Category: Identity

Christmas chills: Time of the Beast by Geoff Smith and Sugar Hall by Tiffany Murray

24/12/2015

As Christmas Eve is the traditional time for ghost stories and the Gothic, so today’s the day to share a couple of my recent reads to have you scared to go to bed.

It’s the year 666, and Britain is a battleground; not only warlords fighting for territory but shamans and priests at loggerheads over people’s minds. After daring to challenge the views of his abbot, Athwold, a young monk, opts to become a hermit in the misty swamps of the Fenlands, in an attempt to reconcile himself to his own truth. But this isn’t a story of spiritual seclusion (as in The Anchoress) as his exposure to a scene of horrific demonic carnage (possibly a hallucination brought on by eating mouldy bread) moves him to join the itinerant monk, Cadroc, on the quest to root out the evil once and for all. Here Athwold finds his faith continually tested, as his mind becomes a battleground between rationality and superstition. Are these killers mythical monsters or merely men gone mad? Whose talisman has the power to defeat them, the pagan or the Roman church?

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Rewriting the history of the Wild West: Beyond the Horizon by Ryan Ireland

18/12/2015

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After a boyhood at sea amongst drunks and cannibals, the man sets off across the empty plains of North America, navigating by the stars. When his wagon bursts its axle, he decides the place he’s got to is as good as anywhere to settle and, when a passing band of Mexicans sell him a pregnant woman in exchange for coffee, his simple life seems complete. But then the stranger arrives out of nowhere and, despite warnings from the woman in a language the man can’t understand, sends him on a fool’s errand to register his makeshift family at the mythical Fort James.

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A Life in the Day: Odysseus Abroad by Amit Chaudhari

13/12/2015

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It’s August 1985, and Ananda, a student of English at the University of Central London with aspirations to be a poet, has a whole day to fill. We follow him reluctantly get out of bed, fret about the neighbours’ noise, miss his mother who has recently returned to Bombay, attend a meeting with his tutor, and hang out with his equally eccentric uncle, Rangamama, as they separately reminisce and bicker about their lives. Their territory is Bloomsbury, Hampstead and Belsize Park, a world of disappointing Indian restaurants, public transport, and potentially racist drunks. Inveterate outsiders, not just in London but in Asia, too: their Sylheti Hindu heritage having been twice rebranded (first with Partition, then with Bangladeshi independence) and leaving a legacy of “Indian” restaurants and the revered poet, Tagore. Desperately unhappy, the two men cling to each other despite their differences, Ananda possibly seeing his empty future in his uncle.

It’s hard to know what to make of a novel comprised of all the minute quotidian detail that most novels would cut out. There are touches of humour, and I especially enjoyed this exposition on the lack of reference to lavatorial necessities in Western film and literature (p128-9):

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Claiming her life: The Lodger, The Drum Tower and Our Souls at Night

12/11/2015

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A severe cold has meant very little writing in the last few days, but a copious amount of reading (completing my reading “challenge” of 100 books in the year), albeit with not a great amount of depth. These three short reviews of novels about three very different women’s quests for a life, and a mind, of their own is part of the result.

After her father’s bankruptcy and her mother’s death from suicide, Dorothy Richardson has come to London to work as a dentist’s assistant. Renting a room in a Bloomsbury boarding-house, she values her freedom, but life is hard for a single woman on a low income at the beginning of the twentieth century. Invited to spend the weekend at the coast with an old school friend, she is initially unimpressed by her husband, Bertie, a writer of some renown. But Bertie’s approval of her independent mind quickly beguiles her and, despite the guilt at betraying her friend, Dorothy embarks on a secret affair. When the sex proves a disappointment, Dorothy is unsure whether she should expect more, until a new boarder teaches her the meaning of sexual pleasure. But, in her liaison with Veronica while still involved with Bertie, Dorothy finds herself caught between two types of taboo. On top of this, Veronica is a suffragette whose involvement in the movement puts her at risk of imprisonment.

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Flogging the first, fixing the second and rewriting the third: Am I now a novelist?

23/10/2015

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This post marks three months since the publication of my debut novel, Sugar and Snails, and a possible a transition to another stage of my writerly identity. A few weeks before publication I wrote of my ambivalence at claiming the title of author but, once my book was out there, and people were saying nice things about it, I felt less of a fictional fictioneer. Now, as I start to soft-pedal on the selling (for non-British readers, flog is slang for sell), get ready to edit the next one (another contract is signed and Underneath is scheduled for May 2017) and revisit the fast first draft of what I hope will be my third, I’m wondering if author is big enough to encompass the size of my ego. With three novels in mind, am I now a novelist?

