Last month, I ended my chain of books for Six Degrees of Separation with Mudlarking, Lara Maiklem’s engaging account of uncovering London’s history through those artefacts she discovers lurking under the silt of the Thames. This month, I thought I’d go dredging too, and try to remember books I’d enjoyed several years ago. What had stuck in my mind?
Maiklem has her own personal museum collection, I’m sure. Twelve year old Clover Quinn is making a museum, in Carys Bray’s The Museum of You. She’s a sweet child, but a bit isolated from her peers. She likes her dad’s allotment, and museums. In fact she secretly decides to make her own museum in memory of her mum, who died when Clover was six weeks old. Gradually her story unfolds. Her dad Darren’s story unfolds, and her mum Becky’s story unfolds. A skilfully constructed tale.
This gull on the Thames in London probably does a spot of mudlarking too.
Peas on an allotment. Darren’s allotment?
Mary Lennox is a solitary child too. Surely, as children, most of us read about this orphaned girl who’s moved from India to England, and about the children she learns to think of as friends? We read about how their lives become fundamentally changed in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, set somewhere in deepest Yorkshire.
Another Secret Garden.
My next choice involves another isolated individual, and in Yorkshire too. Sanctuary. Robert Edric re-imagines the tragic and self-destructive life of Branwell, brother of the more famous and successful Brontë sisters in a book I haven’t forgotten since I read it maybe five years ago. Branwell is the ‘author’ of this book, and paints a sorry picture of his stumbling path, in the final year of his young life, towards illness, addiction and death.
The parsonage and church than Branwell knew so well.
Another life cut short: Simon Lambeau dies in a surfing accident, and his parents have to decide whether to allow his heart to give someone else the chance of life. The journey of Simon’s transplant organ explores the metaphysical zone between life and death, and remains one of the most breathtakingly engaging and unusual books I have ever read. Mend the Living, by Meylis de Karangal. Just … read it.
This is North Yorkshire, not France. A surfer’s sea?
None of these is a light read. Let’s stay with a sea-related theme: The Penguin Lessons, by Tom Mitchell. I didn’t expect to like this book. The story of how Mitchell keeps a penguin during his days as a school teacher in Argentina promised to be a fey, sentimental read, I thought. But it wasn’t. Though light in tone and amusing, it highlighted the real challenges faced, and life-lessons learnt from caring for a wild beast in a thoroughly domestic setting. A somewhat thought- provoking and satisfying holiday read.
As I didn’t have a suitable photo, this guillemot on the Farne Islands will have to stand in for a penguin in Argentina.
From a penguin in captivity to a fish in captivity: Fishbowl, by Bradley Somer. A goldfish falls from his usual home on the 27th floor of an apartment block (where he’s sort of looked after by over-sexed Connor) downwards to the pavement beneath. On his way he passes apartments in which small dramas are being acted out, lives becoming changed. A quirky read.
I’ve a feeling this is a carp, not a goldfish. And it’s a carp in pond in South Korea, rather than a goldfish in a bowl.
We seem to have travelled a long way from the Thames in London: to Yorkshire, to France, to Argentina and America. And I’ve rediscovered the pleasure I had from some books I first read quite some time ago.
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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