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I started this blog in 2013 to share my reflections on reading, writing and psychology, along with my journey to become a published novelist. I soon graduated to about twenty book reviews a month and a weekly 99-word story. Ten years later, I've transferred my writing / publication updates to my new website but will continue here with occasional reviews and flash fiction pieces, and maybe the odd personal post.
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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Two novels featuring women, scarred by life, who have kept themselves slightly aloof. Of the two, Eleanor Oliphant is the most damaged, but small acts of kindness, along with a crush on a self-centred musician, might bring her out of her shell. Upstate is perhaps more realistic in confronting the difficulty of change, even though, when we first meet Vanessa Querry she’s no longer lonely as she’s fallen in love. Eleanor gets the better therapist; but is either of these women completely fine?
Although these two novels couldn’t be more different in tone – the first a literary exploration of a young mother’s development; the second tricksy thriller – I can’t resist pairing them for the other factors they have in common. Both feature thoughtful, philosophising, unnamed narrators; both take as their subject matter how we explore the inside and outside of other people, and ourselves. Both are ambitious and unusual in their approach; both are the author’s second book and a cracking read.
Two historical novels addressing Spain’s internal conflicts: the first, set in Granada, takes us back 500 years to the last Muslim Court; the second, set mostly in London, begins eighty years ago with the International Brigades and resistance to Franco. Both weave a thread of hope for humanity with a romantic storyline – or two.
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.
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.
Given the chance, wouldn’t you live in a comfortable right-on community where none of your neighbours voted for Brexit or Trump? Where people read books, and supported libraries, and no-one hung plastic bags of dog poo from the trees? But you know what would happen if you packed up and moved there? You’d have the neighbours on your back for putting out the bins too early, or letting your dandelions run to seed. Because it’s in the nature of utopian societies to have a downside, often manifest in a denial of our baser human instincts and/or excessive control. It makes great fodder for fiction, however, as I hope to show in my review of Celeste Ng’s latest novel set in 1990s suburban America. Alongside that, I’ve gone back to basics with my first-time read of the original Utopia, published 500 years ago.
As 2018 started a few hours earlier in Australia than in the UK, it’s fitting that I should begin my reading year there. Or it could be the coincidence of kindly publicists sending me advance copies of two Australian novels published in the UK this month. The first namechecks various Sydney suburbs, while the second begins near Melbourne before circumnavigating the country. The first contemporary, the second set in the 1950s, they explore the socio-politics of Australian identities and their links to migration and colonialism.
When I’m not sure what to make of a recent read, it sometimes helps if I couple it with something equally enigmatic. A common thread, even if it’s not the theme the author intended, affords me at least the illusion of understanding. So following White Tears, in which a young white man in contemporary America experiences the terror of a black man in the 1920s arrested for a crime he didn’t commit, with My Falling Down House, in which a former Tokyo “salaryman” experiences homelessness, helped me gain my bearings on both.
With my own short story collection scheduled for November next year, I thought I should give more blog space to the short story. But although I managed to pick the winner of the BBC short story award, the first two of these collections knocked my confidence in my ability to review the short form. Listed in the order I read them, the third has me fizzing with excitement about what the short story can achieve. See what you think!
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.
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!)
I recently featured four novels depicting the impact on children of a father’s absence. These two debut novels present the other side of the story: the terrible harm that a father’s presence can do. In both, the fathers control their children’s minds and bodies through violence and a perverted kind of love. Although fiction, each reflects the darker side of society today.
The Greek myths bubble with revenge and betrayal, while the bloodthirsty tyrants of history are themselves made into to myths. Let me present two novels which reinterpret these legendary stories for the modern era, emphasising the human motivations behind the murder and mayhem. Both novels focus on famous families: in the first, the violence turns inwards in an orgy of self-destruction; in the second, the family will do almost anything to ensure their own survival. In both, the gods of the time are co-opted to sanction sacrifice and murder, while the women use their limited power as best they can.
These two novels are worlds apart in terms of style and genre, but both involve mysterious deaths set against real-life moments of rampage and riot in England during recent hot summers. In the first, a lone gunman on the rampage in 2010 Cumbria is integral to the story. In the second, the 2011 London riots provide the perfect backdrop for a domestic noir thriller.
