Category: The Blog

Theo was seven when he was taken from Rwanda and given a new foster family. Plagued by terrible memories of tribal genocide, Theo is given a new chance in Dublin, but as he grows up and falls into selling drugs, he begins to wonder if you can ever escape your past.

The other voice we hear in the novel is Deirdre’s. She is a forty-year-old ex-nurse working in a restaurant, washing dishes. Her husband beats her. Her children test her with their adolescent disaffection.

When Theo starts at the restaurant, working alongside her, they form a surprising friendship, one which helps them face their increasingly entangled and dangerous lives. Continue reading Rain Falls on Everyone by Clár Ní Chonghaile

In the wonderful way that books speak to each other across continents and centuries, Herland is a novel that feels as if it should be compared. A utopian novel first published serially and then in novel form in 1915, Herland speaks directly to a whole area of literature devoted to considering the possibilities of matriarchy, or the balance of gender power in society.

Vandyck Jennings narrates his experiences of adventuring with his two school pals, Terry Nicholson and Jeff Margrave. Terry is rich and also a chauvinist. Jeff is a doctor, who puts women on a pedestal. Vandyck considers himself a man of science and hence of considered reflection and balance.

On a large scientific expedition – Vandyck doesn’t reveal where – the three of them hear rumours of a female society cut off from the rest of the world by sheer mountains. They get the guide to show them the red and blue river below the mountain and they discover died cloth, evidence of a society far superior (in their opinion) to that to which the guide belongs. They decide to come back and find this women’s world for themselves. Continue reading Herland by Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman

It is 1959 in Jerusalem. Shmuel, a university student with a large heart, weak lungs and an unruly beard, decides to give up his studies when his father’s business collapses. Shmuel couldn’t do military service. He has also just lost his girlfriend to her ex, whom she plans to marry. On top of that, his thesis about Jewish views of Jesus, had come to standstill even before his parents’ funds came to an abrupt halt.

Shmuel has come to some kind of hiatus, a threshold in which he has to decide upon a new path.

He thinks of heading off to a newly built town and becoming a night watchman when an advert seeking a companion catches his eye.   Continue reading Judas by Amos Oz

Butterfly Fish is one of those rare books whose raw invention entices you in and cries out for a second reading. There are so many ideas and stories swimming in the novel that it is literally teaming, as if the book had tendrils reaching out from its pages, wiggling at you and reeling you back in, or sending you off down a new tributary of thought.

Joy is the centrepiece of the novel. A British Nigerian born and living in London, Joy loses her sense of gravity when her mother dies. She inherits the diary of her grandfather and a bronze head. In the quest to understand her identity, other stories unfold: we learn about her mother and we follow some of the history of the bronze head that takes us back into the history of the Kingdom of Benin. Continue reading Butterfly Fish by Irenosen Okojie

Fever Dream is the record of the last few memories and thoughts of Amanda as she lies dying. She is extremely worried about her daughter, Nina. Where is she? Is she safe?

The narrative is delivered as a conversation between Amanda and a young boy, David. David is the son of Carla, the elegant woman in gold sandals who lives not far from the holiday home Amanda and Nina are renting. Right from the first day of their stay Carla has stepped one gleaming foot at a time into Amanda and Nina’s life, her son David an ominous presence hovering in the background.

What does Carla want? What happened to her and her son? Continue reading Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin

Edie and Gnome are brother and sister. Or are they?

It’s difficult to review The Night Brother without spoilers. Set in Manchester at the turn of the century from the 19th to the 20th, the suffragette movement is on the rise. Edie and Gnome become caught up in a new wave of free thinking pushed to its limit by their predicament. For, ultimately, the novel is about a radical rethinking of sex and gender. What does it mean to be a woman or a man? Continue reading The Night Brother by Rosie Garland

Flesh and Bone and Water opens with a letter to André from Luana. She says it has been many years since they’ve been in touch and that André made ‘us wait’. Who is Luana? What happened between her and André?  How did André make her wait?

