What bookish delights did you get, or give for Christmas? - Linda Strachan

Christmas is a time for giving and what better gift to a lover of words than   a good book, or two, to curl up with.








I received a variety of different book gifts -



I love cookery books and I was delighted by the gift of Mums Recipes Two,
a cookbook with some interesting recipes which helps raise funds for MUMs.


The main focus of MUMs is to help reduce maternal and infant deaths in Malawi. The first volume raised £100,000 and there are now three volumes.  You can find out more about them and the project http://www.mumsrecipes.org/









Michelle Lovric's The  Undrowned Child was another present, and I am looking forward to this trip to Venice




.

 Mark Z Danieleweski's  House of Leaves -  a large tome that is dauntingly heavy and on initial inspection it has a very strange layout.

I'm not at all sure what it is about or if it is something I can engage with, especially at the moment when I am trying to keep my head clear until my current work in progress is completed.

So it may have to wait on the shelf for a bit,. On the other hand I am curious to find out about all this strange layout. I feel as if it is a challenge..... so watch this space!






 I also gave some books as gifts and among those were
             
Gillian Philip's Firebrand                                                 

Lob by Linda Newbery

 and  Cathy MacPhail's Grass  









 



So, what bookish gift did you give or receive this Christmas?



Dead Boy Talking (Strident Publishing)  'will knock you off your feet with the speed of its delivery and the raw, tough realism..'  The Bookette
Writing for Children (A & C Black) ideal reading for all aspiring and newly published writers
For younger children the Hamish McHaggis series (GW Publishing)
Follow Linda's blog  - Bookwords - writingthebookwords.blogspot.com
Visit her website -www.lindastrachan.com

Top Reads of 2011 - Elen Caldecott

There is a section of this blog devoted to reviews, so it might seem odd to post about my favourites here. But sometimes, rather than review, it's nice to simply celebrate the books you've enjoyed. Reviews seem such a grown-up thing to me, perhaps with a touch of A-Level English about them - character development, plot arcs, language and imagery... It also gets especially difficult when you know the writers, may even be friends with them! Sometimes, it's better to just press a book into someone's hand and say, "read this. You'll love it."

So here I am, pressing books into your hand. "Read these. You'll love them."

A Tangle of Magicks by Stephanie Burgis was a real treat this year. It's a sequel, so do read A Most Improper Magick first. It's a lovely mix of a Georgian comedy of manners and witchcraft - Jane Austen does Hogwarts. I loved the sequel as it's set in Bath and makes good use of the ancient elements of the city.

A Year Without Autumn by Liz Kessler was a joy. It's a time-slip novel, but rather than finding herself in a Victorian kitchen or Medieval stable or somesuch, the heroine moves forward through her own teenage years. She sees the consequences of one event played out among her family and friends. It's warm, sad and very readable.

One Dog and His Boy by Eva Ibbotson may be my new favourite book (sorry, Holes by Louis Sachar, but you had a good run). It is really simple, direct and honest. I wish I'd have written it. Sigh. Still, that's why reading is so good for writers - it should inspire us to try harder ourselves. It's the story of a lonely boy and his quest to keep the dog he loves; this is one I'll come back to again and again.

I do occasionally read books for adults too. So, I have a grown-up choice to add. A Song of Fire and Ice by George R R Martin is quite an old series of books now (the first, A Game of Thrones was published in 1996), but the TV adaptation was first aired in 2011, so I'm counting it for that reason. I started watching the series, but having to wait a week for each installment was killing me, so I stopped watching the show and read the books instead. I say 'read', actually I'm listening to the unabridged audio books. They weigh in at 40 hours per book and with seven books planned for the series I have a lot of epic, sword and sorcery to come. Hurray!

So, those are my highlights of 2011. What would you have chosen?

www.elencaldecott.com
Elen's Facebook Page

PICK OF 2010 by Adèle Geras

Everyone’s doing it: choosing books they’ve enjoyed, or which they’d like to see under the Christmas tree, or which they reckon in some way deserve to be bought in the run-up to all the festivities. If you can match the reader to a book she’ll truly enjoy, then you’re doing well. Below are my favourite adult novels for this year, and I'm not counting the ones I’ve reviewed on ABBA during the last twelve months.

THE SLAP by Christos Tsiolkas (Tuskar Rock)

This book divided readers more than any other novel published this year. It was denounced as crude, misogynistic, and was also a favoured contender for the Bad Sex Prize which, incidentally, it didn’t win. The story is simple: a man at a barbecue in a suburb of Melbourne slaps a child who isn’t his own. The repercussions of this act propel the book forward, and we see what transpires through the eyes of several narrators. I thought it was terrific: energetic, lively, never for one moment boring and in parts most moving, especially in its depiction of the older generation of Greek immigrants who came to Australia after the Second World War and who have ceased to understand their own children. I reviewed a cracking Aussie thriller earlier in the year called TRUTH by Peter Temple and this, although not quite as good as the Temple, fills in the portrait of Melbourne with a bit more detail. I loved it.

PLAINSONG by Kent Haruf ( Picador)

Has anyone heard of Kent Haruf? I hadn’t until Scott Pack, on his blog, mentioned this novel and what a fine writer Haruf is. I found PLAINSONG and its sequel, EVENTIDE at the library and I’ve just finished reading the latter. My advice is: run, don’t walk to the nearest library to you and see if you can find them there. They are quite marvellous. A combination of Raymond Carver (very plain and unadorned prose) Cormac McCarthy (hard men, farmers, the land, a very small town in Colorado, an amazing landscape etc) and Elizabeth Strout(sensitive portrayal of feelings, emotions, especially of children and women and a build up of the story of a whole community in short chapters). I feel Haruf is my discovery of the year and I will now read everything he’s written. I can’t recommend him strongly enough.


A GATE AT THE STAIRS by Lorrie Moore (Faber)

This novel was on the shortlist for the Orange Prize this year and it’s unputdownable. There are a couple of ‘as if’s’ in it but it’s very good about middle class mores and excellent about subjects like adoption and attitudes to children in general. It's very easy to read and told from the point of view of a young woman from the country who’s a University student. She takes the job of a mother’s help in a family which is much odder than she first thinks.

ABIDE WITH ME by Elizabeth Strout (Pocket Books)

I’m evangelical about this writer. I become like the Ancient Mariner and pin people against walls crying: You must read Elizabeth Strout! All three of her books are excellent but I’ve not written about this one before. It’s about a minister who’s widowed and left to care for a young daughter of five. The child has not spoken since her mother’s death. The rest of the novel follows from this. It’s superb: moving, well-written, and engaging.

THE HAND THAT FIRST HELD MINE by Maggie O’Farrell (Headline)

This novel is on the shortlist for the Costa Novel Prize this year. It has a double time frame: the present, and the Fifties and early Sixties. It’s about motherhood: its problems, its agonies, its great joys and as always with this writer, she has produced a story written with both sympathy and elegance. She’s also very good at plotting so you always have a strong interest in reading on to see how the whole thing fits together. Terrific.

SAPLINGS by Noel Streatfeild (Persephone Books)

Anyone who loved ‘BALLET SHOES’ and Streatfeild’s other children’s books will be happy to read this adult novel. It shows her brilliance at depicting children and adults and the interaction between them. She’s very good at exploring the small miseries of childhood and how important they are; she’s very wise about the emotional havoc that can be wreaked in families and she describes brilliantly things like boarding-school and evacuation during the Second World War and in general gives a full and rounded picture of family life in the Forties. She makes us care about every single one of her characters. This novel is a real find, and I do urge you to seek it out. For anyone who, like me, loves Dorothy Whipple’s books, it would make the perfect present.

