I’m hugely pleased to be back online after two weeks of belly ache with my hosting provider. Hence, two reviews to follow in quick succession. If you’ve been waiting… sorry and thanks for your patience.
Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue
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
Beside Myself by Ann Morgan
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the swap from Helen’s perspective, stuck in the less well-adjusted Ellie’s persona – Ellie was less popular, more withdrawn, in counselling in school.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
Authors QH interview with Emma Claire Sweeney
It was lovely to interview Emma today about her new novel Owl Song at Dawn as well as various other projects. You can reread my review here or simply enjoy the video.
Owl Song at Dawn by Emma Claire Sweeney
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 by Anna Chilvers
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
The Atom Station by Halldór Laxness
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
Hodder & Stoughton #readwithoutprejudice
The story of Ruth Jefferson, a midwife – delivery nurse, as they’re called in America – , who happens to be black, is asked to stop looking after a child because the parents are white supremacists and want no one of colour to touch their child.
The cogs of this inciting incident move in ways you would expect. Ruth is rightfully angry that her boss would allow this level of discrimination to be practised against her and when she is left alone to monitor the baby she has been asked not to touch, and he has trouble breathing and eventually dies (I’m leaving out her actions so as not to spoil the finer points), you can see where the white supremacists might go next. Ruth is put on trial for murder.
Where the story goes then, though, is not predictable. Ruth’s isn’t the only voice we hear. The white supremacist father, Turk, also has a voice, and so does Ruth’s lawyer, Kennedy. At every turn racism in America is brought under the microscope, challenging characters in ways they didn’t anticipate. The fact that it is still a subject mostly avoided, especially by white authors who make up the majority of published voices in the English-speaking market, makes this novel all the more fascinating. Continue reading Hodder & Stoughton #readwithoutprejudice
The Lost Time Accidents by John Wray
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
Love across a broken map. An expanded book review
I was lucky enough to be given Love across a broken map by Farhana Shaikh of Dahlia Publishing. Through Byte the Book and the Authors’ Licensing & Collecting Society, I’d been invited to the All Party Writers Group (APWG) Summer Drinks Reception at the House of Lords. The APWG helps to raise matters that affect writers at a parliamentary level and the theme for this reception was the lack of diversity in the publishing and TV industry. Farhana was in the queue with us to get into the House of Lords and we finally chatted, beyond brief introductions, over a cup of tea having just listened to Baroness Floella Benjamin and Shai Hussain talk about their vision for a diverse publishing and TV industry in which every voice could be represented without stereotype or prejudice.
Baroness Floella Benjamin was a particularly hard act to follow because her fervour for representing our country of diverse peoples in our stories on and off screen was very moving. Don’t we want to project a world in which young people feel included, their voices valued and opinions sought? Shai Hussain had to follow her passion with a story of his own, asking the publishing and TV industries to listen to stories that stand outside typical patterns and that are written by people whose voices have yet to be given a chance to shine.
When Farhana said she ran a small publishing company, Dahlia Publishing, which manages The Asian Writer and Leicester Writes, and that they had a new book coming out that week, Love across a broken map, I quickly offered to review it. How do small presses, often those most interested in publishing diverse writing in all its forms, get their books noticed? How do they get the big reviews? As we know from the recent series of Literary Salons held by Something Rhymed, even getting books written by women, let alone any other diverse group, read and reviewed in mainstream newspapers is a struggle. #readdiverse2016 is a good place to start, but as with #readwomen2015 what happens the following year? Why aren’t good books, why isn’t good writing, rising to the surface as it really should? Continue reading Love across a broken map. An expanded book review