Annecdotal - annethology

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

25/6/2019

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.

Surviving flawed parents: The Distance Home & The Body Where I Was Born

3/6/2019

Two novels from continental America inspired – if that’s not too optimistic a term for the subject matter – by the authors’ own challenging childhoods with parents who weren’t up to the job. Both girls had a brother, a partially-absent father, a determined mother and grandmother with whom she didn’t see eye to eye. Both learnt early about gender discrimination; both lived in relatively comfortable households on the fringes of marginalised communities (with Native Americans as neighbours in the first novel, set in Dakota, and refugees from repressive South American regimes in the second, set in Mexico). Some say a difficult childhood is the ideal apprenticeship for a writer. Read on, and see what you think!

Sibling loyalties and multiple murders: My Sister The Serial Killer & The Night Tiger

17/2/2019

While the title declares the first of these novels, set in Lagos, to be about siblings and killings, it’s not immediately obvious how it applies to the second, set in Perak, Malaysia. A boy who feels guided by his dead twin, a young woman strongly attached to her stepbrother, and mysterious deaths that might be the work of a tiger: does that nail it? Read on!

Where is love? Nothing but Dust & In the City of Love’s Sleep

3/12/2018

A couple of weeks ago, challenged to compose a 99-word story combining mashed potatoes with a superpower, I chose love. Because, as these two novels testify, along with a third I reviewed at the end of last month, love is rarely straightforward, and for some an impossible dream. In Land of the Living, Georgina Harding shows how a husband’s wartime trauma, in conjunction with his wife’s inexperience, acts as a barrier to intimacy. In the City of Love’s Sleep also focuses on romance, in this case the approach-avoidance dance of a man and woman still legally or psychologically bound to another, while Nothing but Dust is a startlingly honest account of the impact of a mother’s inability to love on herself and her sons.

Teenage fugitives: The Shepherd’s Hut & Sal

6/7/2018

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.

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?

In the not-too-distant future: The Unit & Anna

21/3/2018

Setting a novel in the near future requires two extra decisions. To what extent will this imagined world differ from what’s familiar today? What defines that difference? Although the social, environmental and technological developments or regressions in this fictional landscape are inevitably interlinked, one factor tends to dominate (and perhaps determines the readership to which it most appeals). At least that’s what I’ve been thinking since reading The Unit and Anna back-to-back (as well as recent dabbling in one of the subgenres myself). In the first, a democratic society has agreed (over time) that the lives of economically and socially unproductive citizens can be sacrificed for the common good. In the second, feral children roam a post-apocalyptic world in which adults have been wiped out by a virus and most of the infrastructure by a fire. Tempted? Read on!

The Visitors by Catherine Burns #blogtour #giveaway

15/10/2017

Middle-aged siblings, Marion and John Zetland, rattle around the crumbling Georgian townhouse that has been their home since childhood. Timid and childlike, Marion has never had a job, and her more educated brother hasn’t worked since being dismissed from his teaching post at a boarding school twenty years before. She spends her time with her large collection of cuddly toys, dozing in front of the TV and heating the tinned food on which they subsist. John occupies himself with making model aeroplanes and attending to the visitors in the cellar, an unpleasant part of life which Marion does her best to ignore. Who is she to judge whether it’s right or not? John has always known better than her and, as the reader discovers as the story unfolds, her parents, teachers and schoolmates were never any help in teaching her how to be a person.

Twin studies: Mischling by Affinity Konar

16/2/2017

When the cattle car stops at Auschwitz, Pearl and Stasha Zagorski’s mother realises their best chance of survival is in Josef Mengele’s Zoo. As the other kids point out, to the twins shivering on their bunk that night alongside a girl on the brink of death, they get more food there (although “it’s not kosher and it eats your insides”) and keep their hair “until the lice come” and their clothes. Submitting their bodies to the doctor’s measurements and experiments, they hope the bond between them will save their humanity. But when, not long before the camp is liberated, Pearl disappears, Stasha embarks on a perilous journey through Poland’s devastation in search, not only of her sister, but of the man who has done them both such harm.

Beyond the sum of their parts?

26/12/2016

Every novel is comprised of different parts that writers, readers and reviewers hope will combine into a satisfying whole. My last two reviews of 2016 – before I reveal my favourites of the year – are of novels for which finding that coherence is a particular challenge, but extremely worthwhile if achieved. Both published this summer, neither seems to have attracted many reviews on Goodreads, but I’m impressed with both (albeit one more than the other) so I hope you’ll at least give my reviews a chance.

Sister Sebastian’s Library & The Dhow House

15/9/2016

These two novels by established British authors, and published today by two independent presses, both feature an English woman in Africa trying to connect with family, against a backdrop of terrorist attacks and political unrest. Read on to discover the different ways these authors have explored these issues. Thanks to Salt and Legend Press for my review copies.

