Best Books of 2024: My Top 20
I’m keeping it simple again this year with one post covering all genres: these are the 20 current-year releases that stood out the most for me. (No rankings.) Those that aren’t repeated from my Best Books from the First Half of 2024 post didn’t quite make the cut but should be considered as runners-up well worth your time. Unsurprisingly, health is a common theme across many of my selections, especially as it touches women’s lives. Pictured below are the books I read in print; the others were all electronic copies. Links are to my full reviews where available.
Fiction
The Worst Journey in the World, Volume 1: Making Our Easting Down: The Graphic Novel by Sarah Airriess: The thrilling opening to a cinematically vivid adaptation of Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s 1922 memoir. He was an assistant zoologist on Robert Falcon Scott’s perilous 1910-13 Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole. The book resembles a full-color storyboard for a Disney-style maritime adventure film. There is jolly camaraderie as the men sing sea shanties to boost morale. The next volume can’t arrive soon enough.
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley: This nuanced debut alternately goes along with and flouts the tropes of spy fiction and time travel sci-fi, making clever observations about how we frame stories of empire and progress. The narrator is a “bridge” helping to resettle a Victorian polar explorer in near-future London. You just have to suspend disbelief and go with it. Bradley’s descriptive prose is memorable but never quirky for the sake of it. I haven’t had so much fun with a book since Romantic Comedy. A witty, sexy, off-kilter gem.
Behind You Is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj: Darraj’s novel-in-stories is a shimmering composite portrait of a Palestinian American community in Baltimore. Across nine stellar linked stories, she explores the complex relationships between characters divided by—or connected despite—class, language, and traditional values. Each of the stories (four in the first person, five in the third person) spotlights a particular character. The book depicts the variety of immigrant and second-generation experience, especially women’s.
Clear by Carys Davies: Depicts the Highland Clearances in microcosm though Ivar, last resident of a remote Scottish island between Shetland and Norway. John is a minister sent by the landowner to remove Ivar. Mary, John’s wife, journeys from the mainland to rescue him. Davies writes striking scenes that bring the island scenery to life. Her deceptively simple prose captures the slow building of emotion and moments that change everything. For a trio that seemed on course for tragedy, there is the grace of a happier ending.
Small Rain by Garth Greenwell: A poet and academic (who both is and is not Greenwell) endures a Covid-era medical crisis that takes him to the brink of mortality and the boundary of survivable pain. Over two weeks, we become intimately acquainted with his every test, intervention, setback and fear. Experience is clarified precisely into fluent language that also flies far above a hospital bed, into a vibrant past, a poetic sensibility, a hoped-for normality. I’ve never read so remarkable an account of what it is to be a mind in a fragile body.
Wellness by Nathan Hill: A state-of-the-nation story filtered through one Chicago family experiencing midlife and marital crises: underperforming academic Jack; his wife Elizabeth, a placebo researcher at Wellness; and their YouTube-obsessed son Toby. They’ve recently invested their life savings in a new condo. The addictive and spot-on novel asks questions about authenticity, purpose, and nurture. Is love itself a placebo? Hill is clearly fascinated with psychological experimentation but also questions it to humorous effect.
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney: Twenty- and thirtysomethings having lots of sex, yes, but now a solemn tone: Characters’ suffering and failures have deepened their thinking, sense of self, and ability to feel for others. Peter and Ivan lost their father to cancer; Sylvia is in chronic pain after an accident; Naomi is evicted and aimless; Margaret is ashamed of having an estranged alcoholic husband. Chess is a clever metaphor for their interactions; the depiction of grief rings true. A stylistic leap forward, too. Her best, most mature work by a mile.
The History of Sound by Ben Shattuck: A dozen stories form a “hook-and-chain” formation of five couplets, bookended by a first and last story related to each other. Links are satisfyingly overt: A pair takes place in the same New England house in different centuries; a companion piece fills in the history of the characters from the previous. All are historically convincing, and the very human themes of lust, parenthood, sorrow and frustrated ambition resonate across centuries and state lines. Really beautiful (and better than North Woods).
Lunar New Year Love Story by Gene Luen Yang (illus. LeUyen Pham): A super-cute teen graphic novel with gorgeous illustrations prioritizing pink and red to suit the theme. We follow Vietnamese American Valentina through high school as she plays host to an internal debate between cynicism and romanticism. Ever since her mother left, she’s longed to believe in romance but feared that love is a doomed prospect for her family. The Asian community of Oakland, California and a new hobby of lion dancing provide engrossing cultural detail.
Nonfiction
Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley: A bereavement memoir like no other. Heart-wrenching yet witty, it bears a unique structure and offers fascinating glimpses into the New York City publishing world. Crosley’s Manhattan apartment was burgled exactly a month before the suicide of her best friend and former boss, Russell. Throughout, the whereabouts of her family jewelry is as much of a mystery as the reason for Russell’s death, and investigating the stolen goods in parallel serves as a displacement activity for her.
Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti: Heti put 10 years of diary contents into a spreadsheet, alphabetizing each sentence, and then ruthlessly culled the results. The recurring topics are familiar from the rest of her oeuvre: obsessive cogitating about relationships, art and identity, but also the practicalities of trying to make a living as a woman in a creative profession. Heti transcends the quotidian by exploding chronology. Amazingly, the collage approach produces a genuine, crystalline vision of the self. A sui generis work of life writing.