Allow me to introduce you to two translated novels with a supernatural element, albeit less central to the story in the second. Both also give a nod to mental health issues linked to criminality: via one of the off-stage characters in Norma; a neurological disorder thought to be Korsakoff syndrome for the unfortunate narrator of Black Moses. Plus a return to Carrot Ranch Flash Fiction Challenge. For another novel with a supernatural element, see my review of A Jigsaw of Fire and Stars.
If you like to be scared, Halloween is the time for it, and if you like to be scared by a book, any of these might do. The first two are about houses haunted by their history are described as Gothic horror. The third seems to be going that way, but then veers off into a different kind of disturbance which, for me, provided the richer read.
When I studied the psychodynamics of organisations, I learnt to be sensitive to how a social system responds to potential new members. Are they welcomed into the throng, no questions asked, or are they treated with suspicion, kept at a distance until they have demonstrated they’re “one of us”? No wonder “the outsider” crops up frequently in fiction, and where better than in the family which, with its own highly-developed and defended culture, is a social system in microcosm. So these two novels, the first set in India and the second in the USA, about what happens when a young woman joins a privileged family, appealed to me at the outset. They did not disappoint.
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!
After reading The Things We Thought We Knew shortly before its publication back in June, I decided to hang back for another novel on psychosomatic illness or acquired disability with which to pair my review. But picking up The Burning Girl more recently, I was struck by the commonalities between these two novels, not only in the obvious sense of a girl in her late teens looking back on an intense friendship, but in the depth of disturbance resulting from its loss. As happened when I coupled two novels on male infidelity, discovering the similarities enhanced my appreciation of both. While neither pairing uncovered themes of particular personal relevance for me (which can enhance my enjoyment), the fact that they matter sufficiently for more than one author persuades me that other readers might find more to savour. Do let me know if that applies to you!
With my shameful disregard for non-fiction, I glean many of my facts from fiction. So I was delighted to receive advance copies of two debut novels published this month that I hoped would extend my knowledge of shameful periods of Australian and Scottish history that still resonate to this day. Lucy Treloar and Mhairead McLeod have woven engaging stories around historical facts of land appropriation in the 19th century. Although my reviews focus more on the psychological aspects, these novels clearly articulate the socio-political context of the European colonisation of Australia in Salt Creek and the Highland Clearances in The False Men.
I didn’t expect to pair these two novels. I’d already begun reading another Second World War novel to accompany The Sixteen Trees of the Somme, and The Angel in The Stone was going to wait for another novel on mental health. But the latter seemed a good fit for the latest flash fiction challenge and, as I’ve mentioned recently, it’s fun to find unexpected links. Both these novels feature families across three generations; address conflict between brothers; are wholly or partly set in Scotland; and showcase the characters’ musical tastes. Both fictional families have hidden some of their history from the younger generation in a manner that makes life just that little bit harder. Read on, and see what you think.
When recent politics in both the US and UK have gone beyond satire, how else can fiction help us reflect on the systems in which we live? In the first of these two novels reviewed below, Jean Hanff Korelitz explores the politics of an elite university in which, intentionally or otherwise, there are parallels with a liberal America almost too pleased with itself. In the second, Anthony Cartwright more directly examines relationships in divided Britain, in a novel commissioned in response to the Brexit vote.
I do like it when your comments challenge my thinking about the novels I’ve reviewed. Norah Colvin is very good in this, and she recently got me wondering, in response to my post Married or single, something’s missing: First Love & All Grown Up, if the connections I see between novels might differ from what others would find. Although I sometimes stress (in an extremely laid-back manner) about my inability to find a partner for a novel overdue its review, I think finding unexpected commonalities is part of the fun. While the link is obvious in Two novels about a passion for vinyl, what could possibly unite a historical novel about a real murder case and a translated novel about a contemporary musician? For me both Lea and See What I Have Done are stories of a young woman’s breakdown in the context of enmeshed family relationships. Now see what you think!
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entertaining fiction about identity, mental health and social justice
Annecdotal is where real life brushes up against the fictional.
Annecdotist is the blogging persona of Anne Goodwin:
reader, writer, slug-slayer, tramper of moors, recovering psychologist, struggling soprano, author of three fiction books. LATEST POSTS HERE
I don't post to a schedule, but average around ten reviews a month (see here for an alphabetical list), some linked to a weekly flash fiction, plus posts on my WIPs and published books. Your comments are welcome any time any where. Get new posts direct to your inbox ...
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