Category: Animals

These two recent reads – the first non-fiction rooted in the UK, the second a novel visiting Australia, the USA and Iraq – involving characters and authors delving into recent and historical government injustice against its colonised peoples. Read, and use your vote accordingly – but of course you already do!

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Caterpillars, Butterflies, Sugar and Snails

20/7/2020

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Whoever designed[1] butterflies, must’ve been having a laugh. No mere shapeshifters, the creepy crawlers must dissolve completely for their winged alter egos to emerge. No wonder the butterfly is considered a metaphor for transformation. Where else does nature deliver such a dramatic change?

Thanks to our gorgeous garden meadows, I can observe this metamorphosis almost at my back door. And it strikes me that it’s an oversimplification to view this as a transition from ugly to beautiful: some of the caterpillars are rather attractive too. Take, for example the brown-and-yellow striped creature that feeds on ragwort, or the bright[2]-eyed elephant hawk moth caterpillar (pictured) that graced our willow herb last year.

[1] Don't mistake me for a Creationist, I mean this metaphorically!
[2] Obviously these aren't its real eyes.

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Supernatural / super-natural: The Rain Heron & Pine

6/7/2020

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I recently read very different two novels with a supernatural element and a forest setting where nature cannot be ignored. The first is a meditation on our collective fragility involving a fantastic – in the literal sense – bird. The second is a psychological suspense story about a family and community haunted by a young mother’s disappearance a decade before.

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Unrecognised: Rabbits for Food & Miss Iceland

24/4/2020

Is there discrimination against women writers? (Is there even more discrimination against older women writers?) Probably but, there being even worse things to get hung up about right now, I’ll gloss over the fact that these two novels about under-appreciated female writers – one in 1960s Iceland, the other in 21st-century New York – come from fairly successful female authors. With a couple of caveats, either or both would make great lockdown reads.

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A perfectly cathartic political satire: Enter the Aardvark by Jessica Anthony (#review and #giveaway)

23/4/2020

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In those innocent days before Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, Republican Congressman Alexander Wilson might have seemed a cartoon caricature, but I found his fictional hypocrisy and narcissism – and unwarranted optimism – immensely consoling in these rage-inducing times. We join him as the doorbell rings at his comfortable home in Virginia, on a hot day in August at the start of his re-election campaign. He’s surprised at the size of the parcel left by the FedEx delivery driver, and even more so when he unwraps it to find a stuffed aardvark and an unsigned card from his ‘lover’ (Congressman Wilson is incapable of love) Greg Tampico, President of the Namibian charity, The Happiness Foundation.

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Dislocation: The Lost Lights of St Kilda & Gun Island

21/2/2020

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These two novels feature the displacement of people and the unique cultures and environments they left behind. The first introduces us to the remote Scottish island of St Kilda whose depleted population was evacuated to the mainland in 1930. The second links Venice with the Sunderbans in the Bay of Bengal via folklore and cli-fi. Despite their complementary covers, they’re very different books.

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Survival skills for wintry weather: The Year without Summer & Snow, Dog, Foot

14/2/2020

These two recent reads explore physical and psychological survival, or otherwise, in extreme weather conditions. The first is a historical novel about the devastating human, climactic and economic consequences of a volcanic eruption in Indonesia. The second is a translated novella about vulnerable hermit overwintering in the Italian Alps. If you choose to read either of these, you won’t be disappointed.

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Slavery’s shadow: A Tall History of Sugar & Tender Is the Flesh

10/2/2020

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Both of these novels defy easy classification, but I’ve chosen to pair them for their themes of the legacy of slavery, or the way in which owning another person demeans us all. In the first, we follow a young man, marked by his unusual appearance, from babyhood in Jamaica shortly before independence to England and back. The second is a translated Argentinian dystopian novel about cannibalism. In both novels, a character, or characters, withhold or are denied their voice.

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Bending the truth: Inland & Liar

22/10/2019

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Only in court are we required to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but. In our ordinary lives, we stretch, bend and turn it inside out. Not always intentionally, or even consciously, but simply to smooth human interactions and present the best version of ourselves. In the first of these two novels, a Wild-West outlaw needs to create an alter ego to survive, while a frontiers woman needs to revise the details of a family tragedy in order to live with herself. In the second, a lie gives a teenage girl a reprieve from loneliness, and an elderly woman a chance to be heard.

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Keen observers: The Measure of a Man & Bird Cottage

17/10/2019

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Sometimes, the covers of books I’ve paired for review are so well matched, despite differences in genre, it appears I’ve put them together for aesthetic reasons. But, while I like to dress my blog attractively, it’s the content that counts. These two translated novels fictionalise real-life historical figures who were meticulous observers of the world around them. The first is still celebrated 500 years later; the second has been forgotten in the half-century since her death.

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Observing and conserving: Tiger & The Museum of Broken Promises

2/9/2019

While separated by style – the first literary lyrical, the second more off-the-peg – and setting – the first wilderness, the second three cityscapes – these two novels are united by more than a character named Tomas. The main characters of both stories are preoccupied with meticulous observation of the environment: for animal research in Tiger whereas in The Museum of Broken Promises, surveillance might be a more appropriate word. And while the latter is about conserving objects and memories, nature conservation is one of the themes of the first.

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Celebrating another book birthday: Sugar and Snails turns four

23/7/2019

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One advantage of getting a new car on the day I published my first novel, is that I’ll always remember when it’s due its MOT. And taking the car for its MOT means I easily remember my book birthday. So what’s happening as my baby turns four? Read on for an interview with one of the minor characters thanks to one of Craig Boyack’s alter egos and an update on revamping the blurb.

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A meadow of our own

5/7/2019

When we moved to this house over twenty years ago, I was most excited about the garden. Although I’d previously worked an allotment, I’d never had custody of shrubberies and trees. That first winter, we cleared a patch of ground for ten raised vegetable beds and another for fruit bushes, fenced-in to keep out the birds. Along with that and creating a pond and patio, we didn’t pay much attention to the grass.

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Every picture paints a story

1/7/2019

Although I’m generally more articulate in words than visuals, sometimes the balance swings the other way. Still playing catch-up a busy week and weekend, and with a few things to share before I can fully embrace a new week and new month, I’ve gone for an image-heavy post today. First up, is the gorgeous cover of my debut novel, Sugar and Snails, about a woman who has kept her past identity secret for thirty years, which is battling with nine others on cover wars. If you can spare a moment, please follow the link and vote for the one you prefer.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

6/9/2018

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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.

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Gravity Well & The Gravity of Love

13/5/2018

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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Widowers: The Melody & The Haunting of Henry Twist

15/2/2018