subject to availability

DECIPHERING THE JARGON AND BULLSHIT OF MODERN-DAY BUSINESS

If you are fed up with the nonsense that people speak at work, this book is for you. The author has been collecting corporate gobbledygook for 30 years. There appears to be an endless supply, and this is the fi rst-ever dictionary to bring it all together in one place, offering over 2,000 entries and explanations.

“An incisive and entertaining send-up of contemporary offi ce life.Kevin Duncan’s book is a great tool for anyone hoping to master the secret codes of modern business.”Tamar Kasriel, author, Futurescaping

“Anyone looking to get their low-hanging hymn sheets in a rowshould read this book.”Tom Berry, Head of Technology, Fleishman-Hillard

Also available from LID Publishing

CREATIVE4CASTA new Solution for the Fututre of AdvertisingEmanuele Nenna

A timely manifesto for change and success in today’s rapidly evolving advertising industry.

THE COMMANDO WAYExtraordinary Business ExecutionDamian McKinney

A highly original guide to executing and achieving business missions and goals.

For more information go to www.lidpublishing.com

The big day is fast approaching, and for those of you still considering what to buy your Uncle, the in-laws, or that 3rd cousin twice removed, we’ve got suggestions of books that will make really great

gifts. As is our way, the fi nal suggestion comes with an extract so you can get a real feeling for the book. Enjoy!

12 December 2012

GIFTS FOR CHRISTMAS

MASTERCHEFS

WHO PUT THE BEEF IN WELLINGTON?James Winter

Ever wondered where Caesar Salad comes from? Who was Benedict and what’s he got

to do with combining poached eggs with ham and hollandaise sauce? In this fascinating journey into culinary history James Winter provides the answers to these questions and explores the origins of classic dishes from around the world. Who came up with them? When and what inspired them to combine certain ingredients? And why have they endured to become classics that we turn to again and again? With a total of 50 recipes including Battenberg Cake, Peach Melba, Sole Véronique, Chicken Kiev and Bloody Mary, James covers mains, desserts and even drinks. Including the quintessential version of each recipe plus hints and tips from top chefs this book will inform and inspire in equal measure.

Price (RRP): £17.99

GOING, GOING, GONE?

EXTINCT BOIDS

Ralph Steadman

When Ceri Levy asked Ralph Steadman to produce one piece of art representing

an extinct bird for a recent exhibition, Ghosts of Gone Birds, Ralph said ‘yes’. Then ‘yes’ again ... and again ... and again An astonishing 100 paintings later, Extinct Boids was born.

Ralph documents them all in this series of remarkable paintings, featuring unique interpretations of well-known birds such as the Great Auk, Passenger Pigeon and Dodo, along with less familiar members of the feathersome fi rmament – Snail-eating Coua, for example, or the Red-moustached Fruit Dove – and a variety of bizarre beasts including the Gob Swallow, the Long-legged Shortwing and the Needless Smut. All are captured in a riot of expression and colour, with a slice of trademark Steadman humour.

Price (RRP): £35

BROTHERLY LOVE

LIFE! DEATH! PRIZES!

Stephen May

Life! Death! Prizes! is Stephen May’s second novel. This book previously featured in

the Underground Book Club and has since been nominated for the Costa Novel award as well as the prestigious ‘Not the Booker Prize’.

The story follows a 19 year old boy, Billy, who’s mother dies unexpectedly and leaves him to fend for not only himself but also for his little brother, Oscar. Now Billy must be both mother and father to Oscar, and despite what his well-meaning aunt, the PTA mothers, the social services and Oscar’s own prodigal father all think, he knows he is more than up to the job, thank you very much. This is a heartbreaking coming of age tale told in a bleak, humorous and uplifting way.

Price (RRP): £11.99


Christmas Gifts

13December 2012

FEATURED GIFT

IT’S NOT ROCKET SCIENCEBen Miller

CHAPTER ONEFirst love Runs Deep

The Beginning

Did you know that we are all stars? I don’t mean that in a Simon Cowell-type, doing-it-for-my-dead-nan way. I mean that people, real people,

are quite literally made from stardust. It sounds like the most ridiculous sort of science fi ction – but this is the world we live in, seen through the eyes of science.

Let me explain. You, as well as everything around you, are made from atoms. You can think of them as the basic building blocks of nature. There was probably a chart on the wall at school called the Periodic Table that showed them in order of increasing size: the smallest, like hydrogen and helium, up at the top, and the big boys, like lead and uranium, down at the bottom. You’ll probably also have a vague recollection that these atoms were themselves made up of even smaller parts; to be precise, there was a small, dense, electrically positive nucleus at the centre, surrounded by a swarm of negatively charged electrons. Well, have you ever wondered how those atoms were made?

The answer, incredible as it may seem, is that they were made inside stars. The reason that the stars shine is that there is an enormous nuclear reaction going on inside them, where smaller nuclei are fused together into bigger nuclei, releasing huge amounts of energy as heat and light. The bigger the star, the bigger the nuclei it can

make. And once you’ve got a nucleus, all you need to do is sprinkle on a few electrons – which, frankly, are ten a penny – and you’ve got a beautiful, life-giving, electrically neutral, works-straight-out-of-the-box atom.

A star like our Sun, it turns out, is a little on the small side. This means it can produce only the smaller sorts of atoms, like helium. Bigger stars are capable of producing much bigger atoms, like iron and carbon – the sort of stuff that you and I are made of. So how do these bigger atoms get from the inside of a star into our bodies?

The answer is that the life cycle of big stars ends with what Noel Gallagher calls a supernova, a huge explosion that fl ings debris out across the galaxy. Over billions of years, this debris slowly clumps together due to gravity, sometimes forming new stars, sometimes forming planets. On these planets, if the conditions are right, life can form.

In other words, the atoms that make up our bodies were formed billions of years ago in the centres of real, genuine, 100 per cent stars. Those stars then exploded in ruddy great explosions, the debris became planets, life began on our planet – and then, thanks to a particularly slack period in popular music, Simon Cowell evolved. That’s science. It’s big, it’s bold, and – according to every experimental test we’ve been able to make – it’s true. If that is the sort of thing that gets you going, this is the book for you.

This book explains all of the cool scientifi c phenomena that you wished you understood in an understandable way. Miller’s style is very direct and amusing, probably because

he’s a comedian by trade. We found this book very charming and we think it’s a great Christmas gift.