The analogy isn’t very original but, like many clichés, it’s one that works: like children at different stages of development, these novels require different kinds of attention, fluctuating amounts even, as they venture into the world. Of necessity, my firstborn has been the priority over the last six months and, while it’s always going to need me, it can stand on its own two feet as I snuggle up with the baby, and the middle one prepares for its turn in the limelight.

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The promised land: The Betrayers by David Bezmozgis

5/9/2015

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Acclaimed Israeli politician, Baruch Kotler has betrayed his wife and children in (a seemingly chaste) affair with a young woman. Never one to compromise, when he is threatened with exposure if he continues his stand against the government’s decision to forcibly withdraw Jewish settlers from the occupied territories, he flees the country and ensuing scandal along with his lover, Leora. Russian by birth, Kotler’s nostalgia for an idyllic childhood holiday, takes them to the Black Sea resort of Yalta in the Crimea. Against all odds, they pitch up at the home of Chiam Tankilevich, Kotler’s former friend who betrayed him to the KGB and thirteen years in the gulag forty years before.

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Shifting perspectives as the blog tour enters Week 2

27/7/2015

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If I was breathless last Monday, announcing Week 1 of the Sugar and Snails blog tour, I must be on the verge of a swoon this week as I begin another round of visits. The first week has gone brilliantly (you can catch up with those first five posts via the links on my blog tour page), so how could I not be excited about the second? I start today under Julie Stock’s Author Spotlight, with a piece about setting part of my novel in Cairo. As a writer of contemporary romance from around the world, Julie has a particular interest in the challenges of setting fiction in real places, the subject of her own post on Susanna Bavin’s blog this week. Tomorrow, Helena Fairfax is interviewing me about where my own life is set, among other things. Helen lives in an interesting place herself, the UNESCO World Heritage Site and former mill town, Saltaire, which you can discover more about in her fascinating post. Then I’m off to chat with my namesake, Shaz Goodwin on Jera’s Jamboree. With her day job as a school Inclusion Lead, I was interested in her interest in novels that tackle a social barrier, as Sugar and Snails most definitely does. On Thursday, I’m on Our Book Reviews discussing the various transformations of my novel from its initial inception as a story of masculinity across three generations. This post arose out of a Twitter conversation after Mary, one half of Our Book Reviews, read and reviewed an advance copy. Obviously, I was delighted to be invited back. Finally, Friday sees me in Australia, quite fittingly discussing the theme of friendship in the novel and in its realisation (extending the theme of my previous post on gratitude) with one of my dearest blogging friends, Norah Colvin. As Norah has already hosted me once before, I know the tour bus will be safe to leave there over the weekend until I get behind the wheel again on Monday.

I’m generally not in favour of “update” posts, but I can’t ignore the perspective shift since I posted five days ago. As of last Thursday, I’m a published novelist, and enjoying it immensely. With each review (six to my knowledge so far), with each supportive tweet at #SugarandSnails, I’m claiming more of my authorial authority. I’m even infiltrating the more traditional media, with a feature on Sugar and Snails in the Lincolnshire Echo and a nerve-wracking but not too dreadful outing on BBC Radio Nottingham (my bit is at about 2.15 p.m. and the link expires in about three weeks). The highlight of the last few days was, of course, my Nottingham launch party, which I’ll be sharing more about in due course. But in the meantime, there’s this lovely and unexpected post on the event from The Mole, the other half of Our Book Reviews.

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New fiction in translation: The Meursault Investigation and The House in Smyrna

2/7/2015

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I’m featuring two award-winning short debut novels in translation, the first from Algeria and the second from Brazil, both published in the UK today, that would appeal to those who enjoy philosophical fiction.

An elderly man, weary with life, sits in a bar in Oran telling a stranger how the random murder of his brother seventy years before has rendered him an outsider in his own country. Only seven when Musa was killed, his mother’s grief made her neglectful of his needs, binding him to her side and making him the object of her revenge. Spurned by his neighbours for his failure to join the resistance in the 1950s fight for Algerian independence, he’s now aghast at what his country’s become, especially the surge in religiosity (p65-66):

As far as I’m concerned, religion is public transportation I never use. This God – I like travelling in his direction, on foot if necessary, but I don’t want to take an organised trip.

