Category: Second Novels

Do houses harbour the shadows of those who lived in them before?

A few months ago, I reviewed two novels about houses with secrets. Here are two more on a similar theme, with a younger couple taking over the home an older woman’s been forced to leave. In the first it’s because she’s dead, but her spectre lingers on; in the second she’s had to move into a retirement home. In both, the young wives become almost obsessed with the previous owner, while their experiences on Valentine’s Day prove a barometer for the state of their marriages.

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As the colonisers depart: Dance of the Jakaranda & Miss Burma

13/6/2018

Hot on the heels of two novels about the messy aftermath Zimbabwean independence, come a couple more set in erstwhile outposts of the British Empire as the colonisers depart. Both focus on the experience of minorities favoured by the British who find themselves relegated in the new regimes: Indians in Kenya in Dance of the Jakaranda; the Karen in Burma in Miss Burma. Along with the politics, both explore the impact on identity of religion and race.

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On Underneath’s first birthday, I’m confessing a guilty secret underneath

25/5/2018

I have a guilty secret pertaining to abortion. Not that I’ve had a termination myself; I have a far worse confession to make. In those long-ago days when we paraded our objections on the streets instead of Twitter, my first ever protest march was against abortion. In my defence, I was a brainwashed Catholic teenager and I’ve been doing whatever I can to atone for that sin ever since.

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Gravity Well & The Gravity of Love

13/5/2018

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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Fictional teenagers going missing in the Peak District: Reservoir 13 & Whistle in the Dark

3/5/2018

Oh dear! As a Ranger in the Peak District, albeit only as a volunteer on alternate Sundays, I carry a sense of responsibility for the safety of visitors to the National Park. So it’s rather disconcerting to read about two teenage girls, on holiday from London, going missing there in a matter of weeks. Fortunately, both were characters in novels, and both providing the foundation for an engrossing story about the repercussions: the first for the residents of a fictional Derbyshire village; the second for the family of the girl who is found after four agonising days.

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Tale of a Tooth by Allie Rogers, plus a forest flash, or two

21/4/2018

Four-year-old Danny lives with his Meemaw in a cramped rented flat. Like many little boys, he’s obsessed with dinosaurs and poo, loving the first and fearing the second, although perhaps not as much as he fears Karen, the new woman in his mother’s life. Is this down to Karen’s clumsiness around young children, or straightforward jealousy in a child accustomed to having his mother all to himself? Or does Danny intuit right from the start that Karen is bad news?

Danny is a highly intelligent and perceptive child, sensitive to the pressures his mother faces while raging when he doesn’t get his way. As the novel’s narrator, he’s extremely sympathetic and endearing, leaving the reader in safe hands. Despite his child-appropriate fixations, he shows the harshness of the benefits system and the way a disturbed personality can cause chaos in other lives. And how could I not love a story with more toilet scenes than the six novels I featured for World Toilet Day last year put together?

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Where religion, art and science coincide: In the Blink of an Eye by Ali Bacon

8/4/2018

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In 1843, 400 ministers broke away from the Church of Scotland in protest at state interference in matters of faith. Known as the Disruption, the establishment of the Free Kirk was a momentous event that moved the renowned artist David Octavius Hill to celebrate in paint. With the aim of depicting everyone who played a part, his ambitious project took twenty years to complete, and might have taken longer but for the new art of photography, or less time had real life not intervened.

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Secrets of the house: The Two Houses & The Hoarder

27/3/2018

I’ve recently been reading two second novels in which a woman sets out to uncover a family’s tragic secret lodged within a large historic house, aided and abetted by a presence that might or might not be a ghost. In the first, the woman and her husband buy a crumbling manor house as a weekend retreat from London; in the second, the woman is employed in the London mansion as carer for a man who can’t throw anything away. Both have strong voices and characterisation, with beautiful descriptions, but differ sufficiently that you could happily read both. For other novels about mysterious houses see Fell by Jenn Ashworth and post What’s haunting these houses?

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Perfect communities? from Celeste Ng & Thomas More

8/1/2018

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.

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Two novels about contemporary inequalities

26/12/2017

Some moral questions to end the year and see us into the next! Is it okay for some to go hungry while others feast? Is it okay that the accident of where we are born, and to whom, determines our life chances? Does it matter that, with modernity and the march of capitalism, the gap between the haves and have nots is widening? Neither this tragicomedy set in Edinburgh nor this scattershot novel set in India have the answers, but they can entertain us while making us reflect on the issues.

