Books and reading – From Pyrenees to Pennines

Six Degrees of Separation: from The Correspondent to A Little Trickerie

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

I have had a lot of trouble with this chain: It’s stumbled together, rather than gracefully evolved. And it begins with a book I haven’t read. The Correspondent, by Virginia Evans is a debut epistolary novel exploring the life of Sybil Van Antwerp, a prickly, 73-year-old retired Maryland lawyer navigating deteriorating eyesight and past grief.

I decided to go with a woman who writes – not letters, but a notebook. Forbidden Notebook, by Alba de Céspedes and translated by Ann Goldstein, is set in 1950s Rome, about Valeria Cossati, a 43-year-old wife and mother who starts a secret diary. Her dreams are humble: to have space in the house for herself, and just a little time. Writing in this forbidden journal causes her to question her restricted domestic life, her husband’s patriarchal authority, and her own identity, leading to a profound personal awakening.

What about a woman – and a man too, in fact – who hadn’t even known they were dissatisfied, until …. ? This story is told in André Aciman’s Room on the Sea. Paul and Catherine are two married professionals in their 60s who meet during a sultry New York City jury selection. Over a week, their initial connection deepens into a secret, intense, and philosophical romance, exploring themes of yearning, regret, and the temptation to act on missed opportunities. This novella charmed me as much as this man, this woman charmed each other. Their easy teasing relationship, their way with words, their openness with one another had me rooting for them.

Maybe Paul and Catherine have an affair. Maybe they don’t. My next book, Phil Harrison’s The First Day begins with an affair and its consequences. It’s a book of two halves. exploring a destructive affair between Samuel Orr, a married Belfast preacher with a twelve year old son Philip, and Anna, a young Beckett scholar. Anna falls pregnant, they keep the baby … and everything falls apart. Fast forward thirty years to New York where that baby, Sam is now living. He’s our narrator – actually it turns out he always has been. Why is he there? Why is he choosing to stay under the radar? Eventually, horrified, we find out. This is a very readable book about faith, about power-imbalance, about desire, about long shadows cast by single events.

In The First Day, Samuel Orr is never referred to as anything but ‘Orr’. In James Meek’s Your Life Without Me, the main protagonist, an English teacher, is only ever known as Mr. Burnham. The story centres on him as he navigates the death of his wife Ada, and his strained relationship with his truculent teenage daughter Leila. And there’s Raf, ex-pupil with whom he maintains close contact. Is Mr. Burnham going to be implicated when Raf is discovered in a major act of terrorim? Despite the perhaps over-neat ending, this is a well-delivered book about four flawed and compromised people, building into a compassionate and involving story.

Leila is an awkward and motherless teenager. Let’s go back twelve centuries and find another: Agnes, in Emily Maguire’s Rapture. Brought up and educated by her father in a world of men, Agnes renders herself unsuitable marriage material in 9th century Mainz. When her father unexpectedly dies, she disguises herself as a man and enters a monastery. The book catalogues her life as a respected scholar and scribe in an austere Benedictine monastery, and her subsequent adventures which see her travel to Athens, to Rome, where her scholarship, her piety ensure she’s always noticed by those who matter. She lives always with the fear of being found out for who she is, with the discomfort of her tightly bound breasts, with her tussles with herself over her austere faith. We come to know Agnes/John as a child, a scholar, a woman, a lover, a teacher… and finally a pope. An absorbing, well researched, imagined and audacious story, transporting me to the reality of religious life in 9th century Europe.

We’ll stay in the past, but in early Tudor England, and meet a young vagrant, Tibb Ingleby, in Rosanna Pike’s A Little Trickerie. Her mother dies, and Tibb has to make her way alone in a world where vagrancy is a crime. Meeting a young lad, Ivo, makes a big difference and the two team up. One day he disappears, and her next adventure sees her falling in with a band of strolling players. And on the story goes, vivaciously told by uneducated Tibb, who nevertheless has a way with words. Who knew that being naked was ‘wearing a no-clothes outfit’? Through her we meet the often horrifying prejudices and superstitions of early 16th century England, The last section of the book is inspired by the story of a real woman known as the Holy Maid of Leominster who, like Tibb herself, engaged in fraud and ‘trickeries’ . Fraudster or not, Tibb is an engaging character, doing what she can to get through life as best she can, never hurting those she holds dear. The ending disappointed, but till then, I found it an involving story.

So there we have it. Six books, six or more characters with tales to tell about their ordinary – or not so ordinary – lives. Next month, we’re to begin with Charlotte McConaghy‘s Wild Dark Shore, set on a remote small island housing the world’s largest seed bank. That should give scope for next month’s Six Degrees to scatter in many different directions. If you don’t already … why not join in?

Six Degrees of Separation: From Wuthering Heights to Back in the Day

I gave Six Degrees a miss for several months, feeling as though I’d lost my way with it. But it’s rather addictive – so I’m back.

Kate: Books are my Favourite and Best

This month starts with Emily Brontë‘s Wuthering Heights. Whether or not you’ve read the book, or seen any of the film adaptations, you’ll know that anti-hero Heathcliff is a vengeful misfit, and a very angry man.

So I’m beginning my chain with another: Emily’ s own brother, who is the subject of Robert Edric‘s book Sanctuary. Bramwell is the family’s black sheep, fighting his failures, his addictions, his inability to find a way to make something of his life. He is in fact the ‘author’ of this book. He paints a sorry picture of his stumbling path, in the final year of his young life, towards illness, addiction and death. Edric has carefully constructed this book in a series of vignettes that barely constitute a narrative, but which leave us feeling bewildered sympathy for an intelligent young man who has utterly lost his way. A beautifully imagined reconstruction of a life ill-lived.

My next choice features not just one, but two self-destructive men. The Two Roberts, by Damian Barr, re-imagines the lives of two now little remembered Scottish painters from the early years of the twentieth century, Bobby McBride and Robert Colquhoun. These working class Glasgow lads, homosexuals at a time when it was still illegal, at first made a success of both their lives and careers with their prodigious talents. They worked hard, but played harder, and their wild parties were awash with hard liquor. And this eventually became a problem. Their self-destruction tumbles them further and further into poverty. An immersive, sympathetic imagining of two lives. The book illustrates well the blossoming of two talents, and their chaotic collapse, as well as showing what it meant to be queer in a society which both reviled and punished homosexuality.

