Category: The Blog

Lalla, just turning sixteen, lives in a flat in Bloomsbury in a London very different to the one we know today. Regents Park, full of homeless people with no identity cards – and thus no identity, no access to food rations – has been bombed; the British Museum is now home to further homeless, identity-less people who steal exhibits in exchange for food. All over the world resources are scarce, there is no soil to grow crops, many species, including those reared for food, are dead.

Lalla’s father was one of those who suggested identity cards to allow for fair sharing of resources, but the scheme has failed. There simply isn’t enough to go round. The ship is his latest idea – a vessel filled with worthy people and all the food, clothes and resources they might ever need.

But Lalla’s mother refuses to leave London.

On the day of Lalla’s sixteenth birthday, everything changes and life on the ship begins. Continue reading The Ship by Antonia Honeywell

Jende and Neni, a couple from Cameroon, emigrate to America in the hope of fulfilling their dreams for a prosperous life together. They dream of interesting careers, enough money for a house and a car and a good education for their children. America is rich in opportunity, not like Cameroon. America is where their dreams will come true.

The reality of life as an immigrant without the correct papers is much harder. They often work two, if not more, jobs. They live in a tiny cockroach filled apartment and sleep in the same room as their son.

Things start to look up when Jende is hired as a chauffeur to Mr Edwards and his family. Mr Edwards works on Wall Street for Lehman’s. And as the sound of that company name builds tension for the reader, the interaction and interdependence of the two families forces us to question their seemingly obvious differences. Living fulfilled and happy lives is difficult no matter where you come from and how much money you have. Continue reading Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue

Helen and Ellie are identical twins. One day they decide to play a swapping game. Can they pretend to be each other and get away with it? It is fun to successfully pretend to be someone else until Ellie refuses to swap back. Will anyone ever believe Helen when she says she isn’t Ellie? And what happens when the person in charge of your identity takes it in new directions, directions you couldn’t emulate?

Beside Myself describes the swap from Helen’s perspective, stuck in the less well-adjusted Ellie’s persona – Ellie was less popular, more withdrawn, in counselling in school. When the now famous twin, masquerading as Helen, is sent into a comma after a car accident, the adult Helen is forced to confront the past.  

The premise itself is enough to grip a reader. The identity violation feels like a personal affront and we quickly understand the troubling impact the swap has had on Helen. If you box someone in, define them with no room for change or growth, all their energy soon turns to anger, forcing us to confront the complex relationship between trauma and mental illness. This takes Beside Myself out of the straightforward psychological thriller bracket into a novel that puts the British family under the microscope. Unsurprisingly, the power of the unsaid holds sway. Continue reading Beside Myself by Ann Morgan

Maeve runs Sea View Lodge in Morecambe. Nearly eighty years old, Maeve has lived there all her life. A guest house that once catered to civil servants in the war, builders afterwards and now specialises in accommodating travellers with disabilities, Sea View Lodge is filled with a history that Maeve has done her best to keep locked in the shed.

One day Vincent, a friend from her youth, turns up wanting a room and that history begins to break its chains. Continue reading Owl Song at Dawn by Emma Claire Sweeney

Tainted Love (published by Bluemoose Books) is set in the northern town of Hawden where old industry and woodland meet in an enchanting landscape.

Lauren is in love. She met her boyfriend Peter when they were children and he was hiding naked in the woods. Peter loves the woods: lives in them, runs in them with his strong legs and hooves, sleeps in a cave in the cold with his dad, the hair on their bodies thick enough to keep them warm.

Just as Peter is a little different, so is Lauren. Many of the people of Hawden are not quite human and as a woman and her son return to the town, Lauren uncovers the truth about her family. Why did her mother run off when she was a child? Her parents had seemed so in love but then her mother abandoned them and she and her dad moved in with Mr Lion.

Ali, a similar age to Lauren, is in Hawden looking for a place to lie low and hoping to find out more about her grandmother who once lived in the town. But what was her grandmother’s connection to Hawden and to Lauren’s history? Continue reading Tainted Love by Anna Chilvers

Set in Iceland after World War II when America was trying to buy land to build a NATO airbase, The Atom Station tells the story of a nation in turmoil through the eyes of a young girl from the North. Ugla has come to the capital to work in the household of her Northern MP. She comes South full of the wide open landscapes of the countryside and a love of Icelandic sagas. She hopes to learn to play the harmonium.

What Ugla, our narrator, finds is a city full of people with ideas that have as little connection to reality as the mythical wild horses of her Northern home. The only difference being that the mythical horses may have a weight of history behind them.

Though Ugla finds much that would lean her towards communism, no ism escapes her level-headed observation. She listens to the politicians in her employer’s home and the radical thinkers in the home of her harmonium teacher and treats them all equally, her eyes bent thoroughly on the importance of the basics of living.

Of course there is also love – love within and across social boundaries – offering us an insight into how basic living continues through social upheaval, and offering us a different plot line through which to examine the political lay of the country. Continue reading The Atom Station by Halldór Laxness

I was excited at the prospect of this novel. I loved the idea of a novel about time-travel in which a hero narrates the story of his family from outside the flow of chronological time.

Waldemar is exactly this kind of hero and even better his heroism involves a kind of active inactivity, stuck as he is, writing his family’s history in a place out of the flow of time, hoping to win back the affections of Mrs. Haven, to whom he addresses his history.

Waldemar is the end of a chain of sons and daughters grown mad on a legacy left by Waldemar’s great-grandfather, Ottokar Toula, an amateur physicist who claimed to have understood the nature of time just as Einstein published his theory of relativity, but who died on the day of his discovery of what he called time accidents. Waldemar takes it upon himself to solve this family obsession with time, to understand, explain and explore it. Continue reading The Lost Time Accidents by John Wray