#Review - Moon Road by Sarah Leipciger

Moon Road

Sarah Leipciger
Penguin (Doubleday), 16 May 2024
Available as: HB, 368pp, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9780857526533

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of Moon Road to consider for review.

Moon Road is a closely examined account of a grief suspended, diverted, and denied. But it also speaks of endurance and the  possibility of acceptance. It is a sad book, but shot through with hope - and is often very funny. 

Leipciger writes with great heart about the lives of Kathleen and Yannick, and of their daughter, Una. Kathleen and Yannick were married, until they weren't. Yannick marrying and re-marrying and fathering a sequence of kids, Kathleen remaining single. Yet they remained friends. Then, a dreadful thing happens, a thing they can't come together over. Hurt and grieving, they never meet again, not for 19 years, the book opening just as that period comes to an end. What follows is a rackety kind of reunion, a thing of probing and silences and anguish.

I should be clear that this is not always an easy read. We see in flashback the parents' responses to a catastrophe - responses that are, with hindsight, splitting them apart, and because these parts of the story are in flashback, we know there's no happy ending yet. So we see both of them adjusting to grief, perhaps feeling they are trying it on, expecting that normality will reappear, but we know - and they don't - that it's here to stay. It's a credit to Leipciger's writing that these parts of the story, which one might think would drag, sparkle, rather, as we come to appreciate the two awkward, perplexed characters and to understand them as more than containers for grief and hope.

In the present day of this book, Kathleen and Yannick are together again, kind of. Not romantically, but because they need to make a journey across Canada, thousands of miles, to Vancouver Island, where there may be news for them. They can't take a plane, because of Yannick's fear of flight. They can't shortcut through the US, because of his iffy history with the law. So they drive, a couple of septuagenarians, one (Kathleen) with a bad tooth, the other with a dodgy back, made worse by hours of immobility in the car.  Nights are spent in cheap motels, meals taken in diners or skipped. 

It's a road trip, kind of, visiting endless back-of-nowhere towns and the sights and experiences of the journey - from bullying truck drivers to a broken down VW camper (of course). Through this, the two bicker and freeze, melt and share memories, argue about the future and compare versions of the past. We see those lost moments, the ones where you had some perfectly ordinary interaction with another person, one you imagined would be only the latest iteration of a lifelong conversation but which will be the last you hear of them, the final word.

What did he mean by that? 

What if I'd said this instead? 

Why did she leave?

Endless possibilities for guilt and self-rebuke. Through it, Kathleen and Yannick come alive. At first, she's not likeable. Driven by a quest, determined that Una won't be forgotten, she treats others like walk-on actors in her own drama, almost deliberately neglecting herself and her own comfort too (that tooth). It's not that Kathleen sat down and gave up, rather the opposite, she started and runs a flourishing flower nursery after what happened, more that she cuts certain things and feelings out of her life and expects others too as well. Yannick wouldn't, so she cut him out too. On the surface, he's perhaps easier to like but that does unravel through the journey. Yannick is also stubborn and his procession of ex-wives and kids suggests a restlessness, an avoidance of facts.

Now, perhaps, Kathleen and Yannick have a chance to reconsider their choices, if they have the courage to do that. Leipciger works some magic with both, but especially, perhaps, with Kathleen so that by the end of the book I think we understand her much better. I found her - not likeable, exactly, but true, perhaps.

Throughout the novel we're also given glimpses of a young woman - 'our girl' - through a single day whose history will intertwine with the rest. Again, it's an account of a very ordinary day, really, a day that at countless points could have taken different turns. The ordinariness is seen through the lens of knowing that something happened, bringing certain moments into especial forces, as it were, and scattering little crumbs the we'll see the relevance of later. As a consequence, otherwise mundane events and feelings are made significant, their meaning open to interpretation.

The whole thing is a brilliant piece not writing and makes for absorbing reading. It's not a book to race through, there are episodes and threads which demand thought and parts that reward being revisited - my Kindle copy ended up dotted with bookmarks and searches as I went back and forward - but it is deeply rewarding and has remained with me.

