Distraught, she persuades her bonking partner to drive her to the scene, where she suffers injuries.Recovering in hospital, she learns that her "chaps" have been burned past recognition: only her son's cuddly toy, that staple ingredient of bomb sites, is resurrected. In his scenario, a thousand soccer fans are burned to death in a Dantesque orgy of horror. It's a huge canvas, but Cleave's story eschews global politics in favour of the down-and-dirty story of Cleave's unnamed, relentlessly Cockney female narrator, whose heady mix of gallows humour, tabloid-inspired categorisations and sexual recklessness make for disturbing, macabre and often wildly tasteless reading. On the day of the Big Match, she is enjoying a spot of adultery on the sofa with a Sunday Telegraph journalist in front of the TV when - mid-orgasm - she sees the stadium explode, with her husband and young son in it. In Incendiary, the Arsenal football stadium is the bombers' target, making the May Day attack that Cleave imagines an even more brutal and bloody one. The book is packaged in a cleverly imagined and strangely compelling pull-out jacket showing the burning London skyline: the Thames is a red river of blood, shadowed by barrage balloons, evoking a post-catastrophe hell that feels close enough for extreme discomfort. There was something chilling about the review copy landing on my doorstep on the day of the terror attacks, and I went on to read it with a nervous, indeed almost paranoid sense that reality and fantasy had indulged in a perverted sex act to spawn a factoid monster. David Oppenheim always fought for universal values; in 1943, the Nazis murdered him with their labels and limits.
A gem of a journey, all the more brilliant for its refusal of sentimental clich? BT. A story about an al-Qa'ida suicide attack on London, published on 7 July 2005: Chris Cleave's first novel, written in the form of a victim's letter to Osama bin Laden, is so timely it stings. BTPushing Time Away, by Peter Singer (GRANTA £8.99 (254pp))Radical moral philosopher Peter Singer proves himself a pioneer again in a compelling family memoir. Singer goes in search of his Viennese grandfather, a secular Jewish intellectual in the city and era of Freud. A beguiling portrait of a proud writer, his circle and times - with a lime-lit glimpse of the birth of the age of "celebrity". BTHouse of Bush, House of Saud, by Craig Unger (GIBSON SQUARE £8.99 (375pp))An update of this first-rate investigation into the Bush family's long entanglement with ruling Saudi clans. Unger traces every step of a 20-year dance in the dark that brought huge benefits to the Bushes, their corporate cronies, and to an oil-rich elite whose relatives flirted with extremism.
05/11 - 06/11 Get Adele Tickets staging in Stubbs BBQ, The Depot. Adele is staging in Austin, Salt Lake City and Atlanta. Adele tickets
06/11 - 07/11 Score some Bon Jovi Tickets performing in Comfort Dental Amphitheatre, Common Ground Festival. Bon Jovi is performing in Englewood, Lansing and Morristown. Bon Jovi tickets
05/11 - 06/11 Land Kid Rock Tickets staging in Borgata Events Center, 1. Kid Rock is staging in Atlantic City, Tampa and Baltimore. Kid Rock tickets
Just after 11 September, 140 Saudis were spirited out of the US, some two dozen Bin Ladens among them. After the West End d?cle of Guy Domville, he admits defeat, turns inwards, and a harvest of late masterpieces beckons. An adventurous novel that explores what happens when sexual compatibility and personal trust don't go hand in hand. EHAuthor, Author, by David Lodge (PENGUIN £7.99 (389pp))It's not a race, nor a contest. David Lodge's pitch-perfect bio-novel about Henry James and his crisis of the mid-1890s neatly complements Colm T?n's The Master, and merits equal applause. Genial, droll and capable of loving friendship (notably with the beautifully drawn Du Maurier family), Lodge's James is no bloodless aesthete but a shrewd professional coming to terms with the new hype and glitz of the fin-de-si?e literary and media scene.