#ReadIndies Wrap-Up: February Releases (Jukes, Spence) & Review Catch-Up (Buttery, Foust)
Good riddance to February, which added insult to injury on its final day when my in-laws’ neighbour reversed into the car we were borrowing from a book club friend and smashed the driver’s-side window. The blue skies and crocuses of recent days have been most welcome. The best I can say for the month just departed is that I managed to review 15 books for Kaggsy and Lizzy Siddal’s Reading Independent Publishers Month challenge. These came from 10 splendid publishers: Atlantic Books, Backbone Press, Carcanet Press, Counterpoint, Elliott & Thompson, The Emma Press, Faber, Icon Books, Saraband and Sort Of Books.
Mother Animal by Helen Jukes
When she found out she was pregnant, Jukes (author of A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings) lost herself in research, looking for parallels in the natural world. A friend had told her that “childbirth puts you more in touch with your animal side.” Her daughter was born at the start of the pandemic and so early motherhood was perhaps more than usually isolated and emotionally challenging for her. She had an unexpected C-section after the placenta failed to nourish her daughter sufficiently, and then struggled to breastfeed. “I was, I realised, a little afraid of the baby. I’d expected to feel a sense of recognition – to see in her face some sign of familiarity,” but that wasn’t the case. “She was so … other.”
The long thematic chapters present Jukes’s experiences in parallel to those of other mothering creatures with pregnancy, birth, lactation, making a home (nesting) and enlisting the help of the community. Peppered throughout are trivia she shares with boyfriend, baby and readers. Such as that burying beetles lay eggs on a carcass so their babies feed on carrion from day one. That bonobo females attend births, acting as midwives for each other. That Madrid’s storks have started eating and lining their nests with what they find in landfill instead of migrating to Africa. The “Did you know?” litany quickly becomes precious. The details are not that interesting in themselves, and not sufficiently synthesized to be meaningful. The same factoid about leopard tree iguanas is repeated seven pages apart. A significant amount of information comes from Bitch by Lucy Cooke, which I would recommend instead.
As hybrid scientific memoirs of motherhood go, Lucy Jones’s Matrescence can’t be beat. For its social and political engagement, Jennifer Case’s We Are Animals is a valuable companion. Jukes’s offering pales by comparison because her story – not having the delivery she wanted, struggling to connect with her baby, her relationship with the father falling apart – is all too common, and she doesn’t have the scientific bona fides for readers to accept her as a valid source of zoological facts.
I would make an exception, though, for the central chapter, “Forever Milk,” which might be condensed and published in a big-name newspaper as a Rachel Carson-like exposé about endocrine disruptors and forever chemicals. Like any mother, Jukes wants nothing more than to protect her daughter, but how can she when household products (waterproof clothing, non-stick pans, cleaning sprays) contain toxic chemicals and her breastmilk is sure to be contaminated? Add in microplastics and the situation is bleak. We don’t know singly, let alone collectively, what these pollutants are doing to species in the long term, but most likely they interfere with reproduction and alter behaviour. The central message of this chapter, and the book as a whole, is that animals are amazing but vulnerable. “What is this world if nowhere is separate – nowhere safe?” If you think about this stuff much, you can’t bear it. Yet it’s a truth we all have to live with. It’s a brave author who dares sit with the unthinkable.
With thanks to Elliott & Thompson for the free copy for review.
Daughter of the Sun by Rachel Spence
The Emma Press has published poetry pamphlets before, but this is their inaugural full-length work. Rachel Spence’s second collection is in two parts: first is “Call & Response,” a sonnet sequence structured as a play and considering her relationship with her mother. Act 1 starts in 1976 and zooms forward to key moments when they fell out and then reversed their estrangement. The next section finds them in the new roles of patient and carer. “Your final check-up. August. Nimbus clouds / prised open by Delft blue. Waiting is hard.” In Act 3, death is near; “in that quantum hinge, we made / an alphabet from love’s ungrammared stutter.” The poems of the last act are dated precisely, not just to a month and year as earlier but down to the very day, hour and minute. Whether in Ludlow or Venice, Spence crystallizes moments from the ongoingness of grief, drawing images from the natural world.
The second part of the book, “Medea’s Song,” is looser in style and more dispersed across the page. It’s a feminist reinterpretation that refuses to make of Medea a simple murderess, instead redeeming her as a wise woman. “Do not call them seers or sisters // They are the owls of history // nightfliers outliers”. I’m not drawn to Greek myth updates but I expect this would be rewarding for fans of similar projects by Fiona Benson and Anne Carson. Some of the specific vocabulary from the first section recurs, linking the two in a satisfying way.
With thanks to The Emma Press for the free copy for review.
I’m also catching up on two 2024 releases from indie publishers that I was sent for review:
Knead to Know: A History of Baking by Neil Buttery
Not only the pun-tastic title, but also the excellent nominative determinism of chef and food historian Dr Neil Buttery’s name, earned this a place in my 2024 Superlatives post. In not quite 240 pages, it achieves the improbable, producing an exhaustive history of baked goods through miniature essays about every conceivable subcategory. Although the focus is on British baking, the story begins in ancient times with the first grains and the earliest cooking technique of making griddlecakes on a hearthstone. (Speaking of which, make sure you’re prepared for Pancake Day, aka Shrove Tuesday, this week!) Across multi-part chapters about bread, biscuits and cakes, pies and puddings, and patisserie, Buttery spotlights regional specialties, many of them familiar (Cornish pasties and Eccles cakes); a few have fallen into obscurity (Gloucester pancakes and Yorkshire Christmas pyes). Some dishes’ origin stories are apocryphal, while others can be traced back to historical cookbooks.
I was fascinated by the evolution of traditional holiday bakes. “The long tapering shape of the stollen is supposed to represent the infant Christ wrapped in His swaddling.” In general, there is just the right amount of chemistry, and while in places the writing is shaky or at least poorly edited (“populous” instead of populace!), there are good quips, too: “dried fruit haters do have a miserable time at Christmas to be fair.” I read the book in bites across a number of months, which felt appropriate because it’s more a reference text for the kitchen shelf than a narrative to read straight through. Good for picking up now and then over a cup of tea.
With thanks to Icon Books for the free copy for review.
You Are Leaving the American Sector: Love Poems by Rebecca Foust
Foust’s fifth collection – at 41 pages, the length of a long chapbook – is in conversation with the language and storyline of 1984. George Orwell’s classic took on new prescience for her during Donald Trump’s first presidential term, a period marked by a pandemic as well as by corruption, doublespeak and violence. “Rally Insurrection” is a clever erasure poem illustrating how a propagandist might rebrand the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021: instead of “a mob came to Washington to / disrupt the peaceful transfer of power,” the Ministry of Truth bulletin would read “a crowd came to Washington to fight / for their country”. “Language Matters” insists that “language / is the most dangerous weapon in any totalitarian arsenal” and warns “A dictator / might do these things, but surely not // a president.” How much more strongly does this resonate in 2025.
The second and third sections engage directly with the story of Julia and Winston – the collection takes its seemingly inapt subtitle from Foust’s appreciation of 1984’s “idea of love as a subversive act affirming free will, expression, and personal privacy”. Her bold verse also confronts the repeal of abortion rights (“Breaking News”) and toxic masculinity (“Consent: A Primer”). There are some internal rhymes and slant rhymes, as well as a few end rhymes all the more striking for their rarity. I only wish this had been published a few years sooner, when its message might have seemed timelier – though, unfortunately, it is still apropos.
Some favorite lines:
“How can a future exist if we can erase or revise the past?”
“2016, dark year / of the ascension / of our Lord the Mad Clown”
“It’s happening now, / somewhere. Not here, // not yet. But so long as Big Brother is out there— / & he will always be out there—it could, // & one day, maybe it will.”
Published by Backbone Press in the USA. With thanks to the author for the e-copy for review.
Which of these appeal to you? What indie publishers have you read from recently?