Extract continues from Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWOThe Super-duper Atom Smasher

Size Matters

Have you ever wondered what the smallest thing in existence might be? Most of the objects we deal with in our everyday lives are, of course,

round about the size of a human hand – and I’m not entirely sure that’s a coincidence. The smallest division on the average ruler is a millimetre, largely for the reason that most people can’t make out much that’s a lot smaller than about a tenth of that. Imagine for a moment, however, that you are very into your arts and crafts, and you take up that peculiar hobby where you use a magnifying glass and a minute razor blade to carve a palm tree, say, or a smiley giraffe, into the end of a matchstick. For the end-of-year show, you want to pull something really special out of the bag. What would be the smallest object you could ever hope to decorate?

The answer, my friends, is an electron. At least, it would be an electron if there was anything small enough to carve it with – which, of course, there isn’t, because there’s nothing smaller than an electron1. And the next biggest thing up from an electron? Now there, my friends, lies a story. Because the next biggest thing up from an electron is something utterly thrilling, called a quark.

Quarks – and ‘quark’, by the way, rhymes with ‘squawk’ – are fascinating things. So far, we have discovered six of them, but of these the only two you really need to worry about are the ‘up quark’ and the ‘down quark’, because they are what protons and neutrons are made of – and, as you know, protons and neutrons are what atomic nuclei are made of. All the things that you hold dear – your home, your family, your pet Schnauzer – all of them are just fancy ways of arranging quarks.

How do we know that quarks exist? Well, that, my friend, is where some very canny bits of kit called particle colliders come in. And the very latest in particle colliders is the worldfamous Large Hadron Collider or LHC.

If its name sounds off-putting, just think of it as a kind of microscope: a window onto the bizarre world of the Very Small Indeed. With an optical microscope the best resolution we can hope for is around 100 billionths of a metre, small enough to see some of the larger viruses such as Ebola. An electron microscope is capable of making images of objects a thousand times smaller than that, such as carbon atoms. But to investigate anything smaller than an atom – and a quark is nearly a billion times smaller than an atom – you need a different method altogether. And, crazy as it might sound, the

method the LHC uses is to collide two protons together and examine what turns up in the wreckage . . .

A Whet of your Appetite

I fi nd it hard to put into words just how exciting I fi nd the LHC. There’s almost no way to over-exaggerate its signifi cance for the future of physics and, by

implication, the future of technology. Don’t be put off by the fancy handle; hadron is just the family name for something made of quarks, and the whole thing could just have easily been called the Large Proton Collider, because that is its main function. It may be an extraordinarily complex bit of engineering, employing ten thousand of the planet’s top scientists over a time-span of twenty years at a cost of some £4.4 billion – but at its heart is an extremely simple principle: get two protons moving in opposite directions at very high speeds, smash them into one another and look at what gets produced.

Why protons? Well, the answer is that there’s no such thing, as far as we know, as a lone quark, so a proton is the next best thing. Protons are made of quarks, and if you make enough collisions, sooner or later one of the quarks in one proton will collide head-on with one of the quarks in the other proton and all sorts of interesting stuff turns up in the wreckage. Of the many things we might see, the most eagerly awaited is, of course, the Higgs Boson2. Again, don’t be put off by the fancy name; the ‘Higgs’ bit is named after the Geordie mathematician, Peter Higgs, who fi rst proposed the bit of maths that best describes it, and the ‘boson’ bit is another family name for the group of particles it belongs to. Why it is so important – so important it’s been nick-named the ‘God particle’ – is something I shall take great delight in explaining in this chapter. Suffi ce it to say, if the Higgs is there, then the LHC is going to fi nd it. Exactly how we will know we have found it is a fascinating specialist-knowledge secret that I shall be very pleased to let you in on.

As we shall see in the second half of the chapter, however, there’s much more to the LHC than just the search for the Higgs. A whole new world is opening up for investigation, the world of objects as small as a tenth of a billionth of a billionth of a metre. Among the truly extraordinary things we might fi nd are extra-spatial dimensions – yes, really! – and a whole host of new, as yet undiscovered particles. Not only that, but as we shall see, the LHC has been built to explore not just the next chapter of quantum physics, but to try to answer two of the most fundamental unanswered questions in cosmology too: fi rst, if the Big Bang created equal amounts of matter and antimatter, where has all the antimatter gone? And second, if the Big Bang sprayed matter out equally in all directions, as you’d expect, then how come that matter


14 December 2012

managed to clump together into stars and galaxies? We really need to answer those two questions, because they are absolutely fundamental to our understanding of how we came to be here in the fi rst place.

Of course, one of the other talking points of the LHC has been the fact that the collisions are going to be of such high energy that, alongside a Higgs Boson, something else might get produced that is a lot less desirable: a black hole. That is a possibility, but before you throw this book away in a fi t of nihilist angst and drain that raffi a-covered bottle of dodgy Majorcan brandy that’s been sitting in the cupboard ever since the late nineties, let me assure you that such a black hole is never, ever going to destroy the known Universe – exactly why will become clear very shortly.

The Only Game in TownI’ve only ever fl own to Geneva for two reasons: one is to ski off-piste at Chamonix and the other is to visit CERN, the home of the Large Hadron Collider. I’d be hard pushed to say which one left me the more nervous.

CERN is, quite frankly, to physics what the Vatican is to Roman Catholicism. Established back in the 1950s as the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, it was originally founded to explore the atomic nucleus but quickly switched to high-energy particle physics without ever bothering to update the acronym. The greatest scientifi c minds in the world are at work there: it was at CERN, for example, that Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web as a way of sharing research information, thereby spawning the modern internet. Try that as an example the next time someone asks you what on earth is the point of pure academic research.

From Geneva airport, it’s a thirty-minute cab ride to a rather unprepossessing huddle of what look like agricultural silage buildings on the suburban outskirts of a Swiss town called Meyrin. There is nothing whatsoever to tell you that you are approaching the nerve centre of the greatest scientifi c experiment ever attempted by humanity; every time I’ve been there it’s been raining, and the nicest thing you could say about the place is that it always has an empty car park. Because the fi rst thing to learn about the Large Hadron Collider is that nothing much of any importance is happening at street level; the exciting stuff – and, my god, it’s exciting – is all happening underground.

