#BlogTour #Review - How to Belong by Sarah Franklin

Cover by Sophie McDonnell

How to Belong
Sarah Franklin
Zaffre, 12 November 2020
Available as: HB, 353pp, e
Source: Advance HB copy
ISBN: 9781785764868

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of How to Belong to consider for review and to Tracy Fenton at Compulsive Readers for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

I'm a fan of books that match well-drawn, interesting characters with a great sense of place, and How to Belong scores well on both counts. It's the story of Jo and Tessa, coming to terms with their pasts and with their lives when returning to the Forest of Dean. 

Jo has been - is - a barrister. She's one of those who "got out", taking a degree and finding a glamorous job in London. Or not, because once there, she found, of course, that it wasn't all as shiny as she hoped. Life was an endless slog round the country, working on dispiriting cases for clients who scarcely seem deserving, arriving back on late trains from distant courts. All the plum work goes to the men, she's pretty friendless in London and even the money isn't very good. So coming home for Christmas and finding herself in the familiar hubbub of the family butcher's shop strikes a nerve with Jo, especially as her parents are about to sell the shop and retire. Maybe taking over the shop might be a way to return to the familiar, and preserve her family heritage?

Farrier Tessa has also come back to the Forest - after her relationship with Marnie in Bristol ended. Emotionally bruised and struggling with a debilitating illness, she's drawn the circles of her life tighter and tighter to protect herself. Finally, she holes up in her cottage in the woods, struggling to make ends meet on the tiny amount of work she can do.

I loved the way that Franklin depicts these women, giving us flashbacks to show their earlier lives and the wounds and struggles that have made them. 

Jo is bright and intelligent and full of plans and ideas. We are told that her career as a barrister has given her resilience and an ability to deal with people, yet she can also get things so, so wrong: with Ron and Mo, who run her parents' shop, with old friend Liam - at times, it's hilarious to see Jo's mistakes. Moreover, she can scarcely bear the smell and texture of fresh meat so at one level it seems slightly comic that she would take on the butcher's shop, at another, it is rather noble and admirable.

Tessa's wounds didn't begin with her and Marnie's break-up: there was a shocking event that cut to the core of her family and for which she has assumed responsibility and a resulting belief that she's hateful and can come to no good. The forest seems a good place for Tessa to hide away, to not be known or recognised. 

Jo has returned to the Forest of Dean for exactly the opposite reason, to be somewhere she is known, somewhere she fits in. 

It doesn't work out as either expects, of course. There are many eyes in the forest and Tessa is observed and remembered, while Jo finds that her friendship group has moved on (and her family house sold). Many outsiders are coming to the Forest with new estates spring up where the sheep grazed and second homers appearing. Is Jo, despite her origins, really one of them - an urbanite with over romantic views about this place stuck between England and Wales, with its own history and traditions?

The interplay between Tessa and Jo, and also Jo's relationships with Liam and with Ron and Mo and indeed her parents (largely absent though they are) makes a fascinating character study. Franklin lets things build up slowly, with plenty of time and space for each of the two women, and allows us to draw our own conclusions about what's going on rather than having her characters tell us. The Forest is almost a character itself, and we see both the pluses and minuses of increasing tourism and of "incomers" - as well as the resilience of the Forest people themselves. Best of all, perhaps, the ending is left tantalisingly open. I think I know what's going to happen, but as Franklin has shown, Jo and Tessa are real people with real quirks and with their own histories, so really, who knows what comes next?

Definitely recommended.

For more information about How to Belong, see the publisher's website here - and also the other stops on the tour, listed on the poster below!

You can buy How to Belong from your local highstreet bookshop - many are still open for orders even if you can't browse - or online from Hive Books, bookshop.org UK,  Blackwell's, Foyles, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

#Blogtour #Review - This Green and Pleasant land by Ayisha Malik

This Green and Pleasant Land
Ayisha Malik
Zaffre, 13 June 2019 (HB), 1 October 2020 (PB)
Available as: HB 446pp, PB 464pp, audio, e
Source: My son's HB copy
ISBN (PB): 9781785764509

I'm grateful to Tracy Fenton for inviting me to take part in the Compulsive Readers blogtour for This Green and Pleasant Land.

In this novel Ayisha Malik brings together - with some glee, I think - what are often thought of as contrasting, even clashing, cultures within this, our sceptr'd isle. The villagers of idyllic(?)  Babbel's End have accepted, even welcomed, Bilal Hasham and his wife Miriam into their community, just as Bilal, a fairly non observant Muslim, has enjoyed the distance from his home town of Birmingham - and from scrutiny from his aunts and mother. But when Bilal, reexamining his life after his mother's death, decides to carry out her last wish and build a mosque in the village - well, things change...

I have to confess that I live in a village rather like Babbel's End (a significant name, you might think) and my wife is a vicar, so reading this book I did, as people say these days, feel seen. Change doesn't come easily in such places and Bilal ("Bill") hardly makes it easier by setting out his plan, with no warning, at a public meeting. Indeed, by not actually having much of a plan - he's not clear where the mosque will be, what it will cost, how it will be run (he's surprised, for example, to discover subsequently that he will need an imam).

But this isn't just about change, however well or badly handled, is it? The intention to build a mosque is seen as a cultural challenge, as something unprecedented, threatening and unwelcome. At risk of digressing, I'd answer that by pointing out that the English countryside has seen centuries of change, both religious and social: far from being a rural oasis of calm, the fields, cottages, churches and chapels have been contested, reworked and reinvented over hundreds of years. The conflict and confrontation that Malik sketches here is fully in keeping with that history and even rather tame compared with parts of our history, and the good folk of Babbel's End might need to learn a few things about that.

Of course, in This Green and Pleasant Land, battle lines are soon drawn, petitions planned and friendships strained. There's an undercurrent of fear and panic: more than a dash of racism too, if we're honest. But Malik gives us much more than that. In the first third of the book we're introduced to a dizzying cast of characters, and to the strains and tensions arising from their lives. In Babbel's End we meet vicar Richard, who's not, I think, entirely comfortable in his vocation, as well as Shelley, queen of the Parish Council, the splendidly lugubrious Tom, the closeted George Copperthwaite and Jenny, editor of the West Plimpington Gazette.

There is grief and strain in the village, with the recent death of a teenage boy, as the story opens.  Malik shows us how families and friendships were already fractured and strained - marriages under pressure, Miriam alienated from her best friend Anne and besset by her own doubts about Bilal and her first love, Raif - before mention of the mosque. And besides Bilal and Mariam, back at home in Birmingham we glimpse Bilal's mother, his Aunt Rukhsana, and a history of strong women bringing up their kids in the absence of husbands (a theme of this book, something occurring in both communities).

Without this fascinating tapestry of lives and backgrounds, This Green and Pleasant Land might be in danger of falling into the whimsy of an Ealing comedy - a high concept dispute with an air of the absurd and little more. With it, there's emotional depth behind almost every passage, every sentence. The external conflict - which rapidly turns into a cause celèbre in the national media, social media and local gossip - mirrors internal doubts, missteps and frailties in Bilal's family, among his supporters and between the opponents of the mosque.

I loved the personalities that we see here - their histories, griefs and friendships. Best of all perhaps is Aunt Rukhsana, an ordinary seeming woman, apparently bypassed by life but with a wonderful determination - not a great English speaker, on arrival in Babbel's End she determines to learn the language so that she can speak to the friend she meets when out walking. Rukhsana also writes poetry, and tries to counteract Bilal's wilder fits of enthusiasm on occasion. She's a great force of life and drives much of this story.

