Books and reading – Page 2 – From Pyrenees to Pennines

Six Degrees of Separation: from Rapture to The Island Of Sea Women

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

Set within a religious community in 9th century Germany, Emily Maguire‘s Rapture, which I have yet to read, reimagines the life of the first and only female pope.

It’s not too much of a stretch to travel to 7th century Ireland in Emma Donoghue’s Haven. Holy man Artt, recently returned from his travels, fetches up at a monastery with a plan to set forth with two of the monks there to set up a tiny community on a totally uninhabited island, to live prayerfully in total isolation. Imperfectly equipped, they soon embark on their journey into the unknown: and Artt insists on choosing not one of the nearby islands, but a distant one that is rocky, bleak, inhospitable. The tough character of this island, with its panoply of resident birds is brought vividly to life, as are monks Cormac and Trian. Artt remains as distant to us in many ways as he is to the two monks. This is a story that cannot end well, as a bad situation becomes worse. But it vividly brings to life the increasingly unbearable conditions made more difficult by a completely unapproachable and inflexible man-in-charge. It’s a quietly engrossing story.

A different remote island, at a different time – the 19th century. Carys Davies’ Clear is an engrossing book about a vanished way of life. One which disappeared during the devastating Highland Clearances in Scotland during the 19th century. A man Ivar, the sole inhabitant – with his few animals – of a remote island, is alive to the natural rhythms of the island – the many seasons, winds, mists, rains and tides that govern it. And when John Ferguson appears to evict him, but instead falls into a concussed coma from which Ivar nurses him back to health, he too falls under the island’s spell, and haltingly Ferguson begins to learn the vocabulary, then the language itself which Ivar speaks. The book celebrates that language and the fragility of life in such a spot, as well as asking questions about the future of Ivar, John, and John’s wife Mary, all of whom are in different ways implicated in the consequences of the Highland Clearance.

Yet another remote island – off Norway this time – present day Norway. Author and farmer James Rebanks was going through a tough time mentally. He needed to get away, and got the chance to stay in a remote and tiny island just below the Arctic Circle, where a woman was continuing the tradition, practised since Viking times of encouraging eider ducks to breed there, so that their valuable down could be harvested for warm clothing and quilts. This book is an account of the island’s astonishingly rich (but always diminishing) range of birdlife; its weather and relationship with the often unforgiving sea. Of how the woman and her friend, and that year Rebanks too, persuaded eider ducks back by building nests for them – yes, really! The protective down could be harvested from the nests when finally deserted, then cleaned and prepared for sale. It’s an immersive tale of a life that’s simple, often monotonous, always hard and often bleak, but with simple satisfaction too. The tale is told in The Place of Tides.

Let’s stay by the sea but lighten the mood, and read Jess Kidd’s Murder at Gull’s Nest. It’s Cosy Crime, and I don’t like this genre at all. But Jess came to speak recently at our local independent bookshop. She was a hit. She spoke wittily and enthusiastically about her career as a writer, and about this book, which is only the first of a planned series, following its heroine, a woman of middle years, plain and practical, Nora Breen. Nora links back to where we started from, because she was until recently a nun. But when her fellow nun and friend Frieda leaves the order, and then goes missing, Nora chooses this event as her reason to abandon her vocation behind and search for Frieda. She begins her search in a seaside town in the south, Gore-on-Sea(!) at a pretty dreadful boarding house (this is the 1950s) called The Gulls Nest, where Frieda herself had stayed till she disappeared, a victim in Nora’s opinion, but not that of the police, of Murder Most Foul. At first I was rooting for Nora, and enjoyed getting to know the half dozen or so other varied characters who populated this book . But improbable incident follows improbable incident. The book’s well written, but it isn’t enough to keep me invested in the events it described.

It’s too late now. I’ll have to stay with the sea for the whole chain, and this time, with gulls too. But let’s change the mood, and go with non fiction. Adam Nicolson’s The Seabird’s Cry. I unreservedly loved this book. Nicolson has long been fascinated by seabirds – not just gulls – and explains how these birds differ so much in habit and lifestyle from the garden birds with whom many of us are more familiar. Then he takes ten different species to examine in turn. He refers to his personal observations, to scientific research, to history and to literature to build a rounded and fascinating portrait of each species he’s chosen. My husband got used to having a daily bulletin of ‘today’s most fascinating seabird facts’ at breakfast each morning. Beautifully written, meticulously researched. readable and involving, this was a book I was sorry to finish.
.

I’ll end in entirely another part of the world – South Korea, and take you to the island of Jeju, in Lisa See’s The Island of Sea Women. I had an immediate interest in this book, having travelled in South Korea – though we didn’t visit Jeju – and having already learnt to be fascinated by the lives of the haenyeo diving women. These are divers who harvest seafood (sea cucumber, urchins, abalone, octopus) all year round from the sea floor; they can stay underwater for sustained periods of time without breathing apparatus. This book combines a strong story following the story of two women Young-Sook and her mother, whose lives develop through their membership of the haenyeo culture, as they live through a twentieth century defined in Korea by occupation, internal conflict, deprivation and rapid change. Learning more about this history was in itself illuminating and interesting. It was a backdrop to a story of friendships, broken relationships and family struggle which drew me in to the last page. I was sorry to finish this book too.

It’s not clear to me how I got from a religious life in long-ago Germany to six books involving the sea. But Six Degrees takes us all to unexpected places. Where will next month’s starter book, All Fours, by Miranda July take us?

