Blog Archives

Mothering her mother: Hot Milk by Deborah Levy

31/3/2016

Sofia and her mother, Rose, are spending the summer of 2015 in Almería. Although Sofia spends the day on the beach, this is no holiday. For much of Sofia’s life, certainly from the age of five when her Greek father moved on, Rose has suffered from a mysterious illness which renders her intermittently unable to walk. They have remortgaged Rose’s house in London and come to Spain in search of a cure at the unconventional Gómez Clinic.

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11 reasons I might give up on a novel #amreading

28/3/2016

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As I’ve mentioned before, I was surprised when a literary agent who turned down my debut novel did so because the sample I’d sent her was written in the first person present tense. But if you read for a living, being familiar with your preferences and prejudices can save a lot of time. After all, we can’t all appreciate the same thing. Reading for reviews is helping me clarify my own likes and dislikes although, despite the title of this post, a sense of accountability to publishers who’ve provided me a free copy and a belief in the value of diversity will see me rarely abandoning a book. (I think I ditched three out of well over 100 books I read last year.) But since “11 reasons I don’t want to read your book” has a nasty ring to it, for the purposes of this post I’m extending the definition of “abandon” to encompass books I’m not even tempted to start. Practical or blinkered, considered or arbitrary, undoubtedly contradictory, in reverse order of annoyingness, these are my 11 reasons I won’t give a novel my time.

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A musical adventure: The Song Collector by Natasha Solomons

25/3/2016

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The celebrated composer Harry Fox-Talbot, or Fox to his friends, is grieving for his wife, Edie, a singer who rose to prominence cheering the troops during the Second World War. He’s lost interest in music until, quite by chance, his grandson, Robin, discovers the piano. The four-year-old turns out to be a musical prodigy and, by nurturing his development, Fox gradually re-engages with life.

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Sand: Gold Fame Citrus & My Own Beach Memories

22/3/2016

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There’s no rain in California. The swimming pools that graced the homes of the beautiful people are nothing but rubbish tips, no-one can wash and drinking water is rationed. Just beyond Los Angeles, civilisation lies buried under mountains of moving sand. Most people have been evacuated to the camps out East; those who remain take their chances in this lawless environment. It’s not only the sun that is harsh.

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Nostalgia & Reminiscence: Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb & Just One

20/3/2016

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Mihály is on honeymoon in Italy when he bumps into János, an old school friend who, when they last met in London, stole his gold watch. The chance encounter throws up memories of his youth, an extended adolescence of irresponsibility under the influence of the charismatic Tamás, and his sister, Éva. The following day, en route to Rome with his wife, he steps down from the train to grab a coffee. Inadvertently – or perhaps with unconscious intention – he boards the wrong train just as it’s pulling out of the station. Disembarking in Perugia, he realises that he’s been given the perfect opportunity to separate from his wife.

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The Voyage of the Dolphin by Kevin Smith & other St Patrick’s Day reads

17/3/2016

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It’s almost Spring, 1916, and the aristocratic semi-illiterate Hugh Fitzmaurice risks being sent down from Trinity College, Dublin, for his failure to appreciate that university students are required to study in addition to swanning around the town. The Senior Dean has a proposition that might just save him from joining his compatriots in the trenches: his kinship with the celebrated Antarctic explorer, Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton, makes him the ideal leader of a pseudoscientific expedition to the Arctic to bring back the bones of an Irish giant. Not the type to let his lack of seafaring experience stand in the way of an adventure, Fitzmaurice recruits his two friends, and his pet iguana, to join him.

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Man and monster: Trencherman by Eben Venter

15/3/2016

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Marlouw’s sister, Heleen, is worried. When her son, Koert, first went to visit his parents’ homeland in the Bloemfontein region of South Africa, he phoned or emailed almost every day, but now she hasn’t heard from him for weeks, and his last message was mostly gobbledygook. Reluctantly, but not without his own personal agenda, Marlouw agrees to travel from his home in Melbourne to try and find his nephew. Even if it weren’t for his club foot, the journey would be a difficult one in a country where AIDS is rife, the streets are lined with the hungry and desperate, and the infrastructure has collapsed.

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Parallel Narratives: The Living by Anjali Joseph & When We Were Alive by CJ Fisher

11/3/2016

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With the echos of each other in the titles, I couldn’t resist pairing these two novels published this month, both involving parallel narratives. As I’m playing with a similar structure in my current WIP, I’m also interested in what these novels can teach us about a form that’s more difficult to pull off than we might think.

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Struggle without Stupidity: Jihadi by Yusuf Toropov

9/3/2016

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Since childhood, Thelonius Liddell has striven for excellence in an attempt to forget the trauma of seeing his father murder his mother. At a university careers day, he’s recruited into the US intelligence agency by Becky Firestone, the somewhat disturbed daughter of the director whom Thelonius eventually marries. When we first meet Liddell he’s already a dead man, writing his memoir in the ten metre square cell in the clandestine containment unit he calls The Beige Motel. Now preferring the name Ali, he was converted to Islam by his wizened cellmate in a squalid (presumably Iraqi) prison, where he is accused of the murder of a man and his young daughter and of desecrating the Koran. His conversion was part of a deal brokered by a young woman, Fatima, but, like almost everything else in this multi-layered thriller about the war on terror, we have to keep on turning the pages to uncover the truth. While I’m inclined to agree that, as Fatima says, Stupidity has taken over the process of government in both countries, there’s nothing stupid in this complex tale of compromised morality and the fragility of the human mind.

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Libraries, Fictional Heroines and International Women

7/3/2016

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Who doesn’t love a blog poll? This time last year, I asked you to choose between five fictional heroines to mark International Women’s Day, and I enjoyed it so much I thought I’d have another bash, especially when I realised that World Book Day falls only a few days before International Women’s. I’ll admit that I haven’t ploughed systematically through a whole twelve months of reviews to select my shortlist, but I think this year’s five are a good representation of the range of heroic female characters we might encounter on the page. I’m presenting them in alphabetical order and, remember, it you don’t have to have read the books, or even the reviews, to vote.

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All for Nothing & When the Doves Disappeared

5/3/2016

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My historical education – or should that be education about history? – continues courtesy of a couple of powerful novels about the Second World War and its aftermath along the eastern front.

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Women’s Lives: Where Love Begins by Judith Hermann & Vertigo by Joanna Walsh

3/3/2016

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Stand by for two haunting short books published in the UK today about different facets of the lives of women.

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Three debut novels on the lives of preteen girls

1/3/2016

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I’ve partnered these three debut novels because they’re all about preteen girls (although, in the third, Under the Udala Trees, our heroine does grow up to become a mother herself). Set in Britain, China and Nigeria they feature loneliness, religion and burgeoning sexuality with the latter two against the backdrop of war.