Blog Archives

This Is the Water and The Cold Cold Sea ... with a quirky style and some reflections on structure

31/7/2014

I didn’t expect to be dipping my toe in the water again so soon after Waiting for the Rain, but the coincidence of two new novels swimming to the top of the TBR pile has compelled me to add them to Annecdotal’s growing stream of water-themed fiction. Published today and tomorrow, both novels evoke the dangers that lurk in the water through the pain of losing a child and the question of how far a parent will go to safeguard their family.

This is the water. This is the text: letters forming words, words forming sentences, sentences making paragraphs to convey the story of the pool and the girls and boys who swim in it and the parents who ferry their children there. This is Chapter One where you enter the minds of swim moms ultracompetitive Dinah and beautiful but weary Chris. This is Annie who will lead you through the chlorinated water where the killer also swims. This is Annie, confused by her brother’s suicide and her husband’s emotional distance, corsetting her girls into their skin-tight racing suits and deliberating over overpriced energy drinks.

This is Chapter Fifteen. This is you still ambivalent about the “unique narrative style”, wondering if it’s slowing the pace unduly, wondering why this novel is described as a thriller. This is Annie’s husband, Thomas, reading a newspaper report about a girl with her throat slit letting you see at last how well this novel fits the genre. These are the next 200 pages of moral dilemmas around marital infidelity and withholding evidence to protect one’s own skin. This is the climax where Annie’s everyday cares and concerns are meaningless as she fights for her own life and that of her daughters.

This is me wondering how many other bloggers have adopted the author’s style in their reviews. This is Yannick Murphy’s fifth novel. This is the water. Will you plunge in?

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The country house meets friendship betrayed: The Long Shadow by Mark Mills, with fruit for afters

27/7/2014

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Who says fiction doesn’t change lives? Thanks to Mark Mills, I’ve learnt how to peel bananas from the bottom end, like a monkey. Not that this is a novel about fruit, or animal behaviour (unless you think young boys are like monkeys), but I was grateful for the tip about bananas at a point when the narrative pace seemed to drag.

Ben is a scriptwriter aeons away from the big time, a divorced father living in a grotty flat. When a wealthy former schoolmate offers to bankroll his film and install him in his mansion while he does a rewrite, it seems almost too good to be true. As, indeed, it is, but Ben is so seduced by his good fortune and Victor so skilled at manipulation, it takes some time for him to figure out exactly how and why. When he does, it’s immensely satisfying: country house meets poisonous friendship (and so refreshing to have the latter portrayed from the male point of view for a change) seasoned with boys’ games along the lines of Lord of the Flies, the resolution encompasses envy, childhood neglect, rivalry and turning a blind eye to painful truths in a psychologically astute way. I must confess, however, I appreciated this more in retrospect and there were moments across the first 200 pages when I was tempted to give up.

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Holiday Reads: The Lemon Grove and Bite Sized Memoir

24/7/2014

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The last time the husband and I went on holiday we came home a day early, and enjoyed ourselves an awful lot more pottering around the garden than we would have done looking for more touristy things to fill the time. The thatched-roofed cottage I’d booked in a chocolate-box Dorset village had a wall-full of Penguins, but the latticed windows alongside the narrow cobbled street made for a sombre interior, far from ideal for curling up with a book. Since then, we’ve managed a couple of weekends away but I don’t think either of us will be dreadfully disappointed if we never go on holiday again. But that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy reading about other people’s holidays, especially when they don’t go completely to plan.

Jenn has been having a marvellous holiday on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca with her husband, Greg. But her fifteen-year-old stepdaughter, Emma, will be joining them shortly, with unsuitable boyfriend, Nathan, in tow. Their arrival changes everything, although not quite in the way she expected. Jenn finds herself seduced by Nathan’s youth and sensuality and, amid thunderstorms and searing heat, risks, not only her marriage, but her sense of herself.
There’d been a fair amount of media hype about The Lemon Grove, so I was surprised when I didn’t warm to it as readily as I had to another Mallorca-set villa-holiday novel, The Vacationers. The writing was competent:

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A Flash (or Two) of Musical Inspiration

21/7/2014

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I had an encouraging response to the musical link I included in my recent post on water-themed fiction. I used to provide a musical accompaniment to my posts quite frequently – up until the beginning of this year I was actively populating my Google+ page with a YouTube link to each blog post – but somehow I'd lost the habit. The latest flash fiction challenge from Charli Mills seems a timely reminder to re-establish the link between music and words.

I’ve published a couple of short stories on a musical theme: there’s my flash Getting It Together with Elvis; my short stories Melanie’s Last Tune about a narcissistic music teacher and The Invention of Harmony about a mediaeval nun’s fear of her own creativity. So it didn’t take me long to come up with an idea for the required 99 words. I’m pairing this with the march from Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges, although anything that sparks different reactions would do:

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5 Tips for Writing a Powerful Short Story by Shelley Weiner

17/7/2014

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Early last week, I was contacted by Emily Furniss, who was the publicist for Roopa Farooki's novel, The Good Children, which sparked a lively discussion here on Annecdotal about obedience. Emily invited me to host a post on writing tips as part of a blog tour she was arranging. Of course I was game; I'd enjoyed hosting Janet Watson writing about her memoir and Tom Vowler's Laws for a Literary Life.

The blog tour is an excellent way of discovering new blogs and, because I've got some nominations languishing in the virtual cupboard waiting to be appropriately dispensed, I'm awarding each of the four non-commercial blogs partaking in this tour the honourable title of Versatile Blogger. (Only 6 more nominations to go, then.) Do pop over to their blogs to see whether you agree with me about their versatility.

Regarding my role in the current tour, by sheer coincidence, I already knew the writer I'd be hosting: Shelley Weiner helped me excise two superfluous point of view characters from my novel, Sugar and Snails – a painful but necessary amputation.

