20 Books of Summer Begins!
Today marks the start of 20 Books of Summer and for me it begins with a novel that will no doubt take me the entire three months of the challenge to finish (with many other books on the go at the same time, of course).
I technically started reading Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates back in February, but I’ve only reached page 70, where I’ve been stuck for weeks. It’s not that I’m not enjoying it, but the type is so small and thus the writing so dense on the 700+ pages that I never seem to make any progress. Even setting myself micro-goals of 10 pages per day, for instance, failed as I’ve found that I always want to pick up other ‘easier’ books instead. In these sorts of situations, I would be inclined to skim, but that would be missing the whole point of an Oates novel, which seems to be the style just as much as the plot.
I’ve failed with her twice before, alas: in 2020 I read about 80 pages of We Were the Mulvaneys before giving up. My pithy response: “Too much of quirky folks.” And “too much” seems about right for describing JCO in general. Too dark, too wordy. “Prolix” is an adjective I’m tempted to apply, but it doesn’t seem fair when I haven’t managed an entire book yet. Moreover, I’m committed to a casual Oates buddy reading project with Marcie (of Buried in Print) this summer and autumn. We’re choosing different books but trying with our selections to get a good sense of her range. Towards Halloween time we’ll read some spooky stories, for instance. I’d also like to source some of her novellas and nonfiction.
In any case, today is the perfect day to introduce this read as it would have been Marilyn Monroe’s 100th birthday. Oates calls her novel a “radically distilled ‘life’ in the form of fiction, and, for all its length, synecdoche is the principle of appropriation.” After a prologue about Death coming for Norma Jeane, the early pages have been about her childhood with a vain, neglectful mother who ends up in a mental hospital. “The primary fact of Gladys was the primary mystery of Gladys: She could not be a true mother to Norma Jeane. Not at the present time.” Already we see the forces that will shape Norma Jeane’s future: the deep wound of an absent father and an unfit mother, a fascination with glamour and Hollywood, and the genetic curse of substance use disorder.
Here’s a song about endometriosis that uses Norma Jeane as its starting point: “One in Ten” by Jenn Butterworth. Every time I so much as look at the cover of Blonde, I get it in my head…
Literary Wives Club: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (1999)
This was an unusual selection for us in that it’s a short fiction collection, not all of whose stories are about marriage. Lahiri won a Pulitzer Prize for this debut work and I’m so pleased to have finally had an excuse to pick it up. Her characters tend to be Indian or Bengali (first- or second-generation) immigrants in New England, though there are also two pen portraits of unfortunate peasant women back in India. These two are less fixed in time and feel rather fable-like, especially with the plural observers’ voice in “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar.”
Of the nine stories, six are in the third person and three in first. Apart from a couple set in 1969 or 1971, the rest are contemporary. Lahiri alternates between relationship studies and accounts of encounters with strangers across generations and/or cultures. There’s a girl’s impressions of the dignified fellow expat visitor at a time of political instability in “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine,” and the American boy who gets a glimpse into an unfamiliar world on afternoons at his Indian child-minder’s house in “Mrs. Sen’s.” Culture shock goes the other way for the narrator of “The Third and Final Continent,” who has moved from Calcutta to London to Cambridge and rents a room from a formidable 103-year-old landlady.
Often, food is a reminder of home; there are lots of delicious descriptions of curries. Extramarital infatuation is contrasted with true knowledge of another person – a child is wise beyond his years in defining “sexy” as “loving someone you don’t know.”
If you seek out just one story from this excellent collection, make it “A Temporary Matter,” about a couple reeling from a stillbirth. On five successive evenings when the power company cuts their electricity to repair the line, they cook a special meal, light candles and tell secrets, including one concerning the child they lost. This story, which opens the collection, blew me away. The other highlight among a very strong pool is “This Blessed House,” in which a couple keep finding tacky Christian religious relics the previous owners left behind. Even though they’re Hindus, Twinkle decides to keep it all up for superstitious reasons, though her new husband disapproves.
All but one of the stories are standouts, and I could see how they’ve influenced story writers in the decades since, including Anuja Varghese. What linked them all together for me was the theme of denying or affirming common humanity.
More fool me for waiting all these years to try Lahiri! I have two more of her books on the shelf that I’ll try to get to soon. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury) 
The main question we ask about the books we read for Literary Wives is:
What does this book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife?
Marriage can be a welcome support, or a handicap. We see timid wives adjusting to a new country, and newlyweds – via arranged marriage or choice – trying to understand each other’s ways. The loss of a baby threatens to separate one couple, but instead they cling to each other. (Statistics show that 20% of marriages break up over the death of a child; previously it was thought to be 80%.) The villagers think marriage will cure Bibi Haldar, but no man will have her. Mrs. Sen is dependent on her husband for everything because she’s too scared to learn to drive.
In some traditional cultures, it’s risky for wives to assert their independence. America seems to offer women greater freedom. Mrs. Das, from the title story about an Indian American family touring India, transgresses traditional expectations by admitting to not loving her husband and children and having had an affair. Twinkle, too, flouts conventionality by refusing to submit to her husband’s wishes. But, of course, this doesn’t guarantee happiness.
Three Novels with (Tenuous) May Connections
Last year I read a May Sarton novel for the anniversary of her death; this year I thought I’d pick one up for her birth month. When I spotted mentions of May in the first line of two more novels from my shelves, I decided to make it a trio, however tenuous.
Hood by Emma Donoghue (1995)
First line: “Mayday in 1980, heat sealing my fingers together.”
Pen opens her story with a flashback of wandering Dublin with her girlfriend, Cara, when they were teenagers. “Why is it the most ordinary images that fall out, when I shuffle the memories? Two girls in a secondhand bookshop, hands sticky with sampled perfumes”. But in the novel’s present day, 13 years later, news has just come that Cara died in a crash on her way home by taxi after a Greek island holiday. They were only out to their lesbian friends; even Cara’s father, whose home they lived in together, was in the dark about their relationship, so Pen is in a curious position as the secret ‘widow’. “I felt such an amateur,” she confides. “About to embark on the biggest loss I could imagine, with no practice at mourning a mother or even a pop star”.
Pen requests compassionate leave for the death of her ‘housemate’ from the Catholic school where she teaches. She and Mr Wall have plenty of sadmin to do while also hosting his other daughter, Kate, who’s come back from America for the funeral. Pen keeps a lid on her emotions, seeing to household routines and attending formal and informal memorial services, but all the while she’s visited by memories from her life with Cara. (Not all happy; she wasn’t thrilled with Cara’s bisexuality and nonmonogamy.) Many are sensual: Pen is a woman with a strong appetite for food and sex, and matter-of-factly calls herself fat. The title is a riff on sisterhood but also connects to a reference to – ahem – the clitoral hood. Pen’s reliving of her lovemaking with Cara is often a little too anatomical in that way to be hot.
