This month I have novels set in the Mojave Desert and a Northern Ireland that never was; poetry about food and cross-cultural identity / adolescent boys and self-harm; and a short nonfiction book offering ideas for how to reconnect with nature. Repeated themes include environmental damage, Bible imagery and toxic masculinity.

Few and Far Between by Jan Carson

“So this is all true.”

“Historically true or made-up true?”

“What’s the difference?”

This was my first from Carson – and her U.S. debut – though she’s well known in Northern Ireland for her novels and short story collections. (Our own Cathy of 746 Books gets a mention in the Acknowledgements!) Her fourth novel is a work of alternative history with subtle magic realist touches. In 1958, Terrence O’Neill (shortly to be elected Prime Minister) proposed draining Lough Neagh to give Northern Ireland a seventh county. That never happened, but in the world of Carson’s novel it did, creating “the Ark,” an archipelago of islands in the large lake. It was primarily a refuge for people fleeing the Troubles – and also happens to provide a nice raft of allusions to the Book of Genesis. In 2017, middle-aged siblings Marion and Robert-John Connolly are two of the last few remaining residents of the Ark, working as caretakers. They grew up here with their overbearing anthropologist father and German mother. Rumour has it that the government will soon flood the lake to deal with an algae bloom. The Connollys hope that the arrival of Alex Anderson, a homegrown academic writing a history of the Ark, will be their chance to defend their home.

Carson has given careful attention to her worldbuilding here. Along with the previously inhabited islands are four on the “Far Side” that seem more metaphorical: Middle Flat houses “the Sleepers,” who are in a coma due to trauma (cf. Suzanne O’Sullivan’s The Sleeping Beauties); Church Flat is a sort of bardo for the “Almost Dead”; Tom’s Hard is a suicide spot; and Eglish Flat is where people go to bury things they don’t want anyone to know about. Except, like the return of the repressed made physical, all that detritus has been resurfacing. Excerpts from Alex’s manuscript in progress treat this all matter-of-factly, and before long it all feels completely natural. Flashbacks to the 1970s and 1990s fill in backstories for the oddball central characters, whose off-kilter upbringing keeps them tied to an island chain that harbours as many bad memories as good ones. This was intriguing for its blend of realism and fabulist elements; I never knew what was going to happen next. I’ll read more by Carson for sure.

With thanks to Scribner for the proof copy for review.

Eating Air by Suyin Du Bois

In this yummy debut poetry pamphlet, food is wrapped up with memory and serves as tokens of a mixed Chinese-Malaysian and Belgian identity. Sometimes when Du Bois is travelling in Asia, people assume that she is a total foreigner and bring her a fork instead of chopsticks, or remark on her bravery in trying dishes that are an acquired taste. In fact, she’s up for eating anything, no matter how spicy or unusual. Food can be about travel and adventure, but also about comfort and a sense of home. Family chats and celebrations revolve around good meals and drink: “We sate silence with stories / of firm favourites and elusive treats we long for”. A trip to London’s Chinatown entails more of that delicious alliteration and sibilance: “a pile of slender leaves serenades me with its many names: / eng chai, ong choy, kangkong, water spinach, morning glory.” I particularly loved the clever blend of cookery and family tradition in “Ode to Kaya,” where the quest for the perfect egg jam made with palm sugar and coconut milk brings back memories of a departed relative: “Goh Ee Poh has long since condensed / into photographs, so I sweeten my never-asked / regret, trace down someone else’s heirloom recipe.” These 19 poems are a feast, ranging widely across places, languages and cuisines.

With thanks to The Emma Press for the free copy for review.

Unwilded: Finding Our Way Back to Nature by Alastair Humphreys

I discovered Humphreys’ work through his previous book, the Wainwright Prize-longlisted Local (and he’s now a judge for this year’s nature writing race). His wry, sometimes silly tone is reminiscent of Lev Parikian, and the two authors share a clear passion for the natural world and for enthusing others about its everyday wonders here in England. Humphreys opens with two recent events that reassured him that people care about nature: the public outcry that greeted the illegal cutting down of the famous Sycamore Gap tree at Hadrian’s Wall, and the joyful (if competitive) response to sightings of the Aurora Borealis. The former also serves as a cautionary tale of what happens when people are disconnected from nature: The two men convicted for the Sycamore Gap incident retorted that it was “just a tree.”