The Moomins and the Great Flood (#Moomins80) & Poetry (#ReadIndies)
To mark the 80th anniversary of Tove Jansson’s Moomins books, Kaggsy, Liz et al. are doing a readalong of the whole series, starting with The Moomins and the Great Flood. I received a copy of Sort Of Books’ 2024 reissue edition for Christmas, so I was unknowingly all set to take part. I also give quick responses to a couple of collections I read recently from two favourite indie poetry publishers in the UK, The Emma Press and Carcanet Press. These are reads 9–11 for Kaggsy and Lizzy Siddal’s Reading Independent Publishers Month challenge.
The Moomins and the Great Flood by Tove Jansson (1945; 1991)
[Translated from the Swedish by David McDuff]
Moomintroll and Moominmamma are the only two Moomins who appear here. They’re nomads, looking for a place to call home and searching for Moominpappa, who has disappeared. With them are “the creature” (later known as Sniff) and Tulippa, a beautiful flower-girl. They encounter a Serpent and a sea-troll and make a stormy journey in a boat piloted by the Hattifatteners. My favourite scene has Moominmamma rescuing a cat and her kittens from rising floodwaters. The book ends with the central pair making their way to the idyllic valley that will be the base for all their future adventures. Sort Of and Frank Cottrell Boyce, who wrote an introduction, emphasize how (climate) refugees link Jansson’s writing in 1939 to today, but it’s a subtle theme. Still, one always worth drawing attention to.
I read my first Moomins tale in 2011 and have been reading them out of order and at random ever since; only one remains unread. Unfortunately, I did not find it rewarding to go right back to the beginning. At barely 50 pages (padded out by the Cottrell-Boyce introduction and an appendix of Jansson’s who’s-who notes), this story feels scant, offering little more than a hint of the delightful recurring characters and themes to come. Jansson had not yet given the Moomins their trademark rounded hippo-like snouts; they’re more alien and less cute here. It’s like seeing early Jim Henson drawings of Garfield before he was a fat cat. That just ain’t right. I don’t know why I’d assumed the Moomins are human-size. When you see one next to a marabou stork you realize how tiny they are; Jansson’s notes specify 20 cm tall. (Gift)
The Emma Press Anthology of Homesickness and Exile, ed. by Rachel Piercey and Emma Wright (2014)
This early anthology chimes with the review above, as well as more generally with the Moomins series’ frequent tone of melancholy and nostalgia. A couple of excerpts from Stephen Sexton’s “Skype” reveal a typical viewpoint: “That it’s strange to miss home / and be in it” and “How strange home / does not stay as it’s left.” (Such wonderfully off-kilter enjambment in the latter!) People are always changing, just as much as places – ‘You can’t go home again’; ‘You never set foot in the same river twice’ and so on. Zeina Hashem Beck captures these ideas in the first stanza of “Ten Years Later in a Different Bar”: “The city has changed like cities do; / the bar where we sang has closed. / We have changed like cities do.”
Departures, arrivals; longing, regret: these are classic themes from Ovid (the inspiration for this volume) onward. Holly Hopkins and Rachel Long were additional familiar names for me to see in the table of contents. My two favourite poems were “The Restaurant at One Thousand Feet” (about the CN Tower in Toronto) by John McCullough, whose collections I’ve enjoyed before; and “The Town” by Alex Bell, which personifies a closed-minded Dorset community – “The town wraps me tight as swaddling … When I came to the town I brought things with me / from outside, and the town took them / for my own good.” Home is complicated – something one might spend an entire life searching for, or trying to escape. (New purchase from publisher)
Gold by Elaine Feinstein (2000)
I’d enjoyed Feinstein’s poetry before. The long title poem, which opens the collection, is a monologue by Lorenzo da Ponte, a collaborator of Mozart. Though I was not particularly enraptured with his story, there were some great lines here:
I wanted to live with a bit of flash and brio,
rather than huddle behind ghetto gates.
The last two stanzas are especially memorable:
Poor Mozart was so much less fortunate.
My only sadness is to think of him, a pauper,
lying in his grave, while I became
Professor of Italian literature.
Nobody living can predict their fate.
I moved across the cusp of a new age,
to reach this present hour of privilege.
On this earth, luck is worth more than gold.
Politics, manners, morals all evolve
uncertainly. Best then to be bold.
Best then to be bold!
Of the discrete “Lyrics” that follow, I most liked “Options,” about a former fiancé (“who can tell how long we would have / burned together, before turning to ash?”) and “Snowdonia,” in which she’s surprised when a memory of her father resurfaces through a photograph. Talking to the Dead was more consistently engaging. (Secondhand purchase – Bridport Old Books, 2023)
Winter Reads, I: Michael Cunningham & Helen Moat
It’s been feeling springlike in southern England with plenty of birdsong and flowers, yet cold weather keeps making periodic returns. (For my next instalment of wintry reads, I’ll try to attract some snow to match the snowdrops by reading three “Snow” books.) Today I have a novel drawing on a melancholy Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale and a nature/travel book about learning to appreciate winter.
The Snow Queen by Michael Cunningham (2014)
It was among my favourite first lines encountered last year: “A celestial light appeared to Barrett Meeks in the sky over Central Park, four days after Barrett had been mauled, once again, by love.” Barrett is gay and shares an apartment with his brother, Tyler, and Tyler’s fiancée, Beth. Beth has cancer and, though none of them has dared to hope that she will live, Barrett’s epiphany brings a supernatural optimism that will fuel them through the next few years, from one presidential election autumn (2004) to the next (2008). Meanwhile, Tyler, a stalled musician, returns to drugs to try to find inspiration for his wedding song for Beth. The other characters in the orbit of this odd love triangle of sorts are Liz, Beth and Barrett’s boss at a vintage clothing store, and Andrew, Liz’s decades-younger boyfriend. It’s a peculiar family unit that expands and contracts over the years.
Of course, Cunningham takes inspiration, thematically and linguistically, from Hans Christian Andersen’s tale about love and conversion, most obviously in an early dreamlike passage about Tyler letting snow swirl into the apartment through the open windows:
He returns to the window. If that windblown ice crystal meant to weld itself to his eye, the transformation is already complete; he can see more clearly now with the aid of this minuscule magnifying mirror…
I was most captivated by the early chapters of the novel, picking it up late one night and racing to page 75, which is almost unheard of for me. The rest took me significantly longer to get through, and in the intervening five weeks or so much of the detail has evaporated. But I remember that I got Chris Adrian and Julia Glass vibes from the plot and loved the showy prose. (And several times while reading I remarked to people around me how ironic it was that these characters in a 2014 novel are so outraged about Dubya’s re-election. Just you all wait two years, and then another eight!)
I fancy going on a mini Cunningham binge this year. I plan to recommend The Hours for book club, which would be a reread for me. Otherwise, I’ve only read his travel book, Land’s End. I own a copy of Specimen Days and the library has Day, but I’d have to source all the rest secondhand. Simon of Stuck in a Book is a big fan and here are his rankings. I have some great stuff ahead! (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com)
While the Earth Holds Its Breath: Embracing the Winter Season by Helen Moat (2024)
Like many of us, Moat struggles with mood and motivation during the darkest and coldest months of the year. Over the course of three recent winters overlapping with the pandemic, she strove to change her attitude. The book spins short autobiographical pieces out of wintry walks near her Derbyshire home or further afield. Paying closer attention to the natural spectacles of the season and indulging in cosy food and holiday rituals helped, as did trips to places where winters are either a welcome respite (Spain) or so much harsher as to put her own into perspective (Lapland and Japan). My favourite pieces of all were about sharing English Christmas traditions with new Ukrainian refugee friends.
There were many incidents and emotions I could relate to here – a walk on the canal towpath always makes me feel better, and the car-heavy lifestyle I resume on trips to America feels unnatural.
Days are where we must live, but it didn’t have to be a prison of house and walls. I needed the rush of air, the slap of wind on my cheeks. I needed to feel alive. Outdoors.