Last year I read Donoghue’s debut novel, Stir-fry; this was her second. Cara is more than a little reminiscent of Jael from the earlier book. I worried we would get an excruciating scene in which Pen attempts to act on her childhood crush on Kate, but luckily that’s not the case. The book is structured in seven long chapters, one per day for a week. It seemed far-fetched to me that Pen would already be clearing the house of Cara’s belongings within days of her death. While I appreciated the different angle on grief, Pen’s positive body image, and the way that liturgical and theological language permeates her thinking even though she no longer feels associated with the Catholic Church (“Grant me spiritual enlightenment through pain, sure, Lord, grand, you’re on, but not tonight”), this didn’t charm me like Stir-fry did. It felt a little too niche, like you’d need to be familiar with the 1990s lesbian scene to really feel welcome. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com)
Women and Children First by Alina Grabowski (2024)
First line: “On the last Saturday in May, I drown in my sleep.”
This debut novel about a high school girl’s accidental death at a party is structured in two halves: five chapters headed “Pre” and another five under “Post.” Each one is narrated by a different girl or woman from a Boston-area community. They are dealing with chronic illness, loss, relationship difficulties, or career confusion. The prose is often lyrical, but the portraits don’t seem to add up to much and the character names are confusingly similar (Mona – Marina – Maureen; Layla – Lila – Lucy). I wondered if I would have preferred Grabowski’s writing in a short story collection. (Passed on by Susan, who reviewed it here – thank you!)
The Bridge of Years by May Sarton (1946)
This is miniature saga of a Belgian family in the interwar years. Mélanie Duchesne is a furniture dealer and her husband, Paul, a philosopher who’s trying but failing to write a book. Their country home seems like an idyll, but even in this small community there are those whose lives have been irreparably damaged by wartime trauma. There are passages that feel just like a still life:
The room was full of sunlight warming the orange walls, making pools of ruddy light on the copper pots and the shining blue-and-white plates that stood on a shelf at the back, but not dissipating the melancholy face, in the portrait on the wall, of a thin, thoughtful little boy wrapped up in a blue scarf, who was Paul twenty years ago.
I made it through most of Part I, “Spring,” but put this back on the shelf to try another time when I have the patience for lovely prose and less attention to plot. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com)
May Releases by Siri Hustvedt, Will Maclean & More
This month’s overarching theme is creepy and/or haunted houses! My main reviews are of a collage-style bereavement memoir and a slice of English horror. I also excerpt my reviews of four more May releases read in advance for Shelf Awareness, including one that’s in the running for my Book of the Year.
Ghost Stories by Siri Hustvedt
Paul Auster died of non-small cell lung cancer on April 30, 2024. His widow, Siri Hustvedt, wears his old clothes and still occasionally smells his cigar smoke in their Brooklyn home. “I’m living in a haunted house,” she writes, one “inhabited by a ghost Paul and I made together, a ‘we’ that doesn’t exist anymore.” This isn’t a straightforward bereavement memoir recounting the relationship followed by the loved one’s decline and death. Instead, it moves back and forth between past and present and incorporates various documents. There are glimpses of her state of mind as she keeps up with routines to get through the days but still experiences life as unreal and outside of time.
One section reprints 12 e-mail updates she sent to friends and family during Paul’s illness. She weaves through fragments of his shocking family history (familiar from The Invention of Solitude), certain events that have been memorialized in his books (such as the car accident he wrote about in Winter Journal), and brief tales of his work and its reception. There’s also Paul’s incomplete series of letters to his newborn grandson, Miles, in which he tells the boy the stories he thinks he should know about his ancestors. A notable one was about 9/11, which happened to be the day their daughter Sophie started at a new high school; she passed under the World Trade Center on the subway half an hour before the first attack.
For those of us who have read both Auster and Hustvedt, it’s particularly interesting to read about how their work intersects. “We both liked the idea of our fictional worlds kissing, as it were,” she notes. She describes their connection as “intellectual-erotic” and predicts that, given another 100 years together, they would have merged into one person. Their influence on each other’s work was mutual, she insists, rather than one-sided from Paul to her as misogynistic detractors have assumed. She’s always been more the intellectual anyway, with a literature PhD and amateur interests in neurology and philosophy; and he ‘borrowed’ her character Iris Vegan (from The Blindfold) for one of his later novels, Leviathan.
The book grows increasingly political towards its close. Paul didn’t live to see “45” re-elected as 47. Hustvedt decries the rise of anti-intellectualism and, at Paul’s memorial service nearly 10 months after his death, quoted her father’s prescient words: “when fascism comes to America, they’ll call it Americanism.” It doesn’t seem like alarmism to ask what the current regime in the US and elsewhere portends for writers committed to humanism, nuance, and more or less overt voicing of outrage (as in one of Paul’s late books, a short text accompanying his son-in-law’s photographic series on gun violence in America).
This whetted my appetite to read more by Auster and fulfils her stated goal “to bring something of the man back on the page.” I can thoroughly recommend it to fans of either or both authors, as well as those interested in grief stories and the current literary scene. (Read via Edelweiss)
Solace House by Will Maclean
I hadn’t heard of Maclean’s first novel, The Apparition Phase, which was on the McKitterick Prize shortlist (before my involvement with the Prize), but I was drawn to the descriptions of his second. The cover puff from Nicholas Binge – “The Secret History meets The Haunting of Hill House” – can’t be topped, and the promotional materials’ references to Piranesi and Possession are equally accurate. In the summer of 1993, Alex Lane is 19, broke and wondering what to do with himself. He seems to be the only student left at The Ridge. Except for that pale young man he’s seen screaming at a window opposite his room…
The Student Welfare Office offers him a job on a team clearing out two Victorian properties the university has acquired or is hoping to acquire. One is Marshlands, a former mental hospital, while Solace House was the private residence of the Flaynes, the last of whom recently died at age 101. Alex finds “a lifeboat of easy camaraderie” with his seven co-workers: Clive, a loud, confident stoner; Malcolm, who’s beautiful and gay; Helen, who’s super-religious; Ruth, a Goth; Leo, a mystical researcher; Adam, a weird (traumatized rich kid; and Ella, who’s clever and alluring. But none of them is prepared for what they find at Solace House. Edwin Flayne was a hoarder and the rooms are so full that they can’t move. One is completely covered in mirrors; another has creepy effigies around a table; the hall is plastered with strange paintings; and a series of ledgers with the ravings of a madman. Alex and Ella save from the burn pile one that contains an epic poem of utopian visions and musings on the disappearance of Flayne’s mother.
Flayne’s interest in the esoteric is only matched by Leo’s; add on some magic mushrooms and it’s a heady combination of the surreal as the team explores a cave on the property that the Flaynes considered a Thin Place. While high, Leo issues what seems to be a prophecy of the order in which they’ll all die. All along, we’re kept wondering how Alex’s parents both died on “The Last Day” at the hands of “The Annihilator.” He regurgitates fictional orphan plots to try to get Ella off his case, but she (and we) know he’s holding something back.
Although I wearied of the pastiche poetry that heads each chapter and at some point stopped reading it, it does have ultimate significance. (And bully to Maclean for adding “all written by me, rather than AI, before anyone asks” to his Acknowledgements.) Midway through, I was thinking to myself this should have been in the third person to legitimize the horror, as it can otherwise shade into silliness. Part IV jumps ahead in time and subverts what’s gone before, making Alex question not just the last four years of his life but the entire course of it. And now I knew why it had to be in the first person, so reliant is it on individual experience. Time, identity and memory all come into question.