What the LHC is, in essence, is one big circular underground racetrack for protons. And when I say big, I mean big: it’s 27 kilometres in circumference. Buried about 100 metres below the surface, it is about the width of an average tube tunnel on the London Underground. Running down the middle of it are two pipes. One pipe has clumps of protons zipping along it in a clockwise

direction, the other pipe has them zipping along it anticlockwise. At four points on the circumference, the two pipes cross. These four crossing points are where the protons can be made to collide, and huge detectors have been built around them, which are capable of sifting through the debris of the collisions and identifying all the different particles that have been produced. So, if you like, the LHC isn’t really one experiment, but four; each detector has been designed by a different research team with their own sets of goals and priorities. Of these four experiments, two of them – ATLAS and CMS – are out-and-out rivals, both of them looking for the Higgs. The other two – ALICE and LHCb – are looking for clues as to what happened in the very early Universe, just fractions of an instant after the Big Bang. They hope to throw some light on two of the most troublesome problems in modern physics: the scarcity of antimatter and the ‘lumpiness’ of the present-day Universe.

The Search for the HiggsSo what’s the big deal about the Higgs particle? To understand that, we need to talk a little bit about what physicists call the Standard Model of particle physics – and to understand the Standard Model, we need to grasp a couple of things about particles and forces.

You might remember from your physics classes in school that there are four types of forces in nature. Three of those four forces are of roughly the same strength: the electromagnetic force, which operates between particles that have electric charge; the strong force, which operates between quarks; and the weak force, which enables radioactivity. The other force, gravitation, is much weaker than the other three, and really comes into its own for large objects like stars and planets. The gravitation of the Earth, of course, is what’s holding you in your seat right now and stopping you spinning off into outer space.

You might also remember from your schooldays that the standard explanation of how forces worked was that particles produced fi elds, which then acted on other particles. For example, an electric charge produced an electric fi eld; when another electric charge was placed in this fi eld, it experienced a force. I, for one, always found this explanation a little unsatisfactory: how did the second charge ‘know’ that there was an electric fi eld present? If that ever bothered you too, then fret no more; quantum physics has a much better explanation. The answer is that every fi eld has a carrier particle, or boson – as in the Higgs Boson. The electromagnetic fi eld between two electrons, for example, is communicated by a particle of light, otherwise known as a photon.

Remember that Mr Bailey said mathematicians are lazy? Well, theoretical physicists are mathematicians, and they


16 December 2012

Christmas Gifts

17December 2012

are far too lazy to be dealing with four different forces – so one of the chief goals of physics over the last fi fty years has been to try to simplify this picture. The gut feeling is that nature just can’t be this complicated, and these four forces are all related to one another in some fundamental way. In a nutshell, we’re about three-quarters of the way there, and the theory that we have is called the Standard Model.

Things took a big leap forward in the early sixties, when a threesome called Glashow, Weinberg and Salaam showed that the electromagnetic force and the weak force were one and the same. They called this new unifi ed force the electroweak force; to make the maths work, however, they proposed something rather radical. They begged to suggest that all fundamental particles had no intrinsic mass. That’s right: no mass. Instead, they said, there’s another undiscovered fi eld out there in the Universe and, like all good fi elds, it has a carrier particle. Some fundamental particles, like the photon, zip across this fi eld with scarcely a by-your-leave, and they therefore appear massless. Other particles, so the theory goes, aren’t nearly so lucky and get dragged down so much by the fi eld that they appear to have a lot of mass. This new fi eld borrowed a bit of maths from a British chap called Peter Higgs, and was called the Higgs fi eld in his honour. And the carrier particle that communicates this fi eld quickly took the name of the Higgs Boson.

After an enormous group effort in the early seventies, the strong force was also combined with Glashow, Weinberg and Salaam’s electroweak force and the resulting mash-up became known, quite simply, as the Standard Model. Some of the ideas at the heart of it are gloriously off the wall, but it really does seem to work. In fact, it’s not overdoing it to say that the Standard Model is one of the most successful theories ever invented.

A really good test of any scientifi c theory is its success in predicting things that no one could have guessed at, and doing so with great accuracy. To give you a taste of

just how impressive the Standard Model is, all you need to know is that it proposed that the weak force would have a carrier particle, just like the electric force. In fact, it proposed that it would have two, the W and the Z (W for weak, and Z for no good reason that I can work out). It also made a fi rm prediction of their masses: 86 proton masses for the W and 98 proton masses for the Z. This was back in the late sixties, in the days when particle accelerators were capable of collisions only equating to ten proton masses. Well over a decade later, in 1981, at CERN, a forerunner of the LHC called the Super Proton synchrotron – a synchrotron, by the way, is just a fancy name for something that accelerates charged particles in a circle – fi nally reached the energies required. The W and Z particles were right there, as predicted, and their masses were exactly the same as predicted by the Standard Model.

It’s Not Rocket Science is available now from most good book stores. All work is subject to copyright.

follow Ben Miller @ActualBenMiller

Publisher: SphereFormat: PaperbackRRP: £12.99

Thanks to Sphere for providing the sample.

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20 December 2012

Dubbed the ‘oscars of the publishing industry,’ The Specsavers National Book Awards showcases the best of British writing and publishing, whilst celebrating books with wide popular appeal, critical acclaim and commercial success. Here we bring you news of this years shortlisted titles

and the deserved winners. We are covering the three main categories, which are New Writer of the Year, Waterstones UK Author of the Year and International Author of the Year in partnership with Google Play™.

The public vote for the overall Book of the Year will be on www.nationalbookawards.co.uk until 20th December. 1st prize is £200 of National Book Tokens and a Google Nexus 7 tablet with 3 x 2nd place prizes of £100 National Book Tokens.

New Writer of the Year

This is presented to a UK author whose debut title, in any adult genre (or for a new book in a new/different genre) has made a big impression exceeding sales expectations. This years shortlist included:

And the Winner is…

“I am deeply honoured to win this award and to have been nominated alongside so many books that I have read this year and admired. My thanks to Specsavers and the National Book Awards. Writing a novel is such a solitary process; it means a lot be given this sort of support and encouragement.”

Rachel Joyce

When Harold Fry leaves home one morning to post a letter, with his wife hoovering upstairs, he has no idea that he is about to walk from one end of the country to the other. This tender, quietly comic, heartstopping and very British coming of (old) age novel from a powerful new voice in fi ction was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012.

Rachel Joyce lives in Gloucestershire with her husband and four children. She has written over twenty original afternoon plays for BBC Radio 4, and major adaptations for the Classic Series and Woman’s Hour, as well as a TV period drama for BBC 2. In 2007 she won the Tinniswood Award for Best Radio Play.

