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Fictional biographies: Sacred Country & The Stone Diaries

7/1/2021

4 Comments

 
Two novels that have sat on my bookshelves for a while, the first waiting to be read, and the second loved and waiting to be re-read. Written by acclaimed female novelists – the first British and the second, Canadian, now deceased – read on to see what this unacclaimed female novelist, also the author of a fictional biography, thought.

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Twelve novels and two non-fiction books: my favourite reads of 2020

29/12/2020

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Proof, if proof were needed, we are living through strange times: I’ve selected two non-fiction books among this year’s favourite reads. But fiction still gets preferential treatment on Annethology… or could it be I’m saving the best for later?
 
I hope you’ll browse through my choices, the novels listed in the order I read them, and let me know if any chime with yours.


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Aftermath: The Former Chief Executive & Little White Lies

29/11/2020

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These two novels deal with the aftermath of situations that had caught (fictional) media attention told from the point of view of a woman who tried to do her best. In the first, a political scandal has led to the titular Chief Executive’s early retirement; in the second, an abducted girl is returned to her mother. Of course, the aftermath isn’t quite as the protagonists expect.

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Horror: Grey Bees, Witch Bottle & Faces in the Water

22/11/2020

6 Comments

 
Only one of these three recent reads is classed as a horror novel and, although not my usual genre, it turned out to be my favourite of the three. But we don’t need to evoke the supernatural to scare ourselves: there are real-life horrors in each of these stories. In the first, a translation, war has killed many and put the survivors’ lives on hold. In the second, set in rural Cumbria, the spooky happenings are extra disturbing for a man with unprocessed memories of violence from childhood, as well as his helplessness in the face of his wife’s agonising three-day labour. The third is a 1960s classic set in a horrific – but typical of its time – psychiatric hospital where the regime seems designed to make a bad situation worse.

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Communities set apart: Three Things about Elsie; The Pear Field; Oshibana Complex

26/10/2020

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I’m sharing my thoughts about three recent reads set in communities slightly apart from the mainstream: the first two in contemporary residential care settings and the third in a dystopian future world. In genre they’re also slightly apart from my usual fare: the first mass-market commercial fiction; the second, a translation (and therefore closest to my usual); the third, cyberpunk. Each offered something to intrigue and enjoy.

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To and from Jamaica: Mr Atkinson’s Rum Contract; Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole; Augustown

21/10/2020

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When I selected my reading for Black History Month, I didn’t realise that three of the four books had a connection to Jamaica. Nor did I realise that one would obscure black history as much as it illuminates. While three books are around ninety-seven short of composing a timeline, they’re listed here in chronological order of the events they portray. Scroll down for links to my reviews of other books (mostly fiction) I’ve read in recent years.

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What are you reading for Black History Month?

6/10/2020

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Black History Month comes after a summer of confronting the legacy of white interference in black history. Painful for many, from my safe distance the toppling of the statue of the flavour in Bristol has been a beacon of hope in a crazy year. It’s even altered the course of my WIP. But will we learn anything? Will we take the lessons of 2020 into the rest of the decade? Will reading – fiction and non-fiction – keep these issues where they need to be, at the forefront of our minds?


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Holidays, families and home: Summerwater & Ties

23/9/2020

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These two novels defy easy categorisation, but I’ve paired them for the combination of depth and humour, innovative structure and switching points of view. Both feature the dynamics of family and coupledom, and a holiday – the first in Scotland, the second in Italy – with destructive consequences.

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Ordinary coupledom: Footnotes to Sex & Laura Laura

10/9/2020

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These two recent reads bring touches of humour to the serious extraordinariness of ordinary cohabiting relationships, and the impact on the couple of friendships and obsessions outside the partnership. The first features a thirty-something lesbian twosome in London (with one of the partners making frequent visits to Paris). The second focuses on a heterosexual marriage of some duration, the couple having moved to Bath on retirement.