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A day / week under the skin of a community: Johannesburg & Histories

14/12/2017

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.

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Angels of Nigeria? Welcome to Lagos by Chibundu Onuzo

26/11/2017

Chike Ameobi has dedicated his life to the army but when, after twelve months protecting the oil barons’ interests in the Delta, his commanding officer orders the burning of an entire village, he walks out. With him is his only friend, and loyal follower, the uneducated and low-ranking Yemi. As they flee, they enlist a young rebel militant, Fineboy, to guide them to the road, while teenager Isoken, recently saved from rape by her tight jeans, comes under their protection. Boarding the bus to Lagos, Chike is seated beside Oma, the runaway wife of an abusive husband.

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Two fictional young Americans wondering what it’s all about

6/10/2017

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If we leave home at eighteen, it’s often to a particular kind of institution. For me, as for Selin in The Idiot, that means university; for Billy Lynn, as for many young working-class adults who are less academically inclined, it’s the military. While, as Selin discovers, universities encourage questioning, not all questions are received with equal relish. On the other hand, as Billy learns, the army might discourage independent thought, it can’t prevent his wondering. Will these young people find the answers they’re looking for? Read on!

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Two novels about male infidelity and its meaning for the women affected

29/8/2017

When I plucked A Separation from my TBR shelf shortly after reading The Squeeze, I wasn’t sure I’d get away with pairing these two novels. After featuring fictional female infidelity a few months ago, introducing you to Mats and Christopher is a way of redressing the gender balance, but neither of these novels is really about the act of sex outside marriage. It wasn’t until I read the much more philosophising A Separation, that it struck me that the more plot-driven The Squeeze is also about the impact on the meaning and relationship status the women (one wife, the other a sex worker) carry in their minds, irrespective of the bonds of legality.

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Two novel encounters with the wild: Under a Pole Star & Green Lion

21/8/2017

A historical novel about Arctic exploration or a novel set in a near-future South Africa? A romance or an account of a relationship falling apart? A motherless girl or a fatherless boy? Wild animals or ice? Both of these novels explore the conflict and compassion that connects us to the natural world, but it was a bonus for me to read that the protagonist of Green Lion told his friend that his father was killed in a hunting accident in the Arctic, the setting of Under a Pole Star. Read on to see if I was right to pair these reviews.

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Two novel takes on family secrets and vulnerability

14/8/2017

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.

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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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What makes us who we are?

25/4/2017

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What do you think has most shaped your identity? Is it the genetic code inherited from your parents? Is it the culture into which you were born? Is it the way you were nurtured or not in infancy? Okay, a single blog post can’t begin to answer those questions but, with an overdue book review, a memoir and flash fiction prompt deadlines looming, I’m set to dip into the terrain.

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Art’s capacity to disturb

20/3/2017

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With a little over two months until the publication of my second novel, the focus has moved from improving the text itself – apart from scouring the proofs for a stray comma or worse – to ways of articulating what the story is about. You’d think that page upon page of carefully selected words could speak for themselves, but no. To interest readers, I have to write and talk about what’s between the covers.

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A difficult second novel? I’m about to find out!

19/2/2017

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When I was struggling to find a publisher for my first novel, if there was one thing that annoyed me more than advice to keep trying, you’ll get there if it’s good enough; it was moaning about the difficulty of producing a follow-up. While I’m not renowned for my glass-half-full mentality, I’m screaming first world problem to the power of ten. These writers were blessed with a burden I’d have willingly taken from their shoulders, so how do I feel now I’m about to release a second novel of my own?

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Family dynamics: Swimming Lessons & Our Magic Hour

26/1/2017

I decided to pair these novels after reading blurbs suggesting both were about young women adapting to significant losses: the mother’s disappearance in Swimming Lessons and a close friend’s suicide in Our Magic Hour. But, on reading the latter, I felt the main character’s issues predated that particular tragedy, originating with a highly ambivalent mother in a difficult marriage. Unfortunately for the character, but very accommodating for my reading and blogging schedule, the same applies to the first novel. I hope one or both of these will appeal but, if not, you’ll find several other posts and reviews on the theme of family dynamics if you follow the link.

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Land and sea survival: Beast & Cove

18/1/2017