The Somnambulist

Essie Fox

The Land of Decoration

Grace McLeen

The Lighthouse

Alison Moore

Heart-Shaped Bruise

Tanya Byrne

Care Of Wooden Floors

Will Wiles

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of

Harold FryRachel Joyce

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold FryRachel Joyce

Doubleday • Hardback • £12.99

National Book Awards

21December 2012

UK Author of the Year

Presented in partnership with Waterstones, this is awarded to a UK author for a new book; an outstanding literary achievement, combined with a high profi le and strong sales. This years shortlist included:


“I am honoured and delighted to be selected as Author of the Year. My thanks are due to Fourth Estate, who have published me with such imagination and fl air; to many thousands of readers who have not backed off from a challenging book, and to the booksellers who have been so wholehearted in putting Bring Up The Bodies into the hands of the reading public.”

Hilary Mantel

The year is 1535 and Thomas Cromwell must work both to please the king and keep the nation safe. Anne Boleyn, for whose sake Henry VIII has broken with Rome, has failed to bear a son to secure the Tudor line. As Henry develops a dangerous attraction to Jane Seymour, Thomas must negotiate a ‘truth’ that will satisfy Henry and secure his own career. But neither minister nor king will emerge undamaged from the bloody theatre of Anne’s fi nal days.

Hilary Mantel CBE has twice been awarded the Man Booker Prize, in 2009 for Wolf Hall and 2012 for Bring Up The Bodies. In 2006 she was also awarded a CBE.

JK Rowling

Deborah Levy

John Lanchester

Jeanette Winterson

Zadie Smith

Hilary Mantel

Bring Up The BodiesHilary Mantel

4th Estate • Hardback • £20

International Author of the Year

Presented in partnership with Google Play™, this is awarded to an author (outside of the UK) for a new book; an outstanding literary and commercial achievement, combined with a high profi le and strong sales. This years shortlist incuded:


“It is such an honor as a fi rst-time novelist to be considered among such talented authors, and I am tremendously grateful.”

Eowyn Ivey

Alaska, the 1920s. Jack and Mabel have staked everything on a fresh start in a remote homestead, but the wilderness is a stark place, and Mabel is haunted by the baby she lost many years before. When a little girl appears mysteriously on their land, each is fi lled with wonder, but also foreboding: is she what she seems, and can they fi nd room in their hearts for her?

Eowyn Ivey was raised in Alaska and continues to live there with her husband and two daughters. She works at the independent bookstore Fireside Books. The Snow Child hit the Sunday Times Bestseller lists in hardback and paperback.

Daniel Kahneman

Ben Fountain

Herman Koch

Patrick deWitt

Laurent Binet

Eowyn Ivey

The Snow ChildEowyn Ivey

4th Estate • Hardback • £20


EMPIRE PART FIVE

THE WOLF’S GOLDAnthony Riches

22 December 2012

Prologue Dacia, March, ad 183

A dog barked from the other end of the village, and in a heartbeat another half-dozen canine voices were raised in protest against whatever it was that

had alerted the fi rst animal. Snug in his straw nest beneath the house, warm and dry among livestock that had long since become accustomed to the boy’s nocturnal presence, Mus smiled sleepily at the chorus of barking. Whatever it was that had set off the dogs would also have resulted in a storm of invective from the men of the surrounding houses, if his father’s usual reaction was any indication. He wormed his way a little deeper into the straw, closing his eyes in anticipation of the dogs’ protests at whatever nocturnal creature it was that had awoken them dying away into renewed silence.

With a sudden, piercing shriek that had the boy wide awake and sitting up startled in the straw, one of the dogs was silenced. It was a sound that Mus had heard once before, when their neighbour’s animal had mauled his master’s son and been rewarded with four feet of legion issue gladius through its back. The dying animal had given

out howls of agony in its death throes, struggling against the cold blade’s implacable intrusion, until its owner had been forced to rip the sword loose and behead the writhing dog to silence its heart-rending cries. In the brief moment of shocked silence that followed, Mus knew that he had just heard something horribly similar. But who would take a blade to a guard dog for doing its job?

A renewed chorus of barking broke the silence, joined by a swelling sound of gruff voices as the men of the village spilled out from their homes armed with the swords that they had all retained on their retirement from the legion, despite the relative peace of the times. Mus heard his father’s voice through the wooden boards above his head, reassuring the family that there was nothing to worry about even as the big man’s footsteps thudded towards the door. And then the screaming started. Some of the raised voices were those of men fi ghting for their lives and losing that fi ght, the clash of iron overlaid with agonised groans and cries of pain and terror as they were killed and wounded, while others were the higher pitched screams of outrage from their women, howls of imprecation and hatred at whatever was happening down at the other end of the village.

T he Wolf’s Gold is the fi fth in the Empire series from Riches. This action packed historical fi ction follows a Roman unit as it battles ‘barbarians’ in

modern day Romania on behalf of the Roman Empire. Full of twists and turns and political intrigue, this book will keep you reading into the night.

For the full review of The Wolf’s Gold please visit www.undergroundbookclub.co.uk

The Wolf’s Gold

23December 2012

‘Mus!’His oldest brother put his head through the hatch to the

house’s upper fl oor, and Mus called back to him.‘I’m here! What’s—’‘Father says you’re to stay there, and not to move!’The head withdrew, and the boy heard the sound of

heavy footsteps as his father and three older brothers hurried down the steps and ran towards the swelling sound of battle, the retired watch offi cer’s voice raised to bellow encouragement to his former brothers in arms. Above him he heard the sound of lighter feet as his mother and sisters gathered in his parents’ bed, the girls seeking comfort from the night’s sudden terror. While he was tempted to run up the ladder and join them, he knew that his father would punish him when he returned to fi nd his order had been disobeyed, and so stayed where he was, raising his head to stare through the narrow opening in the house’s wall which served to admit daylight during the day. The view through the slit gave him little more understanding of the events that were unfolding in the village’s lower portion than the evidence of his ears, but as he stared out into the dark village he realised what was behind the bobbing fl ames of torches advancing up the hill towards him.

Driving the remaining men of the village before them, a line of heavily armoured warriors was forcing the retired soldiers’ last desperate defence back towards the settlement’s higher end. The outnumbered

defenders were bellowing their defi ance even as they fought and died on the attackers’ swords, their distantly remembered sword drills no match for younger men protected by armour and shields. Behind the line of shields, fi res were taking hold of the houses already captured, and the howls of female hatred and anguish had become helpless screams of outrage.