Without Exception: Reclaiming Abortion, Personhood, and Freedom by Pam Houston: If you’re going to read a polemic, make sure it’s as elegantly written and expertly argued as this one. Houston responds to the overturning of Roe v. Wade with 60 micro-essays – one for each full year of her life – about what it means to be in a female body in a country that seeks to control and systematically devalue women. The cycling of topics makes for an exquisite structure. Houston is among my recommendations for top-notch authors you might not know.
The Body Alone: A Lyrical Articulation of Chronic Pain by Nina Lohman: Chronic Daily Headaches: Having a clinical term for extreme pain did nothing to solve it; no treatment Lohman has tried over a decade has helped much either. Medical professionals and friends alike downplay her experience because she is able to pass as well and raise two children. The fragmentary pieces read like poems. Bodily realities defy language, yet she employs words exquisitely. The tone flows from enraged to resigned to cynical and back.
Others Like Me: The Lives of Women without Children by Nicole Louie: This impassioned auto/biographical collage combines the strengths of oral history, group biography and a fragmented memoir. “Motherhood as the epicentre of women’s lives was all I’d ever witnessed” via her mother and grandmother, Louie writes, so finding examples of women living differently was key. As readers, we watch her life, her thinking and the book all take shape. It’s warm and empathetic, with layers of stories that reflect diversity of experience.
A Termination by Honor Moore: A fascinatingly discursive memoir that circles a 1969 abortion and contrasts societal mores across her lifetime. Moore was a 23-year-old drama student; the termination was “my first autonomous decision,” she insists, a way of saying, “I want this life, not that life.” Family and social factors put her life into perspective. The concise text is composed of crystalline fragments, incorporating occasional second- and third-person narration. The kaleidoscopic yet fluid approach is stunning.
My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss: Moss effectively contrasts the would-be happily ever after of generally getting better after eight years of disordered eating with her anorexia returning with a vengeance at age 46. The mood shifts so that what threatens to be slightly cloying in the childhood section turns academically curious and then, somehow, despite distancing pronouns (mostly second- but also some third-person narration), intimate. Shape-shifting, devastating, staunchly pragmatic; a unique model for converting life into art.
Knife: Meditations after an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie: I’ve not had much success with Rushdie’s fiction, but this is excellent, with intriguing side tendrils and many quotable lines. It traces lead-up and aftermath; unexpected echoes, symbolism and ironies. Although Rushdie goes into some medical detail about his recovery, you get the sense of him more as an unchanging mind and a resolute will. The most noteworthy section imagines dialogues he might have with the imprisoned assailant, probing his beliefs and motivations.
Poetry
Want, the Lake by Jenny Factor: Factor’s long, intricate poetry collection showcases the tension between past and present and envisions womanhood as a tug of war between desire and constraint. “Elegy for a Younger Self” poems string together vivid reminiscences. In “Sapphics on Nursing” and elsewhere, romantic friendships edge toward homoeroticism; heterosexual marriage and motherhood represent either delightful intimacy or a snare. Allusion and experience, slant rhymes and wordplay craft a lavish tapestry.
Inconsolable Objects by Nancy Miller Gomez: This debut collection recalls a Midwest girlhood of fairground rides and lake swimming, tornadoes and cicadas. But her Kansas isn’t all rose-tinted nostalgia; there’s an edge of sadness and danger. “Missing History” notes how women’s stories, such as her grandmother’s, are lost to time. In “Tilt-A-Whirl,” her older sister’s harmless flirtation with a ride operator becomes sinister. She also takes inspiration from headlines. The alliteration and slant rhymes are to die for.
Egg/Shell by Victoria Kennefick: Motherhood and the body are overarching themes. The speaker has multiple miscarriages and names her lost children after plants. Becoming a mother is a metamorphosis all its own, while another long section is about her husband’s transition. Bird metaphors are inescapable. The structure varies throughout: columns, stanzas; a list, a recipe. Amid the sadness, there is dark humour and one-line rejoinders. If you’re wondering how life can be captured in achingly beautiful poetry, look no further.
If I had to choose just one of each? This trio trying out complementary strategies for transmuting life into literature: Small Rain, Alphabetical Diaries and Egg/Shell.
Have you read any of these? Or might you now, based on my recommendation?
Nonfiction November Book Pairings: Autistic Husbands & The Ocean
Liz is the host for this week’s Nonfiction November prompt. The idea is to choose a nonfiction book and pair it with a fiction title with which it has something in common.
I came up with these two based on my recent reading:
An Autistic Husband
The Rosie Effect by Graeme Simsion (also The Rosie Project and The Rosie Result)
&
Disconnected: Portrait of a Neurodiverse Marriage by Eleanor Vincent
Graeme Simsion’s Don Tillman trilogy tells the odd-couple story of an autistic professor and how he falls in love with and marries a wholly unsuitable neurotypical woman. He turns this situation into romantic comedy. For Eleanor Vincent, it wasn’t so funny. She met her third husband, computer scientist Lars (a pseudonym), through Zydeco dancing when she was in her sixties. Though aware that he could be unemotional and act strangely, she found him chivalrous and sweet. They dated for a time but he hurt and confused her by asking for his apartment keys back. After a five-year period she calls their “Interregnum,” the two got back together and married. Despite their years of friendship, she was completely unprepared for what living with him would be like. “At the age of seventy-one, I had married a stranger,” she writes.