Six Degrees of Separation: from Knife to The Lightless Sky

Kate: Books are my Favourite and Best

This month’s starter book is Salman Rushdie‘s Knife, a memoir written in the aftermath of the attempt on his life in 2022, and as a result of which he lost his sight in one eye. I haven’t yet read it. But I have read another memoir which deals with the shadow of death.

This is Amy Bloom‘s In Love – a Memoir of Love and Loss. Bloom has written a searing account of the last year of her husband Brian Ameche’s life. This became a roller coaster year: except it wasn’t, because as she points out, roller coaster rides are thrilling, fun, and fast and furious. Ameche’s last year of life was none of those things. It was the year in which he received the diagnosis he – and she, and those close to him – feared: dementia. Within a week, he had decided, and never wavered, that he would choose to die rather than totter onwards through some kind of half-life . The book reports, dodging back and forth through time, their exploration of how he might die, and arriving at the decision that Dignitas offered him – well – dignity in dying. Against the odds, this book is often wry, funny, darkly humorous, sarcastic and savvy. The pages turn very easily. It’s a moving, very thought-provoking memoir.

Now to a book featuring a character who has – not dementia, but its close cousin – Alzheimer’s disease. The Wilderness, by Samantha Harvey. This is the story of Jake, 65 year old Jake, whose wife has died, whose son is in prison, whose daughter ….. well, Jake has Alzheimers, and we tumble with him into a tangle of reminiscence, misleading timelines and confusion, as like him, we try to make sense of his new helplessness and puzzlement about the fates of those he holds dear. It’s a wonderfully imagined book, which gave me real insight (and fears) into an existence entirely dominated by unreliable memories, whether of mothers, lovers, or where to store the coffee cups. Here is a man who was once an architect with vision, now reduced to dependency and frustration. Beautifully written, it had me gripped till the last page.

Here’s a book about a wilderness of the natural world kind, by Jim Crace. Quarantine. I read it years ago, long before I kept reviews of every book I read. So I’ll quote Carys Davies, writing in the Guardian. ‘Crace’s masterful novel takes us into the parched and hostile landscape of the Judean desert, where we meet Christ himself – naked and fasting – and a small band of other “quarantiners”, all with their different reasons for being there. A spellbinding tale that is by turns funny and grotesque, lyrical and philosophical; a fascinating study of hope and fear, belief and imagination’.

Delia Owens‘ Where the Crawdads Sing is set in a kind of wilderness too – a wild untamed place at the edge of the sea. Is it the perfect novel? Perhaps. It’s got something for everyone: a coming-of-age story about a young friendless girl, Kya, abandoned by her family and siblings, who has to make her own way in the world as ‘Marsh girl’, living in a shack on the shoreline. It’s a mystery story. Though this element unfolds slowly, once it developed, it had me gripped until the very last page. It’s beautifully evocative nature writing too, informed yet lyrical, capturing the soul of a North Carolina marshland shoreline rich in bird and other wildlife. This is a book about Kya herself, and about the community where she grew up in the 1950s and 60s, with its racial divisions.

There’s a wilderness of yet a different kind in Leo Vardiashvili‘s Hard by a Great Forest. Saba, his older brother and his father came to England – originally as asylum seekers from Georgia following the collapse of the Soviet Union. They’re dogged by guilt that they never managed to bring Saba’s mother over before she died. Some twelve years after their arrival, the father returns to Georgia, to Tbilisi, then disappears. The same happens with Saba’s brother when he goes to look for him. So Saba goes too. What follows is an adventure that is in turn picaresque and Kafkaesque. His trail is guided by the dead relatives and friends who speak to him from the grave, with their grievances and advice. He is by turns optimistic, melancholy, cynical, and with a great line in absurdist wit. In his quest he’s assisted by the first taxi driver to give him a lift, Nodar, who offers him bed and board, and then all of his time. Nodar has an agenda of his own, which first leads to the story’s first crisis. Their adventures have a nightmare quixotishness which are exhausting to read, and full of menace. Leitmotifs running through the book are the incidents involving the wild animals who have escaped from Tbilisi zoo and roam town and countryside randomly, and sometimes menacingly. This is a galloping adventure story that is at times difficult to read, because rooted in an uncomfortable reality.

Vardiashvili was himself once an asylum seeker, arriving here when he was twelve. So was Gulwari Passarlay, who wrote The Lightless Sky. This memoir is the story of an ordinary twelve year old Afghan boy, forced to become extraordinary when his family pays traffickers to get him out of the country and into Europe. It’s the story of a child forced within weeks to become an adult confronted with situations nobody should ever have to deal with. It should be required reading for anyone who’s ever complained that such people should get back where they came from, that they are here for the benefits they can extract from their host country. This is a powerful, harrowing book by a boy – now a man – who has survived, and is now making the most of every opportunity that he can to change the situation of refugees and our perception of them.

I’m not going to attempt to link this last book back to the beginning of my chain: except perhaps that both are memoirs. Instead, I’ll tell you that next month’s starter book will be Rapture by Emily Maguire. And I have this evening finished the first book which I’ll link with it.

With the exception of my first image, which comes from the Times’ article about Ameche’s decision to end his life, the rest come from photographers contributing to Pexels: Abdul Rahman Abu Baker; Christyn Reyes; A G Rosales; Roman Odintsov; Tolga Karakaya. Thank you to each one of them.