For more information about Moon Road, see the publisher's website here.

#Blogtour #Review - The Guests by Agnes Ravatn

The Guests
Agnes Ravatn (translated by Rosie Hedger)
Orenda Books, 18 January
Available as: PB, 208pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781913193584

I'm grateful to Karen at Orenda Books for sending me a copy of The Guests to consider for review, and to Anne Cater at Random Things Tours for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

The Guests is a magnificently twisty thriller, a tense, stressy piece but at the same time focussed on apparently mundane themes - a couple taking a few days' break from the kids to stay in a holiday cabin loaned by a wealthy acquaintance. I might be tempted to use the phrase "low stakes" as we aren't dealing here with murder, other crimes or desperate secrets from the past - except that, for the couple concerned, Karin and Kai, the stakes do turn out to be very high (though I won't say exactly how because, spoilers, sweetie).

Much of the joy of this story is in the central characters. Lawyer Karin is a middle aged woman, prone to worry and to self-recrimination - almost to a pathological extent as she's ready to admit to herself. She has some reason, as she slowly reveals, given earlier life events and in particular a bruising encounter in her teens with the mean girls at school. Whether this did actually impact the course of her life as much as she suggests, we can't know. Karin leaves out a lot so we are left to speculate on actions and consequences. To a degree Karin regards herself as an underachiever, and she puts much of the blame for that on her earlier life. To be thrust into the milieu of the super wealthy, people who it seems Karim frankly despises (though there may be envy here!) really narks her, tweaking all her insecurities.

What's clear as subsequent events then unfold is the importance of what happened before to Karin's own story of herself - and this book is all about the stories. Those we tell ourselves. Those we tell others close to us - partners, kids. Those we make up for strangers. Those we carefully construct for ourselves to make sense of the world around us and, in particular, of coincidences, chance events and unlikely overlaps.

Those last feature especially here and they're something that Karin - with her doom-laden sense of the past and its influence - is ill-equipped to cope with, so that at a key moment she's unable, literally unable, to be open and honest about something which then drives the narrative into a spiral of growing deception. This gives subsequent developments a darkly comic twist with Karin and her craftsman husband Kai pushed into an almost Wodehousian imbroglio in their attempt to sustain a charade. Alas, they aren't the only pretenders in this little coastal paradise and nothing is more certain than that lies will come back to bite their creators.

I hope that I'm not making The Guests sound over solemn - as well as exploring dark corners in a. relationship, it's also incredibly funny. Yes, Ravatn dissects the central relationship in an almost forensic style (appropriate given Karin's profession) but as well as sometimes making the reader squirm, that also brings to light the hilarious absurdities to be found in any life partnership. The reader will - well, I was - left both shaking my head at what was going on, almost begging Karin and Kai to extract themselves from the mess, and urging them on, eager to see just how messy things could get.

In summary this book - relatively short at just over 200 pages - packs in a great deal and shoes just how much can be done with apparently little (a restricted setting, few characters and, apparently, not a lot going on. Apparently). 

Rosie Hedger's translation is excellent, capturing Karin's somewhat brittle, always-close-panic internal monologue and the comings and goings of the other participants in this drama. All are vividly present in the reader's mind as the story unfolds.

For more information about The Guests, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy The Guests from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

Review - Hinterland by LM Brown

Cover image: “Roses on Red Chair”
© Kathy Bradshaw

Hinterland
LM Brown
Fomite Press, 13 October 2020
Available as: PB, 324pp, e
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN: 9781947917583

I'm grateful to the author for an advance e-copy of Hinterland to consider for review.

Hinterland is an intense, closely observed study of one family living in a Boston suburb over a decade or so in the early 2000s.

We meet Nicholas ‍Giovanni, a taxi driver, whose main focus in life is the protection of his young daughter, Kate. When first introduced, he is sneaking away from his nightshift and back into the house while baby Kate and her mother Kathleen sleep, to check that all is well with Kate. A devoted father, or just this side of creepy? 