What about a book – a true story – about two men who might also appear to most as failures in life? Under the Hornbeams, by Emma Tarlo . She was a University professor (anthropology) living near Regents Park, and was introduced early in lockdown to two very unusual men. They lived, completely without shelter other than that offered by the hornbeam trees, in a little unfrequented spot in Regents Park, and had done so for some years. They didn’t identify as homeless, and considered their lifestyle a positive choice. Tarlo is intrigued, and their relationship deepens into friendship. Not that of a middle class saviour bringing food and practical gifts to the men, but one of give and take. She appreciates the increasingly deep conversations that take place, grows to love and appreciate the natural world in a different way, and to review with increasing dissatisfaction her own pressured life as a university head of department. Tarlo affords the men dignity as she writes about them, and recognises the dangers and discomfort of many aspects of their chosen life style: not least that the still-in-force 1824 Vagrancy Act still criminalises homelessness.

Here’s another unusual life, as recounted in This, My Second Life, by Patrick Charnley. This is a work of fiction. Up to a point. The story that narrator Jago Trevarno tells is his to tell, but it’s entirely informed by Patrick Charnley’s own life experience of his cardiac arrest and brain injury. This transformation from Jago’s high-achieving life lived to a large extent in the fast lane to a much simpler existence lived off-grid on his uncle’s farm is as much the subject of this story as the tale of how he and his uncle contend with a thoroughly villainous neighbour, Bill Sligo who – unaccountably – wants to buy part of Jacob’s farm. Jago’s new life – simple, measured, suits his new circumstances. Sligo’s nefarious plans force Jago into risky courses of action which could all too easily go wrong. Much of the delight of this book is in its spare. almost elegiac writing, bringing Joseph’s farm and Jago’s new circumstances gently yet vividly to life. I hope Charney can find a voice beyond this one, so effective at its sympathetic depiction of his hero’s brain injury. His writing deserves to be more than a one-book-wonder.

This month seems to be about the outcast. So let’s have an entirely different one, in RJ Palacio’s YA novel Wonder. This is a book about an ordinary 10 year old boy, who isn’t ordinary at all, because in his short life he’s undergone dozens of operations on his face. So abnormal, even frightening is his appearance that it’s impossible to pass him by without staring, or very obviously dropping your gaze. He’s much loved by his family – his parents and older sister Via – but he’s been home-educated till now. But this is the moment to send him out into the ‘normal’ world of school. This is the story of his first year there: a story of bullying, meanness, cruelty even, but also kindness and acceptance. Told by August himself – the boy who lives with his deformity – it’s a moving, thought-provoking roller-coaster of a story showing how even those who love him most can be tested in their acceptance of him, and even those who reject him can – eventually – learn that he is so much more than an exceptionally ugly face.

This chain has been entirely about men and boys living out their lives – with greater or lesser degrees of success – outside the mainstream. So we’ll finish in the same way,with Back in the Day: Oliver Lovrenski (Translated with astonishing bravura by Nichola Smalley) The four protagonists have come with their families as immigrants from various parts of the world – narrator Ivor is from Croatia and Marco from Somalia for instance. Clever and ambitious, they lose interest in school when they overtake their classmates and remain unchallenged. Dreams of becoming lawyers are exchanged for knives and protecting other family members. Drug dealing leads to institutional care for one, and a slippery slope to violence, machetes and guns. Will eventual grief and remorse result in a turning point? This is a tough, intense yet rewarding read by a young Norwegian of Croatian heritage who wrote it when he was just 19. I hope there’s more from him, and from his talented translator.

However did I come to make this chain exclusively male (albeit with two female authors)? It’s International Women’s Day tomorrow after all. Ah well, next month’s book is by a woman, Virginia Evans: her epistolary novel The Correspondent. Next month, why not join in Six Degrees … if you don’t already?

Love your Library in Premià de Dalt

Premià de Dalt is Premià de Mar’s slightly posher sister, just up the hill from here. It has an older town centre, with a church dating from the 10th century, and tantalising views of the sea far below. And a population of only 10,000.

I went to explore by myself on Friday. Malcolm wasn’t feeling so good, and that very night, Emily and I were due to fall victim to a thoroughly nasty sickness bug. It’s been that sort of holiday. Weather (i), transport limitations (ii) and ill- health (iii) have all been conspiring against us. (i) is about to hit again, (ii) are still with us, and (iii) is still afflicting Malcolm.

One of my discoveries was the town’s library. I was impressed. It’s situated by a local park, and there’s a large balcony with tables and chairs so you can read or study there in the fresh air.

It’s well-stocked.

Here are the books available if you’re studying English:

… or just reading in English. There were about 100 books to choose from – the old classics and up-to-the-minute reading choices.

I couldn’t take photos of the study area or the children’s library without expressly seeking permission from those using the spaces. So here’s a display from the chidren’s area.

The feel is very different from a British community library. When I’m ‘on duty’ in our local one, we talk about our tasks together in normal speaking voices, chat with friends who come to exchange their books, and take little notice as the children in the Junior Library enjoy a noisy morning music session or listen to stories on certain mornings of the week. Here in Spain are notices encouraging silence, in the way I remember from my childhood. I’m happy with both.

But in case it all sounds a bit serious to you. Here’s the fellow who welcomes you into the library, then shepherds you out.

Meanwhile, on her way home from work, Emily had popped into their local library to get books for the children.

Who knew that Winnie the Witch would be called Brunhilda in Catalan? Or that she would be so popular for so long? My children, all parents themselves, enjoyed her books decades ago.

I’ll hold over my own reading choices. They’ll keep.

For Rebecca’s Love your Library.

Love your Library in December

What a lightweight. A mere seven library books read in December. To be fair, I also read – and almost finished in December – another book, from The Library of a Friend. But that may not count.