LOVE AND SUMMER by William Trevor (Penguin)

The master of the short story has written a novella which is both a love story and a portrait of an entire community. A young man returns to the home of his youth to sell it after his parents’ death and sets in train a series of events which ends in tragedy. Misunderstandings, and wrongly interpreted signals play a part in a the story which is full of the warmth and ease of summer despite the shadows and the pain.

STARTED EARLY TOOK MY DOG by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday)

Lovers of the previous Jackson Brodie novels will enjoy this one as well. She’s fantastically good at plots which seem unknottable but which always do get unknotted. Jackson is a wonderful character but in this story he plays second fiddle to the heroine: a policewoman with a heart of gold who rescues a child she sees being assaulted in a shopping precinct. What follows involves corruption in high places, awful things happening to children and a Yorkshire setting which is brilliantly evoked. This was a ‘hold in one hand while frying onions’ book for me.

ANNIE DUNNE by Sebastian Barry (Faber)

Another book which takes the reader to a vanished Ireland (see LOVE AND SUMMER above) this is the story of two small children who are sent for the summer to live in the country with Annie Dunne and her sister. That’s it. Barry is outstanding at writing from the point of view of old women and here he creates a truly memorable main character. This novel is one of those which feels as though it hasn’t been ‘written’ at all but somehow arises organically, like a growing tree. The very opposite is true of course and the book is skilfully and poetically crafted, but it reads like life; as though Annie Dunne were a real person. It’s not plot driven in the way the Atkinson is, for example, but enough happens of horrendous and momentous note to keep you turning the pages. It’s a beautiful, life-enhancing book.

THE THREE WEISSMANS OF WESTPORT by Cathleen Schine (Corsair)

The blurb on this book says it’s a version of SENSE AND SENSIBILITY. That’s as may be, but what it certainly is, is a very witty and entertaining story of what happens when Mrs. Weissman and her two adult daughters go and live in a small cottage by the sea. Mr Weissman has asked for a divorce and made his wife leave their apartment while he takes up with Felicity, a much younger woman. The daughters go with their mother, to help her and because they have love entanglements and work problems of their own. It’s a real treat of a book. It’s not Jane Austen but it does have some of her sharpness, perception and humour. She’d have enjoyed reading it, I reckon, and taken it as a compliment that Schine has used one of her novels as a jumping-off point.

I hope you enjoy some of these and please do put your own books of the year into the comments box!
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone.

REVIEWS by Adèle Geras

GREEK MYTHS by Ann Turnbull, illustrated by Sarah Young. Walker Books, hbk £15.00

If I hadn’t recently moved house from Manchester to Cambridge, I would have tried to post an illustration from this book here but at the moment I’m not going to risk trying to deal with pictures of any kind. So you will have to Google Sarah Young and see for yourselves how very beautiful her work is. There’s something in it of Jane Ray; something of Jackie Morris, but she’s her own artist and has a beautiful, dramatic and lyrical way of putting the images on the page to enhance the text and enchant the reader. I’d have thought that a Greenaway medal nomination should follow shortly, although it seems to me that this style of illustration isn’t as loved as it ought to be. It’s formal. The artist has learned how to draw. The colours are rich and strange and touched with gold. It’s opulent and lovely and you could simply turn the pages and that pleasure in itself would be well worth your £15.00

But you also have, of course, Ann Turnbull’s sensitive, elegant and characteristically honest retellings of the Greek myths. If ever there was a book to turn children on to these terrific stories, this is it. Walker Books have produced it in time for Christmas and I can’t think of a better gift. They are the supreme publishers of gorgeous volumes for the young and this is one of the most lavish and tempting I’ve seen. I’m not a fan of sans serif fonts and wondered at first whether I’d be bothered by the one used here, but have to confess that it worked very well with the content of the stories.

Readers of this blog and members of the SAS know Ann Turnbull and know what a good writer she is. She deserves to be far better known, and far more widely read. She’s written many excellent novels (I reviewed ALICE IN LOVE AND WAR on this blog) but with these retellings, she will, I hope, reach a far wider audience. Certainly children of any age from about 7 will love this book and the sophisticated style of the illustrations means that it’s perfect as a gift for teenage readers.

Some of the best-known stories are here: Persephone, the Minotaur, Pandora and her jar (not box, as in the original story), Perseus and the Gorgon’s Head and Orpheus and Eurydice. But lesser- known tales take their place alongside these and we read, among other things, about Arachne, the birth of Pan, and the Kalydonian boar hunt. I like the way Ann uses K instead of C for names like Kalydon. I did the same thing in my novel Ithaka and many people have asked me why. I don’t know Ann’s reason for doing this but I did it because (and there’s no rational basis for the feeling I have) it makes things feel/look a bit more classically Greek.

These are stories which deserve to be remembered and this is the book to ensure that their wonders are spread about among the young. If you’re a teacher then it ought to be in your school library. It’s a treasure on every level.


WHEN I WAS JOE by Keren David Frances Lincoln pbks.£6.99

I was much relieved, when I came to the end of this début novel, to find the first chapter of the sequel, otherwise I’d have been really worried about Joe, (who isn’t really Joe at all but Ty) and his family and desperate to know how the whole story was going to pan out. The taster chapter of the next book, which is called ALMOST TRUE, is very dramatic indeed and leaves us with an even cliffier cliffhanger, but hey, it’s okay because we are sure that the second part is on its way and we’ll just wait till it appears. Making sure your readers want to turn the pages to find out what happens next, is arguably the most important talent any writer can have. I’ve put it in bold type because it’s so crucial. The most exquisite prose, the most carefully-wrought sentences, the most subtle of themes and the most intricate network of symbols count for nothing if people close the book before they’ve even properly got into it.

There's no chance of that here. David has written a really exciting thriller. It doesn’t dwell on violence but it doesn’t soft-pedal it either. It’s told in the first person by a fifteen- year- old boy who has witnessed a knifing and maybe has played a worse part in the incident than we at first realize. He and his family are taken into witness protection because their lives are at risk. Ty (or Joe as he becomes) is going to give evidence in the pending court case and there are those who are anxious for him not to say a word and who are moreover prepared to use any means to stop him: intimidation, arson, and in the taster chapter of the second book, fatal shooting.

As well as having to live an elaborate lie, Joe has to negotiate first love, school bullying, ambitions to be a sports star, absence of his beloved Gran, dealing with his at times flakey mother and with the police charged with his care. Towards the end of the book, Joe is moved again and has to become Jake....it’s a lot for a boy to deal with and the fact that we always care about our hero and always sympathize with him is to Keren David’s great credit. She writes with humour and understanding and we are always right in there in the thick of the action with Joe. Her fifteen-year-old boy’s voice is convincing. Her depiction of the mixture of boredom and fear is spot on and I’m sure this will be a very popular book with teenagers. I can’t wait to see what happens. Roll on the publication date of ALMOST TRUE, and meanwhile, do put this novel in front of anyone who is moaning that books are boring. This one is the very opposite: involving, fast-moving and full of surprises.

REVIEWS by Adèle Geras

REVOLUTION by Jennifer Donnelly Bloomsbury hbk £10.99

Jennifer Donnelly’s A GATHERING LIGHT was a genuine crossover novel which delighted readers of all ages and was one of the first books published on the teenage lists genuinely (and quite rightly) to make its mark on the literary landscape. It was based on a true story, but took off from the original facts to create a time and a place and above all characters, with whom readers could happily engage.

Now Donnelly has written a novel that’s quite different but which is also one that transcends its genre. My copy is a proof so I don’t know whether the author’s introduction will be there in the final book, but it’s a fascinating account of how she came to write this novel. Made very vulnerable by the fact that she had a young daughter of her own at the time, she describes vividly how horrified and chilled she was to read of the fate of Marie Antoinette’s son, Louis, during and after the imprisonment and execution of his mother at the start of the French Revolution.
This feeling has grown into a book which combines three kinds of novel: a time-slip tale of sorts, a historical novel and the thing that somehow Americans know how to do supremely well: the personal odyssey of a teenage girl who has suffered a great tragedy in her own life.