I’d never liked the rain, but if I were to grow to love winters on my island, I had to learn to love wet weather, go out in it.
What can there be but winter? It belongs to the circle of life. And I belonged to winter, whether I liked it or not. Indoors, or moving from house to vehicle and back to house again, I lost all sense of my place on this Earth. This world would be my home for just the smallest of moments in the vastness of time, in the turning of the seasons. It was a privilege, I realised.
However, the content is repetitive such that the three-year cycle doesn’t add a lot and the same sorts of pat sentences about learning to love winter recur. Were the timeline condensed, there might have been more of a focus on the more interesting travel segments, which also include France and Scotland. So many have jumped on the Wintering bandwagon, but Katherine May’s book felt fresh in a way the others haven’t.
With thanks to Saraband for the free copy for review.
Any wintry reading (or weather) for you lately?
Paul Auster Reading Week, II: Baumgartner & Travels in the Scriptorium (#AusterRW25 #ReadIndies)
It’s the final day of Annabel’s Paul Auster Reading Week and, after last week’s reviews of Invisible and Siri Hustvedt’s The Blindfold, I’m squeaking in with a short review of his final novel, Baumgartner, which Annabel chose as the buddy read and Cathy also wrote about. I paired it at random with another of his novellas and found that the two have a similar basic setup: an elderly man being let down by his body and struggling to memorialize what is important from his earlier life. They also happen to feature a character named Anna Blume, and other character names recur from his previous work. I wonder how fair it would be to say that most of Auster’s novels have the same autofiction-inspired protagonist, and are part of the same interlocking universe (à la David Mitchell and Elizabeth Strout)?
Baumgartner (2023)
Sy Baumgartner is a Princeton philosophy professor nearing retirement. The accidental death of his wife, Anna Blume, a decade ago, is still a raw loss he compares to a phantom limb. Only now can he bring himself to consider 1) proposing marriage to his younger colleague and longtime casual girlfriend, Judith Feuer, and 2) allowing a PhD student to sort through reams of Anna’s unpublished work, including poetry, translations and unfinished novels. The book includes a few of her autobiographical fragments, as well as excerpts from his writings, such as an account of a trip to Ukraine to explore his heritage (elsewhere we learn his mother’s name was Ruth Auster) and a précis of his book about car culture.
Baumgartner’s past is similar to Auster’s (and Adam Walker’s from Invisible – the two characters have a mutual friend in writer James Freeman), but not identical. His childhood memories and the passion and companionship he found with Anna are quite sweet. But I was somewhat thrown by the tone in sections that have this grumpy older man experiencing pseudo-comic incidents such as tumbling down the stairs while showing the meter reader the way. To my relief, the book doesn’t take the tragic turn the last pages seem to augur, instead leaving readers with a nicely open ending.
It’s not this that makes Baumgartner feel incomplete so much as the fact that any of its threads might have been expanded into a full-length novel. Maybe Auster had various projects on the go at the time of his final illness and combined them. That could explain the mishmash. I also had the odd sense that there were unconscious pastiches of other authors. Baumgartner reminds me a lot of James Darke, the curmudgeonly widower in Rick Gekoski’s pair of novels. When Baumgartner speaks to his dead wife on the telephone, I went hunting through my notes because I knew I’d encountered that specific plot before (the short story “The Telephone” by Mary Treadgold, collected in Fear, edited by Roald Dahl). The Ukraine passage might have come from Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer. So, for me, this was less distinctive as Auster works go. However, it’s gently readable and not formally challenging so it’s a pleasant valedictory volume if not the best representative of his oeuvre. (Public library) 
Travels in the Scriptorium (2006)
This is very much in the vein of The Locked Room and Oracle Night and indeed makes reference to characters from those earlier books (Sophie Fanshawe and Peter Stillman from the former; John Trause from the latter). Mr. Blank lives in a sparse room containing manuscript pages and a stack of photographs. He is tended by a nurse named Anna Blume and given a rainbow of pharmaceuticals. Whether the pills help or keep him pacified is unclear. The haziness of his memory could be due to age or the drugs. He receives various visitors he feels he should recognize but can’t, and from the comments they make he fears he is being punished for dangerous missions he spearheaded. Even Anna, object of his pitiable sexual desires, is somehow his moral superior. Everyday self-care is struggle enough for him, but he does end up reading and adding to the partial stories on the table, including a dark Western set in an alternative 19th-century USA. Whatever he’s done in the past, he’s now an imprisoned writer and this is a day in his newly constrained life. The novella is a deliberate assemblage of typical Auster tropes and characters; there’s a puppet-master here, but no point. An indulgent minor work. But that’s okay as I still have plenty of appealing books from his back catalogue to read. [Interestingly, the American cover has a white horse in the centre of the room, an embodiment of Mr. Blank’s childhood memory of a white rocking-horse he called Whitey.] (Public library)
Faber, Auster’s longtime publisher, counts towards Reading Independent Publishers Month.
Paul Auster Reading Week: Invisible (#ReadIndies) & Siri Hustvedt’s The Blindfold (#AusterRW25)
The first time Annabel ran a Paul Auster Reading Week, in 2020, it was a great excuse for me to read six of his books (Winter Journal and The New York Trilogy were amazing; I also really enjoyed Oracle Night). I won’t manage so many this time, but maybe three, as well as one by his widow, Siri Hustvedt. Auster would have been 78 today but died of lung cancer in 2024. As a buddy read, Annabel is inviting people to read his final novel, Baumgartner. I’m partway through that and have another of his novellas waiting in the wings in case I find time.
For now, I’m focusing on a novel that exemplifies some recurring elements of his fiction: a book within a book, fragmented narratives, differing perspectives, cryptic events and the inscrutability of memory and language. I’m pairing it with Hustvedt’s debut novel, which is – not coincidentally, I should think – similarly intricate, weird and unsettling.
Invisible (2009)
To start with, I thought we were in autofiction territory, but Auster swiftly adopts a more typical metafictional approach. Adam Walker is a 20-year-old would-be poet studying at Columbia University in 1967. At a party he meets Rudolf Born, a visiting international affairs professor from Paris, and it seems a good omen: Born invests generously in Adam’s literary magazine and also seems open to sharing his beautiful girlfriend, Margot. But when the men are caught up in an attempted mugging, Adam turns against his idol.
That’s at the heart of Part I (“Spring”). Across four sections, the perspective changes and the narrative is revealed to be 1967, a manuscript Adam began while dying of cancer. “Summer,” in the second person, shines a light on his relationship with his sister, Gwyn. “Fall,” adapted from Adam’s third-person notes by his college friend and fellow author, Jim Freeman, tells of Adam’s study abroad term in Paris. Here he reconnected with Born and Margot with unexpected results. Jim intends to complete the anonymized story with the help of a minor character’s diary, but the challenge is that Adam’s memories don’t match Gwyn’s or Born’s.
I can’t say more about the themes without giving too much away, but this is a provocative novel that makes you question how truth is created or preserved. Who has the right to tell the story, and will justice be done? I wouldn’t say I enjoyed it, but I certainly admired how it was constructed. Auster conjures such a sense of unease, and I always felt like I had no idea what might happen next. With no speech marks, it all flows together in a compulsively readable way. (Secondhand purchase – Awesomebooks.com) 
Faber, Auster’s longtime publisher, counts towards Reading Independent Publishers Month.
The Blindfold by Siri Hustvedt (1992)
“Strange, I thought. Everything is strange.”
I read Hustvedt (The Blazing World) well before I ever tried Auster, and wouldn’t have realized then how similar their books are; they almost seem part of the same body of work. Was Hustvedt a fan or a student of his before they married? I don’t actually know and am loath to dispel the mystery for myself by looking into it. Anyway, there are striking connections between this and Invisible: the narrator is fairly autobiographical and a Columbia University student, the novel is in four loosely connected parts, and the sordid content culminates in a sudden, odd ending. (There’s also the little Easter egg here of “I heard someone shout the name Paul.”) But overall, this is more reminiscent of The New York Trilogy in its surreal randomness and subtly symbolic naming (e.g., the landlord is Mr. Then).