But I had some Right Good Reads.

Simon Jenkins‘ A Short History of America: from Tea Party to Trump got a mini- review here and a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐rating .

I fairly raced through Roisín O’Donnell‘s Nesting which details the story of Ciara, as she attempts to escape her controlling, domineering husband Ryan with her two small daughters. When she plucks up the courage to go, even finding a bed that first night is a major achievement. This book describes her attempts to move on as she attempts to keep two children fed, clean and entertained from the bedroom of a hotel partly dedicated to the homeless. A difficult subject tackled with verve and compassion by O’Donnell. ⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Invisible Land: Hubert Mingarelli (Translated by Sam Taylor). An unnamed photographer has, just before the book begins, been documenting the liberation of a concentration camp. Now he wants to document ordinary German villagers. What he saw in the camps simmers away, quietly enraging him. We see, as he does, the bucolic calm of the countryside, as an impertinent and shocking contrast. A compassionate exploration of the – often unseen -consequences of war.⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Half Moon: Mary Beth Keane. Malcolm and Jess are in crisis. She’s just left the marriage for a breather and to take stock. There’s a blizzard in town. Theiy have financial worries. They’ve run through shocking amounts of money spent on unsuccessful IVF treatment – Jess can’t leave aside her dream of having a family. And Malcolm has taken on more financial commitments than he’d let Jess know about when he bought The Half Moon. The bar isn’t now doing well. The books backs and forths through their lives – Jess’s law degree, the community and families that surround them, Jess’s tentative exploration of a new relationship. This is a small town. Everyone knows everybody else’s business. How will things pan out? Only one way to find out. Read the book.⭐⭐⭐⭐

Francesca De Tores’ Saltblood follows the life story of an actual historical figure, Mary Read. Little is known of her but the barest of biographical details, but de Tores fleshes out her entire life to tell an engaging and richly atmospheric tale. Raised as a boy (that’s a story in itself) Mary/Mark first works in service. Then she joins the navy, and later the army – always concealing her female identity in these most male of environments. Read, who narrates her own story, is thoughtful and reflective, describing both humdrum days and moments of danger and adventure . There’s her marriage, her return to the sea, finally as a pirate … This is a well-written and realised drama which brought to life seafaring – and indeed day-to-day existence on land both in Europe and the Bahamas. Transatlantic trade and piracy were part of everyday life. I believe it’s historically correct, and it’s certainly a nuanced and compelling story inviting sympathy for anyone joining this remittingly tough way of life: especially if she’s a woman. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Back in the Day: Oliver Lovrenski. I want to draw attention to the quality of the translation by Nichola Smalley. Largely innocent of capital letters and full stops, this breathlessly episodic story is told in the street argot of the young immigrant who tells this tale. And Smalley has this language, and style of presentation off to a T. The four protagonists have come with their families as immigrants from various parts of the world. Clever and ambitious, they lose interest in school when they overtake their classmates and remain unchallenged. Dreams of becoming lawyers are exchanged for knives and protecting other family members. Drug dealing leads to institutional care for one, and a slippery slope to violence, machetes and guns. Will eventual grief and remorse result in a turning point? This is a tough, intense yet rewarding read by a young Norwegian of Croatian heritage who wrote it when he was just 19. I hope there’s more from him, and from his talented translator. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

And finally, Annie Proulx’s Close Range. This isn’t so much a review as a place-holder as I haven’t read every story in this collection yet. Mainly because, much as I was enjoying them, I need a break from the colloquial style in which they’re written every now and then, even though it’s precisely this that brings the stories to life and makes them vivid. They’re about insular rugged people living tough lives in an unforgiving landscape – often lonely and contending with daily hardship. This doesn’t make for a bleak read however. The tone and language of the stories brings them vividly to life. More later when I’ve read the lot!

And that other book, lent by a friend? A brilliant evocation of Jane Austen’s life and times, immaculately researched, but immensely readable, by Lucy Worsley: Jane Austen at home. It had to be read, with the airwaves full of Austen memorabilia last year, the 250th year of her birth. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Unbelievably, I only have two books on loan at the moment. The first, plucked from the shelves on a whim, is proving utterly absorbing: Craft Land – a journey through Britain’s lost arts and vanishing trades, by James Fox. And the next is a doorstopper: Erika Fatland‘s High- A journey across the Himalaya through Pakistan, Indai, Bhutan, Nepal and China. I might need a big dose of fiction after that little lot.

For Rebecca’s Love your Library

My Favourite Fiction in 2025

As I turned the last page of one of the very first books I read this year, I knew it would make my 2025 Top Ten. It may even be my Top Read. It’s Lucy Steeds‘s The Artist, set in rural Provence in the years after WWI. Rupert is sent off to France to write about the reclusive and wildly successful artist, once a friend of the deceased Cezanne, Edouard Tartuffe. Here he meets the idiosyncratic and uncommunicative painter, and his timid, almost invisible niece, Ettie, who serves his every need. This is their story – evocative, involving and completely immersive.

Shortly after this, I read Tessa Hadley‘s The Party. Hadley packs a lot into this novella about two student sisters, Evelyn and Moira, living in Bristol on the cusp of the 1950s. We meet them at a party in an all-but abandoned pub. We’re introduced to their home life, and to their sortie out of this stifling environment. A thoughtful and enjoyable evocation of a period of recent history and its awareness of class, its sexual and societal mores that feels at once so distant, yet so very recognisable.

Douglas Bruton‘s Woman in Blue next. He must have been fascinated by Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, in the Rijksmuseum: he knows it so well. In his story, an unnamed man visits this picture every day, for several hours, knows it intimately and interrogates it for meaning. The other narrator is the young woman in the picture, who describes how it is she comes to sit for this particular portrait, and her own feelings. This book explores the boundaries between reality and illusion in art, inspecting the portrait and the two protagonists intimately. It’s a captivating novella, with a surprise ending, and beautifully expressed throughout.

