Archive for category Literature
2025 Reading: The Second Half
Posted by cathannabel in Literature on December 3, 2025
Fiction
The usual caveats. I haven’t included absolutely everything I read – if something was mediocre to bad, I wouldn’t bother reviewing it unless that in itself was newsworthy, e.g. it’s by someone who I know to be capable of being much better than that. Crime and thrillers accounts for the largest cluster amongst my fiction reading, which is usually the case. I generally don’t review crime novels in ongoing series, unless there is some particular significance to this book. So honourable mention to Ian Rankin’s Midnight and Blue (this may or may not prove to be the last Rebus, either way it is a worthy addition to the series), Mick Herron’s The Last Voice You’ll Hear (the follow-up to Down Cemetery Road, which I review below), and Tana French’s The Hunter (follow-up to The Searcher). And of course, I do try to avoid spoilers, but read on at your own risk.
Jane Austen – Mansfield Park/Lady Susan/The Watsons/Sanditon
I studied Mansfield Park for A level, which is probably why I haven’t re-read it until now. I don’t think it will ever replace Persuasion as my favourite Austen, but there’s so much subtlety and depth in this – more than I appreciated at the time. I did defend Fanny Price vigorously though, in the exam, against Kingsley Amis who had described her as ‘a monster of complacency and pride’, who ‘under a cloak of cringing self-abasement, dominates and gives meaning to the novel’. There’s a difficulty in presenting characters who lack agency, who are largely passive and yet do pass moral judgements on others, and Amis is not alone in his view, though he is one of the most extreme. This same issue is, I’m sure, why Lynn Shepard in Murder at Mansfield Park, chose to upend the moral certainties of Austen’s novel, and clearly enjoyed doing so. I read one or two academic articles about MP and the Fanny Price issue, and nearly got tempted into writing a dissertation rather than a brief review for this blog… With commendable restraint, I will simply say that I do see the problem, but I think the book repays repeated and close reading, as much as any of Austen’s more popular novels, and there is rich enjoyment to be had.
The unfinished novels Lady Susan, The Watsons and Sanditon are tantalising. The first gives us a thoroughly reprehensible protagonist, but her adventures are cut short with a paragraph showing how she got her comeuppance, which rather spoils the fun. The Watsons I found hard to like – it felt as though Austen wasn’t really sure what she was doing with those characters, and in fact she did abandon the project. Sanditon was abandoned only because of Austen’s ill health and is the most interesting – I would have loved to see how she developed the character of Miss Lambe, a 17-year-old ‘half-mulatto’ Antiguan heiress.
Elspeth Barker – O Caledonia
What an extraordinary novel! Gothic, darkly funny, odd, with a protagonist who is all of those things and primarily in permanent and obstinate rebellion against pretty much everyone around her, which leads to her murder (this is not a spoiler – we start with her corpse and then wind back). I will leave Maggie O’Farrell’s article to tell you more about the book and its author, because she tells it so brilliantly.
Belinda Bauer – The Impossible Thing
Bauer’s novels are always quirky and apparently she initially resisted being pigeonholed as ‘crime’ but subsequently concluded that actually one can do almost anything within that genre, as she has amply demonstrated. This narrative alternates two timelines, the present and Yorkshire in the 1920s, the unifying element being a rare guillemot egg. She brings back Patrick Fort, the protagonist of Rubbernecker, who provides a neurodivergent perspective on events and characters.
Marie Benedict & Victoria Christopher Murray – The Personal Librarian
I’ve long been fascinated by the phenomenon of ‘passing’, which I recall coming across in the context of apartheid-era South Africa, where it was highly advantageous to be able to pass as ‘coloured’ rather than black. In relation to the US, I read Nella Larsen’s Passing, and a much more recent treatment, Brit Bennet’s The Vanishing Half. The Personal Librarian is the fascinating true story of Belle da Costa Greene, who became the personal librarian to J P Morgan, playing a key role in expanding his collection of art and rare books. As a young woman in that world she would have been remarkable enough, but in fact she was a light-skinned African American, passing for white (her olive skin was explained by a fictional Portuguese grandmother). It’s quite extraordinary, and the book explores the implications of living this way, for her family, for how she deals with encounters with other black people, for how she has to be constantly alert for anything that might arouse suspicion.
Ulrich Boschwitz – The Passenger
There is a fascination in reading accounts of Nazi Germany that involve no hindsight. Boschwitz himself got out of Germany and ended up in the UK only to be interned first on the Isle of Man and then in Australia as an enemy alien, and then torpedoed in 1942 on the ship that was bringing him back to Britain. So his account of a businessman, with the luck to not look Jewish, trying to find out a way of getting out when he’s left things a little too late and no longer knows who to trust, is grippingly real. It was written immediately after the events it describes (the pogroms of 1938 often called Kristallnacht), and published in 1939 but had little impact, and only reappeared in 2021. The narrative has the feel of a dream – a nightmare – in which every route one tries to get to safety proves to be impossible.
W H Clark – Made in Blood
This is the long-awaited third part of Clark’s Ward trilogy, and it’s a very satisfying conclusion, well drawn characters and an avoidance of the more irritating clichés of the genre.
Jonathan Coe – The Proof of My Innocence
This is a lot of fun, despite the deeper and more serious purpose to which all the games he plays with words and styles are bent. As the Guardian put it, ‘The narrative comes at us in various guises including memoir, autofiction, present- and past-tense personal accounts and, most amusingly, the first draft of the kind of cosy mystery destined to sell millions in spite of the deficiencies of its prose’.
Anna Funder – Wifedom
I had to question whether to put this in fiction or non-fiction – it uses Eileen Shaughnessy Blair’s correspondence and other non-fictional sources, but then adds sections which are purely fictional, however solidly based, accounts of her life with Blair/Orwell. Rebecca Solnit, whose writing I admire enormously, takes Funder to task for the way she uses some of this material and for factual inaccuracies, and makes the case that her approach gives Eileen less rather than more agency, makes her more rather than less of a victim. Unquestionably Orwell’s attitudes were not feminist, and his failings seem for the most part to have been all of a piece with attitudes to women at that time. Solnit does not comment on the incidents described by Funder where Orwell was apparently sexually aggressive to the point of attempting rape. My internal jury is out on this book – I think I would prefer a more straightforwardly non-fictional approach as Funder’s leaves one constantly wondering which bits are her own speculation and which she has evidence for. I read Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses (see below) as a companion piece anyway, to get a different, more sympathetic (though not hagiographical) approach to Orwell.
Elly Griffiths – The Frozen People
The start of a new series from a writer who I’ve enjoyed enormously over the years. This one introduces a sci-fi element to the plot which is very intriguing, and on the strength of this first title another series that I will be following eagerly.
Jack Grimwood – Nightfall Berlin
An excellent Cold War thriller, which I should have read after Moskva, the first in the series. I will correct that asap, as this is a thoroughly gripping and enjoyable read, in the tradition of John le Carré.
Nick Harkaway – Karla’s Choice
Harkaway has even more claim to be ‘in the tradition of John le Carré’, as he is his son, and Karla’s Choice is explicitly placed in George Smiley’s timeline. His narrative voice is perfectly pitched and it is a worthy addition to the le Carré opus, as well as a fine thriller in its own right.
Robert Harris – Precipice
Based on the correspondence between PM Henry Herbert Asquith and posh socialite Venetia Stanley, just before and during the early part of WWI, this uses Harris’ genius for painstaking research that is then worn lightly to allow his characters to live and breathe. There is real suspense here, but emotional depth too, and whilst I wanted to shake both Herbert and Venetia, Harris made me care about them both.
Mick Herron – Down Cemetery Road
The first in a new series by the author of the Slow Horses books. That was a sufficient recommendation, and this is a cracking thriller, with two female leads, so having thoroughly enjoyed this one I will now be following Zoe Boehm as well as the Slow Horses (in print and on TV).
Claire Keegan – Small Things Like These
Like Foster, the scale is small, low-key, as the title suggests, but so powerful. Like Foster, which was filmed as The Quiet Girl, this was made into a wonderful film (see my Screen reviews). Most readers will realise that the context is the history of the Magdalen laundries and their abuse of young unmarried mothers, but the protagonist does not at first see, partly because trust in the institutions of the Church is so strong in the community. The novella allows us to share his realisation and the clarity he reaches about his own responsibility. It’s beautifully written, and very moving.
Min Jin Lee – Pachinko
Epic historical novel spanning the period 1910 to 1989, following generations of a family from Korea to Japan and the US. Compelling and fascinating – so much history that I wasn’t aware of as well as insights into Korean and Japanese culture, and the characters are well drawn and engaging.
Laura Lippmann – Murder Takes a Vacation
I love Laura Lippmann. And I now LOVE Muriel Blossom. She is my new best friend and I want to go on cruises with her (though I might hope they’re slightly less eventful than this one). She is my age and widowed, and insecure about her size and appearance, but immensely capable, perceptive and clever and I hope this is merely the first of her escapades, as I foresee a feast of thoroughly enjoyable, witty and entertaining mysteries.
Simon Mawer – Ancestry
Mawer died this year, aged only 76. It’s a real loss – he isn’t half as well known as he deserves to be. Ancestry will thus be his last novel, and it’s a fine one. The title is quite literal, and refers to his own ancestors, whose history he pieces together from the documentary evidence and other traces of their lives. It’s described on his website as ‘an investigation into the reality of the past and an exploration of that uncertain borderland which lies between fact and fiction’. The lives that emerge are vibrant, perilous, harsh and enthralling.
Maggie O’Farrell – Hamnet
I have enjoyed everything I’ve read by Maggie O’Farrell, so it’s odd that it has taken me until now to read this one. Perhaps I sensed the intensity of the grief in the book and wasn’t ready for it. I’m still not – and I know that this particular grief, the loss of a child, is something that I could never be ready for. In our time, the death of a child seems to be an overturning of the natural order of things, even if in Shakespeare’s time and into the 20th century it was, in a way, normal – families did not assume that all children would make it to adulthood or even survive their birth. In any era, I imagine, the death of a child would be felt to be a failure of our fundamental responsibility as parents to keep them safe, and I think we may assume too readily that the frequency of childhood deaths meant that parents did not experience the shock and trauma as we might do today. All of that is here in the book. The context, that it is Shakespeare who is the grieving father, adds another dimension, but he is so much absent, and it is Agnes/Anne who is at the book’s heart.
Andrew O’Hagan – Caledonian Road
O’Hagan takes Caledonian Road (the Cally) as his starting point and creates a web of connections, such as between the white male academic Campbell Flynn and his student Milo, and through those connections, many of them unexpected, builds a picture of the state of the nation, post Brexit, post Covid, which is richly characterised, full of humour and humanity. It’s been described as Dickensian, inevitably but not inaccurately.
Ann Patchett – Tom Lake
This moved me immensely. It’s about the way we think about our past, I guess, the way we mythologise and edit it even for ourselves, and so much more for others, to protect them or us. Patchett writes her characters with such warmth – tenderness even – and humour that one cannot help but care what happens to them. The narrative is built around Thornton Wilder’s play, Our Town, which is I think a great deal better known in the US than here – certainly I had never read or seen it. It’s obviously not essential to have done so, but Patchett’s afterword tells us that she hopes that it will take us to Our Town, whether on a return or a first visit. And so I tracked down a YouTube video of a production from 2003, with Paul Newman in the Stage Manager role. I’ve reviewed that in its own right on my Screen blog but suffice to say here that whilst initially I thought it might just be a bit too folksy, by the end I was moved very deeply and can understand the play’s longevity, not just in terms of performances but in terms of its impact on audiences and performers. I hope to return to the book, having seen the play.
Philip Pullman – The Rose Field (Book of Dust III)
I’ve been waiting for six years for this. I did toy with the idea of re-reading everything up to this point before I launch into the final volume, but could not wait. Pullman is drawing the threads together with immense skill and what feels like love, from all of the previous volumes in both trilogies – indeed, the movement of narrative and people in this volume is all about convergence, and there’s enormous tension and peril involved. Not all the threads are tied up. As the Guardian reviewer says, ‘The Book of Dust is a story for grownups, not children, and storybook endings are another casualty of the putting away of childish things. “There are no endings,” said Hilary Mantel on the final page of Bring Up the Bodies; “they are all beginnings.” Pullman draws his great matter to a close, but he’s clear that his characters, and their stories, will continue without him – that the end of his book marks the start of their next chapter. “We need the things we can’t explain, can’t prove, or else we die of suffocation,” says Lyra, towards the end of the novel. With The Book of Dust, Pullman has given us room to breathe.’
Jane Sanderson – Mix Tape
I’m not often particularly taken with romantic fiction, but this is lovely. I saw the dramatisation (see my Screen blog) before I read the book, and its USP is the same, that this is a love story with a soundtrack, chosen by the boy and girl, and shared via the good old-fashioned mix tape. (Do people share Spotify playlists these days as a romantic gesture? Must ask a young person.) Interestingly, there is a key plot difference between the novel and the TV series – unsurprising, as it’s rare for anything to make that transition without tweaks – which could be seen as shifting the sympathies towards or away from the lovers. I can’t really say any more without spoiling both the book and the TV series, but I think if you know both, you’ll get what I mean.
Vikas Swarup – Q&A
This was loosely adapted into the hugely successful Slumdog Millionaire. The trajectory of the protagonist towards his participation in the prize quiz very broadly provides the film’s narrative, but the book is much less romantic than the film. Both are excellent in their own right, and Swarup endorsed the film, recognising that it was and needed to be differentiated from the book.
Ngugi wa Thiongo – Weep Not, Child
The edition I have of this is credited to James Ngugi – he subsequently rejected this colonial name. It was his debut, published in 1964 in the Heinemann African Writers series, partly thanks to the support of Chinua Achebe. (My parents collected some of these titles whilst we lived in West Africa in the ’60s – my copy is inscribed ‘Hallett. 1965’, in my father’s handwriting.) The series was designed to produce paperbacks by black African writers, ‘attractively designed with high quality production, and sold at a very cheap price’. The novel’s plot – which has strong autobiographical elements – focuses on the trial of Jomo Kenyatta (referred to simply as Jomo), and the rising activities of the Mau Mau. Ngugi’s novel was not only his debut but the first novel by an East African to be published in English, and it’s a powerful account of that era of colonial history. Ngugi wa Thiongo died in February 2025.
Colm Toibin – The Magician
Toibin here provides a fictionalised biography of Thomas Mann, during the period of the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, and his exile first in Switzerland and later in the US. It’s a fascinating life, and he is surrounded by fascinating people, not least in his own family. It’s the family that is the real focus of the novel, rather than exploring Mann as writer; here he is father, brother, husband – and yearner after young men. But there’s another strand which is equally fascinating – how various political factions want to and attempt to use his fame and his rhetorical powers for their own purposes, before, during and after the war.
Richard Wright – The Man Who Lived Underground
This was written in 1941-42, between the publication of Wright’s first major success, Native Son, and his memoir, Black Boy. It was rejected for publication, and only appeared in Wright’s lifetime in a collection of short stories, in a truncated and significantly altered form. It was only in 2021 that the full text was published. It is a remarkable and fascinating narrative. The black protagonist is falsely accused of the murder of a white couple, and goes on the run, finding shelter underground. He uses the network of sewer tunnels to move around the city, surfacing briefly in various buildings where he sees glimpses of life and of the way the city works. It reminded me a little of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, where the railroad is both a metaphor and a physical reality. Here, as the Kirkus reviewer puts it, ‘A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation.’ It’s about race – Fred is accused of the murder because he is a black man in the vicinity when a white couple is killed, and the police are happy to pin it on him – but it’s also a wider analysis of American life.
Poetry
Several of the titles below are from the estimable Longbarrow Press, based in Sheffield, and who produce beautiful books, from some fine contemporary poets, which I’m privileged to have hand-delivered as I live within walking distance from their home (by the standards of the publisher, a prodigious walker). An evening of poetry at Crookes bookshop Novel, with readings by various Longbarrow authors, is the primary reason why there’s more poetry in this half-year review than usual. I’ll try to keep that up. Dabydeen, Greenlaw and Hayes are non-Longbarrow poets.
David Dabydeen – Turner
I was prompted to read this after seeing the Turner painting which was Dabydeen’s inspiration for the title poem in this collection – Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhon Coming On (1840), more commonly known as The Slave Ship – in an exhibition which drew attention to its context in the history of the slave trade. I hadn’t previously seen the figures and the chains in the water – having seen them now I cannot imagine how I failed to do so before. Dabydeen has depicted a notorious and horrific case where a slave ship had to jettison some of its human cargo in a storm, and then attempted to claim on their insurance for the loss of their assets. The poem burns off the page. And if one thought the poet might have welcomed Turner’s portrayal of a shameful episode in the history of that shameful trade, he does not, concluding that the intensity of the painting shows that ‘the artist in private must have savoured the sadism he publicly denounced’. This has been a controversial take and a troubling one. But it’s not an objective – or provable – position and does not need to be. Dabydeen is Guyanan and as he explained in an episode of David Olusoga’s recent Empire series, his ancestors, whilst not slaves, were transported from India as indentured labourers, so were part of that whole history. That he identifies with the Africans struggling in the water rather than the man who painted them is hardly surprising.
Pete Green – A Sheffield Almanac
‘A poem in four chapters about rivers, rain, relocation and regeneration, exploring the industrial past and post-industrial future of Pete Green’s adopted home city.’ It’s my adopted home city too and I loved the poem. It was a joy to read and will be a joy to re-read.
Lavinia Greenlaw – The Built Moment
This 2019 collection is centred on poems exploring Greenlaw’s experience of her father’s dementia and death. That is what drew me in, and the writing is extraordinarily tender and moving. I will go back to these – my own experience is probably too recent to allow much perspective.
Terrance Hayes – American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin
Again, I need to re-read these, but whilst I found some of the poems hard to engage with there was plenty there to absorb and move me. Anger, and hope too. ‘In seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the country’s past and future eras and errors, its dreams and nightmares. Inventive, compassionate, hilarious, melancholy, and bewildered – the wonders of this new collection are irreducible and stunning.’
Martin Heslop & Helen Tookey – To the End of the Land
I read this whilst listening to the CD, where the words are interwoven with recorded sounds both musical (fragments from Nova Scotian folk songs) and natural. The poem explores ‘The layered histories and complex geography of Nova Scotia – its mountains, mines, lakes and bays … To the End of the Land investigates this remarkable landscape, and draws out the voices – under the seabed, under the storm – that animate it all.’
Rob Hindle – Sapo
What links these poems, composed over about a decade, is a fascination with words and the slipperiness of their meanings, and the natural world, whether the eponymous toad (sapo means toad in parts of Latin America, along with various other meanings), the birds from the Observer’s Book of Birds, or the landscape of the North Yorkshire Coast. And there’s another thread too, about plague, in our times and in the Derbyshire village of Eyam 360 years previously. They’re all, to quote Hindle, earthly or rooted. I loved Hindle’s earlier collection, The Grail Roads, and am loving this one.
Chris Jones – Skin
‘Skin is a book of bonds, reaching back, reaching out; a sensory exploration of the world we inhabit and try to make sense of.’ I heard Jones read some pieces from this collection at a Longbarrow poetry evening, and knew I wanted to read them all. I’d previously read and loved his earlier collection, Little Piece of Harm.
Non-Fiction
Hilda Bernstein – The World that was Ours
Bernstein’s autobiographical account of the period between the Sharpeville massacre and her family’s flight to Botswana following her husband’s acquittal in the Rivonia trial, is as tense and gripping as any thriller. The political climate of the time – justice skewed inexorably against the defendants, constant surveillance – is vividly described, from the perspective of the defendants and their supporters, but also from Bernstein’s perspective as a woman torn between her personal responsibilities as wife and mother and her political activism. Beautifully written.
Tobias Buck – Final Verdict: A Holocaust Trial in the 21st Century
This is more than an account of what must be one of the very last Holocaust trials, that of Bruno Dey, a former camp guard at Stutthof. Buck analyses the way in which these crimes have been tried, from Nuremberg onwards, and how the desire to move on from that hideous past, and the difficulty in ascribing individual guilt to a collective system of murder, has resulted both in leniency for many who took part in mass murder, and in the spectacle of very elderly men in wheelchairs being called to account for events they may barely remember. It’s fascinating and thought provoking.
Jenny Cathcart – Notes from Africa: A Musical Journey with Youssou N’Dour
This is not solely about N’Dour, though he is at the heart of Cathcart’s ‘notes’, and she clearly holds him in very high esteem. The problem is that there is not enough analysis of the music (I know, dancing about architecture and all that, but still, there are things one can usefully say about how the music works), and when it comes to N’Dour as a person and as a politician, a bit more critical distance would have been welcomed. However, it gives a flavour of the music that N’dour has done so much to bring to wider Western attention, and introduced me to some less familiar names.
Edith Eger – The Choice
Eger is not only a Holocaust survivor but a psychotherapist specialising in PTSD, and the book uses her personal story of recovery (far from a linear, simple process) to suggest that there are choices one can make in how one responds to trauma. She doesn’t oversimplify the issues, and doesn’t claim to have all of the answers. It’s a powerful read.
Mary Lovell – The Mitford Girls: The Biography of an Extraordinary Family
The family is endlessly fascinating. This biography is the basis for the TV series Outrageous (see my Screen blog) and I think tends to soften some of the political stuff – Lovell sometimes tries to be even-handed by balancing Unity’s (and other family member’s) Nazi sympathies against Jessica’s communism, but it’s not an entirely fair comparison as a great deal more was known about the Nazi regime at this stage (pre-WWII) than about the reality of Stalinist repression. Other sources do seem to suggest that the parents and their son Tom had fascist leanings, to say the least, which is barely hinted at here.
Paul Morley – The North (and Almost Everything in it)
I used to read Morley in the NME back in the day, and his style is still recognisable in this very entertaining and idiosyncratic volume, though he’s not strenuously trying to prove how clever he is these days. It’s a personal view of the north, which means that Reddish in Lancashire gets a lot more attention than any objective account would afford it, but that’s fine. It also means that the focus is more heavily – though far from exclusively – on what I think of as the other side of the Pennines. Morley’s personal story progresses chronologically in the normal way, whilst his historical and biographical vignettes start around now and go back through the decades and the centuries. This is sometimes disconcerting. Also disconcerting is that the photographs which interrupt the text seem to have been placed entirely randomly (out-Sebalding Sebald) and one would have to consult the index to find where their significance is described. It’s all most enjoyable and I had to keep a notebook to hand to jot down names and book titles as I went along.
Peter Ross – A Tomb with a View: The Stories & Glories of Graveyards
I do love a graveyard. ‘So we go inside and we gravely read the stones/All those people, all those lives, where are they now?’. I remember visiting the graves in Cobham churchyard in Kent which inspired the early graveyard scene in Great Expectations – tiny stone lozenges representing infants lost at birth or soon afterwards. And I browsed happily in Pere Lachaise and Montparnasse, finding so much French history on the stones and mausoleums, not just famous names. So Ross’s book is a joy, full of interest, and of unexpected humour.
