My Best Backlist Reads of the Year
Like many bloggers and other book addicts, I’m irresistibly drawn to the new books released each year. However, I consistently find that many memorable reads were published earlier. A few of these are from 2022 or 2023 and most of the rest are post-2000; the oldest is from 1910. These 14 selections (alphabetical within genre but in no particular rank order), together with my Best of 2024 post coming up on Tuesday, make up about the top 10% of my year’s reading. Repeated themes included adolescence, parenting (especially motherhood) and trauma. The two not pictured below were read electronically.
Fiction
Fun facts:
- I read 4 of these for book club (Forster, Mandel, Munro and Obreht)
- 3 (Mandel, McEwan and Obreht) were rereads
- I read 2 as part of my Carol Shields Prize shadowing (Foote and Zhang)
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie: Groundbreaking for both Indigenous literature and YA literature, this reads exactly like a horny 14-year-old boy’s diary, but “Junior” (Arnold Spirit, Jr.) is also self-deprecating and sweetly vulnerable. Poverty, alcoholism, casinos: they don’t feel like clichés of Indian reservations because Alexie writes from experience and presents them matter-of-factly. Junior moves to a white high school and soon becomes adept at code-switching (and cartooning). Heartfelt; spot on.
The Street by Bernardine Bishop: A low-key ensemble story about the residents of one London street: a couple struggling with infertility, a war veteran with dementia, and so on. Most touching is the relationship between Anne and Georgia, a lesbian snail researcher who paints Anne’s portrait; their friendship shades into quiet, middle-aged love. Beyond the secrets, threats and climactic moments is the reassuring sense that neighbours will be there for you. Bishop’s style reminds me most of Tessa Hadley’s. A great discovery.
Coleman Hill by Kim Coleman Foote: Is this family memoir? Or autofiction? Foote draws on personal stories but also invokes overarching narratives of Black migration and struggle. The result is magisterial, a debut that is like oral history and a family scrapbook rolled into one, with many strong female characters. Like a linked story collection, it pulls together 15 vignettes from 1916 to 1989 and told in different styles and voices, including AAVE. The inherited trauma is clear, yet Foote weaves in counterbalancing lightness and love.
Howards End by E.M. Forster: Rereading for book club, I was so impressed by its complexities – the illustration of class, the character interactions, the coincidences, the deliberate doublings and parallels. It covers so many issues, always without a heavy touch. So many sterling sentences: depictions of places, observations of characters, or maxims that are still true of life. Well over a century later and the picture of well-meaning wealthy intellectuals’ interference making others’ lives worse is just as cutting.
Reproduction by Louisa Hall: Procreation. Duplication. Imitation. All three connotations are appropriate for the title of an allusive novel about motherhood and doppelgangers. A pregnant writer starts composing a novel about Mary Shelley and finds the borders between fiction and (auto)biography blurring. It’s a recognisable piece of autofiction, with a sublime clarity as life is transcribed to the page exactly as it was lived. A tale of transformation – chosen or not – and peril in a country hurtling toward self-implosion. Brilliantly envisioned.
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel: This has persisted as a definitive imagination of post-apocalypse life. On a reread, I was captivated by the different layers of the nonlinear story, from celebrity gossip to a rare graphic novel series, and the links between characters and storylines. Mandel also seeds subtle connections to later work. Themes that struck me were the enduring power of art and the value of the hyperlocal. It seems prescient of Covid-19, but more so of climate collapse. An ideal blend of the literary and the speculative.
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan: A perfect novella. Its core is the July 1962 night when Edward and Florence attempt to consummate their marriage, but it stretches back to cover everything we need to know about them – their family dynamics, how they met, what they want from life – and forward to see their lives diverge. Is love enough? It’s a maturing of the author’s vision: tragedy is not showy and grotesque like in his early work, but quiet, hinging on the smallest action, the words not said. This absolutely flayed me emotionally on a reread.
The Beggar Maid by Alice Munro: Linked short stories about a hardscrabble upbringing in small-town Ontario and a woman’s ongoing search for love. Rose’s stepmother Flo is resentful and stingy. She feels she’s always been hard done by, and takes it out on Rose. From early on, we know Rose makes it out of West Hanratty and gets a chance at a larger life, that her childhood becomes a tale of deprivation. Each story is intense, pitiless, and practically as detailed as an entire novel. Rich in insight into characters’ psychology.
The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht: Natalia, a medical worker in a war-ravaged country, learns of her grandfather’s death away from home. The only one who knew the secret of his cancer, she sneaks away from an orphanage vaccination program to reclaim his personal effects, hoping they’ll reveal something about why he went on this final trip. On this reread I was utterly entranced, especially by the sections about The Deathless Man. I had forgotten the medical element, which of course I loved. My favourite Women’s Prize winner.
Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang: On a smog-covered planet where 98% of crops have failed, scarcity reigns – but there is a world apart, a mountaintop settlement at the Italian border where money can buy anything. The 29-year-old Chinese American chef’s job is to produce lavish, evocative multi-course meals. Her relationship with her employer’s 21-year-old daughter is a passionate secret. Each sentence is honed to flawlessness, with paragraphs of fulsome descriptions of meals. A striking picture of desire at the end of the world.
Nonfiction
Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood by Lucy Jones: A potent blend of scientific research and stories from the frontline. Jones synthesizes a huge amount of information into a tight narrative structured thematically but also proceeding chronologically through her own matrescence. The hybrid nature of the book is its genius. There’s a laser focus on her physical and emotional development, but the statistical and theoretical context gives a sense of the universal. For anyone who’s ever had a mother.
Stations of the Heart: Parting with a Son by Richard Lischer: Lischer opens by looking back on the day when his 33-year-old son Adam called to tell him his melanoma was back. Tests revealed metastases everywhere, including in his brain. The next few months were a Calvary of sorts, and Lischer, an emeritus professor at Duke Divinity School, draws deliberate parallels with biblical and liturgical preparations for Good Friday. His prose is a just right match: stately, resolute and weighted with spiritual allusion, yet never morose.