It didn’t help that Covid hit partway through their four-year marriage, nor that they each received a cancer diagnosis (cervical vs. prostate). But the problems were more with their everyday differences in responses and processing. During their courtship, she ignored some bizarre things he did around her family: he bit her nine-year-old granddaughter as a warning of what would happen if she kept antagonizing their cat, and he put a gift bag over his head while they were at the dinner table with her siblings. These are a couple of the most egregious instances, but there are examples throughout of how Lars did things she didn’t understand. Through support groups and marriage counselling, she realized how well Lars had masked his autism when they were dating – and that he wasn’t willing to do the work required to make their marriage succeed. The book ends with them estranged but a divorce imminent.
If this were purely carping about a husband’s weirdness, it might have been tedious or depressing. But Vincent doesn’t blame Lars, and she incorporates so much else in this short memoir, including a number of topics that are of particular interest to me. There’s her PTSD from a traumatic upbringing, her parents’ identity as closeted gay people, the complications around her father’s death, the tragedy of her older daughter’s death, as well as the more everyday matters of being a working single parent, finding an affordable property in California’s Bay Area, and blending households.
Vincent crafts engaging scenes with solid recreated dialogue, and I especially liked the few meta chapters revealing “What I Left Out” – a memoir is always a shaped narrative, while life is messy; this shows both. She is also honest about her own failings and occasional bad behavior. I probably could have done with a little less detail on their sex life, however.
This had more relevance to me than expected. While my sister and I were clearing our mother’s belongings from the home she shared with her second husband for the 16 months between their wedding and her death, our stepsisters mentioned to us that they suspected their father was autistic. It was, as my sister said, a “lightbulb” moment, explaining so much about our respective parents’ relationship, and our interactions with him as well. My stepfather (who died just 10 months after my mother) was a dear man, but also maddening at times. A retired math professor, he was logical and flat of affect. Sometimes his humor was off-kilter and he made snap, unsentimental decisions that we couldn’t fathom. Had they gotten longer together, no doubt many of the issues Vincent experienced would have arisen. (Read via BookSirens)
[173 pages]
The Ocean
Playground by Richard Powers
&
Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love by Lida Maxwell
The Blue Machine by Helen Czerski
Under the Sea Wind by Rachel Carson
While I was less than enraptured with its artificial intelligence theme and narrative trickery, I loved the content about the splendour of the ocean in Richard Powers’s Booker Prize-longlisted Playground. Most of this comes via Evelyne Beaulieu, a charismatic French Canadian marine biologist (based in part on Sylvia Earle) who is on the first all-female submarine mission and is still diving in the South Pacific in her nineties. Powers explicitly references Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us. Between that and the revelation of Evelyne as a late-bloomer lesbian, I was reminded of Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love, a forthcoming novella-length academic study by Lida Maxwell that I have assessed for Foreword Reviews. Maxwell’s central argument is that Carson’s romantic love for a married woman, Dorothy Freeman, served as an awakening to wonder and connection and spurred her to write her greatest works.
After reading Playground, I decided to place a library hold on Blue Machine by Helen Czerski (winner of the Wainwright Writing on Conservation Prize this year), which Powers acknowledges as an inspiration that helped him to think bigger. I have also pulled my copy of Under the Sea Wind by Rachel Carson off the shelf as it’s high time I read more by her.
Previous book pairings posts: 2018 (Alzheimer’s, female friendship, drug addiction, Greenland and fine wine!) and 2023 (Hardy’s Wives, rituals and romcoms).
#SciFiMonth: A Simple Intervention (#NovNov24 and #GermanLitMonth) & Station Eleven Reread
It’s rare for me to pick up a work of science fiction but occasionally I’ll find a book that hits the sweet spot between literary fiction and sci-fi. Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber and The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell are a few prime examples. It was the comparisons to Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro, masters of the speculative, that drew me to my first selection, a Peirene Press novella. My second was a reread, 10 years on, for book club, whose postapocalyptic content felt strangely appropriate for a week that delivered cataclysmic election results.
A Simple Intervention by Yael Inokai (2022; 2024)
[Translated from the German by Marielle Sutherland]
Meret is a nurse on a surgical ward, content in the knowledge that she’s making a difference. Her hospital offers a pioneering procedure that cures people of mental illnesses. It’s painless and takes just an hour.
The doctor had to find the affected area and put it to sleep, like a sick animal. That was his job. Mine was to keep the patients occupied. I was to distract them from what was happening and keep them interacting with me. As long as they stayed awake, we knew the doctor and his instruments had found the right place.
The story revolves around Meret’s emotional involvement in the case of Marianne, a feisty young woman who has uneasy relationships with her father and brothers. The two play cards and share family anecdotes. Until the last few chapters, the slow-moving plot builds mostly through flashbacks, including to Meret’s affair with her fellow nurse, Sarah. This roommates-to-lovers thread reminded me of Learned by Heart by Emma Donoghue. When Marianne’s intervention goes wrong, Meret and Sarah doubt their vocation and plan an act of heroism.
Inokai invites us to ponder whether what we perceive as defects are actually valuable personality traits. More examples of interventions and their aftermath would be a useful point of comparison, though, and the pace is uneven, with a lot of unnecessary-seeming backstory about Meret’s family life. In the letter that accompanied my review copy, Inokai explained her three aims: to portray a nurse (her mother’s career) because they’re underrepresented in fiction, “to explore our yearning to cut out our ‘demons’,” and to offer “a queer love story that was hopeful.” She certainly succeeds with those first and third goals, but with the central subject I felt she faltered through vagueness.