Andi writes in the first person and we believe her completely. She’s a talented musician but is troubled by many things. Her parents have divorced. Her younger brother is dead and she feels great guilt about how this happened. Her mother is at the end of her tether. She has a marvellous friend called Vijay and a good teacher too, but she’s in a terrible state when the novel opens. We don’t, as sometimes happens in teenage novels, want to tell her to get real and pull her socks up. Rather, we’re drawn into her world because Donnelly has made her so real, so present, and above all, has given her so engaging a voice. We are worried for her, we feel for her, we sympathize with her and when she goes to Paris to be with her father and pursue research on a French composer of the 18th century called Amadé Malherbeau, we know that the adventures are about to begin.

Andi finds something that leads her back in time. Interspersed with her voice is an account of those days written by a young musician/performer of the time, and Andi becomes obsessed with finding out more. The adventures then happen, thick and fast and at first I wasn’t a hundred percent sure of the time-slip element but Donnelly pulls it off with some bravura and by the end, I was convinced. The dénouement is marvellously satisfying without being a cop-out. This is such a well-written, carefully structured and intricately organized book that you race through it longing to know more and even more. Along the way, you also learn a great deal about a side of the French Revolution that isn’t terribly well known. The musical knowledge displayed in the novel is awesome and it has its own playlist printed at the front of the book which will enchant anyone who cares to listen to the tracks recommended. But its greatest triumph is in bringing to the pages of teenage fiction a really terrific heroine whom we grow to care for and admire. I hope Jennifer Donnelly is already half way through writing her next book because I can’t wait to read it.

A TALL STORY by Candy Gourlay. David Fickling hbk

I know I’m a bit late coming to write about this book. It’s been generally admired wherever I’ve seen it reviewed, but because I loved it, I think I ought to add my bit to the chorus of approval. Candy is a member of the SAS but I’ve never met her. From the evidence of this novel, not only is she a good writer but also someone whose own warmth and generosity comes through in her book. It’s the story of a girl from the Philippines living in London, (and by coincidence, also called Andi) longing to be on the basketball team at school, and about to meet a half brother from the Philippines. He turns out to be not only tall but a kind of giant: a fact that’s been kept from the family in London by everyone back in the Philippines. Over there, he is credited with the power to prevent earthquakes and the way that Gourlay intertwines the stories from back home with the life going on in London is economically and cleverly done. But above all, just as in REVOLUTION, it’s Andi’s voice, her warmth and her bravery, her humour and determination which make the book so enjoyable to read. Also, Bernardo does acquire a kind of magic in the end. Do read it if you haven’t already. It’s a truly original and engaging story.

I know it's only September but

Winter is coming, and the author is getting fat. Yes, indeed, I have seen the signs – ‘Book your Christmas meal now!’ in pubs across the land. This is the time to stick on Radio 4 and some warm socks, draw the curtains, and make the house smell of delicious cooking.

These are my warm socks (I wear them as I type this). They are Authorial Socks. They were knitted for me by my best mate, and the stripes are the barcodes for my first two novels. If they were not made of wool, you could scan them and they would beep. No doubt Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and others have just such socks, which they wear as they write their masterpieces. If they do not, I pity them.



And this is what I suggest for the cooking: a mouth-watering pamphlet of recipes created by author Rosy Thornton, a 'virtual friend' of mine from the Writewords site. All the recipes are taken from her new book The Tapestry of Love, which is set in the Cevennes region of France. She’s giving this pamphlet away as a kind of amuse-bouche for the novel, so do feel free to download it here:



If you get a taste for the book, it can be got from Amazon or the usual places, but there might be a couple of weeks delay because the paperback is just about to be released.
Enjoy!


http://www.rosythornton.com

In Praise of A Good Book - Elen Caldecott

It is early on Sunday evening. I know I have to write this post, but this afternoon I bought a copy of Charlie Higson's The Dead and I just can't stop reading. I am over halfway through and I know I will finish it tonight. I am sure you all know exactly what it is like; I've been telling myself 'just one more chapter' for at least an hour. The book has sucked me in and everything else - eating, walking the dog, blog posts - is an annoying duty.

This is because I love to read. But more especially, I love to read children's books. I had thought that this was normal. However, recently I met a successful children's author who told me that she practically never reads children's books. I was pretty astonished, but the conversation was cut short and I wasn't able to thrust books into her hands while imploring 'read this, and this, and you have to read this.'

Aspiring children's writers are often told that they must read widely in the genre. The purpose of this is to give them an understanding of the marketplace. It's great advice, but it isn't why I read children's books. I read them for three main reasons: entertainment, support and inspiration.

Children's books are entertaining because their authors can go on elaborate flights of fancy (yesterday I read Mortal Engines) but they have to do so within a tight word count. This means that each word has to be chosen with the kind of precision that would make a haiku writer look sloppy. It is this breadth of vision coupled with the constraints of form that makes children's literature so vibrant, in my opinion.

I also read children's books because they are written by my colleagues: people I meet online, at events, at conferences and festivals. Like any other professional who takes their work seriously, I want to know who's doing what in my field. Not because they are competition, but because I love my work.

Finally, other children's writers are an inspiration to me. When I read their work and see what's possible, I feel a real burst of enthusiasm. Of course, there are also the moments of doubt where I think 'I can never write anything as good as this', but it gives me the impetus to at least try. To me, reading a Carnegie Medal winner is like a painter going to the BP Portrait Awards, or a musician listening to Mercury Prizewinners. It sets the benchmark and encourages them to aim higher with their own work.

This is, of course, a roundabout way for me to say that I can't write a blog post, I've got a brilliant book to get back to.


www.elencaldecott.com
Elen's Facebook Page

REVIEWS by Adèle Geras

THE SECRET INTENSITY OF EVERYDAY LIFE by William Nicholson. Quercus pbk. £11.99

SAS members probably know William Nicholson best for his very successful and popular Wind Singer trilogy. He wrote the script for the movie Gladiator and also for Shadowlands. He’s a chap with copper-bottomed macho credentials, therefore, and also a man with a great deal of emotional intelligence. He’s recently written a novel for young adults called Rich and Mad which I haven’t read but which they say is very good, though apparently not for those of a nervous disposition when it comes to frankness about sex.

In The Secret Intensity etc, he takes a group of people who live in the Sussex countryside near Glyndebourne and interweaves their stories in a fashion that’s both skilful and absorbing. Recently, on Nicola Morgan’s blog (http://www.helpineedapublisher.blogspot.com/)
and elsewhere there has been much discussion about the importance of pace and excitement and incident in novels, about page-turnability and this book is extremely page-turny without anything like an exciting plot to drive it forward. When I say that, I mean you’ll have to look to another book for abductions, vampires, dastardly plots against the government of the day, races against time, death bed reversals of fortune and wild chases in fast cars. You will not find heroic feats of strength, nor impossible puzzles. What you do get is exactly what the title promises: the sadnesses, regrets, longings and epiphanies of normal everyday life.

Laura is awaiting a visit from an ex-boyfriend whom she hasn’t seen for more than twenty years. Their love affair was incandescent, all-consuming, mad and life-changing. Her husband, Henry, is making a film for television about iconoclasts. He’s got a star to deal with whom he can’t stand and is worried because he can’t stop himself from fancying almost every woman his eye lights on, in spite of loving his wife enormously. Several other adult characters are also highlighted and it would be tedious to list them all, but into these people’s lives come the day-to- day concerns of their children, too, and Nicholson deals with subjects like bullying and peer pressure and the inner world of childhood in a most sensitive and imaginative way. Just as it’s unnatural sometimes to eliminate adults from children’s books, it’s also very refreshing to see children take their place alongside their parents in a novel for adults. This is the way things are in the real world. Ask any mother or father what their main interest/focus/ object of devotion is and you’ll find it’s their children but this truth isn’t something you find reflected very often in fiction.

