Annecdotal - annethology

Sibling loyalties and multiple murders: My Sister The Serial Killer & The Night Tiger

17/2/2019

While the title declares the first of these novels, set in Lagos, to be about siblings and killings, it’s not immediately obvious how it applies to the second, set in Perak, Malaysia. A boy who feels guided by his dead twin, a young woman strongly attached to her stepbrother, and mysterious deaths that might be the work of a tiger: does that nail it? Read on!

Picturing identity: Mothlight & Trick

10/2/2019

I wondered, initially, whether the fact that these two short novels include images would be sufficient reason to pair them in a post. But, while different in style, they’re both about identity (among other matters). In the first, a young man uses photographs he has inherited to try to understand the woman who kept them, as his own identity seems to merge with hers. In the second, an older man finds his identity as an illustrator losing out to his role as grandfather.

Feline friends: French Exit & My Cat Yugoslavia

29/10/2018

October’s final novel pairing involves migration, mothers and sons, and a couple of anthropoid cats. In the first, reckless spending pushes a mother and her co-dependent son to leave Manhattan for Paris along with the family cat; in the second, a woman is forced to flee Kosovo for Finland, where her son grows up distant from family and roots until he begins an affair with a talking cat.

Can you write a fractured fairy tale?

25/10/2018

It’s rutting season out on the moors again. The first time I heard a bolving deer (no, that’s not a mistype), I thought it was a motorbike. On Sunday, it made me think of the troll who hides under the bridge to scare the billy goats gruff. Or maybe not, if it’s the poor misunderstood creature in Norah Colvin’s fractured fairy tale. Now she’s inviting you to write one too. But beware, you have only 99-words to play with and I’ll be helping Norah, along with children’s author Robbie Cheadle, to select the best.

Two more women in translation: Strike Your Heart & Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead

6/9/2018

Women in Translation month was barely over when I picked up these two novels that should help me beat the last twelve months’ total of seven in the coming year. The first French, the second Polish, both focus on women living their lives somewhat apart from their peers. Diana because, growing up without maternal affection, she fills her emptiness with work. Olga, on the other hand, is more outwardly eccentric, and her beef is not with a mother, but with men.

Gravity Well & The Gravity of Love

13/5/2018

No prizes for guessing why I’ve connected these two novels; I don’t think I’ve ever read another book with gravity in the title – although The Weightless World is about a antigravity machine – and then I find two published in the same month. But rest assured, they’re very different reads: in the first, Lotte feels a stronger pull towards the stars in the sky than her earthly attachments; in the second, love is a force that can furnish reconnections across continents and years.

Flesh on the bones: Beyond the 99-word story #flashfiction

27/4/2018

I wrote recently about how practising the 99-word story strengthens my editing muscle. But, of course, the discipline can also have benefits in the other direction, planting a seed that can grow into a longer piece of fiction. The recently published Congress of Rough Writers Flash Fiction anthology contains five such expanded stories (including one of mine) along with the original 99 words. I not only relished reading the other four on their own merits, but I also wondered about the different ways we’d fleshed out our original bones. Would a closer examination of the authors’ process from flash to the longer story (or, in one case, from long to flash) help elucidate that enigmatic creature, creativity? Here’s what three of the other authors told me, along with my own 99 words. (Photos and links are from/to the relevant author page on the Congress of Rough Writers list.)

Time to end it all? Hotel Silence & The Zero and the One

3/3/2018

Two novels in which men consider suicide; doesn’t sound very jolly, does it? But there’s rather more to both these stories, as well as the coincidence of texts punctuated by philosophical aphorisms. Read on and see what you think! And before you leave, check out my latest 99-word story linking suicide, unlikely weather and ravens.

Widowers: The Melody & The Haunting of Henry Twist

15/2/2018

I’ve recently read two novels in which a widower has an uncanny encounter with someone from the fringes which, for them at least, feels replete with meaning. Jim Crace’s widower is also mourning the end of his musical career; whereas, twenty years younger, Rebecca F John’s widower is offered a fresh start in caring for his newborn baby daughter.

Either side of the Velvet Revolution: Soviet Milk & Spaceman of Bohemia

1/2/2018

1989 brought a transition from communism to democracy across Eastern Europe, with the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, a 600 kilometre joining of hands across Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, and the collapse of the Berlin Wall. These two novels feature a part of that story, one ending, and the other beginning, in 1989 and both, as a bonus, featuring narrators brought up by grandparents partly as a result of political events. Set in Latvia before regime change, Soviet Milk is about the difficulty of living a moral life under totalitarianism. Set in the Czech Republic in the very near future, Spaceman of Bohemia is about how a father’s collaboration impacts on the career and choices of his son.