As Mus watched in horror, he saw a powerfully built warrior stride out of the attack’s line and single-handedly take a long sword to his brothers as the men behind him watched, expertly parrying a cut at his head before swinging the weapon to open the youngest boy’s throat with the weapon’s point. Sidestepping another furious hack from the oldest of the three, he smashed his shield into the boy’s face, then lunged on one muscular thigh to stab his sword through his reeling defences and deep into his chest. As the last of Mus’s brothers screamed and charged at him from one side, his spear stabbing out in a desperate attack, the big man simply sprang back from the lunge and allowed the weapon’s point to fl ash uselessly past him, grabbing the shaft and jerking the child off balance. Laughing in the boy’s face, he leaned in to deliver a crunching headbutt with his iron helmet, then turned away, leaving the men behind him to fi nish the semi-conscious child. The boys’ father stormed out of the fray with his sword painted black, screaming bloody murder for revenge on his sons’ killer.

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24 December 2012

Tossing aside his shield, the warrior faced the charging farmer with a swaggering confi dence that chilled Mus. As his father leapt furiously into his attack, the warrior met the farmer blade to blade and parried the attacking blow wide before twitching his head to the left to avoid a punch that would have put him on his back. Again the helmeted head snapped forward, sending the older man staggering backwards with his nose broken and streaming blood, but the child’s heart soared as his father shook his head and strode determinedly forward again. What happened next was almost too fast for him to understand, but the outcome was obvious enough. Parrying the second attack with equal ease to the fi rst, the warrior snapped out a hand to catch the older man’s punch and twisted the fi st with what seemed effortless power, forcing him to the ground and stamping the sword’s hilt from his hand. Putting his sword’s blade to the fallen man’s throat he stared about him until he found what he was looking for, his prisoner’s terrifi ed woman and daughters staring from the house’s single window. As Mus watched in disbelief, the victorious warrior pulled the helpless veteran to his feet and dragged him towards the house, pushing him back down into the grass a dozen paces from his son’s hiding place and pulling his head back with a hand knotted in his hair, shouting in his ear with a voice made harsh by anger.

‘This is your house, old man?! You have women inside, cowering in their beds while you defend them?! My men will pull them out, and f*ck them all here in front of you as the price for your resistance! And you will watch . . .’

He gestured to the men around him, waving them forwards, and they poured into the house in a thunder of

boots on the boards above the boy’s head, dragging his mother and sisters screaming in terror down the steps. Their leader gloated over the fallen farmer, holding his head up with the sword still at his throat and forcing him to watch, as the night clothes were torn from his women’s bodies and they were dragged to the ground. Each of their victims was held down by a pair of men while their comrades swiftly mounted them, thrusting vigorously into their helpless bodies with triumphant grins and shouts of pleasure. Staring through the narrow window at his father’s anguished face, as the destruction and defi lement of his family played out before him, Mus realised that he was looking straight back into his son’s eyes. Snapping a hand up from the ground the veteran soldier took hold of his captor’s sword hand, forcing the blade away from his throat for long enough to shout one last order to the only member of his family not in the hands of their enemy.

‘Run, boy! Run, and keep running!’His captor released the grip on his hair and punched his

head again, then ripped the sword’s blade across his throat, pushing the dying man away from him and staring at the petrifi ed child’s face for a long moment. He screamed an order to his men while the farmer writhed in his death throes at his feet, pointing at the house. A pair of them ran for the steps, and with a shiver of fear Mus realised he had little time before his hiding place was revealed and he faced the same fate as his brothers. Around the house other dwellings were going up in fl ames, and the few remaining farmers were being slaughtered out of hand while their women were brutally violated by the rapacious groups who had dragged them from their homes. Coming

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The Wolf’s Gold

25December 2012

to his senses as footsteps thun-dered on the steps above his head, he dived out of the straw’s cocoon, rushing across the hard earth fl oor and squirming into a hole in the wooden rear wall which he had long used to escape the attentions of his older brothers. It was a tight fi t, now that he was less the child than in those happier days, and he had to push one shoulder into the hole before contorting to ease the other through the gap, scratching his fl esh badly in the process. He dragged himself out of the house, getting one foot through the hole and gathering himself to spring to his feet, but a voice shouted behind him and a hand gripped at his shoe, and Mus knew that his unseen pursuer only needed to grab his leg to pull him back through the hole. Struggling desperately, he pulled his foot from the rough boot he’d inherited from the youngest of his brothers a week before, still too big to fi t his foot snugly. He scrabbled away on his hands and knees and then staggered onto his feet, running hard for the trees fi fty paces distant across his mother’s vegetable garden, and kicking off the other boot as he fl ed for the forest’s sanctuary. The old tree that held up one side of the house was in fl ames, and in the lurid light of its incineration Mus looked back and saw the tall warrior pointing at him, bellowing an order at the men around him.

‘Stop him!’A spear arced over him, a fl icker of polished iron in

the darkness that thudded into the earth a dozen paces beyond, and an instant later another hissed past him so close that he stumbled with the shock of it and went down on one knee. Looking back he saw a dozen men and more boiling past the house with drawn swords, their shouts unintelligible but all too clear in their delight in the chase. A blaze of terror in the boy’s mind gave him one last spurt of energy, and he sprinted the last twenty paces to the trees with his pursuers catching him fast, diving into the foliage with a grateful sob. The forest was as familiar to him in the night as it was by day, for it was here that he had usually come to hide and sulk when his brothers decided to work their frustrations out on him. Several discoveries and subsequent beatings at their hands had taught him very well how to evade capture once he was inside the forest’s edge. Jinking to the left and right, his steps silenced by the carpet of needles on the forest’s fl oor and his body made invisible in the long shadows, he slipped into the cover of a long-familiar cluster of trees. Burrowing into the midst of a bush in whose depths he had painstakingly picked out a hole large enough to accommodate his body, he became still, calming his breathing as he listened to the men blundering haplessly about in the darkness around him.

In the space between the house’s blazing shell and the trees, the big man waited restlessly until his followers straggled back out of the forest, tapping his sword’s blade

impatiently against one booted foot. They lined up and waited nervously for him to speak, their eyes shining in the fi re’s ruddy light, waiting for the big man’s verdict with the strained faces of men who already knew only too well what to expect.

‘He escaped? A dozen of you, and one small child managed to get away?’ He looked along their line with a sneer of disgust. ‘You’re all cursing your fate that you weren’t lucky enough to fi nd a woman to climb onto, and that you’ve ended up facing me as failures. And with good reason . . .’ He turned back to their leader, nodding curtly. ‘The usual. They can draw lots to see who pays for their failure. And make sure whoever it is dies cleanly, there’s no need to turn an example into a spectacle.’