Not knowing the whole truth about something, having to understand more before you can grasp what’s truly going on, and what a person is like is probably the main theme of the book. It’s very perceptive about a writer’s angst, secret fears, and unacknowledged doubts and terrific at describing love of every kind but there’s also a lovely scene in which Laura is searching for an outfit to wear to Glyndebourne. Nicholson understands perfectly the strange phenomenon of women going shopping and there are very few male writers who’ve nailed that properly. Zola was good at it, and so is Colm Tóibín but I can’t think of others offhand. [Please do leave some recommendations in the comments box if you know of any.]

Readers who are averse to characters who are middle-class and quite well off would do well to steer clear of this book (and in another post I may address the subject of the scorn that many reviewers seem to feel for literature about the upper middle classes and their concerns) but for everyone else, it’s a hugely enjoyable and satisfying read and I am eager to get hold of the sequel which is being published very soon.


THE ANATOMY OF GHOSTS by Andrew Taylor. Michael Joseph hbk £18.99

Andrew Taylor has been one of my favourite thriller writers since I read the Roth Trilogy (The Four Last Things, The Office of the Dead, The Judgement of Strangers) some years ago. If you’ve not come across these before, by the way, you have real treat in store.

His latest book, (published on September 2nd) is a historical novel, set in an invented Cambridge college called Jerusalem in the late 18th century. It’s a ghost story, a crime story and a love story, beautifully and cunningly combined. Taylor has produced a richly atmospheric and exciting tale, which will keep you happily enthralled to the last page. By contrast with William Nicholson's book, this novel has almost everything you could possibly wish for by way of plot: drowned people, terrible happenings in the past, mysteries aplenty in the present, academic machinations, adulterous longings, abuse of one kind and another, and the whole thing written so well that you feel yourself instantly drawn into the time and the place. Here's another real page turner, and one which would make a terrific film or television series. If only Andrew Taylor and William Nicholson in his scriptwriting mode could get together on such a project...what fun that would be! Do try and read it. The hardback is a bit pricey (though less than the cost of some restaurant meals and totally calorie-free!) but this is a good chance to bombard your local library branch and make sure they order at least one copy.

REVIEWS by Adèle Geras

FAITHFUL PLACE by Tana French. Hodder and Stoughton hbk. £12.99

This is Tana French’s third novel. Her first two, In the Woods and The Likeness were both cracking good thrillers which kept you turning pages at a fair old lick all the way through to the end. They both suffered a bit, though, from what our family calls an ‘as if’. That’s to say: an element which somehow doesn’t ring true, isn’t plausible, makes you say, in short: As if that could happen! ‘As ifs’ don’t really spoil a thriller too much because quite often you’re carried along in the general excitement and your disbelief has to be suspended for quite a while.

Faithful Place is different. As I was reading it, I was struck by how very well-written it was. I kept thinking: if it wasn’t Tana French’s name on the front cover and if she weren’t so well-known as a crime writer, this book could stand alongside those of other Irish writers whose work is quite rightly praised as being evocative of a community and a time. It’s a bit like a Roddy Doyle novel with a crime at the centre of the story, I said to myself, though French is her own woman and nothing like Doyle in other ways.

The first person narrator, Frank, and his childhood sweetheart Rosie arranged to run away together to England when they were young teenagers. He went to their secret rendezvous. She never turned up. Frank was devastated and has not got over that day. He’s a policeman, he’s been married, had a child and is now separated from his wife. And all these years later, the house in Faithful Place where Frank and Rosie were going to meet is being demolished. Rosie’s suitcase is discovered. How did it get there? And where is Rosie and did Frank have anything to do with her disappearance?

Those are the the basic thrillerish questions but in getting to the answers you are given the lives and relationships of a close-knit family: brothers, sisters, mother, father. You become involved with their friends and neighbours. You are in the life of the street with its friendships and petty squabbles which can spill over so easily into full-scale hostilities which then get passed on through the generations. You’re in the houses and the pubs and the thoughts of a group of people who become completely real to you and whose fates therefore matter. Above all, you’re being told a love story of immense tenderness and beauty along the way. And you’re given a view of a part of Dublin that the author tells us once existed, though it doesn’t quite in the same way any longer. The solving of the crime is the least of it. I really loved this book. To my mind, it’s streets ahead not only of a lot of thrillers but also of a good many regular novels.


PRISONER OF THE INQUISITION by Theresa Breslin Doubleday hbk. £12.99

Theresa Breslin is an enormously versatile novelist. Whispers in the Graveyard won the Carnegie Medal in 1994 and a particular favourite of mine, Divided City, is about the religious divisions in Glasgow seen through the story of two boys, one of whom supports Celtic and the other, Rangers. During the last few years, though, she’s produced historical novels of a very high quality, like Remembrance, The Medici Seal and The Nostradamus Prophecy.

In this book, she turns her attention to the 15th century and Spain. Ferdinand and Isabella are on the throne; Christopher Columbus is sbout to embark on the explorations which will lead him to a New World and the fearsome Spanish Inquisition has its spies everywhere, and wields a great deal of power in the land. Monty Python has a lot to answer for. We snigger at “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition” but in truth they were terrifying, with the power of life and death over many. Because of them, the menace of possible incarceration and torture darkened people’s lives.

The novel begins with someone being burned at the stake. By the end of the book, we’ve learned who that person is. Between those two points, Breslin unfolds a story of romance and danger, of love and betrayal, of Jew and Gentile and also of kings and queens and courtiers and slave ship owners and nuns and noble ladies and soldiers. Even Torquemada himself makes an enormously dramatic appearance. The book is written in short chapters in which we are told two stories. One strand of the narrative is about the beautiful Zarita and the other about the brave and resourceful Saulo. He’s the son of a beggar. She is rich but not all that she seems to be. Their fates are intertwined from the beginning and as we move through the book, the viewpoints alternate. It’s a fast-moving tale, but one that’s full of feeling and emotion. You care for both the hero and the heroine. The villains are truly villainous but Breslin never overdoes the bloodthirsty elements. There is violence...how could there not be?..but it’s not there for effect. It’s part of the times the writer is describing.

To set against the excesses of the Inquisition, there’s a lot here about the birth of modern navigation, the advances in science and having Christopher Columbus as a character in the story means that we know that at least one plot strand will end happily. How Breslin leads Zarita and Saulo through to their respective fates makes for a really exciting, fast-moving and very enjoyable novel.

HUNGRY THE STARS AND EVERYTHING by Emma Jane Unsworth Hidden Gem Press pbk. £7.99





Sherry Ashworth teaches Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University is the author of books such as REVOLUTION and JUST GOOD FRIENDS which many ABBA readers will have read and enjoyed. She has, however, branched out and is now also a small publisher. The firm that she and her husband Brian have set up in Manchester is called HIDDEN GEM. http://www.hiddengempress.com/
Its first offering is a début novel by a young woman with a background in journalism who contributes to the Big Issue and has published short fiction in magazines and collections.

The title isn’t one that trips off the tongue and it isn’t the sort of thing that’s easy to say when you’re asking for the novel in a bookshop or library. Most of the time (and I’m speaking as someone who has hung on to a poetic cluster of words at least once when I ought to have listened to wiser council) the plainer and more direct the title, the easier it is for the bookbuying public to want it. But to be fair, the book is about hunger and the stars figure in it too, so this is not so much a complaint as a little niggle.

