WITH her 12th novel, Booker Prize-winning author Pat Barker offers a tale of Bright Young Things trying to find their voices as artists. It's the spring of 1914, and at Slade, Paul Tarrant is agonising over whether to abandon the easel. He's down-to
-earth, northern and disaffected. Fellow artist Elinor Brooke feels his pain, though she is southern and middle-class. When war breaks out and Paul goes to work in a Belgian field hospital where he lapses into a homosexual relationship.
Barker conjures the most beautifully wrought images describing the world turned inside out by war, but there's a cloying whiff of preciousness surrounding her characters. Do they have a future together? Will they locate their artistic voices? Hard to care.
STARBUCKED: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce and Culture BY TAYLOR CLARK (Sceptre, £7.9) LESS than 20 years ago, American hipster journalist Taylor Clark informs us, the USA could only boast 585 coffee houses. Now, thanks mostly to Howard Schultz's rampant Starbucks chain, it's saddled with 24,000. With a global reach from Seattle to Shanghai, Starbucks opens six new stores a day. Influencing traffic patterns, the cultural customs of entire nations and the welfare of 25 million coffee farmers, "the company has changed the dynamics of the modern world".
Clark asks the right questions; the conglomerate receives a fair shake rather than a grinding. You can still enjoy a guilt-free caramel macchiato.
BEING SHELLEY by ANN WROE (Vintage, £9.99) THIS remarkable biography casts the romantic poet in a whole new light. Its approach is literally elemental, tracking Shelley's "quest for truth through the steadily rarefying elements of earth, water, air and fire" and aims to answer the questions he asked of himself: "Whence I came, and where I am, and why."
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