Striding away around the burning house he found his deputy waiting for him, and the older man fell in alongside him as they walked back down the slope through a scene of devastation, littered with the bloodied corpses of dead farmers lit by the blazing remnants of their homes. The women’s initial screams were now reduced to moans and sobs of anguish as their degradation continued without any pause other than for one man to replace another. The big man looked about him with an expression of disgust.

‘Let them have one hourglass Hadro, then beat them back into order. I want the animals butchered and salted by morning and every man ready to march. The women are to die, all of them without exception, and you are to ensure that there will be no witnesses. We seem to have allowed at least one small boy to escape, and I’ll take no more risks. If any disobedience to this command is brought to light I’ll have every man in the offender’s tent party beaten to death. Understood?’

The fi rst spear nodded, and when he spoke his Latin was hard-edged and guttural.

‘As you wish, Prefect.’

About The Author

ANTHONY RICHES Anthony began his lifelong interest in war and soldiers when he fi rst heard his father’s stories about World War II. This led to a degree in Military Studies at Manchester University. He lives in Hertfordshire with his wife and three children.

Empire: The Wolf’s Gold is available now from most good book stores. All work is subject to copyright.

Publisher: Hodder and StoughtonFormat: HardbackRRP: £14.99

Thanks to Hodder and Stoughton for providing the sample.


26 December 2012

INTERVIEW:ANTHONY RICHESMilitary historian and Author of the Empire series, Anthony Riches talked to our Editor, Andy Brown, about the fi fth book in the series.

Firstly, I’m ashamed to admit this is the fi rst Empire novel that I have read and I was worried, with it being part of a series, that I might have missed key components of the larger story and fi nd it diffi cult to get into. I can assure our readers this was not the case, but could you please give us your perspective on how this book fi ts into the series as well as being a good starting point?The Wolf’s Gold is the second series in the series that isn’t set in Britain. The fi rst three books (Wounds of Honour, Arrows of Fury and Fortress of Spears) played out in the area around and to the north of Hadrian’s Wall, as Marcus Aquila found his place with the Tungrian cohort and came of age as he fought in the struggle against a vicious native rebellion. Book four, The Leopard Sword, saw the cohort sent to Germania to fi ght bandits, setting them on the road east that fi nds them in Dacia (modern day Romania) in this latest story in the series. This latest book fi ts neatly into a story arc that will takes us all the way from the empire’s northern frontier in AD182 to Eboracum (York) in AD211, and gives the reader a grandstand seat on a fascinating and relatively unknown period in Rome’s history. The empire will suffer under the excesses of Commodus, the devastating destabilisation of a three year civil war and the iron fi st of the strongman who seized power in the wake of his death, Septimius Severus. And Marcus – and the men around him – will be an integral part of those chaotic years.

There are some riveting and unconventional battles and skirmishes in the book, to what degree have those battles come from historical references? Or did the battle scenarios develop from the plot and require you to ‘invent’ tactics?There’s not a single historically accurate battle in any

of my writing. While we know a lot about the ancient period’s battlefi eld tactics from writers like Tacitus, there are no accounts that I’ve seen of the battles that were undoubtedly fought throughout the period in the province of Britannia. All I do is take known fi ghting methods and adapt them to the circumstances required by the story. If I’ve invented anything then it’s terrain, rather than tactics, although the Tungrians’ use of ropes to trip and delay their enemies in Fortress is defi nitely my idea, rather than anything I’ve read. It just felt right...

You are obviously a military historian, what has drawn you to the Roman Empire?I stood on Hadrian’s Wall in August 1996 in horizontal rain, with two small children (now in their twenties) giving me what would be best described as ‘old fashioned’

stares (it was Housesteads or a swimming pool, and just for once I’d made the choice my way), and a story just leapt into my mind. What, I wondered, would a Roman have made of this? After all, it must have been the equivalent of being sent to the Eastern Front, what with the cold, and the horrible locals, and the lack of any decent wine. I turned to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for inspiration, found the true story of

the Quintilii brothers (murdered for their large estate by Commodus), discovered that a Roman general was killed in action in AD182 in Britannia, and the rest came naturally!

Marcus has a few scores to settle in Rome… when’s he going back there?Soon. Very, very soon. And there’ll be hell to pay.

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“What would a Roman

have made of this? It

must have been the

equivalent of being sent

to the Eastern Front.”

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There’s a New Bear in Town!A Bear for all ages…

Created and brought to life by Madeleine Hall in a delightful series of children’s books and brand new special edition boxset.

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28 December 2012

15 June

Healy looked down at the temperature readout as he pulled up outside the estate. Almost twenty degrees. It felt hotter than that. He’d had the air

conditioning on all the way from the station but, on the journey over, nothing had cooled. His sleeves were rolled up, his top button undone, but the car was still stifl ing. Even in the middle of the night, under cover of darkness, the heat continued to cling on.

He paused, looking out through the windows of the Mercedes to the maze of broken homes beyond. The most dangerous housing estate in London had gone into hibernation. There were no lights on in the fl ats, no kids in the alleys, no gangs crossing the walkways between buildings. But then, as more marked cars arrived, lightbars painting the ten-storey slabs of concrete, he could make out shapes in the night, watching him from darkened windows and doorways.

He got out. Away to his left, the media were encamped behind a strip of police tape, in shirts and summer dresses, faces slick with sweat. It was mayhem. Journalists jostled

for the best position. Feet slid on grass banks. Noise. Lights. Voices screaming his name. In another life, he might have enjoyed the celebrity. Some cops did. But when he looked at the entrance to the building, ominous and dark, like a mouth about to swallow him up, he realized it was all a trick. This wasn’t celebrity. This was standing on a precipice in a hurricane. They were behind him now; with him on that precipice. But if it went on any longer, if it got any worse, if the police still hadn’t found the man responsible by the time the media were camped out at the next crime scene, all they’d be trying to do would be to feed him to the darkness beyond.

He moved across the concrete courtyard to the entrance and looked inside. Everything was broken or cracking, like the whole place was about to collapse under its own weight. The fl oor was slick with water, leaking from somewhere, and along the corridor a broken door, leading into the fi rst set of fl ats, was hanging off its hinges.

Litter was everywhere. Some people would go their whole lives without seeing the insides of a place like this: a two-hundred-apartment cry for help. The sort of place

VANISHEDTim Weaver

Without warning, without trace

Vanished is a fast paced crime thriller. The story follows on from The Dead Tracks, where we learned about Healy and Raker, and what

has shaped their lives. Weaver skilfully deals with this, and makes the novel work as a stand-alone. Fans of Mo Hayder’s Gone and Michael Marshall Smith’s The Straw Men should look this way.