This opening puzzle is what drives the novel, allowing the reader to intuit answers well before André whose blindness to events is painfully self-willed. Continue reading Flesh and Bone and Water by Luiza Sauma

I loved this novel. I couldn’t sleep one night because I was trying to think of the right way to describe the way it reads. To me it feels as if the story has been uncovered, carefully dug from the earth and smoothed free of soil with the gentle strokes of an archaeological brush. Many stories feel pieced together, made – mine in particular – but this story feels as if it has been waiting to be set free of the rough unhewn marble.

I don’t want to suggest that everything felt perfect. Both the beginning and the end sounded awkwardly in my ears. The start seems self-conscious and I wanted more from the ending, but perhaps only because I’m greedy – I prefer suggestive endings and that of Strange Heart Beating is more suggestive, truer to the uncertainties of life, than final. However, the novel really is enticing. The hum of our most ancient stories plays quietly in the background, imprinting upon the modern story of pain and loss so that Seb’s grief – his wife Leda has just died, drowned after being knocked from her boat by a swan – deepens the groove in the floor of our understanding of what it is to feel love and loss; in the same way that Leda’s story replays old motifs to create a new song. Continue reading Strange Heart Beating by Eli Goldstone

I’ve been busy reviewing a non-fiction book this week as well: A Secret Sisterhood by Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney exploring the hidden or misinterpreted literary friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. You can read my review on the Byte the Book site here. A Secret Sisterhood is one of those books from which you absorb information without realising it. With a forward from Margaret Atwood, it’s a manifesto for female literary friendship and is out 1st June. You can preorder the book here.

Sonja is forty and wants to learn to drive. The instructions of the title represent all those automatic functions through which our lives are meant to pass: learning to drive, getting a job, getting married, having children etc. etc. But Sonja moved from the countryside – Balling, Jutland to be specific – to come to college and though she is now a translator working mostly on the crime novels of one author (she doesn’t even like crime fiction), she struggles to translate her country self into her town self and vice versa. She feels as if she doesn’t fit in either place.

To top it off, she’s fallen out with her sister who still lives in Balling, and her positional vertigo is playing up. Technically, anyone with positional vertigo probably shouldn’t even be allowed a driving license so she’s hiding the condition from her driving school.

When she was a child she hid in the fields, she ran off to look at the whooper swans and her mind keeps returning to the fields, to her ability to spot rogue stalks of wheat in the rye, to the necks and calls of the swans.

Her life is not as she expected. All those intimate connections are missing. Her sister avoids speaking to her and even the friend she moved to Copenhagen with has changed her name and used Sonja to cover for her marital indiscretions. So instead Sonja has a massage therapist to touch her and driving instructors she hopes will help her learn to change gear.

The story, perhaps, may not appeal to all, but the writing is so beautifully married to the darting, connective, fluctuations of consciousness in which current experience is responded to, challenged, influenced and ignored by memory, conjecture and nuanced interpretation, that the small moments of Sonja’s life are truly evocative and such a joy to read. Reading Mirror, Shoulder, Signal is like stepping into Sonja’s mind. This single woman in her forties may be depressed but her thoughts are multifaceted gemstones that sparkle under the light. Sometimes, someone needs to stand to the side of what it expected and ask why. Sometimes, someone needs to remember. Sonja is just that person. So even though the novel feels mundane, it is everything but. Not every journey requires a rite of passage. Not every person should learn to drive…

Those of you who know me will laugh at the last sentence, so I’ll come clean and admit I’m 40 and can’t drive either. I stand by my response to the book though. Driving represents a step on the ladder of life’s expectations. Just like the fortune teller Sonja meets at a party, this sense of having a future already laid out for you, is one Sonja deeply struggles with.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel.

Next week I’m reviewing Strange Heart Beating by Eli Goldstone.