Born in Switzerland, Inokai now lives in Berlin. This also counts as my first contribution to German Literature Month; another is on the way!
[187 pages]
With thanks to Peirene Press for the free copy for review.
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (2014)
For synopsis and analysis I can’t do better than when I reviewed this for BookBrowse a few months after its release, so I’d direct you to the full text here. (It’s slightly depressing for me to go back to old reviews and see that I haven’t improved; if anything, I’ve gotten lazier.) A couple book club members weren’t as keen, I think because they’d read a lot of dystopian fiction or seen many postapocalyptic films and found this vision mild and with a somewhat implausible setup and tidy conclusion. But for me this and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road have persisted as THE literary depictions of post-apocalypse life because they perfectly blend the literary and the speculative in an accessible and believable way (this was a National Book Award finalist and won the Arthur C. Clarke Award), contrasting a harrowing future with nostalgia for an everyday life that we can already see retreating into the past.
Station Eleven has become a real benchmark for me, against which I measure any other dystopian novel. On this reread, I was captivated by the different layers of the nonlinear story, from celebrity gossip to a rare graphic novel series, and enjoyed rediscovering the links between characters and storylines. I remembered a few vivid scenes and settings. Mandel also seeds subtle connections to later work, particularly The Glass Hotel (island off Vancouver, international shipping and finance) but also Sea of Tranquility (music, an airport terminal). I haven’t read her first three novels, but wouldn’t be surprised if they have additional links.
The two themes that most struck me this time were the enduring power of art and how societal breakdown would instantly eliminate the international – but compensate for it with the return of the extremely local. At a time when it feels difficult to trust central governments to have people’s best interests at heart, this is a rather comforting prospect. Just in my neighbourhood, I see how we implement this care on a small scale. In settlements of up to a few hundred, the remnants of Station Eleven create something like normal life by Year 20.
Book club members sniped that the characters could have better pooled skills, but we agreed that Mandel was wise to limit what could have been tedious details about survival. “Survival is insufficient,” as the Traveling Symphony’s motto goes (borrowed from Star Trek). Instead, she focuses on love, memory, and hunger for the arts. In some ways, this feels prescient of Covid-19, but even more so of the climate-related collapse I expect in my lifetime. I’ve rated this a little bit higher the second time for its lasting relevance. (Free from a neighbour) 
Some favourite passages:
the whole of Chapter 6, a bittersweet litany that opens “An incomplete list: No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below” and includes “No more pharmaceuticals,” “No more flight,” and “No more countries”
“what made it bearable were the friendships, of course, the camaraderie and the music and the Shakespeare, the moments of transcendent beauty and joy”
“The beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone. If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it?”
20 Books of Summer, 17–18: Suzanne Berne and Melissa Febos
Nearly there! I’ll have two more books to review for this challenge as part of roundups tomorrow and Saturday. Today I have a lesser-known novel by a Women’s Prize winner and a set of personal essays about body image and growing up female.
A Perfect Arrangement by Suzanne Berne (2001)
Berne won the Orange (Women’s) Prize for A Crime in the Neighbourhood in 1999. This is another slice of mild suburban suspense. The Boston-area Cook-Goldman household faces increasingly disruptive problems. Architect dad Howard is vilified for a new housing estate he’s planning, plus an affair that he had with a colleague a few years ago comes back to haunt him. Hotshot lawyer Mirella can’t get the work–life balance right, especially when she finds out she’s unexpectedly pregnant with twins at age 41. They hire a new nanny to wrangle their two under-fives, headstrong Pearl and developmentally delayed Jacob. If Randi Gill seems too good to be true, that’s because she’s a pathological liar. But hey, she’s great with kids.
It’s clear some Bad Stuff is going to happen to this family; the only questions are how bad and precisely what. Now, this is pretty much exactly what I want from my “summer reading”: super-readable plot- and character-driven fiction whose stakes are low (e.g., midlife malaise instead of war or genocide or whatever) and that veers more popular than literary and so can be devoured in large chunks. I really should have built more of that into my 20 Books plan! I read this much faster than I normally get through a book, but that meant the foreshadowing felt too prominent and I noticed some repetition, e.g., four or five references to purple loosestrife, which is a bit much even for those of us who like our wildflowers. It seemed a bit odd that the action was set back in the Clinton presidency; the references to the Lewinsky affair and Hillary’s “baking cookies” remark seemed to come out of nowhere. And seriously, why does the dog always have to suffer the consequences of humans’ stupid mistakes?!
This reminded me most of Friends and Strangers by J. Courtney Sullivan and a bit of Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler, while one late plot turn took me right back to The Senator’s Wife by Sue Miller. While the Goodreads average rating of 2.93 seems pretty harsh, I can also see why fans of A Crime would have been disappointed. I probably won’t seek out any more of Berne’s fiction. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury) 
Girlhood by Melissa Febos (2021)
I was deeply impressed by Febos’s Body Work (2022), a practical guide to crafting autobiographical narratives as a way of reckoning with the effects of trauma. Ironically, I engaged rather less with her own personal essays. One issue for me was that her highly sexualized experiences are a world away from mine. I don’t have her sense of always having had to perform for the male gaze, though maybe I’m fooling myself. Another was that it’s over 300 pages and only contains seven essays, so there were several pieces that felt endless. This was especially true of “The Mirror Test” (62 pp.) which is about double standards for girls as they played out in her simultaneous lack of confidence and slutty reputation, but randomly references The House of Mirth quite a lot; and “Thank You for Taking Care of Yourself” (74 pp.), which ponders why Febos has such trouble relaxing at a cuddle party and whether she killed off her ability to give physical consent through her years as a dominatrix.