Six Degrees of Separation: From Prophet Song to Hard By a Great Forest

Kate: Books are my Favourite and Best

Prophet Song, this month’s starter book by Paul Lynch was one of my winning reads of 2024. Here are the final sentences of the review I wrote about this book, set in the near future, in Ireland. ‘This story brought the reality of life in Syria, in Ukraine, in Palestine frighteningly into focus. The final pages should be required reading for the anti-asylum-seeker lobby.’

Which leads me to my first book, which though not about living in a war zone, is about asylum seekers and illegal immigration: Sunjeev Sahota‘s The Year of the Runaway. Three Indian migrant workers in Sheffield, one legally married to a young Indian woman from London for the sole purpose of obtaining a visa. Once obtained, divorce and freedom for them both . This is their story. The young married man is relatively privileged. Another is here on a student visa which forbids him to work. But how otherwise can he send money back to his family? The third is low-caste and lost his entire family in political riots. In England, they are equally vulnerable to poverty, violence, exploitation as they move from one squalid and back-breaking workplace to another, always inadequately housed and nourished, always looking over their shoulder for their illegal or precarious status to be uncovered. This is an important book, helping to uncover the lives of the would-be migrant who has few choices, whatever the level of privilege enjoyed back home. And a readable one too. No wonder it got shortlisted for The Man Booker Prize.

Now a book about other immigrants to England, in Caryl Phillips‘ Another Man in the Street. This is a book about loneliness. It’s about leaving your homeland and facing rejection and even hatred, It’s about Victor, who left Saint Kitts in the Windrush years as a young man, in order to better himself. It’s about Peter, a Jewish refugee from Central Europe. It’s about Ruth, who’s English and firstly Peter’s, then Victor’s lover: but who’s cut herself off from her South Yorkshire home and family in moving to London. And it’s about Lorna, Victor’s abandoned wife.who came with their son Leon to join him from Saint Kitts. It’s told in the first, second and third persons, and the narrative moves back and forth in time and place over a 40 year period between these characters: always lonely and largely friendless, failing to communicate even with those they live with. They are generally speaking meek, and in the shadow of their pasts. An unsettling, if thought-provoking read.

Living abroad can take many forms, as shown in Katie Kitamura‘s Intimacies. This is a novel about dislocation, in many forms. The unnamed narrator has just moved to The Hague from New York to take up a temporary job as interpreter at the international criminal court. Her father has died, her mother has returned to Singapore, and as the child of a diplomat, she has lived everywhere and anywhere. She is rootless, and wonders if she will find a home here. Her boyfriend, Adriaan turns out to be married ‘but not for much longer’. So many ‘ifs’ and uncertainties. Not one thing in her life is certain or permanent. She’s unable to plot a clear path to her future, or even decide if her current career path is for her. This book is compellingly, lucidly, yet sparely written, yet establishes an intimacy between the woman and her reader. I found this a memorable book which deserves a second reading.

What happens though, to an immigrant who returns to the place where she was born and raised? This is the story told in the sequel to Colm Tóibín‘s Brooklyn: Long Island. Eilis came from Ireland to New York to marry Italo-American Tony twenty years ago. With reservations she’s happy with her lot, but some shocking news lands as a bombshell, and she uses it as an excuse to go back to Ireland to celebrate her mother’s 80th birthday. The story continues from Eilis’ point of view, and also from that of her former best friend Nancy who is having a secret affair with Jim, the man Eilis once loved. And it’s also told from Jim’s standpoint too, All three are dealing with complicated and conflicting emotions. The plot moves slowly forward until the last 50 pages or so. Then it hurtles into a maelstrom of action and emotion, unresolved even by the last page of the book. Is a third novel in the offing?

And what happens if instead of living, however precariously, in a country that is not your own, you are instead quite literally, all at sea? That’s the story of Maurice and Maralyn by Sophie Elmhurst. This is an adventure that reads like pacey fiction. It’s actually a true story: a love story, a tale of endurance in unimaginable hardship. The core of this book is the account of the 118 days a couple, Maurice and Maralyn spent adrift in the Pacific on a life raft, bereft of – well – anything really. Certainly they had no way of communicating with the world beyond their tiny and unstable refuge. We learn the backstory of Maurice, isolated, shy, largely estranged from his family: and how he meets the more outgoing Maralyn, their relationship founded on their love of exploring the Great Outdoors. Of how they scrimp and save to build their own ship, planning to sail to New Zealand. They plan carefully, systematically, but an encounter with an injured sperm whale sinks their ship. It’s a tender portrait of an unconventional love affair, as well as a quite astonishing tale of survival against all the odds.

I’ll round off with a book I’ve yet to read: it’s our next choice for our book group. Leo Vardiashvili‘s Hard by a Great Forest. It seems to fit the theme I’ve established here, dealing as it does with Saba’s homecoming from London to Tbilisi, Georgia after more than twenty years away. Here’s what the Guardian says: ‘A compelling story about war, family separation and ambivalent homecoming … propelled by dark mysteries and offset by glorious shafts of humour.‘ I’m looking forward to this.

Perhaps it looks as if there aren’t too many laughs in my choices this month. Yet each one is leavened by lighter moments too. I wonder if next month’s starter will be too? It’s Salman Rushdie‘s memoir, Knife. I’ve reserved a copy from the library already.

The image accompanying Long Island is by Josh Miller, courtesy of Unsplash. The remaining images are my own.