A Flat Place by Noreen Masud: A travel memoir taking in flat landscapes of the British Isles. But flatness is a psychological motif as well as a topographical reality. Growing up with a violent Pakistani father and passive Scottish mother, Masud chose the “freeze” option in fight-or-flight situations. A childhood lack of safety, belonging and love left her with complex PTSD. Her portrayals of sites and journeys are engaging and her metaphors are vibrant. Geography, history and social justice are a backdrop for a stirring personal story.
I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy: True to her background in acting and directing, the book is based around scenes and dialogue, and present-tense narration mimics her viewpoint starting at age six. Much imaginative work was required to make her chaotic late-1990s California household, presided over by a hoarding Mormon cancer survivor, feel real. Abuse, eating disorders, a paternity secret: The mind-blowing revelations keep coming. So much is sad. And yet it’s a very funny book in its observations and turns of phrase.
What were some of your best backlist reads this year?
My Year in Novellas (#NovNov24)
Here at the start of the month, we’re inviting you to tell us about the novellas you’ve read since last November.
I have a special shelf of short books that I add to throughout the year. When at secondhand bookshops, charity shops, a Little Free Library, or the public library where I volunteer, I’m always thinking about my piles for November. But I do read novellas at other times of year, too. Forty-four of them between December 2023 and now, according to my Goodreads shelves (last year it was 46, so it seems like that’s par for the course). I often choose to review books of novella length for BookBrowse, Foreword and Shelf Awareness. I’ve read a real mixture, but predominantly literature in translation and autobiographical works.
My favourites of the ones I’ve already covered on the blog would probably be (nonfiction) Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti and (fiction) Aimez-vous Brahms by Françoise Sagan. My proudest achievements are: reading the short graphic novel Broderies by Marjane Satrapi in the original French at our Parisian Airbnb in December; and managing two rereads: Heartburn by Nora Ephron and Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck.
Of the short books I haven’t already reviewed here, I’ve chosen two gems, one fiction and one nonfiction, to spotlight in this post:
Fiction
Clear by Carys Davies
Clear depicts the Highland Clearances in microcosm though the experiences of one man, Ivar, the last resident of a remote Scottish island between Shetland and Norway. As in a play, there is a limited setting and cast. John is a minister sent by the landowner to remove Ivar, but an accident soon after his arrival leaves him beholden to Ivar for food and care. Mary, John’s wife, is concerned and sets off on the long journey from the mainland to rescue him. Davies writes vivid scenes and brings the island’s scenery to life. Flashbacks fill in the personal and cultural history, often via objects. The Norn language is another point of interest. The deceptively simple prose captures both the slow building of emotion and the moments that change everything. It seemed the trio were on course for tragedy, yet they are offered the grace of a happier ending.
In my book club, opinions differed slightly as to the central relationship and the conclusion, but we agreed that it was beautifully done, with so much conveyed in the concise length. This received our highest rating ever, in fact. I’d read Davies’ West and not appreciated it as much, although looking back I can see that it was very similar: one or a few character(s) embarked on unusual and intense journey(s); a plucky female character; a heavy sense of threat; and an improbably happy ending. It was the ending that seemed to come out of nowhere and wasn’t in keeping with the tone of the rest of the novella that made me mark West down. Here I found the writing cinematic and particularly enjoyed Mary as a strong character who escaped spinsterhood but even in marriage blazes her own trail and is clever and creative enough to imagine a new living situation. And although the ending is sudden and surprising, it nevertheless seems to arise naturally from what we know of the characters’ emotional development – but also sent me scurrying back to check whether there had been hints. One of my books of the year for sure. 
Nonfiction
A Termination by Honor Moore
Poet and memoirist Honor Moore’s A Termination is a fascinatingly discursive memoir that circles her 1969 abortion and contrasts societal mores across her lifetime.
During the spring in question, Moore was a 23-year-old drama school student. Her lover, L, was her professor. But she also had unwanted sex with a photographer. She did not know which man had impregnated her, but she did know she didn’t feel prepared to become a mother. She convinced a psychiatrist that doing so would destroy her mental health, and he referred her to an obstetrician for a hospital procedure. The termination was “my first autonomous decision,” Moore insists, a way of saying, “I want this life, not that life.”
Family and social factors put Moore’s experiences into perspective. The first doctor she saw refused Moore’s contraception request because she was unmarried. Her mother, however, bore nine children and declined to abort a pregnancy when advised to do so for medical reasons. Moore observes that she made her own decision almost 10 years before “the word choice replaced pro abortion.”
This concise work is composed of crystalline fragments. The stream of consciousness moves back and forth in time, incorporating occasional second- and third-person narration as well as highbrow art and literature references. Moore writes one scene as if it’s in a play and imagines alternative scenarios in which she has a son; though she is curious, she is not remorseful. The granular attention to women’s lives recalls Annie Ernaux, while the kaleidoscopic yet fluid approach is reminiscent of Sigrid Nunez’s work. It’s a stunning rendering of steps on her childfree path. 
Reprinted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
I currently have four novellas underway and plan to start some more this weekend. I have plenty to choose from!
Everyone’s getting in on the act: there’s an article on ‘short and sweet books’ in the November/December issue of Bookmarks magazine, for which I’m an associate editor; Goodreads sent around their usual e-mail linking to a list of 100 books under 250 or 200 pages to help readers meet their 2024 goal. Or maybe you’d like to join in with Wafer Thin Books’ November buddy read, the Ugandan novella Waiting by Goretti Kyomuhendo (2007).
Why not share some recent favourite novellas with us in a post of your own?
Love Your Library, August 2024
It’s a Bank Holiday today here in the UK – if you have the day off, I hope you’re spending it a fun way. We’re on a day trip to Windsor Castle with friends who got free tickets through her work. Otherwise, there’s no way we would ever have gone: it’s very expensive, plus down with the monarchy and all that.
Thanks so much to Eleanor (here, here and here), Laura (the two images below) and Marcie for posting about their recent library reading!
Marina Sofia has posted a couple of relevant blogs, one a review of an Alberto Manguel book about his home library and the other a series of tempting photos of world libraries.
In the media: I loved this anti-censorship George Bernard Shaw quote posted by Book Riot on Instagram…
…and my heart was warmed by the story of Minnesota governor and current vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz installing a Little Free Library in the state capitol earlier this year. He gets my vote!
