Category: Mental Health

Three-handers between Britain and the Indian subcontinent: Dignity & The Runaways

21/7/2019

As my next novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home, has three point-of-view characters, I’m always curious to see how others handle three-handers. But that’s not the main reason I chose to read these two novels. Both are set against the backdrop of the tangled web of history tying the Indian subcontinent with Britain. The first links the dying days of the Raj to a British-born woman of Bengali heritage settled in Wales. The second brings characters from Karachi, London and Portsmouth to the deserts of war-torn Iraq.

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An unexplained death in the family: Sea of Bones & The Lost Man

25/6/2019

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Two gripping novels that begin with an unexpected death in the family: in the first, set in Scotland, it’s the main character’s niece; in the second, set in Australia, it’s the protagonist’s brother. In both cases, the evidence points to suicide, until the deceased’s relatives start poking around. Both protagonists discover more than they bargained for but nevertheless benefit from confronting the truth. Both novels are also about male violence and sibling rivalry.

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Cults: Nina X & Beautiful Revolutionary

15/6/2019

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Have you ever wondered what draws people into a cult, or what keeps them there? Do cults always start with good intentions and end in tears? Although neither of these novels can give us all the answers, they do provide interesting insights into what it’s like to outsource your autonomy to a community with a megalomaniac at the helm. Both are informed by real cases: the first in contemporary Britain, the second in 1970s USA.

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Young marriages under strain: Asghar and Zahra & Snegurochka

10/6/2019

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Two novels in which a marriage of a twenty-something man and woman from superficially similar backgrounds shows early signs of strain. In the first, between Muslims in contemporary London, the politics of religion are problematic right from the start; in the second, life gets tough when a new mother follows her journalist husband to a posting in newly-independent Ukraine. All harbour secrets, communication suffers and trust is hard to find. But, with youth on their side, they’ll take something from the experience, whether or not the marriages survive.

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Domestic triangles: Disturbance & Stanley and Elsie

10/5/2019

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Two novels in which a third adult joins the household of a married couple and forms a strong relationship with one or both partners. Both are set in English villages, but map very different terrain. In the first, a wife befriends a young student, but the relationship turns out not to be as innocent as it first appears. In the second, set between the two world wars, a live-in maid skilfully manages to negotiate between an artist couple’s bickering, but she can’t stop the breakup of the marriage when the husband laps up another woman’s flattery.

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Desperately seeking elixir? #amwriting

7/5/2019

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I wrote recently how, after a few uninspiring months, I’d been infected with a new novel idea. A few weeks on, I love the characters, the situation and the potential quirkiness of one of the voices, but I’ve tried to rein in my enthusiasm to nail the plot. As one of my writing goals of 2019 is to reflect on where I’m placed in the marketplace and in my writing journey, I’m exploring how to make my fiction more commercial (as well as more literary), which means not embarking on projects that might lack wide appeal.

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Childhood obsession rekindled: If I Had Two Lives & Poet and Dancer

1/5/2019

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I’m here to introduce two novels about girls who become fixated on another girl in childhood and pick up the relationship again as young adults. In the first, set in Vietnam and the USA, the main focus is on the friendship in childhood; in the second, set in New York, the adult obsession is in the foreground. In both books, the main character has a problematic relationship with her mother: in the first, the mother is painfully distant; in the second, mother and daughter are initially enmeshed.

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Quirky: From the Wreck, Asylum & The Pine Islands

25/4/2019

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Three short reviews of quirky novels published in the UK this month that have taken me around the world without having to leave my armchair. The first, set in Australia, marries historical fact with a lonely alien visitor. The second, set in South Africa, posits an alternative near future where the sick are quarantined. The third, a German translation set in Japan, pairs a suicidal student with an expert on beards for a journey in the footsteps of a revered haiku poet.

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On women’s hair and discrimination: Queenie & The Braid

11/4/2019

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Hot on the heels of The Old Drift, I found myself reading another two debuts about hair. In the first, although I don’t mention it in my review, you can see from the cover image that Queenie has great hair; in the second, the title’s a giveaway. Both novels also address discrimination (albeit not deeply enough for my liking): in the first as experienced by a young black woman in London; in the second it’s the trials of a lower caste woman in rural India condemned to shift shit with her bare hands and a Canadian lawyer hitting a professional brick wall when she gets sick.

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Journeys of personal discovery: Blue Tide Rising & Island Song

9/4/2019

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Two recent debuts about women on an unplanned journey of self discovery: the first by finding a place of healing after years of trauma; the second by uncovering the truth about her parentage. Both women must travel to another part of the British Isles to find redemption; both must overcome obstacles to their understanding, to loving and being loved.

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Write drunk, edit sober?

