Sunday at the Pool in Kigali – Gil Courtemanch

Bernard Valcourt is a Canadian, Quebecois to be precise, who has landed up in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, ostensibly to set up a national TV station. One of the drivers for the project is the urgent need to inform the population how to protect themselves and others from the AIDS epidemic sweeping the country. But the Government do not want to broadcast bad news, publicise their failings, so the job has stalled.

So Valcourt spends his day writing articles for foreign journals, but worldwide interest is minimal, not only in AIDS but also the growing tension and violence between the Hutu and Tutsi people who share the country in a powder keg mix. The Tutsi have post-colonial position and wealth, but the Hutu outnumber them greatly. There is history between them, and history will out.

But on a Sunday in Kigali, sat around the pool at the once plush Mille-Collines hotel, the great and the good congregate in well-guarded luxury. Mainly white – UN officials, economic advisors, bankers, ex-pat Belgians, diplomats who have drawn the short straw – but also those natives who hold government posts or contracts.

However, even in this civilized company, tension bubbles as high-up Hutus abuse any Tutsi staff with impunity. Among the staff is Gentille, a Hutu by birth and identity card but a Tutsi by her crossbred attractive appearance. Valcourt, decades her senior, is smitten. Gentille reciprocates, but is it love or an exit strategy, wonders Valcourt.

What follows is a heady mix of romance and terrorism, tenderness and torture, where sex is a murder weapon and mutilation a political statement. Valcourt, protected by his skin and journalist pass sees it all unfold. The country is physically beautiful and beguiling, but hate, corruption, and history lead the people tear each other apart, and soon there are more rivers of blood than water.

Told with restraint and resigned fatalism, this is a story all too real that should be read, even if it needs a strong stomach.

The New World – Winston S Churchill

This is the second volume of Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples, published in 1956. It covers the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries so spans the Tudor and Stewart dynasties including the Civil War and the interregnum of Oliver Cromwell.

The ‘New World’ discoveries of the East Indies and the Americas, including the colonisation of the eastern seaboard of what becomes the USA, get due attention, but the real new world is closer to home with the makeover of European politics. The consequences of the emergence of the Protestant religion and its adoption by Henry VIII echoes down the decades providing the big divide in England, Britain, and Europe. For Churchill, this is politics not religion, and he describes the power struggles with insight and candour.

He explains how the various divides in society (and we are talking peers, landowners, gentry, clergy, and increasingly the merchant classes) develop from Protestant and Catholic, Royalist and Parliamentary, into the party politics (Whigs and Tories) that we still inherit, in one form or another, today.

The prose is a touch verbose to modern eyes, but that is his style, and his voice (if you know it) comes through every sentence. It is a comprehensive work as regards how the country was ruled and/or governed but rarely digs deep into the lot of the common people.

But taken on its own terms of reference, it is an informative and interesting read.

Deadline – Steph McGovern

Rose Steedman is live on air. It is her job, roving reporter for a top TV channel, today interviewing the Chancellor of the Exchequer at a secure location in the North of England. As ever, she is wired up to the studio but suddenly the voice in her ear is not that of the director. It is a stranger, who tells her, chillingly, he has her wife and son, and she must do exactly what he says to keep them from harm.

The narrative spins back a day to introduce the OB team – Jonesy on camera, Zoya producing, and Sandy the engineer – and show how they work together, how the broadcast should go. Then, as it works back to the present, it spins back again. This time to five years earlier. when, amongst other things: Rose had a stalker; Zoya had an issue with a radical cousin; and a hitherto unmentioned headteacher is trying to get a local school out of special measures.

It is events at the school that dominate the next hundred pages, so they must have a connection to the hi-jack, if only to provide a third possible motive (along with the stalker and the terrorist cousin). And it all comes out in a tense climax, though a lengthy epilogue is needed to clear thing up completely.

As to be expected from TV journalist Steph McGovern, the outside broadcast elements ooze authenticity and convey the excitement and tension involved in live reporting. The antics and dialogue of teenage boys is less comfortable, and the plot, while ingenious, relies rather heavily on coincidence and opportunism. The parcelling out of the narrative to ten different characters could be considered quickfire (good) or staccato (bad) but either way keeps the pages turning rapidly.

At the end of the day, it is just another indifferent celebrity novel-writing effort. Don’t give up the day job, Steph.