“Wild America,” about her first lesbian experience and the way she came to love a perceived defect (freakishly large hands; they look perfectly normal to me in her author photo), and “Intrusions,” about her and other women’s experience with stalkers, worked a bit better. But my two favourites incorporated travel, a specific relationship, and a past versus present structure. “Thesmophoria” opens with her arriving in Rome for a mother–daughter vacation only to realize she told her mother the wrong month. Feeling guilty over the error, she remembers other instances when she valued her mother’s forgiveness, including when she would leave family celebrations to buy drugs. The allusions to Greek myth were neither here nor there for me, but the words about her mother’s unconditional love made me cry.
I also really liked “Les Calanques,” which again draws on her history of heroin addiction, comparing a strung-out college trip to Paris when she scored with a sweet gay boy named Ahmed with the self-disciplined routines and care for her body she’d learned by the time she returns to France for a writing retreat. This felt like a good model for how to write about one’s past self. “I spend so much time with that younger self, her savage despair and fleeting reliefs, that I start to feel as though she is here with me.” The prologue, “Scarification,” is a numbered list of how she got her scars, something Paul Auster also gives in Winter Journal. As if to insist that we can only ever experience life through our bodies.
Although I’d hoped to connect to this more, and ultimately felt it wasn’t really meant for me (and maybe I’m a deficient feminist), I did admire the range of strategies and themes so will keep it on the shelf as a model for approaching the art of the personal essay. I think I would probably prefer a memoir from Febos, but don’t need to read more about her sex work (Whip Smart), so might look into Abandon Me. If bisexuality and questions of consent are of interest, you might also like Another Word for Love by Carvell Wallace, which I reviewed for BookBrowse. (Gift (secondhand) from my Christmas wish list last year) 
#WITMonth, Part I: Novellas by Eva Baltasar and Françoise Sagan
I’m starting off my Women in Translation month coverage with mini responses to two novellas: one Catalan and one French; both about disaffected women trying to work out what they want from life.
Mammoth by Eva Baltasar (2022; 2024)
[Translated from the Catalan by Julia Sanches]
I’d been vaguely attracted by descriptions of the Spanish poet’s novels Permafrost and Boulder, which are also about lesbians in odd situations. Mammoth is the third book in a loose trilogy. Its 24-year-old narrator is so desperate for a baby that she’s decided to have unprotected sex with men until a pregnancy results. In the meantime, her sociology project at nursing homes comes to an end and she moves from Barcelona to a remote farm where she develops subsistence skills and forms an interdependent relationship with the gruff shepherd. “I’d been living in a drowning city, and I need this – the restorative silence of a decompression chamber. … my past is meaningless, and yet here, in this place, there is someone else’s past that I can set up and live in awhile.” For me this was a peculiar combination of distinguished writing (“The city pounces on the still-pale light emerging from the deep sea and seizes it with its lucrative forceps”) but absolutely repellent story, with a protagonist whose every decision makes you want to throttle her. An extended scene of exterminating feral cats certainly didn’t help matters. I’d be wary of trying Baltasar again.
With thanks to And Other Stories for the proof copy for review.
Aimez-vous Brahms… by Françoise Sagan (1959; 1960)
[Translated from the French by Peter Wiles]
At age 39, divorced interior decorator Paule is “passionately concerned with her beauty and battling with the transition from young to youngish woman”. (Ouch. But true.) It’s an open secret that her partner Roger is always engaged in a liaison with a young woman; people pity her and scorn Roger for his infidelity. But when Paule has a dalliance with a client’s son, 25-year-old lawyer Simon, a double standard emerges: “they had never shown her the mixture of contempt and envy she was going to arouse this time.” Simon is an idealist, accusing her of “letting love go by, of neglecting your duty to be happy”, but he’s also indolent and too fond of drink. Paule wonders if she’s expected too much from an affair. “Everyone advised a change of air, and she thought sadly that all she was getting was a change of lovers: less bother, more Parisian, so common”.
I was by turns reminded of Chéri by Colette, In a Summer Season by Elizabeth Taylor, and even The Graduate (“Mrs. Robinson,” anyone?). Simon asks the title question to invite Paule to a concert; that she has to ponder it carefully tells her she’s “losing herself, losing track of herself”. But it’s all too easy for the status quo to be reinstated after a brave act. Middle-aged woman makes bid for freedom but ultimately nothing changes: same plot as The Funeral Cryer and any number of other books, but this was so much better. How did Sagan manage such insight at age 24 (and this was her fourth book)?! While not quite as memorable as Bonjour Tristesse, this is another incisive slice of fiction that has aged well apart from using “sodomite” and “Negress” as matter-of-fact terms for bit players. I’d read anything else I can find by Sagan. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury)
June Releases by Caroline Bird, Kathleen Jamie, Glynnis MacNicol and Naomi Westerman
These four books by women all incorporate life writing to an extent. Although the forms differ, a common theme – as in the other June releases I’ve reviewed, Sandwich and Others Like Me – is grappling with what a woman’s life should be, especially for those who have taken an unconventional path (i.e. are queer or childless) or are in midlife or later. I’ve got a poet up to her usual surreal shenanigans but with a new focus on lesbian parenting; a hybrid collection of poetry and prose giving snapshots of nature in crisis; an account of a writer’s hedonistic month in pandemic-era Paris; and mordant essays about death culture.