The story itself, which does have its comic side at times, grows into an exploration of faith, belonging and identify, but also of the lengths people will go to get what they want.  Malik shows (without labouring the point) how motivations grow and diverge from their ostensible roots: Bilal's plans never quite ring true as having a religious basis, I think that there's more guilt about his mother here, a sense of duty and of a certain sort of middle aged male restlessness. Some of those in the community who support him seem to be doing so out of a sense of bloody mindedness (Tom) while among the opponents, Shelley seems increasingly conflicted as events whirl our of control and unpleasant feelings and passions attach to the campaign. Some of her faction seen more passionate about opposing the mosque the less likely they are to ever bee seen in church. Again this rings true, a certain type of cultural jingoism and fake (and ignorant) religiosity driving debate rather than genuine feeling and knowledge.

Just how might that toxicity be overcome? What are Ayisha Malik's answers? They aren't glib or easy. Celebrating, above all, the value of kindness, reasonableness and friendship this is I think in the end an optimistic book, one that doesn't deny the differences between people but which draws how much more is that unites us all. This Green and Pleasant Land is sharp and well-imagined. It was a great pleasure to read and I'd recommend it unreservedly.

For more information about This Green and Pleasant Land, see the publisher's website here. And don't forget the blogtour stops coming up (see the poster below) for more insights into the book!

You can buy This Green and Pleasant Land from your local highstreet bookshop, or online from Hive Books - who support local bookshops - Blackwell's, Foyles, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

Review - I Am Dust by Louise Beech

I Am Dust
Louise Beech
Orenda Books, 16 April 2020
Available as: PB, 344pp, e
Read as: Advance review copy PB
ISBN: 9781913193218

I'm grateful to Orenda Books for a free advance copy of I Am Dust to consider for review.

Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return...

There are books I read for review because they catch my eye and I think they might interest.

There are books I read for review because I've read the author before and I think I'll like them.

Then... then there are Louise Beech books - which means I know I'll be in for a good time (if a heart-wringing, emotionally involving one).

I Am Dust is, of course, no exception. Operating on two parallel timelines, we see Chloe, a thirtysomething adult, working as an usher at the Dean Wilson theatre in Hull in 2019. We also see Chloe, with her friends Jess and Ryan, rehearsing in the summer of 2005 for a youth theatre production of Macbeth - and dabbling with a Ouija board.

In 2019, the Dean Wilson is preparing for a revival of the iconic musical Dust, considered cursed by some since the lead actress was killed during its premiere run 20 years before at the same theatre. The  murder was never solved, and understandably, speculation runs wild - especially Eoin the part of Chloe's mate Chester.

In 2005, relations between the three friends become more and more intense. Chloe fancies Jess. Jess has eyes only for Ryan. Ryan - well, Ryan is basically in love with himself. The instigator of the Ouija sessions, which take place after hours on the Macbeth stage - among the witches props, royal robes and daggers of the Scottish Play - Ryan has some objective of his own. There is something he wants, something he knows, something he needs. Chloe has always considered herself sensitive in these matters - what might the pressure of the sessions drive her to?

I loved the awkward, triangular relationship between Chloe, Jess and Ryan, the balance always shifting in response to the lurching dynamics of the teenagers, and to external pressures. Beech writes, I think, with great insight when she draws these characters: they ring true, and one worries for them - not only in 2005, but in the future, where Chloe seems alone. What has become of Jess and Ryan?

What, for that matter, has become of Chloe? Part of the lure of this book is the slow drip of revelation about her life then, and now. I don't want to spoil it, so I won't say a lot, but it's clear that she has been deeply affected by something. She has been self-harming. She can't remember all of what went before - so we as readers are in some ways ahead of her when strange things start to happen at the theatre. There's a tension hanging over this book, a genuine sense of menace, whether from the supernatural or from the unresolved dynamics of fourteen years ago. It's exacerbated, somehow, by the way Chloe seems to stand in the spotlight - her mum and dad appear and are mentioned, but never named. She seems to have answers but not to know them, if that makes sense.

And all the while she is weaving her own story, writing a script, that seems both a commentary on what she's been through and a way out of her own life.

I just loved this brooding, claustrophobic novel. In Beech's last, Call Me Star Girl, most of the action during police during one torrid night at a local radio station (mentioned briefly at the start of I Am Dust). Here it's more spread out, the action taking place over several months in each timeline, and the locations are less constrained physically but - as theatres - perhaps even more freighted with hopes, dreams and fears: dangerous spaces, which have to be treated with care, according to established rules (like never mentioning the name of the Scottish Play). Ryan lays down rules for the Ouija sessions too, but the three friends don't pay much heed to them and there's a sense from the start of them playing with fire...

I Am Dust is at the same time a sensitive character study, a heart-stopping, spooky tale and a scorching page turner that will have you up past midnight to complete it (if you're brave enough).

For more information about the book see the publisher's webpage here. If you haven't read anything by Louise before (WHY?) check out my reviews of The Mountain in my Shoe, Maria in the Moon, The Lion Tamer who Lost, and Call me Star Girl.

If you can buy I am Dust from your local bookshop - many are now operating mail order - please do, they need as much support as possible right now. Alternatively, Hive Books are now taking orders again, or you can buy from Blackwell's, Foyle's, Waterstones or Amazon.

#Blogtour #Review - The 24-Hour Café by Libby Page

The 24-Hour Café
Libby Page
Orion, 23 January 2020
HB, 416pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for a free advance e-copy of The Twenty Four Hour Café and to Tracy Fenton at Compulsive Readers for inviting me to join the tour.

I've always been intrigued by the night and especially by those who are awake through it. I love the idea that while I doze in my warm bed, there are people in neon lit spaces working; travellers making their way by bus or train to who knows where; restless people sitting in airports surrounded by their luggage; a pack of Nighthawks out of Edward Hopper's dreams propping up a bleak bar. Recently I read about a woman living on the edge of London who, when she can't sleep, gets the Nightbus into town and visits a particular Soho cafe. Respect to her for that - I'm not THAT much of a night owl myself. Though I will stay up reading (as I did last night, when I just HAD to finish this book) I don't go out into it a lot, I'm more fascinated by the idea of the night. It's just fuel for the imagination and positively drips with atmosphere, glamour, sentiment and anticipation.

Of course, that attitude may reflect a degree of privilege on my part, as a man with a secure home who lives in a safe and sleepy English village (even if we do sometimes appear in Midsomer Murders). Other perspectives are available and often, of course, the night can be threatening, especially for women.

Both sides of that vibe feature in this new book by Libby Page. Hannah and Mona are waitresses, doing twelve hour shifts at Stella's café opposite Liverpool Street Station in the heart of London. The book takes us through Hannah's stint (midnight to noon) and then Mona's (round to midnight again). In the course of those 24 hours we are privy to their thoughts and memories, as well as the experiences of customers who come and go at Stella's, and some who return. Gradually, the picture fills out, telling Hannah's and Mona's story - the story of two friends who've drifted apart and which stands I think for so many trying to make a life in London.

Opening with the midnight handoff between their shifts (dancing to "Tutti Frutti" - 'it reminds them both of what it felt like to be is full of hope and ambition') we learn how Hannah came, barely in her 20s, to make it big as a singer, taking temporary jobs in the meantime. Similarly Mona, who has a passion for dancing. Approaching 30, still struggling, both women are aware that they don't have many more chances ('each year a new swathe of eager, bouncy, fame-hungry young performers heads for London') and other distractions threaten: living from one payday to the next, problems with housemates, illness and injury, all conspire againts the dedication and focus that's required for success - the need for practice, practice, practice, the dispiriting round of auditions leading nowhere, the effort necessary to canvass venues and network and follow up possibilities.