At first I was disappointed, thinking that with this section Maclean had undermined the eerie power of what went before, but there’s another switchback still to come. The book is a little overlong at just under 500 pages, and sags a bit in the final 100, but it kept surprising me and it comes to a satisfying conclusion. I also got the sense of an author having fun with the 1990s nostalgia and student behaviour. I would certainly seek out his debut.
With thanks to Atlantic Books for the free copy for review.
Reviewed for Shelf Awareness:
Memory House by Elaine Kraf: In this posthumous fifth novel, a novelist enters a commune for failed artists. Magic realism and metafiction coalesce in another of this unsung genius’ typically weird explorations of memory, creativity, and sexuality. It all appears to add up to a metaphorical journey, with a symbolic death and rebirth for those re-entering Society.
Mother Tongue by Sara Nović: Nović’s fourth book is a defiant memoir of parenthood achieved in spite of the troubled histories of deaf education, religious indoctrination, and international adoption. This is a fierce defense of deafness as a culture rather than a disability to be eradicated, and a beautiful exploration of the legacies of language and love.
Wellwater by Karen Solie: The Canadian poet Karen Solie’s intricate sixth collection (which won the T. S. Eliot Prize), gilds the natural and human worlds with religious imagery and an environmentalist conscience. The work toggles between the material and the abstract; quotidian experiences fuel meditations on concepts such as intuition, kindness, and fate.
John of John by Douglas Stuart: In Douglas Stuart’s superb third novel set on the Isle of Harris (Outer Hebrides), a young man seeks to reconcile his sexuality and artistic goals with his family’s expectations and devout upbringing. Intriguing in its particularities but timeless in wisdom, it offers hope that relinquishing shame creates freedom to be true to oneself. (I also got to interview Douglas Stuart! This is one of my top three books of 2026 so far, along with Brawler and Whistler – forthcoming in June.)
Spring Reading, Part II: Helen Bain, Stephen King & Ivan Turgenev
When I posted for the first day of spring, I noted that it was already like early summer in the UK. Today it feels like summer is here to stay. After an April with just 18% of normal rainfall, our pond is looking half-empty. It was a surprisingly chilly mid-May, but really hot weather (low 30s C / high 80s F) is moving in just in time for the bank holiday weekend. Myriad insects find a haven in our lush, unmowed garden full of trees, wildflowers and so-called weeds. Benny is closely supervised on his three or four daily walks in this garden jungle. I love to see swifts wheeling through the sky, but I’d happily sacrifice the sun to get some more rain.
My three selections for this batch of seasonal reading are an excellent forthcoming novel about Sylvia Plath, a historical novella that’s become well known through the movie version, and obscure Russian classics about infatuations that end in heartbreak.
The Daffodil Days by Helen Bain
(A quick preview as my full review will be published on Shelf Awareness next month.) A bit of background: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath moved from London to Court Green, a thatched house with two and a half acres of land in North Tawton, Devon (southwest England) in August 1961. They had separated and each moved into lodgings in London – her with their two children – by December 1962, with Plath vowing to return to her beloved house and garden in the spring. Instead, she died by suicide in February 1963. This debut novel covers much of the last 18 months of Plath’s life, but in an inventive way: 16 linked short stories – each from the perspective of a different writer friend, family member, or local acquaintance – illuminate Plath’s personality and state of mind through the interactions they have with her. It’s everyone from her midwife to a washing machine salesman. We learn not just about Plath but also the norms of the time, e.g. through young women she meets at a dress shop and in a BBC recording studio. There are also glimpses into her literary milieu through a visit from Al Alvarez and reminiscences from the Kanes and Merwins. The title refers to her garden’s daffodils, so bountiful that she sells them, which strikes her neighbours as a typically American act of crass gumption. The really genius thing about this structure is that the vignettes go backward in time, so we aren’t approaching her inevitable end but anticipating her prime. Bain’s prose reminds me of Tessa Hadley and Andrew Miller. (Edelweiss) 
Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King (1982)
This novella was published in Different Seasons under the heading “Hope Springs Eternal.” You probably know the story better through the 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption.
“They found him guilty, and brother, if Maine had the death penalty, he would have done the airdance before that spring’s crocuses poked their heads out of the dirt.”
Andy Dufresne was wrongfully imprisoned for the murder of his wife and her lover in 1947. While he bides his time until the workings of justice or his own spectacular efforts can get him free, he makes himself useful as the prison librarian and an unofficial financial advisor (he was a banker back in the real world). He fights back against attempted sexual assaults, too. The narrator, Red, can get anyone anything on the black market, and Andy has made two very specific requests over the years: a rock hammer to continue his geology hobby, and a poster of Rita Hayworth to hang in his cell – replaced in turn, as years stretch into nearly three decades, by Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Raquel Welch, and Linda Ronstadt. All along, the hope of there being a life away from this place keeps Andy, and Red, going. Even though I knew what happened thanks to the movie, this was a quick, amusing, and heartening read. I’ll probably go on to read the other three in the omnibus. (Little Free Library) 
The Torrents of Spring (& First Love & “Mumu”) by Ivan Turgenev (1871; 1860; 1854)
[Translated from Russian by Constance Garnett]
I’ve found Turgenev to be a particularly readable Russian master whose novels are short and accessible enough as to not be daunting (unlike Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and the like, who I’ve never attempted). I had a bit of confusion over this on, not realising my download included the novella First Love and the short story “Mumu” as well, so The Torrents of Spring ended sooner than I expected. It’s said to be highly autobiographical, but I haven’t looked into the links with Turgenev’s life. Twenty-two-year-old landowner Dimitri Sanin is in Frankfurt as part of a world tour. By chance, he rescues young Emil from a swoon and meets his family of Italian confectioners. Captivated by Emil’s sister Gemma’s simple beauty, he fights a duel to defend her honour and gets her to give up her tedious German fiancé for him. His plan is to stay and remotely sell his estate (complete with serfs) to a fellow Russian abroad – the wife of Polozov, a man he happens to know from childhood. But, as in Dangerous Liaisons, Maria Nikolaevna is a seductive schemer who steals his gaze away from Gemma just because she can. This was a gently Hardyesque tragicomedy about what’s fated versus the decisions and weaknesses that change everything. Turgenev explores what happens when money, love and lust don’t align, and leaves us with the aura of inevitable regret. 
The other two stories share that theme of capricious women. In First Love, sixteen-year-old Vladimir Petrovich is one of many suitors vying for the affections of his next-door neighbour, the young princess Zinaïda. He’s so smitten that when she says jump, he basically asks how high (and it ends up being 15 feet down from a wall). There’s an unexpected twist in this one that makes you question the young man’s family dynamic. The message can be summed up by the advice he’s given by another suitor: “The great thing is to lead a normal life, and not be the slave of your passions.” I was interested to note in both novellas that French is spoken as a marker of the upper classes.