Six Degrees of Separation: From Dangerous Liaisons to Cloistered

Kate: Books are my Favourite and Best

I haven’t yet read this month’s choice: Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons. I ordered it from the library and have only just collected it.

So … I’ll go with the fact that it’s a novel written in epistolary form, and choose another written in this way: Ann Youngson’s Meet Me at the Museum. A book of considerable charm. An English 60 year old farmer’s wife writes a letter to a museum curator & professor in Denmark about Tollund Man, a perfectly preserved man from about 300 BCE who is exhibited there. A correspondence begins. Initially formal, the letters become more intimate. This busy outdoorsy farmer’s wife with her chintzy house couldn’t be more different from austere Scandinavian Anders. But both are lonely and have gaping holes in their lives. With every letter they disclose more of their joys, disappointments and difficulties and draw inexorably closer. At the end is a revelation. What effect will this have on them, on their burgeoning relationship? We can only speculate. A touching and intimate book.

Archaeology and paleontology are not the same, but perhaps it’s not too big a leap to go to southern England in the early 19th century for Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures.This book is a fictional account, almost certainly not too far from the truth, about the geological work of middle-class-but-in-reduced-circumstances Elizabeth Philpott, and definitely working class Mary Anning. Both live in one of the fossil capitals of England, Lyme Regis. Both spend hours on the beach fossil hunting – Elizabeth for her own interest and as a pastime, Mary for an income, selling them. It’s inevitable that they should meet, less inevitable that Elizabeth should become Mary’s friend and champion, encouraging her to learn to read and write.This is their story. And it takes a very long time for it to end well for Mary. An enjoyable, and – yes – an informative read, if not Tracy Chevalier at her best.

Reading this may whet your appetite for a spot of non-fiction: Helen Gordon’s Notes from Deep Time: an engaging and thought-provoking account of geological time. As a non-scientist, I often find such accounts dry or inaccessible, but this is a highly readable book attempting with some success to engage our brains in comprehending the vastness of time, and the difference between the various eons that constitute the time that the earth has been in being. Who knew for instance that triceratops and tyrannosaurus rex not only didn’t appear on earth at the same time, but in fact were separated from each other by an infinitely longer time span than humankind from tyrannosaurus? From discussions about the physical appearance of the earth in previous periods, to ongoing research about dinosaurs (what colour were they?) to urban geology, and laying up problems for the future, this is a wide ranging book to which I shall return.

I’m making a great job of mixing archaeology and paleontology, because my next book, The Crossing Places involves a professional archaeologist, Dr. Ruth Galloway, in the first of the popular series about her by Ellie Griffiths. An involving story, with well-developed, believable characters and a sense of place: the flat Norfolk landscape is well described. I bought into the plot, with Ruth Galloway, young academic archeologist brought into a police investigation to uncover a mystery about a disappeared child whose bones might, just might, be buried on her ‘patch’. The series is some 15 books long and I’ve by no means read them all. But they’re good for those moments when you haven’t got much bandwidth for anything too demanding.

Let’s stay in Norfolk, but delve once more into the past. Victoria Mackenzie’s For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain. Two female medieval mystics, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe tell their stories in alternating short chapters. Julian is the better known figure, for her ‘Revelations of Divine Love‘, written when she was an anchoress, enclosed in a tiny windowed cell abutting a Norwich church. Both she and the other figure in the book, Marjorie Kent, had visions. Whereas Julian chooses to see little, but see it intensely, Marjorie is very different. Illiterate and rambunctious, with little time for her husband and children, she loudly proclaims her visions of Christ to anyone who will listen, and indeed these who do not wish to listen. Both took risks. To go against current Christian orthodoxy, especially as a woman, risked excommunication and a painful death. In the book, and we cannot know if this happened, the two meet, and this unlikely pair make a genuine connection. Beautifully written, and quickly read, this is a book that will stay with me for a long time.

Finally, a book I haven’t read, but intend to because I heard snatches of it being read as BBC’s Book of the Week. Catherine Coldstream’s Cloistered tells the story of her years as a nun in the 1990s, and her eventual flight from the convent – I didn’t hear that bit. And how did I get from a story about two amoral lovers-turned-rivals to the story of women who’ve taken vows of chastity? Ah well. That’s Six Degrees for you!

Next month’s starter is Paul Lynch‘s Prophet Song: a book I very much ejoyed reading last year.

Six Degrees of Separation: from Orbital to Walking the Bones of Britain

Kate: Books are my Favourite and Best

This month’s starter book is the 2024 Booker Prize winner: Samantha Harvey‘s Orbital. I loved it. This book moves through space with six astronauts, viewing the spectacular and the ordinary, distance and intimacy and invites us, the readers, to wonder too.

My first link is by book title as much as subject matter. Constellation by Adrien Bosc has pilots rather than astronauts at the heart of his story. Based on an actual plane crash that took place in 1947 in the Azores, on a flight from Paris to New York. Bosc was fascinated by the mysterious history of this tragedy, for which there was little explanation. The flight was carrying a number of well-known people, as well as a group of Basque shepherds. The book tells the story of many of these people, and gives them a voice, as well as piecing together what he can about the story of the crash itself. An interesting blend of actual facts and a degree of surmise. Here’s a story about the inter-connectedness of collective tragedy, engagingly told.