Sathnam Sanghera – The Boy with a Topknot: A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton
A profoundly moving memoir. Sanghera started to write to explain (to himself and to his family) why he was not intending to marry a Sikh girl, and indeed had had white girlfriends, but alongside recalling his own childhood and adolescence he has to address the puzzle of his father’s mental health. This is traumatic, for him and far more for his mother, who tells him of the early days of her marriage, before her new husband’s medical condition was diagnosed and treated. And through that he realises that his sister too suffers from schizophrenia. All of this emerges against the grain of Sikh Punjabi culture, which doesn’t do a lot of talking about feelings, and for which some of the truth that emerged was seen as shameful. Above all, it’s a deeply loving book.
Rebecca Solnit – Orwell’s Roses
Solnit is always a rather discursive writer, at the same time as being incisive and perceptive, and that’s part of the pleasure of reading her. As a reviewer for the Irish Times points out, in this book the structure reflects the organic, rhizomatic forms that Solnit discusses in relation to plants: ‘her topics … spurt and grow from one another in seemingly random yet contained patterns’. I wasn’t entirely persuaded – perhaps I just wasn’t receptive to the theme of roses and gardens and found the links sometimes a little tenuous. Nonetheless, there was a great deal of interest and enjoyment here.
Jamie Taylor – Studio Electrophonique: The Sheffield Space Age, from the Human League to Pulp
The story of Ken Patten, who set up a recording studio in a council semi in Handsworth (Sheffield), in which a generation of Sheffield musicians (most notably, but not only, Human League, ABC and Pulp) got their first chance to experiment with the electronic sounds that would make them so successful. This is a hugely entertaining account, rather charming and often very funny.
Stephen Unwin – Beautiful Lives: How we got Learning Disabilities so wrong
This is a remarkable book. It’s both authoritative in its treatment of the history of attitudes to learning disabilities, and deeply personal as the author talks – with so much love and respect – about his learning-disabled son. At times it is horrifying, and deeply shocking, but throughout there is a focus on the people with learning disabilities themselves, and he never loses hope that we can be better at understanding and supporting people in ways that recognise, respect and value who they are and what they contribute. I should declare a personal interest. I am the chair of an organisation, Under the Stars, that works with adults with learning disabilities and/or autism through music and drama, and this is a subject about which I feel strongly, and easily become emotional when I think of the people I know being – at best – marginalised, ignored, unheard. We – and many more organisations these days – put the individuals with learning disabilities at the centre of what we do. If they want to perform on stage, they won’t be fobbed off with a backstage role. And they shine. I’m grateful to Stephen Unwin for this illuminating and inspiring study.
Rebecca West – Black Lamb & Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia
This is a monumental tome. And it needs to be, to capture even a part of the complexity of Balkan history, culture and politics. The book is based on West’s diaries of her travels in Yugoslavia in 1937, and was published in 1941 with an epigraph ‘To my friends in Yugoslavia, who are now all dead or enslaved’. It’s brilliantly written, full of wry asides and vivid characterisations, and I wish I thought I could hold in my head even a fraction of what I’ve read about the history of those countries, but I know I won’t. I will read more, and try to understand more, since – as West makes clear when she writes about the First World War and earlier history, and as became clear again to us after the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the conflicts that followed – the story of these nations is both vitally important and incredibly complicated.
As always, my reading has taken me across continents and centuries, from very close to home (Sheffield, late 1970s), to Yugoslavia in the late 30s, 16th century Stratford on Avon, colonial Kenya, Korea and Japan, and the vividly imagined alternative worlds of Philip Pullman. I always struggle to pick ‘bests’, since the books I’ve read are so varied in genre, style, subject matter and era, but if pressed (I do realise that I am the only one doing the pressing) I would pick Hamnet and The Man who Lived Underground in fiction, Chris Jones’ Skin in poetry, and Stephen Unwin’s Beautiful Lives in non-fiction. This year we mark the passing of two writers featured here, Ngugi wa Thiongo and Simon Mawer, and a writer who I read some years ago, and met when we both worked at Sheffield Hallam University, Marina Lewycka, author of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian.
2025 Reading: The First Half
Posted by cathannabel in Literature on June 26, 2025
A nicely eclectic list this half year, traversing the continents and the centuries. Our protagonists move between Nigeria and the US, from Nigeria and Trinidad to London, from Victorian Bath to Borneo, from Somalia to Cardiff. Eneas McNulty travels the world, and migrants from all over the world settle in Linda Grant’s Stranger City of London. We visit Saigon as it falls, mid-19th century Paris, Victorian London and a Swiss village at the beginning of the 20th century. And then there’s a dystopian vision of a future USA, set in 2025… Several authors were new to me, and I hope to read more from Claire Fuller, Philippe Claudel, Emma Stonex, Nadifa Mohamed, Aaron Philip Clark, Chibundu Onuzo and Viet Thanh Nguyen. In addition to those reviewed, a cluster of excellent new crime from authors I turn to regularly: Vaseem Khan’s The Lost Man of Bombay, Luke McCallin’s The Pale House, Russ Thomas’ Sleeping Dogs, Elly Griffiths’ short story collection The Man in Black, Cath Staincliffe’s Fire on the Fells and Jane Casey’s The Secret Room.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – Dream Count
I’ve been waiting so long for this! And it was worth the wait. Adichie introduces us to four women, whose lives intersect in various ways, Chiamaka (“Chia”), Zikora, Omelogor and Kadiatou. She has said that ‘the point of art is to look at our world and be moved by it, and then to engage in a series of attempts at clearly seeing that world, interpreting it, questioning it’ and that’s what she does here through these four lives, which move us but also challenge us. The Guardian’s reviewer said that it is ‘quintessential Adichie: ambitious, astute and powered by an accumulation of feather-light sentences that build to devastating weight’.
Kate Atkinson – Death at the Sign of the Rook
Jackson Brodie’s back, in a witty, sharp and very twisty mystery, that plays with/pays homage to the clichés and conventions of the genre, whilst doing it all supremely well so that we’re fully engaged throughout.
Julian Barnes – The Noise of Time
Brilliant, powerful account of three key points in the life of Shostakovich as he tries to live and create under Stalin. Each is rendered so vividly that we can’t take refuge in our own notions of what he ought or ought not to have done. The image of the man waiting outside a lift with his suitcase each night as he expects to be taken away is one that stays with me. But also the humiliation of giving the speech that has been written for him to an audience on a trip to the US, summed up in this passage: ‘There were those who understood a little better, who supported you, and yet at the same time were disappointed in you. Who did not grasp the one simple fact about the Soviet Union: that it was impossible to tell the truth here and live’.
Sebastian Barry – The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty
This is wonderful, and heartbreaking. Eneas is an exile, condemned to wander the world because of a judgement passed on him in his hometown of Sligo, which he knows will never let him go. It’s beautifully, lyrically written and whilst its ending is tragic it also conveys a kind of peace.
Frederic Beigbeder – Windows on the World
Two voices here, the first of a father who is with his sons in the Windows on the World restaurant in the World Trade Center when the planes hit, and second a writer – presumably Beigbeder himself – who is attempting to find a way to write about the attack but daunted by the impossibility of the project. I didn’t warm to either of them and there was quite a blokey, verging on misogynistic strain in both narratives which was off-putting. Did it work? I don’t know – there were certainly moments in the restaurant which hit pretty hard, and which – for good or ill – made one realise what it might have been like being there as the tower burned, both in terms of the physical effects and the emotional. But overall I was not convinced, and the musings of the author or his surrogate were so cynical and self-absorbed that they undercut the power of the other sections.
NoViolet Bulawayo – Glory
I struggled with the basic concept here. Perhaps I have an overly literal mind, but I couldn’t help but attempt to picture the various goats, zebras, horses, etc driving cars, wearing clothes, and so forth, and it didn’t make sense to me and trying to deal with that was a distraction from the plot and the characterisation. It was engaging and darkly funny, but I’m not convinced that the conceit really works, or what its purpose was.
Octavia Butler – The Parable of the Sower/The Parable of the Talents
Dystopian fiction, written in 1993 but set, rather unsettlingly, in 2025 – the threat here is from (a) climate change and (b) human beings, and it deals very effectively with racial and gender politics too. Compelling and fascinating, and the sequel doesn’t just take events further, it questions the account given in the first book, bringing in other, sometimes sceptical voices, which adds real depth.
Jacques Chessex – Le Vampire de Ropraz
Based, apparently, on a real case from 1903, and written in a very detached, pared down style (it reminded me a little of Heinrich Boll’s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, one of my favourite novels ever), which doesn’t spare the horror of the crimes or come to conclusions about guilt or innocence, but dwells rather on the response of the villagers and their eagerness to pin the crime on someone who fits their assumptions, regardless of actual evidence.
Aaron Philip Clark – Under Color of Law
Spike Lee is quoted as saying (I haven’t managed to track down the source or the context) that everything that happens in the US is about race. And this crime thriller – like those by Attica Locke, and the ‘Darktown’ trilogy from Thomas Mullen – makes that point powerfully. It’s a dark, tough story, beginning with the murder of a young black police recruit, and very well told.
Philippe Claudel – Le Rapport de Brodeck
We are somewhere in Europe, where people speak a language that sounds Germanic but isn’t quite German, after a war that must be WW2, and something has happened, a violent incident involving a stranger in a village miles from anywhere, which brings to the surface trauma, prejudice, fear and guilt from the past. Brodeck has been tasked with writing a report of the ‘incident’, a project which he knows will threaten his own place in the village. Absolutely gripping.
Charles Dickens – The Chimes/The Cricket on the Hearth/The Battle of Life
I re-read A Christmas Carol first, and it was just as wonderful as I had remembered. These lesser-known Christmas stories are a bit harder going, with an over-reliance on melodramatic plot devices and a fair dollop of Dickensian sentimentality and piety.
Janice Elliott – Secret Places
For absolutely no good reason, Janice Elliott is pretty much forgotten and her books out of print. Someone should fix that. I read several of her novels back in the 80s and this one re-appeared from years of exile in the attic and demanded to be re-read. It is subtly and beautifully written, set in a girls’ school during WW2, and concerning the arrival of a German refugee, who generates both fascination and suspicion. I have only just discovered that there is a film of this, which I’d love to see, but I suspect is just as mired in obscurity as Elliott’s books.
Buchi Emecheta – Second Class Citizen
Semi-autobiographical account of an Igbo girl’s struggle to get a proper education in Nigeria, and then to make a life for herself in Britain, facing not only racism but sexism and the dead weight of a feckless husband. Adah has dreams that she holds on to tenaciously in spite of everything, and whilst there is much to fuel anger in the narrative, there’s also hope (not least in the subsequent success of Emecheta herself).
Claire Fuller – Unsettled Ground
It starts with a death, the death of a mother, leaving her children as orphans. These orphans are twins, and they’re 51, but they’ve lived in seclusion from the world, and they have to deal not only with this loss, but with the threat of homelessness, and with the necessity of now dealing with the world that they’d largely shut out all their lives. It’s beautifully done, and makes us see contemporary life through their eyes, the impossibility of navigating a world where everything is complex and everything requires connection. Ultimately, as the Guardian’s reviewer says, ‘Jeanie’s refusal to relinquish her tenuous hold on all the things she loves carries the reader with her on a frightening and uncomfortable journey to the truth, and the possibility of starting again’.
Robert Galbraith – A Running Grave
An improvement on Ink Black Heart, with a compelling plot. The main problem with this one (and I’m not having a go because it’s JKR, honestly, but as one of the most successful writers of our time, she shouldn’t be immune from criticism either) is her penchant for rendering people’s accents in the dialogue. This is off-putting and largely unnecessary, and the effort of trying to ‘hear’ that person’s voice in Rowling’s rendition of their accent is a massive distraction. Apart from that, it’s a decent crime novel.
Linda Grant – A Stranger Town
Very me, this one. A polyphonic novel of a labyrinthine city. Dickensian, from its opening scene as a corpse is dragged from the river. It plays with fantasy at points, it alludes to Brexit as the source of anxiety about the future for a city of migrants. The Guardian says: ‘the real achievement of A Stranger City is the way in which its narrative is as fractured and uncertain as the London it portrays. And despite its contemporary relevance, the novel avoids becoming a “state of the nation” tract – it’s far too emotionally intelligent for that. It’s as much a novel of feelings as ideas, and this is what makes it a compelling read. At its heart is the need for belonging, something we all share yet can put us at odds with each other. At a time when dangerously inert notions of national identity are on the rise once more, Grant reminds us that humanity is a migrant species: we are all strangers.’
Mick Herron – The Secret Hours
We’re in the world of Slow Horses, but kind of adjacent to the series – the book stands alone, but if you know, you’ll recognise a number of key players, seen as if from a different angle. It’s very cleverly done, very funny, and dark too.
Susan Hill – In the Springtime of the Year
I remember reading this, probably in my early 20s, and that my Mum read it too, and both of us loved it. I recalled one scene in particular, a young woman hanging out washing who suddenly feels appalling desolation and pain and knows that something has happened to her husband. Reading it now, I’m even more moved by the totally convincing depiction of sudden widowhood but also how the process of grief is tied up with the changes in the seasons and the rhythms of ongoing life.
Stephen King – Never Flinch
This doesn’t exactly break new ground for King but never mind about that, it’s King on form. This one features Holly Gibney, who we first met in the Mr Mercedes trilogy and subsequent novels that sometimes venture into the supernatural (or, one might say, sometimes the supernatural lurks just out of view, or whispers just out of earshot), sometimes not. But as with all of those recent novels, they’re brilliantly done, they make you care and make you keep turning the pages, and it’s good to see that he’s still on top of his game.
Ian McEwan – Lessons
I have reservations. First of all, the somewhat clichéd plot trope of a schoolboy being seduced by a beautiful mature woman doesn’t quite convince, even though the damage (to both parties) is explored sensitively and intelligently. Secondly, and I fear this is another example of some writers being too big to copy-edit, McEwan gives his teenage protagonist, in 1962, cultural reference points that were at least a year premature. I checked some of the details quickly on Google and Wikipedia – surely, he could have done that, or his publisher could have done that? I know I get perhaps disproportionately annoyed about such things but when I read anachronistic or otherwise inaccurate stuff like this it takes me instantly right out of the narrative. It seems lazy, and arrogant. In this instance, the timing was clearly very significant, because it is the tension around the Cuban missile crisis that informs some of the key events. So why not make sure that your cultural reference points make as much sense as the political ones? Apart from that I quite enjoyed it. He can write, obviously, but it isn’t the first time I’ve felt rather cross whilst reading McEwan, for similar reasons.
Nadifa Mohamed – The Fortune Men
This is based on the real case of a Somali man wrongly arrested for murder, and ultimately hanged, having failed to get anyone to really listen to him – and having failed to understand how the system would work and to make it work for him. Mohamed not only inhabits the central character, Mahmood Mattan, but the family of the murder victim too. She brings to life the multiethnic community of Tiger Bay in the early 1950s, and the inflexible legal system that refuses to listen to or see the injustice it is perpetrating. Interestingly, I watched an excellent dramatisation of the Ruth Ellis case (see my screen blog) – not a miscarriage of justice in the same way, since she unquestionably did it, but another illustration of how once the legal system has decided, it cannot allow itself to admit that a mistake is being made. And a reminder, should we need it, of how mistakes and miscarriages are unundoable when a sentence of death is carried out.
Abir Mukherjee – Hunted
We’re a long way from the Raj (the setting for Mukherjee’s Wyndham & Banerjee crime series) in this stand-alone thriller – it’s a gripping read, starting with a terrorist attack on a shopping mall, and following the search for the perpetrators by the FBI and other agencies, and (for different reasons) by the parents of two of those implicated. Nothing is as it at first seems, and things get very complicated, but Mukherjee never loses control of his story, and it has both tension and heart.
Thomas Mullen – The Rumor Game
Set in 1942 in Boston, Mass., where a newspaper writer specialising in debunking rumours and an FBI agent find themselves working together against the activities of anti-semitic organisation the Christian League (fictional but based on real organisations of that ilk at the time). Both protagonists are outsiders, the reporter because she’s Jewish and the FBI man because he’s a Catholic. Mullen’s Darktown trilogy, about black cops in Atlanta in the late ‘40s/early ‘50s conveys brilliantly the sense of always being hyperalert that comes from being the representative of a minority within an organisation and within the wider community, and The Rumor Game is just as skilful and compelling.
Irene Nemirovsky – Le Maitre des Ames
Nemirovsky’s own story (a Russian Jewish emigrée to France, arrested, deported and murdered in Auschwitz by the Nazis) and the story of her last, unfinished book, Suite Francaise, not published until 2004, tend to overshadow her earlier, very successful publications. This one was published in 1939, before the Nazi Occupation. Her protagonist is an immigrant from Eastern Europe, struggling to make ends meet as a doctor, but with a burning conviction that he can be successful, at whatever cost. He’s not exactly a sympathetic character but Nemirovsky makes him comprehensible, pitiable at times, and his situation is vividly conveyed. She’s a sharp, some say cruel, writer – some of the peripheral characters in Suite Francaise too are almost monstrous, though always depicted with humour.
Viet Thanh Nguyen – The Sympathiser
The fall of Saigon and the Vietnamese diaspora through the eyes of a Viet Cong agent (this isn’t a spoiler, he tells us right at the start that he’s a spy/spook, a man with two faces). This is brutal, but brilliant, and often very funny. The description of the fall of Saigon and the desperate attempt to get out as bombs fall on the runway is stunningly powerful, and thereafter the narrative takes us to unexpected places – and an unexpected resolution.
Chibundu Onuzo – Sankofa
Onuzo’s protagonist is a middle-aged woman, recently separated from her husband, and having lost her mother. She’s the daughter of a white mother and Bamanian father (Bamana being a fictional West African country), and the questions about her identity with which she has wrestled all her life have suddenly become more urgent. This leads her on a quest for her father, whose name she now knows, through diaries she finds amongst her mother’s things. Her father is a fascinating character, full of contradictions, all of which Anna has to navigate. Excellent.
Ann Patchett – Run
Two family groups heading out to a public lecture, and for reasons we don’t at first realise, on a collision course with each other. The reasons emerge fairly quickly but the outworking of this connection is what drives the narrative. It’s subtly done, beautifully written, and as always with Patchett, there’s warmth and hope.
Donal Ryan – The Queen of Dirt Island
A family saga, focusing on female resilience across four generations. It’s full of opposites, as the Guardian review says: compassion and cruelty, fragility and strength, joy and despair. The writing is musical, but never shies away from brutality either. Deeply moving and memorable.
Sam Selvon – The Lonely Londoners
This 1956 novel is gloriously polyphonic, musical, using the rhythms of Caribbean speech to portray the lives of Windrush generation immigrants as they navigate life in London, trying to reconcile their hopes and dreams to its drab and often hostile reality. It’s frequently funny, but very touching as well. A delight.
Georges Simenon – Le Passage de la ligne
An odd book. I think I’d picked it up second-hand years ago, assuming it would be a Maigret, and finally got around to reading it, having realised it wasn’t. The protagonist is hard to identify with, because he doesn’t really engage with other people except in a transactional sense – he shows no signs of empathy or even sympathy, and some of his behaviour is not only morally dubious but repellent. I am still not sure what it was all about – it reads like a confession, a statement of his life, or even a suicide note?
Francis Spufford – Red Plenty
Interesting to read this after Julian Barnes’ The Noise of Time, because it took me back to the paranoia and the oppressive party of Stalinist Russia (and beyond). Spufford focuses on the economics of the regime, in an account which sometimes reads like a novel, sometimes like non-fiction, with a LOT of exposition. The latter is sometimes a slog, but he writes it well, and it is often both enlightening and darkly funny. I would also recommend not reading it as an e-book – there is a very helpful cast list at the front of the book, but referring back to it whilst reading on Kindle was rather a faff.
Emma Stonex – The Lamplighters
Inspired by the true story of the disappearance of three lighthouse keepers in 1900, this gothic narrative moves between the lead-up to the disappearance (in 1972), the investigations, and the lives of the women left behind. It’s atmospheric and mysterious, and it leaves us room to take or leave supernatural explanations, because really what it is about is the people, the traumas of their lives, the effects of isolation.
Rose Tremain – Islands of Mercy
Not my favourite Tremain, but she’s far too good a writer for there not to be much to enjoy here. Primarily, the interweaving lives of the female characters, Jane, tall and contrary, a gifted nurse, Clorinda who has made her way from Dublin to Bath to set up a tea room, Emmeline, Jane’s artist aunt and mentor, and Julietta, a married woman with a penchant for female lovers. The men in the story are less satisfactory and the part of the narrative set in colonial Borneo doesn’t entirely convince.
Anne Tyler – Three Days in June
Wonderful. A slightly awkward, abrasive protagonist, dealing with family dynamics at her daughter’s wedding (the three days are the eve of the wedding, the wedding itself and the morning after). It’s very funny, and very touching. I should note that whilst I read it only a few weeks before my own daughter’s wedding, my situation and my feelings about it all bear no relation to Gail’s, however much I liked her.
Chris Whitaker – All the Colors of the Dark
Lord, this is intense. The writing is so dense and so evocative at the same time, the characters blaze off the page, the plot is labyrinthine and full of traps for the unwary reader who thinks they can see where things are going. Is that plot entirely plausible – well, no, but it works, nonetheless, and it holds the reader till the final page, after which that reader might need a bit of a lie down. Glorious.
Emile Zola – Au Bonheur des Dames
My first Zola for many years. He was where I began reading French novels for fun, alongside my A level texts, which were a lot less thrilling than Germinal or La Bête humaine (sorry, Maupassant, Balzac and Moliere). The setting here is a huge Parisian department store, whose growth is threatening the small businesses in the area, who can’t compete. A young orphan, with younger brothers in tow, arrives at the home of her uncle, hoping to find work in retail, and is entranced by Au Bonheur des Dames, despite her uncle’s hostility to it.
Non-Fiction
Andy Beckett – When the Lights Went Out: What Really Happened to Britain in the Seventies
I know about the 70s, obviously. They were the years I became first a teenager and then an adult. In 1970 I was 13 and when the decade ended, I was a graduate, in employment, a married woman and a homeowner. And throughout these formative personal times I was always aware of the news, brought up to read the Guardian and watch the BBC’s bulletins every evening, habits I continued long after leaving home. But it’s refreshing to read a history of this period, which fills in the bits I’d forgotten or never knew and looks back with perspective and insight on what I can only remember in terms of how it was presented at the time, or how it impacted on my own life. Beckett writes engagingly and draws on interviews with those amongst the key players who were still living (it was written in 2009).
Anthony Beevor – Arnhem
I’ve read most of Beevor’s WW2 histories – he manages to make the military manoeuvres comprehensible to me and fleshes out the personalities and personal conflicts. This one commended itself to me as I’d just re-watched A Bridge Too Far and was fascinated by the unusual spectacle of an all-star WW2 film depicting what was unarguably a multi-faceted cock up of tragic proportions.
Viola Davis – Finding Me
I hadn’t realised quite how tough a childhood Davis had. She writes about it in a very direct and emotionally open way (did she have a ghost writer? It didn’t feel like it). There’s a bit too much God-stuff for me, but one cannot come away from the book without a massive admiration for Davis the woman as well as Davis the actor.
