Category: Tourism

Holiday settings: Murmuration & The Summer House

8/7/2018

If you’re going on holiday this summer, you might be tempted to take one of these novels with you. The first focuses on the people who entertain and assist the visitors to a Victorian pier at an English seaside resort across a period of over a century; the second on a family taking a long holiday together on the coast of Finland. But, of course, while it might be all smiles and bonhomie on the surface, there are disconcerting undercurrents to keep you turning the page. Let me know which takes your fancy.

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Genealogy: The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland & The One Who Wrote Destiny

5/4/2018

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When we find ourselves unmoored, we might be extra motivated to seek to consolidate our roots. That’s the slim connection between these two novels in which a woman confronting terrible loss decides to research her family tree. Both involve a story of migration: Jane Ashland’s ancestors moved from Norway to the USA; Neha’s in The One Who Wrote Destiny came from Kenya (and before that India) to the UK. For another novel about tracing the members of an extended family, see Kintu.

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Time to end it all? Hotel Silence & The Zero and the One

3/3/2018

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Two novels in which men consider suicide; doesn’t sound very jolly, does it? But there’s rather more to both these stories, as well as the coincidence of texts punctuated by philosophical aphorisms. Read on and see what you think! And before you leave, check out my latest 99-word story linking suicide, unlikely weather and ravens.

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Men in love: Wabi-Sabi & The Only Story

25/1/2018

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I’m sharing my reflections on two novels in which sensitive men share their reflections on life and love. Both begin with the narrators at a loose end during the university summer vacation, the first in Barcelona, the second in London. Wabi-Sabi is the lighter of the two, in which a university lecturer travels to Japan where he is beguiled by a young woman. In The Only Story, a man’s entire life is shaped by a ten-year relationship with a vulnerable older woman he began as a nineteen-year-old student.

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Two novels and a memoir about caring for babies

24/9/2017

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As far as I’m concerned, the welfare of babies and young children is a collective responsibility, so I offer no apologies for linking these three books. The first is a historical novel that begins with a fascinating account of the experience of a wet nurse in nineteenth century Spain, before moving on to the adult lives of the princess who had first turn at the breast and her milk brother, the woman’s own baby. The second is a contemporary novel set a century later, about a young American woman working as a nanny to a Japanese toddler. Both novels show the strength of attachment we can have to other people’s offspring. The third book is an uncompromising and moving memoir about a young Englishwoman who becomes pregnant as a student and decides to keep the child. Finally, because a baby is a kind of harvest of the womb, we finish with this week’s flash.

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

29/8/2017

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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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What constitutes a holiday read?

30/7/2017

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Now that I rarely go away, I tend to forget that normal people go on holiday in the summer. Now that I read well over 100 novels a year, I also forget that holidays are when most people pick up a book or e-reader. But at this time of year I can’t help noticing that both the broadsheet weekend supplements and the blogosphere abound with holiday reading recommendations, which got me wondering what constitutes a holiday read?

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Two “novel” perspectives on tourism: Here Comes the Sun and The South in Winter

20/6/2017

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Each of these novels provides a behind-the-scenes perspective on tourism, the first raging at the inequalities, the second poking gentle humour at those who mediate between traveller and native. Having anticipated some of the themes in a recent 99-word story composed before I read either, both, while very different from each other, are definitely my kind of book.

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Going away to come home again

5/6/2017

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One of the themes of my second novel, Underneath, is the complex relationship between homecoming and travel, a topic explored in my recent guest post, The passion for travel and the concept of home. Although, as reflected in a recent post on my two accidental visits to Bangladesh, I’m nostalgic for my youthful travelling, these days I much prefer to stay at home and do my travelling in my head.

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Nineveh: Trading in painless pest relocations

13/5/2017

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It’s strange, what disgusts people. Who would scorn the friendship of a gecko, for example: golden-eyed, translucent-skinned, toes splayed on a farmhouse wall? Who could resent a long-legged spider, knitting its silver in the corner of the room? But they do: people will pay to have them killed, poisoned, destroyed.

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The Book of Dhaka by Pushpita Alam and Arunava Sinha (eds)

21/2/2017

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I visited Dhaka by accident. Twice. Back in the days when there were no affordable direct flights from London to Kathmandu I travelled with Bangladesh Biman via Dhaka. On the way out the first time, I don’t even remember changing planes at the airport. On the way back, after a month in Nepal and three and a bit in India, it occurred to me I could visit some Bangladeshi friends I’d made on a work camp in Gujarat and fly home via Dhaka.

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Fictional toilets #WorldToiletDay #amreading

18/11/2016

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We all know that fictional characters, like royalty, don’t have to suffer the indignity of urinating or opening their bowels. But, having marked World Toilet Day on Annecdotal every year since launching in 2013, regular readers know that clean and hygienic toilet facilities are something to celebrate. In last year’s post, I wrote about the advantages of gender-neutral facilities. For this year, while the official theme is toilets and jobs, I’ve collected a few quotes from novelists who don’t ignore this most basic of human functions. And if these aren’t enough to satisfy, Twitter is usually quite entertaining on 19 November each year.