My next book begins with dealing with the elemental natural world in a different way: the sea this time. Mallachy Tallack‘s That Beautiful Atlantic Waltz is a quiet book, telling a story with its roots in the 1950s, when the main protagonists’s father Sonny was working in brutal conditions on a whaling ship before returning to the Shetlands to ask Kathleen to marry him. Jack is their son, and grows up unable to find his place in life, except through the medium of the country and western music he loves. The story of Sonny, Kathleen and especially Jack interweave to tell a story with no great dramas, but which lyrically evoke their simple Shetland lives.

The elements and the natural world come to the fore in my next book, written for children: Leila and the Blue Fox by Kiran Millwood Hargrave. A lovely book for older children, this story is told as much by the glorious blue and black illustrations that illuminate the action described. This is a story of migration. Of Leila, a Syrian asylum seeker who lives in London with her aunt and cousin. Of her mother, who is now an academic in northern Norway, studying climate change as it affects the animal population of the Arctic. And of Miso, the Arctic fox whom she and her fellow research scientists are tracking as she completes her 2000 mile migration from the eastern Arctic to Canada. Leila comes to spend her summer with her mother as the research project evolves by going to follow the little fox ‘in person’. It’s an opportunity to discover the raw beauty of the Arctic, the courage and steadfastness of one little fox, and most importantly, a chance or Leila and her mother to discover and rediscover their bond. A story that invites thought and reflection on the whole issue of migration, and the issues which face those obliged to migrate, whether human or animal.

From Elements to Weather, British style. 188 Words for Rain, by Alan Connor. When I noticed this title at the library, I knew immediately I wanted to read it. A tour of the British Isles looking at all the different words that have evolved over the years to describe this most British of weather phenomena in all its manifestations? I was in! And it WAS interesting, reminding me of many terms I know, and many more that I don’t. Together with engaging weather-related factoids. But it was held together by pointess little anecdotes of imaginary people and their experience of these phenomena, intended to drive the narrative along, but which only succeeded in irritating me. A good idea spoilt.

Now why should a book about rain lead me to a book about walking, eh? Must be because I’m English, and a woman who walks. Annabel Abbs‘ Windswept: Why Women Walk is, according to the publisher ‘The story of extraordinary women who lost their way – their sense of self, their identity, their freedom – and found it again through walking in the wild.‘ And this applies to Abbs herself, who interweaves episodes from her own walking life with the stories of famous women, not noted as walkers, such as Simone de Beauvoir and Gwen John, to whom walking was a fundamental need and source of renewal and refreshment.

Which brings me to my last book: Walking the Bones of Britain by Christopher Somerville. What a rich and immersive book this is. For a small island, our geological story is particularly rich. Somerville undertakes to walk it, from the north of Scotland down as far, slightly oddly I thought, only to the River Thames. And this is what he does. He’s curious to examine the geology of every path he takes, and to understand what effect the geological story has had on the development of the landscape and how it has been exploited by the people who live in it. He’s investigative, humorous, personable in his enquiries, which makes what could be a difficult book approachable. This book has opened my eyes to the landscape, both locally and more widely throughout Britain.Which brings us full circle. In Orbital, our astronauts see the whole earth spread beneath them as they orbit the planet, whereas Somerville examines just a small portion of the planet in forensic detail.

Next month’s starter book is one I don’t know, by an author I don’t know either. Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos.

My Year in Books: 2024

I was just thinking about writing a post about the books I’ve enjoyed this year. I was feeling not a little daunted. But then an email from Goodreads dropped into my inbox . It’s done the hard yards so I don’t have to. Here are a few highlights: although the examples in the featured photo seem to include representatives of both my most enjoyed and least remembered books.

They’ve missed a few of my ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ reviews here. What about Stowaway: The Disreputable Exploits of the Rat by Jo Shute? Or Bee Sting, mentioned below? There was Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry. Clear, by Carys Davies. And Orbital, by Samantha Harvey. Tomb with a View, by Peter Ross. I might have missed one or two others as well. I really HAVE had a really good reading year. For which I must thank two book bloggers in particular. Susan, who blogs at A Life in Books. And Kim, of Reading Matters fame. Both read a wide range of My Kind of Fiction, and write thoughtful and enticing reviews for the books they enjoy, whilst warning me off just a few of the ones they come across.

I’m reminded of the very first book I read this year: the Norwegian Hanne Ørstavik‘s Love. That got ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐.

And the very last (up to press – there are still 13 days left of 2024): also a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐read – Malachy Tallack’s That Beautiful Atlantic Waltz.

This is information overload really. I hope that clicking here will lead you to thumbnails of the books I’ve read this year, and by clicking on individual titles, to their reviews. But in January, I’m migrating to The StoryGraph, because it’s independent from Amazon. The StoryGraph might be a bit stats heavy for me, but I’d like to give it a go. Might you join me?

Six Degrees of Separation: From Sandwich to My Coney Island Baby

Kate: Books are my Favourite and Best

This month begins with Catherine Newman‘s Sandwich. It’s a book I enjoyed – with reservations – but let’s concentrate on the basics. This is a smartly delivered story told through the voice of menopausal Rocky as she goes with her husband; her two grown up children; and for part of their week there, her elderly parents to the same -faintly decrepid – house in Cape Cod that they’ve rented every summer for years and years. This gives me my premise for my Six Degrees this month. All my choices will have a marriage embedded in the story – to a greater or lesser degree.