Jim Down – Life Support: Diary of an ICU Doctor on the Frontline of the Covid Crisis
I read this around the fifth anniversary of lockdown and it is powerfully written, angry and heartbroken. As an intensive care doctor, Down really was on the frontline and it’s essential reading as the memories – at least for those of us who were far from the frontline – begin to fade.
John Elledge – A History of the World in 47 Borders: The Stories Behind the Lines on our Maps
Hugely entertaining and enlightening account of various national borders (past and present), how they came about, how they have changed, how they have been – and are – bloodily fought over.
Goran Rosenberg – A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz
There is a whole literature of the Holocaust that comes from the children of survivors. I’m thinking particularly of Eva Hoffman’s After Such Knowledge and Lost in Translation, Lisa Appignanesi’s Losing the Dead, Anne Karpf’s The War After. This generation had to deal both with their parents’ inability to tell them about their experiences, and with the very evident trauma that their parents lived with every day, and which often distorted family relationships and everyday life. Rosenberg grew up in Sweden, knowing very little of his father’s road to Auschwitz, only of the road he took from it, and has reconstructed that first road, as far as possible, to try to understand the tragedy that was waiting at the end of the second. Powerful and very moving.
Rebecca Solnit – Recollections of my Non-Existence
A memoir of how this remarkable and vital writer found a voice, found a way to exist and be both visible and audible, and to have an impact. It’s tough, heartbreaking, to read of how the relentlessness of violence against women wears down and intimidates even those who have not been directly victims, but Solnit always offers hope, even if it’s hope in the dark.
John Steinbeck – Travels with Charley
Steinbeck’s tremendously engaging account of his road trip in 1960, accompanies by his dog, Charley. It’s a journey of almost 10,000 miles, starting and finishing in New York, and travelling through Maine, the Pacific Northwest, California, Texas, and the Deep South. It’s a most intriguing glimpse of America and Americans, which becomes most disquieting, inevitably, when he reaches the deep South and encounters the hatred and fear that prevailed in those segregated towns – he’s frank about his discomfort and uncertainty about how to deal not only with the racism but how to talk to the black Americans he meets without putting both them and himself at risk of violence. It’s interesting to note, in contrast to his awareness of the evils of segregation, that native Americans are encountered only as a brief historical footnote and whilst this reflects the brutal reality Steinbeck doesn’t indicate that he has given the implications of this any particular thought. But it’s a great read, funny, perceptive and sharp.
Elijah Wald – Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties
This is the primary source for A Complete Unknown. Whilst the film tinkers a bit, inevitably, with chronologies ‘for dramatic purposes’, it does justice to the protagonists. But the book takes a much deeper dive into the folk scene, as represented primarily by Pete Seeger, and explains why Dylan’s ‘betrayal’ was so explosive. Entertainingly written and fascinating.
2024 Reading – the second half
Posted by cathannabel in Literature on December 6, 2024
My reading this year has been the usual eclectic mix. I normally (normal for me, I hasten to add) have four books on the go at any time. One will be in French, maintaining a fairly recent resolution (so far this half year, de Beauvoir, Gide, Mauriac, Fatou Diome and Francois Emmanuel, of whom the last two were new to me). At least one will be non-fiction. One will be on the Kindle, two will be by my bedside to read before I turn out the light, and one in my library room (currently the French one).
Having brought so many books, half-forgotten in many cases, down from the attic this year, I’m instituting a new ‘rule’ for 2025 – one of the four books will be a re-read. Or, possibly, a first read if it’s one I’ve had for yonks but honestly can’t recall whether or not I did read it (there’s a lot of M’s sci-fi stuff that’s in that category). But there are also books the mere sight of whose covers made me yearn to revisit them. And whilst life is short and there’s so many great new books out there, there are also so many great old books that absolutely deserve to be savoured all over again.
I read a lot of crime fiction, but would not want to be reading more than one in that genre, as clues and corpses could easily get in a muddle. When it comes to crime fiction in particular, I haven’t listed everything I read, not because it wasn’t any good, but because ongoing series are hard to review without just repeating myself about how good, e.g. Elly Griffiths or Val McDermid is.
There are a few books here that slide across genres – Thomas Mullen’s Blind Spots is crime + sci-fi, Leonora Nattrass’ Blue Water is crime + historical fiction. For more straightforward historical fiction the stand-out is Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait. And for books that don’t present us with the world that we know or that existed, or not straightforwardly, there’s Evaristo’s alt history/alt geography Blonde Roots, Mullen, Jenny Erpenbeck’s End of Days which plays around with how death normally operates, and Kate Atkinson’s short stories (see below). I was pleased to discover some new novelists in this batch, notably Nathan Harris, Caleb Azumah Nelson, Margot Singer and Anna Burns – my top books of this half year are Nelson’s Open Water and Burns’ Milkman, and in non-fiction, Paul Besley’s The Search. As always, I try to avoid spoilers, but do proceed with caution.
Fiction
Kate Atkinson – Normal Rules Don’t Apply
I love Atkinson – Life after Life in particular is one of my absolute favourite books. I’m not generally a fan of short stories but these are – as the title suggests – quirky and sometimes baffling, as well as being often very funny, and definitely need to be re-read asap.
Simone de Beauvoir – Les Belles Images
Reading this, I felt as if it should be one of those French films where elegant people sit around talking about ideas, when they’re not sleeping with each other’s partners. Isabelle Huppert should be in this. I’ve not found it an easy read, partly because the narrative voice switches between our protagonist Laurent, and a narrator, without the distinction always being clearly made on the page. It’s short on event (another reason why it should be one of those French films), very introspective. Worth persevering, because it’s intelligent and perceptive and sharp, and the discussions they have are still pertinent fifty years on.
Mark Billingham – The Wrong Hands
The second in his new Declan Miller police procedural series. Miller is infuriating, but funny and human (though I’m not sure he’s quite different enough from Tom Thorne, about whom the same things could be said), and the crime here is woven together with his own search for truth about the death of his wife, which gives it a lot of heart.
Anna Burns – Milkman
I’ve been meaning to read this for a long time – urged on by my Belfast-born sister-in-law in particular – and I’m so glad I did. It’s darkly funny and terribly sad and horrifying and the people in it blaze with individual life, despite not being named.
Candice Carty-Williams – People Person
I loved her debut, Queenie but this didn’t quite work for me. It started off brilliantly, with the crackling dialogue that was so enjoyable in Queenie, and the deft characterisation of the group of half-siblings and their hopeless father. But the event that dictates the rest of the plot and what flowed from it just seemed so improbable, and then it all got resolved rather too neatly. A lot to enjoy along the way but flawed.
Fatou Diome – Le Ventre de l’Atlantique
A Senegalese woman, making a living (just about) in France, talks on the phone to her younger brother who (along with many of his contemporaries) is desperate to make the same journey, with dreams of being a professional footballer. Through their phone conversations and her own account of her life in their village, we explore those dreams and the realities that the dreamers don’t want to face, all with the backdrop of the 2000 European Cup and the 2002 World Cup.
Francois Emmanuel – La Question humaine
I saw the film based on this – Heartbeat Detector, starring Matthieu Amalric – some years ago and it’s pretty close to the book. A psychologist in the HR department of the French branch of a German firm is asked to investigate the fitness of the CEO and finds himself investigating complicity or direct involvement in the Holocaust. At the heart of it is an exploration of language – the inhuman language of memos dating from the early phases of the Holocaust, and the reductive language of HR practice in large corporations.
Jenny Erpenbeck – The End of Days
The structure frequently wrong-footed me at first – characters are unnamed – it’s the daughter, the mother, the grandmother – and so as we move around in the chronology those relationships change too. Worth the effort to focus. The central conceit reminded me of Kate Atkinson’s Life after Life – a life ends, but it need not have, and what if it didn’t end then, but a bit later, or much later than that? Compelling and moving.
Bernardine Evaristo – Blonde Roots
An alternative world, where the slaves are white, their owners African. It’s not a straight reversal of history, geography has been adjusted too. It’s funny – I love the scene where the white peasant family raise the newborn to the heavens to see ‘the only thing greater than you’, a skit on that same scene in Roots, and perhaps on the Lion King too… The Independent said, ‘Running through these pages is not just a feisty, hyperactive imagination asking “what if?”, but the unhealed African heart with the question, “how does it feel?” This is a powerful gesture of fearless thematic ownership by one of the UK’s most unusual and challenging writers’.
Sebastian Faulks – Charlotte Gray
I think I read this slightly too soon after Simon Mawer’s The Girl who fell from the Sky/Tightrope which has a very similar plot (young female SOE agent parachuted into France, but with her own agenda). It was worth reading though, and it avoids the clichés of wartime heroics, with a compelling protagonist. Apparently Faulks received a Bad Sex award for this but honestly, I’ve read far, far worse…
Damon Galgut – The Promise
Across the years, from the ‘80s to 2018, a South African family wrestles with the huge changes in society, and with the titular promise, made on her deathbed by the matriarch Rachel, that the family servant, Salome, would be given a house of her own on the family farm. It’s a promise that’s explicitly disavowed, or deliberately forgotten about, or that simply is impossible to keep, but that promise speaks eloquently about South African society and its history. It’s in four sections, each beginning with the death of a member of the family, and each reflecting key episodes in the country’s recent history. In each section we see things from the perspective of one of the family members, although always with dry asides from the narrator to puncture their naivety or complacency. But the person into whom we get the least insight is Salome, who is more of a symbol than a character, let alone a protagonist.
André Gide – La Porte étroite
The only Gide I’d read before this was Thesée, his version of the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, which I read whilst writing my PhD thesis, and preoccupied with labyrinths. That was published in 1946 – this is a much earlier work, from 1909, and with a strong biographical element, as the central relationship between his protagonist Jerome and Jerome’s cousin Alissa reflects Gide’s relationship with his own cousin, who he married, despite his homosexuality. Here the issue is not so much sexuality – the relationship between Jerome and Alissa is intense but spiritual rather than physical, and mired in misunderstandings and things unspoken.
Patrick Hamilton – Hangover Square
Rather a depressing read, TBH. But bleakly funny at times. The Critic said that ‘This novel could not have been written at any other point in history. Hamilton is a great navigator of human frailty in the face of desolation. It is not the bar room drinkers, but the articulation of the tragic lack of power man has over the madness that swirls about him that makes Hangover Square a novel of its time.’
Nathan Harris – The Sweetness of Water
Set in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, Harris’s debut novel tells of a white farmer whose encounter with two newly freed slaves both transforms his life, and brings about tragedy. It’s beautifully written, with the central characters all given depth and complexity. It’s about change, and how even the most desired, necessary, righteous social change is traumatic, and not just for its opponents. It’s about how people – individuals and communities – move on from that, about what freedom might mean at this time and in this place. Deeply moving, and with a sense of hope.
Robert Harris – Archangel
Harris never lets me down. We start off in Death of Stalin territory, and then jump forward to the post-Soviet era to meet our protagonist, an academic specialist in Soviet history who gets embroiled in highly dangerous secrets that show how that great dictator is not and perhaps cannot ever be entirely consigned to history. Thrilling up to the final page.
Sarah Hilary – Sharp Glass
The latest stand-alone psychological thriller from Hilary, and it’s another corker, perhaps her best yet. It’s not about twists for the sake of twists (I do go on a bit about this, but it really annoys me, when all credible plotting or character development is jettisoned for the sake of ‘a twist you’ll never see coming’…). Here, character is all, and these characters gradually become clearer, to themselves, to each other and to the reader, but there are loose ends left loose, not tidied away, so we’re still wondering about the protagonists after we’ve turned the final page.
Winifred Holtby – The Crowded Street
Holtby’s second published novel. I’d read South Riding many years ago, and several times – my Mum was a fan – and also Anderby Wold, but this one was new to me. Her protagonist is a young woman who feels a strong sense of familial duty but nonetheless struggles to fit the role that is expected of her. It’s often funny but there’s a deep sadness too, and anger.
Aldous Huxley – Point Counterpoint
A roman à clef about interwar intellectuals (based on, inter alia, D H Lawrence, Middleton Murry and Huxley himself). Like a fugue, the novel unfolds through a series of different voices and different debates, interweaving and recurring in different forms. As such it’s wordy and light on incident, but nonetheless fascinating.
Tom Kenneally – Fanatic Heart
I was looking forward to this – I’d read a few of Kenneally’s books years back and remember liking them, and Fanatic Heart covers an interesting period of history, spanning three continents, from the Irish Famine through to the first stirrings of civil war in the US, through the life of Irish nationalist writer John Mitchel. But the style was somehow so inert. The story was eventful enough, it should have been engaging but instead it dragged, and I ended up skim reading the last chapter or so just to finish it. The story is also cut off before what would potentially have been an opportunity to explore Mitchel’s controversial views on slavery (he was for it), and his loyalty to the Confederate cause during the Civil War. But I’m afraid I didn’t enjoy this enough to read a sequel, if there is one.
Jhumpa Lahiri – The Namesake
Touching, funny account of a young man’s life, from a Bengali family, growing up with a Russian name in the USA. Julie Myerson in the Guardian said that ‘this is certainly a novel that explores the concepts of cultural identity, of rootlessness, of tradition and familial expectation – as well as the way that names subtly (and not so subtly) alter our perceptions of ourselves – but it’s very much to its credit that it never succumbs to the clichés those themes so often entail. Instead, Lahiri turns it into something both larger and simpler: the story of a man and his family, of his life and hopes, loves and sorrows.’
Francois Mauriac – La Pharisienne
Mauriac’s Le Noeud de Viperes was one of the first French novels that I read (in French) without having to, whilst I was at school. I’ve read several of his other novels, and his remarkable clandestine pseudonymous publication Le Cahier Noir, a rallying call to Resistance during the Occupation. He’s a hero of mine – he was in many ways a conservative – family, the Church, his country – but never an unquestioning one, and his questioning led him to challenge the Church’s support for Franco, and to bring his skill as a writer to the Resistance. He was never going to be a fighter (too old, too weedy), but he still risked everything by his activities and associations. This novel was published during the Occupation, under his own name, because it isn’t, at least overtly, about that. It’s the study of a woman whose religious convictions make her seek perfection not only in herself but in those around her, and to deal harshly with those who fall short. As a critique of religious zeal it was controversial enough – but the depiction of a culture of denunciation perhaps does refer obliquely to the Occupation. It’s powerful and Brigitte Pian, the ‘Woman of the Pharisees’ is a horrifying creation.
Arthur Miller – Focus
I was prompted to re-read this by watching Joseph Losey’s film Mr Klein (see my screen blog). This is Miller’s only novel and it’s premiss is a man who gets a new pair of specs and realises he now looks like a Jew, and that people around him are suddenly seeing him as a Jew. It’s a powerful and shocking account of antisemitism in the US at the end of WWII, and all the more interesting because the protagonist is himself a repository of antisemitic and other racist prejudices (unlike, for example, Gregory Peck’s character in Gentleman’s Agreement, who is noble and righteous and allowing himself to be seen as a Jew consciously and deliberately).
Thomas Mullen – Blind Spots
I have read and loved Mullen’s trilogy (Darktown, Lightning Men and Midnight Atlanta) dealing with Atlanta’s first black cops in the era of segregation and civil rights protests. This is completely different – we’re in an unspecified future, where everyone, worldwide, gradually lost their sight. A technological solution has been found (even if it’s not available, or acceptable, to everyone), downloading visual data directly to people’s brains. But then, it gets hacked, and no one can really trust what they’re seeing… It’s a sci-fi crime thriller, which is completely gripping, but also thoughtful and thought-provoking.
Leonora Natrass – Blue Water
A cracking historical mystery, set in the days of the American Revolutionary Wars, and we’re all at sea, en route to Philadelphia with a disgraced FO clerk, who is trying to ensure that a vital treaty will reach the Americans in time to stop them joining France’s war on Britain. This is the second in a series so I should really have read Black Drop first, but thoroughly enjoyed this one nonetheless and will backtrack to its prequel asap.
Caleb Azumah Nelson – Open Water
Stunning debut from a young British-Ghanaian writer, with a second-person narrative that involves the reader intensely in the protagonist’s thoughts, emotions and experiences. It’s about love, race, masculinity. The i review describes it as ‘an emotionally intelligent and tender tale of first love which examines, with great depth and attention, the intersections of creativity and vulnerability in London – where inhabiting a black body can affect how one is perceived and treated’.
Maggie O’Farrell – The Marriage Portrait
Gorgeously written historical novel, beautiful and tragic and very memorable. Its heroine is Lucrezia de’Medici, married at 15 to the Duke of Ferrara, whose early and suspicious death inspired Robert Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’.
Ann Patchett – The Dutch House
This almost sounds like a fairy tale – a magical house from which the children are driven out by their stepmother. But for all of the motifs from those archetypal narratives, it’s really about how we deal with the past when the past has hurt us. Maeve (an extraordinary creation) and Danny, the two exiled children, struggle with and find different approaches to this. As the Guardian reviewer put it, Patchett ‘leads us to a truth that feels like life rather than literature’.
Richard Powers – Orfeo
I discovered Powers last year through The Time of our Singing. Like that book, this one is suffused with music. The Independent reviewer said ‘There are passages that make you want to rush to your stereo, or download particular pieces to listen to as you read — Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time — and others that seem to offer that same experience for pieces you will never hear, pieces composed by Powers’s composer hero, Peter Els.’ It’s not just about the subjective experience of music, it’s about composition, and microbiology and technology, and it’s absolutely compelling.
Margot Singer – Underground Fugue
Another novel that invokes musical form (see also Huxley’s Point Counterpoint). In this case, fugue is both structure – there are four voices here, which alternate and interweave, and connect or echo each other in different ways – and psychological state – all four are exiled and unrooted (and there’s a connection too to the case of the so-called ‘Piano Man’). As these stories interconnect, we move closer to the climactic event of the novel, the 7/7 London bombings. Beautifully written, suffused with a sense of loss.
Cath Staincliffe – The Fells
A police procedural dealing with a cold case – the discovery of a skeleton in some caves in the fells. As always, Staincliffe is interested not just in the crime, and who was responsible for it, but in the ramifications of the crime, the effects on the family and friends. And as always, she makes you believe in her characters, including her new detective duo, and care about them.
Elizabeth Strout – The Burgess Boys/Lucy by the Sea
I do love a Strout. As always, these novels connect with each other, and with others of Strout’s oeuvre. The Burgess brothers connect here to Lucy Barton (via Bob), and we also encounter (indirectly) Olive Kitteridge and the protagonists of Abide with Me – there are more links than those, and I think some kind of a flowchart is called for. Lucy is a Covid novel, it starts with Lucy’s ex-husband William insisting on taking serious steps to isolate the people he cares about as the pandemic looms, and it explores the strange world that we all inhabited then with Strout’s remarkable insight and empathy.
Douglas Stuart – Shuggie Bain
This is a tough read. It’s brilliantly written, with profound sympathies for its characters, including some of the more hopeless ones, but most of all for Shuggie as he tries to survive a chaotic childhood and navigate a path to some kind of stability. There were many moments when I feared how this would end, when a brief period of hope ended in yet another heartbreaking betrayal or failure, but ultimately there is some hope. Just enough.
Kit de Waal – Supporting Cast
These short stories connect to de Waal’s novels – as the title suggests they take characters who played a supporting role in those narratives and bring them to the foreground. As always with de Waal, these people, the lost and the losers, are drawn with tenderness and understanding, and I found them very moving.
Colson Whitehead – Crook Manifesto
A brilliant sequel to Harlem Shuffle. We’re now in the 70s, and furniture salesman Ray Carney is trying to stay on the right side of the law, but things get messy… The writing is marvellous, edgy and with bleak humour. As the Independent says, ‘the blend of violence, sardonic observation and out-and-out comedy reflects Whitehead’s ability to neatly balance the trick of writing both a homage to, and affectionate tease of, noir crime fiction’.
Non-Fiction
Albinia – The Britannias
Alice Albinia takes us island-hopping, and on each of the islands that surround Great Britain, she explores the history (going back to ancient times, and moving gradually forward to our own), folklore, landmarks and traditions, weaving in her own personal history and the conversations she has with locals and fellow-travellers. A lovely, intriguing read.
Paul Besley – The Search: The Life of a Mountain Rescue Dog Search Team
I probably would not have come across this book had I not known its author. And that would have been such a loss. I’m not particularly a dog person – that is, I’ve never lived with a dog, and there are only a few that I have got to know at all well (Alfie, Loki and Bentley). I did have my own encounter with Mountain Rescue though, when I was a teenager with a small group on a church youth hostelling trip who got stuck in awful weather on Great Gable and I can still vividly remember hearing and then seeing our rescuers arrive, with duvet coats and hot chocolate and the relief and joy and gratitude that I felt. The book describes Paul’s own experience of being rescued (a great deal more dramatic than mine) and subsequent involvement with Mountain Rescue, culminating in training a dog, Scout, to work with him to track people who need help in the hills. It’s that training process that forms the bulk of the book, and it’s extraordinary – fascinating and moving and gripping. The title turns out to mean much more than the literal search for those lost bodies – it’s a very personal search for meaning, for a way of living well and in the present, for contentment even in the toughest of times. Do read it, whether or not you are a dog or a hiking person – it’s quite remarkable.
Jarvis Cocker – Good Pop, Bad Pop: An Inventory
Not a memoir. Rather, this is Jarvis rummaging in his attic and telling us stories about some of the stuff he finds there, whilst debating whether to keep or get rid of each item. It’s very engaging, playful and tricksy (just how random are these random items? Were they all actually in that attic at the start of the project? Did the things he tells us he decided to ‘cob’ (a Sheffield word – albeit not one I’m familiar with – for chuck out) actually get cobbed?). And along the way lots of brilliant anecdotes about Jarvis’s youth and the early days of Pulp.
Joan Didion – Blue Nights
I read The Year of Magical Thinking last year, just long enough after the sudden death of my husband. That book deals not only with her husband’s death but with the serious illness of their daughter Quintana, who was in hospital, unconscious when he died, and after an initial recovery became seriously ill again, dying just before Magical Thinking was published. Blue Nights tells – in a non-linear fashion – the story of Quintana’s adoption, her issues with depression and anxiety, her illness and death, through Didion’s eyes. Didion shows, with brutal clarity, how little she understood her daughter, and it offers no healing insights into dealing with such a loss. Cathleen Sohine wrote in the NY Review of Books that ‘Blue Nights is about what happens when there are no more stories we can tell ourselves, no narrative to guide us and make sense out of the chaos, no order, no meaning, no conclusion to the tale’. It’s utterly bleak. Whereas Magical Thinking is an act of mourning, Blue Nights, permeated by Didion’s sense of failure as a mother, and failure to understand Quintana, is a cry of despair.
Jeremy Eichler – Time’s Echo: Music, Memory and the Second World War
Brilliant, fascinating and eminently readable. A study of four composers (Richard Strauss, Schoenberg, Britten and Shostakovich) and a key work by each, responding to World War II and the Holocaust in particular. It generated a powerful playlist: Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, Strauss’ Metamorphosen, Britten’s War Requiem and Shostakovich’s 13th Symphony (specifically the 1st movement, the Adagio, often referred to as Babi Yar) and along the way lots of other pieces are discussed, with such clarity that one almost feels as if one can hear them.
