#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 Space Between Us by Doug Johnstone

The Space Between Us
Doug Johnstone
Orenda Books, 2 March 2023
Available as: PB, 276pp, audio, e
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781914585449

I'm grateful to Karen at Orenda Books for an advance copy of The Space Between Us to consider for review, and to Anne Cater for inviting me to take part in the book's blogtour.

In his new novel Doug Johnstone - whose most recent works include the Skelfs detective series set at an Edinburgh undertaker's - really doesn't hang about, plunging us right into a fantastical plot with three varied and intriguing protagonists. Told in short chapters with dramatic changes of view, we quickly learn who is who.

Lennox is a lonely teenager living in a children's home. 

Ava is pregnant and trying to escape her coercive, in fact outright abusive, husband. 

Heather has lost her daughter and her husband, she has cancer and, when we first see her, is trying to end her own life.

All are about to have their destinies and lives changed when they encounter first, a strange light in the sky which leaves them hospitalised then miraculously healed, and secondly, a peculiar octopus-like creature washed up on the Edinburgh shoreline and affectionately named Sandy by the three.

In chapters told from their alternate perspectives, and those of a couple of other characters who are drawn in, we follow events during a frantic road trip across Scotland with several different but equally sinister authorities intent on capturing Sandy (I have tagged this review "Men in black") and a furious husband chasing down Ava.  (An interesting juxtaposition). The different viewpoints make for a clever technique - Ava, Lennox and Heather have a lot to come to terms with, both their own variously troubled lives and Sandy's unique nature. Their developing relationships with each other complicate this, and plot shock about. Johnstone's approach allows him, though all this, to both reveal and, at  times, to conceal, just what is happening, allowing the author sometimes to not describe things from the perspective of whoever has the clearest view, preserving ambiguity and building tension.

That ambiguity is at the heart of the story - we know how the scared authorities will react to Sandy, we know that Ava's husband has no good intentions for her, but what we don't know is how the gang will ultimately process what's going, how they will assimilate the incredible moral challenge presented by Sandy's existence and his need. Nor how those on whom whey will depend for help will react.

It all comes down to empathy, to the balance between their fears for their own future and their capacity for love, their ability to go on hoping. 

I don't want to over intellectualise this or make it sound over solemn, because its not. It's the very opposite. The Space Between Us is a thriller about human (and non human) nature, but it's a fun read, morally clear in that you can happily hiss at a couple of the characters and root for the others, (even if at times they do play fast and loose with legal niceties). As a science fiction adventure (that's not really a spoiler) the setup is by no means original - I could draw parallels with at least one well known film and a couple of other recent novels - but Johnstone brings to it his ability to create fresh and lively characters who quickly become very real to his readers. They are people you feel for - full of complexities and quirks and above all very very human. 

Additionally, the Scottish setting gives the whole thing an air of familiarity and localness which makes it all seem very plausible. And who doesn't love a good road trip?

In summary, The Space Between Us is a fresh and enjoyable story which explores some fundamental themes about what it is to be connected - or not. Tears may well have been shed over it... definitely recommended!

For more information about The Space Between Us, see the Orenda Books website here, and also the other steps on the tour, listed in the poster below.

You can buy The Space Between Us from your local bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, WH Smith, Foyles, Waterstones or Amazon.