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Growing pains in Dublin and Naples: Tatty & The Lying Life of Adults

3/9/2020

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These two recent reads are narrated by girls whose young lives are blighted by parental conflicts, secrets and lies. We follow them over a period of years: Tatty, the middle child of a largish Dublin family, from around three to twelve, which is the age that Giovanna, an only child, begins to learn to navigate her home city of Naples.

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What seriously tickles your funny bone? V for Victory & I Am Not Sidney Poitier

7/8/2020

4 Comments

 
Humour is a tricky business, especially around serious subjects. Get it right, and you can entertain while inciting rage at injustice. Get it wrong, and you risk becoming the target of rage. So what did I make of these two comic novels? The first set in Blitz-blasted London, the second in contemporary Atlanta, which draws you most and are you able to guess which I’d prefer?

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Are you ready for women in translation month?

31/7/2020

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What does August signify for you? Sandy beaches, barbecues in the garden, an easy-read book? For me, it’s a singing summer school (and, despite large gatherings still being prohibited, I have two virtual ones this year) and a chance to celebrate female novelists writing in languages other than English. I’m no linguist – although I’ve studied French and Spanish and have enjoyed picking up a smattering of the lingua franca on my travels – so I’m grateful to translators, who are far too often unacknowledged. As physical international travel is still problematic, it’s a great way of virtually visiting other countries.

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A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom by John Boyne

23/7/2020

10 Comments

 
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From his birth of the night King Herod’s men slaughter baby boys, we follow the unnamed narrator through multiple incarnations across numerous countries to election night in North America and the unlikely presidency of Donald Trump. Scorned by his soldier father, bullied by his beefy brother, betrayed by his beloved cousin, he survives to be thrice widowed, imprisoned for murder and to make a success of a creative career. Braving war, slavery, colonialism, he finds temporary respite in monasteries Christian and Buddhist, and fathers a son who will send a rocket to the moon.

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12 recommended reads for World Refugee Day

20/6/2020

8 Comments

 
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Twenty people a minute abandon their homes to escape war, persecution or terror. The United Nations has designated June 20 as World Refugee Day in solidarity with refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced persons, stateless persons and returnees. The global pandemic means they need our support more than ever; having made my donation, I’m ready to share some fiction books you might like to read. All were published within the last ten years and are loosely arranged in historical order of the story setting, beginning with two set in the Second World War and ending with two which are timeless. I’ve limited myself to twelve, but could have chosen more. I hope you find something here to tempt you.

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The emotional climate in the age of Trump: Right after the Weather & Weather

22/5/2020

3 Comments

 
The titles themselves are reason enough to pair these recently published American novels. What I didn’t expect when I picked them from my TBR shelf is that they’d both feature the painful shock, especially among women, of Donald Trump’s election to president. The first zooms in on alienation, perceived inadequacy and a painful discovery of one’s own propensity to violence. The second forefronts the anxiety engendered by the climate crisis and rampant capitalism. I wonder if either of these authors is considering a sequel about their characters’ relationships with the coronavirus pandemic!

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Shadowed by violence: The Revolt & The Disaster Tourist

14/5/2020

4 Comments

 
Strange bedfellows these two translations: the first an historical novel from France; the second a contemporary slipstream novel from South Korea. My excuse for linking them is an issue that was on my mind the day I finished the first and started the second, thanks to a non-fiction book I had ordered. Although women being blamed for sexual abuse and harassment is only a minor issue in these novels, it’s so important I make no apology for ushering it into the limelight.


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Sleep, insomnia and mental health in contemporary fiction

3/5/2020

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Early this year, I was prescribed a course of antibiotics. While I’m grateful to live in a time and place where such things are available, this medication did not like me. Not only did they leave a nasty taste in my mouth, they disturbed my sleep to the extent of fleetingly fragmenting my mind in a manner akin to psychosis. So I don’t need convincing of the importance of getting sufficient sleep to our psychological (and physical) well-being; but we can also get too hung up on sleep such that the associated anxiety can be almost as damaging as not sleeping. I drafted this post back in February when I saw that sleep was the theme of this year’s mental health awareness week; although that's now changed to kindness, with many suffering insomnia in lockdown, this post on sleep in my own reading and writing still seems worth sharing.