Paul Fussell – The Great War and Modern Memory
Fascinating study – published in the ‘70s – of how the ‘Great War’ was portrayed in poetry and fiction, how literary references, mythology and religious ideas permeated these portrayals, along with a strong strand of homoeroticism. Some of the work Fussell explores is familiar to me (Owen, Sassoon, Graves), some not at all, but it’s full of interest and new insights. I was particularly struck by how the ‘literariness’ of the accounts was not restricted to the officer class but is present in diary and memoir from other ranks too, suggesting a widespread familiarity with, e.g. Shakespeare and Bunyan.
Rebecca Godfrey – Under the Bridge: The True Story of the Murder of Reena Virk
An insightful account of the murder, carried out by a group of teenagers, of another teenage girl, a bullied outsider. I watched the TV adaptation of this, which oddly makes Godfrey a protagonist, getting directly involved in the investigation, and having a personal history that connects her to the suspects, none of which is actually what happened. It’s odd because it derails the drama, which really needs no embellishment. The book is much better than I was expecting, having been irritated by the dramatization (but sufficiently intrigued to see what the source material actually said).
Richard Holmes – The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
A rather wonderful account of science in the Romantic era – Herschel and Davy, Mungo Park and Joseph Banks. There are important women here too, most notably Caroline Herschel and Mary Somerville. Very readable, and not just for historians of science – one of the fascinating things about this period is that people weren’t silo’d into arts or sciences as later generations, including my own, tended to be – William Herschel was a composer and Humphrey Davy a poet.
Stuart Jones (ed.) – Manchester Minds: A University History of Ideas
Full disclosure – I contributed a small ‘vignette’ to this volume, on W G Sebald and Michel Butor. But there’s masses of interest here, all marking the 200th birthday of the University of Manchester by celebrating some of its most notable and influential figures. I was drawn to the outsiders or exiles amongst them – like economist W Arthur Lewis, from St Lucia, Gilbert Gadoffre whose time at the University was interrupted by a spell of activity in the French Resistance, Eva Gore Booth, the Irish poet and activist, and philosopher Dorothy Emmett, plus a number of Jewish academics who had left Europe either because of pogroms in the East, or the advent of the Nazis.
Hilary Mantel – A Memoir of my Former Self
A collection of Mantel’s short non-fiction, on a wide range of topics, some autobiographical (these overlap with Giving up the Ghost, a memoir that she published in 2010), some film and book reviews, and most enjoyably and interestingly her Reith lectures on writing historical fiction. As in her novels, she is sharp, funny, and sometimes fierce – her account of how her endometriosis was dismissed by a series of doctors as just female neurosis is utterly enraging.
D. Quentin Miller (ed.) – James Baldwin in Context
A collection of short essays on aspects of Baldwin, his life, his novels, his politics. I’ve immersed myself in Baldwin periodically over the years (first as a teenager when I discovered the novels and short stories, then a couple of years ago inspired by Black Lives Matter, and now for his centenary), and there is much to be savoured here, that can enrich my understanding. I supplemented the reading (I also re-read Go Tell it on the Mountain, and I am not your Negro) with watching some of Baldwin’s interviews, and as always, I find his voice so very compelling. He doesn’t do soundbites or inspirational quotes – when he talks about politics it is all about narrative, the narrative of the African American chained and trafficked and exploited, and then subjected to segregation and the daily evidence of white hatred. Rewatching his ‘debate’ with Paul Weiss was rage-inducing, Weiss’s complacency in his own privilege staggering, but Baldwin’s narrative overwhelmed him. His speech and his writing have a rhythm, a beat, that comes from the church (he was a preacher in his late teens), and from blues and jazz. He’s never less than piercingly articulate, and never less than fiercely passionate, but more than that, his humanity always shines through.
Graham Robb – The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War
It’s described as historical geography but it’s also what I would have called social history – it’s about the people who didn’t make it into the history books, and who were for the most part buffeted by Great Events rather than playing an active role in them. And really, as the title suggests, it’s about how little the concept of ‘France’ meant to most of those people, vast numbers of whom did not speak any language resembling French (perhaps one of the reasons why the Académie is so protective of that language now). It also provides a fascinating context for the 19th century novels I’ve been reading since my teens – Balzac, Flaubert, Zola.
Sathnam Sanghera – Empireland: How Imperialism has Shaped Modern Britain
My schooling until the 11+ year was in two newly independent West African nations. Whilst I mixed primarily with other ‘expatriates’ I could not be unaware (and my parents were profoundly aware) of the reasons we were out there, and how the legacy of empire was still playing out. My understanding may have been primitive (I was 9 when we left) but it influenced my thinking about so many things as I grew up. So it was fascinating to read Sanghera’s exploration of the ramifications of our imperial history in British culture and politics. It is clear-sighted and forward looking, and asks what we do once we have recognised what empire did to its overseas subjects and what it did to those who grew up here in its shadow.
Claire Wills – Lovers and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Postwar Britain
The story of immigrants from the wreckage of the war in Europe, from Ireland, from the Caribbean, from across the Commonwealth, at work, at home and at play. It’s a rich and varied picture – the experiences of immigrant life varied enormously as one would expect depending on why they came, where they came from and who they’d been in their previous life. Some of these stories are familiar but a great many are not, and it is good, in particular, to get beneath the generalisation of ‘Asian’ to explore the very different communities who arrived, with different expectations, and different challenges to their integration.
2024 Reading – half time report
Posted by cathannabel in Literature on June 23, 2024
There are a few new themes in my reading this half-year. First, I got back into reading in French (see Barbéry and Camus below, and Fatou Diome’s Le Ventre de l’Atlantique will feature in my December books blog as I am only one-third of the way through at present). I had new bookshelves to fill, and so books that have been exiled in my attic for many years (some since we moved here in 1987) have been brought down and places found for them on those shelves – I’ve rediscovered things I’d forgotten I owned, seized with delight on treasured books that I’d not seen for ages, and found books that I really don’t know if I ever read, as well as books that I now need to re-read. And thirdly, I went on a marvellous trip to Europe with my son, a three city, week-long holiday that started in Vienna, moved on to Prague, and then ended in Berlin. Being me, I did of course do quite a lot of preparation for this, not just in terms of the obvious travel arrangements and packing, but watching films set in those cities and reading books about them or set in them. Those books feature both in my fiction and non-fiction lists.
Otherwise, it’s a familiar mix, and the usual warning, that whilst I try to avoid spoilers, I make no absolute promises that there aren’t any. And note that I haven’t listed absolutely everything – the latest in a long-running series, for example, not because it’s not great, but because the only thing I could really say is that this is book no. x in series y. Books that I started and CBA’d to finish, or that I thought were just a bit rubbish I haven’t felt obliged to include; there are books here that didn’t work for me, but I’ve only listed them if there’s more to say than ‘this was a bit rubbish’, usually because I wanted to like the book more than I did, and so wanted to understand why I hadn’t cared for it. But generally, this blog is about sharing my enthusiasms, sharing what’s delighted, informed and inspired me, rather than my disappointments.
As always it’s difficult to pick out favourites from such an eclectic bunch. I think I’d choose, from the fiction list, Sarah Gainham’s Night Falls on the City, Simon Mawer’s Prague Spring and Francis Spufford’s Cahokia Jazz, and from non-fiction, Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste.
FICTION
Muriel Barbéry – L’élégance du hérisson
This marks my resolve to get back into reading in French (see also Camus below). I never really stopped, between reaching the point in my comprehension that reading a novel was feasible (around A level), and diving into Zola and Mauriac and de Beauvoir, and my PhD focusing on Michel Butor. But since finishing the PhD I hadn’t read a word, and this, a gift from my brother-in-law, was a good way to re-start. It was slow progress at first, which can mean you lose the impetus of the plot, but I gradually got more comfortable. The novel was entertaining and at times moving, and whilst my internal jury is out about the ending, I’m very glad I read it.
Heinrich Böll – The End of the Mission
This is one of the books that came down from the attic, where it had been in storage probably since we moved in here, in 1987… Böll’s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum is always going to be in any list of books that have had a significant impact on me. This one didn’t live up to that but was darkly funny and acerbic and I will read more Böll (I think I read Group Portrait with Lady way back when and liked that very much but there’s another one on my bookshelf which I will turn to soon).
Octavia Butler – Patternmaster
I read a lot of sci-fi in my late teens/twenties, because my boyfriend/fiancé/husband (that’s all the same bloke, just to be clear) was really into it. Some I loved; some left me cold. In later years I’ve read much less, but in bringing boxes of books down from the attic I found, not Kindred, which was the Butler novel I remembered, but this one, and I’m still not sure if I did read it, all those years ago. No matter, it feels fresh to me, and she has the gift – so essential to writers in this genre – of acquainting the reader with the specifics of that world and those peoples efficiently and swiftly, with the minimum of exposition, so that within the first couple of pages, one is gripped.
Albert Camus – Le premier homme
Camus’s last, unfinished book, the manuscript of which was found near the site of his fatal car accident and edited and published by his daughter. It’s highly autobiographical in its rich and vivid depiction of a childhood in poverty in Algeria, a deaf and illiterate mother and a father killed in the First World War, whom he never knew.
Jane Casey – A Stranger in the Family/The Outsider
Two new ones from one of my favourite contemporary crime writers. The first is the latest in her excellent Maeve Kerrigan series, the second a stand-alone (at least so far) which connects to the Kerrigan novels. Both are, as always with Casey, tightly plotted, with great characterisation and very well-written. I’m now in a state of some anxiety waiting for the next Kerrigan, due to a very disturbing epilogue….
Aidan Chambers – Postcards from No-Man’s Land
A young adult novel, with two timelines, one contemporary, one set in the Netherlands during the Second World War. I didn’t quite believe in the contemporary protagonist, unfortunately, and it left me quite cold, to my surprise.
Louise Doughty – A Bird in Winter
Doughty writes a damn fine thriller, and there’s always depth and complexity as well as twists and turns and suspense. The opening sequence is riveting, and one remains riveted to the final page. (P.S., anyone who only knows Doughty through Apple Tree Yard, do read Fires in the Dark, her novel about the Roma holocaust – superb and unforgettable).
Cyprian Ekwensi – The People of the City
A Nigerian novel, published in 1954, before Nigeria gained independence – one of the first African novels to be published internationally. Ekwensi had previously published work based on folk tales, but this is very much a contemporary, urban narrative, the story of a young man, a crime reporter/bandleader in a city that isn’t named but seems to be Lagos. It’s quite episodic, betraying its origins in a series of short stories aimed at West Africans living in England (where Ekwensi wrote the book) , and is a vivid and engaging read.
Sarah Gainham – Night Falls on the City/A Place in the Country/Private Worlds
The first in this excellent trilogy is set in Vienna, so I read it before and during my time there. It begins just before the Anschluss and takes its protagonists’ story through to the liberation of the city by the Red Army. The second volume shifts the focus and the location to British military personnel near the border with Hungary, but in the third we’re back in Vienna. I found the final volume a bit too talky and wasn’t entirely convinced by the portrayal of the relationship between the two central characters (mind you, at one point I thought, oh, this is all getting a bit D H Lawrence, but then one of the characters said the same thing!).
Joanne Harris – Jigs and Reels/Coastliners
The first of these is a collection of short stories and I didn’t get on with them at all. I tried several (at random, following some advice I read somewhere about how to tackle short story collections) and then gave up. Coastliners is very different to the other Harris novels I’ve read (Gentlemen and Players/A Different Class) and is a slow burner but it got under my skin, and I very much enjoyed it.
Bessie Head – When Rainclouds Gather/Maru
When Rainclouds Gather is Bessie Head’s debut novel, written in exile in Botswana, where she had fled from apartheid South Africa, and published in 1968. It’s a great read, illuminating many aspects of contemporary society and politics, and offering a strong environmental message, rather ahead of its time. It’s also ahead of its time in the portrayal of the male characters, who are complex and sensitive in ways that go against the more macho stereotypes, as Helen Oyeyemi says in her introduction. Maru was Head’s second novel, published three years later, and focusing on caste, through the character of Margaret, a member of the San (pejoratively, Bushmen) people. I read Head’s later A Question of Power many years ago and will re-read in light of these two.
Mick Herron – Slough House/Bad Actors
Up to date with the books now, which means I’m eager for the next one, and for the next TV series. I started Bad Actors desperately wanting to know what had happened to one of the regulars, and Herron rather sadistically kept me dangling till the last page. The swine.
Patricia Highsmith – The Talented Mr Ripley/Ripley Underground/Ripley’s Game
I’d read the first of these, many years ago, and thought I’d read the others, but they seem quite unfamiliar. There is a degree of repetition in the plots, and it’s all very entertaining and well-written, but I’m not sure that I’m going to go on to Volumes 4 and 5 – I think I’ve spent enough time with Mr Ripley, for now at least. I watched the new adaptation of the first novel, with Andrew Scott and loved it (see my review in the screen equivalent of this blog).
Daisy Hildyard – Hunters in the Snow
The influence of W G Sebald is strong here, but this debut novel doesn’t entirely work for me. Its starting point is a young woman sorting through the papers left behind by her eccentric grandfather, which comprise his idiosyncratic history of England. This turns out to be the stories of four men: Edward IV, Peter the Great, Olauda Equiano and Lord Kitchener, and in each case the accounts are heavily weighted towards anecdote, and the sifting through anecdote for truth or deception. In between, the young woman remembers her childhood on the grandfather’s farm, and this too is of course exploring our relationship with the past. I liked a lot of things about it, but the different strands didn’t seem to come together in a satisfying way – it’s good, good enough to give it a re-read to see if I can get what Hildyard is trying to do.
Christopher Isherwood – Goodbye to Berlin
Read in preparation for our visit to Berlin. Not quite either a novel or a short story collection, these six narratives follow the same characters and are ordered chronologically, but with jumps in time that make these sections seem more free-standing. What is noticeable is how the Nazis go from being background noise in the first to being a clear and present threat by the end. The characters aren’t in general very sympathetically presented (even the one who’s called Christopher Isherwood), but they’re vividly drawn, as is the city.
Vaseem Khan – Midnight at Malabar House
A new (to me) historical crime writer – this series is set in India in the years after Independence and the protagonist is a nicely quirky character, also distinguished by being the first female copper in the newly independent police force.
Stephen King – You Like it Darker
It’s obviously not a coincidence that the title of this collection of short stories echoes that of Leonard Cohen’s final album, You Want it Darker. I knew it wasn’t, even before I read the acknowledgement in King’s Afterword, because he’s a man who knows his music. And in this collection of stories, perhaps more than ever, King’s protagonists are older, intensely aware of their own mortality, of the frailty of their bodies, of the accumulation of losses, of regret and shame for past mistakes. He’s always explored darkness, but there’s a particular note that he strikes here, again and again. He can still work that trick on my mind that he has done so often over the years, of making me read on in the hope that if I get to the end of the story that uneasy sensation in my gut would ease, only to find that the last words in the story are ‘God help me!’ and I’m not free after all, debating whether to leave the light on. I know that it isn’t real, and I know that there’s no way I will hear that particular sound in the house and I know that I’m listening for it…. The stories vary considerably in length, and one or two are slight in content as well as short on pages, but the best are King at full strength (full darkness). ‘Rattlesnakes’ in particular will stay with me for a long time, I fear (given my snake phobia, born from living in West Africa where we had to learn to be afraid of them).
John le Carré – The Spy who came in from the Cold
A re-read, whilst in Berlin, of one of the first le Carrés that I read in my teens. As brilliant as I remembered it, and as bleak.
Simon Mawer – Prague Spring/The Glass Room
More travel-related reading. The first is set, as the title suggests, at the time of the Prague uprising and its violent repression, the second spans a much longer period, beginning between the wars, and taking the story through to, again, the Prague spring. Both are fascinating and compelling, beautifully written and moving.
Simon Mawer – The Girl who fell from the Sky/Tightrope
This is a more conventional thriller from Mawer, about one of the SOE agents parachuted into Occupied France. It’s territory I know well, having been obsessed with the stories of the female agents since watching Odette and Carve Her Name with Pride in my teens, and having read Sarah Helms’ biography of Vera Atkins and Leo Marks’ memoir, Between Silk and Cyanide (both Atkins and Marks make appearances here, along with a mix of real and fictional characters). The quality of Mawer’s writing makes this stand out – and the thriller really does thrill (there is a sequel about which I can say nothing without spoilers, so I’ll say only that it’s just as tense and gripping as the first).
Saima Mir – The Khan
We’re in Godfather territory here, transposed to a northern industrial city (I’m thinking Bradford but it’s not specified) with a significant South Asian population. It’s about family, loyalty and morality, as the titular Khan faces questions of succession and of a changing city. The narrative immerses the reader in Pakhtun culture, which in itself is fascinating.
Sarah Moliner – The Whispering City
Spanish crime thriller set in Barcelona during the Franco era. The context is absolutely part of the narrative, not just a backdrop, and Moliner creates the atmosphere of fear and mistrust very effectively.
Abir Mukherjee – Smoke and Ashes
Another in the Wyndham/Banerjee series, set in 1921. What Mukherjee does by telling the story through the voice of the British officer, not his Indian sergeant, is brilliant – he doesn’t make Wyndham anachronistically enlightened, but as something of a maverick, able to contemplate other points of view than the received Raj wisdom. Nonetheless, some of his remarks about India and Indians make me wince, and his relationship with Banerjee, whilst respectful to a degree, is rooted in that view of the world. It’s nimbly done, and the plot is complex and interesting, not only in terms of the crime but of the politics of the time.
Alice Munro – The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose
This was one of the books that came down from a long sojourn in the attic, and news of Munro’s death prompted me to re-read it. It’s a joy to read (whether this is a collection of linked short stories or a novel, who cares?), so clear and subtle, often funny and sad at the same time. I realised reading this again after many years that she must have been a huge influence on Elizabeth Strout, who I also love, both in terms of the form and the style. Both Flo and Rose are beautifully drawn – it’s interesting to re-read now and find that Flo’s story and that of the older Rose are as compelling to me now as the younger Rose’s were when I first met her.
C P Snow – The Search
Snow was probably my father’s favourite writer of fiction. He read a fair bit of fiction as a younger man, but then rediscovered its joys in later life, when his sight failed and he turned to audio books (Dickens, Trollope, le Carré, Harper Lee and others – he was entranced by The Book Thief). Sadly, Snow’s work is so out of favour that it’s hard to find affordable real books, and no audiobooks at all. Dad related to Snow’s interest in science and politics, and this one, which precedes the Strangers & Brothers series, is about academic scientific research and University politics. I would have probably found it a great deal less interesting had I not worked in higher education management for so many years, and in a Physics department until shortly before my retirement, but as it is, it resonated strongly with me.
Francis Spufford – Golden Hill/Cahokia Jazz
I discovered Spufford through Light Perpetual, a stunning novel about an alternative world in which five children didn’t die in the V2 bombing of Woolies in 1944…. Golden Hill is quite different – a rambunctious Fielding-esque tale of a young man on a mission or on the make in America, with a much darker undercurrent that becomes clear only quite late in the narrative. Beautifully done. And Cahokia Jazz is an alt-history crime novel, about which I will say little more, except to recommend it very highly indeed. He’s one of the most exciting novelists I’ve encountered over the last few years.
Anne Tyler – French Braid
I’ve read, I think, nearly all of Tyler’s novels, and have loved nearly all of them (Vinegar Girl, her take on The Taming of the Shrew, just didn’t work, I’m afraid). This is classic Tyler, as the Guardian’s reviewer put it, ‘Funny, poignant, generous, not shying away from death and disappointment but never doomy or overwrought, it suggests there’s always new light to be shed, whatever the situation, with just another turn of the prism’.
NON-FICTION
Daniel Finkelstein – Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad: A Family Memoir of Miraculous Survival
The title emphasises survival but throughout this family history we are aware both of how many didn’t survive, and of how easily ‘Mum and Dad’ could have been amongst the lost. That sense of loss is pervasive – ‘so many families, so many happy homes, so many childhoods’ – as is the awareness that, as Finkelstein puts it, “What happened to my parents isn’t about to happen to me. It isn’t about to happen to my children. But could it? It could. Absolutely, it could.”
Zora Neale Hurston – Barracoon: The Story of the Last Slave
I came across the story of Cudjoe Lewis (or rather, Oluale Kossola), believed to be the last survivor of a slave ship, in the documentary Descendants, which included a short film clip of Zora Neale Hurston with Lewis. This is her biography of the man, based on extensive interviews with him, and it’s extraordinary. The book wasn’t published until 2018 – Hurston failed to find a publisher in her lifetime because she kept Lewis’s account in his own words and in the vernacular that he used, and because she acknowledged African involvement in the slave trade.
Sinclair McKay – Berlin: Life and Loss in the City that Shaped the Century
Read in preparation for the trip to Berlin, this is a fascinating account of that city’s twentieth century. Unlike Vienna, Berlin, as McKay says, displays its wounds openly – in a sense it had no choice, given both the extent of the devastation from Allied bombs and the world’s knowledge of the devastation that was wreaked upon Europe, and particularly on its Jews. That makes it a remarkable city to visit, and this book was an excellent introduction to it.
Donald L Miller – Masters of the Air: How the Bomber Boys Broke Down the Nazi War Machine
See my blog about this half-year’s watching for my review of the TV series based on this book (and on interviews and memoirs from the surviving bomber boys). The book itself takes a wider sweep than the drama and gives much more context for the missions which cost so many lives, as well as exploring the ethical arguments about the bombing of civilian areas. Miller is an excellent writer, and gets the balance between technical stuff and human stuff right, so it’s a very engaging read.
Paul Newman – The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man: A Memoir
Ordinary, maybe. But certainly complicated. It’s a very honest account (as far as we can judge) and often sad, but because of the extraordinary life he’s had it illuminates so much about the movies during the decades in which he was a leading light, and about American life, culture, politics more broadly.
Deborah Orr – Motherwell: A Girlhood
I used to read the late Deborah Orr’s columns in the Guardian, and later followed her on Twitter and her voice was always compelling. This memoir is remarkable, and I find it strangely hard to write about, almost as if I’m reviewing a person (who I never met), rather than a book. So I’ll let Andrew O’Hagan’s words stand: ‘forging out of living memory a glowing vision of troubled belonging. In the writing of it, Deborah found a way to rise out of her sorrows and dependencies, her own difficult loves, and create a masterpiece of self-exploration. We can only mourn her loss and the brilliant books she might have written after this.’
Lucy Pollock – The Book about getting Older (for people who don’t want to talk about it)
I am not averse to talking about getting older – I don’t embrace all aspects of it (who could!), but I accept it, and, as my late husband used to say, it is better than the alternative. Unless it isn’t. My thoughts on my own ageing are heavily influenced by having lost my mother-in-law and being in the process of losing my father to dementia, and whatever else happens to me in the remainder of my life, that is the most terrifying thing to contemplate. There’s a lot of practical stuff here, about how to prepare yourself and your family, most of which I’ve already been cracking on with (PoA, will, lists of account numbers and passwords, funeral plan), others that I’m still thinking on (e.g. advance decisions). What was particularly interesting to me was the distinction Pollock makes between what is common as one gets older, and what is normal. In other words, what is genuinely pretty much inevitable, and what might be avoidable, or should be properly investigated rather than just being accepted. It’s not a cheery read but it is practical and hopeful, which is how I intend to approach my advancing years.