Iris Vegan (Hustvedt’s mother’s surname), like many an Auster character, is bewildered by what happens to her. An impoverished graduate student in literature, she takes on peculiar jobs. First Mr. Morning hires her to make audio recordings meticulously describing artefacts of a woman he’s obsessed with. Iris comes to believe this woman was murdered and rejects the work as invasive. Next she’s a photographer’s model but hates the resulting portrait and tries to take it off display. Then she’s hospitalized for terrible migraines and has upsetting encounters with a fellow patient, old Mrs. O. Finally, she translates a bizarre German novella and impersonates its protagonist, walking the streets in a shabby suit and even telling people her name is Klaus.
I worked out that the chronological order of the parts is 2 – 4 – 3 – 1, with 1 including a recap of the others. The sections feel like separate vignettes, perhaps reflecting Hustvedt’s previous experience with the short story form, and make a less than satisfying whole. I was most engaged with the segment on working for Mr. Morning and thought that might recur, but it doesn’t. Many of the secondary characters are grotesque, whereas Iris is the intellectual waif trying to make her way in the cruel city, almost like a Dickens or Gissing (anti)hero.
It’s refreshing to get a female take on the Bildungsroman and a little bit of gender-bending with the cross-dressing. (Iris reminds me of Lauren Elkin’s Flaneuse.) The title felt like an enigma to me until close to the end, when it’s revealed to be a tool of sexual sadism. Indeed, each of the sections, in its own way, addresses male exploitation of and violence against women. Disappointingly, Iris remains defined by her relationships with men. She deserves better. Heck, she deserves a sequel! It’s interesting to see where Hustvedt got her start, but I didn’t warm to this as I did to later novels including What I Loved. (Secondhand purchase – Community Furniture Project, Newbury)
January Releases: Greathead, Kauffman, Mills & Watts (#ReadIndies)
I feel out of practice writing reviews after the endless period of sluggish and slightly lackluster reading that was January. Here we are at the start of Kaggsy and Lizzy Siddal’s Reading Independent Publishers Month challenge and I’m happy to make this my first tie-in post as these four books all happen to be from independent publishers. The first two are American novels (that could arguably be called linked short story collections) very much in my wheelhouse for their focus on dysfunctional families and disappointing characters. I also have a group biography aiming to illuminate bisexuality, and a poetry collection about girlhood/womanhood and nature.
The Book of George by Kate Greathead
The marketing for this novel courts relatability: you probably know a George – you might have dated one (women read the most litfic). Each chapter dates to a different period in George’s life, adolescence to late thirties. From the fact that 9/11 happened when he was a college freshman, I know he’s my exact contemporary, and I could indeed see bits of myself in this Everyman schmuck: indecisive, lazy, underachieving, privileged but never living up to his own or others’ expectations. Life keeps happening around him, but you wonder if he’ll ever make something happen for himself. Two gags are revealing: In college he is known for his impression of a clinically depressed penis going through airport security, and later he has 15 minutes of fame for appearing in a hidden-camera Super Bowl commercial. He’s been writing fiction for years – first a Stoner rip-off, then a Kerouac homage – but by the time he gets a short story collection together, it’s the height of #MeToo and he’s missed his moment to publish. Meanwhile, his cohort is doing great things, winning awards for documentaries (his pal Jeremiah) or becoming pro bono lawyers (his longsuffering girlfriend Jenny).
If you need to like a protagonist, expect frustration. Some of George’s behaviour is downright maddening, as when he obsessively plays his old Gameboy while his mother and Jenny pack up his childhood room. Tracing his relationships with his mother, his sister Cressida, and Jenny is rewarding. Sometimes they confront him over his shortcomings; other times they enable him. The novel is very funny, but it’s a biting, ironic humour, and there’s plenty of pathos as well. There are a few particular gut-punches, one relating to George’s father and others surrounding nice things he tries to do that backfire horribly. I thought of George as a rejoinder to all those ‘So-and-So Is Not Okay at All’ type of books featuring a face-planting woman on the cover. Greathead’s portrait is incisive but also loving. And yes, there is that hint of George, c’est moi recognition. His failings are all too common: the mildest of first-world tragedies but still enough to knock your confidence and make you question your purpose. For me this had something of the old-school charm of Jennifer Egan and Jonathan Safran Foer novels I read in the Naughties. I’ll seek out the author’s debut, Laura & Emma.
With thanks to Atlantic Books for the free copy for review. (Published in the USA by Henry Holt and Co. in 2024.)
I’ll Come to You by Rebecca Kauffman
Is 30 years long enough ago to count as historical fiction? In any case, this takes us through the whole of 1995, proceeding month by month and rotating through the close third-person perspectives of the members of one extended family as they navigate illnesses, break-ups and fraught parenting journeys. Corinne and Paul are trying to get pregnant; Paul’s mother, Ellen (again!), is still smarting from her husband leaving with no explanation; Corinne’s father, Bruce, has dementia but his wife, Janet, is doing her best to keep his cognitive deficiencies from the rest of the family. Son Rob is bitter about his ex-wife moving on so quickly, but both he and Ellen will have new romantic prospects before the end.
The family’s lies and secrets – also involving a Christmas run-in with Bruce’s shell-shocked brother decades ago – lead to everything coming to a head in a snowstorm. (As best I can tell, the 1995 setting was important mostly so there wouldn’t be cell phones during this crisis.) As with The Book of George, the episodic nature of the narrative means that particular moments are memorable but the whole maybe less so, and the interactions between characters stand out more than the people themselves. I’ll Come to You, named after a throwaway line in the text, is poorly served by both its cover and title, which give no sense of the contents. However, it’s a sweet, offbeat portrait of genuine, if generic, Americans; I was most reminded of J. Ryan Stradal’s work. Although I DNFed Kauffman’s The Gunners some years back, I’d be interested in trying her again with Chorus, which sounds like another linked story collection.
With thanks to Counterpoint (USA) for the advanced e-copy for review.
Uneven: Nine Lives that Redefined Bisexuality by Sam Mills
Back in 2022 I reviewed Julia Shaw’s Bi: The hidden culture, history and science of bisexuality, which took a social sciences approach. By contrast, this is a group biography of nine bisexuals – make that 10, as there are plenty of short memoir-ish passages from Mills, too. Oscar Wilde, Colette, Marlene Dietrich, Anaïs Nin, Susan Sontag: more or less familiar names, though not all of them are necessarily known for their sexuality. The chapters deliver standard potted biographies of the individuals’ work and relationships, probably containing little that couldn’t be found elsewhere in recent scholarship and not really living up to the revolutionary promise of the subtitle. However, it was worthwhile for Mills to recover Wilde as a bisexual rather than a closeted homosexual. A final trilogy of chapters comes more up to date with David Bowie, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Madonna. The closer to the present day, the more satisfying connections there are between figures. For instance, Madonna looked to both Dietrich and Bowie as role models and fashion icons, and she and Basquiat were lovers.
Mills and Shaw consider the same fundamental issues: bi erasure, with bisexuality the least understood and most easily overlooked element of LGBT and many passing as straight if in heterosexual marriages; and the stereotype of bis as hypersexual or promiscuous. Mills is keen to stress that bisexuals have very different trajectories and phases. Like Wilde, they might have a heterosexual era of happy marriage and parenthood followed by a homosexual spree. Or they might have simultaneous lovers of multiple genders. Some might never even act on strong same-sex desires. (Late last year I encountered a similar unity-in-diversity approach in Daniel Tamet’s Nine Minds, a group biography about autistic people.)