Joseph O’Connor‘s The Ghosts of Rome now. A thriller that starts where My Father’s House leaves off: though it can be read independently of the earlier book without difficulty. We’re in Nazi-occupied Rome in 1944. The novel details the activities of a group in the Vatican known as The Choir, daring Escape-Line activists, who have real achievements under their belts despite the disapproval of the Pope, and the efforts of Obersturmbannführer Paul Hauptmann to have them brought down. The writing is immediate, graphic and authentic; and the book is based on a real knowledge and understanding of this particular slice of Rome’s wartime history. It’s a thrilling and involving story that I was captivated by from the very first page.

Georgina Harding‘s Land of the Living has two settings: the Burma campaign towards the end of WWII, set in the beautifully exotic and remote landscape of Nagaland with its rains, forests, waterfalls and exotic birds; and the muted grey, flat Norfolk farmland to which Lt. Charles Ashe returns to farm following his wartime soldiering. Ashe soon marries the woman he was engaged to, Claire, and embarks on the hard day to day life of a Norfolk famer. He can’t – won’t – communicate with her about the horrors he’s encountered. She doesn’t know how to break his protective shell, finds she hardly knows him. Their mutual incomprehension, and Ashe’s two vastly different worlds is well-wrought. A vivid and emotionally charged book.

The Safekeep: Yael van der Wouden. We’re in a small Dutch town in the 1960s. WWII has cast a long shadow. Memories of the hardships endured then, and of the fall-out from the defeat of Germany intercede in every day life.This book keeps on delivering surprises. Is it about a lonely – and frankly unpleasant – young woman, Isabel, left living in the family home after her parents had died and her brothers departed? Is it about an astonishingly unexpected lesbian love affair? Or perhaps something else altogether? An absorbing, cleverly plotted book, which made me aware of a part of Dutch history about which I knew little.

We Germans, by Alexander Starritt, takes the form of a long account written by an elderly German, shortly before his death, to his British grandson, who has, perhaps clumsily, been asking what the old man did back in WWII. In 1944, Meissner, a German artillery soldier, had been fighting with his unit in Russia, in Ukraine. But in Poland, he and a few others somehow got separated when detailed to look for a rumoured food depot. They’re forced to kill as they attempt to muddle their way back to their unit, They witness horror. They steal. They squabble. This is a well-drawn book, a deft exploration of the moral contradictions inherent in saving one’s own life at the cost of the lives of others. Though fiction, it’s clearly deeply rooted in the reality of the helpless, pointless horror of the last period of the war for those often starving people, both army and hapless civilians who found themselves marooned on the Eastern Front.

With Benjamin Wood‘s Seascraper, we’re in the 1950s. Thomas is nineteen, and lives in poverty with his mum in a dishevelled house in a depressed Lancashire coastal town , scrabbling a living since his much-loved grandfather’s death by continuing his work as a shankar – prawn collector – using a pony and trap. Though bright, he never completed his schooling. His dream is to become a musician. One day, an American film director who somehow meets his mum involves Thomas in his idea to use a stretch of local beach as the atmospheric backdrop to his latest film. And he’s willing to pay Thomas well. Although he’s sceptical, this is an opportunity perhaps to escape his obligations, the bleak poverty of his situation. Of course, things don’t turn out to be so straightforward, but yet the story ends with a glimmer of hope. This story, unfolding a film-that-might-be is cinematic in its evocation of the bleak seaside landscape and Thomas’ dreary, tough existence. It packs a lot into its 160 pages. Benjamin Wood is someone whose writing is to be savoured.

The Two Roberts by Damian Barr re-imagines two lives: those of Bobby McBride and Robert Colquhoun, two twentieth century painters of whom you may not have heard. Both born in working-class Glasgow just before WWI, they both had a struggle at home to be permitted to attend Glasgow School of Art. Where they met, and soon became inseparable, living and working together, exploring their homosexuality at a time when they risked ostracism and imprisonment by being so much as noticed for this. Early success propelled them to star-status. They worked hard, but played harder, and their tendency to self-destruct sent them on a downward trajectory towards poverty and early death. An immersive, sympathetic imagining of two lives. The first part, where the two men overcome their difficult circumstances to become rising stars is perforce much more enjoyable than the later chapters illustrating their self-destruction. But the book describes well the blossoming of two talents, as well as showing what it meant to be queer in a society which both reviled and punished homosexuality.

The Wax Child by Olga Ravn is beautifully translated by Martin Aitken. This story takes us to 17th century Denmark, where on average, one ‘witch’ was burned every five days. This kind of event was mirrored all over Europe. Our narrator is a little beeswax doll fashioned by a impoverished noblewoman, Christenze Krukow. Omniscient, she sees and hears all that goes on. How her maker is one of a group of women who work, and sing, and gossip, and practice the folk remedies they learned from their own mothers: who protect one another from violence from husbands or others in their household: who become seen in their communities as practisers of magic and witchcraft. The book is interspersed with spells and incantations which exist not to harm, but to protect; to prevent accident and disease; to bid others be kind; to divine if someone’s life may soon end. Inevitably, most die, found guilty of witchcraft. This book is beautiful, horrifying, visceral, poetic. There is a sense of spells being woven on every page. The women in this story existed. They died as ‘witches’ and now they are remembered in this powerfully atmospheric and evocative re-imagining of their circumstances.

I made this list of Top Ten books a week or so ago. But lo! Since then I have had two further 5 ⭐reads. I’ll review those in my Love your Library round-up next week. They couldn’t be more different from each other. They’re Saltblood: Francesca de Tores and Back in the Day: Oliver Lovrenski (Translated by Nichola Smalley).

It’s been a good year for memorable books. Of the 112 or so books I’ve read, well over half have scored 4⭐and above.

Only one has gained but a single star: Horrible Histories author Terry Deary came and spoke at our local Independent book shop about his venture into crime writing – Actually I’m a Murderer. I thought I should give this book a chance, even though Cosy Crime isn’t my thing. I tried. I have concluded that Cosy Crime definitely isn’t my thing.