Ambush at Still Lake by Caroline Bird
Caroline Bird has become one of my favourite contemporary poets over the past few years. Her verse is joyously cheeky and absurdist. A great way to sample it is via her selected poems, Rookie. This seventh collection is muted by age and circumstance – multiple weddings and a baby – but still hilarious in places. Instead of rehab or hospital as in In These Days of Prohibition, the setting is mostly the domestic sphere. Even here, bizarre things happen. The police burst in at 4 a.m. for no particular reason; search algorithms and the baby monitor go haywire. Her brother calls to deliver a paranoid rant (in “Up and at ’Em”), while Nannie Edna’s dying wish is to dangle her great-grandson from her apartment window (in “Last Rites”). The clinic calls to announce that their sperm donor was a serial killer – then ‘oops, wrong vial, never mind!’ A toddler son’s strange and megalomaniac demands direct their days. My two favourites were “Ants,” in which a kitchen infestation signals general chaos, and “The Frozen Aisle,” in which a couple scrambles to finish the grocery shop and get home to bed before a rare horny moment passes. A lesbian pulp fiction cover, mischievous wit and topics of addiction and queer parenting: this is not your average poetry.
With thanks to Carcanet Press for the free copy for review.
A sample poem:
Siblings
A woman gave birth
to the reincarnation
of Gilbert and Sullivan
or rather, two reincarnations:
one Gilbert, one Sullivan.
What are the odds
of both being resummoned
by the same womb
when they could’ve been
a blue dart frog
and a supply teacher
on separate continents?
Yet here they were, squidged
into a tandem pushchair
with their best work
behind them, still smarting
from the critical reception
of their final opera
described as ‘but an echo’
of earlier collaborations.
Cairn by Kathleen Jamie
As she approached age 60, Kathleen Jamie found her style changing. Whereas her other essay collections alternate extended nature or travel pieces with few-page vignettes, Cairn eschews longer material and instead alternates poems with micro-essays on climate crisis and outdoor experiences. In the prologue she calls these “distillations and observations. Testimonies” that she has assembled into “A cairn of sorts.”
As in Surfacing, she writes many of the autobiographical fragments in the second person. The book is melancholy at times, haunted by all that has been lost and will be lost in the future:
What do we sense on the moor but ghost folk,
ghost deer, even ghost wolf. The path itself is a
phantom, almost erased in ling and yellow tormentil (from “Moor”)
In “The Bass Rock,” Jamie laments the effect that bird flu has had on this famous gannet colony and wishes desperately for better news:
The light glances on the water. The haze clears, and now the rock is visible; it looks depleted. But hallelujah, a pennant of twenty-odd gannets is passing, flying strongly, now rising now falling They’ll be Bass Rock birds. What use the summer sunlight, if it can’t gleam on a gannet’s back? You can only hope next year will be different. Stay alive! You call after the flying birds. Stay alive!
Natural wonders remind her of her own mortality and the insignificance of human life against deep time. “I can imagine the world going on without me, which one doesn’t at 30.” She questions the value of poetry in a time of emergency: “If we are entering a great dismantling, we can hardly expect lyric to survive. How to write a lyric poem?” (from “Summer”). The same could be said of any human endeavour in the face of extinction: We question the point but still we continue.
My two favourite pieces were “The Handover,” about going on an environmental march with her son and his friends in Glasgow and comparing it with the protests of her time (Greenham Common and nuclear disarmament) – doom and gloom was ever thus – and the title poem, which piles natural image on image like a cone of stones. Although I prefer the depth of Jamie’s other books to the breadth of this one, she is an invaluable nature writer for her wisdom and eloquence, and I am grateful we have heard from her again after five years.
With thanks to Sort Of Books for the free copy for review.
I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman’s Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris by Glynnis MacNicol
I loved New York City freelance writer Glynnis MacNicol’s No One Tells You This (2018), which approached her 40th year as an adventure into the unknown. This second memoir is similarly frank and intrepid as MacNicol examines the unconscious rules that people set for women in their mid-forties and gleefully flouts them, remaining single and childfree and delighting in the freedom that allows her to book a month in Paris on a whim. She knows that she is an anomaly for being “untethered”; “I am ready for anything. To be anyone.”
This takes place in August 2021, when some pandemic restrictions were still in force, and she found the city – a frequent destination for her over the years – drained of locals, who were all en vacances, and largely empty of tourists, too. Although there was still a queue for the Mona Lisa, she otherwise found the Louvre very quiet, and could ride her borrowed bike through the streets without having to look out for cars. She and her single girlfriends met for rosé-soaked brunches and picnics, joined outdoor dance parties and took an island break.
And then there was the sex. MacNicol joined a hook-up app called Fruitz and met all sorts of men. She refused to believe that, just because she was 46 going on 47, she should be invisible or demure. “All the attention feels like pure oxygen. Anything is possible.” Seeing herself through the eyes of an enraptured 27-year-old Italian reminded her that her body was beautiful even if it wasn’t what she remembered from her twenties (“there is, on average, a five-year gap between current me being able to enjoy the me in the photos”). The book’s title is something she wrote while messaging with one of her potential partners.