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Music and movement: Swing Time by Zadie Smith

16/11/2016

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In contrast to the three women who shape her through childhood to early middle age, the female narrator of Zadie Smith’s fifth novel is so insipid, she doesn’t even bother to tell us her name. Her mother, a beautiful Jamaican-born feminist, autodidact and activist who resembles Nefertiti, delegates parenting to her less ambitious husband while she plots her escape from the confines of gender, race and class. She barely tolerates our narrator’s intense friendship with Tracey, the only other brown-skinned girl at their North London dancing class. With her doting, but foul-mouthed white English mother and absent African Caribbean father (whom the little girl claims is on tour with Michael Jackson, when he’s actually in prison), Tracey’s allotment of advantage and disadvantage mirrors hers. Their relationship pirouettes around a shared passion and a suppressed mutual envy: while Tracey has the skill and talent to make it to the stage, the narrator’s relative stability with a loving father provide some compensation for her flat feet.

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Hotels and expectations: Lover by Anna Raverat

16/10/2016

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Kate has a new job as an executive for a hotel chain and two young daughters when she discovers her husband is having an affair. As her marriage implodes, the pressure mounts in the workplace where Kate finds it increasingly difficult to reconcile the competing demands of caring for the guests and providing dividends to the shareholders.

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Sister Sebastian’s Library & The Dhow House

15/9/2016

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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.

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At home in the asylum: Signs for Lost Children by Sarah Moss

10/8/2016

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Not long after their marriage, Tom and Ally must spend several months apart. He goes to Japan to oversee the building of earthquake-proof lighthouses and falls in love with the culture. She, a newly qualified doctor, an unusual profession for a woman in 1880s Britain, stays in Cornwall to volunteer at the asylum until, unable to bear the gap between her own ideals and the often brutal treatment of the inmates, she flees to Manchester and the madhouse of her childhood home. She runs from there to her aunt’s house in London and wonders, with her mother’s voice chiming in her head, whether she will ever be fit to work again. When the paper she publishes on the possible social causes of insanity is well received, she’s invited back to Cornwall to serve as medical director of a new convalescent home to support women to make the transition from the hospital back to their communities. It’s just when she seems to have found her feet that Tom returns from his travels. He’s also changed and, like Kirsten and Rabih in The Course of Love, it looks as if their different ways of turning away from hurt will bring their marriage to an end before it’s properly begun.

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Two novelistic takes on fostering: My Name is Leon & The Lauras

27/7/2016

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Busy with my birthday blog tour, my reviews have been somewhat neglected this month. So good to find a theme to link a couple of books together. Set in Britain, My Name Is Leon is about a boy’s struggle to adapt to being too black for adoption; set in the USA, The Lauras is about a woman revisiting the places she was fostered through the eyes of her own child.

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In Brontë Country: Howarth vs Stanage-NorthLees

20/4/2016

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We British are proud of the Brontës, especially in cinematic form played out by attractive actors. But the Japanese are the real fans, apparently, making pilgrimages to the village on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales where the sisters penned their novels. One such tour is the launch point for Mick Jackson’s fourth novel for adults in which the eponymous “heroine”, after a few days drinking with her sister in London, travels north with a coachload of older women. But Yukiko is no Brontë aficionado. Instead, armed with a handful of photographs taken in the area, she considers herself a psychic detective, intent on discovering the secret of her mother’s visit ten years before, which she believes precipitated her suicide back home in the snow.

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Hotels of North America by Rick Moody & Thomas and Mary by Tim Parks

14/4/2016

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The protagonists of novels are often called upon to act more heroically than they might have to in real life. So it can be refreshing to come across main characters who are as ordinary as the rest of us. Here I’m reviewing two novels about the loves and limitations of middle-aged men; the first in America and the second in the UK. Do these characters have enough oomph to keep our interest? Read on for my personal view. (And, for another take on masculinity and compromised morality, see my review of The Faithful Couple.)

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Mothering her mother: Hot Milk by Deborah Levy

31/3/2016

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Sofia and her mother, Rose, are spending the summer of 2015 in Almería. Although Sofia spends the day on the beach, this is no holiday. For much of Sofia’s life, certainly from the age of five when her Greek father moved on, Rose has suffered from a mysterious illness which renders her intermittently unable to walk. They have remortgaged Rose’s house in London and come to Spain in search of a cure at the unconventional Gómez Clinic.

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<<Previous

Holiday settings: Murmuration & The Summer House

Genealogy: The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland & The One Who Wrote Destiny

Time to end it all? Hotel Silence & The Zero and the One

Men in love: Wabi-Sabi & The Only Story

Two novels and a memoir about caring for babies

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

What constitutes a holiday read?

Two “novel” perspectives on tourism: Here Comes the Sun and The South in Winter

Going away to come home again

Nineveh: Trading in painless pest relocations

The Book of Dhaka by Pushpita Alam and Arunava Sinha (eds)

Fictional toilets #WorldToiletDay #amreading

Music and movement: Swing Time by Zadie Smith

Hotels and expectations: Lover by Anna Raverat

Sister Sebastian’s Library & The Dhow House

At home in the asylum: Signs for Lost Children by Sarah Moss

Two novelistic takes on fostering: My Name is Leon & The Lauras

In Brontë Country: Howarth vs Stanage-NorthLees

Hotels of North America by Rick Moody & Thomas and Mary by Tim Parks

Mothering her mother: Hot Milk by Deborah Levy

2018 Reading Challenge

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