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Do you read differently in anxious times?

29/3/2020

8 Comments

 
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As I said earlier this month, in a more optimistic – or head-in-the-sand mentality – there are good things about the coronavirus pandemic, an obvious one to this blog’s readers being more time to read. On the other hand, while we might find unexpected gaps in our schedules, anxiety consumes vast quantities of headspace, reducing our capacity for, on some days, anything more taxing than watching cat videos and repurposing unloved paperbacks as toilet tissue. So I’ve been wondering whether I, you, or anyone else, reads differently in times of high anxiety. What do you think?

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Traditional cultures in transition: The Butchers & Hashim & Family

18/3/2020

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My two most recent reads are of novels that map cultural changes within two very different communities. The first is set in rural Ireland during the BSE crisis at the end of the twenty-first century, as more and more people turn their backs on a traditional form of butchering. The second starts and finishes in the two decades before the first begins, in the community of recent migrants to the UK from Bangladesh. While both include scenes of violence, the second is overall a cosy story of adaptation and resilience, while the first is a literary novel of linguistic and psychological depth.

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Problematic Masculinity: Our Fathers & A Man Who Is Not a Man

15/3/2020

7 Comments

 
How do boys become men and what happens to those whose journeys go wrong? The first of these novels, set in Scotland, looks at what boys learn from their fathers when the son of a bully goes on to murder his family, apart from his younger son. The second is about a traditional coming-of-age ceremony in South Africa and the physical, psychological and social consequences of a botched circumcision.

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Lucky? Beautiful & 900 Miles

11/3/2020

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Miguel seems to have won life’s lottery, a beauty from birth. Christina was born into deprivation, but winning the lotto can’t put that right. An Italian translation set in Mexico and coming-of-age story on the Californian coast, these two recent reads explore the ups and downs of being blessed with something many people crave.
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16 novels about Women’s History #WomensHistoryMonth

7/3/2020

4 Comments

 
I’ve read a lot of excellent historical novels by female authors, but they don’t always (and this isn’t necessarily a criticism) forefront the female experience. For Women’s History Month I’ve plucked from my shelves, real and virtual, a few that particularly highlight the lives of women in days gone by. Firstly, I’m recommending 8 novels fictionalising famous and relatively unknown women; secondly I’ve selected 8 (from potentially hundreds) exploring historical happenings through a female perspective. All are from female authors who might yet become historical figures themselves!

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How our minds work: Tyll & Human Traces

19/1/2020

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Although these two historical novels are very different, both sparked some deep reflection about the workings of the human mind, and especially how our reasoning and problem-solving is influenced by beliefs and assumptions which, in turn, are shaped by the times and cultures in which we live. Both are set primarily in mainland Europe – the first in the seventeenth century and the second towards the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth – and feature – predominantly in the first and latterly in the second – countries ravaged by war.
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A Kindle Christmas catch-up of self-published and small-press fiction

3/1/2020

9 Comments

 
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While I can appreciate the convenience of e-readers, I much prefer reading in print. But I do have an unloved Kindle and the app I can use with my slightly-more-convenient touchscreen on my laptop. From time to time I download books and then forget to read them; this Christmas I thought I’d try and catch up. Read on for my mini reviews – and apologies for mentioning the C-word in January! I know that the modern Christmas begins at the end of November, so people are heartily sick of it well before New Year but, while I’m a confirmed humbugger, I stick to the old-fashioned notion that Christmas runs for twelve days ending January 6th.

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The challenge of cognitive difference: Census & The Heavens

29/12/2019

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Both these novels feature characters who are challenged and/or challenge others with their different-from-average minds. In the first, it’s a young man with Down’s syndrome, viewed from the perspective of his loving father. In the second, it’s a young woman, latterly diagnosed with schizophrenia, who inadvertently time travels to Elizabethan England. If that doesn’t sound like your kind of book, do give me the chance to persuade you otherwise!

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    Annecdotist is the blogging persona of Anne Goodwin: 
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