The 1890s to 1980s window allows for a record of changing mores yet means that the book seems rather dated. Were it written by an author of a later generation (Mills, who I knew for The Fragments of My Father, is around 50), the point of view and terminology would likely be quite different. Also, including a section on Bessie Smith within a chapter mostly on Colette felt tokenistic. (Though later considering Basquiat separately does add a BIPOC view.) Ultimately, though, my problem with Uneven was that I don’t want to know about behaviour – which is all that a biography can usually document – so much as the internal, soul stuff. Even from Mills, whose accounts of her long-term relationships and flings (including, yes, a threesome) can be titillating but not very enlightening, I didn’t get a sense of what it feels like. So neither the Shaw nor the Mills gave me precisely what I was looking for, which means that the perfect book on bisexuality either doesn’t exist or is out there but I haven’t found it yet. Any suggestions?
With thanks to Atlantic Books for the free copy for review.
The Face in the Well by Rebecca Watts
I’ve also read Watts’ The Met Office Advises Caution and Red Gloves; this is her third collection. The Suffolk and Cambridgeshire scenery of her early and adult lives weaves all through, sometimes as an idyll that blurs the lines between humans and nature (“Private No Access”) but other times provoking anxiety about common or gendered dangers, as in the title poem or “The Old Mill” (“What happened there, / down by the old mill, / they never tell. // Something about / a man and a girl / is the most you’ll hear.”). “Woman Seeks” is a tongue-in-cheek advert for the perfect man. Animals – a dolphin, a shark, rodents, a wandering albatross, a robin – recur, as do women poets, especially Emily Brontë, and Victorian death culture (“Victoriana” and “Baroque”). Adulthood brings routine whereas childhood stands out for minor miracles, such as a free soda from a vending machine.
The format and tone vary a lot, so the book is more of a grab bag than a cohesive statement. I noted slant rhymes and alliteration, always a favourite technique of mine. I especially liked “Entropy,” about finding a slice of cake in the freezer labeled by someone who is now dead (“Nothing ever // really dies: all the pieces of you / persist, riven and reconfigured / in infinite unknowable ways”) and “Personal Effects,” about the artefacts from her childhood that her mother guards under the bed (“twists of my hair, my teeth, / my bracelet from the hospital.”).
With thanks to Carcanet Press for the advanced e-copy for review.
Which of these appeal to you? What indie publishers have you been reading from recently?
Miscellaneous #ReadIndies Reviews: Mostly Poetry + Brown, Sands
Catching up on a few final #ReadIndies contributions in early March! Short responses to some indie reading I did from my shelves over the course of last month.
Bloodaxe Books:
Parables & Faxes by Gwyneth Lewis (1995)
I was surprised to discover this was actually my fourth book by Lewis, a bilingual Welsh author: two memoirs, one of depression and one about marriage; and now two poetry collections. The table of contents suggest there are only 16 poems in the book, but most of the titles are actually headings for sections of anywhere between 6 and 16 separate poems. She ranges widely at home and abroad, as in “Welsh Espionage” and the “Illinois Idylls.” “I shall taste the tang / of travel on the atlas of my tongue,” Lewis writes, an example of her alliteration and sibilance. She’s also big on slant and internal rhymes – less so on end rhymes, though there are some. Medieval history and theology loom large, with the Annunciation featuring more than once. I couldn’t tell you now what that many of the poems are about, but Lewis’s telling is always memorable.
Sample lines:
For the one
who said yes,
how many
said no?
…
But those who said no
for ever knew
they were damned
to the daily
as they’d disallowed
reality’s madness,
its astonishment.
(from “The ‘No’ Madonnas,” part of “Parables & Faxes”)
(Secondhand purchase – Westwood Books, Sedbergh) 
&
Fields Away by Sarah Wardle (2003)
Wardle’s was a new name for me. I saw two of her collections at once and bought this one as it was signed and the themes sounded more interesting to me. It was her first book, written after inpatient treatment for schizophrenia. Many of the poems turn on the contrast between city (London Underground) and countryside (fields and hedgerows). Religion, philosophy, and Greek mythology are common points of reference. End rhymes can be overdone here, and I found a few of the poems unsubtle (“Hubris” re: colonizers and “How to Be Bad” about daily acts of selfishness vs. charity). However, there are enough lovely ones to compensate: “Flight,” “Word Tasting” (mimicking a wine tasting), “After Blake” (reworking “Jerusalem” with “And will chainsaws in modern times / roar among England’s forests green?”), “Translations” and “Word Hill.”
Favourite lines:
(oh, but the last word is cringe!)
Catkin days and hedgerow hours
fleet like shafts of chapel sun.
Childhood in a cobwebbed bower
guards a treasure chest of fun.
(from “Age of Awareness”)
(Secondhand purchase – Carlisle charity shop) 
Carcanet Press:
Tripping Over Clouds by Lucy Burnett (2019)
The title is a setup for the often surrealist approach, but where another Carcanet poet, Caroline Bird, is warm and funny with her absurdism, Burnett is just … weird. Like, I’d get two stanzas into a poem and have no idea what was going on or what she was trying to say because of the incomplete phrases and non-standard punctuation. Still, this is a long enough collection that there are a good number of standouts about nature and relationships, and alliteration and paradoxes are used to good effect. I liked the wordplay in “The flight of the guillemet” and the off-beat love poem “Beer for two in Brockler Park, Berlin.” The noteworthy Part III is composed of 34 ekphrastic poems, each responding to a different work of (usually modern) art.
Favourite lines:
This is a place of uncalled-for space
and by the grace of the big sky,
and the serrated under-silhouette of Skye,
an invitation to the sea unfolds
to come and dine with mountain.
(from “Big Sands”)
(New (bargain) purchase – Waterstones website) 
&
The Met Office Advises Caution by Rebecca Watts (2016)
The problem with buying a book mostly for the title is that often the contents don’t live up to it. (Some of my favourite ever titles – An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam – were of books I couldn’t get through). There are a lot of nature poems here, which typically would be enough to get me on board, but few of them stood out to me. Trees, bats, a dead hare on the road; maps, Oxford scenes, Christmas approaching. All nice enough; maybe it’s just that the poems don’t seem to form a cohesive whole. Easy to say why I love or hate a poet’s style; harder to explain indifference.
Sample lines:
Branches lash out; old trees lie down and don’t get up.
A wheelie bin crosses the road without looking,
lands flat on its face on the other side, spilling its knowledge.
(from the title poem)
(New (bargain) purchase – Amazon with Christmas voucher)
Faber:
Places I’ve Taken My Body by Molly McCully Brown (2020)
The title signals right away how these linked autobiographical essays split the ‘I’ from the body – Brown resents the fact that disability limits her experience. Oxygen deprivation at their premature birth led to her twin sister’s death and left her with cerebral palsy severe enough that she generally uses a wheelchair. In Bologna for a travel fellowship, she writes, “There are so many places that I want to be, but I can’t take my body anywhere. But I must take my body everywhere.” A medieval city is particularly unfriendly to those with mobility challenges, but chronic pain and others’ misconceptions (e.g. she overheard a guy on her college campus lamenting that she’d die a virgin) follow her everywhere.