And in Hannah's case, her bad luck with men has also set her back, landing her with what seem to have been two superficial charmers only interested in themselves - something that has driven a wedge between her and Mona, who seems the more dedicated of the pair. This book is really a paean to friendship, to the support these women have shown each other over the years, from always showing up for the other's performances to tending for each other in periods of illness (Page makes a point in this book of showing where her protagonists have done this - for example Dan with his dying mother or Sonja and Timur who have waited so long, saving painstakingly for their wedding: 'At work she takes pride in being confident... behind the door of their flat she clings to him at night and asks him to brush her hair when she is unwell...') to simply offer support and a hug.

As we follow Hannah and Mona through the night, it becomes clear that the book is hinged around the future of their relationship, and that it is very much in doubt: grief, loss and anger come between them and may erase what they have been to each other. Page makes both women (as well as the other characters here!) very real, and one comes to understand what has happened and to ache for both of them (perhaps more for Mona, admittedly) and wish they could make up.

Coming and going through that long night and day (12 hours! I couldn't be on my feet working for 12 hours...) are many others: the student who finds himself homeless and shelters all night in the café, the gay couple who face separation due to immigration rules, the man and woman in their 60s who have found love late and are off on honeymoon, the woman who flees her home because she can't bond with her newborn baby. There are also less sympathetic people here - the couple who list what's wrong with London, the woman who stands in the café and screams. There are abusive customers and those who are merely rude. As I said, there are dangers in the night as well as glories.

All these stories and parts of stories - we don't get told everything - seem peculiarly fitting to a café where people kill time waiting for a train or a bus. Stella's is full of people on the cusp of things - waxing, waning; losing, gaining; never at rest (like Dan, some have nowhere to rest), but appraising their past and their future. A daytime customer has lost his job in the City but not told his wife. he come sin every day and sits with his laptop. The Big Issue seller outside has lost one life and is trying to build another. It's a fascinating patchwork of people, of love and friendship, loss and loneliness.

The language in this book is arresting, often beautiful ('The sun rises over London, but at the small table in Stella's, it sets on Joe and Haziq') and shows great insight ('It didn't mean I stopped caring about my friend, though; he just made me carrels with them'). Page uses its single location, narrow focus and 24 hour duration to explore universal themes of love, loss and friendship with great delicacy - and to introduce some great characters.

I'd strongly recommend!

About the Author

LIBBY PAGE is the author of the SUNDAY TIMES bestseller and runaway success of 2018, THE LIDO. THE LIDO has sold in over twenty territories around the world and film rights have been sold to Catalyst Global Media.

After writing, Libby’s second passion is outdoor swimming. Libby lives in London where she enjoys finding new swimming spots and pockets of community within the city. She and her sister run a blog and Instagram account @theswimmingsisters, documenting their swims and the benefits of outdoor exercise for mental health.

About the Book

Day and night Stella’s Café opens its doors for the lonely and the lost, the morning people and the night owls. It is many things to many people but most of all it is a place where life can wait at the door. A place of small kindnesses. A place where anyone can be whoever they want, where everyone is always welcome.

Meet Hannah and Mona: best friends, waitresses, dreamers. They work at Stella’s but they dream of more, of leaving the café behind and making their own way in life.

Come inside and spend twenty-four hours at Stella’s Café; a day when Hannah and Mona’s friendship will be tested, when the community will come together and when lives will be changed...

For more about the book, see the publisher's website here.

The tour continues with reviews from some excellent bloggers (check out the poster below).

The 24-Hour Café is available from your local bookshop (or online via Hive Books which supports local bookshops) but can also be ordered from Blackwell's, Foyles, WH Smith, Waterstones and Amazon.

Review - A Degree of Uncertainty by Nicola K Smith

A Degree of Uncertainty
Nicola K Smith
Compass Publishing, 20 November 2019
PB, e, 334pp

I'm grateful to the author for a copy of A Degree of Uncertainty to consider for review.

A Degree of Uncertainty is a book focussed on the impact a new university is having on the small West Cornish town of Poltowan.

Jobs are being created and business generated for some of the local traders - but houses are also being snapped up for investment and letting, established firms are being replaced by new ones focussed on the students and local families being priced out of the market. Nor are the students happy as numbers increase and the friendly "boutique" experience they were promised fails to appear. Welcome to the marketised world of 21st century higher education. Estate agent Harry Manchester worries about all this, so when it becomes known that the dynamic Vice Chancellor, Dawn Goldberg, is pressing for even more expansion, he decides to take a stand. As the book opens, Harry is about to be interviewed for local TV, but he won't find it an easy ride.

I enjoyed A Degree of Uncertainty. The book surprised and pleased me by not being a semi-comic account of friction between the locals and academics (I have read that book several times) but instead focussing strongly on character and on the complexities of Poltowan and the challenges before it. So, Harry is determined to stop the expansion, for altruistic reasons, but it could be argued that he has a business interest himself. He's also in an emotionally precarious situation, having recently left his wife Sylvia for younger Jo (in no small part at Sylvia's urging). As soon becomes clear, Harry has reservations about this and doubts he can be who Jo wants him to. The emotional currents between the three are complex and they ebb and flow throughout the book, giving the story a real depth and texture.

Pitted against Harry is Goldberg, who could have been made into a 2D villain (she is a formidable opponent, and not above a few dirty tricks) but who is, instead, actually rather sympathetic. Smith makes clear Goldberg's motivations but also hints, perhaps, that she is rather out of her depth. Many of the best scenes were between Dawn and her secretary (and I think only friend) Janice.

The supporting characters are nicely drawn, too, from narrowboat dwelling student Ludo to the mysterious but alluring singer Rockstr (both of whom support Harry's campaign) and the Poltowan business owners (most of whom don't). There is plenty of grey in their motivations, plenty of room for debate about what, really, is right for Poltowan. And there are Secrets. It's a very issue-led book which shows how development and change can split communities and divide friends.

Certainly, as events gather pace, Harry finds his business suffering, his friends turning against him and his personal life coming under strain. He's an unlikely campaigner, really - he just wants to be sitting in his familiar armchair, headphones on, listening to the music of Queen - but once he takes his position, it's as if he can''t shift (perhaps there's some compensation going on for the way his domestic life has lost all its point of reference). But nor is Dawn used to being stopped: as the book's blurb say, something will have to give.

A Degree of Uncertainty is an excellent read. In this, her debut novel Smith creates characters you will care about and enough conflict to challenge them, rooted in a realistic setting and very current issues. I wanted to know more about Poltowan, its people and its future as well as about Harry, Sylvia and Dawn.

About the Author

Nicola K Smith is a freelance journalist and writer living in Cornwall, regularly contributing to a number of national newspapers and magazines. She studies English Literature at Loughborough University.

Nicola was chosen as 'most promising student' on Curtis Brown Creative's 'Starting to Write Your Novel' source and A Degree of Uncertainty was conceived under their tutelage. This is her first novel.

You can find her at:

Twitter: @NicolaKSmih
Instagram: nicolaksmith740

A Degree of Uncertainty is available from Blackwell's, from Foyles,  Waterstones or from Amazon here. For more about the book, visit Nicola's website at https://www.nicolaksmith.com 

#Review Stubborn Archivist by Yara Rodrigues Fowler #YoungWriterAwardShadow

Jacket design by Nico Taylor

Stubborn Archivist
Yara Rodrigues Fowler
Fleet/ Little Brown, 21 February 2019
HB, 362pp

This is the first of four reviews I'm doing as part of shadow judging the The Sunday Times / University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award. I am part of the Shadow Panel which will make its own choice from the shortlist for the award.