For the full review and interview with Tim Weaver please visit www.crimefi ctionlover.com

Brought to you in association with CrimeFictionLover.com

Vanished

29December 2012

where even the night at its darkest wasn’t black enough to hide all the bruises.

A uniformed offi cer with a clipboard was standing at the bottom of a stairwell to Healy’s right. He looked up as Healy approached, shining a fl ashlight in his direction.

‘Evening, sir.’‘Evening.’‘The elevator doesn’t work.’Healy glanced at the lift. Across its doors was a council

notice telling people it was unsafe to use. On the damp, blistered wall next to it, someone had spray-painted an arrow and the words ‘express elevator to hell’.

After showing the offi cer his warrant card, Healy headed up three fl ights of stairs, most of it barely lit. Everything smelled like a toilet. Glass crunched under his shoes where light bulbs had been deliberately smashed and never cleared away. At the third-fl oor landing, people started to emerge – other cops, forensics – a line snaking out from Flat 312. A crime-scene tech broke off from dusting down a door frame to hand Healy a white paper boiler suit and a pair of gloves. ‘You’d better wear this,’ she said. ‘Not that you’re going to be disturbing much evidence.’

Healy took the suit.Inside the fl at, a series of stand-alone lights had been

erected, their glare washing into the corridor. Apart from the buzz of a generator, the apartment was pretty much silent. The occasional click of a camera. A mumble from one of the forensic team. Brief noises from other fl ats. Otherwise, nothing.

After zipping up the boiler suit and pulling up the hood, Healy moved into the fl at. It was just like the ones the other victims had lived in. Run-down. Squalid. Damp. In the kitchen, which led off from the living room, a big brown watermark had formed on the linoleum. Healy spotted DCI Melanie Craw looking around inside. There was a door off the living room, opening on to a bedroom. Chief Superintendent Ian Bartholomew stood in the doorway, the bed in front of him. He looked back at Healy, a pissed-off expression on his face, then to Craw, who’d arrived from the kitchen.

‘Melanie,’ he said. ‘What the bloody hell am I supposed to tell the media?’

Bartholomew backed out of the bedroom and let Healy take it in. The crime scene. A small bedroom with a tiny walk-in closet, a dresser, and a television on a chair in the corner of the room. The carpet was worn, the wallpaper peeling. On the pillow, placed in a neat pile, was the victim’s hair. He’d shaved it all off, just like all the others, and left it there. The mattress was where the body should have been.

But that was just the problem.He never left the bodies.

part oneCHAPTER 1

12 June

Her offi ce was on the top fl oor of a red-brick four-storey building just off Shaftesbury Avenue. The other fl oors belonged to an advertising agency

and a big international media company. Two code-locked glass doors protected sharp-suited executives from the outside world, while a security guard the size of a wrestler watched from inside. Everything else in the street was either dead or dying. Two empty stores, one a shoe shop, one an antiques dealer, had long since gone. Adjacent to that was a boarded-up Italian restaurant with a huge now closed sign in the window. The last man standing was a video rental store that looked like it was on its way out: two men were arguing in an empty room with only a single DVD rack and some faded fi lm posters for company.

It was a warm June evening. The sun had been out all day, although somewhere out of sight it felt like rain might be lying in wait. I’d brought a jacket, just in case, but for the moment I was in a black button-up shirt, denims and a pair of black leather shoes I’d bought in Italy. They were the genuine article, from the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan, but I didn’t wear them much; mostly their purpose in life was to cut my feet to shreds. Yet they were a sacrifi ce worth making for the woman I was meeting.

Liz emerged from one of the elevators in the foyer about fi fteen minutes later. People had been fi ling out of the building steadily since fi ve, but the offi ce she worked in was also the offi ce she ran, so she tended to be the last one out. She spotted me immediately, standing in the doorway of the now-defunct antiques shop, and I was struck by how beautiful she looked: dark eyes fl ashing as she smiled, long, chocolate hair pulled back from a face full of natural angles. Elizabeth Feeny, solicitor advocate, had thrived in a city packed with dominant males: she’d gone up against bigger fi sh and won; she’d taken their clients and retained them; she’d brought together a team of formidable lawyers under the umbrella of Feeny & Company and she’d fronted a number of high-profi le cases that had secured her growing reputation. It would have been diffi cult not to be impressed by her, even if I hadn’t been seeing her for eight months and living next door to her for a lot longer. She completely looked the part, moving across the road towards me in a white blouse and black pencil skirt that traced the gentle curves of her body. But her biggest asset was that when she smiled, she made you feel like the only person in the room. That was a useful skill when you were pacing the fl oor of a court.

‘Mr Raker,’ she said, and kissed me.


30 December 2012

‘Elizabeth.’She gave me a gentle slap – she hated being called

Elizabeth – and I brought her into me and kissed her on the top of the head. ‘How was your day?’ I asked.

‘Full of meetings.’We stayed like that for a moment. This was new

for both of us. It had been two and a half years since my wife Derryn had died of breast cancer, and almost sixteen since we’d fi rst met. Liz was married at twenty-one, pregnant six months later and divorced shortly after that. She spent two years bringing up her daughter Katie, before returning to the law degree she’d started and completing her training as a solicitor. She hadn’t dated seriously since before she’d married her husband.

‘Where are we eating?’ she asked.‘There’s an Italian place I know.’ I shifted us – still

together – around to face the closed restaurant just down from where we were standing.

She squeezed me. ‘You’re a funny man, Raker.’‘I booked us a table at a South African place just off

Covent Garden. We can get drunk on Castle Lager.’‘South African?’‘Ever had babotie?’‘Can’t say I have.’We started walking slowly. ‘Well, tonight’s your

lucky night.’

The restaurant was in a narrow cellar in a side street between Covent Garden market and the Strand. The stone walls had holes carved in them, framed photographs of South Africa sitting inside. In the one closest to us, the Ferris wheel at Gold Reef City was caught in black and white, frozen for a moment against a markless sky. I’d spent a lot of time in and around Johannesburg in my previous life as a journalist, and been stationed there for a year in the run-up to the elections in 1994. It had been a different place back then, more like a war zone than a city, its people massaged by hatred and fear.