A poet, Brown earned minor fame for her first collection, which was about historical policies of enforced sterilization for the disabled and mentally ill in her home state of Virginia. She is also a Catholic convert. I appreciated her exploration of poetry and faith as ways of knowing: “both … a matter of attending to the world: of slowing my pace, and focusing my gaze, and quieting my impatient, indignant, protesting heart long enough for the hard shell of the ordinary to break open and reveal the stranger, subtler singing underneath.” This is part of a terrific run of three pieces, the others about sex as a disabled person and the odious conservatism of the founders of Liberty University. Also notable: “Fragments, Never Sent,” letters to her twin; and “Frankenstein Abroad,” about rereading this novel of ostracism at its 200th anniversary. (Secondhand purchase – Amazon)
New River Books:
The Hedgehog Diaries: A Story of Faith, Hope and Bristle by Sarah Sands (2023)
Reasons for reading: 1) I’d enjoyed Sands’s The Interior Silence and 2) Who can resist a book about hedgehogs? She covers a brief slice of 2021–22 when her aged father was dying in a care home. Having found an ill hedgehog in her garden and taken it to a local sanctuary, she developed an interest in the plight of hedgehogs. In surveys they’re the UK’s favourite mammal, but it’s been years since I saw one alive. Sands brings an amateur’s enthusiasm to her research into hedgehogs’ place in literature, philosophy and science. She visits rescue centres, meets activists in Oxfordshire and Shropshire who have made hedgehog welfare a local passion, and travels to Uist to see where hedgehogs were culled in 2004 to protect ground-nesting birds’ eggs. The idea is to link personal brushes with death with wider threats of extinction. Unfortunately, Sands’s lack of expertise is evident. This was well-meaning, but inconsequential and verging on twee. (Christmas gift from my wishlist) 
February Releases by Hess, Kim, Sides (#ReadIndies); Atwood and Shah
I’m pleased to have, between this post and yesterday’s review catch-up, featured 9 books from 8 independent publishers for Read Indies this month. (I have also done some indie reading from my shelves, which I’ll summarize early in March.) Three of the books in my February review stacks were indie releases. I’ve got a hybrid memoir that blends poetic exploration of scripture with personal psychological reflections; an out-of-the-ordinary mystery about a father’s disappearance that comments on disability, racism and much more; and a terrific set of fabulist short stories. My two bonus (non-indie) February books are an unconvincing collaborative novel and a counselling-focussed bibliotherapy guide.
When Fragments Make a Whole: A Personal Journey through Healing Stories in the Bible by Lory Widmer Hess
Some of you may know Lory, who is training as a spiritual director, from her blog, Enter Enchanted. It was so kind of her to get in touch offering her first book for review. It’s a unique combination of poetry, scriptural exegesis, and fragments of memoir. Each chapter considers a different healing story from the Gospels. As in the lectio divina I learned from college Christian fellowships, the idea with the verse retellings from the Bible is to imagine oneself into a character’s position and consider the crises that led to seeking Jesus’ help. I especially liked the poem “Talitha, Koum,” which links the stories of the woman with the issue of blood and the resurrection of Jairus’ daughter. In both, faith reverses a seemingly hopeless situation.
The short sections of commentary draw in a lot of context as well as etymology from the Greek. The autobiographical essays chart a history of physical and mental challenges, including dissociation, low self-esteem and shame, and offer openness to healing as its own miracle when there are no easy answers. They are notable for their vulnerability, especially when discussing marital problems. The outlook is intellectual and psychological rather than the spiritualizing I’m used to from my evangelical background – Lory comes from the anthroposophy tradition, which I don’t claim to fully understand but (I think) eschews dogma like original sin and atonement and instead makes the spiritual journey a matter of human reconnection with God through free will and the intellect. This is nicely balanced, though, by her work with developmentally disabled adults in residential homes in New England and Switzerland, which reminds her “there is a truth beyond intellectual knowledge, a language beyond words”. It is a calm, honest, methodical book that will intrigue anyone interested in thinking through how the Bible is applicable to the challenges of daily life.
With thanks to the author and Floris Books (Edinburgh) for the free copy for review.
Happiness Falls by Angie Kim
Buzz from across the pond about Kim’s novels led me to request this even though I don’t typically read mysteries. The bulk is set over 2.5 days in June 2020 as the Korean American Parkson family investigates, on their own and with the help of police and various local tip-offs, what happened to the father, Adam, who’d been at River Falls Park with the severely disabled 14-year-old son, Eugene, who is autistic and has mosaic Angelman syndrome. Mother Hannah and 20-year-old twins Mia and John, home from college for the lockdown, quickly realise something is wrong when Eugene, who has blood on his shirt and under his nails, stumbles home on his own and Adam is unreachable by phone. There’s more to the setup than that, and many complicated side-tracks to the investigation, but the basic questions remain for 300+ pages: What happened to Adam? and What was Eugene’s part in it?
Mia narrates, and it’s a pleasure spending time with her quick, systematic brain as she runs through all the options and deals with each new theory and red herring. She clearly gets it from her father, whose recovered notebook is full of amateur experimentation on the “Happiness Quotient”. Her wit and garrulousness (sample aside: “I’m sorry, but I don’t care how much you love fun fonts—you cannot talk about prison rape in Comic Sans”) spills over into footnotes as if in effusive counterpoint to Eugene, who is nonspeaking.
The pandemic setting places interesting constraints on the official proceedings, and the prospect of a new communication method (involving painstaking spelling with a letter stencil) revolutionizes this family as they grasp that Eugene is far from nonverbal and has been ‘locked in’ all along. The account a therapist elicits from him seems to clinch the case, but uncertainty lingers.
This is like a blend of Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You, Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions for You, and Naoki Higashida’s The Reason I Jump; if you’ve liked one or more of these, I would strongly recommend it. Mystery readers may lack patience for the digressions. The solution is eclipsed by the many issues – prejudice based on race and disability, how one’s circumstances affect contentment, nuances of communication, sibling relationships and twin ESP – explored along the way. Because I am not a crime reader, the pace was no problem for me. My annoyances were with the preponderance of hindsight (“I wish I’d said something,” “It didn’t occur to me until much later”) and the fact that Mia says “begs the question” for raising a question (misuse of a rhetorical term) several times. I found personal meaning in the book because of the Washington, DC-area locales and my severely disabled, nonverbal goddaughter. What if there really is something going on in her mind, and we could find out what it was… I mused. I’ll be keen to read Kim’s debut, Miracle Creek.
With thanks to Faber for the free copy for review.
Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood by Bradley Sides
These 17 flash fiction stories fully embrace the possibilities of magic and weirdness, particularly to help us reconnect with the dead. Brad and I are literary acquaintances from our time working on (the now defunct) Bookkaholic web magazine in 2014–15. I liked this even more than his first book, Those Fantastic Lives (2021), although the contours are very similar. Young people, animals and monsters abound – and sometimes the lines between those identities are unclear. There’s a lot of experimentation with form: a choose-your-own-adventure narrative, a police transcript, a two-truths-and-a-lie challenge, a story all in questions, an English exam, and a letter. A few of my favorite stories were “The Guide to King George,” about an amusement farm’s resident pond monster; “Claire & Hank,” in which a paleontologist’s unearthed Pteranodon becomes a sister to his motherless son; and “Dying at Allium Farm,” whose sassy undead owners think they’re fooling their Tennessee customers. And can you imagine a better title and cover combination?!
With thanks to Montag Press and publicist Lori Hettler for the e-copy for review.
And a couple of bonus February releases that are not from indie publishers:
Fourteen Days, ed. Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston
This Authors Guild Foundation collaborative project is a Covid-era Decameron update in which the residents of an increasingly derelict New York City apartment complex meet on the rooftop every evening for two early lockdown weeks to clap for healthcare workers, indulge in adult beverages, and swap random stories. The tenants all go by nicknames like “Hello Kitty,” “Florida” and “Vinegar.” The frame narrative has the building superintendent (Yessie, a lesbian of Romanian heritage) worrying over her father’s wellbeing in a care home and surreptitiously recording the oral stories on her phone to later transcribe into the “bible” kept by the previous super. We’re told up front that the manuscript ends up in police custody.
I had a misconception that each chapter would be written by a different author. I think that would actually have been the more interesting approach. Instead, each character is voiced by a different author, and sometimes by multiple authors across the 14 chapters (one per day) – a total of 36 authors took part. I soon wearied of the guess-who game. I most enjoyed the frame story, which was the work of Douglas Preston, a thriller author I don’t otherwise know.