The four shortlisted books are Stubborn Archivist by Yara Rodrigues Fowler (Fleet/ Little, Brown), Testament by Kim Sherwood (riverrun), The Perseverance by Raymond Antrobus (Penned in the Margins) and salt slow by Julia Armfield (Picador).

About the author

Yara Rodrigues Fowler is a British Brazilian novelist from South London. Stubborn Archivist, published in 2019 in the UK and USA, is her first novel. It was called ’stunning’ by Olivia Laing, ‘visceral and elegant’ by Claire-Louise Bennett and ‘breathtakingly written’ by Nikesh Shukla. Yara was named one of The Observer’s nine ‘hottest-tipped’ debut novelists of 2019 and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. Yara is also a trustee of Latin American Women’s Aid, an organisation that runs the only two refuges in Europe for and by Latin American women. She’s writing her second novel now, for which she received the John C Lawrence Award from the Society of Authors towards research in Brazil.

About the book

"A bold debut novel exploring the nuances and the spaces between ourselves and our bodies, told through the shards collected by our own stubborn archivist. When your mother considers another country home, it’s hard to know where you belong. When the people you live among can’t pronounce your name, it’s hard to know exactly who you are. And when your body no longer feels like your own, it’s hard to understand your place in the world. This is a novel of growing up between cultures, of finding your space within them and of learning to live in a traumatized body. Our stubborn archivist tells her story through history, through family conversations, through the eyes of her mother, her grandmother and her aunt and slowly she begins to emerge into the world, defining her own sense of identity."

My review

Stubborn Archivist is a novel exploring the experiences and identity of a young woman of Brazilian-English heritage. Born in London to a Brazilian mother and an English father, she, the archivist of the title (which is I think an allusion to her role in observing her family) narrates her early life (borrowing from family stories) and her memories of travelling to Brazil for family reunions at Christmas. We see her growing up in early 00s London, leaving for university, making and falling out of friendships and always, always, returning to Brazil.

It's all beautifully, even poetically portrayed but it's impossible to convey that with a carefully selected quote or two because - and this is the first thing I need to say about Stubborn Archivist  - the book is (for me) very experimental in its structure (or perhaps, rather, in its form?) Rodrigues Fowler delights in space, allowing her text almost to dance against the blankness - a handful of worlds will be emphasised by being printed alone at the top of a page, or bleeding down the side

one

by

one

She enthusiastically jumbles her sentences in places or runs words together, creating something much more like the patterns and rhythms of thoughts and feelings than conventional text.

There are pages with a block of text at the top and nothing after. There are words which morph into one another down the page, stretching meanings into sounds and sounds into meaning and playing to the rhythms of language (something very important in this book where there is a running point about people not being able to pronounce the Archivist's name: 'What's your name? He repeated the syl-la-bles.').

Now I thought I couldn't do with this sort of thing (trying to describe it, I realise I've probably made it seem very pretentious) and I worried, when I opened Stubborn Archivist, that it would be a barrier for me. But I found it all actually worked very well and far from being a barrier, it opened up the world of the Archivist and her family, removing the sense of distance that can be created by prose (however polished, perhaps especially if polished) and giving the book a much less formal air that complements its subjects and themes very well.

The book works on you at a different level than plot, sentences and logic, whispering through its convolved text to tell you about its themes - growing up, origins, belonging, not belonging. We are given scenes in the Archivist's life. There are events in her childhood both from her own perspective and as passed on to her by her family, for example the first visit of her Brazilian grandparents - her beloved Vovô and Vovó - to her parents' small London flat when she's a baby. We see the little surprises, the accommodations, as English and Brazilian cultures encounter one another and the ways in which they merge, jostle and accept each other, lubricated, as it were, by familial love (and with some effort, at times).

That basic picture endures as the Archivist grows up, the story taking in joyous, illicit teenage evenings out in London with her friend Jade, experiences with boys, and her exploration of her family's past. There is both acceptance and rejection of those different underlying cultures (the latter when a friendship founders as the friend wants to visit Brazil but can't shed her preconceptions), a romance that peters out, symbolised by the boyfriend wanting to impose his views over hairstyle, and, a recurring theme, the question (from both Brazilans and English) "But when did you move to London?"

It's perhaps symbolised most by the layered descriptions of the flight between England and Brazil. As a child (the first being beyond memory). As a teenager, doing it alone for the first time. As a seasoned traveller, who knows just what to pack and how, where to sit, how to make the flight work for her. And I haste, for a funeral. These layers build up, both distinct and, somehow, existing together, illuminating each other so that it's almost as if several different women are making the trip together.

In the same way, events bleed out of one context and into another and some of those more poetic renderings intercut, playing with worlds, morphing them from English to Portuguese, almost singing names and phrases. There are the different challenges laid down to the reality of this Anglo-Brazilian woman - not only the "When did you move...?" but the assumptions about her and the two sides of her family. An employer (a media organisation) seems to see her as "their Brazilian" and sets her to researching cosmetic surgery or gang violence. But at the same time, working in the staff restaurant, is Tiago, a much more interesting subject of research...

This is a book that's impossible to summarise. There are so many threads. It looks back to Brazilian politics in the 90s, with police brutality and disappearances. It takes in something that happened to the protagonist, which has left her, at some level, traumatised and uneasy, possibly with physical consequences - whatever happened is hinted at and explored here but rarely confronted, although it does seem to come to a resolution. And that stands for much of this book in a way - all those layers, those different version of the same woman, lend the story a sense of completion so that the story isn't happening in front of us, as it were, more being documented - a kind of coolness in the perspective which contrasts with the closeness from the textual style.

It was a book I found easy to read, easy to take big gulps of, so to speak, a story and a life that really grabbed attention, told with great verve and compelling attention tuition from the reader. Truly a magnificent read and I book that I think I'll go back to, one with a great deal more to give on rereading.

For more information about Stubborn Archivist see the publisher's website here.

Review - Oligarchy by Scarlett Thomas

Oligarchy
Scarlett Thomas
Canongate, 7 November 2019
HB, 224pp

I was really pleased to be able to attend this book's launch on 4 November - see below the author reading from it and sharing anecdotes about touring schools to promote her children's books, which this is NOT one of - and I'm grateful to Canongate for a free advance e-copy of Oligarchy via Netgalley, to consider for review. (Quotes below come from that copy, and may not reflect the final text).

'Sometimes she also prays for peace, and joy, and to be thin. Sometimes she even prays for the villagers, that they might become thin too.'

The thing - one of many things - I like about Scarlett Thomas's books is that they always give something unexpected. There is no "just" to them. They are all recognisably hers, but they are also all very different and they all confound one's assumptions.

Scarlett Thomas and Francis Bickmore

So Oligarchy is a book about a group of schoolgirls, with a mystery element, but little detection - and at the same time it's a book about the pressures modern society imposes on young women - and at the same time, a book about friendship and abuse. It's also funny, sad and truthful.

As I started the book - with Russian oligarch's daughter Natalya ('but at home they call her Natasha') coming to a scuzzy English boarding school in the Midlands - I thought it might take a fantastic turn. The village boys howl like dogs outside the school gates at night. This is not a metaphor, but it's not pursued (which boys? why?)  There's also a distinctly gothic twist in the girls' mythology of the school, involving a drowning Princess, a Sultan and a diamond. The story hovers behind the action,  inspiring various events and being embroidered in various ways but as with those howling boys there is no "official" explanation.

Later, with deaths occurring, and an interesting sounding detective (DI Amaryllis Archer, in her jeans and high-heeled boots) appearing on the scene, I wondered about the mystery element - but while it's there and is, eventually, resolved (kind of) that's not central either at least not in detail.