As I wrote yesterday about Others Like Me, there are plenty of childless role models but you may have to look a bit harder for them. MacNicol does so by tracking down the Paris haunts of women writers such as Edith Wharton and Colette. She also interrogates this idea of women living a life of pleasure by researching the “odalisque” in 18th- and 19th-century art, as in the François Boucher painting on the cover. This was fun, provocative and thoughtful all at once; well worth seeking out for summer reading and armchair travelling.
(Read via Edelweiss) Published in the USA by Penguin Life/Random House.
Happy Death Club: Essays on Death, Grief & Bereavement across Cultures by Naomi Westerman
Like Erica Buist (This Party’s Dead) and Caitlin Doughty (Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, From Here to Eternity and Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?), playwright Naomi Westerman finds the comical side of death. Part of 404 Ink’s Inklings series (“Big ideas, pocket-sized books” – perfect for anyone looking for short nonfiction for Novellas in November!), this is a collection of short essays about her own experiences of bereavement as well as her anthropological research into rituals and beliefs around death. “The Rat King of South London” is about her father’s sudden death from an abdominal aneurysm. An instantaneous death is a good one, she contends. More than 160,000 people die every day, and what to do with all those bodies is a serious question. A subversive sense of humour is there right from the start, as she gives a rundown of interment options. “Mummification: Beloved by Ancient Egyptians and small children going through their Ancient Egypt phase, it’s a classic for a reason!” Meanwhile, she legally owns her father’s plot so also buries dead pet rats there.
Other essays are about taking her mother’s ashes along on world travels, the funeral industry and “red market” sales of body parts, grief as a theme in horror films, the fetishization of dead female bodies, Mexico’s Day of the Dead festivities, and true crime obsession. In “Batman,” an excerpt from one of her plays, she goes to have a terrible cup of tea with the man she believes to be responsible for her mother’s death – a violent one, after leaving an abusive relationship. She also used the play to host an on-stage memorial for her mother since she wasn’t able to sit shiva. In the final title essay, Westerman tours lots of death cafés and finds comfort in shared experiences. These pieces are all breezy, amusing and easy to read, so it’s a shame that this small press didn’t achieve proper proofreading, making for a rather sloppy text, and that the content was overall too familiar for me.
With thanks to 404 Ink and publicist Claire Maxwell for the free copy for review.
Does one or more of these catch your eye?
What June releases can you recommend?
Sandwich by Catherine Newman (Blog Tour)
Catherine Newman’s second novel for adults, Sandwich, takes place during a week on Cape Cod, a popular Massachusetts beach resort. Rachel, nicknamed “Rocky,” is a fiftysomething mother to two young adults, Jamie and Willa. She and her husband Nick have been renting the same cottage for their family’s summer vacations for 20 years. Although Rocky narrates most of the novel in the first person, in the Prologue she paints the scene for the reader in the third person: “They’ve been coming here for so many years that there’s a watercolor wash over all of it now … pleasant, pastel memories of taffy, clam strips, and beachcombing.”
Also present are Maya, Jamie’s girlfriend; Rocky’s ageing parents; and Chicken the cat (can you imagine taking your cat on holiday?!). With such close quarters, it’s impossible to keep secrets. Over the week of merry eating and drinking, much swimming, and plenty of no-holds-barred conversations, some major drama emerges via both the oldies and the youngsters. And it’s not just present crises; the past is always with Rocky. Cape Cod has developed layers of emotional memories for her. She’s simultaneously nostalgic for her kids’ babyhood and delighted with the confident, intelligent grown-ups they’ve become. She’s grateful for the family she has, but also haunted by inherited trauma and pregnancy loss.
There couldn’t be more ideal reading for women in the so-called “sandwich generation” who have children growing towards independence as well as parents starting to struggle with infirmity. (The contemporary storyline of Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered, which coincidentally is about a character named Willa, is comparable in that respect.) Newman is frank about Willa’s lesbianism and Rocky’s bisexuality, and she doesn’t hold back about the difficulties of menopause, either. Rocky is challenged to rethink her responsibilities as a daughter, wife and mother when she’s surrounded by equally strong-willed people who won’t do what she wants them to. The novel is so quirky, funny and relatable that it’s impossible not to sympathize with Rocky even if, like me, you’re in a very different life situation.
I like the U.S. cover so much more!
One observation I would make is that Rocky is virtually identical to Ash in Newman’s debut, We All Want Impossible Things, and to the author in real life (as I know from subscribing to her Substack). If you read even the most basic information about her, it’s clear that it’s all autofiction. That’s not an issue for me as I don’t think inventing is inherently superior to drawing from experience; some authors write what they know in a literal sense and that’s okay. So, for her fans, more of the same will be no problem at all. But it is a very particular voice: intense, scatty, purposely outrageous. Rocky is a protagonist who says things like, “How am I a feminist, an advocate for reproductive rights, Our Bodies, Ourselves, hear me roar, blah blah, and I am only just now learning about vaginal atrophy?” (A companion nonfiction read would be Nina Stibbe’s Went to London, Took the Dog.)
In outlook Newman reminds me a lot of Anne Lamott, who is equally forthright and whose books similarly juxtapose life’s joy and sorrows, especially in this late passage: “this may be the only reason we were put on this earth. To say to each other, I know how you feel.”
This is a sweet, fun, chatty book that’s about a summer break – and would be perfect to read on a summer break.
With thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things Tours and Doubleday for the free e-copy for review.
Buy Sandwich from Bookshop.org [affiliate link]
I was delighted to help close out the blog tour for Sandwich. See below for details of where the other reviews have appeared.