“Mumu” started off promising, but I should know by now that when an animal is a central character in a classic work, it’s not going to go well. Mumu is a spaniel rescued by Gerasim, a giant deaf-mute man who labours on an old woman’s estate. His mistress observes that he’s sweet on Tatiana the laundress and quashes that budding relationship, at which point Mumu enters his life as a sort of replacement. Mumu is utterly devoted to him and suspicious of anyone else – including the mistress, who soon makes it her mission to silence the barking dog. It’s all disappointingly conventional and I wished it could have been otherwise, but I guess Turgenev, like so many other 19th-century authors – Dickens, Flaubert – felt duty-bound to keep women and peasants in their place. 
(Project Gutenberg)
Three on a Theme: Bog Body Novels by Balen, Holmes & North
I’ve been down something of a rabbit hole this year, reading four novels centred on the discovery of a bog body. I heard about Anna North’s first and, as a big fan of The Life and Death of Sophie Stark (and, to a lesser extent, Outlawed), had to read it. Who could resist the setup of scientists trying to solve a millennia-old murder mystery? When I learned that the theme of Katya Balen’s adult fiction debut was similar, there was no choice but to make it a trio. Through the library I located a teen novel that links the discovery of a bog body at the Irish border with a young man’s experience of The Troubles, Bog Child by Siobhan Dowd. I ended up reviewing that for Reading Ireland Month instead, but then spotted a backlist mystery – again, about a bog body discovery in Ireland – and couldn’t resist.
There are some common elements in all four of these novels. The authors briefly mention the special qualities of peat bog that preserve a corpse. In each case, the body is unearthed by accident and found to be that of a victim of violence – a kind of symbolic, corporate punishment. A female archaeologist is the lead researcher caught up in studying the body. In the Holmes and North, the archaeologist is the main character and has to deal with protesters; the other two feature a lay protagonist. The discovery becomes a matter of personal significance for all of them, though. (Discussed in the order in which I read them. The three below are also linked by an Anna!)
Bog Queen by Anna North (2025)
Dr. Agnes Linstrom is an American forensic scientist in Manchester for a postdoctoral fellowship. When a woman’s body is found in a patch of peat bog in Ludlow, she’s called down to give her expert opinion. Police think they’ve finally solved a 1960s spousal murder, but it soon becomes clear that the corpse is much, much older. Alternating chapters follow Agnes’s 2018 investigation, complicated by competing claims on the bog (a peat company vs. environmental protesters, who have occupied the site); and the story of the Iron Age druid who came to be buried in the bog.
As per usual with a dual-narrative novel, I was more engaged with the contemporary storyline, so rather felt I had to push myself through the historical material so I could get back to the good stuff. Luckily, though, North doesn’t spoil the Celtic Britain segments with too much research or attempts at archaic speech. Occasional short sections from the point-of-view of a colony of moss were unnecessary but harmless. Subtle parallels emerge between Agnes and the druid, both young women who have to fight to be taken seriously, hope to live up to family expectations, and struggle to see the way forward.
Agnes works with other female scientists who seem to represent different ways of living: Sunita, who’s married to a woman and has a teenage daughter, Ruby; and Danielle, who’s easing back into work after a difficult childbirth. I thought the connections to Agnes’s past and potential future were a little heavy-handed in the party scene where she commiserates with Ruby over mental health and holds Danielle’s baby. If I were being unkind, I might also say that the characters are designed to tick boxes (Sunita = South Asian and queer; Nicholas, the lead protester = Black). Overall, though, this is illuminating about women’s lives then and now – not as different as one might hope – and kept me turning the pages to find out what happened to the not one, but two, bodies the bog disgorges. (Public library)
{SPOILERS IN THE NEXT TWO}
Our Numbered Bones by Katya Balen (2026)
This was Balen’s adult debut after many works for children. Anna is stuck on her contracted novel when she gets a place on a retreat for writers who are struggling financially. Her struggle is more against despair, though: her mother is disappearing into dementia, and she recently had a stillborn daughter. The latter fact is not fully revealed until maybe halfway through, despite some heavy foreshadowing, so until then we are left to wonder why Anna left her husband, JP, who seems like a great guy (a considerate French chef, what’s not to like?), and why she is so inept and bent on sabotaging her own life.
When a bog body is found near the cottage where she’s staying, Anna becomes imaginatively and emotionally involved in the ensuing exhumation. As in Bog Child and Bog Queen, the corpse is that of a woman and it becomes clear that she was executed – punishment for a perceived social infraction, but also emblematic of the systemic misogyny of the time. Anna becomes enmeshed with the archaeologists, especially Jen, who wears a custom ring as a tribute to each woman she has found dead.
While the content of this novel ticked a lot of interest boxes for me, I didn’t particularly enjoy the style. The attempt to wring poetry out of a mental health crisis too often results in pretentious fragments – as in this sample two-page spread. (Read via Edelweiss / Public library)
The Find by Anna M Holmes (2022)
Construction on a retail park in Ireland stops abruptly when a digger encounters a body in the peat, and before long it’s clear that this is not a Troubles victim. Dr Carrie O’Neill, a young archaeologist from New Zealand, becomes “the Face of the Find” as media outlets become increasingly obsessed with the mystery of Ballybere Man. The furore only heightens when certain research conclusions are released about him: he was from Palestine, lived about two thousand years ago, had his body lovingly embalmed with pine needle stuffing and a coating of honey, and has wounds in his feet and hands consistent with crucifixion.
It’s such an interesting setup, pitting the scientists, who are determined to uncover the whole truth, against the religious powers that be – everyone from the Roman Catholic hierarchy to American fundamentalists – to whom the very idea of Jesus’s physical body being extant is an affront. Holmes makes Carrie a sympathetic character what with her homesickness, grief for her grandmother, relationship with Irish Times journalist Finn Durante, and harassment by extremists. But I was disappointed that a pretty standard thriller plot of abduction, blackmail, and violence ensues. From the cover you can tell that the author and publisher were hoping to attract readers of Peter May. The bog body itself is just a stand-in for an ideological impasse and so ends up feeling less important than in any of the other novels. (Read via BookSirens)
Another readalike: Meet Me at the Museum by Anne Youngson, a charming, bittersweet epistolary novel in which an English farmer’s wife writes to the curator at the Silkeborg Museum in Denmark about the Tollund Man.
“Peat might just save the world.”
~Victoria Gatehouse
Last year a book I helped crowdfund, The Book of Bogs, edited by Anna Chilvers and Clare Shaw, was released by independent publisher Little Toller Books. The project began as a protest against a proposed wind farm that would obliterate Walshaw Moor in Yorkshire, which inspired the Brontë sisters and Ted Hughes. It’s astonishingly comprehensive and I’m only a third of the way through so far. I’ve been reading slowly, one or two pieces a week. There is art and poetry (I’ve been enjoying this the most so far) as well as environmentally minded essays. I’m looking forward to work by some greats of the nature writing world.
Earlier this year, I got to attend a special preview evening (put on for local charities – this was in my capacity as a Repair Café volunteer) of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award exhibition at The Base in Greenham. I was already working on this trio so was alert for photographs of bogs and moss.
April Releases by Victoria Bennett, Ben Lerner and Barbara Yelin
A memoir of gardening to come to terms with midlife and a new island home, a work of autofiction about memory and technology, and an arresting graphic novel tracing the life of a child Holocaust survivor: it was a real variety last month. (But then again, I say that every month, don’t I?)