Central, rather, are the lives of the girls and the caustic, pressured expectations on them in modern society. Tash, arriving from Russia, the recently discovered daughter of an oligarch who has plucked her from obscurity and stored her away for safekeeping, is our way into the group, whose members deform almost before our eyes under the weight of those expectations. There is Bianca ('She doesn't tell anyone about the sadness and the failure and the light inside her that is a bright white colour but is never bright or white enough'). Tiffanie, who plans her funeral 'which will have a botanical theme' and who is 'too lazy, too French and frankly too fucking cool to learn English pronunciation' and whose usage of 'Ange' for English 'ing' becomes a meme among the girls. There is Becky 'with the bad hair', the would-be Head Girl.

Thomas's eye for character here is so sharp, getting right inside (Tash's Aunt Sonya 'looks like money rather than sex or love') and it's the way her ensemble of memorable, real people - most of them young women - reacts to the stresses on them that makes this book come alive and forms the gothic heart of the novel (with the oft-quoted story of Princess Augusta the topping, perhaps). There's an atmosphere of confinement, or abandonment, to this group in their strange school and of a breakdown of their sense of identity as they try to be - something. All manner of fake science, folk wisdom and wishful thinking swill around concerning what one should and should not eat, what one should be and not be. The the urge to thinness becomes almost a contagion in itself, with its own heroes and victims.

There is no restraint, no voice of reason, and a palpable sense of the girls being alone - this seems to be a singularly ill-run school where there is no help, typified by an episode where a vomiting bug has broken out and they are simply left alone, in a dormitory, to wait it out - but also very much exposed to the ill winds of social media, to the expectations of teaches, gym trainers and shifty DJs in provincial basement nightclubs. The paradoxes of teenage life - of innocence and experience ('at fifteen you have to practice everything you plan to do') - are played out here as in countless other novels, but with I think a rare sharpness of observation and deftness of portrayal ('Suze likes drinking in a pub called the Marionette ("drinking in" not "going to")')

Behind all this there are Tash's memories of home, of her mother, her boyfriend. Behind it are her doubts about her place in England, her place in the world, above all, about her place in her father's orbit. Having 'found' her he is elusive. Aunt Sonya seems to have been given the job of looking after Tash. Possibly her father wants to marry her off to the son of a business associate (there's a strange episode where she's helicoptered out to a party in a remote castle, but like many scenes in this book Thomas gives only glimpses of this, returning to it, though, several times to draw out different aspects). The run-down, dangerous feeling school doesn't feel like a good place to be trying to resolve these issues, without support or guidance - but maybe the slightly fantastical, out of this world bubble universe, the intense relationship and teenage concerns are a good balance for those family concerns?

Oligarchy is a fascinating, provoking, book, a deeply human book and I think shows Thomas on top form. I strongly recommend it.

For more about the book, see the publisher's website here.

Review - Treading the Uneven Road by LM Brown

Treading the Uneven Road: Stories
LM Brown
Fomite Press, 15 March 2019
PB, e-book 206pp

I'm grateful to the author for a free advance e-copy of this book for review.

The Book

The stories in this linked collection are set in a small village in the Northwest of Ireland in the early 1980’s and 90’s. The residents feel forgotten by the world, as a by-pass around the village has rid them of their once busy traffic. The collection is not only about the characters' need for salvation but it is about a society that is unraveling: the world inside and outside the village is changing. 

Pamela Painter, author of Getting To Know The Weather, and The Long and Short of it, writes: Set in Ireland, the wonderful stories in TREADING THE UNEVEN ROAD are connected with bands of steel and heart. Their unforgettable characters weave in and out of each other’s lives, acting on impulses that are sometimes misguided, occasionally dangerous but often beautiful. A great read.

The Author

LM Brown is the author of the novel Debris, released last April. She has a master's in creative writing and her stories have appeared in numerous literary magazines. She grew up in Sligo, Ireland, but now resides in Massachusetts with her husband, three daughters, a dog and a bearded dragon.


What I thought

I really enjoyed this linked collection of stories. The (unnamed) village, on the road from Dublin to Sligo ("at one time the road would have been busy with traffic... but that was before the bypass brought quietness to the area and a lull to the shops"), is conjured vividly with its focal points, Faith's bakery, the Dun Maeve pub, the statue of Our Lady in its niche opposite the bridge and its employers - the quarry, Lavin's Construction. At one point a "Station Road" is mentioned, but there's no indication of any trains, and it's a three hour drive or bus ride to get anywhere.  The village does not sound an easy place to live - we hear of industrial accidents, of the urge to get out to Dublin, to London or further afield (getting away, together with the ways it can go wrong, is a recurrent theme) and of the pressure of living one's life under the gaze of family, friends and strangers.

Within this setting, Brown deploys well-observed and recurring characters whose stories we see from separate perspectives and at different times (not necessarily, as someone once said, in the right order) - a device which makes themes and events increasingly familiar. In some respects it's like a serial drama, with familiar faces welcomed back to tell about their lives )and storytelling is very much part of it with stories within the stories too).

The first story, "The Lady on the Bridge", focusses on Bernadette, a woman who suspects her husband Marcus of adultery. As she goes about her day she imagines what may be happening ("the names she gave the woman she thought her husband was seeing depended on her mood") and finds that the only person she can speak to is his drinking friend, Mike. She begins to make illicit telephone calls to him on Saturday mornings and the story gradually sketches the origin, perhaps, of Bernadette's general sense of worry (at the start of the story she's concerned the river may flood) and dis-ease in her fear that "I might end up like my mother" and in a buried longing to escape the small town.

"The Sacred Heart" is about two brothers, Dick and Enda, and is also framed by the desire to get away, something Dick tries at the age of three - an event which seems to set the shape of his life and his relationship with his bother, who foils that attempt. An intense study of the two boys and their mother (the father fades from the scene) it's a poignant tale of ambitions thwarted, things said and unsaid (yet understood: perhaps that's worse) which reminded me of a Thomas Hardy story.

In "The Taste of Salt" a young man sits over the body of his childhood friend. The closeness between Lou and Sam, the intensely observed behaviour of friends, relatives and strangers, above all, perhaps, what's not said ("For most things he did, there was an element of shame, though he would not have understood it as such") the felt, but pent in, grief, all make this a confined, claustrophobic story.

In "The Shape of Longing" we really see how Brown is weaving a bigger picture. It's the story of (or maybe, a story of) Bernadette's (from "The Lady on the Bridge") mother, Ann Lavin. Of how she left her husband and daughter - but that's the conclusion, not the story itself, which concerns her brother Ryan and also touches on the events described in "The Sacred Heart". Set much earlier than "The Lady on the Bridge" and reaching back to describe events earlier still, I think here Brown is showing consequences and causes, or at least correlations, reaching backwards and forwards, uniting this small town but also creating divisions - even if  just in the minds of her characters, as in the way that Ann cuts herself off from her family.

Ann Lavin is clearly not a comfortable person, not with herself, not with her family. ("If I'd made my mother look at me, I might have wanted more.") While she tells us a bit about her earlier life it isn't an explanation of her, any more than she can explain herself. This is a closely imagined, impressionistic view of a woman in a small community, in a web of friends, neighbours, all of them, she imagines, judging her. I wasn't sure, after reading this story if I understood Ann, or for that matter, Bernadette, and better - but perhaps I understood Ann-and-Bernadette.

"The Wrong Man" is a story of two young women, Este and Moire and perhaps parallels and contrasts with the two boys in "The Taste of Salt". Coming from different social strata, they become firm friends and after leaving school, head to London. However, all does not go well, although exactly why is complex - I wasn't sure if it was, in the end, something that happened in London, something whose seeds were planted long before, or indeed if it was to with Este and Moire at all. This is a beautifully observed story of assumptions, of trying to cling on to things that are gone, of lives spooling by like reels of film, as Brown follows what happened, what went wrong, for decades, before, tentatively, hinting at the possibility of a second chance.