One volunteering day, a staff member told the strange-but-true story of an e-mail just received to the general libraries account. A solicitor presiding over an estate clearance let us know about a West Berkshire Libraries book found among their client’s effects, borrowed in early 1969 and never returned. Did we want it back? The consensus was that, as we’ve been doing fine without this book since BEFORE THE MOON LANDING, we will drop the issue.
Not exactly library related, but in other fun book news, I took a couple of online quizzes and got intriguing results:
My suggestion (for Angie Kim’s Happiness Falls) featured in the recent Faber Members’ summer reading recommendation round-up. And here’s that blog post I wrote for Foreword Reviews about the Bookshop Band’s new album and tour.
I’m hosting book club a week on Wednesday. Although it’s felt for a while like it might be doomed, the group has had a stay of execution at least until January. We took a break for the summer and at our July social everyone made enthusiastic noises about joining in with the four autumn and winter reads we voted on – plus we have two prospective new members who we hope will join us for the September meeting. So we’ll see how it goes.
My library use over the last month:
READ
- Private Rites by Julia Armfield
- Parade by Rachel Cusk
SKIMMED
- Nature’s Ghosts: A History – and Future – of the Natural World by Sophie Yeo
CURRENTLY READING
- One Garden against the World: In Search of Hope in a Changing Climate by Kate Bradbury
- Clear by Carys Davies (for September book club)
- Moominpappa at Sea by Tove Jansson
- The Garden against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise by Olivia Laing
- The Burial Plot by Elizabeth Macneal
- Late Light: Finding Home in the West Country by Michael Malay
- The Song of the Whole Wide World: On Motherhood, Grief, and Poetry by Tamarin Norwood
- The Echoes by Evie Wyld
CHECKED OUT, TO BE READ
- Wasteland: The Dirty Truth about What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, and Why It Matters by Oliver Franklin-Wallis
- This Is My Sea by Miriam Mulcahy
IN THE RESERVATION QUEUE
- The Glassmaker by Tracy Chevalier
- James by Percival Everett
- Small Rain by Garth Greenwell
- Bothy: In Search of Simple Shelter by Kat Hill
- The Painter’s Daughters by Emily Howes
- Dispersals: On Plants, Borders and Belonging by Jessica J. Lee
- Held by Anne Michaels
- Playground by Richard Powers
- Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
ON HOLD, TO BE PICKED UP
- The Accidental Garden: The Plot Thickens by Richard Mabey
RETURNED UNFINISHED
- The Cove: A Cornish Haunting by Beth Lynch – I enjoyed her previous memoir, and her writing is evocative, but this memoir about her return to the beloved site of childhood holidays lacks narrative drive. If you’re more familiar with the specific places, or can read it on location, you might be tempted to read the whole thing. I read 30 pages.
What have you been reading or reviewing from the library recently?
Share a link to your own post in the comments. Feel free to use the above image. The hashtag is #LoveYourLibrary.
Three on a Theme: Tiger Novels (Polly Clark, Tania James, Téa Obreht)
I was sent Loot for review, picked The Tiger’s Wife – a reread for me – as our February book club book, and then couldn’t resist making it a trio with Tiger as it was also a good excuse to pick up a book that had sat on my shelves unread for several years. In all three, the tiger is an emblem of wildness and mystery – and often of danger, too (“you must rid us of this devil in his fiery pajamas,” the village priest begs the hunter in The Tiger’s Wife).
Tiger by Polly Clark (2019)
I was fully engaged with the 150 or so pages of Part I, which is narrated by Dr Frieda Bloom, a zookeeper knowledgeable about and fascinated by bonobos. She’s also a morphine addict who continues to justify using at work (not to mention stealing from the veterinary supplies) until she is caught and fired. It’s all in response to a random act of violence: a man attacked her outside a Tube station late one night and she was lucky to have survived the head injury. In ignominy, she moves from a prestigious research institute to a rundown local zoo where the star new acquisition is an injured tiger named Luna. She develops an amazing rapport with Luna, even spending time in the enclosure with her. Meanwhile, the macho behaviour of her colleague Gabriel makes it seem like Frieda could be a victim again at any time.
But then we jump back in time and to the Russian taiga to meet, through third-person segments, a conservationist who hears about a mighty Siberian tigress, and a mother and daughter who encounter her for themselves. This turns out to be “the Countess,” Luna’s mother, and Frieda, a few years on now, travels to Russia herself to bring back one of Luna’s cubs. The focus, as the title signals, is on the tiger herself, but my interest was only ever in Frieda, and it was a little confusing how quickly she switches allegiance from primates to tigers. More first-person narration might have kept me engaged, or maybe a different order to the sections? Anything to keep me latching onto Frieda and missing her for most of the book. (Instagram giveaway win) 
Loot by Tania James (2023)
A halfhearted skim. It’s a shame that when I was offered this for review I didn’t remember I’d read something by Tania James before. The Tusk that Did the Damage, from 2016, is a composite picture of the state of wildlife conservation in India told from three perspectives: an elephant named The Gravedigger, a poacher, and a documentary filmmaker. That was a book I had to force myself through because of the lacklustre storytelling and character development, and I found the same here. Historical fiction can be tedious when it assumes that an unusual setting and intriguing incident are enough to maintain reader interest. Abbas, a woodcarver, is only 17 when he is taken to the sultan’s palace to be apprenticed to a French clockmaker. Together, they create the real-life automaton known as Tippoo’s Tiger and held at the V&A Museum. When the automaton is plundered, Abbas sets out on a quest to rescue it. I never warmed to any of the characters here, even though du Leze’s adopted daughter Jehanne is a promising one. If it’s automata that intrigue you, read The Weather Woman instead. 
[Now on the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction longlist]
With thanks to Harvill Secker for the free copy for review.
The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht (2011)
What I remembered: a wartime Eastern European (Bosnian?) story that incorporated legends.
What I rediscovered:
Natalia, a medical worker in a war-ravaged country, learns of her grandfather’s death away from home. The only one who knew the secret of his cancer, she sneaks away from an orphanage vaccination program to reclaim his personal effects, hoping they’ll reveal something about why he went on this final trip. Something is missing from his belongings: his beloved copy of The Jungle Book, which sparked a lifelong fascination with tigers. When war broke out mid-century and a tiger escaped from the zoo, he was nine years old. He and the butcher’s wife, a pregnant, deaf-mute Muslim woman with whom he communicated by scratching images in the dirt, were thrilled by the tiger’s nocturnal skulking rather than frightened like the rest of the villagers. Her outcast status led people to ignore the fact that she was a victim of domestic violence and to spin tales about her unnatural connection with the tiger, spreading rumours about the child she was carrying (“The Tiger’s Wife”).