The Apothecary by the Sea: A Year in an Orkney Garden by Victoria Bennett
I’ve been hankering to get back to the Orkney Islands after two decades but haven’t managed it yet; reading about it was the next-best thing. There’s a similar make-do attitude to Bennett’s second book, which is about adapting to the unexpected and being in tune with nature. After being forced out of their rented home in Cumbria (and, disastrously, having to raze the abundant garden they’d made there), Bennett and her husband and son resettled in South Ronaldsay. Moving to Orkney was a long-held dream that allowed the couple to become property owners for the first time in their fifties. Chronic illness restricts what she can do, but over the course of a little over a year, she slowly, steadily turns their little outdoor space into a bountiful apothecary garden when not out exploring a new landscape.
I loved Bennett’s 2023 debut memoir, All My Wild Mothers. Both employ a similar structure of short chapters named after plants with medicinal uses. However, the first book is a lot richer, distilling as it does the experiences and wisdom of an entire life. The format is fresh there, whereas this sequel needed new strategies to set it apart. It’s so short – with sections of gardening tips, further plant rundowns, and recipes for padding – that I suspected the author and publisher were scratching around for enough material to fill a book. The editing is also lacking this time around; dangling modifiers and minor typos abound. This could have been more substantial had Bennett waited a few more years to develop an intimate knowledge of Orkney and make connections with people to draw on. Still, there are reassuring sentiments about accepting one’s limitations, welcoming the changes of age, and setting humble goals (“The garden, like life, is not perfect. Start with what you have”), and the black-and-white illustrations by Bennett’s husband, Adam Clarke, are gorgeous. Though it’s fairly niche, I can, offhand, think of several people to whom I would recommend Bennett’s work.
Written while listening to Doing This for Love, the fab new album by Kris Drever, everyone’s favourite Orkney singer.
With thanks to Elliott & Thompson for the free copy for review.
{SPOILERS IN THE NEXT TWO}
Transcription by Ben Lerner
The UK cover
You know what you’re in for with a Ben Lerner work, in much the same way as when you pick up something by Rachel Cusk, Katie Kitamura or Deborah Levy. The narrator resembles Lerner in that he is a 45-year-old writer who graduated from Brown University and has spent significant time in Madrid. The novella opens with him on a train to Providence, Rhode Island to write a long profile of his mentor, a German writer named Thomas. Thomas is turning 90 and there is a sense that this is to be his “exit interview” – yet he’s as sharp as ever, describing his early life as if composed of film scenes.
There is a strong emphasis on the visual here, but also on the oral. Thomas’s first memory is of hearing Hitler’s voice on the radio, and the narrator fully intended to record this conversation, but dropped his phone in the sink at the hotel and now it won’t turn on. He decides this evening will just be a pre-chat, and tomorrow they’ll get into things properly. For some reason, though, he can’t admit his technological failure to Thomas and instead brings his dead phone out, puts it face down on the table, and pretends that this is all on the record.
I prefer the U.S. cover, as per usual!
The book is in three long sections, named after different hotels. The second is set in Madrid, where, a few years later, the narrator gives a talk as part of a Festschrift for Thomas. He’s turned the story about his phone into a self-deprecating joke, but it turns out that his conference co-organizer, Rosa, is not the only one angry with him for what she perceives as falsifying Thomas’s last testament. This causes him to second-guess himself.
The third section is, ostensibly, a conversation between the narrator and Thomas’s son, Max – except the former can hardly get a word in edgewise (as was the case with Thomas, too), so it’s really more of a monologue. And, strangely, the subject is Max’s young daughter Emmie’s extreme food issues: a sort of pre-anorexia. Except Thomas would philosophize his granddaughter’s struggle, or query her screen time. Max remembers that when Thomas was hospitalized with Covid, apparently near death, he poured out many warm words to his father. Then Thomas recovered. On their first post-Covid visit, Max recorded his father’s speech without telling him he was doing so – an ironic counterpart to the narrator’s actions.
The themes drew me in, and the writing is addictively lucid. But what does it all mean? Lerner’s repeated references to father-and-son glassmakers and their beautiful glass flowers indicate his interest in questions of talent, (metaphorical) inheritance and legacy. The narrator’s version of Thomas’s memories being presented as gospel raises the question of whether fiction is the more appropriate vehicle for biography. There is also a message about overreliance on technology. The narrator feels helpless without his phone, even for one night: He can’t communicate with his family or confirm his walking route with online maps. But I wasn’t sure how Max’s daughter fits in, except perhaps as an emblem of multigenerational mental health struggles. This was an odd little book that I might like to discuss in a book club but found stubbornly unsatisfying to ponder on my own. (Read via Edelweiss)
Emmie Arbel: The Colour of Memory by Barbara Yelin (2023; 2026)
[Translated from German by Helge R. Dascher]
Edited by Charlotte Schallié and Alexander Korb
Barbara Yelin’s Irmina was the subject of an early review on my blog (just over 10 years ago!); I called it “one of the most visually stunning graphic novels I’ve ever come across” and noted that it was “based on a fascinating family story.” Such is even truer of this illustrated biography of a child Holocaust survivor. Yelin met Emmie Arbel at Ravensbrück Memorial in 2019 and over the next several years they had many conversations in person and online, which Yelin has memorialized in this solemn, powerful graphic novel. Emmie was born in the Netherlands in 1937 and first sent to a transport camp at age five. She then spent time in Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen, where her mother died. After the war, she and her brothers were displaced persons in Sweden before returning to the Netherlands to live with a foster family. Since then she has had a career, raised three daughters, divorced, retired early, lost a daughter, and traveled extensively but mostly lived in Israel. Yelin recreates scenes from Emmie’s life but mostly recounts recent conversations (and so is herself a repeated presence in the book). The narrative moves back and forth in time in imitation of memory. Emmie’s ever-present cigarette is a crutch as she tries to find words for the unspeakable.
A key motivation for this book is to face the facts that survival is not a one-time event and that trauma is complex and ongoing. In Emmie’s case, her foster father (himself a Holocaust survivor) molested her for years. The memory of rape remained locked inside until a breakdown in 1977, when she started seeing a therapist – which, she insists, saved her life.
The colour palette is appropriately sombre: lots of dark blue and grey shading into black, which is the colour of memory for Emmie. And yet there is vibrant colour in the depiction of Emmie’s home and garden in Tiv’on, and in her interactions with her children and grandchildren. I can’t revisit particular spreads of this book without crying. One is the final few pages before the epilogue, in which Emmie remembers lying in a camp with typhus.
“They put me with the dying and the dead. I knew I was going to die. I was not afraid. I think I remember how it felt to be dying. It was a good feeling. There was no pain, no hunger, no noise. Nothing. It was quiet and good. But I live.”
This is a work of real courage, of speaking out in spite of a suspicion that all is bleak and meaningless.
“Humiliation. I was not a human being. I was a number, you know. I feel like no one can understand what I’m feeling. But if I don’t talk about it, the others can’t understand. They can’t understand what happened. And it must not happen again. And that’s why I have to speak.”