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The Great Unsaid: Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

24/2/2015

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Three days after her sixteenth birthday, Lydia Lee is dead. As with the Mormon family in A Song for Issy Bradley, the different ways in which her parents and siblings, older brother Nath and younger sister Hannah, react to the loss brings further hurt to them all. The favourite child of both parents, it seems that Lydia has held them together; her absence reveals and widens the cracks in the family system.

The parents met at Harvard: James a postgraduate student delivering his first ever lecture on that great American archetype, the cowboy; Marilyn an undergraduate determined to make it in the male-dominated world of medicine. Pregnancy and marriage puts paid to her ambitions as they move to small-town Ohio where James has been offered a teaching post. Chillingly, their marriage would be illegal in some States: James is the only son of Chinese immigrants and, in 1958, interracial relationships are taboo.

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The family in the world: The Winter War by Philip Teir and The Lightning Tree by Emily Woof

15/1/2015

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I’m delighted to bring you reviews of two novels published in the UK today which feature couple and family relationships within a wider sociopolitical context.

The Winter War* follows a liberal, middle-class professional Scandinavian couple and their two adult daughters over the course of one winter. While this is a period of change for the family, the pleasure of this novel is less in its plot than in its beautifully drawn characters* and searing sardonic wit*.

Max Paul is a Finland-Swede*, a sociologist approaching sixty, living off his reputation as a public intellectual, given an ego-boost when a former student turned journalist requests an interview:

One important criteria for all research was that it had to be possible to explain the basic ideas in a simple manner. A good doctoral dissertation could be comprehensively summarised over lunch. Taking this to extremes: a good researcher should, in principle, be able to speak with such enthusiasm that his words could function as a series of pick-up lines. (p74)

His wife feels ground down by his emotional neglect and burnt out at work in the human resources department of the Helsinki health service:

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We can be heroes: Vigilante by Shelley Harris

8/1/2015

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“You’re not Superwoman, Anne!”

It was no doubt a combination of tussles with my current WIP, Charli Mills’s post on her horror of perfectionism and reaching the end of Shelley Harris’ second novel that reminded me of this feedback from a colleague over twenty years ago. Tasked with resettling longstay psychiatric patients into more ordinary lives within the community (incidentally, the subject of my current WIP), youthful idealism made me susceptible to setting unrealistic goals, both for myself and the service. Not recognising my misguided heroics, my colleague’s comment helped me to take a step back. However much I might have wished to, I couldn’t save the world!

So, although I’ve never been tempted to don a cape and mask and strut about my home town righting wrongs, I don’t find it too difficult to identify with the protagonist of Vigilante, who does exactly that. Jenny Pepper has abandoned her career as an actor to become a mother; now she finds herself increasingly marginal in her teenage daughter’s life and unstimulated in her work as the manager of a charity bookshop, the spark long having gone from her marriage. Rendered virtually invisible by dint of her age, unglamorous job and gender, tidying-up has become her life’s purpose until, en route to a fancy dress party, she witnesses a woman being attacked. Although lacking the skills of a comic-book superhero, Jenny does manage to rescue the woman from her assailant. Soon, her secret identity has become an addiction, threatening her marriage, friendship and her own safety. When a masked villain stalks the town, preying on girls the age of Jenny’s daughter, her alter ego is tested to the limit.

Having enjoyed Shelley Harris’ debut, Jubilee, and explored it with her here, I was interested to see where her imagination would take her next. When I came across her YouTube trailer, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on a copy. It’s such an appealing premise, but does it live up to the hype?

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Stairway to heaven: The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber

2/1/2015

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Beatrice and Peter are united in their love for each other, their church and God, but when only he is selected as missionary to a faraway planet, they accept their separation with goodwill. Rocketing trillions of miles in a drug-induced coma, Peter is too excited by the challenge to question the motives of USIC, the organisation that has recruited him.

His first hours on the base are a catalogue of strange new things: the green water that tastes of melon; the humid atmosphere that twirls and creeps like prying fingers beneath his clothes; the community of loners quietly engrossed in their various roles in establishing the colony. But Peter has not been recruited to attend to the spiritual needs of his fellow humans; his job is to satisfy the indigenous population’s thirst for what he calls the Bible and they “the book of strange new things”.

To the earthlings, the Oasans are disturbing creatures, despite their small and frail stature, shrouded in hooded robes of a fabric “disconcertingly like a bath towel” that intermittently reveal faces like twin foetuses “nestled head-to-head, knee to knee”. But, trusting in God and humbled by their openness to Christian the message, Peter easily overcomes his initial revulsion.