"Blackbirds" picks up the story of bereaved, guilty Lou from "The Taste of Salt" as he confronts a hated figure from his past and finds that revenge isn't as simple - or as satisfying - as he thought. "The Man on Sea Road" takes the same story further, introducing another character, also bereaved, with a different involvement in the situation.

"White Trout" rounds off the collection by telling us more about Dick and Enda, and also about Faith, the owner of the cafe, who plays a key role in several of the stories giving a little hope, bringing people together, acting as a memory and a conscience. her now life hasn't been easy and her business is now suffering from loss of trade due to the by-pass but she's a redoubtable figure who clearly makes a difference in the community.

You have to take the stories together, as there are themes that only emerge once you have read several and I needed to go back and reread some of them to pick up the references and the contrasts. Rooted in the 80s and 90s perhaps, the stories thread forward and back across many decades - the earlier parts of "The Wrong Man" had a very 60s or 70s feeling to me - to give a vivid picture of a community constantly changing while retaining some central character.

While many of the stories are sad this is a strong collection which I'd wholeheartedly recommend.

You can buy the book from Amazon (UK here, US here).

Review - Country by Michael Hughes

Country
Michael Hughes
John Murray, 26 July 2018
PB, 314pp; e-book; audiobook

I bought my copy of Country as an audiobook.

I've started listening to audiobooks in the car on my commute to the station, and I think Country was an excellent choice to begin this. Not only is the subject matter - a reimagining of the Illiad set in the corner country Ireland towards the end of the Troubles - fittingly oral, but in this version, read by the author, the story becomes luminous, immersive, beautiful - even when dealing with very ugly events.

Hughes has a rhythm, an air, that engages. Listening to him is like sitting by a camp fire, or in a courtyard or marketplace or a chief's fort long ago, hearing the beginning of story, before it would ever have been written down. "Listen" he says or "Now we're getting to it" or "Wait till you hear". Or the story veers off into a tale of the old days, of heroes and cruelties, or the life of some curious person tangential to the main narrative. While I'm sure this book reads well on the page, I think it's made to to be heard.

The episodic nature helps with that: I've found before with audiobooks that there's a risk of losing concentration, missing something vital, and leaving the story half done. Not here. The effect is almost holographic, building up the lives of the IRA squad, its enemies in the British base and the people of the "downland" - including spies, political bosses ("our friend, Mr Paul Bright"), the shady "higher ups" who are often invoked but never appear in person and victims.

The conflict in Ireland was seen - is seen - here in Britain as very polarised and indeed that is reflected here, with awful things done by one side to the other. But the book also reflects another story - a closeness, an interdependence, blind eyes turned by one faction to the goings-on of the other, Republicans passing intel back to the Brits to settle scores, tacit deals to spare those "higher-ups" from violence. These are small communities where everyone knows everyone else, whichever side they're on. Hughes draws a fascinating picture of this society, and layers it with references and analogies to the story of Troy, or the oldest tales of Ireland - other societies where warfare was, at one level, "heroic" - and we get the preposterous warrior boasts, the single combat, the looting of the dead, gifts of treasures, women and, above all perhaps, the drinking and feasting (the latter conveyed through fry-ups joyfully described and eaten in volume).

I'm at a disadvantage here because I have never read The Illiad (don't @ me) but even I can see some of the comparisons - those "higher-ups", the names, the centrality of a vanished wife to the story. They give it a point and a focus and demand attention. Is Hughes really saying that nothing has changed in attitudes in three thousand years? All the blood shed from the 1960s to the 1990s might suggest that. Is this a good way to understand the "men of violence" we were nightly warned of on TV? Their cause, rehearsed here, is familiar yet in this story it's overshadowed by the score-settling of the older Troy story. Is that fair?

I wasn't, in the end, sure whether the comparisons with Troy - beyond the similarities in outlook I've mentioned above - helped. Certainly, towards the end, there were parts of the story where what one might see as the need to stay close to the source, such as two combatants running three times around the walls, or close quarters fighting rather than the use of firearms over greater distances, seemed to constrain the story rather. But in many other places Hughes happily throws overboard Homer's narrative (even I can see that) so I think this is still him telling the story he wants to tell, not just following his source.

And if at times that makes the doings of these hard men, these soldiers, these heroes, look faintly ridiculous - well, think about that. Perhaps they were, both in the 20th century AD and the 10th BC.

One thing Hughes does do here is to give some voice to the women. Yes, many of the characters - the volunteers in the squad, the SAS, the police and the "Green Army" are men but women play some key roles and most of all, the Helen-figure, Nellie, plays an independent role, taking her own destiny in her hands, manipulating those who would use her and making the best she can of her circumstances. She speaks, here, and what she says matters.

All in all this is a startling, vivid and compelling story, very different from anything I'd read recently. I'd strongly recommend.

For more about Country, see the publisher's website here.

Review - Nutcase by Tony Williams

Nutcase
Tony Williams
Salt, 15 September 2017
PB, 252pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for a copy of this book.

In this remarkable, not to say unusual, book, Williams tells the story of Aidan Wilson, a young man growing up on a tough estate in Sheffield.

Aidan's story is inspired by the Icelandic Saga of Grettir the Strong. I'm sorry to say I am not familiar with that so I can't comment on how it has been adapted but I was very impressed with the way Williams maps the chaotic (from my comfortable middle class perspective) lives of his protagonists, adrift in a haze of drink and drugs and violence, onto the heroic pattern that we see in many ancient tales. After all, these sagas, ballads and myths are generally stories of strong men, strong warriors, whose chief concerns are drinking, having sex and fighting. To judge the lifestyle of Aidan and his mates while retelling and praising stories such as Beowulf or the Illiad seems rather hypocritical, perhaps. So a lot of respect is due Williams for forcing a new way of seeing things.

That said, it's often a hard book to read. No punches are pulled: rather we get close descriptions of fights and injuries, of the quantities of drugs and drink consumed, of squalid flats and squats, of a lifestyle that might be described as hedonistic if you thought anyone was actually having a good time.  At times I didn't want to go on reading, although Williams does tell a rattling good story and it's so episodic ('The next thing was...') that none of the incidents lasts more than a few pages.

It's a story that is very much narrated, from the first sentence ('Mick Wilson was a man of steel.') to the last ('And there would be a little gap and then they would say "Same again?" ') Indeed, it soon becomes clear that the audience is part of the story - as Aidan rises briefly in popular esteem when he knifes a child abuser and then plunges again, we're very conscious of there being an audience, a wider society judging him, urging him on, condemning, cheering. Sometimes it's the people on the estates around (Irene at the taxi office is a regular chorus as she sucks on her cigarette), sometimes it's a wider public reading the tabloids or following on social media.

And sometimes, of course, it's us, the readers of the book.

If the book's hard, that's appropriate because Aidan himself is also hard in several respects - a tough man, yes, but also difficult to understand, often placid and accepting (as long as he has a few cans and the odd tablet to hand) of what seems an awful life, then animated, driven to avenge a wrong or pursue a feud. He's hard in another sense - unyielding to fate or society around him, apparently content to go the way he must. The only hint of weakness we see is the nightmares - PTSD, the prison psychologist says - brought on after that stabbing. How they affect Aidan's waking hours is left to us to guess.

The book rises to the pitch of a classical tragedy, letting Aidan rise, having apparently done something good for once - and then fall, doomed by some quirk or flaw of character, some lack of interest or focus that always sees him back with the drink, the drugs, shifting from one grim lodging to another, living from one side of the law to another.