With thanks to SelfMadeHero for the free copy for review.
12 Days in Portugal and Spain & What I Read
It’s the second time we’ve braved the 20+-hour ferry crossing from the south coast of England to Santander in the north of Spain. Four years ago, we stayed on the edge of the Picos de Europa national park in Spain. This time we prioritized Portugal, spending a night in Spain on the way out and back. (In Léon, we acquired a taste for vermouth – and the free tapas that come with it. So cheap, too. What a fun eating-out culture!)
Portugal was a new country for us and we thoroughly enjoyed getting a taste of it. Spring seemed to be a month ahead of the UK and blossom was abundant. We stayed in three places in the north: Guimarães, the Douro Valley, and the Côa Valley. We took our new-to-us EV and found the distances manageable and charging cheaper and easier than in the UK. Going by car made packing easy and allowed us to bring back some port, Mr. F’s favourite tipple. However, there were hairy drives along confusing city streets and narrow mountain roads.
Our first stay was at Pousada de Santa Marinha, overlooking Portugal’s oldest city. One of a chain of state-restored castles and convents, it was originally a 12th-century monastery. We relished the bountiful breakfast buffet and manicured grounds but wished for more free time to relax in the grand common areas. Mostly we used this as a base for the first of two day trips to Porto, where we got good views from the cathedral tower, had delicious coffee and veggie snacks at 7g Roaster, and did a tour and tasting at Taylor’s port house. Portugal does a good line in doorstep cats. We also had our first sighting of swifts for the year on the 7th, flying above the azulejos (painted tiles) and cobbled streets of Guimarães before a traditional taverna meal of bacalhau (salt cod) fritters and bean stew with vinho verde.
Quinta dos Murças was, if anything, even more luxurious than the pousada. We were the only guests on our first of three nights at the winery, and after a private English-language cellar tour and wine and port tasting, a sit on the wisteria-covered balcony, and a three-course meal in the dining room, we were feeling like royalty. Along with grapes, they grow almonds, olives and several types of citrus. The lemon trees were dripping with the biggest fruits I’ve ever seen, and the smell of the orange blossom was truly intoxicating. The next morning we got up early and took a pack-up picnic on the train back into Porto, which was so hot and busy that we wondered why we’d bothered – though we did have an excellent tasting experience at a smaller producer, Poças, that included white and red wine, several ports, and a cocktail of white port, lime juice, and blood orange tonic served with a salt rim.
Portuguese is significantly more challenging than Spanish, so I was pleased with myself for managing an all-Portuguese transaction with the conductor on the rural branch line. The old-fashioned train carriages were spacious with comfortable seats, though the ride was not what one would call speedy. The journey back was fraught because we found ourselves pressed to catch the final train of the day (at just after 5:30 p.m.!), couldn’t figure out how to buy tickets at the station machines, were short of cash to pay the conductor on board, and arrived 2 hours late after a car collided with a telegraph pole and left the track blocked for an hour. The following day, what did we do? Got back on a train! (In the opposite direction, with tickets we’d carefully purchased ahead online.) This time we traveled toward the eastern end of the scenic Douro Valley so that we managed to see the whole river in pieces. The village of Tua had no particular sights, but we had a pleasant amble along its river boardwalk.
We’d earmarked the Côa Valley because it’s home to a sizable rewilding project. On the way, we stopped at Penascosa, an outdoor rock art site with etchings of ibex, aurochs and deer – and even ancient attempts at animation! The Rewilding Centre, where we stayed, is similar to a hostel and has an industrial kitchen because it also operates as a café for the villagers. In cities, we had tended to find English speakers, but the centre manager here had no English, so we happily switched to French (a true lingua franca!) to communicate with her.
The accommodation may have felt like a step down after our two previous splurges, but we’d booked a different treat to selves: an English-speaking guide from Wildlife Portugal who took us out in a Land Rover and found us loads of eagles, vultures and warblers. Bee-eaters and black storks were particular highlights. We were impressed by the array of landscapes: vines and olive groves, granite boulders, high cliffs, pools created by former mining, and green glens. At the hostel we met an English couple (one half a botanist) who are exploring Europe on Interrail passes during a three-month sabbatical, and they joined us for the second day of wildlife tourism; we discovered that Fernando is just as good with plants as with birds.
It was a varied, comfy, boozy trip. There was the touristy experience in Porto and parts of the Douro Valley, but also the ‘real’ countryside. Things ended on something of a sour note due to a rough return crossing of the Bay of Biscay. We’ll be back in Spain next summer to meet up with my sister and our nephew on his school trip to Barcelona, but that jaunt will be by train!
What I Read
En route: Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King, which I’ll review for a spring-themed post as it’s the first in a quartet of loosely seasonal novellas. You likely know this prison story from the film version.
In Portugal: three Portugal-set novels I’d proudly sourced, including two in translation. My only previous knowledge of Portuguese literature had been a DNF of a José Saramago novel.
The Migrant Painter of Birds by Lídia Jorge (1998; 2001)
[Translated by Margaret Jull Costa]
The title figure is Walter, a former soldier who wanders the world and sends his bird paintings back to his daughter at the Dias family home in (fictional) Valmares. His actual visits are few and clandestine: Jorge keeps returning to a scene of him holding his shoes in his hand so he can soundlessly climb the stairs to see his daughter. You see, his daughter is officially his ‘niece’, born of an affair Maria Ema had with her husband Custódio’s brother. That act of adultery is the foundation of the novel but so tacit that it influences everything, including the language and narration. “Walter’s daughter” narrates – in third person or first – and frequently refers to herself as “Walter’s niece” instead.
The slippery narrative moves back and forth in time, pausing at a few landmark years. Very little happens, per se, apart from Walter’s daughter having a liaison with her mother’s therapist and then going to find her father in Argentina, but throughout we are invited to observe the family’s shifting dynamic and understand the narrator’s growing bitterness – “so bruised are we all by the passing of time.” I found the writing intermittently beautiful (“the sun was setting, persimmon red, behind the smooth fields”; “A tangle of living ghosts, the magical cortège of all tyrannies”) but sometimes pretentious or obfuscating to no purpose (“I invoke the decade of irony, the decade of silence pierced by the oblique laughter of cynicism”). (Interlibrary loan)
The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel (2016)
I knew of Martel’s obscure fourth novel through The Bookshop Band’s song “Why I Travel This Way,” about a bereaved man who starts walking backwards. What I didn’t realize is that the book is essentially three linked novellas and that song responds to just the first one, “Homeless.” Within a week, museum curator Tomás’s son, common-law wife, and father all died. Tomás sets off in his uncle’s early motorcar (this being 1904) to find a religious relic he learned about from a 17th-century priest’s journal written in São Tomé. But he has no idea how to drive, and accidents and persecution continue to beset him. A Job-like figure, he has set “his back to the world, his back to God” as a way of “not grieving” but “objecting.” Next, pathologist Eusebio and his wife have a high-minded discussion of the morality of murder mysteries in the 1939-set “Homeward.” Eusebio then undertakes an unexpected late-night job when an old woman arrives with her late husband’s corpse in a suitcase. Every cut reveals the substance of the man’s life rather than the reason for his death.