I already have a pile of books, mainly from the library – fiction, works in translation, and non-fiction, awaiting my attention in 2026. Not to mention the books that sit on our bookshelves, month after month, wondering why I never get round to them. One day …

The featured photo is by Nitin Arya, via Pexels.

My Favourite Non-Fiction Reads of the Year

It’s that time of year, The endless lists. I’m joining in too. Next week, I’ll write about my favourite fiction. But this week, I’ll instead focus on my 10 favourite non-fiction reads of 2025. I’m not ranking them. I’ll start with my most recent read, and reach back towards January. ‘Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin’. (who’s old enough and British enough to remember this welcoming formula introducing Listen with Mother on the Home Service at 1.45 every weekday in the early 1950s?)

A Short History of America: from Tea Party to Trump: Simon Jenkins. Jenkins puts right my formerly really rather sketchy grap of American history in a highly readable account of its early days as a barely inhabited continent, through its early discovery by Asiatic peoples on the one coast, and Vikings and similar on the other. Native American; intellectual and economic development; the long history of slavery; the Civil War; and right up to more recent history and the emergence of Trump. It’s lucid, informative and useful.

The Lie of the Land: Guy Shrubsole. This is a book that should be read by every sitting MP, particularly those Tory MPs anxious to preserve the status quo as far as our countryside is concerned. It is about our countryside and who gets to decide how it’s used: about the way the countryside has been treated has made the UK so nature-impoverished. It’s about how our history has give much of our countryside over to the landowner. It’s about the shooting industry; the draining of the fens; the Enclosure Acts. And it’s a Call to Action.

Island Stories – An Unconventional History of Britain: David Reynolds. In this book, Reynolds demonstrates how England (not to be confused with Britain) has, from the earliest years, even before the Roman Empire took this island under its wing, been inextricably bound to mainland Europe and beyond in dozens of ways, both political and social. He shows how our Glorious Past, our days of Empire grew up in conditions that can never be repeated, and how in any case had many aspects – slavery, subjugation of indigenous peoples – of which we cannot be proud. He looks at the Brexit delusion of making a ‘clean break’ from Europe and demonstates its impossibility, especially in the context of the four nations that currently constitute the British Isles. A thought-provoking read.

And now for something completely different. Raising Hare: Chloe Dalton. Dalton finds a small, apparently abandoned leveret. This is her story. Of how she treads a difficult path of wishing to help it survive to adulthood, while respecting its wildness. But the creature has a profound effect on Dalton. She strives, as she describes in this book to restore a sense of the sacred and to meet an animal on its own terms. Its part in her life changes her forever.

Stuffed: Pen Vogler. This is a book to relish, as it journeys through the history of eating, in good times and in bad, in the British Isles. It doesn’t begin at the beginning, then go on until it comes to the end, and then stop. Instead it works thematically, focussing in turn on some of the foodstuffs that perhaps define us:for instance, bread & ale; turnips (yes, really!); herring; Yorkshire pudding; gruel … and several more. She tells a good story, bringing it right up to date by mentioning the campaigns by Marcus Rashford and Jamie Oliver, and comparing child poverty and malnutrition as it presents now, with Victorian and even earlier times. A well-researched and highly readable book.

Bird School: Adam Nicolson. Nicolson was not a birder. But he decided to change that, and had a rather superior bird hide built in a wild corner of his Sussex farm. And there, all manner of birds come, and he learns. And teaches us: about surviving; singing;breeding; flying; migrating – every aspect of bird life. The story however, turns somewhat depressing. Birds here are in decline, because the natural world is generally in decline. Nicholson tells us why, so we can join the fight for the natural world in our turn.

Let’s go indoors now, and off to America: All the Beauty in the World: Patrick Bringley. I loved this book. Here is a highly educated man who left his start-of-a-glittering-career in a period of grief following the death of his 27 year old brother, to become a museum attendant at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. He spent ten fulfilled years there. In his book he talks about the works of art he spent his day with; the collections themselves; his colleagues; the visitors; his personal life. He’s perceptive, likeable and tells a good story. The accompanying illustrations by Maya McMahon tantalisingly suggest the works we can see when we get there.

The Meteorites: Helen Gordon. I picked this up in the library on a whim. I knew little about Deep Space, and next to nothing about meteorites. Not only do I now know more about the rich variety of forms they take, how they are formed and where they might come from, but I’ve met the dealers, hunters academics and geologists involved in the meteorite community across the world. I now have a whole new perspective on our planet and outer space,and a hunger to know more, by reading this engaging and enjoyable book.

A little Book of Language: David Crystal. Here’s a book which with a broad brush, discusses all kinds of aspects of language: How a baby learns to communicate; how sounds are made; languages and dialects; writing; changing and evolving and disappearing languages; slang and style … and so much more. Not all of this was new to me – this is not the first Crystal book I’ve read – but all of it is told in a lively and engaging way, encouraging thought and discussion.

And finally … Island Dreams: Gavin Francis. This is a beautifully produced book. On heavy paper, with blue and black ink, the text is allowed generous space to breathe. As well, the text is interspersed – also generously – with maps old and new illustrating the outlines of islands he visits and discusses. These are the only illustrations. It encompasses myth, psychology, philosophy, literature and straightforward travel writing. So this is a book to savour and linger over, returning several times to the maps on display.

And if you’re going to push me into naming a favourite? Raising Hare, no question. Heartwarming, thoughtful, highlighting the tension between the natural world and our own, beautifully written.

I’m not going to be able to respond to any comments this weekend. Family Official Christmas, ahead of the usual date. But replies will happen.

Love Your Library

Rebecca of Bookish Beck fame has a monthly challenge – Love your Library. She uses her own post to tell us what she has read, what she is reading, what she gave up on or never even started, and what she’ll read next. That’s what I’ll do too.

But first. Why do I love my library? Well, I’m lucky. Our County Council still prioritises books. It’s not often that we have a week when no new stock comes into our branch. New releases; books that have won some literary prize; works in translation; books from small indie publishers; old favourites and non-fiction of all kinds all get a look in.