Humphreys doesn’t point fingers but acknowledges that the issue is systemic and affects all of us, even avowed countryside-lovers: “Our busy indoor lives, the moth-like lure of bright screens and shopping centres, and restricted access to much of our remaining green space all combine to make us more disconnected from the natural world than any previous generation.” Short chapters give strategies for various activities that, in as little as 15 minutes, could get people more engaged with the outdoors: litter picking, photographing the same tree every week for a year, foraging for blackberries, testing the water quality in a local stream, wild swimming, planting trees, and joining in a parkrun. I liked his idea of marking each full moon by enjoying a different spot by night. He also worked outdoors for one hour per day for a week, and dabbled in performance art through graffiti reading “15 Minutes to Nature” with an arrow or “NOTICE THIS TREE.” It’s easy to become disheartened by the scale of environmental problems, but Humphreys suggests choosing five to focus on, and then joining up with other local concerned citizens to work towards five corresponding mitigating actions. This is a readable and practical book written with a light touch. Like Lucy Jones’s Losing Eden, it ends with a utopian epilogue imagining humans living in harmony with a restored natural world. Let’s all keep living in hope, and doing our bit to make it a reality.

With thanks to the author and Eye Books for the free copy for review.

Afterlight by Caleb Nolen

Nolen’s debut collection won the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry (the same award that my old blogger friend Carolyn Oliver won for her first book, Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble). It reflects on an early life marked by male friendship, addiction and other self-destructive behaviours, including suicidal ideation. The poet barely knew his father, who had a new wife and kids and treated meetings with his older sons as begrudged obligations. He and his high school friends snuck beer, weed and prescription pills. There were other even more dangerous things around, too –

from “First Gun”

A pistol, wrapped in an old shirt, hidden behind a panel

in his parents’ basement. When he brought it out to show us,

he held it carefully in both hands.

I was reading this collection at the same time as Michael Amherst’s The Boyhood of Cain, and the two chimed for their equation of expected masculinity with violence –

from “Letter to Cain”

My first consolation, my first friend,

tell me what you learned when the blood cried out:

 

who are we the keepers of, we who were not kept?

Nolen is 40, too young to have four dead friends – Bobby, Mike, Jonathan and Troy – threading through his memory. The book is rife with biblical references (“Jonah Years,” “Killing the Fattened Calf”), including letters addressed to particular figures: Abel, Job, the Woman Taken in Adultery, Paul the Apostle, Judas, the Man Possessed by Demons. Personal and religious history mesh, such that the quartet of departed friends are included alongside Mary of Oignies and the like in an Appendix of Hagiographies.

You’re making a life out of scribbling

the names of your dead friends.

This is a sombre collection that looks back with pain rather than nostalgia. Gentle alliteration and glimpses of nature help to make the vision of the past endurable.

With thanks to the University of Utah Press for the advanced e-copy for review.

Yellow Pine by Claire Vaye Watkins

Watkins’s fourth work of fiction exudes love for a distinctive and endangered landscape: the deserts of the American West. Rose has worked for the Sierra Club and has a preteen daughter, Juniper, who lives with her father back east. The book opens with Miles, a former lover, returning to Rose’s life. Approaching age 40 and grieving her alcoholic mother’s untimely death, she finds herself yearning for a baby even though she feels it’s morally questionable to have children in a time of climate breakdown. If Miles won’t commit, she has a backup plan called “The Swirl” whereby male acquaintances will be invited to inseminate her after signing away parental rights. (Just the sperm, thanks; Rose will take care of the rest.) Meanwhile, she’s part of a loose group based at the Yellow Pine encampment, protesting the construction of a solar farm that would devastate local tortoise populations. The defenders’ impassioned conversations about how to work toward good in a time of corporation-driven extinctions are a highlight. It’s a bold, kooky, horny novel in the same vein as Melissa Broder’s Death Valley and Miranda July’s All Fours, but still manages an intellectual rigour and felicity of prose that I perhaps wasn’t expecting. Some sample lines:

It was surprisingly nice to be named a friend by the man who’d once poured salt on the slug of her heart

Rose and Miles sallied forth, trying again in Indian summer in a low-key failed state on a dying planet.

Love laid down a new layer. Rose’s despair patinaed with faith.

“I’m trying to be unapocalyptic. I’m trying to be practical.”

I’ve been reading Watkins since her debut story collection, Battleborn, won the Dylan Thomas Prize, though it’s her first novel, Gold Fame Citrus, to which I’m most partial. Her third book, I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness, went too far off the rails for me, whereas this one is a return to form. The outlook is a little bit woo-woo and I appreciated the environmental theme more than the indulgent autofiction framework. Still, it feels realistic and up-to-the-minute, positing human connection and purposeful collective action as antidotes to hopelessness. (“It wasn’t enough to be anti … You had to be for something.”)

With thanks to riverrun/John Murray (Hachette) for the free copy for review.

Which of these July releases have you read, or will you seek out now?

What am I missing out on?