HUNGER, etc is a somewhat unusual love story. Helen has a relationship with the Devil. She met him one Christmas Eve and since then, he’s turned up in her life at certain times and she knows when these occur by a variation on ‘a pricking of my thumbs.’ She has a birthmark over her palm which becomes burning hot whenever Satan’s around. The story is structured most ingeniously. In the present, Helen, who’s a restaurant critic, is having a meal at a very strange restaurant indeed called Bethel. Each dish she eats leads her into a memory and thus a patchwork of her life emerges. We are shown her love affair with Luke (this is where the stars come in) and how that developed. We learn of her relationship with Pete, who’s a chef. Details of her friendship with Kate, and her dealings with her family also emerge and I won’t give any more away except to say that I had the book pegged as one kind of thing and it turned out to be another. The ‘devilish’ or ‘spooky’ elements, and there are quite a lot of them, turned my thoughts in a certain direction and so I was quite surprised by the way things turned out, but in a good way.

Emma Jane Unsworth writes well and the book is never dull. There’s a description of the high, canyon-like walls you pass on the approach to Liverpool Lime Street Station, which I’ve often wondered at and noticed, that is absolutely brilliant and I liked the way the book sends up in the nicest possible way the work of the restaurant critic and the chi-chiness of some eateries. It’s a promising beginning for Hidden Gems Press and for Unsworth herself. May they flourish and prosper.



CADDY'S WORLD by Hilary McKay. Hodder hbk £10.99




I know Hilary McKay is a prize-winner and a writer of long-standing excellence, but I feel that she’s not talked or written about enough, so I’d like to draw the attention of readers of this blog to her latest Casson Family book.
Those who know the Casson Family will need no introduction, but for anyone who doesn’t, they’re a most unusual normal family. Mother, always called Eve, is an artist. Dad lives away from home much of the time and I won’t spoil your fun by telling you why. The children are named for colours: Indigo, Saffron, Cadmium (Blue) and (Permanent) Rose. There have been five previous books about these children but CADDY’S WORLD takes us back to a time before Rose was born.
It has an exemplary beginning which I’m going to quote in full because it tells you most of what you need to know about the book in five lines:
‘These were the four girls who were best friends:
Alison….hates everyone.
Ruby is clever.
Beth. Perfect.
Caddy, the bravest of the brave.
(“Mostly because of the spiders,” said Caddy.)

You now have the skeleton of what the book’s about. The details, the way the story develops, the ups and downs and disasters and triumphs, the heart-stopping anguish and the laughter and the tears and every single relationship will now unfold before you as seamlessly and easily as though they weren’t written down but grew organically. It’s a masterclass in how to put together a novel of this kind and you only see how outstanding it is when you’ve read to the end and can look at the story in its entirety. Then you appreciate the careful structure, the way the small things at the start lead to the big things at the end, and especially, since it’s Caddy’s story, the way the bravery about spiders becomes much more than that.

The cover image of a pretty girl blowing bubbles will attract girls, which is fair enough but it doesn’t give any indication of the wit, sense, heart and toughness of what lies between the covers. This is the sort of domestic comedy (and sometimes tragedy) that seems to be less popular these days than flashy, fast, fantastical, whizzy books aimed mostly at boys. For anyone wanting a present for a ten or eleven- year- old girl (which she might lend to a brother who will find himself more interested than he thought he would be) this is just the thing. It’s more than time to shout about the glories of domestic fiction, which has just as much drama and incident as any adventure. The Casson Family books are a terrific achievement and this one is superb.

REVIEWS by Adèle Geras

MY DEAR, I WANTED TO TELL YOU by Louisa Young. Harper Collins hbk £12.99.

The title of this book comes from the wording of an official postcard, sent by wounded soldiers during the First World War, to announce to their families the extent of their injuries. A facsimile of the card appears on the front endpaper. You’ll see spaces on it to be filled in by the soldier, announcing that he’s been admitted to a Casualty Clearing Station. There’s room for him to put in the date, and two options (of which he can delete one) ‘slight wound’ or ‘serious wound.’ The card then has the printed message: I am now comfortably in bed with the best of surgeons and sisters to do all that is necessary for me. This novel uncovers what ‘all that is necessary’ really means and I promise you, it’s quite an eye-opener.

Louisa Young is better known to ABBA readers, perhaps, as half of Zizou Corder who wrote the Lion Boy trilogy some years ago. She’s also the granddaughter of Lady Kathleen Scott, widow of Scott of the Antarctic and mother of Peter Scott. Lady Scott was a sculptor and the work that she did in the very early days of plastic surgery and facial reconstruction have clearly been part of the inspiration for this novel.

It’s a most unusual take on the First World War. We’re used to tales of courage and appalling conditions in the trenches; of deserters and conscientious objectors; of amazing gallantry; of friendships between the men and so on. Women are often very much in the background in such novels but here, they’re most important and each of the men we get to know is part of a love story as well as a war story. Riley Purefoy is the hero, and his journey through the narrative is particularly poignant and it’s to Louisa Young’s credit that we care about him so much and about whether he and his beloved Nadine will come through the trials that beset them by the end of the book. There’s a cast of doctors, artists, relations, friends which circulates around these two and the stories that spin off from the main narrative are heart-rending and terrifying and sad. But there’s also the fascinating account (sometimes hard to read, this) of the astonishing ways in which the faces of the dreadfully wounded were reconstructed by such pioneers as Harold Gillies. Sculptors like Young’s grandmother were called in to make casts of the men’s faces, and artists used to paint features on them which were as realistic as they could possibly be. This is something that I’ve not seen in other fiction about the First World War and if it makes you want to find out more, then there’s an afterword which tells us which books the novelist has relied on to make her fictional story as true to historical fact as it could be. It also tells us which of the characters in the novel are based on real people. One particular episode, perhaps the most moving thing in the book, turns out to be true but Young weaves it in seamlessly with the inventions and you can’t see the join. For anyone interested in this period, as well as for lovers of a cracking story very well told with no trace of sentimentality or soppiness, then this novel is just what you’re looking for.


THE HOTEL ON THE CORNER OF BITTER AND SWEET by Jamie Ford. Allison and Busby hbk. £12.99

If the First World War is much written about; if we feel we know it backwards, here’s a wartime episode about which I, for one, knew very little: the fact that in 1942, thousands of American citizens of Japanese origin were incarcerated in camps in the middle of the continent: rounded up from cities and communities where they’d lived for years and interned as ‘enemy aliens’ of a sort.

Rather in the way of two buses coming along when you’ve been waiting for a while, there seem to be some other books on this period and these events going about just now. There’s Lee Langley’s BUTTERFLY’S SHADOW for one, which was much praised by Lynne Reid Banks on a recent edition of The Book Show. And here we have a début novel with a very enticing title. It’s already a big hit in the USA and it’s easy to see why.

The story is simple and simply told. In 1986, Henry Lee, an elderly man of Chinese origin living in Seattle, sees that the Panama Hotel is being opened up after decades of being closed. Down in the basement of this hotel are stored all the belongings of the families who were rounded up in Seattle and sent away to the camps in 1942. Henry remembers, in chapters which go back to that time, his relationship with Keiko Okabe, a girl of Japanese origin and also how much he loved her. Their situation was complicated at the time by the fact that Henry’s father was violently anti-Japanese. So we have Romeo and Juliet and not only that but both Romeo and Juliet in this particular case are having to cope with being perceived as immigrants in the USA. Keiko, in fact, is more American than Henry. She was born in Seattle and can’t even speak Japanese, which makes her situation all the harder for her to understand. In the more modern story, Henry and his son have an edgy relationship and we learn about Henry’s wife who’s recently died of cancer. I shan’t spoil the story for readers by saying any more but it’s a good read which unfolds slowly and builds up to a very moving climax on several levels. There’s a great deal in it about jazz too, and the incidental colour and detail of life in wartime Seattle is fascinating. I thought it was a really interesting book about a period that's not very often written about, and I enjoyed it very much.