Here’s another American marriage, in Ron Rash‘s The Caretaker. Jacob is called up to fight in the Korean war, and has to leave his pregnant wife Naomi behind. He is from a privileged background, and Naomi most definitely is not. His parents disapprove of the match so much that they set up a subterfuge to ensure that the couple will never see one another again once Jacob returns. Only one person, Jacob’s childhood friend has an idea that something very wrong is taking place. The book quietly presents a story that slowly unfolds when Jacob comes home, invalided out of the war, and believing himself a widower, with a child who never saw life. A cleverly devised plot, which for all its lack of high drama, is suspenseful to the end. My first Ron Rash. But definitely not my last.

Naomi doesn’t feature directly in Rash’s story. The wife in my next choice doesn’t either: Bernhard Schlink‘s The Granddaughter. 1964. A young West Berliner spending time in East Berlin meets a young woman and falls in love. He contrives her escape, marries her. But they do not live happily ever after. She only half heartedly returns his love, is constantly searching for she knows not quite what, and eventually dies in a drunken stupor. Only then does her husband, a bookseller, discover that she’d had a baby whom she’d abandoned before marrying him. The book describes his search for this woman, who must now be well into her 40s, and it results in his taking the woman’s own daughter under his wing and having her visit him for weeks at a time. A tale of complex feelings: getting to understand that the East was not in fact necessarly grateful to be ‘liberated’: that anger, bitterness, political feelings that resulted in the rise of the Far Right in Germany is one of the consequences of the fall of the Berlin Wall. His granddaughter’s father has passed all this anger onto his child, and this plays out in the latter part of this book. A moving and illuminating account of the feelings informing modern German politics.

The division of Germany into East and West was a consequence of World War II, so let’s go to wartime France. Code Name Hélène by Ariel Lawhon. A real fast-moving page-turner, detailing the war time adventures of the real-life Nancy Wake. An Australian, Nancy lived and worked in Europe as a reporter in the years before the war. By 1939, she was in Marseille, and it’s here that her story begins – as far as the book is concerned. The plot however, weaves between her four incarnations as, initially an ambulance driver and people-smuggler for the French resistance: and increasingly, under different guises, as a fully fledged member – and commander even – of the guerilla military arm, in her case in the Auvergne. We are also witness, in Marseille, to the slow-burning yet passionate love affair between herself and Henri which results in their marriage. Her war work drives them physically apart, but does not diminish their love for one another. This work cannot be described as a biography. Lawhon has admitted to some characters being composite, some incidents elided or transposed for the sake of the story. And certainly there are scenes here whose veracity could never be proved: though I am sure the general ‘flavour’ remains accurate. Nancy was unusual in being a female commander in a male world, which brought its own difficulties, and also meant she probably had to be larger-than-life. Henri has his own role in the story. But not until towards the end. Because I already am familiar with much of the history of the French resistance, I found this a fascinating and involving story, and I fairly raced through its (almost) 450 pages.

Let’s stay in France and look at Boxes by Pascal Garnier. I simply don’t know what to make of this. Brice’s wife Emma has disappeared, leaving him to manage alone the move into the countryside which she had wished for. In this book, we witness Brice’s descent into depression and madness. We see his developing odd friendship with his neighbour Blanche. Various intriguing hints are dropped, but never ultimately satisfied. For instance, why does Brice so strongly resemble Blanche’s father? The house, the surrounding countryside are described in unsettling ways. Everything is alien. Brice’s past life. His present life. His career, which he abandons, apparently on a whim. Everything’s on a whim: from his shopping choices to the hole he stoves into the kitchen/dining room wall. It was all a bit like watching a certain kind of French film, and I was bemused, rather than enthusiastic about this book.

Now for another book where it’s a woman who’s centre stage: Water, by John Boyne. We meet a woman in middle years who has just fled to live in a fairly remote Irish island, changed her name and as far as possible her appearance. Why? Only slowly do we find out. Her husband’s crimes reflect on her: the world assumes she had enabled them – and, she believes, one even greater tragedy. She has done her best to vanish. She meets a few characters who are also uncomfortable with their lives, making relationships with some. Slowly she regains the strength of character necessary to reject her husband and to renew her relationship with her daughter. This book deftly charts her slow, but steady steps to recovery.

And for our last book, we’ll return to America, though to (like Boyne) an Irish writer, in Billy O’Callaghan‘s My Coney Island Baby. Michael and Caitlin have been meeting as lovers for one day a month, for a quarter of a century. They are married, but unhappily, to other people. The book explores their time together, on a single day. The day when Michael reveals that his wife has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. And Caitlin will reveal that her husband is likely to be promoted, and will require them both to move to Illinois, almost 1000 miles away. Yet despite their marriages’ fading passion, duty and the constraints of middle age will probably keep them tied to their respective spouses. The book swings between the hotel bedroom where the couple meet, and their past lives which have brought them to where they are now, disappointed by the choices they have made. An achingly poignant exploration of an intense and long-held love, drowned out as darkness falls and duty calls.

So that’s it for this month. A selection of marriages and stories, and ending where we began, in America. Next month we leave earth all together, and read Booker Prize-winning Orbital, by Samantha Harvey.

Six Degrees of Separation: from Intermezzo to The Patient

Kate: Books are my Favourite and Best

This month’s starter book, Intermezzo, is by Sally Rooney and I have no immediate plans to read it. It’s -apparently – a moving story about grief, love and family. Which seems to leave the field wide open.