After religious parable and magic realism, “Home” initially seems more straightforward with its story of a widowed Canadian senator who buys Odo the chimpanzee from a research centre and relocates to rural Portugal. If you’ve read Life of Pi and/or Beatrice and Virgil, you know that Martel really goes in for his animal allegories. Odo might be considered symbolic of simplicity and joy in life. There are apt connections with the other novellas: not only an overarching theme of grief, but the specifics of one northern Portuguese village and its events that have become legend. And, yes, chimpanzees. A line from the first part serves as Martel’s mantra: “We are risen apes, not fallen angels.” Weird but satisfying. (Public library) 
The Piano Cemetery by José Luís Peixoto (2006; 2010)
[Translated by Daniel Hahn]
It may be premature, but I feel I can pinpoint some trademarks of Portuguese literature based on the few examples I’ve now read (plus Martel’s pastiche): narrative trickery, family dysfunction, metaphors of blindness, philosophical and religious dialogues, and a fine line between life and death. Unfortunately, in this case I found the appealing elements buried under an off-putting style. The Lázaro family are carpenters in 1910s Lisbon with a back room housing busted pianos that they use for their instrument-repair side business. To start with, the narrator is the dead patriarch of the family, who remembers how he met his wife at the piano cemetery and keeps watch over his children and grandchildren in the present day. There are also two long sections of stream-of-consciousness memories of his son Francisco as he runs the marathon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. Francisco Lázaro was a historical figure who died in that athletic pursuit, but the family backstory of estrangement, domestic violence, and adultery that Peixoto builds around him is fictional. Punctuated by distance markers (“Kilometre one” and so on), Francisco’s fragments are decontextualised and often don’t join up or even form complete sentences. Add in the father’s fatphobic attitude toward one of his daughters and the laughably circuitous phrasing (“my thick hand in a single movement, like an impulse, but not even an impulse, like a desire you have for a moment and which becomes concrete in that same moment, another person’s desire within me, a desire which is not thought, but which rises up like a flame” – huh? can I blame the translator?) and you might see why this was a slog for me. (Secondhand purchase – Awesomebooks.com)
Plus a partial reread of a delightful teen novel we both read the last time we were in Spain:
The Murderer’s Ape by Jakob Wegelius
[Translated from the Swedish by Peter Graves]
Talk about a risen ape! Sally Jones is an animal narrator extraordinaire: a ship’s engineer who meets every challenge that comes her way with aplomb, traveling from Portugal to India and back just to clear the Chief’s name after he’s falsely accused of murder. She happens to be a gorilla, but her only real limitation is that she can’t voice human language; she understands and writes it perfectly, and can beat most people at chess. This doorstopper never feels like one because it races along on a tide of adventure and intrigue. The technology suggests a 1920s date. All the settings are evocative, but historical Lisbon is especially enticing (and not dissimilar to Peixoto’s): Sally Jones lives with Ana Molina, a famous fado singer, and works in her neighbour Signor Fidardo’s instrument workshop repairing accordions. 
Plus the latter half of another novel or two I had on the go, and most of a couple of pre-release e-books for Shelf Awareness reviews: the odd Kitten by Stacey Yu, about a cat-identifying millennial Disaster woman, and The Half Life by Rachel Beanland. Set in 1970s Sardinia, this was a perfect summer read – intelligent as well as sultry – about a young Navy wife’s sexual coming of age and casual investigation into the ongoing effect of American nuclear submarines on the island’s natural environment.
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates for #1961Club
Simon and Karen’s classics reading weeks are always a great excuse to pick up an older book or two from my shelves. I’m just back from 12 days in Portugal and Spain (about which more anon) in time to post a review for the latest one, the 1961 Club. I own the film tie-in paperback of Revolutionary Road and indeed saw the Leonardo DiCaprio–Kate Winslet film when it first came out, but had no specific memory of the plot. However, I’d read Yates’s The Easter Parade and Cold Spring Harbor and also recently experienced Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge, so I knew the sort of suburban despair I was in for.
Frank and April Wheeler appear to be the perfect 1950s American family, with a lovely home in Connecticut’s Revolutionary Hill Estates, a daughter and a son, and Frank’s comfortable New York City job at Knox Business Machines – which he is proud of getting without so much as mentioning that his father was a long-time Knox employee. But neither Frank nor April ever intended to be trapped in provincial conventionality. Frank has “made it clear, time and again, that his job was the very least important part of his life, never to be mentioned except in irony.” The ennui hiding under the surface of their marriage seeps out through alcoholism and adultery. In one fantastic sequence, Frank calculatedly seduces the office receptionist on his 30th birthday, arriving home late for April and the kids’ homemade cake.
The Wheelers begin to dream of escape, specifically moving to Paris, where April could be the family breadwinner as an ambassador’s secretary and Frank would finally be free to produce the novel he’s been toying with writing ever since he finished his military service. They start telling their acquaintances – their drinking buddies, Shep and Milly Campbell; the local real-estate agent, Helen Givings – about the plan to leave for Europe in the fall. They’re sure it’s their chance to push back at capitalist conformity, leave small-mindedness behind, and be happy and bohemian. That is, until April finds out that she’s pregnant a third time.
Yates really plays up the ironies of the situation. The Wheelers try to be avant-garde but keep getting sucked back into the same old ways of doing things. Glimpses into the main couple’s upbringings hint at their psychological motivations but don’t explain away their mistakes. The omniscient narrator’s occasional highlighting of others’ perspectives is particularly effective for contrasting radical ideas with the status quo. Shep is in love with April and has his own romantic fantasies, while Mrs. Givings hopes that the Wheelers could be a good influence on her son, John, who pays visits to them on the Sunday afternoons that he’s temporarily let out of a mental institution. It is only John, the ‘mad’ character, who truly appreciates the gravity of what Frank and April are attempting, and mocks them for faltering: “You figure it’s more comfy here in the old Hopeless Emptiness after all[?]”
Are the Wheelers revolutionary – in what they long for, in what they attempt, in what they admit to themselves? To an extent. But there’s also what they settle for, and what is possible in 1955; April, in particular, isn’t allowed to become her own person. As in Jude the Obscure, punishment seems inevitable for those who reach above their station or outside of social norms. This is a justly famous novel of ordinary angst, a tragedy so realistic it can’t be ignored. (Secondhand purchase – Wonder Book and Video, many years ago)
Here are some other famous 1961 titles that I’ve read but mostly not reviewed (I’ve now read just 5 of the top 20 on the Goodreads list of the most popular books published that year):
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis (twice)
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (twice)
Travels with Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck
I’ve previously participated in the 1920 Club, 1956 Club, 1936 Club, 1976 Club, 1954 Club, 1929 Club, 1940 Club, 1937 Club, 1970 Club, 1952 Club and 1925 Club.
Reading Ireland Month, Part II: Dowd, Enright, Madden & Nugent
I’m catching up with a final set of reviews for #ReadingIrelandMonth26. I read two novels set at least partially during the Troubles, one of them for teenagers; a quiet novel about adultery and bereavement; and a thriller about consent and family legacy. I also read the first half of one more novel, a sombre one about the aftermath of a mental health crisis. Between this post and my first one, I covered 6.5 novels by Irish women, which I’ll call a win.
