From Pyrenees to Pennines

On the first Saturday of every month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.

Kate:  Books are my Favourite and Best

This month’s starter book, Yesteryear, by  Caro Claire Burke attracts me not at all. Here’s what Google’s AI Overview has to say about it: ‘Yesteryear is a darkly satirical thriller about Natalie Heller Mills, a high-profile ‘tradwife’ influencer who glorifies a romanticised, 19th century farm life. Behind her curated, cottagecore Instagram feed lie hidden modern appliances, paid nannies, and a crumbling, fame-obsessed marriage.’ 

I thought I’d run away immediately to a group of women whose young lives could hardly be more different from our own Instagram-able days. The Eights, by Joanna Miller, follows the fortunes of 4 young women admitted to Oxford University in the very year – 1920 – in which they would be able to study towards a degree, a possibility until then denied to female students. They face petty and strict rules about their day-to-day lives, prejudice and family difficulties. This is their story.

Two women , in Almost Life by Kiran Millwood Hargrave show how women’s possibilities change during the twentieth century. English (bi-sexual) Erica comes across French (lesbian) Laure one summer morning in 1978, on the steps of Sacré Coeur when Erica smiles at Laure after spotting they’re reading the same book. They become lovers then part – often. Erica is in her mid 30s as the story reaches its climax, and the social change that characterises both French and British society between the 70s and the very early 2000s is subtly yet vividly made a living part of the narrative.

In Vaseem Khan‘s Edge of Darkness, another female is treading new paths for women. We’re in just-post-partition India, and Persis Wadia is India’s first female detective. She faces the same kind of prejudice and condescension faced by the Oxford students. Persis is determined, principled and awkward. She thinks outside the box, but has very little support, with the possible exception of her new second-in-command. Solving the murder of a prominent politican isn’t something you should leave in the hands of a mere woman. Or is it? This is the sixth book In which Persis is Our Heroine, and I’ve loved every single one of them.

We’ll stay on the Indian sub-continent, but change the mood completely, and look at a real door-stopper: High: A Journey across the Himalayas, through Pakistan, India, Bhutan, Nepal and China: by Erika Fatland (translated by Kari Dickson). Erika Fatland is a Norwegian anthropologist. She’s undertaken here quite a journey: the one outlined in the title of her book. She observes the sights and sounds of – often very remote -cities, towns and villages on her travels, describing her meetings with locals. These can be the inhabitants of these communities, or religious leaders, nuns, bureaucrats, countryside rangers – even a king: even the dispossessed. In particular, women’s lives are still on the whole greatly impacted by tradition and custom. A big chunk of a book, this is nevertheless highly readable and accessible, and engagingly translated.

Travel in unfamiliar places always brings challenges of one kind or another. None more so than when you are deliberately abandoned on a deserted and inhospitable island in the South Pacific. This was the fate, in the early 18th century, of Alexander Selkirk. His misadvenures have already been imagined by Daniel Defoe, in Robinson Crusoe. Now Francesca de Tores has done it again, in Castaway. I’m reading it now. And it’s no swashbuckling adventure, I can tell you. Think rats, mosquitos, and not a single mod con, 18th century style, to help you along. (For ‘mod con’, read eating or drinking vessel, knife, axe, change of clothing, blanket ….).  Over time, Selkirk’s back story is trickled into the story. Our task as readers is to observe this man reveal himself as he comes to understand himself better.

Paul Lynch greatly enjoyed Francesca de Tores‘ previous book, Saltblood, and as I got a lot from reading his Prophet Song, I’ll end my chain with it. It was one of my winning reads of 2024.  It’s set in Ireland in the near future, after a fascist government has been elected to power. Long breathless paragraphs, light on punctuation, drive the story on as everyday wife, mother and daughter Eilish ‘s decision making and relationship with her children and family gradually becomes increasingly erratic, as the government increases its stranglehold on everyday life, as violence and the impossibility of everyday living increases. It’s a deeply uncomfortable read. Perhaps even more so now than when I first read it.

One way or another, I’ve wandered pretty far from the starting point this month. What will happen next month, I wonder, when our starting point is a book already on my TBR list:  Maggie O’Farrell‘s Land?