Blog Archives

Walk or gallop? The question of pace.

28/2/2016

Walk. Trot. Canter. Gallop. Each of these words conjures up precisely both the speed and style of movement of the horse.

On a writing course once we were tasked with finding as many possible ways of replacing the word entered in the phrase She entered the room. I might never get the chance to use She hopscotched into the room in a piece of fiction, but I learnt something in thinking it up.

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Fictional philosophising: Superabundance & Salinger's Letters

25/2/2016

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I’m discussing two novels in translation about philosophy-obsessed / philosopher-obsessed men who travel from Europe to New York in pursuit of their interests. Yet, as is often the case when I partner one novel with another, they are very different books. Because of the mental-health slant, I also could have paired either with A Cure for Suicide, or, because of the identity issues, with The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty and/or The Life and Death of Sophie Stark.

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Becoming a person: The Cure for Suicide by Jesse Ball & The Man I Became by Peter Verhelst

22/2/2016

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Let me share with you my reflections on two highly original novels about dissemblance and truth in the process of becoming a person. Although the publishers don’t do so, I’m classing both as slipstream fiction, a place between fantasy, sci-fi and literary fiction I’ve also explored in my own short stories. Read on, and let me know what you think.

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Memory, memoir and fiction (again): A Daughter Your Age & Washday Blues

20/2/2016

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I once had a summer job in a pickle factory in Germany. The work was boring, smelly and noisy but the money, even though being foreign and female entitled the management to pay us at a lower rate, was good. I shared some of the memories for a bite-size memoir challenge on first jobs a couple of years ago, but I didn’t expect I’d turn it into fiction. To be honest, I didn’t find interesting enough.

I wrote recently about how fiction can function as a metaphor for the personal stories we struggle to tell. This post is about the reverse side of that, of how, in fiction, we can take a mundane, or shapeless, event from our lives and stretch it into a more intriguing story.

The pickle factory was in a village with a couple of pubs, but we had to travel to a larger town in the Netherlands to do our food shopping. If we missed the bus, we’d hitch across the border. Only once did I have any concerns about my safety.

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Held Captive by Neurodiversity: Truestory by Catherine Simpson

19/2/2016

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Alice doesn’t get out much. In fact, the only time she is able to leave the Lancashire farm where she lives with her husband, Duncan, and eleven-year-old son, Sam, is for two hours on a Tuesday afternoon when she sits in a sad café nursing a cooling cup of tea and a shortbread biscuit. It’s not that she’s overly busy with farm work. It’s not that she’s kept away from the world by a controlling husband. But her life is restricted by her family: Sam is a boy with problems, averse to change, terrified of noise and the colour yellow, and, although he won’t let her comfort him the way a mother might, he’s liable to go into “meltdown” if she leaves him too long with a father who has little understanding of the boy’s needs.

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Love torn asunder: Where The River Parts by Radhika Swarup

17/2/2016

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Punjab in 1947, and Asha and her best friend, Nargis, are seventeen and still at school. Although Asha is a Hindu and Nargis Muslim, religious differences cannot sour their friendship, nor the goodwill between their families living in neighbouring houses in a comfortable part of town. The girls take part in each other’s traditions, such as fasting alongside the older women to safeguard their future husbands’ well-being. Unusually in a culture in which marriages are usually arranged by the parents, Asha has already chosen her husband in the form of her friend’s older brother, Firoze. What could possibly come between them? Firoze likes her, and her parents like Firoze; in fact, he’s her beloved father’s protégé in his law firm.

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The pull of the wild: Katherine Carlyle by Rupert Thomson

13/2/2016

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Finding a fifty euro note while crossing the Piazza Farnese near her home in Rome, nineteen-year-old Katherine interprets it, not as a stroke of luck, but as the first of several messages signifying that her life is about to change. When she hears an English couple in a cinema discussing a friend of theirs with an apartment in Berlin, she feels that after “so many dry runs and rehearsals” it’s time to act. So, instead of taking up her place at Oxford University, she wipes her computer files, throws her smartphone in the river and boards a plane for Germany. A series of chance encounters take her progressively further from her itinerant journalist father and her friends in Rome, through Russia and into the frozen bleakness of Northern Norway in winter. As she jubilantly sheds her real identity to follow increasingly risky opportunities, the reader wonders if she’s in the process of finding or losing herself.

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After the Asylum: The Ballroom by Anna Hope & Song of the Sea Maid by Rebecca Mascull

11/2/2016

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I’m delighted to showcase two second novels published this week (although Song of the Sea Maid has been out for a while in hardback) featuring feisty female characters. Both take a sideways look at history, with a focus on scientific thought either side of Darwin, and celebrate love against the odds. Both stories begin in an asylum (the first a psychiatric hospital, the second an orphanage) and take the reader on an engaging journey beyond its walls.

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Elemental by Amanda Curtin: Review and book giveaway

9/2/2016

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In her declining years, as her memory for the past overtakes her connection to the present, Meggie Tulloch sets out to write her life story. Addressed (in the mid-1970s) to her hippyish granddaughter, and kept secret from her daughter, Kathryn, the girl’s mother (although, as time goes on, Meggie increasingly confuses the two), it’s a story of migration from north-east Scotland and the Shetlands to Fremantle, Australia, a journey through the elements of water, air and earth, and finally (in a contemporary strand picked up by the daughter herself) fire.

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Power battles: Fractured by Clár Ní Chonghaile

7/2/2016

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Locked in a dark room somewhere in Mogadishu, Peter Maguire has ample time to consider the legacy of his three decades on this earth. A journalist with a CV full of danger zones, he has a girlfriend in Paris who enjoys weekends in the Loire Valley and a five-year-old son in Monrovia she doesn’t know about and he’s never seen. He’s been estranged from his mother, also formerly a journalist in West Africa, since she told him his biological father is not the gentle Irishman he’s called Dad all his life, but an American photographer with whom she had an affair in Liberia. If life weren’t complicated enough, his friend and local driver was shot dead when Peter was kidnapped, and he’s about to be sold on to the brutal Al-Shabaab. He finds a glimmer of hope and humanity in the Somali teenager who brings his food, but can Abdi really rescue him from captivity?

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Identity and make-believe: The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty & The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

4/2/2016

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Lately, I’ve been contemplating my identity as a novelist: how, on the one hand, it’s a simple statement of fact while, on the other, it represents an existential anxiety about what I’d be if I couldn’t describe myself in terms of something that sounds like a job. So these two novels exploring identity and make-believe, albeit with reference to film rather than fiction, have come along at exactly the right time.

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Let’s celebrate LGBT history month

1/2/2016

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Although we can find difference disconcerting, there is evidence that diversity is good for the brain. It seems marvellous to me that, in the course of my admittedly long lifetime, sex between men has progressed from a shameful secret, sometimes leading to arrest, to something that can be celebrated through marriage. Not far behind, we’re learning to accept diversity in gender identity, with those estranged from their birth gender able to scratch it from their birth certificate and/or declare themselves #TransandProud. While we might be a long way from eradicating trans- and homophobia, LGBT history month is a cause for celebration for us all.

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