Category: Friendship

Friends reunited: Ponti & Falling Leaves

10/12/2018

There seems to be a chain of connections between my reviews so far this month; either of these novels, but especially the first, could have been paired At Dusk. Although the school friends in Ponti aren’t reunited until late in the novel while, in Falling Leaves it’s towards the beginning and after a gap of only seven years, the resonance is perhaps equally strong. And, no, they didn’t make contact through a now-defunct social media site, nor at a school reunion, but you’ll have to read on to find out how.

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Italy translated, urban and rural: The Eight Mountains & The Night of Rome

17/9/2018

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These two novels translated from Italian couldn’t be more different: a pastoral coming-of-age story in the Italian Alps follows a twisty-turny political thriller in modern-day Rome. Yet together they build a picture of contemporary Italy amid the ruins of the past.

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In death’s waiting room? The Great Unexpected & Extinctions

24/8/2018

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I sometimes wonder if the link between books is too tenuous to pair the reviews; less often, I worry they might be too alike. These two new novels about curmudgeonly widowers reluctantly rubbing shoulders with other retirees in what feels to them like death’s waiting room seemed to belong to the latter category: second novels about men at odds with their grown-up daughters finding a kind of redemption when an unlikely friend intrudes upon their private space. Both have hints of humour and a quietly political backdrop of past injustice but, despite the surface similarities, once I was lost in the pages I realised that no two novels are ever the same.

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Lonely females on the family farm: Meet Me at the Museum & All Among the Barley

8/8/2018

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Having decided to pair these novels on the basis of the unlikely friendships I’d gleaned from the blurbs, I was pleased to discover other commonalities that caught my attention more. Both authors bring a female perspective to life on an East Anglian farm, albeit almost a century apart. While Tina Hopgood is in her 60s and Edith Mather only fourteen, both narrators are lonely, despite having family around them, and unsure about their right to choose their own future.

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Death-defying customs: The People in the Trees & The Tree of the Toraja

26/7/2018

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I’m linking these novels less for the arboreal coincidence of the titles but because each is about the impact of another culture’s approach to death and/or ageing on a Westerner’s life. For the first, six months as a young man deep in the forest of a remote Micronesian island determine the course of his professional and domestic life; for the second, a glimpse of the culture of the Toraja people in Indonesia in middle age helps him mourn the loss of a close friend.

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Teenage fugitives: The Shepherd’s Hut & Sal

6/7/2018

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When teenagers flee the family home to fend for themselves, they swap one kind of brutality for another. And while their troubled lives will have forced them to develop survival skills in some areas, they are often more vulnerable than their peers in others, such as emotional literacy. But real-life tragedy can make engrossing fiction as you’ll find if you let the young narrators of these two novels lead you into the wilderness: Jaxie in Western Australia and Sal and her younger sister in Scotland. For real-life youth homelessness, mostly in urban areas, Centrepoint (in the UK) is worth supporting.

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Late-adolescent identity in London and Dublin: The Tyranny of Lost Things & Conversations with Friends

27/6/2018

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If adolescence was the invention of the baby boomers, it’s the millennials who’ve shown – along with recent(ish) research into the developing brain – that this interlude between childhood and adulthood lingers well into one’s twenties. At this stage of our lives, many of us are still experimenting with who and how to be, as these two debut novels illustrate in thoughtful and entertaining ways. The young female narrators juggle the legacy of patchy parenting; love triangles; envy and class privilege; and platonic and sexual relationships at the boundary between intimacy and privacy – and city living, one in London and the other in Dublin. Read on!

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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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Celebrating female literary friendships: A Secret Sisterhood blog tour

8/3/2018

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For International Women’s Day this year I'm taking part in the blog tour for the paperback publication of A Secret Sisterhood, an erudite and engaging celebration of literary friendships between Jane Austen and amateur playwright, Anne Sharp; Charlotte Brontë and the feminist Mary Taylor; George Eliot and Harriet Beecher Stowe; Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. The book is the product of a contemporary literary friendship between the authors who, in addition to writing and teaching, host the website Something Rhymed, profiling a range of additional female writing buddies.

Follow the link for my review (originally posted for the hardback publication in May 2017).

Read my review of A Secret Sisterhood

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

3/3/2018

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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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What do friends mean when they say There must be a novel in there?

2/12/2017

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Writers, does this happen to you? Catching up with friends, someone will relate an amusing and/or interesting and/or convoluted anecdote. When they reach the end, instead of being satisfied with a few moments’ entertainment, they – or another from among the group – will quip There’s a novel in there somewhere! A novel? Excuse me, but it shouldn’t take a novelist to recognise this is not the case. But is the reference to novels an innocent, albeit clumsy, metaphor, or are nastier issues afoot?

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Two novel perspectives on childhood friendship lost

6/9/2017

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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!

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How to have a book launch party

11/8/2017

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While babies might have naming parties, couples wedding parties, a book launch party can be both celebration of a significant milestone and a marketing opportunity. I might be only on my second novel, but I have a fat party-to-publication ratio of 3:2. So, still buzzing from my latest, I hope these pointers based on my experience of hosting a launch party might be of use to others who have yet to foist one on your friends.

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Two novel reflections on current sociopolitics in the US and UK

8/8/2017

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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.

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Two novels about young men forced to face the real world

23/6/2017

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Let me introduce you to two debut novels about young men forced out of their retreat from life by a determined young woman. Both feel responsible for the deaths of a younger sister, both have absent fathers and serious mental health issues induced by trauma. Both are about to get a rude awakening. But, as you’ll see, the authors have dealt with these bare bones in very different ways.

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A Secret Sisterhood by Emily Midorikawa & Emma Claire Sweeney

1/6/2017

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And so, misleading myths of isolation have long attached themselves to women who write: a cottage-dwelling spinster; an impassioned roamer of the moors; a fallen woman, shunned; a melancholic genius. Over the years, a conspiracy of silence and obscured the friendships of female authors, past and present. But now it is time to break the silence and celebrate this literary sisterhood – a glimmering web of interwoven threads that still has the power to unsettle, to challenge, to inspire.

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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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A huge thank you, as a second novel is born!

25/5/2017

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Happy publication day to me! I must admit it doesn’t feel the huge leap it did the first time round, but I’m still excited, albeit not breathlessly so. There’s a quieter satisfaction in having more than one of my own novels on the shelf, making the transition from writer to author to novelist. This post is to thank those who’ve helped me on my way. While writing is a solitary activity, no writer is an island. Our achievements arise through hard work, good luck and not a little help from our friends.

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Blame by Paul Read

28/4/2017

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Lucas is slightly inebriated when he calls in at a funeral parlour to discuss the disposal of his father’s remains. His intoxication might account for his making a pass at the mortician when it’s Mariana, the IT expert at the pharmaceutical company where he works as a researcher, he’s most keen to impress. But it’s hard to engage in romantic pursuits when everyone thinks he should be grieving. And so he is, although not for his father’s passing but for the terrible event he witnessed in the summer of 1989 that tore his family apart.

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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.