Francis Spufford – The Child that Books Built: A Memoir of Childhood and Reading
I am very much a child built by books. I read voraciously from the moment those marks on the page turned themselves into words for me and have never stopped. That childhood reading shaped my adult reading, and the more I read, the more I wanted that experience of turning a page and entering someone else’s world. So I was very intrigued to read Spufford (as I mention above, a fairly recent discovery and one of the most exciting contemporary writers) talking about the books that built him. He is a fair bit younger than me, but of course we read a lot of the same things – Tolkien, C S Lewis, E. Nesbit, etc. Le Guin, who was clearly hugely important to him, became part of my life only when I was a teenager, but it’s fascinating to read his account of discovering Earthsea as a child. And the way he writes about his life in books, as I’d expect from the way he writes his novels, is beautiful and touching and funny and deep.
Isabel Wilkerson – Caste: The Origin of our Discontents
A rigorous and persuasive exploration of American racism as a form of caste system. Wilkerson draws comparisons with the Indian caste system and with Nazi Germany. Kwame Anthony Appiah described the book as beautiful and painful to read, and indeed the account of how notions of purity and pollution, for example, played out in the American South – and more widely – are horrifying, and much of this detail was new to me. It seems to me that this analysis is hugely important in understanding not only the history but the future – recognising that this is about caste allows us a clearer view of how a society can change for the better. It certainly got into my head, and I found myself referencing it after one recent episode of Doctor Who (Dot and Bubble)…
Stefan Zweig – The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European
It’s hard reading this and knowing that the day after posting this manuscript to the publisher, Zweig and his wife committed suicide. The book isn’t a suicide note – it doesn’t really explain that decision. They were safe, albeit in exile and (this was in 1942) with no guarantee that their safety would continue or their exile end. Clearly that sense of exile, of having left a life behind that, whatever the outcome of the war, could not simply be picked up again, was beyond bearing. But for most of the book, Zweig appears to lead a fairly charmed existence, attracting success, brilliant and talented friends, and a life of culture and comfort. He seems to have accepted the good things that came his way without any great surprise or doubt that this was his due, which isn’t an entirely appealing quality. And the way in which all of those brilliant and talented people immediately became his dearest friends was a bit queasy. So I wasn’t won over to Zweig (though Michael Hofmann’s vitriolic demolition job in the LRB seems weirdly excessive and personal). In some ways I felt about Zweig as I felt about Vienna, where he spent his early years. Somehow Vienna gives the impression of being quite pleased with itself, and to have distanced itself more than other European capitals from the ‘unpleasantness’ of events. One friend, whose father got out of Vienna just in time, described the city as soulless and another, who grew up and lived there till recently, described how claustrophobic she found the city. My two days there hardly qualify me to judge but my son and I had both asked ourselves why we loved Prague and Berlin and didn’t fall for Vienna’s undoubted charms.
Postscript
It seems appropriate to honour here the late Alice Munro (see The Beggar Maid, above, and I have read others of hers), C J Sansom (see previous years’ book blogs for his Shardlake series, and I’ve also read his alt history, Dominion, and his Spanish Civil War novel, Winter in Madrid), and Christopher Priest (see future book blogs as I revisit some of his brilliant sci-fi novels, and catch up on any I missed. A Dream of Wessex is the one I always think of first, because it had such an impact on me). Thank you all.
And thank you to all the writers listed above, for everything that they brought me over the last six months. You’ve taken me to four continents, to several centuries, as well as to places that never existed, and history that never happened. You’ve entertained me, informed me, made me think, deepened my understanding of this world and its history and of the people who inhabit and have inhabited it. The child that was built by books is still being built by books, even in her seventh decade.
What I read in 2023 – the second half
Posted by cathannabel in Literature on December 15, 2023
This half year seems to have been particularly heavy on the crime fiction. And what’s listed below is not even all of the crime I read – there were some that disappointed me, and as always I prefer to share enthusiasm rather than disappointment (although I am not uncritical of the books that I have chosen to review), and there were some that were perfectly enjoyable but about which I could say little other than that this was another cracking title in x series by y. I turn to crime (as it were) for tension and suspense along the way and a satisfying denouement. But of course the best crime writers (looking at you, Sarah Hilary, Jane Casey, Will Dean, Laura Lippman, Denise Mina, Abir Mukherjee, Mark Billingham, Anne Holt, Louise Penny, Elly Griffiths, Ian Rankin, Mick Herron, Ann Cleeves, Val McDermid, Lesley Thompson and Sara Paretsky, to name only those I’ve read this year) give you more than that – psychological, political, sociological insights into the why and who of crime (on both sides of the law).
If I had to pick the outstanding novels in this half-year (of course I don’t have to, it’s my blog and I make the rules here) I’d say Richard Powers’ The Time of Our Singing and Stuart Evers’ The Blind Light, not only because they took me over completely whilst I was reading, and moved me tremendously, but because both authors were new to me, and so I had no expectations and was bowled over. I also rate very highly Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood, and great new stuff from Stephen King (Holly) and Sarah Hilary (Black Thorn).
Non-fiction was heavy on autobiography (Martin Amis, Angela Davis, Joan Didion, Catherine Taylor and Terri White), and biography. Two books on the US opioid crisis which has proven rather addictive as subject matter these last six months, and some grief/bereavement reading. Best/favourites? Catherine Taylor’s The Stirrings, and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking.
FICTION
Megan Abbott – Beware the Woman
The premiss is one which I’m sure I’ve encountered before, but it’s a fresh take on the set up – a young couple, expecting their first child, visits one of their parents, and things get a bit weird. (Get Out sprang immediately to mind, although the tensions here are not to do with race). There’s a whole lot of gaslighting going on here, the creepiness is built up gradually and cleverly, and it was all very enjoyable, but with an undercurrent that’s really rather serious.
This is a complex and gripping thriller – it’s featured in a lot of end of year Best Of lists, not just mine – which delivers, generously, both intelligence and suspense. ‘Birnam Wood is a dark and brilliant novel about the violence and tawdriness of late capitalism. Its ending, though, propels it from a merely very good book into a truly great one.’
Ta-Nehisi Coates – The Water Dancer
Compelling narrative of slavery, with echoes of The Underground Railroad (like Whitehead, Coates takes the metaphorical and makes it literal), and with a leading role for Harriet Tubman. This isn’t just about slavery though, Coates looks more widely at capitalism, at the oppression of women, at the structures in society that require there to be a hierarchy and someone at the bottom of that who is powerless. Full of pain, inevitably, but of beauty too.
Will Dean – The Last Passenger
A cracking opening (and very different to Dean’s excellent Tuva Moodyson crime novels – I also read Wolf Pack in that series recently) . Caz is on holiday on an ocean liner with her partner, and wakes to find she is, apparently, alone on the ship. Dean pulls this off brilliantly, and every time we (and the protagonist) thinks they have begun to figure out what’s going on, we are blindsided with a new revelation – right up to the final page. It’s irresistible.
Bernardine Evaristo – Soul Tourists
An impromptu road trip for a slightly ill-matched couple which somehow leads to encounters with key figures from black European and Middle Eastern history. I don’t think it entirely worked; perhaps Evaristo was simply trying to do too much, and there are two novels in here, which don’t always mesh. Thoroughly entertaining nonetheless.
Stuart Evers – The Blind Light
A family saga, of lives lived in the shadow of the bomb, absolutely enthralling and moving. It sweeps across sixty years in the lives of its main protagonists, Drummond, Gwen and Carter, but always the focus is on these relationships, always intimate rather than letting the individuals become lost in the sweep of big events. One of my books of the year.
Robert Ford – The Student Conductor
Ford’s writing about music is wonderful, and really made me think about the role of the conductor. But the characters of Ziegler, the lead character’s supposed mentor, didn’t convince me (though he did remind me very strongly of J K Simmons’ character in Whiplash), nor did the oboist/love interest. Very mixed feelings about this one.
Abdulrazak Gurnah – Pilgrims Way
I read Gurnah’s brilliant Afterlives recently, set in what is now Tanzania in the early twentieth century. Pilgrims Way is closer to home, geographically and chronologically, and its scope is much narrower, dealing with one man, Daud, an immigrant whose life has not gone to plan, and who deals with his disappointment and disillusionment with sardonic humour and leaps of imagination. It’s often funny, but always dark and troubling.
Mohsin Hamid – The Last White Man
A fable in which a white man wakes up one morning and looks in the mirror to see that he’s no longer a white man. He has to navigate the world now as a black man, and everything is different. At this point it made me think of Arthur Miller’s novel, Focus, in which a man gets new spectacles, which make him look Jewish to some people, and those people conclude that he must be Jewish. But Hamid’s tale goes in a different direction and I found it beautiful.
Sarah Hilary – Black Thorn
A stand-alone from Hilary, whose Marnie Rome detective novels are amongst my favourite contemporary crime thrillers. Here the focus is not on the police, who play a more peripheral role, but on a small community of people who, we learn at the beginning, have encountered some catastrophe, and we gradually learn what, how, who, why… It’s beautifully done – incredibly tense and creepy and that tension is maintained as truths emerge.
Catherine Ryan Howard – Run Time
This is gripping stuff! Layers upon layers, super tense atmosphere, the plot revolves around the filming of a horror movie, in an actual cabin in the woods…
Clare Keegan – Foster
A novella of real delicacy, beauty and heartbreak. A child goes to stay with strangers when her mother is pregnant again, and finds herself with space and time to think and breathe, as she tries to understand her new guardians, and her own mother.
Stephen King – Holly
Holly first appeared in King’s Mr Mercedes, but he clearly loved her, because her role became increasingly important, in the other two books in that trilogy, but also in The Outsider. And here she is front and centre, as the title promises. This is King at his best, conjuring up creeping unease and tension, creating monstrous human beings and monstrous deeds, without ever letting the monstrous have it all their way, because he also creates people like Holly, who will, as she has done since Mr Mercedes, stand in its way. We love her as much as King does.
Laura Lippman – Prom Mom
Lippman’s plots are as twisty as the run of the mill psychological thrillers which bill themselves as having ‘a twist that you’d never predict’. But unlike so many of those, the twists are earned by careful plotting and, most of all, by character building. Our sympathies shift as we understand the protagonists better but understanding them is key to the twists in the narrative, rather than just upturning everything we’ve previously been told. And we do feel for these people, all of them, however weak and flawed they turn out to be.
Luke McCallin – The Man from Berlin
McCallin’s protagonist is an Abwehr officer, a former policeman, who is trying to solve brutal crimes in the context of a regime which is itself brutal and criminal. It’s similar territory to Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series, and whilst I have only read one of this series so far, I will follow it up because I’m fascinated to see how Gregor Reinhardt navigates this dangerous, brutal world.
Cormac McCarthy – All the Pretty Horses
McCarthy’s prose is as rich as his dialogue is spare – sometimes the former feels just a bit too much, but at best its richness is beautiful rather than indigestible. His protagonist is a 16 year old boy who’s just been turfed off his grandfather’s ranch, and decides to try his luck in Mexico, along with his best friend, and their horses. John Grady Cole is someone we quickly learn to care about – like so many at his age, he thinks he understands the world rather better than he does, but he is in many ways an archetypal Western hero, with principles and courage and loyalty. It’s a world I don’t really understand but this is a compelling and moving novel. It’s the first in a trilogy, so I may venture on to Vol. 2 (The Crossing) at some point.
Denise Mina – Field of Blood
Mina weaves a fictionalised version of a real crime, and a real case of miscarriage of justice together with her usual skill. Paddy Meehan too finds her job (as a copyboy at a newspaper) and her personal life getting dangerously intertwined. She’s an engaging character, not perfect in judgement or actions, but I will look forward to reading the other books in which she features.
Abir Mukherjee – A Rising Man/A Necessary Evil
The first two in a crime series set in India in the early 20th century, with a British/Indian team, exploring all the tensions that creates (between the two of them, and with wider society). The context is fascinating, the writing excellent, and the voice of Wyndham, the British officer, is convincingly that of an enlightened man of his time, rather than a stand-in for a contemporary reader.
Richard Powers – The Time of our Singing
A truly immersive book, which I started off reading in short bursts until I realised that wouldn’t work. It’s a profoundly musical book – I half intend to create a playlist of all of the pieces of music that play a part in the narrative, although what I would really want would be those pieces performed by the characters in the book. It’s also brave (or foolhardy) enough to tackle race, as the protagonists are a mixed-race family (white father, black mother) in the US in the mid-twentieth century. I found it beautiful, powerful, very moving.
Anya Seton – My Theodosia
I read this, along with everything Anya Seton wrote, as a teenager, and revisited it because I was reading the biography of Alexander Hamilton (see below), who was killed in a duel by Theodosia Burr’s father. But, my god, this is an appallingly, sickeningly racist book. I wondered whether Seton was simply trying to convey the perceptions of a young woman in a society where slavery was still entrenched (although we are told that Theodosia thought slavery was wrong), but no, Seton wrote this in 1942 as a young woman in a post-slavery but pre-civil rights society, and it is impossible to escape the conclusion that these were her perceptions too. Her descriptions of any black characters are contemptuous, the n word is on every page. Of course, this is a novel of its time (and about a time when things were worse), but it made it a grim read and it was hard to care about Theodosia or her father when one had to wade through all of this. I can’t remember how I felt about the book when I first read it, but I think that, although I was more aware of racial politics than my contemporaries at school in Mansfield, having grown up in West Africa with parents who were passionately anti-apartheid, and having a keen interest in the civil rights/black power movements, I was at the same time used to encountering these attitudes and this language, unapologetically presented, in a way that we no longer are.
Elif Shafak – The Island of Missing Trees
I’ve enjoyed a couple of Shafak’s other books, and I liked a lot of things about this, but there was way too much whimsy for my taste. Whole sections are narrated by a fig tree, and whilst I can see how this connects with the history of the divided island of Cyprus, and with the stories of the main protagonists, I speed-read through these bits (sorry) to get back to the human characters, with whose stories I could more fully engage.
Khushwant Singh – Train to Pakistan
A novel about Partition, published in 1956, so not long after those events, set in a fictional village near the new border. Singh was a lawyer, diplomat and politician as well as a writer. His perspective here is to explore the cataclysmic events taking place across the sub-continent through a close focus on this small place, its dignitaries and officials and local ne’er do wells, who are portrayed with sharp wit and humour, even whilst the undercurrent of imminent tragedy is getting stronger.
Noel Streatfeild – Saplings
I’ve read many/most of Streatfeild’s children’s books, and her Vicarage trilogy but had no idea of this one’s existence until I spotted it in the catalogue of the brilliant Persephone Press. It’s the story of four children in wartime, of losses and betrayals and insecurity, and it’s a deep dive into ideas about attachment and loss and their effects on the young. If that makes it sound offputtingly theoretical, it isn’t – her novelist’s gift is to make us care about these children and what happens to them, and it’s very moving.
Marion Todd – See Them Run
Very enjoyable police procedural, set in the area around St Andrews, where I visit a couple of times a year (there’s always a peculiar fascination in reading thrillers set in familiar territory). Will read more.
Miriam Toewes – Women Talking
Recently made into a rather good film (see my screen review blog). This is horrifying, all the more so because the case is real. Girls and women in a Mennonite community in Bolivia were drugged and raped by members of their own community, and despite the perpetrators being exposed and some jailed, the women were left with no redress, and no protection. The book is, as the title tells us, women talking – and they talk about survival, about whether they should stay in the only place they know or leave and take their chances in what may be a hostile world. The tension – and it is very tense indeed – comes both from the disagreements amongst the women and the depths of trauma that they reveal, and from the knowledge that they could so easily be prevented from leaving, when the men return.
NON-FICTION
Martin Amis – Experience
I’ve only read one of Amis’s novels, and I hated it. Time’s Arrow was clever, but in a way that repelled me, and that put me off trying any of his other novels. So, in the aftermath of his death, I thought I might encounter him through his memoir. I liked him more here – he is self-critical, he can find his past self ridiculous and blameworthy, and he can be generous to at least some of the other people in his life. And in his writing about the disappearance and murder of his cousin Lucy Partington by Fred and Rosemary West, there is real heart, real grief. I still don’t want to read any of his novels though.
Anita Anand – Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary
Biography of an extraordinary woman. Daughter of a Maharajah, god-daughter to Queen Victoria, and as the book’s title tells us, suffragette and activist. Absolutely fascinating. Sophia herself remains enigmatic, but her engagement with the ‘advancement of women’, and with campaigns in support of Indian lescars, Indian troops in WWI, and the cause of Indian self-determination was bold and brave, and through her we see a varied and colourful cast of characters, both Indian and British.
Jeanine Basinger & Sam Wasson – Hollywood: An Oral History
The story of Hollywood told through interviews with people who were there – directors, actors, writers, studio bosses. The interviews, held in the American Film Archives, cover all aspects of movie-making so inevitably some sections are more interesting (to me) than others, though overall it is fascinating and enlightening, and very entertaining.
Ian Black – Enemies and Neighbours: Arabs in Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017
In the wake of the 7 October Hamas attacks, and the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, I wanted to understand more about why we are where we are and why this is such an intractable situation. I knew some of the story, of course, but I wanted a rigorous historical approach, non-partisan as far as is possible. Black’s book fits the bill. It is, of course, deeply depressing, but it is impossible when reading it to take a simplistic view of causes or possible solutions.
Ron Chernow – Alexander Hamilton/Mike Duncan – A Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution
I’ve grouped these two biographies together because their subjects were not just contemporaries but friends, and there are many parallels between them. Reading up on Hamilton is prep for going to see the musical in Manchester in February – when I watched it on TV I realised how sketchy my knowledge of that period of American history was, and whilst I dare say it’s not compulsory to do the reading before enjoying the music, it’s very much me… I had a better grasp on Lafayette’s story because my History A level covered the French Revolution and its aftermath, and I’ve read around the subject since. Both Hamilton and Lafayette were extraordinary men who achieved far more than anyone expected of them, at quite a young age, and these accounts bring them to life whilst providing a thorough, well-researched and readable historical context.
Angela Davis – An Autobiography
Davis was a hero of mine during my teens. I read a lot about the activists in the black power movement but was inevitably drawn to Davis – her charisma, her passion, her image. Women, Race and Class is brilliant, and so is this. It was originally published in 1974 and now has a series of prologues written for each successive edition, which shed light on how her perspectives have changed and how she responds to more recent events.
Joan Didion – The Year of Magical Thinking/Sarah Tarlow – The Archaeology of Loss: Life, Love and the Art of Dying
Two books that I was drawn to because they addressed how we live after the death of a partner. Didion’s book was recommended to me, with the caveat that I shouldn’t read it too soon – there are of course no rules as to how soon is too soon, and I think I got it about right. It was in places a very tough read – her description of her husband’s death had so many echoes of what happened to me – but her insights into the process she went through were profound and powerful (my copy of the book now has many sections highlighted so I can return to them when I need to). Tarlow ventures out further from her own experience to ruminations on how we (now and in the past) deal with death and loss, and it’s fascinating and often moving. It spoke to me less personally than Didion’s account because much of it is concerned with how she became her husband’s carer when he developed a terminal degenerative illness, and how that affected her and their family (my loss in contrast was shockingly sudden). It’s brutally frank and unsentimental about the cost and the loneliness of the carer’s role, and so whilst I was initially drawn to the book because it addressed bereavement, this topic is also vitally important and relevant.
Eddie Glaude – Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for our Own
I have loved Baldwin’s writing since my teens, when I read Go Tell it on the Mountain, and found his voice so compelling that I read over the subsequent years all of his other novels and essays. Glaude considers Baldwin’s evolving views on race in America, and as promised draws out lessons, and he conveys both Baldwin’s despair and the hope he held on to despite everything. It’s not a hagiography, he does not treat Baldwin as a sage, but as a passionate, deeply insightful, direct and honest writer whose insights into America are as relevant as ever.
Beth Macy – Dopesick: Dealers, Doctor and the Drug Company that addicted America/Chris McGreal – American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts
See my Screen blog for the two dramas and the documentary that I watched on the topic of the US opioid crisis. I clearly became somewhat obsessed with this topic, having read Demon Copperhead and then watched the Netflix drama Painkillers… These books follow similar ground, but have a different approach. American Overdose focuses more on the politics and the perpetrators: ‘McGreal’s book reads like a white-collar The Wire, with a cast of characters determined to exact as much money as possible regardless of the human cost’. Macy foregrounds the stories of the victims and their families. Taken together they give a full and heartbreaking account that will, and should, make you angry, even whilst it breaks your heart.
Wendy Mitchell – One Last Thing: How to Live with the End in Mind
I’ve been following Wendy Mitchell for some years now, as she navigates life with early onset dementia with humour and honesty. It’s rare to hear the voices of dementia sufferers because they are so often and so quickly unable to articulate their own experience, so Mitchell’s accounts are immensely valuable. This book is different – it looks at how we approach the end of our own life, and how that end can be made more dignified, how we can have some control over when, how, and where. This is a passionate work of advocacy for assisted dying, but Mitchell recognises that the provision that exists in a number of countries generally cannot help her and others with dementia because by the time they would want to be able to check out (the point at which, for example, they are no longer able to recognise their closest family), they will not have capacity (or not be deemed to have capacity) to make that decision. It’s a huge and heartbreaking dilemma, and Mitchell doesn’t offer solutions, but makes a vital contribution to the discussion.
Anthony Seldon & Raymond Newell – Johnson at 10: The Inside Story
‘This is an authoritative, gripping and often jaw-dropping account of the bedlam behind the black door of Number 10 and it confirms that we did not really have a government during his trashy reign. It was an anarchy presided over by a fervently frivolous, frantically floundering and deeply decadent lord of misrule.’ It’s all the more powerful because the authors are far from being anti-establishment figures. It makes it clear that the picture painted by the TV drama Partygate (see my Screen blog) is entirely plausible and consistent with the culture at Downing Street under Johnson. Incredible, and appalling.
Gitta Sereny – The German Trauma: Experiences & Reflections, 1938-2001
This collection of articles from almost forty years of writing about, thinking about and remembering the Nazi era includes much that is fascinating, some that is contentious, and inevitably a vast amount that is horrifying.
Catherine Taylor – The Stirrings: A Memoir in Northern Time
A memoir of Sheffield – of my Sheffield (Broomhill and Crosspool, the University) – was always going to interest me. Taylor is around ten years younger than me, and so she describes the Sheffield she knew as a teenager, whereas I arrived here to go to University. The shadow of Peter Sutcliffe hangs over much of her account, as it did over my life – scared to be out at night, scared even to open the back door to put the milk bottles on the window ledge, praying that Karen from next door would be on my bus so we could scurry home together along School Road, looking over our shoulders and not breathing properly until we were indoors. Taylor’s writing is brilliantly evocative, both of the place and of her own experiences and emotions. As Helen Mort puts it, this is ‘a lyrical account of what cities and their residents witness, how places shape character’.
Dorothy Whipple – The Other Day: The World of a Child
Charming, funny account of a childhood in the very early twentieth century, from a writer whose novels I’ve discovered and loved in recent years.
