Labyrinths By Jorge Luis Borges (1962)
“The library will endure; it is the universe… We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and our future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others.”
Jorge Luis Borges wrote mind-blowing, reality-bending, short stories that I read and ponder again and again. He was a prolific writer and I have several collections of his works that I tend to dip in and out of. For my staff pick, I recommend Labyrinths, a collection of short stories and essays that contains most of Borges’ greatest hits and is an excellent example of what is so special about his writing.
Labyrinths was translated and published in English in 1962 but contains stories that could have been written by ancient Greek philosophers or modern-day multi-verse theorists, if either of those crowds had the artistic flair to help spawn Latin American magical realism. My favourite stories in this collection include, The Library of Babel (1941), The Garden of Forking Paths (1941), Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940) Death and the Compass (1942) and Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (1939).
A Thorn in their Side By Robert Green (2013)
Hilda Murrell was killed in 1984, in a seemingly random act of extreme violence; she was abducted from her country home in Shrewsbury and left for dead in a nearby field. Local police struggled to imagine a motivation behind the brutal murder of the 78 year old, Cambridge educated, award winning rose grower.
The investigation begins and the plot thickens. The initial theory that a lone, panicking burglar robbed, stabbed and then abducted Hilda in her own car for petty cash, erupts into a sensational political conspiracy involving Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s plans for British nuclear energy and the controversial sinking of the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano in the 1982 Falklands War.
The author is Hilda’s nephew, a former Royal Navy Commander, involved in nuclear submarines and intelligence during the Falklands war, turned roof thatcher. Robert Green finds himself at the centre of a paranoid spy thriller as he investigates in the decades after his aunt’s murder. Building on the work of journalists like Judith Cook and MP Tam Dalyell, Green wades into unfamiliar waters where cover ups by the police and covert surveillance by the intelligence services become the norm.
Perfect fuel for a Netflix true crime docu-series; the more we learn about the life and death of Hilda Murrell and the investigations that follow, the more unsettling questions we are left with.
By Jake Ripley