Maybe Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood hovers round the edges of all these themes. I was somewhat unsettled by this book, which reads somewhat as auto-fiction. It presents as a sort of diary of a woman who has abandoned both her marriage and her job, and thrown her lot with a community of nuns, despite having no religious belief. She takes comfort in the daily rhythms of the convent, and its hard physical work. Events arrive, in the form of the bones of a former member of the convent, murdered in Thailand and transported there by Helen Parry, assured climate activist whom the writer had, with others, bullied dreadfully at school. Even worse is the cataclysmic arrival in the convent of an infestation in their thousands of mice, of over a long period. The writer muses on her past, on her relationships, paying great attention to detail. I’ve a feeling this book may stay with me, though I can’t say I enjoyed the experience of reading it.

Here’s another woman who’s just made big changes in her life, in The Arsonist, by Sue Miller. It’s an engaging book, whose central character is Frankie, home on extended leave – or is it forever? – from her post as an Aid Worker in Africa. She goes to her parents’ summer house, which on retirement is where they plan to live permanently. And then her father shows increasing signs of Alzheimer’s disease … Frankie’s adjusting to life back in America when a series of arson attacks sweeps the town – just the homes of those who come here only for the summer months. This book is a slow burn in a thoroughly satisfactory way as Frankie starts to find her feet in the community and falls in love. I particularly liked the ending as it (sort of) slowly resolved the mystery surrounding the arson attacks, the changed situation of her parents, her own career plans – and the love affair.

It’s every character who undergoes change in my third book, Catherine Chidgey‘s Remote Sympathy. This is a cleverly constructed narrative, set mainly in and around Buchenwald Concentration Camp, and the nearest town, Weimar. The voices are those of Dr. Weber, a doctor with Jewish ancestors, who is a camp inmate. He has previously invented a cancer-curing machine, only recently found to be ineffective: Frau Hahn, who has reluctantly move to the area with her son, following her husband’s appointment as camp administrator: SS Sturmbannfuhrer Dietrich Hann himself: and a 1000 voces from Weimar – the collective voice of the town’s citizens. The narrative cleverly contrasts the opulence and ease of the Hahn’s lifestyle with that of the camp inmates’. The terrible lies believed by the town’s citizens, and by everyone outside the camp itself are exposed as the plot develops to allow Frau Hahn and Dr. Weber to meet in uncomfortable and deeply painful circumstances. This exhaustively researched novel depicts the holocaust anew. It’s sensitive yet powerful in its exploration of human feelings and emotions, and is both moving and involving.

Family relationships as seen through the prism of politics and power is the theme of Annie Garthwaite‘s The King’s Mother. A fine sequel to Garthwaite’s first book, Cecily. This narrative about the troubled reigns of her sons Edward (IV) and Richard (III) is brought to life in the story told from the perspective of their redoubtable mother. It offers a rounded perspective of life as it must have been at that time. Being rich, powerful and influential was no passport to an easy life, with allies becoming sworn enemies , and enemies friends, for a whole variety of reasons both good and bad. Richard in particular is sensitively portrayed, and is a different one from his image in popular mythology. I paid attention to the genealogical tables and the notes, because the strong list of characters is not always easy to get a handle on. Not Garthwaite’s fault. That’s the way it was. An involving and powerful story from a troubled period of history.

Dani Shapiro‘s Signal Fires also explores relationships. Here is a book about two families living in the same comfortable urban neighbourhood. Their situation – well off, cultured families, one with 2 almost-adult children, the other with one – can’t take away the fact that all is not well. In the doctor’s family, one child was driving the car when an accident they caused resulted in the death of a passenger. The other family’s highly intelligent son disappoints the father, because he’s not following the track his father had mapped for him. The narrative slips back and forth between various decades, allowing each of the principal characters a voice each time. This tender and moving novel with several sub-plots looks at different family dynamics, exploring guilt, penitence and loneliness.

Just to add something completely different to the mix, let’s go off piste and meet someone who’s rubbish at relationships, in Tim Sullivan‘s The Patient. George Cross is an unusual detective, in that he is neuro-diverse. His autism however, is what gives him focus, and an unusually fine attention to detail that others miss. His logical brain stands him in good stead. But he’s often awkward, rude and therefore misunderstood. His single-mindedness means that he determines to follow a case involving a woman who’s died, even though it’s already been decided by the Crime Unit that it’s a suicide. His obstinacy pays dividends, and what had appeared a fairly simply if tragic circumstance is revealed to be something much more complex and wide-ranging. My first George Cross read, but definitely not my last. An absorbing read.

One way or another, this month’s books have all been about relationships. As is next month’s starter book, Catherine Newman‘s Sandwich, which I’ve already read – and enjoyed: perhaps best described as a beach read with a difference.

Photo no. 1 is by Vladimir Šoić on Unsplash. Photo no. 3 is my own, but is an accommodation block from Auschwitz, not Buchenwald. Photo no 4 is also my own, of Alnwick Castle: the next nearest castle to Raby where Cecily Neville was born. Photo no 6 is by Gerda on Unsplash. Photos 2 & 5 are also my own.

Six Degrees of Separation: from Long Island to A Girl’s Guide to Winning the War

Kate: Books are my Favourite and Best

I haven’t managed to read this month’s choice yet: Long Island by Colm Tóibín. I want to, because I loved its precursor, Brooklyn.