Terri White – Coming Undone
This is a bleak, harrowing account of how a chaotic and abusive childhood pushed White into crisis as an adult. Her honesty is unflinching. I wondered throughout just how she was managing to function (at least to some extent) in her working life, and, at the end, how she managed to turn the corner into a more stable life. I’d have liked to understand that more, but maybe that’s about me feeling less harrowed, and actually this is exactly the book that White intended and needed to write.
Celebrating Michel Butor
Posted by cathannabel in Michel Butor on September 14, 2023
Today would have been Michel Butor’s 97th birthday – he died just before his 90th, in 2016. I have written elsewhere in this blog about how I discovered his work, back in 2005-06, and the impact that his novel Passing Time (L’Emploi du temps) had on me, as evidenced by my blog title, many of the pieces I’ve posted here, a PhD thesis, and a couple (soon to be three) chapters in academic books. I also have something more personal than the shelves of multiple copies of his novels and other works (in English and German, as well as French) and of critical studies of his work.
In 2008, already immersed in his work and steering my undergrad assignments in his direction wherever I could, I wrote to him, hoping to start a correspondence that might enrich my understanding of L’Emploi du temps in particular. What I received was a postcard, an image cut in two on a diagonal, and then taped back together by him, with a warm and friendly message:
He writes:
Your letter took some time to reach me as I was on holiday on the Basque coast. Thank you for your interest in my books. Don’t hesitate to ask me anything, if you think my replies might help in your work. Have a great summer! Very cordially, yours, Michel.
I did write again in 2012, in hope rather than expectation, as I worked on my undergrad dissertation, and considered a PhD proposal, but I didn’t hear back. Butor’s wife Marie-Jo had died two years earlier, and I know now, as I didn’t then, how the loss of a partner has an impact on every aspect of one’s life, from the most profound to the most mundane. I can understand that an earnest enquiry about a book he’d written over half a century previously will not have been a priority.
But the impression of Butor that the postcard gave me is confirmed by many accounts of those who knew, worked with and interviewed him, and by this fascinating documentary, unfortunately not available with subtitles, but which shows a straightforward, warm and generous man, as well as a writer who experimented with language and with narrative, and whose work is richly human, who wanted, through his work, to change the reader, and to change the reader’s view of the world.
So, I am grateful for that postcard, for the thought and for the warmth, as I am grateful for the books, especially the one that has absorbed me for so long and fuelled my writing, and my academic life. That postcard is proudly displayed on my bookshelves, alongside those multiple copies of his books, and the bound copy of my thesis, and the many academic studies of his writing.
Passing Time is, of course, now available in a revised English translation, published by Pariah Press in 2021.
2023 Reading – Half-Time Report
Posted by cathannabel in Literature on June 25, 2023
My reading has returned, I think, to pre-bereavement patterns, both in terms of how much I read, and the range of what I read. And books have been, over the last six months as always, solace and company, escape and engagement with other worlds and lives. Perhaps different things make me cry now when I read – I’ve gained a whole lot of other triggers to add to the ones I’d already accumulated over the years. And there’s been a certain sadness whenever I’ve started a new entry in a series that M and I both enjoyed, or something new by a writer that we both loved, that we can’t bicker about who gets to read it first, and we can’t talk about it afterwards.
I’ve split the list into fiction, poetry and non-fiction. I’ve tried to avoid spoilers but reading reviews is always risky, so you takes your chances if you read on. I haven’t listed absolutely everything but everything here is a book that I finished, and that I have something to say about – mainly positives, since I do this to share my enthusiasms rather than my disappointments. However, I do sometimes have a grumble about sloppy writing. I haven’t picked a definite top three, but I have starred the books that I feel most passionate about.
Fiction
Kate Atkinson – Shrines of Gaiety*
The writing is, as always, delicious, as are the characters. The Guardian describes the novel as ‘a heady brew of crime, romance and satire set amid the sordid glitz of London nightlife in the 1920s’. There are multiple plot strands but we never lose track (for long, at least) of the young women at the heart of the narrative, and we do quickly care what happens to them. Atkinson is in total control here – it’s skilful and has real heart, and I’m going to re-read it soon, as I tended to gallop through parts of it to find out what happened, and second time around I can just savour how she did it.
Pat Barker – The Women of Troy
Follow-up to The Silence of the Girls. There’s a third part to this, which doesn’t appear to be out yet, and this novel leaves many important narrative threads dangling. It’s a bleak, brutal retelling of the story, focusing always on the women, owned, appropriated, used and abused, always vulnerable to shifts in power and favour. Powerful stuff.
Yvonne Battle-Felton – Remembered
The women at the centre of Remembered are not so different from the women of Troy. They’ve been enslaved, they are abused, they find dangerous ways to resist. The focus is on one woman, Spring, as she tells her story to her dying son. It’s often a tough read, but a rewarding and important one – we may feel we’ve heard enough of the horrors of slavery but those stories must continue to be told, and that is the real theme of the novel.
Britt Bennett – The Mothers*
Bennett’s debut – I read The Vanishing Half last year, which I loved, and this is also very fine. I love the way the older women in the community form a kind of Greek chorus, sometimes as judgemental as the stereotype of older church women suggests, but also looking back to their own youth, to their own heartaches and tragedies and mistakes.
Mark Billingham – Rabbit Hole
A stand-alone from the author of the Tom Thorne series. I hadn’t realised this so was awaiting Thorne’s appearance for quite some time… It’s a gripping plot, with a narrator who is the very definition of unreliability, and the psychiatric ward provides a powerful setting. My only quibble is that the ‘who dunnit’, when revealed, is a bit throw-away and anti-climactic. Clearly that wasn’t Billingham’s main concern, but one feels a little cheated.
Joyce Cary – Herself Surprised
One of my mum’s favourite writers, and one of her favourites of his. The portrayal of the central character is so good – her voice is idiosyncratic (she uses loads of metaphors and similes, piling them on top of one another, mostly drawing from domestic life) and honest. She’s not admirable but she wins our sympathies. The other two books in the trilogy foreground the male characters so it will be interesting to see how Cary pulls off the switch in perspective.
Jane Casey – The Close
The latest Maeve Kerrigan. Another cracking plot, which sizzles not only with the tension of the investigation, and the constant doubt as to who can be trusted, but with the tension between Maeve and her colleague Josh Derwent.
Will Dean – Bad Apples
The fourth Tuva Moodyson novel, this is creepy as hell, atmospheric and gripping.
A house on a lake, somewhere in east Germany, that passes from its Jewish owners to an architect who pays only what the Nazi law requires him to, and from him to others during the post-war era, when the property is in the GDR, and so on through the years. We learn relatively little about the people whose lives here we glimpse – we know the fate of some (the only time we leave the house on the lake), others seem to vanish, or what we are told is ambiguous and uncertain. Brilliantly constructed and powerful.
Nicci French – Secret Smile/The Unheard
These psychological thrillers are so highly rated that I read two in quick succession. This was a mistake. There’s a long gap between the publication of the two novels, so it’s maybe pure chance that I read two that had such similar plots, and identical tropes (the ‘secret smile’, the man who kisses an ex-partner too close to the lips). They’re very well written but as I read the second of the two the irritation of realising, ok, we’re going here again, overcame any other pleasures of reading. I may try another one at some point.
Bonnie Garmus – Lessons in Chemistry
Everyone seemed to be reading this, and everyone told me to read it. I thoroughly enjoyed it – it was very funny, but made me cry quite a lot, it was wittily written and, as the Guardian reviewer put it, ‘that rare beast; a polished, funny, thought-provoking story, wearing its research lightly but confidently, and with sentences so stylishly turned it’s hard to believe it’s a debut’.
Linda Grant – The Story of the Forest*
A remarkable family saga, from Latvia to Liverpool, exploring the idea of the stories that bind a family together. It ‘continues her exploration of how chance, contingency and unintended consequences intersect with history’s larger movements; how personal narratives are shaped not merely by what we think of as inescapable forces and events, but by moments of randomness and whimsy. Her characters are, as ever, mobile not only in a geographical sense, but in the way that their desires and motivations shift and adapt, influenced by memories of the past and intimations of the future’ (The Guardian).
Kate Grenville – Sarah Thornhill
I wasn’t aware when I read this that it was a sequel. It didn’t seem to matter – the plot was handled so skilfully that, although events covered in the first book (The Secret River) are crucial to the story of Sarah Thornhill, the book could stand alone (I will, however, go back and read the first). There’s a theme emerging in some of my reading this year – families and the stories they tell, and what those stories hide, and how past events resonate through the generations. Here the setting is Australia and both the convict past and the brutality meted out to the aboriginal inhabitants are powerfully depicted.
Elly Griffiths – The Last Remains
Is this the last Ruth Galloway? At least for a while? Fair enough – Griffiths has two other excellent series on the go, the Brighton mysteries and the Harbinder Kaur novels, as well as YA fiction. And, if I do treat this as the final outing for Ruth, Nelson, Cathbad and the rest, it is a very satisfying one. After all, if I want to spend more time in their company (and I will because I love them) I can always go back and start again at the beginning.
Lorraine Hansberry – Raisin in the Sun
I kept coming across Hansberry’s name, in documentaries about the civil rights movement, in James Baldwin’s writing, and elsewhere – she was the inspiration for Nina Simone’s ‘Young, Gifted and Black’. She died very young, and there isn’t a huge body of work but she knew and worked with anyone who was anyone (e.g. duBois, Belafonte, Robeson). Raisin was the first play by an African-American woman to be performed on Broadway. I haven’t seen the 1961 film, which uses the Broadway cast, but will track it down.
Robert Harris – V2
Harris’s trademark combination of meticulous and detailed research (here, into the technical challenges of the V2 rocket programme) and a gripping plot, with nuanced and complex characters (on both sides) works brilliantly again here.
Zakiya Dalila Harris – The Other Black Girl
This is a cracker. I had no idea where it was going, it kept on completely wrong-footing me. Often very funny along the way, it also conjures a powerful sense of paranoia. It’s her debut novel – I will look forward to where she goes next.
Philip Hensher – Scenes from Early Life
I read a lot about Partition last year, and in a way this is a follow-up to those narratives, dealing with the history of Bangladesh and how that nation emerged (bloodily) from what had been East Pakistan. Hensher is working with the early memories of his husband Zaved Mahmood, telling his story, or rather the stories that he himself was told (for much of the story he is a baby). Some of the peripheral characters, especially the musicians Amit and Altaf, have their own subtle, touching story to tell.
Mick Herron – London Rules
The fourth in the Slough House/Slow Horses series, and it is another cracker. Herron seduces you with gorgeous writing, and then Jackson Lamb ambles in, scratching his balls and farting prodigiously and poetry goes out of the window. But witty, sharp writing never does. The opening sequence was genuinely shocking even when one knows (sort of ) what to expect from Herron.
Anne Holt – A Memory for Murder
The third in Holt’s Selma Faelck series. Cleverly plotted, and with a fascinating protagonist, it’s a thoroughly good read.
Kazuo Ishiguro – Klara and the Sun*
Klara is an android, an ‘artificial friend’ bought to be a companion to a sick child. We have to figure out how this world works, we’re not spoon-fed explanations or context, and we see things through Klara’s eyes, as she figures out what it is to be human, and to be only nearly human. It’s beautiful, and very moving.
Paterson Joseph – Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho
Fascinating invented diaries of the very real Sancho, escaped slave, abolitionist, composer and writer. Joseph has worked with what is known of his life (1729-1780), and acknowledges in a postscript that since completing the work he has discovered more of Sancho’s descendants. But it stands as a powerful filling out of the details, putting together of the fragments, that give us an extraordinary glimpse of an extraordinary man.
Barbara Kingsolver – Demon Copperhead*
Kingsolver takes Dickens’ David Copperfield and transposes his life to the Appalachians in our own or very recent times, where a chaotic childhood leaves the young Demon vulnerable to exploitation and abuse, constantly falling through the welfare safety net. Dickens’ characters are all here, updated/transformed. Demon’s authorial voice is brilliantly realised – self aware, honest, funny – and the tragedies of his life are powerfully felt even when we know the story and know where the various plot threads will lead us.
David Koepp – Cold Storage
Koepp is a Hollywood scriptwriter and that ability to ramp up the tension is evident in this bio/eco horror thriller. The characters aren’t given any very great depth but they’re engaging and the whole thing works brilliantly. Interesting to read this shortly before starting to watch The Last of Us, which has a related theme…
Aysin Kulin – Without a Country
The context here is fascinating – in the early days of Hitler’s regime, German Jewish scientists find opportunities in Turkey, where Ataturk is modernising the universities, through the Emergency Association of German Science Abroad, founded in Zurich in 1933 by a German emigrant, Philipp Schwartz. These German emigrés’ safe haven has indeed saved their lives, but they are not as welcome as it first appears. Kulin’s narrative takes us through the subsequent generations, as political tensions in their adopted homeland, as well as anti-semitism, challenge their sense of belonging.
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi – Kintu
I’ve read some other Makumbi – The First Woman, and her short story collection, Manchester Happened. Kintu was her debut, and it’s a family saga that takes us from the 21st to the 18th century and back again, through different generations of a family living with a curse. Its scale doesn’t ever get in the way of the characters living and breathing, and it’s a compelling read. It can be read as the story of a nation but fundamentally it is the story of a family, whose homeland changes shape over the centuries and whose fortunes change accordingly.
Livi Michael – Reservoir*
I’ve loved Michael’s other adult novels – most recently her War of the Roses trilogy – and this is exceptional. Much of it is set at an academic conference, but one where the various papers that are presented, of which we read substantial chunks, are gradually, directly or indirectly, exploring a mystery from the childhood of two of the delegates. The themes are responsibility – in the legal and moral sense, guilt, secrets and lies. Notwithstanding the setting, it never feels ‘academic’, rather, it is as gripping as a thriller.
Denise Mina – The Red Road
The fourth of Mina’s Alex Morrow series, and this one is particularly complex and compelling. Mina’s world is a bleak one, and as in so many of her books she fills out the lives that we often prefer not to see or think about, as well as, in this novel particularly, those in positions of influence and power. Alex herself is entirely believable – she’s encumbered not with some quirk or interesting flaw but with kids and family life – and imperfect, but hugely sympathetic.
Ann Patchett – State of Wonder
There are strong echoes of Heart of Darkness in this tale of a woman sent by her pharmaceutical company employers to track down a researcher deep in the Amazon rainforest, and find out what happened to the previous person sent on that same quest. The plot switches rapidly from the mundane misfortunes of travel (Marina’s luggage goes repeatedly AWOL) to the life-threatening hazards of that environment and some of its inhabitants, and to issues of science and ethics. It’s fascinating and engaging.
Louise Penny – A Rule against Murder/How the Light Gets In
The fourth and ninth Inspector Gamache novels, with the series’ trademark mix of (almost) cosy and very dark.
Charlotte Philby – A Double Life
One woman leading two lives, trying to keep them separate, seeing them inexorably head for collision, whilst another woman digs for the truth behind something she thought she had witnessed. Neither is heroic, nor entirely likeable, but Philby manages her plot with skill and it grips right to the final page. And yes, Philby is the daughter of one Kim Philby, who knew all about double lives…
Ian Rankin – A Heart full of Headstones
Rebus is weary and unwell, and his past dodginess (he was never bent but he did bend the rules) is catching up with him. Siobhan is tired too and not just tired of having to manage Rebus’s interventions in the cases she’s working. It feels as if the series is drawing to a close – one more book in Rankin’s deal with his publisher – which feels right and timely. There are series in which the protagonists never seem to really age, or lose heart, or get sick (looking at you, 87th precinct) and Rebus has always been far too real to go on forever, without consequences. It’s a fine addition to the series, whether or not it is the penultimate.
Jane Rogers – Conrad and Eleanor
As the Guardian puts it, ‘In its every cell this remarkable novel reproduces the dialectic of a long marriage’. There is more to it than this, with a plot (sub-plot?) relating to Conrad’s work in an animal laboratory, but it is the relationship between them (is it doomed? Dying? Or is there still something profound there?) that fascinates.
William Gardner Smith – The Stone Face*
This is a very remarkable novel, whose existence I was unaware of for a long time, and of which I was then unable to find a copy. Smith was a black American writer, based for a long time (like many others, James Baldwin in particular) in France, and this novel explores the experience of the African-American in Paris, and the nature of racism, in relation to the Algerian/North African community, culminating in an account of the 1961 massacre of demonstrators by the Paris police. That latter event has been something of an obsession of mine, ever since watching Michael Haneke’s film, Caché, in which it plays a small but very significant role. The massacre’s significance lies in part in the highly effective cover-up, so that it is only in the last few decades that it has been widely known about, and in the fact that the head of the Paris police at the time was Maurice Papon, who had been an enthusiastic collaborator during the war, helping to organise the deportation of Jews from Bordeaux. But the novel is fascinating on many levels and it’s good to see that it’s now available in paperback.
Elizabeth Strout – Amy and Isabelle
I’ve been devouring Strout’s novels for the last few years, but not in any particular order – this one is her debut and it is tremendously assured. The relationship between daughter and mother, and the crisis in Amy’s life which shakes that relationship to its foundations, are beautifully drawn.
Nicola Williams – Without Prejudice
A legal thriller by a black British lawyer, first published in 1997 and reissued now through Bernardine Evaristo’s Black Britain: Writing Back initiative. It’s a thriller in its own right, with a twisty plot that skewers corruption in the legal profession, but it’s also an account of what it is like to be a black lawyer in the British judicial system. The protagonist’s experiences (being assumed to be the defendant, for example) reminded me very much of Alexandra Wilson’s memoir, In Black and White, just in case any one was thinking that things must have massively improved in the last quarter of a century…
Poetry
Poems inspired by the death of Faber’s wife Eva, from cancer. Some were written during her illness, others after her death. These are tough to read. There’s no sentimentality here, the poems confront the brutal physicality of the illness and of death itself. That can be shocking but also a relief, in a way, to see it there on the page, not shrouded in euphemism and piety.
Samuel Fairbrother – A Promenade
The latest publication from Pariah Press, this is poetry written in direct response to music (Shostakovich’s String Quartets) and to be read alongside that music. The performance which inspired Fairbrother took place on the day that Russia invaded Ukraine, and that event is also present in the poetry and, somehow, in the music.
Non-Fiction
Peter Bradley – The Last Train: A Family History of the Final Solution
Bradley didn’t know, until his father died, that the man he’d known as Fred Bradley was/had been Fritz Brandes, and that the family story was a story of the Holocaust. Bradley charts his father’s journey to survival, and finds the traces of the family members who were murdered, setting those individual narratives in the context of what was happening to millions of others across Europe.
Sarah Churchwell – The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells
A while back one might have thought that this book’s passionate arguments were a bit overwrought or unnecessary – surely we have moved on? But the Confederate myths have all resurfaced in recent years, the flag is everywhere, and those who carry it are often no longer hiding the racism that is an inescapable part of the mythology. Churchwell uses Gone with the Wind (primarily focusing on the book, though with a lot of interesting insight into how the film sanitised some of the book’s breathtaking racism) to forensically examine those myths and their contemporary impact.
Steve Davis & Kavus Torabi – Medical Grade Music
This is a delight. I always enjoy being in the company of people who are enthusiastic about music, even when I don’t share their particular passions. Both Davis and Torabi are engaging writers, and have led me back to CDs in my own collection (Henry Cow’s Legend, for one) through their infectious excitement about them.
Hanna Flint – Strong Female Character
I wasn’t quite expecting the strongly autobiographical and very personal focus of this book, but Flint uses that focus to explore how the movies deal with women’s lives, how they address sex (solo and with partners), body image, our relationship with food, working life, race, friendship and love. It’s fascinating, and with lots of unexpected insights.
Angela Harding – Wild Light: A Printmaker’s Day and Night
One hundred illustrations – prints, drawings and photographs – illustrating, as the title says, a day and a night. Harding’s images are beautiful and the book is a joy.
Katy Hessel – The Story of Art Without Men
Beautiful, both in terms of the images, and the accounts of so very many women artists through the centuries, many of whom have never had the place they deserved in art history. As Tracy Emin said, it won’t restore the balance on its own, but ‘this is a good start’.
Jill Nalder – Love from the Pink Palace
Jill is the real-life version of her namesake from It’s A Sin. Many of her memories of the young gay men who she loved, lived with and watched – in too many cases – die, made their way into the series, along with creator Russell T Davies’ memories of the same period. The atmosphere of the time comes across incredibly vividly in Nalder’s account, which is moving, funny and horrifying.
Helen O’Hara – Women vs Hollywood: The Fall and Rise of Women in Film
Where did the women directors of the very earliest days of cinema go to? Why did they stop getting hired, or funded, and why has it taken a century to get back to anything resembling the prominence of women in the industry in those earliest days? O’Hara’s fascinating account is passionate, meticulously researched, and engagingly written.
Nicholas Shakespeare – Six Minutes in May: How Churchill Unexpectedly Became Prime Minister
One of the aspects of WWII about which I knew very little was the Norway campaign. I recently watched the film Narvik, which gave a pretty accurate portrayal of part of that campaign, which was not, really not, our finest hour. However, despite that, and despite Churchill being to a significant degree responsible for the failure of that campaign, it was instrumental in ensuring that Chamberlain resigned and Churchill became PM. Shakespeare’s book takes the reader through a day by day – and sometimes minute by minute – account of what was happening, in Norway, and in the House of Commons, informed by the recollections of his great-uncle Geoffrey, who was there (in the HoC). There was so much here that was new to me, and it was even more gripping when I realised at several points that I was reading it on the exact 83rd anniversary of those events.
Paul Thompson and John Watterson – Beware of the Bull – The Enigmatic Genius of Jake Thackray
I can’t remember how we got into Thackray – we probably saw him on TV, and then got an LP or two. I know we used to be reduced to tears of laughter by some of those songs. There’s almost always an element of melancholy though, as funny as they are, and some darkness too. This biography makes some sense of all of those elements and took me back again to the songs. It hurt a little bit though, to be laughing at ‘The Statues’ all on my own.
Thanks to all of the writers who have entertained, diverted and informed me, who have expanded my horizons, taken me to places I have never been or could never go, shown me lives very different to mine and enabled me to connect with them.
2022 Reading: Full-time Report
Posted by cathannabel in History, Literature, Personal, Second World War on December 16, 2022
I’m still not reading as much as I used to. It’s the silence that’s the problem. Lord knows I used to tut sometimes when I was reading and he broke my train of thought with his own train of thought, but Lord knows I would love to have him do that now. So I turn to the TV sometimes when in the past I would have turned to a book, just to break the silence. Nonetheless, I’ve still normally got two or three books on the go – one on the Kindle and a couple of physical books, usually one fiction and one non, and nonetheless it’s still quite an eclectic list. As always, I haven’t listed absolutely everything – I want to share my enthusiasms rather than my disappointments – and as always I have tried to avoid spoilers but make no guarantees. Top reads this half-year? Jan Carson’s The Raptures, Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives, David Park’s Travelling in a Strange Land. From the first half of the year, I’d pick out Alan Garner’s Treacle Walker, J L Carr’s A Month in the Country, and Sarah Moss’s The Fell. Since I make the rules for this blog, I shan’t require myself to choose amongst those six titles.