In the years to come, during Natalia’s grandfather’s career as a doctor, he had several encounters with Gavran Gailé, “The Deathless Man,” a troubadour who seemed, vampire- or zombie-like, to survive every attempt on his life. In service to his uncle, Gavran Gailé read people’s coffee grounds to inform them of their impending death, but his own cup was bare and unbreakable. Natalia’s grandfather, a man of science, didn’t believe Gavran Gailé’s claims and agreed to a wager. Gavran Gailé would walk into a lake, tied up in chains attached to cement blocks, and pull on a rope when he started drowning. His pledge was his cup; the doctor’s was The Jungle Book, his most treasured possession. But as promised, Gavran Gailé spent an hour underwater and emerged from the lake none the worse the wear.
Natalia knows her grandfather’s final journey must have been to meet The Deathless Man, who collected on his pledge. She’ll have her own encounter with him before the end.
This is a demanding read, in that there are not a lot of orienting details and the several storylines surge in and out through flashbacks and oral storytelling. It takes effort and commitment to keep reading in the hope that everything will come together. This was a flop for my book club in that only three people had read it so we decided it wasn’t worth meeting. One who did finish it commented that it felt like three separate stories, and I see what she means. Obreht could certainly have made the links and chronology more obvious. Instead, each chapter is such a honed and self-contained narrative, often focused on a different peripheral character, that the book almost reads like a set of linked short stories. On this reread I was absolutely entranced, especially by the sections about The Deathless Man. I had forgotten the medical element, which of course I loved.
It can be depressing looking back at amateur reviews I wrote in my pre-freelancing days because I have not notably advanced since then. This response I wrote when I read the brand-new book in 2011 is allusive, opinionated, and admirably absent of dull plot summary. Could I do any better now if I tried? (Though I think I maybe misunderstood the ending back then.)
Had I reread this sooner, it would have been tough to choose between it and Larry’s Party, my ultimate selection, for the Women’s Prize Winners 25th anniversary reader vote. Were I to vote again today, I’d join Laura in choosing The Tiger’s Wife instead. (Public library)
My original rating (2011): 
My rating now: 
Eleanor recently reviewed it, too.
There was a clear winner here: The Tiger’s Wife!
See also Laura’s fab series on tiger novels from her old blog. This is the first post and there are more listed in the right-hand sidebar.
I searched my Goodreads library for others I’ve read and the only books she didn’t cover were Nick Harkaway’s Tigerman, a disappointment after Angelmaker; and (nonfiction) Margaux Fragoso’s Tiger, Tiger (title from a William Blake line), a memoir of childhood sexual abuse, and Ruth Padel’s Tigers in Red Weather, a travelogue – it happens to share a title with Liza Klausmann’s novel, which is likewise named after a line in the Wallace Stevens poem “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock.”
The Woman in Black, Train Dreams, and Absolutely & Forever (#NovNov23)
I’ve been slow off the mark this year, mostly because instead of reading a sensible one or two novellas at a time, I’ve had 10 or 15 on the go. It might mean I’ll read more overall, but from day to day it feels like crawling through loads of books, never to finish any. Except I did finally finish these three, all of which were great reads. After my thoughts on each, I’ll ponder this week’s prompt, “What Is a Novella?”
The Woman in Black by Susan Hill (1983)
This was a reread for me and our November book club book, as well as part of my casual project to read books from my birth year. I’ve generally been underwhelmed by Hill’s ghost stories, but I found this spookier than remembered and enjoyed spotting the nods to Victorian literature and to classic ghost story tropes. (Best of all, because it was so short, everyone actually read the book and came to the discussion. All 12 group members. I can’t recall the last time that happened!)
Hill keeps the setting deliberately vague, but it seems that it might be the Lincolnshire Fens in the 1930s or so. Arthur Kipps is a young lawyer tasked with attending the funeral of old Mrs Drablow and sorting through her papers. Locals don’t envy him the time spent in Eel Marsh House, and when he starts seeing a wasting-away, smallpox-pocked woman dressed in black in the churchyard, he understands why. This place harbours a malevolent ghost, and from the empty nursery with its creaking rocking chair to the marsh’s treacherous mud, Arthur fears that it’s out to get him.
The rational male narrator who insists he doesn’t believe in ghosts until he can’t deny an experience of one is a feature of the traditional ghost story à la M.R. James – and indeed, one of the chapter titles here (“Whistle and I’ll Come to You”) is a direct adaptation of a James story title. A framing story has Kipps as an older man writing the ghost story to share with his stepchildren. Some secondary characters have Dickensian names and there’s a Bleak House-esque description of a thick fog. The novel’s title must be an homage to Wilkie Collins’s sensation novel The Woman in White, with which it shares the theme of debated parentage.
A few members of our book club had seen the play or one of two film versions. Curiously, it seems like both movies alter the ending. Why, when the last four pages are such a perfect kicker? I might have dismissed the whole as a bit dull were it not for the brilliant conclusion. (Public library) [160 pages] 
Train Dreams by Denis Johnson (2002)
This is Cathy’s example of a perfect novella. I picked it up on her recommendation and read it within a few days (though you could easily do so in one sitting). Robert Grainier is a manual labourer in the American West. His body shattered by logging before he turns 40 and his spirit nearly broken by the loss of his home to a forest fire, he looks for meaning in the tragedy and a purpose to the rest of his long life. Is he being punished for participating in the attempted lynching of a Chinese worker decried as a thief? Or for not helping an injured man he came across in the woods as a teenager?
Although Grainier might appear to be a Job-like figure, his loneliness never shades into despair, lightened by comic dialogues and the mildest of supernatural interventions. He starts a haulage business and keeps dogs. There are rumours of a wolf-girl in the area, and, convinced that his dog’s new pups are part-wolf, he teaches them to howl – his own favourite way of letting off steam.
