Category: The Blog

This isn’t The Girls currently most obvious in all the lists and bookshop shelves. That The Girls by Emma Cline I reviewed back in May. This novel is the autobiography of two girls, conjoined craniopagus twins, born during a tornado in Baldoon County, Canada, just the other side of the American border.

The autobiography is Rose’s idea. She is the writer. But she gets her sister, Ruby to write some contributing chapters and as the narrative develops those chapters grow in number and offer a different insight into the girls’ lives. Continue reading The Girls by Lori Lansens

Kathy H was lucky enough to grow up at Hailsham. After fourteen years as a carer to various donors around the country, she is spending more and more time reminiscing. She thinks of her childhood, the Hailsham estate, guardians and friends. She tries to understand what her life and the lives of her friends have all meant.

She has two particularly special friends, Tommy and Ruth. Ruth is brazen and popular. Tommy is brooding, good at sport, prone to angry outbursts. Continue reading Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Undoubtedly many of you will remember this novel. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker in 2003 and then made into a film starring Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench in 2006. I felt certain I hadn’t read it before but somehow, as I turned the pages, it was as if the story were coming from a familiar place even though I hadn’t seen the film.

Though the scandal is salacious and as sordid and mundane as one might expect – an affair between a female teacher and a fifteen-year-old; people behaving thoughtlessly, living through the mists of their own egos and creating drama and intimacy out of desperation – the real pleasure is in Barbara’s first person, witness account. Continue reading Notes On A Scandal by Zoë Heller

His Bloody Project was recommended by the New York Times as one of the best books of 2016 and as someone for whom a murderous thriller is appealing, I was interested to get to grips with the novel.

Given the premise that this is an account written by the actual Roderick Macrae in 1869 with additional documents that include statements from witnesses and accounts of his trial, working your way into the novel isn’t straightforward and won’t be for everyone. This is a very consciously constructed tale built to give the characters authenticity even if it does not offer certainty.

The story behind the various documents is fascinating. Roderick Macrae was a seventeen-year-old crofter living in a small village in Scotland, who killed Lachlan Mackenzie, his neighbour and the local constable of the parish, Lachlan’s teenage daughter and his youngest son. Roderick claims to have intended to go to Lachlan Mackenzie’s house to kill him for persecuting his father and that the other murders were incidental, necessary only so that neither child could raise the alarm. Continue reading His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet

Patrick Sumner is a surgeon who takes a job on a whaling ship. He is down on his luck. Discharged from the army with a limp and a story hiding in a locked chest, Sumner is also an orphan who was adopted and trained by the local doctor turned alcoholic. To top it all, Sumner is now addicted to Laudanum.

Heading for the same ship is Henry Drax, a man ruled by thirst and hunger, sometimes for drink, or for sex, or for blood. The North Water puts the two men in the same ship, holes them up on the same bleak stretches of ice, and lets us meditate on what it is to be human: do you follow your own desires, or do you question them? Continue reading The North Water by Ian McGuire

 

After a month focussing on my novel, I’m back to blogging. While I was gone I also discovered I was a book vlogger, something I hope to do more of in the new year. If you haven’t seen any of my videos, head over to Authors QH or follow my you tube channel. Here’s my review of The Power:

I’ve not read any Naomi Alderman before and I found this book thoughtful and wry.

It begins with a series of letters from Neil to his fellow writer friend, Naomi.

Neil is writing a novel reimagining the history of the world before what is referred to as ‘the cataclysm’, a war that wiped the world clean of civilisation requiring human beings to start again. All knowledge of the world before the cataclysm has been interpreted through the eyes of the current dominant hegemony, a maturing matriarchy led by women who are more powerful than men because they can generate electricity, like electric eels. The women of this society behave in much the same way as men have done throughout our own history. Continue reading The Power by Naomi Alderman

