Category: Transfiction

Families forced to change: The New Woman & Unless

26/12/2023

Here are two moving recent reads about families confronting a life-changing decision by one of their members and the changes they must make to accommodate this. The first is a trans novel published in 2015 which I’ve only just discovered; the second is a story I loved when I first read it on its publication in 2002.

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6 positive social changes in my lifetime: trans visibility; deinstitutionalisation; reproductive rights and more

23/2/2023

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January marked ten years since I started this blog and last October I published my 1000th post. Whether or not that’s a good thing, I’m minded to celebrate. How about a retrospective?

I achieved my dream of becoming a novelist almost 8 years ago, but I want this post to go beyond my bookshelves. Yet, when I look at the world outside, with the climate crisis and increasing inequalities, the view is bleak.

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Fictional biographies: Sacred Country & The Stone Diaries

7/1/2021

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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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The Enigma of Gender

23/4/2019

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Women love shoes and shopping, or so the stereotype goes, but since I prefer tramping the moors in my walking boots, I can’t be one of those. But, given that I’m not so keen on getting drunk while watching football, I can’t be a man. That’s the problem with binary categories, they don’t allow for “a bit of both”. They reduce the world to black or white, no room for shades of grey.

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Either side of the Velvet Revolution: Soviet Milk & Spaceman of Bohemia

1/2/2018

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1989 brought a transition from communism to democracy across Eastern Europe, with the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, a 600 kilometre joining of hands across Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, and the collapse of the Berlin Wall. These two novels feature a part of that story, one ending, and the other beginning, in 1989 and both, as a bonus, featuring narrators brought up by grandparents partly as a result of political events. Set in Latvia before regime change, Soviet Milk is about the difficulty of living a moral life under totalitarianism. Set in the Czech Republic in the very near future, Spaceman of Bohemia is about how a father’s collaboration impacts on the career and choices of his son.

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Two novels and a short story about marginalised females

21/9/2017

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Life’s tough on the fringes of society, perhaps particularly if you’re female. Not only have you your own vulnerability to contend with, but the projections of others who feel safer dwelling on your difference than on your similarity to them. Let me take you into the worlds of three such fictional females: The Parcel is harrowing novel about sex workers in Bombay; Dance by the Canal is a lighter novella about a homeless woman in East Germany; my recently published short story, “Ghost Girl” is about an African girl with the wrong colour skin.

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LGBT history: Days Without End by Sebastian Barry

12/2/2017

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Sebastian Barry’s latest novel, which won the 2016 Costa Book of the Year Award announced last month, is a story of migration and massacre; of bravery and brutality; of family, friendship and gender fluidity told in the unique voice of an Irishman in 1850s America.

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Beyond the sum of their parts?

26/12/2016

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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.

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Further instructions for a novel: Neverhome by Laird Hunt

30/11/2015

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I was strong and he was not, so it was me went to war to defend the Republic. I stepped across the border out of Indiana into Ohio. Twenty dollars, two salt-pork sandwiches, and I took jerky, biscuits, six old apples, fresh underthings, and a blanket too. There was a heat in the air so I walked in my shirtsleeves with my hat pulled low.

So begins the story of the transformation of Constance Thompson, wife and farmer, into Gallant Ash, fearless soldier and folk legend of the American Civil War. Hers is a story of love and loss, deceit and duty, and the way in which violence can be used as a defence against unbearable pain that, in the end, brings its own trauma. It’s also the story of how women are airbrushed out of history.

While I’d recommend this novel to readers, I want to focus, as I did some time ago with Instructions for a Heatwave, on what we can learn from Laird Hunt’s sixth novel (although the first to be published in the UK) as writers, whether we are looking to write historical fiction or not.

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Girl-to-boy traditions: The Pearl That Broke Its Shell and Sworn Virgin

17/11/2015

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As the middle child in a family of five daughters in a village in contemporary Afghanistan, Rahima knows first-hand how gender shapes people’s lives. For a few short years she gets to experience the world from the other side: dressed as a boy, she is able to attend school, wrestle with her friends and run errands to the market, while her sisters stay home, helping their mother cook and clean and avoid the blows of their opium-addicted father. But the local warlord has taken a fancy to her and, at thirteen, she is forced to become a girl again and join his three other wives under the disapproving gaze of his mother. All that sustains her through the cruelties of married life is the story she’s been told of her great-great-grandmother, Shekiba, facially disfigured as an infant, mistreated by her extended family when she loses her parents and siblings to cholera, who becomes a guard of the king’s harem.

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Othering India? Land Where I Flee by Prajwal Parajuly

18/9/2015

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In Gangtok in the remote state of Sikkim, Chitralekha, Nepali-speaking Indian clothing factory owner with the ear of the local politicians, awaits her eighty-fourth birthday. Reluctantly, her thirty-something grandchildren travel from across the world to join her: Agastaya from New York; Manasa from London; and Bhagwati from Boulder, Colorado. Each arrives without their significant other: Agastaya because he can’t tell his family he’s gay; Manasa – married by arrangement into a high-caste Nepali family whose Oxford degree is useless now she stays at home nursing her father-in-law – because she is grateful for a break; Bhagwati because her low-caste Bhutanese husband and two Americanised sons would be unwelcome in the family home. So far, so clichéd, but a dysfunctional family, especially one in an exotic culture, can be entertaining in its way, even if, like in a stale sitcom, the characters are obliged to continually repeat their defining grievances, just in case the audience hasn’t got it.

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