#OwlSongatDawn blog tour: Morecambe’s White Hope

11/7/2016

Like Workington and Barrow, Morecambe is a small, slightly rundown, coastal town in north-west England to which I have personal connections: my parents lived there for many years and, coincidentally, one of my good friends, whom I met in Cairo, has a house overlooking the bay which, for a short while, she ran as a guesthouse. Although I don’t refer to it by name, it’s also one of the settings, along with Nottingham, for my forthcoming novel, Underneath. So when I discovered Owl Song at Dawn was set in Morecambe, I was keen to read it. I was even happier to be offered a slot on the blog tour when the author agreed to write a post on the setting. I hope you enjoy Emma Claire Sweeney’s piece as much as I did. My mini review follows at the end.

Seropurulent: The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie

9/5/2016

Paul and Veblen are engaged to be married. They’re clearly in love and clearly, with their mismatched attitudes to the world beyond themselves, unsuited for the decades of companionship we hope will follow a wedding. It is obvious from the moment Paul gives her a ring, with a diamond so large it interferes with her obsessional typing.

Unlike Veblen, who espouses the anti-capitalist values of her namesake, the economist Thorstein Veblen, Paul is ambitious. A research neurologist, when the pharmaceutical empire Hutmacher offers him the opportunity to begin clinical trials on the device he’s developed to minimise battlefield brain damage, he dismisses his ethical reservations with the word Seropurulent “an ironic superlative they used in med school for terrible things that had to be overlooked” (p62). Raised by hippies, the trappings of the consumerist world spell safety for Paul (p66):

Beyond Vietnam: The Outside Lands & Journeyman

2/5/2016

I’m pleased to recommend two California-set novels published this week about the fragility of masculinity, sibling loyalty and the impact on families of the Vietnam war, the first for the generation directly affected and the second for the children of men who served.

Two Novels about Bullying and a Craze from Times Past: Bone by Bone by Sanjida Kay & Hush by Sara Marshall-Ball

26/4/2016

Humans are social creatures, and the social systems we create can serve as both help and hindrance. Bullying is one of the more disturbing things that can happen when we gather together, but the dark side of human nature can catalyse engaging fiction. In Bone by Bone, childhood bullying is at the core of the novel, while in Hush it’s a consequence of a family trauma, but both make for gripping reads. On a lighter note, I’ve followed these too short reviews with a memory of a more positive aspect of human association, the childhood crazes from which no-one is excluded.

A musical adventure: The Song Collector by Natasha Solomons

25/3/2016

The celebrated composer Harry Fox-Talbot, or Fox to his friends, is grieving for his wife, Edie, a singer who rose to prominence cheering the troops during the Second World War. He’s lost interest in music until, quite by chance, his grandson, Robin, discovers the piano. The four-year-old turns out to be a musical prodigy and, by nurturing his development, Fox gradually re-engages with life.

Identity and make-believe: The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty & The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

4/2/2016

Lately, I’ve been contemplating my identity as a novelist: how, on the one hand, it’s a simple statement of fact while, on the other, it represents an existential anxiety about what I’d be if I couldn’t describe myself in terms of something that sounds like a job. So these two novels exploring identity and make-believe, albeit with reference to film rather than fiction, have come along at exactly the right time.

Only We Know by Karen Perry sparks some musings on genre

9/12/2015

Three children on a camping trip in Kenya meet another two little girls on the banks of a river. Mixing friendship and competition, as well as an unacknowledged rage, they devise a game that ends with a scream. The mothers come running and, while it might not be entirely clear how the tragedy occurred, one mother is adamant that her boys, Nick and Luke, along with Katie, the daughter of her best friend, must guard the shocking secret from the world. Thirty years later, Nick and Katie meet again back in Dublin, following Luke’s sudden disappearance. Over the next few weeks, they’re forced to confront their memories of their childhood trauma, and the damage the cover-up has caused.

Punishment and prophecy: The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma

27/11/2015

In a small town in western Nigeria, in January 1996, nine-year-old Benjamin and his three older brothers take advantage of their disciplinarian father’s absence, and their mother’s preoccupation with their two younger siblings, to go fishing, instead of studying, after school. So absorbed in their secret new hobby, they continue every school day for six weeks, although the eldest, Ikenna, understandably becomes reluctant after a local “madman” tells him he will be killed by “a fisherman”, presumably one of his brothers. However, what finally puts a stop to their enterprise, is one of their neighbours informing their mother, who then tells their father on one of his weekend visits home. The father takes a whip to the boys, with Ikenna the most severely punished, after which, the fifteen-year-old’s behaviour spirals out of control.

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

12/11/2015

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.