‘For Hominy any day when he could personify American primitivism was a good ol’ day. It meant that he was still alive, and sometimes even the carnival coon in the tank misses the attention. And this country, the latent high school homosexual that it is, the mulatto passing for white that it is, the Neanderthal incessantly plucking its unibrow that it is, needs people like him. It needs somebody to throw baseballs at, to fag-bash, to nigger-stomp, to invade, to embargo. Anything that, like baseball, keeps a country from actually looking in the mirror and remembering where the bodies are buried.’ (Loc. 1353)

Sellout is one of the nicknames of the narrator of The Sellout (his other is Bonbon), a black man who reinstates his city, Dickens, a deprived area unofficially labelled as L.A.’s hood, through a mass programme of segregation inspired by the surviving actor of a racist television series from the 30s and 40s, Hominy. Hominy begs to become Sellout’s slave, going as far as asking to be whipped.

What begins as a birthday gift for Hominy – redrawing the old city limits of Dickens in paint and putting segregated seating signs in a local bus – grows into creating a segregated local school by faking the coming of an all-white school over the road, to selling signs like ‘Blacks Only’ and ‘No Whites Allowed’ to shops, businesses and even the local hospital. Crime rates and unemployment drops, the children’s attendance and attainment levels soar, even the rival gangs celebrate hood day without violence. Continue reading The Sellout by Paul Beatty

This is the first Booker shortlisted novel I’ve read this year and Hot Milk didn’t disappoint.

Sofia travels to Spain to accompany her mother in her treatment at a private medical centre. For as long as Sofia can remember her mother has complained of aches and pains and has needed Sofia to tend to her, to fetch and carry, to bear the burden of care.

Her mother has mysterious pains in her feet that make it difficult for her to walk. She says her feet are numb, senseless, useless. When she can walk, she hobbles.

The medical centre forces Sofia and her mother to confront the mental health issues that beleaguer both their lives. Continue reading Hot Milk by Deborah Levy

Anastasia thought, She lived for those evenings. I knew she would say that. She lived for those evenings. It is pitiful. We are all just the same, and yet we go over and over our little lives time and time again, looking at each other and talking earnestly.

She listened earnestly. (p58-9)

Anastasia has returned to her childhood home in Dublin, the home of her Grandmother, the formidable Mrs. King. Her parents are both dead, her mother recently so. She hasn’t been home in six years after leaving to join her mother who fled Dublin, her husband and his family for Paris.

Anastasia does not receive a warm welcome. The grandmother is as mean and pinched a person as you can imagine, wielding silence and propriety to passive aggressive perfection, determined to be left alone to mourn her son. Quietly manipulative, she has orchestrated her life around her son and Anastasia’s mother, hence Anastasia herself, were and remain intruders, visitors, who never belonged. Any hope of bringing her mother’s body back from Paris or of living peacefully in her childhood home will be dashed. Continue reading The Visitor by Maeve Brennan

I don’t know what I expected from The Weight of Things, but what I got was something entirely unexpected and powerful. I feel ashamed that this is the first time I’ve read Marianne Fritz. It seems, somehow, sadly entirely typical that a body of work written in a language other than English and by a woman, should remain outside of the canon of someone, like me, who has spent my entire adulthood studying, reading and writing literature. If this is how it is now, how will it be when we move further from Europe? More than ever, the work of the translator is essential. We need to hear voices that don’t speak quite like our own.

The Weight of Things was the first published book of the Austrian author, Marianne Fritz, who has been called by some a female Joyce – an ambiguous accolade. Apparently, her work after The Weight of Things becomes untranslatable as it fleshes out into diagrams, maps, paragraphs created around single letters, manuscripts so complex they were printed direct from the original copies. The thought is an enticing one for me and leads to a further sense of shame in my own lack of linguistic ability.

To return to the work in hand, The Weight of Things is a slight volume that eases you in with a portrait of an embattled marriage only to take you into the heart of a world weighed down by thought and reflection. So intense is Berta’s contemplation of her children and her desire for them to be unburdened of her and the difficulties of making one’s way in the world, that unending sleep seems their only option and she the only one who can take them there. Continue reading The Weight of Things by Marianne Fritz translated by Adrian Nathan West