A couple of gratuitously bleak scenes (a confession of incest and an accidental death) made me think Cormac McCarthy would be a major influence, but the tone is lighter than that. Richard Brautigan came to mind, and I imagine many contemporary writers have found inspiration here: Carys Davies, Ash Davidson, Donald Ray Pollock, even Patrick deWitt.
Gritty yet light, this presents life as an arbitrary accumulation of error and incident, longing (“Pulchritude!”) and effort. Grainier is an effective Everyman, such that his story feels not just all-American but universal. (Free from a neighbour) [116 pages]
Absolutely and Forever by Rose Tremain (2023)
I had lost track of Tremain’s career a bit; I find her work hit and miss – perhaps too varied, though judging by her last five novels, she seems to have settled on historical fiction as her wheelhouse. I wasn’t sure what to expect from this latest book, but seeing that it was novella length, I was willing to give it a try. Tremain follows her heroine, Marianne Clifford, from the 1950s up to perhaps 1970. At age 15, she falls hopelessly in love with an 18-year-old aspiring writer, Simon Hurst, and loses her virginity in the back of his pale blue Morris Minor. She feels grown-up and sophisticated, and imagines their romance as a grand adventure that will whisk her away from her parents’ stultifying ordinariness –
when I thought about my future as Mrs Simon Hurst (riding a camel in Egypt, floating along in a gondola in Venice, driving through the Grand Canyon in an open-topped Cadillac, watching elephants drink from a waterhole in Africa) and about Mummy’s future (in the red-brick house in Berkshire with the shivery birch tree and the two white columns, playing Scrabble with Daddy and shopping at Bartlett’s of Newbury), I could see that my life was going to be more interesting than hers and that she might already be envious
– but his new post-school life in Paris doesn’t have room for her. As she moves to London and trains for secretarial work, Marianne is bolstered by friendships with plain-speaking Scot Petronella (“Pet”) and Hugo Forster-Pellisier, her surfing and ping-pong partner on their parents’ Cornwall getaways. Forasmuch as her life changes over the next 15 years or so – taking on a traditional wife and homemaker role; her parents quietly declining – her attachment to her first love never falters.
This has the chic and convincing 1960s setting of Tessa Hadley’s work. Marianne’s narration is a delight, droll but not as blasé as she tries to appear. Tremain could have easily fallen into the trap of making her purely naïve (in the moment) or nostalgic (looking back), but instead she’s rendered her voice knowing yet compassionate, and made her a real wit (“I thought, Everything in Paris looks as if it’s practising the waltz, whereas quite a lot of things in London … appear as if they’ve just come out of hospital after a leg operation”). Pet is very funny, too. And it’s always fun for me to have nearby locations: Newbury, Reading, Marlborough. In imagining a different life for herself, Marianne resists repeating her mother’s mistakes and coincides with the rising feminist movement. There are two characters named Marianne, and two named Simon; the revelations about these doubles are breathtaking.
This really put me through an emotional wringer. It’s no cheap tear-jerker but a tender depiction of love in all its forms. I think, with Academy Street by Mary Costello, it may be my near-perfect novella. (Public library) [181 pages]
Novellas in November, Week 2: What Is a Novella?
- Ponder the definition, list favourites, or choose ones you think best capture the ‘spirit’ of a novella.
A novella is defined by its length in words, but because that’s often difficult for readers to gauge, for this challenge we go by the number of pages instead, making 200 an absolute maximum – though some books with wide margins and spacing may top that but still seem slight enough to count (while those with tiny type can feel much longer than 160–200 pages).
Thematically, a novella is said to be concentrated on one character or small set of characters, with one plotline rather than several. This week I’ve been musing on a theory: a novella is to a novel what a memoir is to an autobiography. That is, if the latter is a comprehensive and often chronological story, the former focuses on a particular time or experience and shapes a narrative around it. What it potentially sacrifices in scope it makes up for with intensity.
But as soon as I’d formulated this hypothesis to myself, I started thinking of exceptions on either side. Train Dreams, like Silk by Alessandro Baricco and A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler, conveys a pretty complete life story. And no doubt there are many full-length novels that are almost claustrophobic in their adherence to one point of view and timeline.
The simplest way I’d put it is that a novella is a book that doesn’t outstay its welcome. I think it must be easier to write a doorstopper than a novella. Once you’ve arrived at a voice and a style, just keeping going can become a question of habit. But to continue paring back to get at the essence of a character and a situation – that takes real discipline. My other criterion would be that it has to portray the full range of human emotion, even if within a limited set of circumstances. Based on that, Train Dreams and Absolutely and Forever both triumph.
A few classic novellas that do this particularly well (links to my reviews):
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr
Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
A few more contemporary novellas that do this particularly well (links to my reviews):
A Lie Someone Told You about Yourself by Peter Ho Davies
Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf
Foster by Claire Keegan
A Feather on the Breath of God by Sigrid Nunez
Daphne du Maurier Reading Week: Rebecca Reread & Forster Biography
It’s been a couple of years since I took part in HeavenAli’s annual Daphne du Maurier Reading Week (the last time was with a review of My Cousin Rachel; this year, links are being hosted by Liz here).
My last-minute and meagre contribution comprises an attempted reread (which ended up being a skim) of Rebecca for book club last month, and a partial, ongoing read of Margaret Forster’s cracking biography of DDM.
Rebecca (1938)
I must have first read this in my early twenties, and remembered it as spooky and atmospheric. I had completely forgotten that the action opens not at Manderley (despite the exceptionally famous first line, which forms part of a prologue-like first chapter depicting the place empty without its master and mistress to tend to it) but in Monte Carlo, where the unnamed narrator meets Maxim de Winter while she’s a lady’s companion to bossy Mrs. Van Hopper. This section functions to introduce Max and his tragic history via hearsay, but I found the first 60 pages so slow that I had trouble maintaining momentum thereafter, especially through the low-action and slightly repetitive scenes as the diffident second Mrs de Winter explores the house and tries to avoid Mrs Danvers, so I ended up skimming most of it.
However, it was satisfying to rediscover the Jane Eyre parallels and there are deliciously chilling scenes, like with Mrs Danvers at the window and the way she then sabotages her young mistress at the costume ball. This was one of four rereads for book club already this year, which has the benefit of reducing pressure and sometimes increasing the comfort-read factor. We have two Rebeccas in my book club, so it seemed an appropriate choice. Others found the book as gripping as ever, with one member reading it in a day thanks to long hospital waits. Would you believe, I hadn’t at all remembered the truth of what happened to Rebecca! So there was that surprise awaiting me. In our discussion we remarked that though this has the trappings of a romance novel or mystery (e.g. see my dreadful paperback cover above!), it also has enduring literary weight – it won the National Book Award, for instance.