Or, let's face, it doomed by having lousy parents, little hope of anything better and too many easy ways out. What was it they used to say about drink being the quickest way out of Manchester?

Overall a powerful, if disturbing, book that will remain with you long after you finish it.

Review - Artefacts and Other Stories by Rebecca Burns

Artefacts and Other Stories
Rebecca Burns
Odyssey Books, 30 September 2017
PB, 154 pp

I'm grateful to the author for a review e-copy of this book.

Having previously enjoyed Burns' collection The Settling Earth I was keen to read more of her stories and wasn't disappointed. The seventeen here are all, in their different ways, treats. There are stories that find hope in bleak times; stories that leap time, joining moments across the decades through the recollection of a dandelion, a display of hats in a museum, or the gathering of a family after a death.

Many of them come at their point sideways - or, perhaps, they approach it from the margins, from the kitchen, typically, not the front hall. We often get a view from below of history - especially of war, and in particular of the First World War. A soldier home from France mourning the loss of his best mate with whom he shared a death and coat. A last cricket match, the boys taking it slowly, making the afternoon last, before marching off to war.

In keeping with that sidelong viewpoint, Burns often uses food to show what a character is like, where they stand in relation to others. Essential yet often neglected, the meals eaten or a lack of food to eat illuminate lives here.

The first story, The Dandelion, reminded me with something of a shock how controversial the building of the Channel Tunnel once was. We're back in the 80s, pre Tunnel. Monica is travelling to France with her daughter Rachel who's going to study French at a language college. Monica is against the idea and at first seems something of a fusspot, but it's not till the journey stirs painful memories that we understand why - and begin to sympathise with her.

The Last Game, August 1914 has an elegiac qualty, one of a number which examine the impact of the Great War, one hundred years on. It's no less powerful for the fact the War itself is never directly mentioned. Sport as a metaphor for war - and, in England, cricket as a metaphor for life, especially stiff-backed, English imperial life - is a recurring image in fiction from England but Burns does something remarkable and different here, turning the idea inside out. The cricket game being played is at once a rehearsal for the imminent conflict and a means of deferring it. Could we, her characters seem to feel, remain here, now, poised forever in this perfect moment, on the eve of the great catastrophe?

The Bread Princess similarly looks at a series of moments in successive generations in the life of a colliery town through the eyes of the young women chosen to distribute loaves to the poor (they're commemorated in their ceremonial bonnets, displayed in that museum). We see the changing life of the community, families rising and falling, hopes for the future dashed, we see injury, disease and death. From the bits and scraps of stories we can infer the whole sweep of nearly a century in the town. Here we're not trying to remain in a single moment but experiencing history as dynamic, forward moving and vibrant.

Walter Bidelow's Egg sets a change of mood. Rather comic in tone, it chronicles rotund Professor Julian Cramp's attempts to lay hands on a precious dodo egg from what he sees as an obscure Colonial museum. Meanwhile, his wife grows frustrated and his daughter dabbles with Suffragism. Cramp's stomach complains and his weighty breakfasts and dinners act as a fine metaphor here for his (Imperial?) acquisitiveness. But why is this fifty-two year old professor so obsessed with a bird that was notoriously stupid and prone to gluttony?

The Greatcoat returns to the theme of the Great War. A discharged soldier cherishes the coat that sheltered him and his mate on the battlefield (he's supposed to hand it back in within two weeks). A gentle story, teasing out the impact on Jack of four years of war, this is all the more powerful for being low key, understated.

Spark is in the minority here for being set in the present day. Wanda awaits her husband, Ray's, coming come to their house in Alaska. She suspects infidelity. One of several stories that feature women who want, but can't have, children ("the house was a womb of wadded calm") this story also explores a moment in Wanda's life: one where everything seems on hold, waiting, perhaps for a great change - we never find out.

The Waiting Room is another Great War themed story. Here the protagonists - an artist and her brother - have escaped direct consequences, but the preoccupation is still with death and loss, almost more dreadful for being indirect, not a matter of shells and gas but of some more creeping doom. Again, history from the sidelines.

I enjoyed the titular story in this collection, Artefacts, the most of all. Set in 1940, this is the only one with a hint of the supernatural. It revolves around Leah - "the woman in the registry office" - who has a secret ability to "see" things about people by touching their possessions. Following her and a colleague, Patrick, on a date at the cinema, we learn a great deal about Leah and her life with her grandmother. Good on the details, the daily inconveniences, of life in the Blitz, this story is perfectly paced and, I thought, deeply moving. I wanted to know what came next!

In Mayflies of Apollo, Burns agains uses the present day - so many of these stories are historical that those that don't need to delicately imagine the feelings and routines of a century ago almost seem strange, almost seem alien. Daphne hears on TV about a giant swarm of mayflies nearby on lake Erie and, on a whim, goes off to see them. The story works by frustrating the reader, by avoiding what one might expect - some epiphany brought on by the wonders of Nature - when Daphne is unimpressed and leaves in a hurry to take in a new vodka vapour bar.

An Old Man Walks up a Road shows the dangers of keeping family secrets for too long. Families change, it seems to be saying, secrets that might safely be kept at one time grow stale and things need to be shared, and until you're ready to that, relationships will go sour.

Lamb's Lettuce returns to the aftermath of the Great War. Adrian is back in his childhood home. Everything is the same - except that people are older - but nothing is the same. His father's stuffed animals evoke the horrors of war. "The hawk's eyes were black, like drops of ink. No brightness to them at all. And this is how it really is, he thought, remembering figures prone in mud."

In Tide we see a boy and a girl separated by a bridge - more a symbolic than actual barrier but it seems as though they will never be together. As in several of the other stories, there is a moment of choice, a moment of potential change but it's not clear whether it will come to something or just wither.

On This Day shows the dangers of being too drawn into memory, into commemoration. Richard Brakeman sees the past through the events described in one of those "On This Day" books. Starting by recapitulating the start of a Great War attack, he jumps through  variety of personas in an almost Walter Mitty way. But never on a Sunday. In the meantime his life in the here and now, the present, seems to dissolve.

In Cleaning the Gite a woman tends the holiday cottage that she lets out. Why does a baby's bootie, left by a mother who's otherwise been meticulous in clearing up before leaving, move her so? A sort of counterpoint to Spark, this isn a story about a woman who's lost (well, kicked out) her husband, a story of where Wanda may be several years down the line. There almost seems an affinity though between those characters.

Defibrillate gives us a surgeon suspended after an operation goes wrong contemplates her life in a a remote cottage in Scotland. Rather than food metaphors we have the commentary from the surgery to counterpoint her reacquaintance with a figure form her past.

The final story, A Gathering of Relics, features a big, ramified family (the relics of the title). Three generations of women (sisters, aunts, nieces) are gathered for a funeral. (No men - "menfolk always die early") Change may be in the air - Ruth hopes for forgiveness (from who? For what?) Again the story has a sideways feel. A lot is implied, a lot has been going on that no-one wants to state directly: Veronica knows this and uses tricks to bring some of it out in the open. Hovering over all is loss, and secrets and, as with An Old Man Walks up a Road, there is a question about whether those secrets should remain that way, or not.

Overall this is a strong collection of stories. They're all excellent taken separately but the themes that thread their way from one to another - or perhaps, I might say, season them, like a series of dishes prepared in the same kitchen - mean there's a unity and clarity here. Something is being worked out, something about what's missing from lives and how time plays tricks on us all. And Artefacts is well chosen as the title since in that story perhaps we come closest to what Burns is doing here - it's as though she is, like Leah, putting out her hand and touching something significant, seeing the whole in the part - and sharing that insight with the reader,

Blogtour - Maria in the Moon by Louise Beech

Maria in the Moon
Louise Beech
Orenda, 30 September 2017
PB, 270pp

Always find out the real names...