A thriller and a satire about women at work: The Night Visitor & The Beautiful Bureaucrat

16/1/2018

I like fiction that shows the characters at work, but it can be difficult to pull off convincingly. While approaching it from very different angles – British writer Lucy Atkins in a thriller about a highflying TV presenter and historian; American Helen Phillips in a satire about a data entry clerk – both have produced extremely satisfying reads.

A day / week under the skin of a community: Johannesburg & Histories

14/12/2017

From a day in the life of a city in mourning to a week in a busy hospital, in both these novels a large cast of characters tell not only their individual stories, but the story of the settings that shape their interlinked lives.

Two novels featuring supernatural rescues

9/9/2017

Apart from featuring supernatural rescues, these two novels have very little in common. But since I rarely read anything that takes me away from the rational, that’s enough to pair them in a post. While in A Jigsaw of Fire and Stars the spirits of the drowned migrants – plus a magic flute and a clutch of snakes – are firmly on the side of the good guys, the miracle cure in Fever Dream has a be-careful-what-you-wish-for flavour. Intrigued? Read on!

Two novel encounters with the wild: Under a Pole Star & Green Lion

21/8/2017

A historical novel about Arctic exploration or a novel set in a near-future South Africa? A romance or an account of a relationship falling apart? A motherless girl or a fatherless boy? Wild animals or ice? Both of these novels explore the conflict and compassion that connects us to the natural world, but it was a bonus for me to read that the protagonist of Green Lion told his friend that his father was killed in a hunting accident in the Arctic, the setting of Under a Pole Star. Read on to see if I was right to pair these reviews.

Two novel encounters with foxes

11/7/2017

What’s special about the fox? What do we project into these beautiful, furtive and sometimes highly disruptive creatures? Two impressive debut novels depicting an individual in crisis locking eyes with a fox might go some way towards answering these questions – and other enigmas of the human condition. The first, in which the fox takes centre stage, takes place in an urban setting; the second, where the fox is only one of several animals encountered, is in a rural context. Although I have less to say about the second, I can heartily recommend both.

Nineveh: Trading in painless pest relocations

13/5/2017

It’s strange, what disgusts people. Who would scorn the friendship of a gecko, for example: golden-eyed, translucent-skinned, toes splayed on a farmhouse wall? Who could resent a long-legged spider, knitting its silver in the corner of the room? But they do: people will pay to have them killed, poisoned, destroyed.

The Birdcage by Clive Aslet

22/10/2016

Lieutenant Winnington-Smith is a promising artist and hopeless soldier who gets injured on his second day. Captain Southall is the commander of the Royal Flying Corps, Kite Balloon Section, who takes ‘Winner’ up in the sky to sketch the view. Elsie Fox is the fearless young working-class woman who drives an ambulance for the British Women’s Hospital and developed a soft spot for Winner on the boat out there. Isabel Hinchcliff is an upper-class nurse at the hospital, brought up with a heavily starched upper lip. Welcome to Salonika in the middle of the First World War, a multicultural playground and hotbed of spies in neutral Greece where those with the means can make believe carnage doesn’t lurk just over the horizon.

Between a Wolf and a Dog by Georgia Blain & Strange Bodies by Marcel Theroux

10/10/2016

I was pleased to mark World Mental Health Day last year with a post on dignity in fictional representations of mental health. This year’s theme is dignity in mental health first aid. Now, although I perceive therapy as a longer term project rather than first aid, its foundation in active listening is fundamental to our initial response to others in distress. And, as no-one can engage in therapy unless they actively want to, it’s an approach that bestows dignity, so what better day to celebrate my series on fictional therapists by introducing you to a couple of new ones? As a finale, I’ve got a piece of flash fiction on combining short-term and long-term solutions to mental ill-health.

Sounding out the body in fiction

7/8/2016

I spent what seemed to me a considerable amount of time flushing out what I thought was a bit of leek stuck between my upper right incisor and its neighbouring canine – first with my fingernail, then with the corner of a business card, and finally with a sharpened matchstick. But there was no piece of leek. It was an erroneous message that my gums were sending me, themselves misled by some previous irritation.

The stain of sin: Smoke by Dan Vyleta

7/7/2016

Mother says that I am obsessed; that far from dismissing Smoke, I have made it my idol. Indeed I am grateful for the Smoke. It tells us when we err. Imagine a world in which we err and nobody notices. Not even oneself. Until one goes to seed by increments and slides into the madness of villainy. Smoke eats our reason with a charcoal spoon. We measure our humanity against its darkness. It is good it leaves a mark.