Daphne du Maurier by Margaret Forster (1993)
I read my first work by Forster, My Life in Houses, last year, and adored it, so the fact that she was the author was all the more reason to read this when I found a copy in a library secondhand book sale. I started it immediately after our meeting about Rebecca, but I find biographies so dense and daunting that I’m still only a third of the way into it even though I’ve been liberally skimming.
So far I have noted: du Maurier’s artistic pedigree, including her grandfather’s authorship of Trilby and her parents meeting through stage acting; her frank engagement in sexual activity, and presumed bisexuality (so far only evident through a requited crush on a teacher at her French finishing school, though perhaps there will be more to come); her first publications of short stories (“inspired by her three favourite short story writers, Maugham, Mansfield and Maupassant”) and the early novels, including one from a male point of view; her close relationship with her father and the crushing blow of his death; her determination to escape London for Cornwall; and her marriage to a soldier and ambivalent motherhood.
The last chapter I got to was all about the success of Rebecca. Though the critical reaction was generally favourable, reviewers also deemed it melodramatic … fair?
#DDMReadingWeek
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher Stage Production
Just a few months after Notes from a Small Island, it was back to one of my local theatres, The Watermill, for the stage adaptation of another book club selection, this time the Victorian true crime narrative The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize (now called the Baillie Gifford Prize) for non-fiction in 2008.
{SPOILERS ENSUE}
I must have read the book in 2009, the year after it first came out, and while I had the best intentions of rereading it in time for our book club meeting earlier this month, I didn’t even manage to skim it. I remembered one fact alone, the method of murder, which is not surprising as it was particularly gruesome: A young boy had his throat slit and was stuffed down the privy. But that was all that had remained with me. My husband filled me in on the basics and the discussion, held at our house, reminded me of the rest. We then made it a book club outing to the theatre.
The crime took place in late June 1860 at the Wiltshire home of the Kent family: the patriarch, a factory inspector; his four children from his first marriage; his second wife, formerly the older set’s governess; and their three young children. Jonathan “Jack” Whicher, sent by Scotland Yard to investigate, was one of London’s first modern detectives and inspired Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens. Constance Kent, 16, later confessed to the murder of her three-year-old half-brother, Saville, motivated by anger at her stepmother for replacing her mentally ill mother, but uncertainty remained as to whether she had acted alone.
The play was very well done, maintaining tension even though there was a decision to introduce Constance as the killer immediately: the action opens on her and Mr Whicher in her cell at Fulham Prison in the 1880s. This is an invented scene in which he has come to visit, begging her to tell him the whole truth in exchange for him writing a letter to try to secure her early release. (She appealed four times but ended up serving a full 20-year sentence.)
Cold, stark lighting and a minimal set of two benches against a backdrop of steel doors and a mullioned window evoke the prison setting, with only the subtle change to warmer lighting indicating flashbacks as Constance and Whicher remember or act out events from 20 or more years before. These two remain on stage for the entirety of the first act. Four other actors cycle in and out, playing Kent family members and various other small roles. For instance, the bearded middle-aged actor who plays Mr Kent also appears as a coroner giving a precis of Saville’s autopsy – he mentions Collins and Dickens, but the evolution of the Victorian detective is, by necessity, a much smaller element of the play than it was in the book.
It’s a tiny theatre, but projections on a screen (such as a sinuous family tree) and a balcony, used for wordless presence or loud pronouncements, made it seem bigger than it was. Saville himself is only depicted as a mute figure on that upper level, in the truly spooky scene that closes the first act. I remember when the Watermill put out a discreet call for child actors, warning parents about the sort of content to expect. Three children play the role (plus one other bit part) in rotation. Pulsing violin music enhanced the feeling of dread, and each act was no more than 45 minutes, so the atmosphere remained taut.
Production photographs by Pamela Raith.
A missing nightdress – presumably blood-stained – as well as her own father’s hunch, were among the main evidence against Constance, so Whicher did not secure a conviction at the time and was publicly ridiculed for his failure to crack the case. That and his own loss of a child are suggested to be behind his obsession with tying up loose ends. While Constance expresses regret for her actions and calmly takes him through the accepted timeline of the murder, she refuses to give him anything extra.
The second act delves into what happened next for Constance: living among nuns in France and then in Brighton, where she decided to confess, and then relocating to Australia, where she worked in a halfway house for lepers and troubled youth, as if to make up for the harm she caused earlier in her life (and she lived to age 100!). This involved the most significant change of set and actors, with the former Mr. and Mrs. Kent now filling in as the older Constance and William, the brother closest to her in age.
The play fixates on the siblings’ relationship, returning several times to their whim to run away to Bristol and be “cabin boys” together. I wondered if there was even meant to be a sexual undercurrent to their connection. William Savill-Kent went on to be a successful marine biologist specialising in corals and Australian fisheries. One theory is that they were accomplices in the murder but Constance took the fall so that her brother could live a full life.
Intriguingly, the team behind the production decided to espouse this hypothesis explicitly. In the chilling final scene, then, a crib is wheeled out to the centre of the stage and Constance floats on in a white nightdress to lower the side closest to the audience. Just before the lights go down, William, too, appears in a white nightdress and stands over the far side of the crib.
Although I referred to the book as “compulsive” in the one mention I find of it in my computer files, from 2011, I only gave it 3 stars – my most common rating in those years, an indication that a book was alright but I moved right along to the next in the stack and it didn’t stick with me. My book club had mixed feelings, too, generally feeling that there was too much extraneous detail, which perhaps kept a narrative that could have read as fluidly as a novel from being truly gripping. The play, though, was thrilling.
Book (c. 2009):
Play:
Buy The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher from Bookshop.org [affiliate link]
Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island: Reread and Stage Production
Bill Bryson, an American author of humorous travel and popular history or science books, is considered a national treasure in his adopted Great Britain. He is a particular favourite of my husband and in-laws, who got me into his work back in the early to mid-2000s. As I, too, was falling in love with the country, I found much to relate to in his travel-based memoirs of expatriate life and temporary returns to the USA. Sometimes it takes an outsider’s perspective to see things clearly.