There was a promising idea here, but problems with the execution. One is that, for the most part, the stories are pointless. The characters get hung up on whether they’re ‘true’ or not, but for readers it’s all made up and, while one or two individual tales might be amusing, they do nothing to build a plot and so I found myself mostly skipping over them to get back to the interactions on the roof and the super’s commentary. Another is that, to stand out from an ensemble cast, a voice needs to be really distinctive, and only “Eurovision” (flamboyantly gay) was that for me – based on my love for his rabbit story in particular, I should be reading Joseph Cassara. And finally, the book culminates with an annoying twist that made me cross.
With thanks to Chatto & Windus (Penguin) for the proof copy for review.
Bibliotherapy: The Healing Power of Reading by Bijal Shah
Bibliotherapy is one of my niche bookish interests (see my write-up of my bibliotherapy appointment with Ella Berthoud at the School of Life), so I was delighted to be offered a copy of another relevant book. Bijal Shah grew up in an East African Indian community before moving to the UK with her family as a teenager. When she was in training as a psychodynamic counsellor and attended therapy sessions herself, she realised how helpful literature was in helping her think through traumatic experiences from her past, such as sexism, colourism and a painful break-up. “I have lived half my life in the pages of books,” she observes, “relying on them to put my real life into perspective.” I feel the same way.
The emphasis is very much on therapy here, as Shah elaborates on practices such as literary journaling, recording audio notes, writing poetry, and focusing on gratitude. About half of the book is given over to anonymized sample case studies where she looks at the reasons why a client might come to her for bibliotherapy, the books and exercises she prescribed them, and the sorts of realizations people came to when reflecting on their own lives in relation to what they read. I suspect that the majority of readers, unless they have a vested interest in counselling, will, like me, most enjoy browsing the A–Z list of book prescriptions in the final 20% of the book (with more on Shah’s website). There is good variety to these in terms of author diversity, new vs. backlist reads, and both YA and adult fiction, though most of the recommendations are nonfiction, particularly psychology and self-help: these are much more literal (and, generally, obvious) prescriptions than Berthoud and Elderkin’s playful take.
With thanks to the author and Piatkus (Hachette) for the free copy for review.
#ReadIndies Catch-up: Ansell, Kinard, McNaught, Ponce, Toews and Vara
At last, my first dedicated selections for Read Indies month, two of which have been languishing on the shelf since 2022! A few more indie titles will appear in my February roundup tomorrow. I’ve got a huge variety here: an extended essay comparing life among the unhoused in London in the 1980s with the freedom of the open road and the island of Jura; gospel-saturated poems of queer African American life; an exposé of spiritual abuse in a Pentecostal church with branches in England and Nigeria; an Ecuadorian novella obsessed with bodies and sex; a funny yet heartbreaking novel about a zany family trying not to fall apart; and short stories about siblings, adolescence, memory, death and much more. I name the publishers and other books I have on the docket from each one.
Deer Island by Neil Ansell (2013)
My last unread book by Ansell (whose Deep Country, The Last Wilderness, and The Circling Sky I’ve loved) and one that had been out of print for many years, so it was great to hear that Little Toller was reissuing it. Ansell has visited most countries; pressed for a favourite place, he names the Scottish isle of Jura. In memory he returns to a place he hadn’t been in over 20 years. In the early 1980s he lived in London and volunteered with The Simon Community, a homeless charity, for three years. Later that decade, he found himself in the same situation as those he served, squatting in chaotic multi-occupancy London properties. But in between he’d had a magical jaunt to Jura by hitchhiking and motorbike with a girlfriend. And later, when his only sentimental keepsake was stolen from his squat bedroom, he left that lifestyle behind and fled to Jura, haunt of golden eagles and otters; refuge for George Orwell, who experienced his fair share of squalor – Down and Out in Paris and London gets a mention, but Ansell doesn’t belabour a comparison he more than earns. It’s a shame this is so short, but it’s a carefully crafted slice of life, and illustrates a sobering truth: “Security is an illusion.”
With thanks to Little Toller Books for the free copy for review. Deer Island came out in paperback on 27 February.
Little Toller
Also read recently: brother. do. you. love. me. by Manni Coe
Currently reading: The Long Field by Pamela Petro
Orders of Service by Willie Lee Kinard III (2023)
At a confluence of Southern, Black and gay identities, Kinard writes of matriarchal families, of congregations and choirs, of the descendants of enslavers and enslaved living side by side. The layout mattered more than I knew, reading an e-copy: often it is white text on a black page; words form rings or an infinity symbol; erasure poems gray out much of what has come before. “Boomerang” interludes imagine a chorus of fireflies offering commentary – just one of numerous insect metaphors. Mythology also plays a role. “A Tangle of Gorgons,” a sample poem I’d read before, wends its serpentine way across several pages. “Catalog of My Obsessions or Things I Answer to” presents an alphabetical list. For the most part, the poems were longer, wordier and more involved (four pages of notes on the style and allusions) than I tend to prefer, but I could appreciate the religious frame of reference and the alliteration.
Two favorite passages:
Ma taught me how to change a tire
the fall before it got real cold one October,
on the plot of dirt the pole beans we call Babel
spiral from, where our boozy station wagon
sat after hobbling home & passing out
in the backyard
(from “Work”)
I left before the door was closed.
I built myself of drowning hymns.
I stole every one to fly.
(from “Icarus Confesses”)
With thanks to Alice James Books for the advanced e-copy for review.
Alice James Books
Also read recently: Theophanies by Sarah Ghazal Ali
Immanuel by Matthew McNaught (2022)
“Immanuel was the centre of the world once. Long after it imploded, its gravitational pull remains.” McNaught grew up in an evangelical church in Winchester, England, but by the time he left for university he’d fallen away. Meanwhile, some peers left for Nigeria to become disciples at charismatic preacher TB Joshua’s Synagogue Church of All Nations in Lagos. It’s obvious to outsiders that this was a cult, but not so to those caught up in it. It took years and repeated allegations for people to wake up to faked healings, sexual abuse, and the ceding of control to a megalomaniac who got rich off of duping and exploiting followers. This book won the inaugural Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize. I admired its blend of journalistic and confessional styles: research, interviews with friends and strangers alike, and reflection on the author’s own loss of faith. He gets to the heart of why people stayed: “A feeling of holding and of being held. A sense of fellowship and interdependence … the rare moments of transcendence … It was nice to be a superorganism.” This gripped me from page one, but its wider appeal strikes me as limited. For me, it was the perfect chance to think about how I might write about traditions I grew up in and spurned.
With thanks to Fitzcarraldo Editions for the proof copy for review.
Fitzcarraldo Editions
Currently reading: Intervals by Marianne Brooker
Up next: Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti
Blood Red by Gabriela Ponce (2020; 2024)
[Translated from the Spanish by Sarah Booker]
Like other short works I’ve read by Hispanic women authors (Die, My Love, September and the Night, In Vitro), this Ecuadorian novella is intense, fragmentary, and obsessed with the female body and psyche. The unnamed narrator, a woman separated from her husband and freed from inhibitions, gives in to her substance and sex addictions – “For me, anything that isn’t falling in love has never merited much attention. That giddiness from proximity or bodies”. I was reminded of A Spy in the House of Love in that she flits compulsively from one lover to another, but Ponce is much more explicit than Nin. At least at the start, the sex scenes are almost constant and described in graphic detail. The narrator meets her lovers in warehouses and caves. Literal holes/orifices and blood are profuse, but also symbolically weighty, with fear of pregnancy also featuring heavily. I was impressed at how Booker rendered the stream-of-consciousness approach, which involves several-page paragraphs and metaphors of moths and moss. I wouldn’t say this was a pleasant book to spend time with, but the style and vocabulary made it worthy of note.
With thanks to Dead Ink for the free copy for review. Blood Red was first published in English by Restless Books in the USA in 2022.