These days, our libraries run on a mixture of professional staff and volunteers: some smaller libraries are entirely volunteer-run. And I’m a volunteer at our local, bigger library. I love it. First of all, it’s easy to get first dibs on new stock. But the tasks are varied. Processing books from other libraries requested by our own readers. Sending copies of books we stock to other libraries who’ve requested them. Helping the public with queries about books; parking; local clubs; photocopying …. And shelving. Always shelving. But that’s OK. Being shallow, I often judge a book by its cover, and I rarely get through a morning without finding something appetising to borrow. To go with the dozen or more I usually have on reserve.

And anyway, on the morning I usually volunteer there’s a pre-school music group in the children’s section, and I’ll find myself singing along (strictly to myself) to ‘Hola! A todos aqui‘, or ‘Row, row, row your boat‘, as I wander round with my book trolley, shelving. Friends turn up to change their books. We have a quick chat. The morning passes quickly.

So. What have I read during November? Normally I’ll do a mini-review, but this post is quite long enough already, so star-ratings will have to do.

Magpie Murders: Anthony Horowitz ⭐⭐
Carte Blanche: Carlo Lucarelli (Translated by Michael Reynolds) ⭐⭐⭐⭐*
Peace on the Western Front: Mattia Signorini (Translated by Vicki Satlow) ⭐⭐⭐*
A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better: Benjamin Wood ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Rich People Have Gone Away: Regina Porter ⭐⭐⭐
The Dinner Party: Viola van de Sandt ⭐⭐⭐
The Frozen River: Ariel Lawhon ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Run Me to Earth: Paul Yoon⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Penelopiad: Margaret Atwood ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐*
The Wax Child: Olga Ravn (Translated by Martin Aitken) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐*
The Silver Book: Olivia Laing ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Burnt Shadows: Kamila Shamsie ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Before you say that seems a lot, remember that 4 (marked *) are novellas, and therefore short, reviewed here. But you’re right. This has been a book-heavy month.

Borrowed and yet to be read, or currently being read:

A Short History of America: from Tea Party to Trump: Simon Jenkins
Reward System: Jem Calder
Close Range: Wyoming Stories: Annie Proulx
The North Road: Rob Cowen

As I have nine books on reserve, it’s possible some of the already-borrowed books may end up unread. You can never tell. Some books I reserve come straight away. Some take so long I’d forgotten I’d reserved them. One hasn’t even been published yet!

I DID abandon a couple of books, but I forgot to note them down, and they went out of my head the second they got back to the library.

So that’s my month in books … and in my library. I took most of the shots in the minutes before the library opened, in order not to ruffle any feathers. Actually, it’s well-used and should look rather more peopled. But at least nobody’s been upset by being photographed on a bad-hair day.

Novellas in November

For a couple of years now, I’ve more or less promised to take part in Novellas In November, a reading challenge celebrating short books – those coming in at under 150, or – stretching it a bit – 200 pages, hosted by Bookish Beck and Cathy of746Books. This is the first year of keeping that promise. And I haven’t over-delivered. I’ve read a mere five this month.

The first wasn’t even on my would-like-to-read list at all. I simply found it on the library shelf, and thought it looked worth a go.

Peace on the Western Front: Mattia Signorini (Translated by Vicki Satlow)

I’m not sure what to make of this book. It re-imagines the now well-known story of the Christmas truce of 1914, when English and German soldiers gathered in No-Mans-Land to share food and play football. For one day only.
It’s a tale that could not fail to be moving. And yet I felt the points that were being made were rather over-spelled-out: that Signorini told, not showed what was going on for these two young men. For me it was a slightly flawed giving of the message that war squanders young lives pointlessly, leaving nothing positive in its wake.

Having lived in the Pyrenees, and being a fan of Colm Tóibín’s writing made my next one a very easy book to pick up.

A Long Winter: Colm Tóibín

Set in an isolated village in the Spanish Pyrenees, this is mainly the story of Miquel. He lives with his mother and father – his younger brother is away on military service. They are largely ostracised because his father largely ignores his neighbours. After his secretly alcoholic mother vanishes in a blizzard, Miguel spends the rest of the winter searching for her body. He eventually has one single friend, the young man Manolo who comes to keep house for this undomesticated father and son, and helps him come to terms with his grief. The story is written in a clipped style, removed from emotional expression. I find though,it’s stayed with me . I explore the unexplained inner life of Miquel: I wonder if his relationship with Manolo becomes sexual – there are hints. A powerful story with much to think about from such a short novella.

Next, a novella translated from the Danish – and another powerful read.

The Wax Child: Olga Ravn (Translated by Martin Aitken)

This story takes us to 17th century Denmark, where on average, one ‘witch’ was burned every five days. This kind of event was mirrored all over Europe. Our narrator is a little beeswax doll, fashioned by a impoverished noblewoman, Christenze Krukow. Omniscient, she sees and hears all that goes on. How her maker is one of a group of women who work, and sing, and gossip, and practice the folk remedies they learned from their own mothers: who protect one another. The book is interspersed with spells and incantations which exist not to harm, but to protect; to prevent accident and disease; to bid others be kind; to divine if someone’s life may soon end. This solidarity among women is looked on askance by men ‘The woman is more easily tempted by Satan, for she is weaker than the man in body and soul … When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil …’And so it comes to pass that several of these women are tried, found guilty …and die, horrifically. And yet this book is beautiful, horrifying, visceral, poetic. There is a sense of spells being woven on every page. The women in this story existed. They died as ‘witches’ and now they are remembered in this powerfully atmospheric and evocative re-imagining of their circumstances.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Carte Blanche: Carlo Lucarelli (Translated byMichael Reynolds)

We’re in Italy, April 1945. The Fascist regime is crumbling, but the Germans are still in town. Life is violent, messy, disordered. Nobody knows whom they can trust. Commissario De Luca, who just wants to be a good cop, has just joined the Police ranks having transferred from the Political Police. He doesn’t want to get involved in politics. But how can he not? The latest murder victim is Vittorio Reihnard. He is well-connected, has lots of lady-friends, has a stash of drugs. And De Luca finds he can’t just get on with finding the perpetrator. He has to point the finger at whoever the political high-ups wish. It’s tense, breathless, cleverly revealing right-wing corruption and misdeeds. Here’s a nation seeking new moral bearings, and a cop who’s disillusioned and worn out. There’s a lot packed into just over 100 pages. There are however, two further books in the series.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