When we heard that Notes from a Small Island (1995), his account of a valedictory tour around Britain before returning to live in the States for the first time in 20 years, had been adapted into a play by Tim Whitnall and would be performed at our local theatre, the Watermill, we thought, huh, it never would have occurred to us to put this particular book on stage. Would it work? we wondered. The answer is yes and no, but it was entertaining and we were glad that we went. We presented tickets as my in-laws’ Christmas present and accompanied them to a mid-February matinee before supper at ours.
A few members of my book club decided to see the show later in the run and suggested we read – or reread, as was the case for several of us – the book in March. I started my reread before attending the play and had gotten through the first 50 pages, which is mostly about his first visit to England in 1973 (including a stay in a Dover boarding-house presided over by the infamously officious “Mrs Smegma”). This was ideal as the first bit contains the funniest stuff and, with the addition of some autobiographical material from later in the book plus his 2006 memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, made up the entirety of the first act.
Photos are screenshots from the Watermill website.
Bryson traveled almost exclusively by public transport, so the set had the brick and steel walls of a generic terminal, and a bus shelter and benches were brought into service as the furnishing for most scenes. The problem with frontloading the play with hilarious scenes is that the second act, like the book itself on this reread, became rather a slog of random stops, acerbic observations, finding somewhere to stay and something to eat (often curry), and then doing it all over again.
Mark Hadfield, in the starring role, had the unenviable role of carrying the action and remembering great swathes of text lifted directly from the book. That’s all well and good as a strategy for giving a flavour of the writing style, but the language needed to be simplified; the poor man couldn’t cope and kept fluffing his lines. There were attempts to ease the burden: sections were read out by other characters in the form of announcements, letters or postcards; some reflections were played as if from Bryson’s Dictaphone. It was best, though, when there were scenes rather than monologues against a projected map, because there was an excellent ensemble cast of six who took on the various bit parts and these were often key occasions for humour: hotel-keepers, train-spotters, unintelligible accents in a Glasgow pub.
The trajectory was vaguely southeast to northwest – as far as John O’Groats, then back home to the Yorkshire Dales – but the actual route was erratic, based on whimsy as much as the availability of trains and buses. Bryson sings the praises of places like Salisbury and Durham and the pinnacles of coastal walks, and slates others, including some cities, seaside resorts and tourist traps. Places of personal significance make it onto his itinerary, such as the former mental asylum at Virginia Water, Surrey where he worked and met his wife in the 1970s. (My husband and I lived across the street from it for a year and a half.) He’s grumpy about having to pay admission fees that in today’s money sound minimal – £2.80 for Stonehenge!
The main interest for me in both book and play was the layers of recent history: the nostalgia for the old-fashioned country he discovered at a pivotal time in his own young life in the 1970s; the disappointments but still overall optimism of the 1990s; and the hindsight the reader or viewer brings to the material today. At a time when workers of every type seem to be on strike, it was poignant to read about the protests against Margaret Thatcher and the protracted printers’ strike of the 1980s.
The central message of the book, that Britain has an amazing heritage that it doesn’t adequately appreciate and is rapidly losing to homogenization, still holds. Yet I’m not sure the points about the at-heart goodness and politeness of the happy-with-their-lot British remain true. Is it just me or have general entitlement, frustration, rage and nastiness taken over? Not as notable as in the USA, but social divisions and the polarization of opinions are getting worse here, too. One can’t help but wonder what the picture would have been post-Brexit as well. Bryson wrote a sort-of sequel in 2015, The Road to Little Dribbling, in which the sarcasm and curmudgeonly persona override the warmth and affection of the earlier book.
Indeed, my book club noted that a lot of the jokes were things he couldn’t get away with saying today, and the theatre issued a content warning: “This production includes the use of very strong language, language reflective of historical attitudes around Mental Health, reference to drug use, sexual references, mention of suicide, flashing lights, pyrotechnics, loud sound effect explosions, and haze. This production is most suitable for those aged 12+.”
So, yes, an amusing journey, but a bittersweet one to revisit, and an odd choice for the stage.
A favourite line I’ll leave you with: “To this day, I remain impressed by the ability of Britons of all ages and social backgrounds to get genuinely excited by the prospect of a hot beverage.”
Book:
Original rating (c. 2004):
My rating now:
Play:
Have you read anything by Bill Bryson? Are you a fan?
Patrick Gale at Marlborough Literature Festival
It’s been a long time since I attended a literary festival in person rather than online. Four of us from my book club went along yesterday evening to the headline event of Marlborough Literature Festival. Marlborough is a pleasant market town in Wiltshire about 40 minutes from Newbury, and I’d like to get back to it sometime soon when things are open so I can explore its secondhand and plastic-free shops.
Patrick Gale closed the festival by speaking about his new novel (his 17th), Mother’s Boy. I knew it was a historical novel that covered the Second World War, but I had no idea that it was based on a real person, poet Charles Causley. With Andrew Motion, Gale is a patron of the Charles Causley Trust, which runs an annual poetry competition for children. I hadn’t heard of Causley, but Gale and some members of the audience recall memorizing his poems in school – like Roald Dahl’s, they can have a wicked sense of humour. Causley also wrote in the style of traditional ballads; my husband knows a version of one on a folk album.
Gale called Causley the “least sexy” of the war poets. He was from Launceston, Cornwall and left school at age 15, joining the Navy and later working as a schoolteacher for many years. He lived with his widowed mother and, if you believe the legend, died a virgin. However, Gale unearthed evidence that Causley was in fact a closeted homosexual and had sexual encounters with men during the war. He experienced survivor’s guilt because he escaped his ship’s explosion while he had an on-shore posting so that he could sit his exams.
Equally important to the novel is Causley’s mother, Laura, who grew up in extreme poverty and, after her husband’s death from TB, raised Charles in a slum on a laundress’ salary, even managing to buy him a piano. Launceston was decimated by the two world wars, and essentially colonized by the segregated U.S. Army. Gale made up a Black character named Amos, but gave him a horrific real-life story. Laura would have met Black soldiers and, later, German POWs through her working-class church.