Dead Ink
Up next: Sinking Bell by Bojan Louis
Fight Night by Miriam Toews (2022)
I knew from All My Puny Sorrows that Canadian author Miriam Toews has a knack for combining humour and heartbreak. I can’t believe it took me since 2015 to read another of her novels. Once again, there seems to be a strong autobiographical element and suicide in the family is part of the backstory. Although abandonment and failure haunt these three female generations, we see everything through a child’s point-of-view, which turns life into a jolly adventure. Swiv’s mother, an underemployed actress, is heavily pregnant with “Gord”; her father is out of the picture. Swiv has been expelled, which gives her plenty of time with Grandma Elvira, who makes friends with everyone she meets but, alas, is crumbling physically. Luckily, Swiv knows just how to keep her going with nitro spray and compression socks and pills rescued from the floor. Before Gord arrives, Grandma wants one last adventure: a flight from Canada to Fresno, California to see her remaining family. Their trip is a disaster, in hilarious ways. Child narrators are tough to pull off, so kudos to Toews for making eight-year-old Swiv almost completely believable (though a bit too precocious). These characters are all foul-mouthed fighters, with a quick wit and the determination to make their stories matter. You’ll laugh and cry.
With thanks to Faber for the proof copy for review.
Faber
Also read recently: Happiness Falls by Angie Kim
Currently reading: Places I’ve Taken My Body by Molly McCully Brown
This Is Salvaged by Vauhini Vara (2023)
The epigraph is from the two pages of laughter (“Ha!”) in “Real Estate,” one of the stories of Birds of America by Lorrie Moore. Vara shares Moore’s themes, which are the stuff of literary fiction generally – adolescence, friendship, ageing, memory, romantic relationships – but also her tone of dark comedy. The death of a sibling recurs. In “The Irates,” teenage Swati, whose brother died of cancer, and her friend Lydia get phone sales jobs through the Chinese restaurant where they go for egg rolls. In “I, Buffalo,” Sheila tries to hide her alcoholism when her sister Priya comes for a visit with Sheila’s brother-in-law and niece. “The girl” in “You Are Not Alone” is delighted to spend her eighth birthday in Florida with her estranged father, but less so when she learns there’s a stepmother figure in the picture. The women of “Sibyls” look after an elderly neighbour with dementia. The querulous child in “Unknown Unknowns” reminded me of Good Talk by Mira Jacob. My two favourites were the title story, about building a Noah’s Ark replica, and “What Next,” about a woman accompanying her teenage daughter to meet her father for the first time. A few stories didn’t stand out, and while I liked the writing, this didn’t necessarily feel like a cohesive collection.
With thanks to Grove Press UK for the free copy for review. This Is Salvaged came out in paperback in the UK on 1 February.
Grove Atlantic
Up next: Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker, Home/Land by Rebecca Mead, We Play Ourselves by Jen Silverman
Have you discovered any new-to-you independent publishers recently?
This and That (The January Blahs)
The January blahs have well and truly arrived. The last few months of 2023 (December in particular) were too full: I had so much going on that I was always rushing from one thing to the next and worrying I didn’t have the time to adequately appreciate any of it. Now my problem is the opposite: very little to do, work or otherwise; not much on the calendar to look forward to; and the weather and house so cold I struggle to get up each morning and push past the brain fog to settle to any task. As I kept thinking to myself all autumn, there has to be a middle ground between manic busyness and boredom. That’s the head space where I’d like to be living, instead of having to choose between hibernation and having no time to myself.
At least these frigid January days are good for being buried in books. Unusually for me, I’m in the middle of seven doorstoppers, including King by Jonathan Eig (perfect timing as Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. Day), Wellness by Nathan Hill, and Babel by R.F. Kuang (a nominal buddy read with my husband).
Another is Carol Shields’s Collected Short Stories for a buddy rereading project with Marcie of Buried in Print. We’re partway through the first volume, Various Miracles, after a hiccup when we realized my UK edition had a different story order and, in fact, different contents – it must have been released as a best-of. We’ll read one volume per month in January–March. I also plan to join Heaven Ali in reading at least one Margaret Drabble book this year. I have The Waterfall lined up, and her Arnold Bennett biography lurking. Meanwhile, the Read Indies challenge, hosted by Karen and Lizzy in February, will be a great excuse to catch up on some review books from independent publishers.
Literary prize season will be heating up soon. I put all of the Women’s Prize (fiction and nonfiction!) dates on my calendar and I have a running list, in a file on my desktop, of all the novels I’ve come across that would be eligible for this year’s race. I’m currently reading two memoirs from the Nero Book Awards nonfiction shortlist. Last year it looked like the Folio Prize was set to replace the Costa Awards, giving category prizes and choosing an overall winner. But then another coffee chain, Caffè Nero, came along and picked up the mantle.
This year the Folio has been rebranded as The Writers’ Prize, again with three categories, which don’t quite overlap with the Costa/Nero ones. The Writers’ Prize shortlists just came out on Tuesday. I happen to have read one of the poetry nominees (Chan) and one of the fiction (Enright). I’m going to have a go at reading the others that I can source via the library. I’ll even try The Bee Sting given it’s on both the Nero and Writers’ shortlists (ditto the Booker) and I have a newfound tolerance of doorstoppers.
As for my own literary prize involvement, my McKitterick Prize manuscript longlist is due on the 31st. I think I have it finalized. Out of 80 manuscripts, I’ve chosen 5. The first 3 stood out by a mile, but deciding on the other 2 was really tricky. We judges are meeting up online next week.
I’m listening to my second-ever audiobook, an Audible book I was sent as a birthday gift: There Plant Eyes by M. Leona Godin. My routine is to find a relatively mindless data entry task to do and put on a chapter at a time.
There are a handful of authors I follow on Substack to keep up with what they’re doing in between books: Susan Cain, Jean Hannah Edelstein, Catherine Newman, Anne Boyd Rioux, Nell Stevens (who seems to have gone dormant?), Emma Straub and Molly Wizenberg. So far I haven’t gone for the paid option on any of the subscriptions, so sometimes I don’t get to read the whole post, or can only see selected posts. But it’s still so nice to ‘hear’ these women’s voices occasionally, right in my inbox.
My current earworms are from Belle and Sebastian’s Late Developers album, which I was given for Christmas. These lyrics from the title track – saved, refreshingly, for last; it’s a great strategy to end on a peppy song (an uplifting anthem with gospel choir and horn section!) instead of tailing off – feel particularly apt:
Live inside your head
Get out of your bed
Brush the cobwebs off
I feel most awake and alive when I’m on my daily walk by the canal. It’s such a joy to hear the birdsong and see whatever is out there to be seen. The other day there was a red kite zooming up from a field and over the houses, the sun turning his tail into a burnished chestnut. And on the opposite bank, a cuboid rump that turned out to belong to a muntjac deer. Poetry fragments from two of my bedside books resonated with me.
This is the earnest work. Each of us is given
only so many mornings to do it—
to look around and love
the oily fur of our lives,
the hoof and the grass-stained muzzle.
Days I don’t do this
I feel the terror of idleness
like a red thirst.
That is from “The Deer,” from Mary Oliver’s House of Light, and reminds me that it’s always worthwhile to get outside and just look. Even if what you’re looking at doesn’t seem to be extraordinary in any way…
Importance leaves me cold,
as does all the information that is classed as ‘news’.
I like those events that the centre ignores:
small branches falling, the slow decay
of wood into humus, how a puddle’s eye
silts up slowly, till, eventually,
the birds can’t bathe there. I admire the edge;
the sides of roads where the ragwort blooms
low but exotic in the traffic fumes;
the scruffy ponies in a scrubland field
like bits of a jigsaw you can’t complete;
the colour of rubbish in a stagnant leat.
There are rarest enjoyments, for connoisseurs
of blankness, an acquired taste,
once recognised, it’s impossible to shake,
this thirst for the lovely commonplace.
(from “Six Poems on Nothing,” III by Gwyneth Lewis, in Parables & Faxes)
This was basically a placeholder post because who knows when I’ll next finish any books and write about them … probably not until later in the month. But I hope you’ve found at least one interesting nugget!
What ‘lovely commonplace’ things are keeping you going this month?
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 