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Only the lonely: Academy Street by Mary Costello

20/12/2014

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What can I say to attract you to a novel that starts and ends with a funeral and mines a deep well of sadness in between? Academy Street is one of the most honest and heart-breaking accounts of fictional grief I’ve come across, as well as one of the most beautifully written.

Tess Lohan is marvelling at a blackbird that has flown in through the window to peck at the wallpaper in the family farmhouse as a coffin is carried downstairs. Seven-year-old Tess finds herself intermittently forgetting that her mother has died, that she won’t be able to run and tell her what she’s observed.

We stay with Tess over the next six decades as she follows her sister to boarding school, moves to Dublin to train as a nurse and then to New York to spend the bulk of her life on Academy Street until, echoing the opening chapters, she returns to her beloved Easterfield for the funeral of her elder brother. Tess finds moments of intense joy in the little things, but she’s often lonely: her deepest loves are ephemeral, her losses profound*. Like Dear Thief, Academy Street addresses the pain of attachments, whether it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

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9 fictional psychologists and psychological therapists: 9. The Delivery Room by Sylvia Brownrigg

20/10/2014

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The delivery room is the moniker Mira Braverman‘s husband, Peter, ascribes to the office in their North London flat from which she operates her psychotherapy practice. Over a period of just over a year, the reader bears vicarious witness to the trials and tribulations of her patients while Mira struggles to prevent her own pain intruding upon the therapeutic hour.

This is a beautiful novel about what it is to be human: about birth and death; grief and yearning; and the boundaries between public and private. It’s about conflict, from minor misunderstandings to the fragmentation of nations and all-out war. It’s about national identity, about insiders and outsiders and the risks entailed in genuinely getting to know another human being. Like therapy itself, it’s a gentle novel woven with textured detail, absorbing and gripping while proceeding patiently, eschewing formulaic tropes and attention-grabbing gimmicks, towards some deeper truth.

The narrative progresses from multiple points of view. Although, at least initially, I balked at the head hopping, it’s successful in both adding layers of nuance to the story and in highlighting one of the most interesting aspects of the therapeutic relationship. Each of Mira’s patients meets a plump woman in late middle age with an Eastern European accent, but what they make of this varies with their own personalities and needs. One perceives her as maternal; another sees a Russian or Czech intellectual; the one who comes closest to seeing her as she really is snipes at her for being a Serbian at the time of the Balkan conflict. Yet there’s a touch of humour in their different assumptions about the abstract painting hanging on her wall.

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Literary Dementia: novels by Emma Healey, Fiona McFarlane, Julie Cohen and Michael Ignatieff

26/9/2014

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With Alzheimer’s research in the news again lately, I thought I’d better knuckle down to my much foreshadowed post on literary dementia. For readers and writers who are wary of fictional old age, the spectre of dementia might seem a definite no-no. Yet there’s so much potential in the condition for creative exploration and expression: the poignancy of loss; the enigma of memory and identity; the frustrations experienced by family and other carers; even, for those who can achieve the right tone without denigration, humour. So it’s heartening to discover young women writers who are addressing these themes in their debut novels: Emma Healey in the UK with Elizabeth Is Missing, and Fiona McFarlane in Australia with The Night Guest. I thought I’d draw on those novels, along with two less recent novels from more established writers, Getting Away With It by Julie Cohen and Scar Tissue by Michael Ignatieff, to explore fictional representations of dementia.

Dementia as mystery

One of the tragedies of dementia is the way in which the ordinary is rendered unfamiliar. Names of people and everyday objects are forgotten; life becomes a mystery to be solved. This aspect of the condition is beautifully played out in Elizabeth Is Missing in which eighty-one-year-old Maud attempts to resolve the dual mysteries of the sudden absence of her good friend, Elizabeth, as well as the disappearance of her elder sister in her 1940s childhood. Maud, like a true detective, tells us how she tries

to be systematic, […] to write everything down. Elizabeth is missing and I must do something to find out what’s happened. But I’m so muddled. I can’t be sure about when I last saw her or what I’ve discovered. I’ve phoned and there’s no answer. I haven’t seen her. I think. She hasn’t been here and I haven’t been there. What next? I suppose I should go to the house. Search for clues. And whatever I find I will write it down. I must put pens into my handbag now. The thing is to be systematic. I’ve written that down too. (p22)

The Night Guest also starts with a mystery: Ruth, a seventy-five-year-old widow living alone in a house by the sea, is woken at four in the morning by the noise of a tiger in the next room:

Something large was rubbing against Ruth’s couch and television and, she suspected, the wheat-coloured recliner disguised as a wingback chair. Other sounds followed: the panting of a large animal; a vibrancy of breath that suggested enormity and intent; definite mammalian noises, definitely feline, as if her cats had grown in size and were sniffing for food with huge noses. (p1)

Dementia is also something of a mystery for those who witness the decline in a relative, as explored by a son trying to care for his mother in Scar Tissue:

When I could think about anything at all, I thought that the simplest facts about what had happened would never be clear: when her illness commenced, when she was first aware of it, whether the manner in which she had struggled with it delayed or altered its course in any way; whether the manner in which we cared for her and fought to keep her aware of her surroundings helped to slow its passage through her brain; whether it was an illness of memory or an illness of selfhood. Simple explanations will not do. They fail to accord her the necessary respect. (p170)

Second childhood

In their confusion, decreased competence and need for extra assistance with navigating the tasks of daily life, dementia sufferers might sometimes seem like children. This can cause frustration in relatives as in these two quotes from characters in Getting Away With It:

‘Sounds monstrous, doesn’t it? But it’s maddening, an adult acting like a child. And it isn’t like normal illness, because they won’t get better …’

‘If she were whole, herself, I could argue with her … I want her to be herself again so I can be angry with her properly …’ (p368)

Memories of the distant past are often sharper than those of more recent events, so it makes sense that Maud, in Elizabeth Is Missing, should return to an unresolved issue from her childhood. In The Night Guest, Ruth’s experience of the tiger prowling her lounge is reminiscent of a child’s conjuring of fairies, monsters or an imaginary friend. Unfortunately, her childlike innocence leaves her ripe for exploitation.

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What was that all about, then? After Me Comes the Flood by Sarah Perry and Lucky Us by Amy Bloom

4/9/2014

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Today I’m reviewing two novels about interpersonal connections that had me struggling to connect with the essence of the story. I’m hoping you can help me untangle why.

The opening of Lucky Us seemed promising:

My father’s wife died. My mother said we should drive down to his place and see what might be in it for us.

She tapped my nose with her grapefruit spoon. “It’s like this,” she said. “Father loves us more, but he’s got another family, a wife, and a girl a little older than you. Her family had all the money. Wipe your face.”

Oh, how that mother had me hooked! She seemed much more resourceful in accommodating to the duplicate family than the poor woman I’d left contemplating the cracks in the ceiling in a recent flash. Would the narrator follow her lead? I wondered. Or would she struggle to adapt, like Mary, in Geoff LePard’s novel-in-a-flash? What I didn’t anticipate was that she would abandon both her daughter and the novel only four pages on. Reader, I was bereft. Rudderless, despite, I now discover, having been warned this would happen by the blurb. (But we don’t pay much attention to blurbs, do we?)

Eva is twelve when she meets Iris, her father’s other daughter. Over the next decade, we follow their fortunes as Iris seeks stardom in the movies in 1940s America and Eva follows in her slipstream. Through the sisters and their various friends, lovers and hangers on, the novel shows us Hollywood hypocrisy, new-money airs and graces, post-war plastic surgery and the internment camps and repatriation of supposed “enemy aliens”. There are even a few scenes on tarot that had me wondering about extending the criteria for my series on fictional therapists. All very interesting and entertaining, related with that touch of humour evident in the section I’ve quoted above, but I felt rootless, longing, despite my general refusal to bow to the law of motivation, for the narrator to have a little more agency, to come out and tell us what she wants. As Charli Mills says, motivation is movement but movement without motivation is passivity. With the lack of a clear narrative arc, Lucky Us resembled memoir or a truth-based story and, in my mind, that’s not necessarily a compliment.

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9 Fictional psychologists and psychological therapists: 8. By Blood by Ellen Ullman

18/8/2014

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Who can say they’ve never dreamt of being a fly on the wall, eavesdropping on the intimate exchanges between people who don’t even know we exist? Such an opportunity presents itself to the unnamed narrator of this unusual and multi-layered novel when he rents a room in an office block right next to a psychotherapist in 1974 San Francisco. A troubled, and troubling, university professor on enforced leave from his post, and veteran of decades of unsuccessful therapies, he is obsessively drawn to the unfolding story of the young woman to whom he refers as “my patient”. Adopted as a baby, her journey to discover the identity of her birth mother takes her, via Israel, from affluent 1930s Berlin to the horrors of Bergen-Belsen. As a reader, I also became engrossed in her tragic story but, in keeping with the parameters I’ve set myself in this series of reviews, I’ll now turn my attention away from the content to the process of its telling, packaged as it is within a series of therapeutic encounters over the course of around sixteen months.