I'm grateful to the publisher and to Anne for an advance copy of this book and for inviting me to take part in the blogtour.

I loved Beech's previous book, The Mountain in my Shoe (full disclosure - my review is quoted in this one!) and with Maria in the Moon I think she's done it again - that is, delivered an involving, acutely observed slice of life featuring characters you'll care desperately about and an emotional punch that could win a gold medal for boxing at the Olympics.

Louise Beech

This time the setting is Hull, soon after the 2007 floods. The TV cameras have moved on and people are left to rebuild their lives and their homes. Families live in hotel rooms, grotty flats, or caravans in the drive. Front gardens are piled with filthy furniture. Yet people carry on. This finely observed story deals with one life, but we always see the bigger picture; bus passengers grumbling about neighbours getting lavish new kitchen on the insurance, revellers out for a good time as Christmas approaches, the ubiquitous question "Were you flooded?"

Catherine is flooded out of her own house and volunteering for Flood Crisis, spending two or three shifts a week listening to desperate people, meantime sharing a flat with Fern, the sparky writer of the "Wholly Matrimony" column in the local paper. (Fern is far from that state herself, but her editor doesn't know). To a degree their existence seems almost cosy, despite the dripping tap, the lack of space or privacy, and Catherine's only having a sofa to sleep on). There's certainly support and solidarity from Fern when Catherine wakes from a nightmare: I enjoyed the portrayal of their friendship.

Catherine herself is a wonderfully drawn character. It's clear from the outset that she has issues, and we may suspect she's working at the helpline so can ask the questions and not have to answer them. But she's marvellously vivid and alive, coping with her ruined house, her spotty relationship with her stepmother and with - well, with whatever it is she can't remember fro when she was nine. Steaming through life in a haze of indulgence, edgy sex and swearing, she's nobody's victim, won't be pitied and has built defences around herself like the walls of Troy.

In a story like this it's clear that something is going to happen to bring those walls down, so in a sense there's no mystery here, nevertheless Beech brings a real tension to the story as we discover secrets long hidden and especially as Catherine experiences the aftermath of that.

It would be so easy to leave things after the big reveal, implying that now everything will be OK. Of course life is seldom that neat and Beech acknowledges this. In so doing she makes Catherine even more real and vivid - and tugs on the reader's heartstrings as she does. I think you'd have to be pretty lacking in empathy not to shed a tear over the ending.

Overall a delightful book with a powerful, beating emotional heart. I'm so glad I read it and I'm sure you will be too.

Review - The Upstairs Room by Kate Murray-Browne

The Upstairs Room
Kate Murray-Browne
Picador, 27 June 2017
HB, 369pp

I'm grateful for an advance copy of this book from the publisher.

It was there from the beginning...

The Upstairs Room successfully marries the grammar of classic horror with a very modern story of restless, slightly over privileged adults toying ("struggle" would be putting it a bit strongly, I think) with the dilemmas of work, sex, childrearing and - the great topic of the day - house prices, in an up-and-coming part of London.

There's no view of the wider world, of diversity, Brexit or (barring a pervasive background of student debt) poverty. Rather the world is focussed down upon one particular house, the house Richard and Eleanor, with their two young children, have taken on. The reader is aware from the start of this dichotomy, of the real challenges that the characters face in their world.

Because the house Litchfield Road is a dispiriting place. Murray-Brown has a knack for unsettling with the ordinary, piling up the details of a house sticky from being over-lived in, full of someone else's dubious furniture. Like putting on someone else's unwashed clothes, there's a sense of unease, a sense the house isn't empty. And that's before strange things even start to happen.

Murray-Browne is clear from the start - though her characters don't know - that some of these things aren't mysterious at all. Living in the basement is lodger Zoe (a wonderfully realised character, slightly obsessive, drifting through life, not really wanting to be entangled with another boyfriend (except when she does) but missing the the sex the last one brought) and one subplot of this novel focuses on the way that Zoe invades Eleanor and Richard's space, and the way he invades hers. There are some really creepy moments as he prowls her rooms while she's out. As a result, things are left out of place, and noticed. Does this explain all of the mystery, all of the unease? Murray-Browne isn't clear, but I'd say probably not.

Is Richard obsessed with Zoe? Perhaps. Does that drive the plot? Not really. Like many themes it's there, but we never, perhaps, glimpse the edges or quite fathom the depths. The same is true of the girl Emily, the previous occupant of the upstairs room itself, about whom we learn a little, slowly, but never everything. (I'll come back to Emily in a moment).

Indeed, much of what we are told in this story - in agreeable digressions ranging back over the earlier lives, especially the love lives, of the central characters - isn't directly about the present day story at all. What it does do, though, is establish the odd trio - as well as Zoe's shifty maybe-boyfriend, Adam ("She liked sex and she liked being in his flat more than in her own and she liked the way he touched her hair. She just wouldn't particularly want to go on a long train journey with him") - as curiously, well, stuck people. They are all trying to be something, with varying degrees of success (of success in realising themselves, that is - Richard and Eleanor are quite successful in worldly terms, though still crushed by the burden of buying and doing up a 4 bedroom central London house). In a sense all are people who have drifted into their current lives, relationships, jobs, and making little progress in setting their own direction (Richard's ineffectual MA studies counterpoint the narrative). It creates a claustrophobic atmosphere: the stickiness of the house could represent a metaphorical stickiness, as if everybody here is stuck down by flypaper in an elaborate trap. There is no initiative. Moving into a dilapidated house, Richard and Eleanor - especially him - meant to clear it out and renovate, but, despite endless planning, almost nothing happens. Even the squalid old furniture is retained. Maybe that green wallpaper really is arsenicated, is really acting like flypaper?

Richard's MA founders, Zoe plays at being a writer but regrets walking out of her office job to work in an art shop, Eleanor suffers debilitating headaches and nausea in the house and feels as though she isn't quite there, and the children begin to act oddly. Is something sapping the will, undermining the inhabitants of the house - or is this just the logic of their lives?

The book is nicely written and contains some sharp observations on middle-class life ("Rob keep wanting to do things like go to the theatre and they did a couple of times, but it really fucked up your evening") ("You make money teaching people how to make money as an artist?") as well as ranging over an impressive gallery of characters besides the main three (or four) - my favourite was Laura, Zoe's self consciously Bohemian friend (and there is some history between her and Zoe that's never quite brought into focus but I'm sure is key to understanding Zoe) but Richard's ghastly parents are also fun, in a perverse way.

It is, in the end, an entertaining, knotty story, albeit one that perhaps takes a little while to get under way: for me the pace of reading picked up around a third of the way through and then the pages flew by. The exact boundary between the ordinary and the supernatural is never mapped out, attempts to address it resulting in failure, with only partial explanations offered, focussed on the unfortunate girl Emily. This was one aspect I felt was a little lacking. When Emily appears - and like other features of the book, her history is tantalisingly vague - I was expecting to hear she'd been diagnosed with autism (my daughter has autism, and I recognised this straight away) and that she and her family were receiving some support. When this didn't happen I wasn't sure whether to take this as a deliberate feature, a sign that they were exceptionally disconnected from the modern world - stuck, perhaps, like Richard, Eleanor and Zoe - or whether this was simply a slip in the otherwise excellent writing and research.

I don't want to dwell too much on that one point, this is a fine, unsettling piece of modern horror which engages us with its - not always sympathetic - characters and makes them genuinely interesting. I think Murray-Brown's eye for character, and ear for dialogue, are exceptional and I look forward to reading more by her soon.