Americans in Paris and a sweat lodge of meaning

If you read one book this week

'Jar City' by Arnuldur Indridason (Vintage) R150

Indridason is the big cheese of Iceland's crime writers and a cornerstone of Nordic noir. This comes highly recommended by compatriot Yrsa Sigurðardóttir. A solid, Rebus-like procedural, it introduces Idridason's award-winning Reykjavik Murder Mysteries series, with detective Erlendur investigating the killing of an old man in what looks like a botched burglary. Dreadful secrets duly emerge.

The issue

Travel writer and novelist Peter Matthiessen has died aged 86. His work took him to wildernesses around the world and led to such acclaimed works as 1978's Snow Leopard, about a grief-stricken Himalayan odyssey, and 1986's Men's Lives, about Long Island fishermen and their disappearing way of life.

His 1965 novel, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, stemmed from an investigation in the Brazilian rainforest to determine civilisation's impact on a primitive, indigenous population.

More controversially, Matthiessen was also a CIA operative. In the early 1950s he, along with other American writers in Paris, set up The Paris Review, a literary journal. Only years later did its angry and dismayed editor, George Plimpton, a childhood friend, learn that Matthiessen had helped found the Review as a cover for spying on Americans in France.

His last novel, In Paradise, is published in the US today.

Crash course

Where is home? And how do we get there? Two quite different recent books have a crack at providing answers. In her new novel October (Umuzi), Zoë Wicombs chronicles a woman's journey from Scotland, her adopted country, back to the place of her birth in Namibia.

Expect, as they say, a moving family history and what it means to belong.

The journey's a bit more roundabout in Boyd Varty's soul-searching memoir, Cathedral of the Wild: An African Journey Home (Random House). If any family can be said to know their place, then it is the Vartys, who have owned the Londolozi Game Reserve for more than 80 years.

Boyd certainly had a childhood other boys could only dream of. Uncle John Varty, a documentary filmmaker full of golden god brio, would take the boy out to trail rhinos. "What's the rule?" John would ask the young Boyd, who would answer, "When we do the stalkie, no talkie."

Boyd's quest for meaning draws him to India, which doesn't work for him, and a sweat lodge in Arizona which does - as it's there he gets the visions, in hallucinations of big game, that take him home.

The bottom line

"There is no relation between the historical reality of a saint and the importance of their cult." - Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation by Robert Bartlett (Princeton University Press)