8/4/2019

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It’s been an odd year so far on the creative front. After setting some grandiose fantasy goals about raising my profile, I succumbed to a virus which meant I could barely manage the weekly 99-word stories. But, once the acute phase was over, while still lacking the energy to leave the house, I found I could edit. Big time! So that what began as a gentle tidy-up of the (already much-edited) manuscript of my possibly third novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home, cutting out modifiers like just and only (of which there were actually surprisingly few), morphed into a mammoth spring clean, where almost every word was subjected to the third degree.

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Disaffected mothers: A Perfect Explanation & Adèle

11/3/2019

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Enid is a Scottish aristocrat who has married ‘down’; Adèle a working-class Parisian who married into the bourgeoisie. Enid considers sex a painful duty; Adèle is sex obsessed. For Enid, work is for men and servants; Adèle has a job. Born almost a century apart, the ‘heroines’ of these debuts nevertheless have similar motivations: both have been emotionally neglected by their own mothers and feel shackled by marriage and motherhood.

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Teenagers in exile: Shadows on the Tundra & The Key

23/1/2019

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Two books about teenage girls forced from their homes in what initially appear to be very different circumstances. In the first, a fourteen-year-old Lithuanian is transported to the Siberian tundra in 1940; in the second, a nineteen-year-old is compulsorily admitted to a psychiatric hospital in mid-1950s England. The first memoir, the second fiction, both books are about the struggle to survive in alien environments.

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Irish debuts looking back: A River in the Trees & When All Is Said

18/1/2019

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Published this month are the debut novels of two promising Irish writers, both looking back to that country’s history, through the changes wrought by time on a family home. In the first it’s a humble farmhouse and overnight refuge for freedom fighters in the War of Independence, barely inhabitable when an exile considers buying it a hundred years later. In the second it’s the grand house of the local gentry when the narrator first crosses the threshold as a ten-year-old servant, and latterly the hotel where he reviews the eighty-plus decades of his life. And if you’re wondering about the coincidence of the blue covers, why not look back on this post?

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Out of their depth: Loyalties & The Death of Murat Idrissi

10/1/2019

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My first reviews of books published in the UK in 2019 are another two translations: the first from French and the second from Dutch. Both feature young people getting dangerously out of their depth, although, at 12 ¾, the boys in the first are probably around half the age of the young women in the second. See if either takes your fancy.

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War wounds in two French translations: Retribution Road & Small Country

7/1/2019

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When I shared my favourite books of 2018, I was disappointed not to be able to identify a single unifying thread. Except, perhaps, that each of my selected nineteen turned out to be so much better than I expected. Which got me thinking – and this isn’t particularly profound – how difficult it is to tell how much I’m going to like a book from the publisher’s advance information and blurb. That thought was at the forefront of my mind when I considered pairing my first two reads of 2019: both translations from the French set elsewhere, and featuring characters traumatised by war, but very different books. If you’re a regular visitor to annethology, I wonder if you can guess which of the two I was least looking forward to reading, but could well be one of this year’s favourite reads.

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Young women, invisible even to themselves: My Year of Rest and Relaxation & Pretend I’m Dead

31/12/2018

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I’m rounding off my reading year with reviews of American novels about women in their mid-20s who are estranged from everything, even themselves. While the first owns two properties and the second cleans other people’s houses for a living, they are equally desperately homeless inside. While the first namedrops designer labels, and the second cleaning products, both bring a light touch to the tragedy of feeling invisible and being insecurely attached.

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Hunger, madness and incarceration: Dark Water by Elizabeth Lowry

28/12/2018

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Twenty-one-year-old Hiram Carver, assistant surgeon on the USS Orbis in 1833, senses something special about William Borden when he first sees him on board. The sailor exudes a quiet dignity that his upper-class superior officers seem to lack. So when he hears the story of Borden’s heroism in saving the lives of four men cast adrift for two months in an open boat following a mutiny, his admiration grows.

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Families in crisis: The Break & Ferocity

21/12/2018

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Two novels about the antecedents and consequences within the family when one of their female members is severely injured, both drawing on multiple perspectives to tell the story. In the first, set in Canada, the women rally around when a teenage girl is assaulted; in the second, set in southern Italy, and focusing primarily on the viewpoints of the men, the violent death of a daughter/sister/wife threatens to lift the lid on a web of corruption.

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Beneath the surface calm: Stories We Tell Ourselves & And the Wind Sees All

11/12/2018

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Reading these books consecutively, I doubted I could legitimately pair their reviews. The first focuses on the tensions in an Anglo-French family Christmas, the second an Icelandic fishing village anticipating a celebratory concert in mid-summer. But both are about the pain beneath a deceptively tranquil surface, and the psychological distance between people living in close proximity.