Rambling in the Ramblas: Sue Purkiss

I was going to do reviews for today's post, but all of a sudden everyone's doing reviews. This is no surprise: someone else always seems to get there first. In the immortal words of ABBA (the supergroup, not the blog). 'If I tell a joke, you've probably heard it before.' So in the interests of variety, I won't do reviews this time. But in the interests of recycling, I'm going to use one of the books I had planned to write about as a rather convoluted springboard. Could you have a convoluted springboard? It would probably be lethal, or at the very least extremely painful. But I'm going to do it anyway. Yes, that's how incredibly daring I am. Here goes. The book in question is The Book of Human Skin, by Michelle Lovric. I got this after I'd read and by wowed by her two books for children, The Undrowned Child and The Mourning Emporium. I have to be honest - the first time I tried it, I didn't get into it. It was in lots of different voices and I couldn't see where it was going. But don't do as I did, do as I say. Read it. It's brilliant, a dazzlingly colourful tapestry of mystery, humour, romance, strong characters, exotic settings - everything. (But you probably do need a fairly strong stomach. If the thought of a doctor scraping smallpox scabs off dead patients and storing them in a jam jar concerns you, then this book is possibly not for you.) Anyway, let's not get carried away - this isn't a review, it's a springboard. So - after I'd read it, i tried to think of anything else I'd read that was similarly gothic and gripping, and I thought of Carlos Ruiz Zafon. I read Shadow of the Wind soon after it came out and was entranced by it. If you haven't read it, it's a darkly funny tale of love and mysterious villainy - and books - set in mid 20th century Barcelona. Zafon's next book, The Angel's Game, turned out to be a prequel, and after I'd read it, I promised myself that some time, I'd re-read the two books in the correct order - which I've just done. Of central importance in both books is the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. If by any chance this place does not truly exist, then it should. It is a vast, labyrinthine space filled with 'passageways and crammed bookshelves... that presaged an immense library of seemingly impossible geometry.' It's a secret place, accessible only by personal introduction to people who love books. As the narrator Daniel's father tells him: 'When a library disappears, or a bookshop closes down, when a book is consigned to oblivion, those of us who know this place, its guardians, make sure that it gets here. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader's hands.' So - here is my question to you. What is the book you would place for safety in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books? It doesn't actually have to be forgotten - Great Expecteations is there , and so is Tess of the D'Urbervilles. (But so also is The Castilian Hog, That Unknown Beast: In Search of the Roots of Iberian Pork, by Anselmo Torquemada.) My own selection would be The Amazing Mr Whisper, by Brenda Macrow. I borrowed this from the library when I was nine or ten - time, after time, after time. It was the first book I'd come across where a being from legend entered and interacted with the normal world, and I was fascinated by it. I managed to get hold of a copy recently, and I have to say, it didn't stand up well to the test of time. But even so, I want it kept safe. Then perhaps one day, it will come into the hands of a child who will read it just at the time s/he needs it, and who will love it as much as I did.

REVIEWS by Adèle Geras

I REMEMBER NOTHING by Nora Ephron. Doubleday hbk. £12.99

This is a bit of a pricey book. It’s also a very lovely object to handle, so anyone who can find it cheaply on Kindle or some such will be saving money but denying themselves the great pleasure of holding something that’s beautiful and satisfying. It’s a small, square-ish volume that fits most neatly into the hand. The typeface is lovely, the paper is thick. What, as a Nora Ephron character might say, is not to like?

Ephron is famous for having written the screenplays for When Harry met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle. She also wrote a terrific novel called Heartburn * (better than the movie of the same name) about her divorce and what led to it. This novel has recipes in it and she’s a good cook. Anyone who’s familiar with any of the works I’ve mentioned will know what to expect: sharp, funny, clever and occasionally very moving short essays written by someone who knows how to grab your attention from the very first word. Ephron started her writing life as a journalist and it shows. This is prose with not an ounce of flab on it. Her general theme is ageing and the pleasures and indignities which accompany it. Every piece she writes is perfectly structured and whether it ends in a laugh or a tear or a mixture of both, the reading is nothing but unalloyed fun. She has very good instincts for the most part and you do (or I did!) find yourself shouting: YES! all through the book. But there are certain things she says with which I fervently disagree. For instance: never buy a red coat. I’ve bought lots from time to time since I was 18 and I’ve never regretted a single one of them.

She talks, amongst other things, about how she forgets everything, about the internet, about her family, about New York, about Lillian Hellman, about a meatloaf named for her in a restaurant and about white egg omelettes. She’s got interesting things to say about almost everything. This book would make the perfect present (and here I’m addressing the younger readers of this blog) for any mother who’s over 60. Together with its hilariously-named companion volume, I Feel Bad About My Neck and other thoughts on being a woman, it makes an exhilarating read for anyone who’s left their first youth behind them. Do try these books.

*Nora has three sisters. One of them, Delia Ephron, wrote a good novel about their father called Hanging Up. That, too, is worth reading.



MOON PIE by Simon Mason. David Fickling Books. hbk. £10.99

I read this book in proof and if that’s anything to go by, Simon Mason’s new novel will be much the same size and shape as Ephron’s essays, discussed above. I also think that if Nora E could read Simon M’s book, she’d love it. She may not share my taste in coats but I reckon we might like a lot of the same novels and this one in particular would strike a chord with her because her own mother became an alcoholic. Mason’s book is about the way two young children deal with the problem of a father who’s become alcoholic after the death of his wife.

The cover image, which I’ve only seen on the internet and not in real life, is attractive enough but I’m not sure it gives a very good idea of what sort of book this is. For one thing, Martha, the eleven-year-old heroine, is such an outstandingly-drawn character that you have a strong image of her in your head and an artist’s representation isn’t going to satisfy you. Also, the cartoon-ish style of the artwork somewhat belies the seriousness of the novel. Which is not to say that it’s gloomy or depressing. Trying to work out why a subject which should be so grim to read about is actually uplifting , I came to the conclusion that it succeeds in avoiding misery by emphasising throughout how very devoted the protagonists are to one another. The whole story is about different kinds of love, and that makes everything bearable and better in the end, even if it leads to heartache along the way. The Dad who’s drunk is not a baddie. Sister and brother are very close and brought even closer because of the circumstances in which they find themselves. Even a pair of grandparents who could be seen as less than lovely are doing their best and love the children, albeit in ways that Martha and her little brother Tug don’t quite know how to deal with.

The characters make this book live. They positively spring off the page. Tug is one of the most loveable and believable five year olds I’ve encountered in a book. Martha’s friend Marcus is wonderful, both as a character and as a support to Martha. It’s through him that her theatrical ambitions develop and the ending...well, I shan’t say a word about that. Critics will use the word ‘heartwarming’ about this book and they’ll be right. I’ve seen one review which suggested that the way Martha behaves and thinks is too mature for her years but I don’t agree. The whole narrative rings true and the reason that it does is due in part to the story being beautifully told in the third person and the past tense (somewhat of a relief to me, I have to confess!) Because it is, the writer isn’t limited to a young girl’s language. In any case, there are eleven-year-olds and eleven-year-olds. Martha is one of the mature ones, taking her place most appropriately alongside Anne of Green Gables, another famous redhead, who’s important in this book as well. The blurb on my proof says: “ A funny tender novel about families, dreams, being yourself …and pies.” All of that is true and I’d only add: it’s heartwarming as well.

