Category: Disability

Degenerative disorders: Every Note Played & May

2/4/2018

Would you rather lose the use of your body or lose your mind? Both so dreadful to contemplate; perhaps it’s just as well we don’t get to choose. And neither need we choose in fiction: both these novels about brain degeneration are worth your time. In the first, a concert pianist’s encroaching paralysis due to motor neurone disease is mirrored by the psychological immobility of his ex-wife. In the second, the reader can gradually make sense of the obsessions of a woman with senile dementia through the memories of her family and carers. Painful topics but, for those who need it, these novels provide a note of lightness too.

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Strange afflictions: Kintu & The Alarming Palsy of James Orr

21/1/2018

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An epic story of cultural change in Uganda and a novella set in an idyllic English community, these debuts have little in common apart from the strange affliction and that I’m happy to recommend them both. In the first, multiple branches of an extended family at the beginning of the twenty-first century are affected by a curse on their ancestor 250 years before. In the second, James probably feels cursed when he wakes up one morning to find he can’t move half his face.

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Three novels about intersecting lives

8/12/2017

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Apologies for the less-than-inspiring title – and anyway, aren’t all novels about how lives intersect? – but I’m pulling this post together in a bit of a rush to move a backlog of reviews before the end of the year. Each of these novels is by an established writer who isn’t dependent on my short-out whose previous novel I reviewed very positively here, both Laird Hunt’s and Maggie O’Farrell’s eliciting instructions-for-a-novel posts. Their new novels are listed in ascending order of number of point of view characters. (Of course!)

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Anger is understandable in Crimes of the Father & Seeing Red

12/10/2017

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Life’s a game of snakes and ladders; we all have our ups and downs. But some people’s snakes are much longer than some other people’s ladders, and some so unlucky on the roll of the dice it’s like they’ve landed in a slithery nest of snakes. If fear or despair hasn’t shut down their emotions, these people are angry, understandably so. And that’s my tenuous link between these novels: the first about a young woman’s sudden blindness and the second about the victims of paedophile priests.

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Three novels about people whose brains work differently

18/7/2017

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Okay, perhaps not the most elegant title to sum up the common thread between these three debut novels from small and innovative independent publishers. But they’re all, in very different ways, about life with a brain or mind that functions a little differently from average. In the first, we meet an elderly voice hearer on a mission to bring hope to his granddaughter. In the second, a retired teacher with dementia is convinced a former pupil can save him from the persecutory antics of his deceased father. The third takes the reader even further into the realms of fantasy as a teenager with unexplained blackouts is drawn into a world she thought existed only in her dreams.

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Two novels about a passion for vinyl

14/7/2017

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The digital revolution has massively changed the way we listen to music, yet vinyl has been revitalised in some quarters in recent years. Perhaps it’s no surprise that contemporary novelists should review their record collections in search of new ways of exploring the human condition. But two published within three months of each other? That’s quite a coincidence. Read on to see how these established British authors have addressed the topic in very different ways.

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School of Velocity by Eric Beck Rubin

28/5/2017

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It doesn’t seem such a promising start to a friendship when Dirk steals Jan’s girlfriend. But before too long, Jan de Vries feels more at home at Dirk’s house in the city of Den Bosch than at his own in a village a cycle ride away. For years they’re inseparable, the more reticent Jan emboldened by his friend’s daredevil charisma, until, the day after Dirk’s drunken high-school graduation party, they go off to separate universities, Dirk to drama school in America, Jan to study piano at the Conservatory in Maastricht.

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Amid the splendid scenery of Orkney and the Monros

10/4/2017

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Let’s take a look at a couple of debut novels with some fine evocations of the natural world and a strong sense of place published by small independent presses based in Scotland.

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The Song of the Stork by Stephan Collishaw

17/3/2017

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When fifteen-year-old Yael takes refuge in the forest, it’s not because she’s a stroppy adolescent looking for adventure. This is Lithuania in the 1940s and, as a Jew, Yael’s very survival depends on her ability to stay out of sight. But when her companion dies, Yael seeks shelter on a nearby farm. Aleksei, the young owner and village outcast because of myths surrounding his disability, is initially reluctant to help her, conscious that it means putting his own life at risk. But, little by little, the pair grow closer, becoming lovers until the encroachment of a Nazi encampment forces Yael once more to flee.

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Two novels about approaching the end

24/2/2017

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I’ve enjoyed these two novels about how we manage the end of life, the first through old age and the second through assisted dying. Mortality gets us all sooner or later; what better way to face it than with a novelist holding our hands?

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Twin studies: Mischling by Affinity Konar

16/2/2017

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When the cattle car stops at Auschwitz, Pearl and Stasha Zagorski’s mother realises their best chance of survival is in Josef Mengele’s Zoo. As the other kids point out, to the twins shivering on their bunk that night alongside a girl on the brink of death, they get more food there (although “it’s not kosher and it eats your insides”) and keep their hair “until the lice come” and their clothes. Submitting their bodies to the doctor’s measurements and experiments, they hope the bond between them will save their humanity. But when, not long before the camp is liberated, Pearl disappears, Stasha embarks on a perilous journey through Poland’s devastation in search, not only of her sister, but of the man who has done them both such harm.

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What’s marriage, anyway? Wait For Me, Jack blog tour

20/1/2017

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Blinded by the sun as they walked slowly back to the car, they leaned towards each other. They felt wrong together, mismatched, a mistake taken too far. But from a short distance they looked like many couples did to outsiders – exclusive, close. From a greater distance, they looked like a single person.