Fiction
Pat Barker – The Silence of the Girls
This, and its sequel The Women of Troy (which I have yet to read) tell the familiar story (familiar not only from Homer but from countless retellings – in my case the first encounter was with Roger Lancelyn Green’s Tales of the Greeks and Trojans and The Luck of Troy) with the focus shifted to the women. In this one, the central role is that of Briseis, handed over to Achilles, appropriated by Agamemnon and retrieved by Achilles, all as part of the spoils of war. It’s a grim tale, beautifully told.
Thomas Bernhard – The Loser
Sebald and Bernhard are often linked, and I figured it was about time I gave the latter a go. The choice of book was a foregone conclusion once I discovered that The Loser was about (in part) Glenn Gould, who fascinates me. There are elements of the style that certainly recall Sebald (any influence was from Bernhard on Sebald) – the novel, like Austerlitz, is one unbroken paragraph, and the narrator’s voice constantly makes it explicit that these are his thoughts, and when he was thinking them (‘I thought, as I entered the inn’, ‘I thought in the inn’ , ‘he said, I thought’, etc) which reminded me again of Austerlitz.
Frances Hodgson Burnett – The Shuttle
I adored The Little Princess and The Secret Garden as a child (never read Fauntleroy, as far as I can recall) and this adult novel was a delight too. It’s quite Gothic in places, but punctured with humour, and with a hero (Bettina) who shines from the pages. The theme is intermarriage between British aristos (broke, with run-down country estates to maintain) and wealthy American heiresses but it’s also a very perceptive (based on first-hand experience) account of coercive control.
Jan Carson – The Raptures
This is stunning. I had no idea for most of it where it was heading, what the answers to the questions were going to be, and indeed ultimately there were no firm answers. But it grips on every page, its characters live and breathe, even when they’re no longer living and breathing. It’s a supernatural mystery, a who (or what) dunit, an allegory about plague and pandemic, a coming of age narrative, a portrait of a small Protestant Northern Irish community. Never mind all that, just read it.
Ann Cleeves – The Rising Tide
A new Vera! I wasn’t sure Cleeves was still writing Veras. Anyway, very pleased to get this and it’s as enjoyable as ever.
Robert Galbraith – Ink Black Heart
Oh dear. I have enjoyed all of the Cormoran Strike books so far, although few of them need to be the length they are. But this one desperately needed an editor to tell her to slash great chunks of the book so that it’s coherent, and particularly to cut back the use of verbatim online conversations (three columns of different conversations, going over several pages) which are incredibly hard to read and to follow. There’s also the issue of the subject matter – online abuse – and its proximity to the author’s life on Twitter and other social media over recent years. I think it’s too close for her to be able to examine that world with any objectivity and the book is a mess.
Elizabeth Gilbert – City of Girls
I read The Signature of All Things a few years back and loved it. Still haven’t read Eat Love Pray or whatever it’s called, fairly sure that would not be my cup of tea. But she’s a lovely writer – City of Girls is captivating, and very witty, it sparkles like one of those screwball comedies from the era in which the book is set. And then the tone shifts, and whilst it’s every bit as witty it’s also darker and deeper and very moving.
Graham Greene – The Quiet American
I honestly thought I’d read all of Greene, many years ago (he was a favourite of my mum’s). But this one had eluded me and it’s a fine example of his style and of his preoccupations.
Elly Griffiths – Bleeding Heart Yard
This is Griffiths’ third novel featuring detective Harbinder Kaur, now relocated in that London, and it is hugely enjoyable. As always with Griffiths, the characters are drawn with humour and affection (mostly), and with compassion and insight.
Abdulrazak Gurnah – After Lives
Gurnah was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021 but his name had never registered with me. I shall put that right now and read his other books, because this one was excellent. Set in what is now Tanzania, in the early 20th century when the area was a German colony, it sweeps across that century, through the first and second world wars, the shifting boundaries and colonial rulers, but is always centred on the lives of a handful of characters who are battered, in different ways, by these forces. Despite the scale and the horror of what is unfolding, it manages to be, in relation to these people, gentle and subtle and, somehow, hopeful.
Yaa Gyasi – Transcendent Kingdom
I’d read Homegoing a couple of years ago, an epic family history that begins in Kumasi, Ghana, and crosses continents and centuries. The scale in Transcendent Kingdom is much smaller, although it still reaches back to Kumasi, but the central family is contracting rather than expanding (as the narrator says, “There used to be four of us, then three, two. When my mother goes, whether by choice or not, there will be only one”. Its concerns are philosophical, scientific even, as the central character is a neuroscientist, her research intimately connected with her family’s tragedy.
Robert Harris – Act of Oblivion
After Cromwell’s death, those who signed King Charles’ death warrant are on the run, and supporters of the new King are determined to track them down. Harris cleverly builds the tension but also gives us insight into both sides, so we as readers have to keep switching our perspective, as we are with first the regicides and then the manhunter, and we see how both are driven by the absolute certainty that they and their cause are absolutely right.
Mick Herron – Live Tigers/Spook Street
The third and fourth of the Slough House novels and they’re as sharp and funny and dark as ever. I look forward to reading the rest of the series, and to seeing the dramatisation of the second book – Gary Oldman has a marvellous time as Jackson Lamb, really letting rip, in every sense.
Tayari Jones – The Untelling
Secrets and lies and their toxic effects upon relationships are the theme here, and Jones is perceptive and subtle in her portrayal of Aria(dne) and the small circle of people who matter to her.
Stephen King – Fairy Tale
This resembles his 1984 collaboration with the late Peter Straub, The Talisman, more than it does his most recent spate of novels. That’s deliberate, I’m sure – King often makes references to his other books, sometimes in passing, sometimes to create resonant connections (see his various books set in or around Castle Rock, for example), and there are some nice echoes here. He and Straub had talked about another collaboration, although it had never got off the ground, so maybe we can take this as a tribute. It’s King on top form, in any case.
John le Carré – Silverview
Ah, the last le Carré. Edited by his son, from what was a virtually complete manuscript. It’s not the best le Carré but it’s bloody good le Carré and it has the melancholy and the anger that have characterised his work in later years.
Attica Locke – The Cutting Season
A stand-alone from Locke, after her two excellent short series of crime novels. This is crime that drags one back into the past, the slavery past, and it is tense and gripping stuff.
David Park – A Run in the Park/Travelling in a Strange Land
Beautiful writing. A Run in the Park is the gentler read, although there’s plenty of emotional heft in there. Travelling in a Strange Land goes to dark places but in both books there is always darkness and light, loss and love, grief and hope.
Sara Paretsky – Tunnel Vision
The eighth in Paretsky’s excellent detective series, featuring PI V I Warshawsky battling corporate crime and corruption. I’ve read these in random order as I got hold of them, so at some point I will try and fill in the gaps.
Ann Patchett – Bel Canto
My first Patchett – this is compelling and often moving. It’s about a terrorist attack, and the fate of the hostages, but its also about love, beauty and music.
Louise Penny – The Madness of Crowds
Inspector Gamache series, no. 17, the most recent. As with the Paretsky, I’m reading these in a totally random order, so there are references in this one to events which I don’t yet know about, but the main plot stands alone. As always with Penny, there are times when Three Pines seems just too magically cosy but she always undercuts that with the crime and its motivation, which are anything but.
Bapsi Sidwha – The Ice Candy Man
Many years ago I read Sidwha’s debut novel, The Crow Eaters, which I remember loving even if its plot has faded from my memory. The setting is Lahore, once in India, then allocated to Pakistan at the time of Partition. The Ice Candy Man (also published as Cracking India) starts in the period leading up to Partition and confronts the horrors of what happened, through the eyes of a child, who at first has no real notion that the different communities (Sikh, Parsi, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian) are potentially a threat to one another. Indeed, her home is a place where people from these communities meet and bicker and insult one another in a largely friendly way, and when violence is predicted insist that they will stand by their friends. We see things through Lenny’s eyes, not all of which she understands, not all of which adults are prepared to explain to her. It’s unflinching, but also often funny and touching.
Zadie Smith – White Teeth
I struggle with Zadie Smith and am still trying to work out why. Her characters never quite seem to live and breathe, as if she’s at too much of a distance from them to really bring them to life. This, her debut, didn’t change my view, unfortunately.
Russ Thomas – Nightwalking/Cold Reckoning
Parts 2 and 3 of Thomas’s Sheffield-based trilogy which began with Firewatching. Excellent plotting and interesting, complicated lead characters.
Anne Tyler – Redhead at the Side of the Road
I hadn’t read any Tyler for ages, not since being so disappointed with Vinegar Girl (kind of a take on Taming of the Shrew, but it really didn’t work). But I have read most of her stuff, and I love most of her stuff (top two are Saint Maybe and Breathing Lessons, I think). This one is a lovely variation on ‘a perennial Tyler theme: the decent, mundane, settling-for-less kind of life whose uneasy decorum is suddenly exploded by the random, the uncontrolled, the latent sense of what might have been’, as The Guardian’s reviewer put it.
Non-Fiction
Molly Bell – Just the one Ice Cream?
I read this account of widowhood, by a family friend, a few years back when it was first published. Reading it again now was a remarkable experience – so many of Molly’s observations are ones that I can relate to – I kept thinking ‘Yes! Yes, that’s it!’. It’s insightful, honest and warm.
Sarah Churchwell – The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe
Having felt rather grubby after watching Blonde I thought this would be a good antidote. It’s the story of the stories of Monroe’s life, of the clichés and stereotypes, the biographies and memoirs and attempts to uncover the ‘real’ Monroe. It’s incisive and rigorous and fascinating. It was published before the film of Blonde came out, but includes Joyce Carol Oates’ novel in her analysis, along with Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller and a host of lesser lights whose accounts have been published over the years.
Laura Cumming – On Chapel Sands: My Mother and other Missing Persons
A very intriguing memoir/detective story. Cummings gradually reveals the secrets of her mother’s early life, and at each step shows how she had to reevaluate everything she thought she knew, and her understanding of the people involved. If it were fiction it would be a great read but it gains depth through the knowledge that it is a true story – it’s deeply personal, and terribly sad.
Mike Duncan – The Storm before the Storm
The rise of the Roman Republic, as Duncan tells it, was the beginning of its fall. Fascinating, accessibly written account.
Sebastian Haffner – Defying Hitler: A Memoir
Haffner (real name Raimund Pretzel) wrote this account of Germany in the First World War, the Weimar Republic and during the rise of Nazism, in 1939, after he had emigrated to England. It was only published in 2003, having been left unfinished, as Haffner worked on his less personal account, Germany: Jekyll and Hyde, and was collated for publication by his son. It is therefore written without hindsight, at least without the knowledge of what lay inexorably at the end of the Nazi road, and thus its insights are fresh and passionate, exploring how Germans came to choose Hitler.
Sudhir Hazareesingh – Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture
Epic is right. An extraordinary man, with an extraordinary life and achievements, which resonate to this day (as I was reminded in the cinema the other day, watching Wakanda Forever…)
Hans Jahner – Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955
An excellent study, exploring many aspects of the post-war period, and taking the story further, beyond the bomb sites and the hunger, to recovery, and division. He draws on a number of memoirs, often from women, which shed light on daily life, on culture and politics, on work and money. It’s rigorous but entertainingly written, often with a wry humour.
Michelle Obama – Becoming
Great stuff – she writes interestingly and engagingly, about her life before she hooked up with Barack as well as showing us his presidency from her perspective and that of the family. I would have liked to hear her account of the years after his presidency ended – maybe another volume will be forthcoming…
My reading this year has taken me out of my own time and place and as always I feel enriched by it, I feel my sympathies have been extended, as George Eliot puts it. I’ve been entertained as well as educated, often at the same time, and I’ve been moved to both laughter (laughing out loud is something I do too little of these days, living alone) and tears (well, no shortage of those, nor any surprise to those who know me, even before recent losses). I am deeply grateful to all of the writers with whom I’ve shared 2022 and who, in their various ways, have helped me through it.
2022 Reading – Half-Time Report
Posted by cathannabel in Literature, Personal on June 30, 2022
I’ve read a lot less so far this year than in the first half of 2021 – half as many books, in fact – despite the fact that back then I was intensively working on my PhD thesis, trying to finish and submit it by the end of the summer (spoiler – I did, and was awarded the doctorate in May 2022). My ability to concentrate, and to sleep well enough at night not to fall asleep over a book in the daytime, is still impaired following the loss of my husband, but for several months of this year was also limited by the painful aftermath of knee surgery. However, I did read (and the flip side of the surgery recovery was relative inactivity), and it’s a reasonably eclectic selection. As always, I try to avoid spoilers, but you takes your chances if you read on. And, as always, I have missed one or two books out that really weren’t worth drawing anyone’s attention to. I haven’t picked out a winner from this half-year’s crop, but I have starred those books which had the greatest impact on me and which I’m most eager to share.
FICTION
Ben Aaronovitch – Amongst Our Weapons
The latest in the funny, engaging and often rather magical (yes, it’s about magic, but there are so many moments that achieve that, rather than just describing it) Rivers of London series. The interface between ‘the weird stuff’ and regular policing never fails to entertain (e.g. the senior copper who won’t take any lip from witnesses, whatever they say they’re the god of).
Rumaan Alam – Leave the World Behind
Very, very unsettling. Especially when, whilst I was reading it, on holiday with friends, we had an episode when none of us could get internet on our phones, and there was this weird looking cloud up ahead… Can say no more without spoilers but it’s excellent and unnerving.
J L Carr – A Month in the Country*
This is beautiful. A tender gem of a book. There’s joy here, something almost magical in the uncovering of the long-hidden mural, which mirrors the gradual revelations about some of the characters, but there’s such deep sadness too. Remarkable.
Sinead Crowley – Can Anybody Help Me?
A decent thriller, with an interesting setting, in the world of ‘mumsnet’ type fora, where people seek reassurance and online friendship via online identities, but end up giving away more about themselves than they intend.
Will Dean – Black River
Third outing for Dean’s deaf female detective, Tuva Moodyson. It’s a dark and gripping tale, the lead character is fascinating and I will certainly find the first two in the series and then read on.
Maurizio de Giovanni – The Bastards of Pizzofalcone
Hard-boiled Naples-set Italian crime. The series has been compared to Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels, which we read voraciously for years (it may still be going on, I’m not sure, with Steve Carella et al mysteriously un-aged). There’s an earlier novel, The Crocodile, which I haven’t read, but must do so.
Bernardine Evaristo – Mr Loverman
This is lovely – we see our hero through his own eyes and through those of other people close to him, and he isn’t who he initially seems to be. There is warmth and humour and real sadness, and one ends up kind of rooting for all of the characters, even when they’re most at odds with each other.
Penelope Fitzgerald – The Bookshop*
Low-key and heartbreaking, and beautifully written. The initial reviews when this appeared in 1979 were screechingly condescending – ‘a harmless, conventional little anecdote’, according to The Times – but there have been more discerning readers since. It reminded me a bit of Dorothy Whipple – it may appear gentle but it’s razor sharp.
Alan Garner – Treaclewalker*
Every Alan Garner book brings with it echoes from every other Alan Garner book, including his memoir, Where Shall We Run To? It’s all part of this rich weave of folk tales, childhood memories, of place and landscape. His style is as spare as ever and the rhythms of his writing as mesmerising as ever.
Winston Graham – Poldark
I started binge reading the Poldark series (which, surprisingly, I never read during my historical fiction obsessed teens), after my husband died and I needed reading matter that was not going to challenge or break me. They are very well written, and clearly well researched, the plots were familiar from the more recent TV adaptation (at least for the first five of the series), and very enjoyable.
Elly Griffiths – The Locked Room
The latest Ruth Galloway novel, set just at the start of the pandemic, which is beautifully well handled and conveys the strangeness and the anxiety of that time.
Robert Harris – Enigma/The Fear Index/Pompeii/The Second Sleep
I had a bit of a binge on Robert Harris, evidently. They’re all very different. Enigma fed into my long-standing fascination with WWII codebreaking, with a plot blending actual events with invention, but thoroughly researched and much better than the film of the book. The Fear Index is a highly intriguing contemporary thriller, however probable or otherwise its central premiss may be. Pompeii is, unsurprisingly, a historical account of the destruction of the city, which gives us not only the individual and social dramas, but the scientific background too, whether in terms of volcanic eruptions, or the engineering of water supplies – gripping and fascinating, even though of course we know what’s coming. The Second Sleep is most intriguing – I won’t say anything about the plot because you have to read it and pick up on the subtle hints and clues before things become clear (and if anyone reads this and Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle, which I talk about below, there’s a surprising link).
Melissa Harrison – All Among the Barley
‘As an evocation of place and a lost way of life, Harrison’s novel is astonishing, as potent and irresistible as a magic spell’, as the Guardian reviewer puts it. But there’s nothing romantic or sentimentalised about it, and there are darker undercurrents as national politics starts to infiltrate the life of the countryside.
Tayari Jones – Silver Sparrow/Leaving Atlanta*
I read An American Marriage last year, and loved it, so I followed it up with these two. Silver Sparrow explores the lives of two sisters, who share a bigamous father. The Guardian reviewer called it ‘moving, intimate and wise’. Leaving Atlanta was Jones’ debut and is a response to the Atlanta child murders (see also James Baldwin’s Evidence of Things Not Seen), drawing on her childhood in that city at the time. It’s compelling and dark, and offers a different, child-centred insight into these strange and deeply troubling crimes.
Philip Kazan – The Black Earth
A bow drawn at a venture, but I very much enjoyed this account of WWII in Greece (about which I knew very little) and the internecine battles which engulfed the country so that the bloodshed didn’t end with the end of the war. It’s got a romance at its heart, but it’s not romantic fiction, it’s well constructed, dark and gritty.
Barbara Kingsolver – The Bean Trees
Kingsolver’s debut. Well worth reading, though it’s kind of softer than some of her later work, verging on sentimental.
Malcolm Lowry – Under the Volcano*
A friend told me this was his absolute all-time favourite book, and I had to admit I’d never read it. I have now remedied that, and I can entirely see how one could become lost in it, and obsessed with it. I would not dream of offering any insights without a re-read, but I can still summon up its woozy, shifting realities and its deep sadness.
Val McDermid – 1979
One can practically smell the cigarette smoke in this thriller set in a newspaper office in, oddly enough, 1979. McDermid at the top of her game. I love all her work, except for the Tony Hill/Carol Jordan series which I have never got on with. Soz Val – that still leaves a lot for me to enjoy!
Dervla McTiernan – The Murder Rule
I was disappointed in this, having enjoyed a couple of her others (The Ruin and The Scholar) very much. This is a stand-alone, and the setting is the US rather than Ireland. Neither the plot nor the characters entirely convinced me, I’m afraid.
Sarah Moss – The Fell*
One of my favourite contemporary novelists, and this is a remarkable, powerful novel. It’s set mid-pandemic, with one character shielding, another self-isolating after contact with Covid, and it explores subtly and sensitively the sense of ‘accumulating dread’ as Moss puts it. But the dread is less of Covid itself, more of the effects of isolation and confinement. Beautifully written, with the voices of the four protagonists creating ‘polyphonic momentum’.
Joyce Carol Oates – A Fair Maiden
A troubling tale, with echoes of Lolita, which was widely regarded as a disappointment from Oates. I think I agree – I’m not sure what she was attempting here (a reworking/reimagining of Lolita? To what purpose?). It is of course well written and the protagonist (the ‘fair maiden’) is an excellent creation.
Rob Palk – Animal Lovers
Very funny, and very touching. Palk has a delicious turn of phrase, but never lets the comedic elements turn the characters into mere jokes or caricatures.
Philip Pullman – Serpentine
This novella is set between the end of the His Dark Materials trilogy and The Secret Commonwealth, Vol. 2 of The Book of Dust. It seems slight, but it sheds light on the troubled relationship between Lyra and Pantalaimon. Eagerly awaiting the final part of the second trilogy…
Ian Rankin – Resurrection Men
I have read the Rebus novels in an entirely random order, and thought I had read this already but it turns out the plot is familiar from the TV adaptation – it matters not, I’m absorbed and entertained.
Donal Ryan – Strange Flowers
Ryan writes with such beauty and tenderness, about people and about landscape. I wasn’t entirely convinced by the story within the story, which took me out of the narrative that I was fully invested in, rather than enriching it or shedding light on it. But it’s a fine novel, even with that caveat, and will stay with me.
Sunjeev Sahota – China Room
I’ve read both of Sahota’s previous novels, and this one didn’t disappoint. Much of it is set in the 1920s, with a contemporary plot woven through, and it’s quite different in pace and tone to its predecessors. Subtly powerful and very moving.
Elizabeth Strout – Oh, William!*
Oh, Elizabeth! I thought I might have got used to Strout’s writing, and that it might therefore affect me less. I was mistaken. As always, her narratives overlap with one another and so we meet or hear of people and stories from other books, and with every novel the tapestry becomes richer. As the Guardian’s reviewer says, ‘the intense pleasure of Strout’s writing becomes the simple joy of learning more while – always – understanding less. “We are all mysterious, is what I mean,” says Lucy towards the close of this novel, leaving us already hungry for the next one’.
Russ Thomas – Firewatching
Sheffield set crime, very dark. This is Thomas’s debut and I will look out for more from him. The plot is complex, as are the characters, but it’s not driven, as far too many thrillers are, by the need to include ‘an incredible twist which you’ll never guess’. (That’s a bugbear of mine. Twist away, but it’s got to work with the plot and the characters, rather than just blasting in from nowhere simply to make us gasp.)
Lesley Thomson – The House with no Rooms
The fourth in the Detective’s Daughter series. The two leads are each decidedly odd, and not in the classic ‘detective with a fatal flaw/memorable quirk’ way, and the crimes are odd and troubling too.
Rose Tremain – Music and Silence*
This is fabulous. Set in the Danish royal court in the mid-17th century, it interweaves the stories of royalty and musicians and servants in the most intriguing and moving ways. And as the title would suggest, music plays a major, almost magical, certainly spiritual role.
Nicola Upson – Josephine Tey series
I started binging this series last year, and have continued. The conceit of having a writer of crime fiction getting involved in real crimes is hardly a new one, but it’s nicely done, and the period setting (the series has now reached the start of WWII) is interestingly handled, drawing out complexities that could only have been hinted at by Tey and her contemporaries.
Ocean Vuong – On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
I found this difficult to read, and am not sure why. It may well be that my concentration, which has at times been sadly lacking this year, was insufficient to follow the narrative or fully appreciate the very beautiful poetic prose. Another attempt may be called for, given how strong the recommendations have been for this.
S J Watson – Before I go to Sleep
This was certainly gripping (and much better than the film, which had to skate over so many aspects of the plot that the improbabilities were sharply highlighted). I don’t think I quite believed in any of it, but I was fascinated to see how Watson put the narrative together and how he was going to resolve things. Entertaining.
Colson Whitehead – Harlem Shuffle
After the horrors of slavery in The Underground Railroad, and of a brutal reform school in The Nickel Boys, there is really quite a lot of hope, and much more scope for humour in this story of a furniture salesman’s attempt to negotiate the blurred lines and moral grey areas of Harlem in the 50s/60s. The writing is just as acute as in his other, darker novels, and the narrative just as gripping.
