Word: picador
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...hard not to love even a squat, stumpy and probably leaky boat made of wood. Two amiable new books about the perilous beguilement of wood boats are Sea Change, by Peter Nichols (Viking; 238 pages; $23.95) and Sailing in a Spoonful of Water, by Joe Coomer (Picador; 256 pages...
...from trends as the passage of seasons it records, In the Deep Midwinter (Picador USA; 278 pages; $23) homes in on these four fallen but forgivable souls as they try to find the right way to act in a world where women smoke but never swear, and pregnancy and infidelity can destroy. It's no coincidence that author Robert Clark sets his debut novel at precisely the moment when America's confidence in leading the world and its belief in its higher myths about itself began to crack...
Kelly makes his first kills as a teenager; becomes known; acquires hangers-on, women, a car; kills more people; is jailed; gets out; kills; is shot. As Irish writer Eoin McNamee, 33, imagines the progression in Resurrection Man (Picador USA; 233 pages; $21), his terse, forceful first novel, it is not the fact of random murders, which of course are normal, that makes the city uneasy and somehow complicit. It is the gaudiness of the knifework, the unseemly calling of attention, that feels wrong. As the killings continue, the language of official statements quoted in news reports slides instinctively toward...
...second novel, The Romantic Movement (Picador USA; 326 pages; $23), the unforgivably young and unforgivably knowing writer, now 25, gives us more of the same, presenting himself as a Stendhal of the '90s dating scene. Alice works in an ad agency, Eric in commodities. They meet at a ball, go to trendy London restaurants, take a holiday in Barbados; gradually, obligingly, they settle into their roles like glossy-magazine archetypes in a masque. He's a self-contained realist, she a self-doubting romantic. He won't talk and she won't stop. Their ups and downs are delicately choreographed...
Alain De Botton, the unforgivably young and unforgivably knowing author of "The Romantic Movement" (Picador USA; 326 pages; $23) offers in his second novel a happy discourse on love and the nature of the words "I love you." De Botton comes to realize that these words can be a question, a prompt or an opening bid. "Light as a souffle, and no less addictive," saysTIME book critic Pico Iyer, "The Romantic Movement is that happiest of artifacts, a novel that smiles."Previous TIME Daily