It’s about a young Irish woman who leaves Ireland to have a fresh start in America. I’ll begin my chain with a young Irish woman who leaves Ireland to have a fresh start in London. As told in Christine Dwyer Hickey‘s Our London Lives. This could easily turn out to be my Book of the Year. It features three main characters: Millie, who’s run away from Ireland; Pip, an aspiring boxer who drinks at the pub where Millie finds work; and London itself, seen at its best and its worst – its vibrancy, its diversity, but also its expense, its violence and its diminution as a community in the face of capitalist redevelopment.The chapters pass between Millie and Pip. Millie’s story begins in 1979; Pip’s not until 2017 when, a recovering alcoholic, he’s just been released from prison. We don’t read a continuous narrative. Rather it’s a series of vignettes, from which we are able to work out the un-narrated years for ourselves. Real events pepper the narrative: the release of the Guildford Four; the Grenfell Tower disaster, and this contrubutes to the novel’s very real sense of place. Here is a story of flawed individuals who make, and fail to make choices; who miss opportunities and fall through the cracks, but about whom we come to care. I was involved for every one of the book’s 500 pages.

My next book starts with a young girl born in London, Frida -in Flatlands, by Sue Hubbard. A quietly powerful piece of storytelling, set in the flatlands of Lincolnshire near the Wash during WWII. The narrative is divided between 12 year old Frida, evacuated to an impoverished and unfriendly farming couple whose house is also remote: and the more privileged young adult Philip, who as a consciencious objector is working as a farm labourer while developing his painting skills in his spare time. Despite their differences, the two have much in common – their loneliness, their apparent abandonment by those who should love them, their poverty. The wetlands which are their temporary home is also a character: their savage beauty, their harshness. A moving tale, well told.

My next book is also deeply rooted in the landscape, whose main character, the author, has barely moved at all. This is an intensely personal and lyrical memoir from poet Wendy Pratt. The Ghost Lake is embedded in two things: her deep connection to the part of East Yorkshire where she has lived her entire life; and the death, at the moment of her birth, of her much-wanted daughter. She focuses each chapter on a different community surrounding the Paleolake Flixton. This now-vanished lake provides an epicentre to her story. Throughout the book she dwells on its own history; and her own – though not in order. Her father’s decision not to continue the family tradition of farming; her own ‘oddity’ and inability to mix, to shine – despite her intelligence – at school; her chequered job and personal life; her conversion from working class girl to educated and successful – though always working class – career as a facilitator and poet. And always, threaded through the narrative, the much mourned dead baby daughter. A haunting, powerful and poetic memoir, bringing to life the natural world and landscape of her home patch, as well as exploring belonging, and loss.

Death is central to The World After Alice, by Lauren Aliza Green. On page one of this book, teenage Alice stands on a bridge … jumps … and dies. Then the story proper starts, 12 years later. Morgan, once Alice’s best friend is to marry Benji, Alice’s brother, after a courtship long kept secret. In a series of visits to the present day and flashbacks to the period both before and after Alice’s death, we gradually build up a picture of the turmoil her death effects in two increasingly disfunctional families and those who are closest to them – that of Alice, and that of Morgan. This is a story of family dynamics, of love, of loss, of secrets, of individuals who have lost their ability to trust, to communicate. A deftly written and immersive book, and not at all as irredeemably depressing as I have undoubtedly made it sound.

Another story about how life is complicated, and about how past events can cast a long shadow. John Boyne‘s Earth. ‘I became a different boy than the one I was supposed to be. I wanted to be a painter. I wanted to be good. I wanted to love someone, and to be loved in return. But none of those ambitions came to be.’
This is Evan, a young Irish would-be abstract painter – only he wasn’t good enough; impossibly handsome; gay. He’s a top-class football player, against his inclinations – but it brings him money and lots of it. One of his (sort of) friends in the team is Robbie, an arrogant young man whom Evan can’t take his eyes from, as heterosexual Robie is well aware of. After a party in Robbie’s flat, Evan is accused of filming his friend’s rape of a young woman. This is far from a simple narrative. It explores several themes: the long shadow of upbringing; class; homophobia; moral corruption; the way the legal system treats alleged sexual offences. In doing so, it drops several bombshells into the narrative, none more shocking than the one revealed in the last pages of the book. A thought-provoking and well-turned out read.

I’m choosing my final book, because perhaps we need to lighten up a bit. Life doesn’t always turn out as expected, but it doesn’t have to be awful. A Girl’s Guide to Winning the War, by Annie Lyons. This was an entertaining read, and the pages turned themselves easily enough. It’s about how clever, bookish but working class Peggy, and her titled side-kick Marigold become the darlings of the Ministry of Information with their writing and photographic skills, producing heart-warming books about aspects of the war as experienced by ordinary peple, whether serving in the forces or on the home front. Although I enjoyed it, I found the characterisation a bit stereotypical. Warm, loving working class family. Formal, buttoned up, emotionless public school types. Everyone however, if you look hard enough, has a Heart of Gold. A book to curl up with and race through on a foggy winter evening. And to bring us back to London, where I began my chain.

We’ve had a bit of a gallop through a series of books that in different ways touch the heart strings. Next month the chosen book is Intermezzo by Sally Rooney.

A Bonus and Unexpected Seven

I volunteer at our local library most Monday mornings. First job of the day is the Pick List. A list of books reserved by readers in other parts of the county and held in our branch is circulated for types like me to find, then despatch in the next delivery van to the branches where they’re wanted.

And look what the first book on the list was yesterday. The Square of Sevens. Really? I knew nothing about it, but courtesy of Google, I can tell you that it’s a crowd-pleaser for lovers of historical novels, of crime novels and of thrillers. You can read all about it here.

Will Becky, Queen of Squares,put it on her reading list?