NON-FICTION
James Baldwin – The Evidence of Things not Seen
This is Baldwin’s essay on the Atlanta Child Murders (see Tayari Jones’ Leaving Atlanta, above). As always with Baldwin, it’s both passionate and lucid, and if it comes to no firm conclusions about guilt or innocence, that is hardly surprising since we appear to have moved on barely at all since Wayne Williams was charged with two of the murders back in 1982.
Antony Beevor – The Mystery of Olga Chekhova
I’ve read most of Beevor’s WWII history tomes, but this is a bit different. It’s a complex narrative, and one is very grateful for the Dramatis Personae at the front, to help the reader keep track of who is who (I remember reading Dr Zhivago as a teenager and struggling with the many variants of each character’s name). Gripping stuff.
Ruth Coker Burks – All the Young Men: How One Young Woman Risked it all to Care for the Dying
I feared this might be a bit sentimental, and also a bit too much God-stuff for my liking, but Burks is not given to soppiness, or to judgement. She’s an outsider, as a single parent in a rather conventional society, and her chance encounter with an AIDS patient – isolated, terrified, uncared for – immediately starts her on a path which leads to remarkable work both in exercising practical compassion and in lobbying for changes to the way people with AIDS are treated. The title isn’t as hyperbolic as it appears either – she lost friends and jobs, and ran the real risk of losing custody of her daughter due to her activism.
Michel Butor – Selected Essays*
A new translation of some of Butor’s essays on the novel. He writes with such clarity, so refreshing for those of us who have wrestled with some of his slipperier contemporaries (looking at you, Deleuze, in particular), and sheds light on his own four novels, as well as giving an insight into his later work.
Joe Hadju – Budapest: A History of Grandeur and Catastrophe
I had a tantalisingly brief visit to Budapest, as part of a Danube cruise, which left me wanting to know much more about the city. I am unlikely to visit in the near future given the political climate there, but the history is fascinating.
Debora Harding – Dancing with the Octopus
As the sub-title tells us, this is ‘The Telling of a True Crime’. And it really is about ‘the telling’ – the remembering and attempted forgetting, the being believed and, horrifically, not being believed. It’s a tough read and a gripping one.
Kerry Hudson – Lowborn*
This is a vital read, as more and more families are forced into the kind of poverty that Hudson experienced as a child and a teenager. What hits me most is what bloody hard work it is being poor. The simplest things – eating nourishing food, keeping warm, keeping clean, staying safe – things that many of us take for granted, can only be achieved with constant, relentless battling against the system.
Yasmin Khan – The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan
I’ve been fascinated by Partition since reading Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown novels, and watching the dramatisation. I think the experience of living in Northern Nigeria during the build up to its Civil war, when Igbo people were murdered or driven out of the northern territories, gave those events particular resonance for me. I’ve previously read a collection of personal accounts of these events (Kavita Puri’s Partition Voices) but this is a detailed, solid history, with an emphasis on the human consequences of violence and displacement.
Rachel Lichtenstein – On Brick Lane
Portrait of a changing community through time, as different waves of immigration each reshape the area (Huguenot, Jewish, Bangladeshi) and its culture.
Wendy Lower – The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed
When we are losing day by day the eye-witnesses to the Holocaust these scraps of photographic evidence become more vital, and Lower uses an image of one of the massacres of Jews in what is now Ukraine to identify killers, witnesses and victims. It’s a brutal read, as it should be.
Patrick Marnham – War in the Shadows: Resistance, Deception and Betrayal in Occupied France
A gripping account of the murkier aspects of SOE’s activities in Occupied France. It’s a very complicated story – it helps if one already knows some of the story of at least some of the protagonists – and sheds some light on who was doing the betraying…
Wendy Mitchell – What I Wish People Knew about Dementia
I read a lot about dementia when my mother-in-law was diagnosed. Some things were helpful, others less so. Wendy Mitchell’s first book didn’t so much give us practical help, as tremendous insight, from the person actually with the dementia, into what the condition means. Remarkably, she’s still writing, still sharing her experiences and this book may give us some useful ideas in supporting my father who has recently been diagnosed. He’s aware of his condition, as Mitchell is, and so can be involved to some extent in finding work-arounds to make life easier (mother-in-law’s confusion progressed so quickly that any solution we came up with one week was useless by the next).
Caroline Moorehead – A House in the Mountains: The Women who Liberated Italy from Fascism*
I know very little about Italy’s war (see above for the same admission re Greece), but this was a fantastic, inspiring read. It focuses on four young women, in the mountains around Turin, who risked their lives daily during German occupation to move weapons and pass on messages, to fight, to take prisoners, to help liberate their country.
Philip Norman – Wild Thing: The Short, Spellbinding Life of Jimi Hendrix
Another biography of Hendrix, and dammit, the ending is the same as always. Having read so much about the man, there were anecdotes here about which I was sceptical, but also real new research and insights.
Tim Parks – Italian Life: A Modern Fable of Loyalty and Betrayal
Fascinating account of how HE in Italy works – the subtitle is very revealing. Having just completed a PhD in English HE, I am very thankful not to have had to go through the Italian system!
Samantha Power – The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir
An essential read for anyone interested in international politics, particularly in the politics of war and genocide from someone who, both as a journalist and as a US government official (including as Obama’s ambassador to the UN), saw at close quarters many of the events she discusses.
Tracy Thorn – Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew up and Tried to be a Pop Star
A delight. Funny and touching, beautifully written.
Dorothy Whipple – Random Commentary
I only recently discovered Whipple’s novels and that she had lived in Nottinghamshire, including a spell in the vicinity of Newstead Abbey, very close to my teenage home. These are her own edited extracts from her diaries between 1925 and 1945, touching on the minutiae of everyday life, the successes and frustrations of her writing career and the momentous world events just off stage.
Reading has, over the last eight months, to some extent been an escape. But that doesn’t mean only reading easy stuff, or cosy stuff (I feel about ‘cosy’ books similarly to how I feel about Classic FM’s insistence that music should be ‘soothing’). The books I’ve read – the funny ones, the challenging ones, the heartbreaking ones, the gripping ones – have all taken me out of my immediate situation, out of the familiar home that is so strange without him in it. I’ve not only gained that respite, but also what George Eliot called the extension of sympathies – it’s easy to become very self-focused in a situation like mine, but books take me into other lives, other places, other histories. And I’m grateful for that.
2021 Reading: Full-time Report
Posted by cathannabel in Literature on December 11, 2021
This is a second half of two halves. In the first three months, my reading patterns were as normal, two or three books on the go at any one time, a mix of fiction and non-fiction, of high, low and middle brow, of different genres. On 9 October everything changed, for ever. My husband’s sudden death left me shell-shocked, devastated. I could not concentrate enough to read anything demanding – indeed, for a week or so I read nothing at all, a completely unprecedented state. When I felt able to read again I had to pick very carefully, and I started and discarded any number of books that I would normally relish. The variation in length and depth of the reviews which follow largely depends on whether I had completed and made some notes on the book before, or after.
As always, I aim to avoid spoilers but read on at your own risk. As always, my aim is to share my enthusiasms, so I’ve missed out one or two books about which I could only have said negative things. That doesn’t mean an unqualified recommendation for everything I read this year but I think it will be clear where I have major caveats…
James Baldwin – Going to Meet the Man/Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone
I read the former, a collection of short stories, a very long time ago, so they seem only faintly familiar (and some of the themes and ideas obviously are in the novels too) but the joy in reading Baldwin’s prose, and dialogue, is something I will never tire of. ‘Sonny’s Blues’ is probably my favourite story – it taps into the church and musical environments which stimulated some of Baldwin’s most beautiful writing. But there is no beauty in the brilliant title story – just horror, plainly told. Tell Me… is classic Baldwin, exploring race and sexuality with candour and courage. It is, as he so often is, deeply moving.
Laurent Binet – HHhH
This was fascinating. I can’t imagine how one could make the story of the Anthropoid mission to assassinate Heydrich boring, even if one just recounted the facts. But what Binet does is to interrogate his own processes as a writer, to tell us a story and then cast doubt on it, to question his own motives in writing about Heydrich himself (is he becoming unhealthily fascinated with this man?). I find fiction about the Holocaust and Nazi atrocities inherently problematic – why tell fictionalised stories when the real stories still need telling, and re-telling – but this confronts the problem head on, acknowledges the invention as such, but in so doing gives us a powerful and vivid account of extraordinary, tragic events.
Brit Bennett – The Vanishing Half
Not so long back I read Nella Larson’s Passing, which was my first (fictional) encounter with the phenomenon of passing for white. This powerful novel brings that to life through the portrayal of two twins, both of whom could pass, and the decisions they both make. I had absorbed from Larson’s account the constant agony of those who decided to pass, the hyperconsciousness of everything they say and do, the fear of exposure. What this account gave me, in addition, was the way in which the person passing for white is forced to identify more strongly with their white neighbours, and avoid all contact with black people for fear that they, somehow, would sense the pretence and expose them. It’s a brilliant, complex picture of racial politics at the personal level, through two generations, and it will stay with me for a long time.
Susannah Clarke – Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell/Piranesi
I’d seen the TV dramatization of JS & Mr N – which was very good – but the book was even better. And then Piranesi was on a whole other level. I don’t really know how to talk about the book before going back and re-reading it again. It is beautiful, mysterious and moving, without losing the dry humour that was so much a part of its predecessor. And I’m a sucker for labyrinths, so there’s that. Nods to Narnia, echoes of Le Guin. One of my books of the year, without a doubt. Just read it, OK?
Harlan Coben – Win
Jonathan Coe – Mr Wilder and Me
What a delight. For anyone who enjoys Coe’s writing, for anyone fascinated by cinema, or who’s ever seen a Billy Wilder movie. I knew a bit about Wilder’s life and have seen several of his films, including Fedora, which is at the heart of the narrative, and this casts a fascinating light on him and his sidekick Iz Diamond. A warm, humorous and touching novel.
Abigail Dean – Girl A
I was afraid this was going to be a harrowing account of abusive parenting and I guess it is but it is far more the account of the aftermath, of how one learns – tries to learn – to live again, to love oneself and other people, to trust, through the account of ‘Girl A’. Reminders of Room, though it’s structured very differently, going back to the awful past, and then to the aftermath of escape, and then to the present.
Len Deighton – Berlin Game
Having nearly run out of unread Le Carrés, I thought I’d revisit Deighton, by whom I’ve read a fair few over the years, but not this series. Thoroughly enjoyable, will read more.
Philip K Dick – The Man in the High Castle
I do love a bit of alt. history, especially WWII related. I’m surprised therefore that I never read this, during my sci-fi phase in my late teens/early 20s, but I think I only ever read Do Androids…. This was excellent – the depiction of the alt. US is thoroughly thought through and convincing and the ending turns everything inside out. I haven’t seen the TV adaptation, but I suspect it’s very different. Might give it a watch at some point.
Eva Dolan – After You Die
The fourth in the gripping, Peterborough set Zigic & Ferreira series, set in a Hate Crimes unit.
Avni Doshi – Burnt Sugar
A powerful, uncomfortable read. None of the characters are exactly likeable, but they are convincingly drawn and the narrative plays with, if not our sympathies, at least our willingness to be convinced by them.
Margaret Drabble – Pure Gold Baby
I hadn’t read any Drabble for about 30 years. That was a re-read of The Millstone, and I recall it vividly, sitting in our garden, and reading about the protagonist’s experience of having a sick child in hospital and being excluded from being by her side. I’d just been through that, the first part of that, but I’d been cared for by the hospital, and had been able to be with my son throughout (I also had a partner, unlike Rosamund). This new book shouts out to The Millstone – its central character is a single parent, with a child who has some learning/developmental disability, never clearly defined. At one point, she recalls the way in which she was expected to think about her child, as a ‘millstone’. She doesn’t, the child is her pure gold baby. We follow Jess and her daughter through the decades as the narrator, a close friend, shares not only what happened, but the debates and discussions that the group of friends had about mental health and women’s lives and love and parenthood. I loved it.
Helen Fields – Perfect Prey
I’ve been reading these in entirely the wrong order, but this is the second in the DI Callanach series.
Jo Furniss – The Last to Know
I’ve read the previous two of Furniss’ books, the post-apocalypse All the Little Children, the psychological thriller The Trailing Spouse, and now this one, which has a very strong Gothic flavour about it. The set up is familiar – a married couple return to his family home, and the wife feels immediately an atmosphere of threat which leads her to doubt everything she thinks she knows about her husband. It’s nicely, and not too predictably, worked out, and Furniss builds up the tension very effectively.
Amitav Ghosh – Flood of Fire
Final volume in the Ibis trilogy which was just fantastic, exhilarating, teeming with characters and landscapes and plot and historical detail, and sweeping the reader along with the narrative.
Lesley Glaister – Blasted Things
Glaister never lets me down. Most of her novels have a contemporary setting but this one pitches us right into the horrors of a WWI field hospital, and then the conventionality of a 1920s middle-class marriage. The brutality of the first and the claustrophobia of the second are skilfully conveyed, and the characters are vivid and multi-dimensional. At times I thought I could see where the plot was leading but I was invariably wrong. I’d like to re-read this to savour the writing, as my concentration is still shot and I have a tendency to race through books to get the plot.
Winston Graham – Ross Poldark/Demelza/Jeremy Poldark/Warleggan/Black Moon
Post-bereavement binge reading. I’d never read the Poldark series, but was content to revisit the plot familiar to me from the recent TV series, and to conjure up mental images of the Cornish coastline.
Elly Griffiths – The Midnight Hour
The latest Brighton mystery, with police and private detectives working together to solve a crime. As always, Griffiths’ novels are a delight.
Susan Hill – A Change of Circumstance
The latest Simon Serrailer novel.
Nick Hornby – Juliet Naked
I did feel ‘seen’, as they say, whilst reading this. Musical obsessions, the kind that make one track down an alternative mix or a rare bootleg live recording because it has an extra few notes from the object of one’s obsession, yes, thank you, we know about that. Very funny, and rather touching too.
Katherine Ryan Howard – 56 Days
Writing about the pandemic is tricky, given where we are now. I’ve seen TV programmes take various tacks – ignore, nod to it with the occasional shot of masked shoppers or whatever, or set something in the build up to ‘all this’ (see Series 2 of This Way Up). This one goes for it – the narrative starts in mid-pandemic but darts back to the days when we were talking about it but with no idea of what was to come – and really uses the ideas of lockdown and isolation to drive the plot forward. Very intriguing and tense and took me by surprise at a number of points.
Stephen King – Billy Summers
King, it would be pretty uncontroversial to say, is on a roll. His recent books are amongst his very best, and his embrace of the crime genre (even when he turns it to his own purposes) has helped to overcome the one problem with his fiction, the endings. This one is completely gripping throughout.
John Lanchester – The Wall
I had no idea what to expect of this, having downloaded it on the strength of Capital. We’re in a future Britain, changed irrevocably because of climate change (the past events which have created this new version of the world are only touched upon lightly, we have to accept this world as it is, with its rules and structures).
John le Carré – The Tailor of Panama
This was the book I was reading at the point when my life changed completely. I bear it no particular grudge, but would need to re-read before reviewing its place in the Le Carré oeuvre.
Laura Lippman – Dream Girl
Lippman possibly channelling King here (I won’t say which King, because that might be slightly spoilery). As always, superbly written.
Megha Majumdar – A Burning
This one is a heartbreaker. Majumdar gives the reader hope and then snatches it away, over and over. Beautifully done, and the three voices that we hear are clear and convincing, however flawed their characters and perspectives.
Jennifer Makumbi – Manchester Happened
A fascinating collection of short stories about migration, specifically between Uganda and Manchester, that illuminate many different perspectives. I was particularly taken with the first story, set in the early 50s, as I’ve been doing a PhD on a novel written at that time, and set in Manchester (Passing Time – I may have mentioned it once or twice)
Klaus Mann – Mephisto
This isn’t a fun read – it’s bitter, cynical, despairing. How could it be other, written as it was by an exile from Nazi Germany, in 1936? It is based very much on real people (Goering, Goebbels and their wives, future Hollywood star Elisabeth Bergner, and many others), and got Mann into difficulties when the model for central character Hendrik Hofgens objected vigorously to Mann’s portrayal of him as someone who made a pact with the devil, in exchange for fame and success…
Denise Mina – The End of the Wasp Season
Mina’s crime novels are always unsettling and this is no exception. She wrongfooted me several times during this narrative, but not just for the sake of it.
Erich Maria Remarque – Arch of Triumph
I read a lot of Remarque during my teens (starting in the obvious place with All Quiet, but particularly enjoying his novels set between the wars, Three Comrades, A Time to Love and a Time to Die, A Night in Lisbon. This one powerfully conveys the life of people who’ve ended up in Paris in those precarious days, without documents. Coincidentally, it reminded me that I had the remnants of a bottle of Calvados at the back of a pantry shelf. I no longer have those remnants.
C J Sansom – Heartstone/Lamentation
Two Shardlake historical detective novels. I enjoy these, although sometimes the style grates (too much ‘he said sadly/she said quietly/he said grimly’ and a bit too much of people telling each other the history)
Elif Shafak – 10 Minutes, 38 Seconds in this Strange World
A strange one, this. The narratives of our protagonist, who is dead when we first meet her, but whose memories take 10 minutes, 38 seconds to fade, and she shares them with us, as she passes from one world to another, and of her loyal friends, all of them people who for one reason or another are on the margins, are powerful and moving. The tone changes in the final act, becomes almost comedic, which is strange.
Ali Smith – How to be Both
It took me a while to get into the rhythm of this, with the shifting tenses and then the shifting timeframes and perspectives, but as with all of Ali Smith’s work, it’s worth the effort, and will be worth re-reading.
Zadie Smith – Swingtime
I still haven’t quite come to terms with Zadie Smith, but I enjoyed this one more than NW. There was something troubling about the portrayal of Tracey and her mum though, a hint of snobbery?
Cath Staincliffe – Running out of Road
Not for the first time, Staincliffe made me hold my breath for long stretches of narrative.
Stuart Turton – The Devil and the Dark Water
A vividly written historical thriller, set on the high seas, with a supernatural (is it or isn’t it?) thread. Very vividly written
Nicola Upson – Sorry for the Dead/An Expert in Murder/Angel with Two Faces/Two for Sorrow/Fear in the Sunlight/The Death of Lucy Kyte
Post-bereavement binge reading of a series in which the real-life crime writer/dramatist Josephine Tey is the protagonist in various fictional murders.
Sylvia Townsend Warner – Lolly Willowes
Dorothy Whipple – High Wages
I loved this, my second Whipple. A resourceful young woman as our hero, and the crushing weight of social conventions at the time (written in 1930).
Chris Whitaker – We Begin at the End
An absolutely gripping and moving crime thriller, with a compelling young female hero.
Non-Fiction
Enjeela Ahmadi-Miller – The Broken Circle: A Memoir of Escaping Afghanistan
Carole Angier – Speak Silence: In Search of W G Sebald
The first biography of W G Sebald, hampered somewhat by its author not having the cooperation of Sebald’s wife or daughter. This does mean that a lot of it is very speculative and dependent on sources whose reliability we might reasonably question. There’s lots of new information here, however, and some useful insights.
James Baldwin – The Last Interview
Anthony Burgess – Obscenity & the Arts
Ciaran Carson – Belfast Confetti
I discovered this poet accidentally through my PhD researches, which brought up a remarkable poem, ‘Turn Around’, about maps and labyrinths.
Kate Clanchy – Some Kids I Taught and What they Taught Me
Oh boy, where to start. I read this having already seen some of the negative comments on Twitter, but also having read many of the poems that Clanchy has posted from the young poets she’s worked with, and found them very striking, and moving. She is trying, I think, in Some Kids, to let us see the diversity of these young people in all its glory, but there’s something very off-key about the way she describes them, and ultimately it was a very uncomfortable read.
Teju Cole – Known & Strange Things: Essays
Dan Davies – In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile
If I say that this is the one book I’ve read so far this year that made me feel physically sick, it is no reflection on the author or the writing. It’s a response to his subject. I felt a sense of hopelessness in reading it, at the opportunities to stop him that were missed, through bad luck or deliberate blindness, or corruption. It’s a shocking read, rightly so.
Grant Graff – The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11
An extraordinary account of 9/11, built from the words of those who experienced it, directly or vicariously as they waited to hear from people they loved, including the transcripts of phone calls from the planes and other emergency calls. It’s fascinating, often heartbreaking, and sheds new light on an event that we might all feel we know, because those images are so ubiquitous and burned into our memories.
Naoki Higashida – The Reason I Jump
Leo Marks – Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker’s War, 1941-1945
The memoir of a man who was key to the code-setting and code-breaking activities during the war, and who knew most of the SOE operatives who were sent into France. It’s self-deprecating, with a wry humour, but Marks speaks movingly and powerfully of the tragedy of what happened to those young men and women.
Ben MacIntyre – Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story that Changed the Course of World War II
An account of one of the more improbable seeming exploits of British intelligence during the war – a corpse, bearing apparent secrets that were meant to deceive the enemy.
Caitlin Moran – More than a Woman
Ridiculously funny, but also very moving when Moran talks about her daughter’s eating disorder. It doesn’t always resonate with me – for starters, I’m much further ahead on that journey than Moran or probably much of her intended readership – but when it does, it really does.
Mary Oliver – American Primitive
I chose ‘In Blackwater Woods’ for my husband’s funeral ceremony. ‘To live in this world / you must be able / to do three things: / to love what is mortal; / to hold it / against your bones knowing / your own life depends on it; / and, when the time comes to let it go, / to let it go’.
Kavita Puri – Partition Voices: Untold British Stories
First hand accounts from the Partition of India and Pakistan. Harrowing and haunting.
Philippe Sands – The Ratline: Love, Lies and Justice on the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive
Reads like a thriller, the account of a senior Nazi who escaped arrest after the war, but it never loses sight of what Otto Wachter was responsible for, and Sands draws out the connections between Wachter and the fate of his own family.
Kate Vigurs – Mission France: The True History of the Women of SOE
SOE again. I’ve been fascinated by these stories since I was a teenager, watching old black & white films – Odette, and Carve her Name with Pride. This is a much less romanticised account than those films gave, and doesn’t shy away from the extent to which naivety or over-confidence led to some of the tragedies which befell the agents.
Isobel Wilkerson – The Warmth of Other Sons: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration
I thought I knew nothing about the Great Migration, but reading this gripping account, I realised that everything I’ve read about the African-American experience in the 20th century, fictional and non-fictional, has had this at the core. Fascinating.
Reading has always been my solace as well as my inspiration. It will be again, even if for now I’m reluctant to tackle anything too challenging, or anything which might come too close to my own grief and loss.
My two novels of the year are Jon McGregor’s Lean, Fall, Stand, and Susannah Clarke’s Piranesi. In non-fiction, I’ll pick Rachel Clarke’s Breathtaking, an account of the early months of the pandemic, and Rebecca Clifford’s Survivors, about child survivors of the Holocaust. (Both are reviewed in my half-time report.)
Thank you to all of the writers whose work has entertained, comforted, amazed, intrigued and in whatever other ways enriched me in 2021.
Passing Time 