Gale acknowledged that he had to make up more of Laura’s story, relying only on the information about her in Causley’s tiny appointment diaries. In response to an audience question, he said he thinks Causley would be “utterly appalled” at the existence of this novel because he was an intensely private person, but that he’s salved his conscience with the fact that the book is driving people back to Causley’s poems. He wrote this as a novel rather than a biography because he tends to “overempathize” with characters, and likes to go “behind the bedroom door,” as he put it – indeed, one (non-graphic) scene he read was of Charles’s conception, while the other was about Charles learning to read at age five and enjoying his father’s company though he knew he was ill.
Mother’s Boy is most like A Place Called Winter from his oeuvre, Gale remarked, in that it’s historical fiction based on real people – in that earlier case, his own relatives. Gale’s father was the governor of Wandsworth Prison and his mother the daughter of the governor of Liverpool Prison (where he oversaw many hangings). In fact, he’s now at work on a sequel to A Place Called Winter, about his grandparents and parents, and researching from letters.
I was impressed with Gale’s delivery: he spoke engagingly for 45 minutes about the book and its context, peppering in readings and recitations, with no interviewer to prompt him. It was clearly a practiced lecture, but he had no notes and spoke warmly and as if off the cuff.
Are any of these poem titles familiar to you? These were the ones mentioned during last night’s event. (You can listen to Causley reading some of them in his eighties – with his large cat purring in the background – on the Poetry Archive site I linked to above.)
- “Timothy Winters”
- “Rattler Morgan”
- “Eden Rock”
- “The Ballad of a Bread Man”
- “Angel Hill”
I have a copy of Mother’s Boy on hold at the library for me to pick up tomorrow, and we fancy reading A Place Called Winter for book club soon – his Notes from an Exhibition was one of our all-time favourites that we’ve read together.
Are you a Patrick Gale fan? Have you been able to attend any literary events recently?
Women’s Prize Shadowing & Men Reading Books by Women
Back in April I announced that my book club was one of six selected to shadow this year’s Women’s Prize shortlist by reading and discussing one of the finalists. Our assigned title was one I’d already read, but I skimmed back through it before our meet-up and enjoyed getting reacquainted with Martha Friel. Here’s our group’s review:
Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason
Readability: 5/5
Characters: 5/5
Storyline: 4/5
Can’t Put It Down: 4.5/5
Total = 18.5/20
Our joint highest rating, and one of our best discussions – taking in mental illness and its diagnosis and treatment, marriage, childlessness, alcoholism, sisterhood, creativity, neglect, unreliable narrators and loneliness. For several of us, these issues hit close to home due to personal or family experience. We particularly noted the way that Mason sets up parallels between pairs of characters, accurately reflecting how family dynamics can be replicated in later generations.
Even the minor characters are fully rounded, and although Martha is not always pleasant to spend time with, her voice is impressively rendered. The picture of mental illness from the inside feels authentic, including the fact that Martha uses it as an excuse for her bad behaviour, becoming self-absorbed and not seeing how she is affecting others around her. Our main point of disagreement was about Mason’s decision not to name the mental illness Martha is suffering from. It seemed clear to several of us that it was meant to be bipolar disorder, so we wondered if it was a copout not to identify it as such.
We also thought about the meaning of the term “literary fiction”, and whether this has the qualities of a prize winner and will stand the test of time.
We had to fill out a feedback questionnaire about our experience of shadowing, and most of us sent in individual blurbs in response to the book. Some ended up in the final Reading Agency article. Here was mine:
“This deceptively light novel was a perfect book club selection, eliciting deep discussion about mental illness, family relationships and parenthood. Martha’s (unreliable) narration is a delight, wry and deadpan but also with moments of wrenching emotion. Mason masterfully controls the tone to create something that is witty and poignant all at once.”
Probably the main reason we were chosen for this opportunity is that we have a man – my husband, that is! – who attends regularly. This year the prize has been particularly keen to get more men reading books by women (see more below). So, he was responsible for giving The Male Response to the novel. No pressure, right? Luckily, he enjoyed it just as much as the rest of us. From the cover and blurb, it didn’t necessarily seem like the sort of book that he would pick up to read for himself, but he was fully engaged with the themes of mental illness, family relationships, and the question of whether or not to have children, and was so compelled that he read over half of it in a day.
I’m not sure who I expect to be awarded the Women’s Prize tomorrow. We of West Fields Readers would be delighted if it went to Meg Mason for Sorrow and Bliss, but I’d also be happy with a win for Louise Erdrich or Ruth Ozeki – though I wasn’t taken with their latest works compared with earlier ones I’ve read, they are excellent authors who deserve recognition. I don’t think The Bread the Devil Knead has a chance; I’d be disappointed in a win by Elif Shafak in that I would feel obligated to try her novel – the kind that gives magic realism a bad name – again; and, while I’m a Maggie Shipstead fan in general and admire the ambition of Great Circle, it would be galling for a book I DNFed twice to take the title!
Who are you rooting for/predicting?
I’d like to mock you with that thought,
jeer at the man
who won’t read novels
written by women –
at least not if they’re still alive
~from The Poet by Louisa Reid
Maybe you’ve seen on social media that the Women’s Prize has been canvassing opinion on the books by women that all men should read. This was prompted by some shocking statistics suggesting that even bestselling female authors can only attract a 20% male readership, whereas the best-known male authors are almost equally popular with men and women. They solicited 60 nominations from big names and ran a public poll. I voted for these 10:
Half of a Yellow Sun (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)
Possession (A.S. Byatt)
Homegoing (Yaa Gyasi)
The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
The Sea, The Sea (Iris Murdoch)
The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
We Need to Talk about Kevin (Lionel Shriver)
Olive Kitteridge (Elizabeth Strout)
The Goldfinch (Donna Tartt)
Orlando (Virginia Woolf)
*If I could have added to that list, though, my top recommendations for all men to read would be Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel and Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (and probably a different Octavia E. Butler novel from the one nominated).
Three of my selections were among the 10 essential reads announced on the WP website. Their list was headed by Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, though of her works I’d be more likely to direct men to Oryx and Crake.
I’ve seen discussions on Twitter about why men don’t read novels (at all, prioritizing nonfiction), or specifically not ones by women. Do you have any theories?
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 