FAMILY VALUES by Wendy Cope. Faber hbk £12.99

I’m adding an extra book this time round. Wendy Cope and I were exact contemporaries at university and also at the same college, and I’ve been a fan of her work since the (in restrospect) revolutionary Making Cocoa For Kingsley Amis. I say, ‘revolutionary’ because Cope is a believer in rhyme and scansion and words making sense: quite unfashionable in some circles when she first came on the scene and still today not every critic’s cup of tea. Because she often writes humorously, there are those who classify her work as Light Verse, but it’s much more than that and in this volume in particular, many of the poems strike a more serious note, though never a solemn or pompous one. You’ll want to come back to your favourites again and again. Mine (and it was hard to choose) was a poem about the reading of the Shipping Forecast at the BBC but there are gems throughout the book and many wise reflections on life and love and literature. Great stuff.

Book review: Stones for My Father by Trilby Kent (review by Leila Rasheed)

For a change, I thought I’d post a book review today. Stones For My Father, by Trilby Kent, is a historical children’s novel published in Canada and the U.S. by Tundra Books. Set during the Boer war, it’s the story of an Afrikaans girl, Corlie Roux, whose life is changed forever when her farm is burned by the British army and she has to escape into the bush. From the days hiding out with the laager, to her final imprisonment in a concentration camp, Corlie’s struggle to survive in the beautiful but harsh African landscape is richly and evocatively described. Animals, in particular, are so well-painted that they leap off the page. This is one of those books that leaves you feeling as if you have really been there.

“We continued in silence, stopping only to watch a goshawk slice between the treetops on its afternoon death-cruise. When we reached the river-bank, I tore off a thread from the hem of my dress and showed Gert how to tie it onto a fishhook. We gathered sticks for rods, and used bright protea leaves for bait. Then we slipped our dry-soled feet into the sparkling water and waited, trying to ignore our growling stomachs.”

Corlie’s mother – who hates her, for reasons that are revealed at the end of the book – is one of the adult characters who are so well-described that they seem to have physical weight in the mind.

“’Get out of here,’ she snapped. ‘Take your brother to Oom Flip’s. He owes us a box of tobacco.’ Despite her godly airs, my mother was a prodigious smoker. Pa had never approved of her pipe habit, but Pa wasn’t around anymore to tell her so. My mother’s face had turned quite red, the veins in her temples bulging where her hair had been scraped back into a severe bun. ‘Are you deaf, girl? Do you want me to get the sjambok?’”

There was a discussion recently about hope in children’s books on the Balaclava mailing list, and I thought this was an interesting book in relation to that discussion. Corlie’s life is tough and unredeemed by love. No-one comes out of this well, not the British who burn farms and herd children like Corlie into concentration camps to die, nor the Boers who consider Africa given to them by God and casually beat the African servants by whose knowledge and skills they have been kept alive in the bush. There is a sense of people made hard by their hard lives, and all – from soldiers to children - caught up in the chaotic whirlwind of war.

The most obvious source of hope is in the figure of Corporal Byrne, the Canadian soldier fighting on the British side, who finally gives Corlie a future. But I think there is another one, which pervades the whole book – the physicality of Africa itself; the animals, the vegetation, the land. This is a harsh and dangerous place where Corlie is at risk, but it is always described with love and a sense of joy in its immense beauty. The land itself is the hope.

There is another interesting issue, which may or may not be obvious from the excerpts above: it’s difficult to determine the reading age for this book. This is certainly not The White Giraffe, for example! Corlie herself is twelve, but narrates the book from some future point of adulthood, and very much as a literate and educated adult – for example, on the first page she describes a baby as a ‘putto’. There’s plenty of exciting plot, but I did feel that the final chapters, particularly around the dream sequence, might drag for the child reader. The novel would probably be best suited to a thoughtful teenage reader or an adult. If younger children who like a challenge try it, though, I’m sure they will find much to enjoy, for Corlie’s Africa is a world which will entrance you and convince you. When I put it down I could still hear the lourie birds calling and see the bright wildflowers trembling in the breeze.

**

Stones For My Father is Trilby Kent’s second novel for children. Her first is Medina Hill, and her first novel for adult readers: Smoke Portrait, has just been published by Alma Books. She lives in London.

In Praise of Mr Gum - Andrew Strong

For years I’ve wanted to write Finnegans Wake for children. A book that bordered on linguistic chaos, but which, deep down, played on some elemental need to savour the primitive music of words. Logic, plot, characters could all take a hike into the mountains. I wanted to write a surreal masterpiece.

I never did it, I never will do it. There’s no point now, anyway. Andy Stanton has beaten me to it.

Stanton’s books are almost without plot, and the characterisation is a little eccentric. But there is a texture of rich, playful, fizzing language. A few weeks ago I read the first Mr Gum book to a bunch of nine and ten year olds. They laughed so much I had to stop at the end of each sentence to let the noise die down. They pleaded with me to read the second book, but after that one I suggested they go out and buy the others themselves. Most of them did just that.

‘You’re a Bad Man Mr Gum’ has a plot device that makes me tremble with envy. Mr Gum is a very lazy and hence, messy man. His house is a tip, but his garden is immaculate. When a neighbour’s dog gets in Mr Gum’s garden, and wrecks it, Mr Gum seeks revenge. Of course, if it occurs to a child to question why Mr Gum’s garden is pristine, when his house is a tip, Stanton is one step ahead: Mr Gum must keep the garden tidy, or a fairy appears and smashes the old grouch in the face with a frying pan. Of course!

But when this plot device is no longer necessary, we hear nothing more of the fairy with the frying pan. And no one cares. Stanton is not in the business of tying up loose threads. He abandons his threads, leaves a heap of them in the corner for you to sweep up.

The Mr Gum books are anarchic, but buzzing with humour and word play. The language is gorgeous. For an example of this, consider the setting of the Mr Gum stories: the town of Lamonic Bibber. This would not be out of place in Finnegans Wake. It’s a phrase that suggest laziness, booze, the bubbling of a stream.

The theme of laziness pervades the Gum books. Descriptions tail off, and similes have a late period Blackaddery feel to them. Early on there are a smattering of conventional similes, for example, there's Mr Gum's ancient carpet which 'smelt like a toilet'. But later, when the effort of coming up with consistently accurate comparisons seems to bore him, Stanton describes a character ‘giggling like a tortoise’. The absurdity of it, and the sense that all this simile stuff is too much like hard work, makes it deliciously funny.

Stanton turns slouching into an art form. Like Miles Davis or Picasso, he works hard at making things look very easy. The Gum books remind me of Geoff Dyer’s wonderful non-biography of D H Lawrence, ‘Out of Sheer Rage’ – a book about not getting around to writing a biography of D H Lawrence.

A parent of one of the boys who was particularly taken by the Gum series told me his son had read all eight books, one after the other, and was now having withdrawal symptoms. Could I suggest something else? I grabbed a piece of paper and scribbled down Finnegans Wake.

I didn't really.

.

REVIEWS by Adèle Geras

NIGHT WAKING by Sarah Moss Granta pbk.

Last Thursday, I had to take the coach between Cambridge and Oxford. I bought a return ticket. That’s seven hours of coach travel, but as it turned out, it was a really enjoyable journey and the time flew by because I’d brought with me a truly gripping and page-turny book. It wasn’t a thriller. I read far too many of those and they are, it’s true, very good at making travelling time pass speedily. This was a book I’d seen mentioned favourably on a book blog (Cornflower, I think) and the little bit I knew about it made me eager to read it. The ingredients, as I was aware of them before I began, were: a remote Inner Hebridean island, a couple there for the summer with two small children, a skeleton found in the garden and a bundle of letters from a woman writing in Victorian times. There were connections with the real Clearances which took place in this part of the world in the late nineteenth century. Every one of these is intriguing as far as I’m concerned, so I bought the book with no hesitation.

