Though very much a young person's book, and with several probable touches of fiction, this is a gripping, funny and hugely entertaining tale based on Nicholl's quest in the early 1980s for "the great cocaine story".
What's more, since "starchitect" Zaha Hadid added a touch of science fiction to the city's skyline, in the form of the Hungerburg Funicular and the Bergisel Ski Jump, Innsbruck has confirmed that it has one foot in the future, too.
The Chinese Room's Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, released this summer, quietly takes on nuclear war anxieties through its unsettling absence of people and touches of science fiction, and is striking for its bucolic rendering of an apocalypse.
Along the way, the teacher, Jill Grossman, managed to touch on the nature of fiction and nonfiction, the three branches of government, the names of New York's two senators, race in America and the impact of the Supreme Court's 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, which established the doctrine of "separate but equal" for blacks and whites.
This is true not just of fiction touching on Palestine and the Lebanese civil war but on women's rights.
Suddenly, big publishers and agents, none of whom would touch fan fiction before, were desperate to meet her.
He is the master of eliciting the light touch in fiction.
He was regarded as a dependable character actor and appeared in such disparate fare as Niagara (1953), Welles's Touch of Evil (1958), the science-fiction story From the Earth to the Moon (1958), and the gothic shocker Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), and his performance in the critically reviled Heaven's Gate (1980) was singled out for praise.
Ms. Ramsay's movies are stylish fictions with a touch of the surreal, yet they wipe away the cosmetics of narrative convention and easy sentiment to show us the naked, sometimes startlingly beautiful face of the everyday.