Kathleen herself is a troubled woman - how much so we'll only slowly discover - who is riled when Ina moves back in next door. Ina's mother Tilly has had a fall (Nicholas discovered her in the snow in her back garden) and Ina has returned to look after her. Nicholas, Tilly and Ina know each other well (Nicholas is still living in his childhood home, he and Ina grew up together) - and it's soon clear there is history here ('it had been hard to be in the same room as Ina'). What, exactly, and what sort, you need to discover for yourself - Brown will reveal this slowly as the months and years move forward and a catastrophe strikes Nicholas's little family, leaving him to care for Kate alone (alone, with help from Ida).

The characters will grow on you. Nicholas is always uneasy, trying to control everything, especially Kate (for example, he's unwilling to let her go to the playground alone, following her even when she tells him not to). At one point we are told of Nicholas that 'It was impossible to know exactly how to feel', as though he is an actor on stage waiting for direction. 

Kate misses her mother ('She wondered constantly where her mother was, if she had fallen and hurt herself, if she had forgotten where she lived...'), aware of a great absence that nobody will talk about. Nicholas won't be frank with Kate about the thing that has happened - understandably, you might think, but it leaves Kate so wounded and he refuses to do the one thing that might set things right. Why, we can only speculate.

And Ina, Nichola's sister-in-law, who seems part of, and not part of, this odd family, helping out, but resented, resenting. There is, as I said, history here - and secrets to be revealed - with Ina's and Nicholas's relationship now playing out a pattern that's rooted in events of twenty years before. The tension that Brown sketches between the two is electric, one almost feels the words crackle as one reads them, and there is a sense in which everyone else in the book - even Kate - is in their shadow, having to work round them, make space for them, if unconsciously. So Kate and, for example, Nicholas's brother Stefano and son Cooper, when they turn up, are all puzzled, stepping round in a dance they don't comprehend to accommodate Nicholas and Ina. 

It's a dance that Kathleen never learned to perform: so early on, she has to leave the stage and this fascinating woman is mostly seen in glimpses, memories, the reports of interested parties and experts. She's always interpreted by others, analysed, argued over. Yet even in her absence Kate seems to have a bond with her and a major theme of the book is Kate's quest for her mother, a quest that's sometimes overt but sometimes hidden even from her. An inevitably that quest opens up a rift with Nicholas, who's so wound up in keeping the truth from his daughter that he seems almost stop knowing her, his understanding of her personality drifting from that seen by everyone else ('he never thought that Kate could be a completely different person outside her house.')

That does give the book a vein of melancholy, but it's never maudlin. And Brown's characters are complex and real enough that - while one may not like all of them - one comes to understand them and want the best for them (even Nicholas, who, as I have said, does sometimes exhibit a worrying degree of obsession and control).

I would recommend Hinterland, both to readers of Brown's previous stories - for example her collections Treading the Uneven Road ‍and ‍Were We Awake - and those who are new to her writing. 

For more information about Hinterland, see the publisher's website here. You can purchase the book from Amazon here. 

Review - Fallen Angel by Chris Brookmyre #Blogtour

Cover: www.blacksheep-uk.com

Fallen Angel
Chris Bookmyre
Little, Brown, 25 April 2019
HB, 291pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for a free advance e-copy of this book via Netgalley and to Caolinn Douglas and Grace Vincent for inviting me to take part in the blogtour.

I always enjoy Brookmyre's books, because - rather than despite! - never being quite sure what to expect. With a long running base of crime, investigated for example by the redoubtable journalist Jack Parlabane (who took a bit of a break but is now back) and by Jasmine Sharp (I hope one day they will meet) Brookmyre also branches out into SF (Pandemonium, Places in the Darkness) and fantasy (Bedlam). In Fallen Angel, mostly a standalone (but with a couple of hooks into his wider universe) he has I think done something different again.