And finally…

The Penelopiad: Margaret Atwood

Don’t tell anyone, but I’m not really a fan of Margaret Atwood’s writing, often finding it too dystopian for my taste. Recently, someone (was it you, Rebecca? suggested I try The Penelopiad. I’m glad I did. Most people know the story of king, soldier and adventurer Odysseus. Few people give much thought to his wife Penelope, abandoned during his long years away and forced to keep a constant stream of suitors at bay. This book puts that right. Now dead, Penelope wanders the Underworld, putting her own spin on events. She recounts her snarky relationship with the beautiful Helen of Troy. She details snippets about Odysseus’ doings: some describing the Homeric tales we read about, others giving a far less positive spin on his adventures. The narrative is interspersed with a Greek Chorus line of doomed maids: the ones whom Odysseus had killed on his return for their (unwilling) sexual alliances with Penelope’s suitors. Like Penelope herself, they are saucy, smirky, irreverent. A refreshing take on an extremely well-known legend.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Any other novellas this year? Well, yes, but only a few:

Seascraper: Benjamin Wood ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
French Windows: Antoine Laurain, translated by Louise Rogers LaLaurie ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Woman in Blue: Douglas Bruton ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Madame Sosostris & the Festival for the Broken-Hearted: Ben Okri ⭐⭐⭐

This last bit’s no novella. Well, it might become one I suppose. I needed a book for Becky’s NovemberShadows, and is was what I found.

Six Degrees of Separation: from Ghost Cities to My Father’s House

Kate: Books are my Favourite and Best

I haven’t read Siang Lu’s Ghost Cities. But I’ve read several reviews, and it seems that this novel is inspired by the vacant, uninhabited megacities of China, and follows multiple narratives many years apart. In the present day, Xiang is fired from his job as a translator at Sydney’s Chinese Consulate after it’s discovered he’s been using Google Translate. This alternates with stories from the past of a dictatorial Imperial Emperor and his escapades.

I immediately thought of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, which I read far too long ago to comment on seriously now. But it begins: ’Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his.’ And here begins Italo Calvino’s compilation of fragmentary urban images.

This Italian author made me think of one travel writer’s account of one part of Italy. Jan Morris’ Trieste and The Meaning of Nowhere. I felt a little ambivalent about this book. I wanted to like it more than I actually did. It’s a meditation on, and an exploration of Trieste, a city history has left behind, whose glory days are over, which is top of nobody’s tourist agenda, and which Jan Morris entertains strong feelings for. She discusses its history, its streets, its day-to-day life in a loving, melancholic way, and relates it to her own experience of being outside the mainstream. It’s a book which I’m glad to have read about a part of Italy I don’t know, but which I was happy enough to finish and set aside.

Vigàta in Sicily is another town which time has perhaps forgotten. It’s also imaginary, and the setting for a series of murder mysteries by Andrea Camilleri. Despite the fact that as a detective series, which therefore concerns murder and other crimes, the Inspector Montalbano books are ones I turn to when I need a bit of relief from weightier tomes. I love to meet the people Camilleri describes. I like to accompany Montalbano as he seeks out delicious meals at home or at neighbourhood restaurants. And I like to observe his relationships with his colleagues. The Voice of the Violin doesn’t disappoint. It’s about a murder which might have taken a very long time to have come to light if the police car in which Montalbano was a passenger hadn’t careered into a car parked outside a villa…. And in due course, Montalbano’s curiosity is piqued … He finds a body, of course. And up to five people might be responsible for the gruesome murder. But who? And you’ll need to read this book to find out why the title it’s been given is so apposite.

From one Italian detective to another. I love Commissario Brunetti, and I love the picture of Venice that Donna Leon, his creator, always conjures up. The alleys between ancient buildings, those palazzi themselves, the little bars Brunetti frequents…. and so on and so on. So even before I get involved in the plot, I’m absorbed by the ambience she creates. Death at la Fenice is, like all Leon’s tales, a good story. This one features the conductor who’s murdered during the interval at a performance at la Fenice. Whodunnit? His wife? That soprano? Her lover? As ever, the result of Brunetti’s investigation is an unexpected one, and convincing. Read it.

We’re staying in Italy for the rest of this chain. But we’ll leap back several centuries in Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait.. Lucrezia, third daughter Cosimo de’ Medici, finds herself betrothed, then married to Alfonso, heir to the Duke of Ferrara when her older sister, his original choice, dies. The story flits between her early life in Florence and her early married life. Underneath, throughout her marriage, her conviction that she will be killed by her apparently loving husband bubbles away. She’s a Duchess now, her father-in-law having died. She’s only 15, more than 10 years younger than her husband. Although she’s been brought up privileged, her new status brings with it loneliness and challenges. Virtually her only constant friend is her maid.

This book links with the two previous ones by being rich in quotidian detail. O’Farrell paints the pictures of her privileged life in such a way that we can hear, see and smell the scenes that surround her: her father’s exotic menagerie; her husband’s castrati singers; the sumptuous clothing; the simple bowls of fruit which she examines with her painterly eye – she is a talented artist. This rich attention to detail brings an already absorbing story fully to life.

Still Italy, still history, but much more recent in the first volume of Joseph O’Connor‘s Escape Line Trilogy. My Father’s House is an immersive story, taking as its starting point the fact that while Rome was under German occupation in 1942, there was an Irish priest, Hugh O’Flaherty, based at the Vatican who was involved in running an escape line for Jews, escaped POWs and resistance fighters during WWII.

The plan is to evacuate scores of refugees and resistance fighters, all separately hidden, out of Rome on Christmas Eve, when perhaps guard is lowered. Plans take place at the rehearsals of a specially convened Chamber Choir: singing drowns out the mutter of whispered instructions to each singer in turn. Each player in the plot has a role, No one knows what any other individual is required to do. Gestapo leader Paul Hauptmann has his suspicions that a plan is afoot, and O’Flaherty is in his sights.