Bog Child by Siobhan Dowd (2008)
Fergus McCann is 18 and taking A levels; if he can only get three Bs, he’ll have his ticket out of Northern Ireland to study medicine at Aberdeen. This is no ordinary summer, though. He loves running on the hills at the border and here he makes a landmark discovery and embarks on a risky mission. The plot opens with Fergus and his uncle stumbling on the corpse of a girl while cutting peats. It’s a case for archaeologists rather than the police: the body is from the Iron Age and there’s evidence that the girl was sacrificed. An acquaintance then pressures Fergus into running parcels up and down the hill, right under the noses of the British at the checkpoint. He makes friends with Owain, a Welsh soldier, but gets a horrible feeling he’s partially responsible for the bombings he soon hears about on the radio. His family is enmeshed in the IRA anyway: his brother is among the hunger strikers in the local prison. There’s every chance that Joey could die before the summer is out, as much a victim of injustice as “Mel” (as Fergus names the girl from the bog, whose story he dreams).
This was Dowd’s third novel, published posthumously after her death from cancer, and won the Carnegie Medal. I’d say it’s one of the few best young adult novels I’ve ever read. (It’s shelved under Teenage Fiction at my library.) It’s an excellent peripheral glance at history ancient and modern – Fergus’s letter to Margaret Thatcher is brilliant – and effectively recreates a teen’s divided attention: friends, schooling, family drama, the future, and romance (via the daughter of the archaeologist). I searched my library catalogue for further books on bog bodies after reading Anna North’s Bog Queen and it really paid off! (Public library)
The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright (2011)
I’ve only read a handful of Enright novels and wanted to experience more, so picked this one because it was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. On the face of it, it’s a fairly straightforward adultery story, but the unshowy potency of Enright’s writing and her realistic insight into relationships set it apart. While married to Conor, Gina has an affair with Seán, who’s older and married to Aileen. Seán is part of their social circle but also someone she knows through work, and business trips are an easy excuse. “The office game was another game for us to play, after the suburban couples game, and before the game of hotel assignations and fabulous, illicit lust, and neither of us thought there might come a moment when all the games would stop. It was a lot of fun.” Gina narrates matter-of-factly, rejecting cause-and-effect language. She doesn’t defend herself, or fool herself that Seán is perfect. This new relationship involves as many challenges as her marriage, what with her mother’s death and Seán’s preteen daughter, Evie, who appears to be autistic and epileptic. The short chapters are all headed with song lyrics, mostly from love songs (“Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” “Stop! In the Name of Love”) whose ironic optimism underlines the novel’s gently melancholy tone. This reminded me most of Maggie O’Farrell’s early work, and more than justified delving into Enright’s back catalogue. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com)
{SPOILERS IN THE REST!!}
One by One in the Darkness by Deirdre Madden (1996)
Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses was our book club selection for March; I’d read it just two years ago, so skimmed back through and was impressed by its construction. Some were less convinced by the framing story and not emotionally engaged with Michael and Cushla’s affair, but we all appreciated it as a sideways look at Northern Irish history. One by One in the Darkness, which was also shortlisted for the Women’s (then Orange) Prize, is set close to its publication in the 1990s but returns to the Troubles through memories and flashbacks. Set over one week – Saturday to Friday – it’s the story of the three Quinn sisters. Cate is a journalist in London who flies home to Antrim to break the news that she’s pregnant out of wedlock. Helen is a lawyer and Sally a schoolteacher. They, their mother, and Uncle Brian have all gotten on with life as best they could, but their father’s murder is something they can’t forget and won’t ever get over. By saving that scene for the very last page of this novella, Madden keeps the horror of it fresh. Through one family’s story, she gives a sense of the scope of the country’s loss. But the book is not without a dark sense of humour, either. Madden was a new author for me. I found her work profound at the sentence level (see below for some favourite lines) rather than engaging at the plot level. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com)
“‘What’s wrong with Uncle Peter?’ ‘Two things,’ [Granny] said. ‘He thinks too much, and then he drinks too much.’”
“Once when [Cate] was home she’d remarked to Helen that she thought the forecasts were often inaccurate in Northern Ireland. ‘It’s probably deliberate,’ Helen had replied. ‘If they read out the average day’s news here and then said at the end of it, “Oh, and by the way, it’s going to bucket rain for the next twenty-four hours,” it might be more than people could take.’”
“Cate had remarked once that it was only when you lived away from Northern Ireland that you realised on returning how deeply divided a society it was, and how strange the effect of that could be.”
“There’d been well over three thousand people killed since the start of the Troubles, and every single one of them had parents or husbands and wives and children whose lives had been wrecked. It would be written about in the paper for two days, but as soon as the funeral was over it was as if that was the end, when it was really only the beginning.”
The Truth about Ruby Cooper by Liz Nugent (2026)
We read Nugent’s Strange Sally Diamond for book club a couple years ago and it was a great Northumberland holiday read for me, with a deliciously off-kilter narrator whose traumatized (and perhaps neurodivergent) perspective carried the novel. Here again Nugent prioritizes unreliable women’s voices and dark happenings, but Ruby is awfully hard to like. At age 16, she falsely accuses her older sister Erin’s boyfriend Milo of raping her. Milo maintains his innocence all along, but goes to jail for the crime; after all, DNA evidence can’t lie, right? Years of his life – and a heartbroken Erin’s – are stolen, his mother dies by suicide, Ruby becomes dependent on alcohol: all of this because of sisterly jealousy and an elaborate lie that their mother upholds rather than expose the family to further shame.
Narration alternates between Erin in Boston and Ruby, who’s moved back to Ireland with their mother. For Ruby’s confession to work, readers are kept in the dark about the truth of the incident, though only for 76 pages. Together the sisters give a tedious blow-by-blow of the intervening years – until Ruby’s daughter, Lucy, is raped by her boss on a drunken night out. Ruby refuses to believe her “because if it was true, that was karma coming to bit me on the ass.” This is where things finally get interesting, as Nugent explores ironies and familial patterns. But I’m sure I won’t be the only one to find the whole thing distasteful. Nugent clearly anticipates a backlash, stating in a prefatory letter, “I need to be very clear about the fact that girls and women like Ruby Cooper are extremely rare.” Was it worth undermining the #BelieveWomen campaign to explore a certain state of mind? Nah.
With thanks to Sandycove (Penguin) for the proof copy for review.
I’d also hoped to finish one more, but ran out of time. Here are my thoughts on the first half:
Show Me Where It Hurts by Claire Gleeson (2025)
Rachel knew Tom had recurring problems with depression, but had no idea he was on the verge of a breakdown when he deliberately drove their car off the road with the intention of killing his entire family. Their two young children die in the crash but they both survive – Tom held in a psychiatric hospital and Rachel resuming her life as a nurse. The chapters alternate between “After” and “Before,” giving relative date markers in weeks, months or years out from the incident. Gleeson’s understated prose makes it possible for readers to face a tragedy so awful we’d otherwise look away; it never tips over into mawkishness.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 