This book is essentially a dissection of an ill-functioning family, the Temples, told across two timelines (2002 and 2018) and from multiple characters' point of view: mainly in the third person, following different characters, but in first person for Amanda, a Canadian au pair flung into the maelstrom in the later timeline. Amanda, perhaps, comes closest to an investigator figure being a You-Tuber and aspirant journalist but this book doesn't really have a Parlabane or Sharp equivalent, until close to the end, rather than following an enquiry we're really just watching events unravel (and how!)

In 2018, the Temples have come together at their villa in Portugal to commemorate the life of patriarch Max, recently deceased. Max was something of a celebrity both as a controversialist - an academic psychologist, who in later life had taken to debunking conspiracy theories - and because of a tragedy suffered by the family, involving a young child, which is explored in the 2002 timeline but whose effects linger. Ironically this tragedy - about which I won't say much because Brookmyre reveals the details gradually, layer by layer - itself becomes the subject of conspiracy theories (perhaps an element of payback?) and the unravelling of events via Amanda's viewpoint in 2018 itself relies more than a little on those theories and the information (including red herrings) gathered by online enthusiasts.

To UK readers, the location - Portugal - and the nature of the events in 2002 will inevitably suggest the tragedy that befell the McCanns, especially given the bizarre theories and speculation which built up around that. Bookmyre is at some pains to distance his story from this: he makes clear he is not writing, however obliquely, about the McCanns, both through the standard disclaimer and, more pointedly, by referring to their tragedy, in his imagined universe, when it happens some years later. Nevertheless, the link made, we can't help but compare the mythmaking and intrusion suffered by that family with those that afflict the Temples here.

It gives that part of the story a bitter taste. The events of 2002 have - it's clear - lefts scars. Ivy, who we meet at the start of the book in the 2018 timeline, has been hardened and has obvious "issues" (eating disorders, drugs, sex). In fact we eventually learn that she has actually changed her name - ostensibly this is because her work, in a reputation management firm, requires that she not attract attention herself but perhaps in reality there is more to it than that.

Gradually, teasingly, Brookmyre explores his characters - the formidable matriarch Celia, a former actress who manipulates and dominates her unfortunate children, Max himself, who might be gone by 2018 but who casts a long (and far from benevolent) shadow (he seems to have put his psychology skills and understanding of conspiracies to work in controlling his own family), their neighbours, Vince and Laurie (in 2002 - by 2018 he's with Kirsten) and Amanda, who insists that with two dads, she doesn't miss a mother because 'what you're never had, you never miss'. With other Temple children, and some grandkids plus spouses, partners and hangers-on in both timelines there are a lot of people to get one's head round (especially given that the two narratives mean some have changed a lot). However Brookmyre makes them all real - there are no cardboard cutouts here - and all these lives weave together to make a complex, believable (and sometimes funny) web. The book is also sharply observed. For example, here's creepy Vince pondering the teenage Temple daughter: 'He remembered how she had developed through her early teens. he had watched her blossom...' or there's Ivy, taking advantage of a friend: '...she knows he'll help right now too. He's a good person. Good people want to help you. It's why they get hurt by people like her.' (That last quote encapsulates Ivy so well - hardened, ruthless in business, but regretful - elsewhere she ruefully observes that good people need to be protected from her.

You could get hung up about what genre this book is, but really there's little point - as I said, for much of the story nobody is investigating anything so I'd hesitate to call it "crime" and besides, the incident that is ostensibly at the centre of focus is elusive, and it's unclear whether a crime was committed. The focus on family dynamics is however fascinating and the book doesn't pull its punches on the hurt and derangement that can exist behind closed doors, more so when there's a determination to present an image of ideal lives, and to protect that image.

A gripping novel, with a real twist of darkness to it and an excellent addition to anyone's shelf of Brookmyre.

The blogtour for Fallen Angel continues - see the poster below for details of today's stops.

For more details of the book, see the Little, Brown website here.

You can buy the book from your local bookshop, including via Hive, from Blackwell's, Waterstones, Amazon and other places besides.