What I didn’t know and what became clear the minute I began to read is that Sarah Moss is a very good writer, bringing to a story that could easily have been mawkish and predictable not only a sure eye for both pathos and humour, but also a very intelligent discussion, in a completely non-didactic vein, of the conflicts that arise for women who are torn between their academic and professional work and the care of their children, one of whom doesn’t sleep at all well at night. Anna, our mostly bone-tired heroine, is a historian and she’s desperately wanting to finish her book. Her husband, Giles, whose family have owned the island of Colsay for centuries, is busy monitoring puffins and their behaviour and to say he doesn’t pull his weight when it comes to childcare is putting it mildly. Still, he’s not a villain, which is another unexpected and clever aspect of the story. Giles and Anna have a newly-renovated cottage to rent out and to it come a high-flying surgeon, his flaky and alcoholic wife and their daughter, Zoe, who has problems of her own.

I won’t give more of the plot away than that, but it’s very well put together, with the Victorian letters slotting into the narrative most ingeniously, and allowing us to see a different historical perspective of what went on in the island. The children, Moth and Raph, (Timothy and Raphael) are brilliantly depicted. Any mother of small children will sympathize with Anna in her sometimes overwhelmingly tiring and difficult situation. It’s never a book that wallows in grimness, though, because Moss tells the story with a wry humour which is laugh-out-loud funny from time to time, but mostly a good description of situations in which if you didn’t laugh, you’d burst into tears. Anna’s excursions into cookery in particular are very entertaining. The food management in the house probably deserves a review paragraph to itself. The children’s relationship with their meals and their biscuits is terrific. This writer describes things exactly. I noticed especially her account of a train journey taken without children for the first time in ages. It’s forensically accurate and I defy any mother not to be saying: Oh, yes! as she’s reading those pages. The novel is an excellent dissection of maternal love, and Anna speaks without shame or embarrassment about how close this sometimes comes to hatred of a sort. Moss is good at history: describing what it is, what it does, how it operates at different epochs and she also somehow manages to give us the look of the island with scant physical description. There are ghosts and birds and the sea and a very modern and familiar kind of marriage. Do seek this book out. It’s a real treat to find a good new writer. Yesterday I was in a bookshop and got hold of her first novel, COLD EARTH. I can't wait to read it.


THE THREE LOVES OF PERSIMMON by Cassandra Golds Penguin Australia pbk.

I hestitated before deciding to write about a book published in Australia, but now that we are all connected by Facebook, twitter and so forth, it ought to be the work of moments to acquire it if you should wish to do so. Which is why, yet again, I’m writing about Cassandra Golds, whose magnificent THE MUSEUM OF MARY CHILD I reviewed last year. It still saddens me that she’s not published in the UK. Any publishers reading this are advised to order her books and give them some consideration. She’s a most extraordinary writer and also one of those rare creatures who really does march to the beat of her own drummer. Her books are quite unlike anyone else’s and it’s this quality of being completely unusual that makes her work so appealing. Some British readers might remember her ‘CLAIR DE LUNE’ which has in it, in addition to much else, a mouse who sets up a ballet school. This mouse interacts with the human heroine and in her latest novel, Golds goes back to the mouse/human combination which was so well done in the earlier book.

Here, a mouse called Epiphany seeks to discover whether there’s a world other than the one she knows. She is one of the mice who live on Platform One in a railway station. We are never told where this railway station is. We don’t know where anything is in a Golds novel: not in the normal, Oh, that’s obviously a place in Australia kind of way. Her stories take place in their own strange universe. Not exactly fairyland but certainly not the real world either. Rather, the author picks bits and pieces of the real world and situates them in a kind of story territory that is unique. We have theatres here, and Botanic Gardens and railway stations and florists’ shops but all of them are not quite as we know them. Persimmon Polidori’s family is split into two camps. “The first and strongest camp was the fruit and vegetable faction. The second, rebel camp was those who (against the wishes of their relatives) had thrown their lot in with flowers.” Thus, Persimmon has a true rebel of a great-aunt called Lily. She writes to Persimmon from beyond the grave (why not? This is Golds territory!) and we discover very soon that Lily was ‘formerly known as Turnip’.

There is magic here and fun. Golds writes delicately and humorously. This is not a book for everyone, but for any child (and this child will most likely be a girl) who loves novels like ‘HENRIETTA'S HOUSE’ by Elizabeth Goudge and who is deeply, deeply romantic, this novel is perfection. Persimmon seeks love and with the beyond-the-grave help of Great-Aunt Lily in Paris I can reveal without giving too much away that Persimmon’s story ends happily as all the best fairytales should, but not before we’ve had some ups and downs with an array of more or less unsuitable suitors. Epiphany the mouse has some hair-raising adventures and the end of her tale is positively epic. Both she and Persimmon will stay with you for a long time after you finish reading this delicious book.

REVIEWS by Adèle Geras

TO TOUCH THE STARS by Jessica Ruston Headline Review pbk.

This book is Jessica Ruston’s second novel and ABBA readers may remember that I also reviewed her first, LUXURY, when it appeared. That’s because I’m a Jessica Ruston fan. The shoutlines on the proof copy that I read say A glittering empire, a golden family, a guilty secret. Those are the kinds of temptations I can’t resist and Jessica Ruston comes up trumps again. This is the story of Violet Cavalley who is to millinery what Chanel is to fashion. She has risen from humble beginnings to become the head of a dazzling and lucrative empire. Her family is the wonderfully mixed bag of neuroses, desires, passions, rivalries and deceptions you’d expect in such a book and the secrets that have been part of Violet’s life from a time before she was even called Violet are as juicy as secrets should be and the revelations when they come distribute some kind of justice.

This sort of novel isn’t to everyone’s taste and it’s easy to say: froth, frivolity, fun and not pick it up for reasons of high-mindedness which somehow don’t afflict us when we’re reading children’s books. When it’s for children, we reckon it’s okay to be page-turny and pacey and over the top. We approve of books which get children to read just because of the pleasure they get from following a cracking story. The same should be true of books like this: they’re fun to read. They don’t require too much knitting of the brows, and they may not change the way you think, but not all books have to be serious and life-changing. Ruston manages a huge cast of characters and a very intricate set of relationships with great economy and aplomb and if you’re like me and love details of dress, hats, jewels and so forth, then you’ll revel in it. Line it up for your holiday reading.


ICE MAIDEN by Sally Prue OUP pbk

Sally Prue is one of a kind. It’s impossible to do an ‘if you like this person, you’ll like Sally Prue’ because she’s unclassifiable. Other people have written about fairies, or elves or creatures from the other side of the veil between this world and other worlds, but I can’t think of anyone who does it in quite the same way. Edrin is one of The Tribe. They’re the beings who live on the Common, in a perfectly ordinary small town in England. Most of the time,they’re invisible and they haunt the woods and fields and hedgerows and manage to find sustenance without encroaching too much on the world of the humans, who are mostly unaware of their presence. In this novel, though, we have Franz. The time is just before the Second World War and Franz’s family is German. He’s not quite clear what they’re doing in England and he’s lonely and distanced from his mother and father because they consort with Nazis and are part of something which the boy, even at his tender age, can tell is deeply wrong. Edrin is hungry. There are those in the Tribe who are against her and she’s drawn to the human boy, who, in his turn, first senses and then sees her. What happens after that is written like an adventure story but is in fact a very unusual love story. It’s hard to imagine walking through a landscape after reading this book and not watching out for the members of the Tribe behind every tree. Edrin is a wonderful creation and this book deserves to be read slowly. Prue is good at describing the natural world and she’s also funny. The end of the story has a good twist which adults may see coming but children won’t and what happens between Franz and Edrin is genuinely moving. Do read this book, especially if you loved COLD TOM, this writer’s prizewinning story about another member of the Tribe.