So, without further ado, it's over to Shelley and her tips on writing a powerful short story.

(Incidentally, I have no connection with the Faber Academy.)

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The Right to Die Debate and God’s Dog by Diego Marani (translated by Judith Landry)

14/7/2014

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I’m sure I’ve read somewhere that to blog about religion is a sure-fire way of losing half your followers. But what the hell! Geoff LePard has done it and seems to have survived. Paula Reed Nancarrow does it too. And, while I shy away from too much personal disclosure, I did touch on my Catholic childhood in my first bite-sized memoir.

How the belief in the Divine shapes people’s lives can make for engrossing fiction. In a later post, I hope to review Carys Bray’s debut novel, A Song for Issy Bradley about the impact on a Mormon family of the death of a child. My short stories, The Invention of Harmony, What Time It Sunset? and Four Hail Marys (unfortunately the link is no longer working for this one, unless you’d like to read it in Hungarian), all touch on religion to a greater or lesser degree. But none of these are the main reason I’m daring to post about religion today.

Voluntary euthanasia is a highly emotive topic which pits those concerned with the relief of end-of-life suffering against those who fear the vulnerable might be coerced into a premature death. It’s one type of compassion versus another; a painful debate but, in my opinion, an important one given that, with medical advances over the last century, many of us risk facing a long drawn-out death. I know where I stand, but I have sympathy for those who take a different position. What I find difficult to tolerate is when this important debate is hijacked by religion, as if the faithful are assumed to lead more moral lives than the faithless, as with the recent attempt by The Church Of England to prevent the debate on assisted suicide in the House of Lords later this week. (Apologies to readers outside the UK for the parochialism here.)

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Waiting for the Rain: Water in Fiction from Novels to Flash

11/7/2014

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The latest flash fiction challenge from Charli Mills sent me cruising my geographically-arranged bookshelves for novels on the theme of water. Waiting for the Rain by Zimbabwean Charles Mungoshi was my obvious starting point since, as usual at this time of year, my garden is particularly thirsty. I try to conserve water by harvesting rain from the drainpipes and pounding my plot with a watering can as the sun goes down behind the trees. But, with my tendency to precrastinate over arduous tasks, I can often make extra work for myself by transplanting seedlings in the heat of the day, then bemoaning their failure to thrive. Yet, through this, through the dirt under my fingernails, I feel a connection to those subsistence farmers whose very survival is dependent on the rain. Of course, there’s an over romanticism bordering on the delusional in this assumed affinity between my pampered life and theirs.

The Westerners’ illusions about the poor is one of the themes of Ann Patchett’s novel, State of Wonder, about secret research in the muddy waters of the Brazilian jungle. It’s not too much of a boat ride from the Amazon basin to the West Indies, the setting for Jean Rhys’s reimagining of Charlotte Brontë’s mad-woman-in-the-attic, The Wide Sargasso Sea. Depending on how far they’ve drifted off course, we might also encounter Grace Winter on those waters, fighting for survival in Charlotte Rogan’s debut novel, The Lifeboat. From there, we could sail through the Panama Canal into the Pacific ocean, where, in Yan Martel’s debut, The Life of Pi, a young man shares his lifeboat with a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan and a 450-pound Bengal tiger.

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Looking ahead: Precrastination or Procrastination?

7/7/2014

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Despite my smug response to Norah Colvin’s question for the Liebster award, I’m dreadfully pushed for time at the moment. Novels to read and review, blog posts to read and write, the eternal submissions before I can even consider writing fiction. Then there’s the rest of my life, the garden especially frantic at this time of the year. I’m not sure I’ve even got time to write this post. But no point complaining; you’re probably in the same boat and I’m grateful to you for reading. How did you make the time?

I wonder if skimming the blogs was one of the items on your to-do list today? Perhaps you’ll feel a warm glow of well-being when you tick it off? If that’s your general style, you might be one of life’s precrastinators.

Yup, you read that correctly. No, my spell check hasn’t gone on the blink. This is just the snazzy new term for people who tend to knuckle down to tasks prematurely, for the satisfaction of having got them out of the way. Perfectly sensible, you might be thinking, except that in the research that spawned the term, people were prepared to expend more effort completing the task early than they would have needed had they put it off until later.

Does this mean that we should all congratulate ourselves for our tendency to procrastinate? Probably not, but we might consider whether “clearing the decks” before settling down to “the real work” is not only a way of avoiding an unpleasant or daunting task, but actually creating more work for ourselves.

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Woman, stranded: debut novels from Aria Beth Sloss, Natalie Young and Emma Chapman

3/7/2014

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Reading Lisa Reiter’s post yesterday on a sanctuary for women on the receiving end of domestic violence, I remembered the research I’d come across years ago indicating that marriage confers greater benefits in health and well-being to men than to women. Alas, I couldn’t access the reference, so this report from the New York Times will have to suffice as my introduction to a trio of debut novels that raise questions about the experience of women in and outside marriage. Two are published in paperback in the UK today and the third came out last year.

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Welcome

This Is the Water and The Cold Cold Sea ... with a quirky style and some reflections on structure

The country house meets friendship betrayed: The Long Shadow by Mark Mills, with fruit for afters

Holiday Reads: The Lemon Grove and Bite Sized Memoir

A Flash (or Two) of Musical Inspiration

5 Tips for Writing a Powerful Short Story by Shelley Weiner

The Right to Die Debate and God’s Dog by Diego Marani (translated by Judith Landry)

Waiting for the Rain: Water in Fiction from Novels to Flash

Looking ahead: Precrastination or Procrastination?

Woman, stranded: debut novels from Aria Beth Sloss, Natalie Young and Emma Chapman

2022 Reading Challenge

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