This is a work of fiction, even though heavily indebted to known facts. It’s told in a series of distinct voices, all characters in the book. Each voice is distinctive, authentic, even funny: Irish, English, Italian, aristocrats and shopkeepers. An often thrilling, always thought-provoking and absorbing story.

My chain seems to owe everything to Italy, and little to the starter book. I won’t do any better next month. I’m unliklely to participate, as we’ll be away, and I don’t like the idea of not responding promptly to comments. But the starter book will be Dominic Amerena’s novel about authors and publishing, I Want Everything. I think I’ll try to read it anyway.

With thanks to the photographers from Pixabay whose photos I have used: LeoLeo (cities); VBosica (Miremare, Trieste); Gianni Cio 10 (Sicily); Filip Filopovic (Ferrara); Davide Cattini (Rome).  And from Unsplash, Giusi Borrasi (La Fenice, Venice)

Six Degrees of Separation: The Safekeep to Pachinko

Kate: Books are my Favourite and Best

Thank you so much for putting Yael van der Wouden‘s The Safekeep on my reading list Kate. It’s a book which delivered so much, and also invites any number of ways the Six Degrees contributor could go.

I settled for looking at those parts of WWII little known about here, as far as the German perspective goes. and begin with We Germans, by Alexander Storritt. ‘What did you do in the war?’ a young British man asks his German Grandad. And is told, in the form of a long letter found after his death. In 1944, Meissner, a German artillery soldier, had been fighting with his unit in Russia, in Ukraine. But in Poland, he and a few others somehow got separated when detailed to look for a rumoured food depot. They see Polish villagers hung by unidentified men from a single tree ‘in bunches, like swollen plums.’ They witness rape and crucifixion. They steal a tank and use it against the Russians. They squabble bitterly with each other. They kill enemy soldiers without compunction. This is a well-drawn book, a deft exploration of the moral contradictions inherent in saving one’s own life at the cost of the lives of others. Though fiction, it’s clearly deeply rooted in the reality of the helpless, pointess horror of the last period of the war for those often starving people, both army and hapless civilians who found themselves marooned on the Eastern Front.

A book in a similar vein is Hubert Mingarelli‘s A Meal in Winter (translated by Sam Taylor). An account of three German soldiers whose task on a bitterly cold winter day is to hunt down Jews in hiding and bring them back to the Polish concentration camp where they are based, for an inevitable end. This unenviable task is better than the alternative: staying in camp to shoot those who were found the previous day. They talk – about the teenage son of one of them – and they find just one Jew. Is he their enemy, deserving his fate, or is he just like them, a young man doing his best to survive? What if they return to camp with nobody to show for their day’s hunting? As the men retreat to an abandoned cottage to prepare a meagre meal, their hatred and fear jostle with their well-submerged more humane feelings to provide the rest of the drama for this short, thought provoking book.

This reminds me of a book about the seige of Leningrad, which I read many years ago, but which made a lasting impression on me: Helen Dunmore‘s The Siege. The novel revolves around five interwoven lives during the war when Leningrad was completely surrounded by the Germans. Winter came and there was no food or coal, it was a brutal winter and one half of the population of the city perished. What energy the citizens had was devoted to the constant struggle to stay alive. Some of the strategies they employed will stay with me forever. Soaking leather bookmarks to get some nourishment from the resulting ‘stock’, for instance.

Let’s leave war behind, but looks at another struggle for survival in Cormac McCarthy‘s The Road: another book I read a long time ago. The tale of a father and son trudging through post-Apocalypse America. This is a land where nothing grows, no small animals are there for the hunting: where communities and dwellings are deserted and long-since looted for anything that might sustain life a few more days: where other humans might prove peaceable, but might instead be evil and dangerous. This book is bleakly, sparely written. Conversations between father and son are clipped, necessary. No speech marks. Sometimes little punctuation. Every ounce of energy is needed for the business of staying alive. This book, in which nobody lives happily-ever-after has stayed with me.

Oh dear, back to war, but staying with relationships within a family. V.V. Ganeshananthan‘s Brotherless Night. This book plunged me right into a war that had previously been an ongoing news item from somewhere very far away. The ethnic conflict in 1980s Sri Lanka between the Sinhalese dominant state and several separatist Tamil separatist groups is brought to life by the Tamil narator, Sashi. She’s 16 when we meet her, and an aspiring doctor. She has 4 brothers, 3 older, one younger. We follow the family’s fortunes as an ethic-inspired war breaks out, and daily life becomes more difficult, disrupting her education and resulting in her older brothers and their friend K joining the fray at the expense of their own education. Loyalty to a movement rather than family is alien to their parents. Tensions arise. Tragedy strikes. Normally conforming Sashi is moved to become a medic at a field hospital for the Tigers, because what is more important than relieving suffering, saving lives, whoever needs that help? As the war becomes ever more destructive, her personal conflicts and the family’s day to day arrangements become ever more complex. Years go by as the story unfolds. This story is impeccably and compassionately researched. It is urgent, intimate, written with striking imagery and immediacy. A distant conflict, several decades old is brought right into our homes and becomes alive once more.

Another book I read ages ago is Min Jin Lee‘s Pachinko. This too is about not civil war, but about two nations – Korea and Japan -who historically have a less than happy relationship, and how this conflict plays out in the life of a single family, throughout the twentieth century. Some stayed in Korea (South Korea in due course), and others tried for a new life in Japan. None found it easy. This is a book about resilience and emotional conflict passing down through the generations. It’s about well-drawn characters making their way in the world, sometimes with great success, but rarely able to escape from the shadow of their past. It’s a real page turner, from which I learnt much about this period of Korea’s history. Highly recommended.

I seem to have wandered rather far from the intimately domestic scale of The Safekeep, and spent a lot of time dwelling on war. I wonder what my next chain will make of August’s book: Ghost Cities, by Siang Lu?