Jack and Milly’s marriage is like the weather, with sun either too fierce or blocked by clouds. They inhabit a climate with myriad variations of hot and cold, seeming different from the inside than from outside, from morning or evening, when filtered through a prism of the promise of happiness or resignation to “for better or worse”.

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My stop on the #devilautopsy #blogtour

12/8/2016

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What would have to happen to drive an entire town insane? In Tiffany McDaniel’s unusual and gripping debut, all it takes for Breathed, Ohio, in the summer of 1984, is a heatwave and the suggestion that a tattered and bruised thirteen-year-old boy is the incarnation of the devil.

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#OwlSongatDawn blog tour: Morecambe’s White Hope

11/7/2016

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Like Workington and Barrow, Morecambe is a small, slightly rundown, coastal town in north-west England to which I have personal connections: my parents lived there for many years and, coincidentally, one of my good friends, whom I met in Cairo, has a house overlooking the bay which, for a short while, she ran as a guesthouse. Although I don’t refer to it by name, it’s also one of the settings, along with Nottingham, for my forthcoming novel, Underneath. So when I discovered Owl Song at Dawn was set in Morecambe, I was keen to read it. I was even happier to be offered a slot on the blog tour when the author agreed to write a post on the setting. I hope you enjoy Emma Claire Sweeney’s piece as much as I did. My mini review follows at the end.

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Seropurulent: The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie

9/5/2016

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Paul and Veblen are engaged to be married. They’re clearly in love and clearly, with their mismatched attitudes to the world beyond themselves, unsuited for the decades of companionship we hope will follow a wedding. It is obvious from the moment Paul gives her a ring, with a diamond so large it interferes with her obsessional typing.

Unlike Veblen, who espouses the anti-capitalist values of her namesake, the economist Thorstein Veblen, Paul is ambitious. A research neurologist, when the pharmaceutical empire Hutmacher offers him the opportunity to begin clinical trials on the device he’s developed to minimise battlefield brain damage, he dismisses his ethical reservations with the word Seropurulent “an ironic superlative they used in med school for terrible things that had to be overlooked” (p62). Raised by hippies, the trappings of the consumerist world spell safety for Paul (p66):

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Mothering her mother: Hot Milk by Deborah Levy

31/3/2016

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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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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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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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Psychologist Write: Barbara Fagan Speake

13/8/2015

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For my third post in this series, I’m delighted to welcome Barbara Speake to Annecdotal. After an accomplished career as a research and clinical psychologist, Barbara is well on the way to publishing her fifth novel. Here’s Barbara in her own words:

How did you come to writing fiction?

I came to fiction writing through the discipline of writing non-fiction. I was very fortunate to have had two major psychology careers spanning nearly four decades, firstly as a research psychologist and then, after further training, as a clinical psychologist and NHS manager. During my academic career, I authored or co-authored numerous journal articles, book chapters, government reports, a PhD thesis and two books for parents and staff, both published by Souvenir Press. When I later qualified as a clinical psychologist, my writing was mainly of a clinical nature, service reports, and court reports, firstly in primary care, then in learning disability services, autism, Asperger’s Syndrome and forensic services.

Of course, like many authors, who have written non-fiction, I always wondered if I had a fiction book in me.

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A special brother: The Insect Farm by Stuart Prebble

23/3/2015

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When his parents die in a house fire, Jonathan Maguire decides to give up his studies at Newcastle University and move back to London to live with his brother. Six years older but with the mind of an eight-year-old, Roger has little understanding of the workings of the social world, but is an expert on the community of insects he breeds in glass-fronted cages in a garden shed. Despite their age difference, the boys were extremely close as children and Jonathan is determined to do the right thing by his brother, but his loyalty comes at a cost. Not only does he give up his degree, but it means separation from his girlfriend, Harriet, a talented flautist much admired by young men. Their marriage, just before Harriet returns to university after the summer break, does little to assuage Jonathan’s suspiciousness and jealousy, especially when she is the only woman in a classical quartet that includes his nemesis, Brendan Harcourt, who has never attempted to hide his attraction to Harriet. With Harriet’s support, and the occasional fiery confrontation, Jonathan seems to be learning to manage his emotions, when Roger reveals witnessing an illicit kiss after a performance by the quartet.

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<<Previous

Degenerative disorders: Every Note Played & May

Strange afflictions: Kintu & The Alarming Palsy of James Orr

Three novels about intersecting lives

Anger is understandable in Crimes of the Father & Seeing Red

Three novels about people whose brains work differently

Two novels about a passion for vinyl

School of Velocity by Eric Beck Rubin

Amid the splendid scenery of Orkney and the Monros

The Song of the Stork by Stephan Collishaw

Two novels about approaching the end

Twin studies: Mischling by Affinity Konar

What’s marriage, anyway? Wait For Me, Jack blog tour

My stop on the #devilautopsy #blogtour

#OwlSongatDawn blog tour: Morecambe’s White Hope

Seropurulent: The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie

Mothering her mother: Hot Milk by Deborah Levy

Man and monster: Trencherman by Eben Venter

Held Captive by Neurodiversity: Truestory by Catherine Simpson

Psychologist Write: Barbara Fagan Speake

A special brother: The Insect Farm by Stuart Prebble

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