Liz let me choose, so I ordered two bottles of Castle, peri-peri chicken to start and babotie – spiced mincemeat, baked with egg – for the main course. While we waited for the food to arrive, she talked about her day and I told her a little of mine. I’d just put a case to bed a couple of days before: a seventeen-year-old runaway who’d been hiding out close to Blackfriars Bridge. His parents, a couple from a sprawling council estate in Hackney, had told me that they only had enough money to cover my search for three days. It took me fi ve to fi nd him, the job complicated by the fact that he had no friends, talked to pretty much no one, and, when he’d left, had literally taken only the clothes on his back. No phone. No cards. No money. Nothing even remotely traceable. I’d been to see his mum and dad and told them to pay

me for the three days, and then return when they felt they could afford to square up the extra two. They were good people, but I wouldn’t see them again. I wasn’t normally in the business of charity, but I found it even more diffi cult to leave things unfi nished.

After the babotie arrived, conversation moved on from work to Liz’s daughter and the university course she was doing. She was fi nishing the fi nal year of an economics degree. I hadn’t had the chance to meet her yet, but from the way Liz had described her, and the photos I’d seen, she appeared to be almost a mirror image of her mother.

I ordered two more bottles of Castle and, as Liz continued talking, caught sight of a woman watching me from across the restaurant. As soon as we made eye contact she looked down at her food. I watched for a moment, waiting for her eyes to drift up to me a second time, but she just continued staring at her plate, picking apart a steak. I turned back to Liz. Ten seconds later, the woman was looking at me again.

She was in her late twenties, red hair curling as it hit her shoulders, freckles scattered across her cheeks and nose. She had a kind of understated beauty, as if she didn’t realize it, or she did but wasn’t bothered enough to do anything about it. The thin fi ngers of her right hand grasped a fork; those on her left were wrapped around the neck of a wine glass. She was wearing a wedding ring.

‘You okay?’The woman was looking away again now, and Liz

had noticed me staring at her. ‘The woman in the corner there – do you know her?’

Liz looked back over her shoulder. ‘I don’t think so.’‘She keeps looking this way.’‘Can’t say I blame her,’ Liz said, smiling. ‘You’re a

good-looking man, Raker. Not that I want to infl ate your ego or anything.’

We carried on eating. A couple of times I glanced in the woman’s direction, but didn’t catch her eye again. Then, about thirty minutes later, she suddenly wasn’t there any more. Where she’d been sitting was empty; just a half-fi nished steak and a full glass of wine. Money sat on a white tray on the edge of the table, the bill underneath it.

She was gone.

CHAPTER 2

Just before we left, Liz got a call from a client. She rolled her eyes at me and found a quiet spot in an alcove. I gestured to her that I’d meet her upstairs

when she was done.The rain that had been in the air earlier had now

Vanished

31December 2012

arrived. I pulled my jacket on and found shelter a couple of doors down from the restaurant. Across the street people emerged from Covent Garden Tube station, a few armed with umbrellas and coats, but most dressed in short sleeves or T-shirts, blouses or summer skirts. After about fi ve minutes I spotted a fi gure approaching me from my left, moving in the shadows on the opposite side of the street. When she got close, the light from a nearby pub illuminated her, freeze-framing her face, and I realized who it was.

The woman from the restaurant.She crossed the street and stopped about six feet away.‘Mr Raker?’I immediately recognized the look in her eyes. I’d

seen it before, constantly, repeated over and over in the faces of the families I helped: she’d either lost someone, or felt she was about to. Her face was young, but her eyes were old, wearing every ounce of her pain. It gave her a strange look, as if she was caught somewhere in between, neither young nor old, not beautiful or ugly. Just a woman who had lost.

‘I’m really sorry I had to come up to you like this,’ she said, and pushed her hair behind her ears. She seemed nervous, her voice soft but taut. ‘My name’s Julia. Julia Wren.’

‘What is it you want, Julia?’‘I, uh . . .’ She paused. A bag strap passed diagonally

across her chest. She reached behind her and pulled it around, opening up the front fl ap. She took out her purse and removed a piece of paper from it. As she unfolded it, I could immediately see what it was: a printout. ‘I read about you,’ she said. ‘On the internet.’

It was a BBC story, a photograph showing me being led out of a police station, fl anked by a detective, two uniforms and my legal counsel, Liz. Three days before the picture had been taken, I’d gone right into a nest of killers and almost lost my life. Eighteen months had passed since then, but my body was still marked by the scars.

There had been other stories on the same case. Many other stories. I’d given no interviews, even to the people I’d once worked with, who’d called begging for comment. But it had gone big. For a week it had played out in the nationals until, like all news stories, it eventually burned itself out. For everyone else, it was consigned to history.

But not for this woman.‘Have you been following me for long, Julia?’She shook her head. ‘No.’I believed her: I’d spotted her straight away in the

restaurant, and seen her the second she started to approach me. If she’d been following me for any length of time, it wouldn’t have gone unnoticed. Tailing was

an art. If you followed someone, you had to stay invisible at the same time.

‘I’ve read about you,’ she continued, nodding at the printout. ‘I mean, you can see that. I read about what you did when you found that place up north. How they tried to hurt you. What . . .’ She stopped, looking down at the scars on my fi ngers. ‘What they did to you. Then I saw another story about you in the papers last year. To do with that man the police found. The one who took those women. When I saw those stories, I thought, “That’s a man who can help me.” ’

‘Help you?’‘Do you believe in fate?’I shook my head. ‘No, I don’t.’That seemed to stop her in her tracks. But then she

found her feet again. ‘I saw you and your . . .’ Her eyes drifted to the restaurant. ‘Your friend. I saw you walk past me. The man I’d read about on the internet. So when you passed me I couldn’t help but see it as fate. And I suppose I lied a little. I did follow you – but only after I saw you tonight. I followed you to the restaurant because I wanted to be sure it was you. And when I saw that it was, I realized I needed to speak to you.’

‘What do you want, Julia?’‘I want you to fi nd my husband,’ she said, pausing

and kneading her hands together. For a moment she seemed to shrink into the shadows: head bowed, shoulders hunched, protecting herself in case I turned her away. ‘Six months ago he got on to the Tube at Gloucester Road. And he never got off again.’

About The Author

TIM WEAVER Tim was born in 1977. At eighteen, he left school and started working in magazine journalism, and has since gone on to develop a successful career writing about fi lms, TV, sport, games and technology. He is married with a young daughter, and lives near Bath.

Vanished is available now from most good book stores. All work is subject to copyright.

www.timweaverbooks.comFollow Tim @TimWeaverBooks

Publisher: PenguinFormat: PaperbackRRP: £7.99

Thanks to Penguin for providing the sample.

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