This was one of the most credible fictional accounts of psychotherapy I’ve discovered so far. Alongside the mind-blowing personal discoveries, were the sulks and silences, the tedium, the long hard graft for both patient and therapist in their search for the truth. While some might find the fly-on-the-wall approach introduces an unnecessary distancing from the patient’s narrative, it works well as a way of exploring the process and rituals of therapy. His observations, such as this on the Christmas break:

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The Complexity of Desire: He Wants by Alison Moore

15/8/2014

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One of the signifiers of good fiction is the early clarification of what the main characters want and sending them on a journey where they will be continually thwarted in their search to get it, right? With each of the seventeen chapter titles flagging up something the characters either want or don’t want, Alison Moore, in her second novel, seems on the surface to have taken this to heart. Lewis, doesn’t want soup or sausages but, when he was a child, he wanted to go to the moon. Sydney wanted to live in Australia. Lawrence wants a CD of The Messiah.

But Alison Moore is too sophisticated a writer to churn out a formulaic quest story. He Wants is populated by people who singularly fail to pursue their desires, or even to know what they are. Lawrence, an elderly resident of a nursing home, eagerly accepts the staff’s offers of tea, even when he already has one going cold on his lap. Lewis, his son, a retired RE teacher, eats the soup he does not want that is delivered each day by his daughter. Sydney, the childhood friend who mysteriously disappeared, wants to meet Lewis’s daughter but Barry Bolton gets in the way. Yet, despite their passivity, the reader can’t help rooting for these characters as it gradually dawns on us how, for most of his adult life, Lewis has wanted something he could never bear to acknowledge.

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Who am I, by the way? – In Search of Solace by Emily Mackie

14/8/2014

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This week sees the publication of two second novels by female writers addressing the themes of identity and religion through the portrayal of men who don’t sit very comfortably within their own skins. Yet my experience of these novels was so different I’ve decided, despite my obsession with linking, to review them in separate posts, thereby breaking my unwritten rule and posting on consecutive days. I hope you’ll be able to join me for both.

The title, In Search of Solace, suggests a quest novel and, indeed, Jacob Little does set out to find both the woman he knew as Solace, as well as the comfort and consolation of discovering the answer to the question of who he is. But Jacob is a long way from the traditional hero: a shadowy figure who, consistent with his own theory of identity as:

not something we choose for ourselves, nor … Something that grew organically as we got older. It was something gifted to us. By others … as a kind of malleable gloop that could be manipulated by the people around us; never fixed, but changing with every situation and circumstance (p 172-173),

is revealed to the reader through the perceptions of the other, more solid, characters. I liked the idea of exploring a protagonist from the outside in, and that notion of identity as something forced upon us by other people is consistent with the psychoanalytic notion of projective identification in which we experience ourselves as thinking, feeling and acting in ways that don’t actually belong to us. But I wasn’t convinced that the omniscient narrator speaking directly to the reader in meta-fictional asides was either necessary or helpful:

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Forward>>

Welcome

Christmas chills: Time of the Beast by Geoff Smith and Sugar Hall by Tiffany Murray

Rewriting the history of the Wild West: Beyond the Horizon by Ryan Ireland

A Life in the Day: Odysseus Abroad by Amit Chaudhari

Claiming her life: The Lodger, The Drum Tower and Our Souls at Night

Flogging the first, fixing the second and rewriting the third: Am I now a novelist?

The promised land: The Betrayers by David Bezmozgis

Shifting perspectives as the blog tour enters Week 2

New fiction in translation: The Meursault Investigation and The House in Smyrna

The Great Unsaid: Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

The family in the world: The Winter War by Philip Teir and The Lightning Tree by Emily Woof

We can be heroes: Vigilante by Shelley Harris

Stairway to heaven: The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber

Only the lonely: Academy Street by Mary Costello

9 fictional psychologists and psychological therapists: 9. The Delivery Room by Sylvia Brownrigg

Literary Dementia: novels by Emma Healey, Fiona McFarlane, Julie Cohen and Michael Ignatieff

What was that all about, then? After Me Comes the Flood by Sarah Perry and Lucky Us by Amy Bloom

9 Fictional psychologists and psychological therapists: 8. By Blood by Ellen Ullman

The Complexity of Desire: He Wants by Alison Moore

Who am I, by the way? – In Search of Solace by Emily Mackie

2022 Reading Challenge

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