April Releases by Brownrigg, Ernaux, O’Connor, Waterman and Wood
Family history is a common element for the first four of these review books: a multi-generational story (incorporating autofiction in places) about Anglo-American writers and the legacy of suicide; a brief slice of memoir about the loss of a mother; a historical novella inspired by family stories and set on an island at the cusp of war; and a poetry collection drawing on a father’s death as well as on local folklore. Addiction and dementia are specific links between pairs. And to round off, a set of short stories about pregnancy and motherhood.
The Whole Staggering Mystery: A Story of Fathers Lost and Found by Sylvia Brownrigg
“The dead don’t come back, but they are not as far away as you think.”
I knew Brownrigg’s name as a novelist thanks to Susan’s blog (see her review of Pages for Her), but when I read about this family memoir it piqued my interest more than her fiction might have. The Brownrigg clan are nobility (really – her brother has the title “Baronet”) but have rejected conventional Englishness over the past century. First her grandfather, Gawen, separated from his wife and moved to Nairobi to work as a journalist. He also published two obscure novels before dying at age 27. The empty bottle of Nembutal and recent changes to his will suggested suicide, though his mother resisted the notion vociferously. Gawen’s son, Nicholas, was raised in California by his mother, Lucia, and became an alcoholic who lived off-grid on a ranch and had an unpublished Beats-influenced novel.
After Nicholas’s death in 2018, Brownrigg was compelled to trace her family’s patterns of addiction and creativity. It’s a complex network of relatives and remarriages here. The family novels and letters were her primary sources, along with a scrapbook her great-grandmother Beatrice made to memorialize Gawen for Nicholas. Certain details came to seem uncanny. For instance, her grandfather’s first novel, Star Against Star, was about, of all things, a doomed lesbian romance – and when Brownrigg first read it, at 21, she had a girlfriend.
Along with the more traditional memoir sections, there are the documents that speak for themselves and extended passages of autofiction. I loved an imaginary letter by Gawen’s older brother, who died in young childhood, and a third-person segment about Beatrice’s life in England during the Second World War. But I mostly skipped over the 90 lightly fictionalized pages about the author’s (“Sophie’s”) life with her father in California. You might view this as a showcase of possible methods for engaging with family history, some of which work better than others. All of it is fascinating material, though.
Published by Counterpoint in the USA. With thanks to Nectar Literary for the advanced e-copy for review.
A Woman’s Story by Annie Ernaux (1988; 2024)
[Translated from the French by Tanya Leslie]
This memoir of Ernaux’s mother’s life and death is, at 58 pages, little more than an extended (auto)biographical essay. Confusingly, it covers the same period she wrote about in I Remain in Darkness (originally published nine years later), a diary of her mother’s final years with dementia; I even remembered two specific events and quotes. Why not combine the two into a full-length biographical recollection? Or pair it with A Man’s Place, Ernaux’s memoir of her father, in one volume? Perhaps her works will be repackaged in the future. But this came first: Ernaux started writing just a couple of weeks after her mother’s death, and spent 10 months over it. It’s clear she was determined to salvage what she could of her mother’s life:
It’s a difficult undertaking. For me, my mother has no history. She has always been there. When I speak of her, my first impulse is to ‘freeze’ her in a series of images unrelated to time … This book can be seen as a literary venture as its purpose is to find out the truth about my mother, a truth that can be conveyed only by words. … I believe I am writing about my mother because it is my turn to bring her into the world.
Ernaux opens with news of the death, and the funeral. But soon she’s pushing back into the past. Her mother grew up in poverty near Rouen and worked in a factory before her marriage, when she and her husband took on a grocery store and café. The Second World War was in some romantic way the great drama of her life. She was exacting of her daughter: “Her overriding concern was to give me everything she hadn’t had. But this involved so much work, so much worrying about money”. In her widowhood she came to live with Ernaux, who was then divorced with two sons, and tried to find a middle way between independence and connection. Eventually, though, her memory loss required admission to a nursing home.
I’ve felt the same about all three short works I’ve read by Ernaux so far: though precisely observed, they conceal themselves behind emotional distance. So while this might seem similar to A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir, I found the latter more engaging.
With thanks to Fitzcarraldo Editions for the free copy for review.
Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Connor
The remote Welsh island setting of O’Connor’s debut novella was inspired by several real-life islands that were depopulated in the twentieth century due to a change in climate and ways of life: Bardsey, St Kilda, the Blasket Islands, and the Aran Islands. (A letter accompanying my review copy explained that the author’s grandmother was a Welsh speaker from North Wales and her Irish grandfather had relatives on the Blasket Islands.)
Eighteen-year-old Manod Llan is the older daughter of a lobster fisherman. Her sweetheart recently left to find work in a mainland factory. It’s 1938 and there are vague rumbles about war, but more pressing is the arrival of strangers here to study a vanishing culture. Anthropologists Edward and Joan learn snatches of Welsh and make recordings of local legends and songs, which are interspersed with the fragmentary narrative. Manod, star-struck, seeks the English researchers’ approval as she helps with translation and other secretarial duties, but becomes disillusioned with their misinterpretations and fascist leanings.
The gradual disintegration of a beached whale casts a metaphorical shadow of decay over the slow-burning story. I kept waiting for momentous events that never came. More definitive consequences? Something to do with Manod’s worries for her little sister, Llinos? A flash-forward to the abandoned island’s after-years? Or to Manod’s future? As it is, the sense of being stuck at a liminal time makes it all feel like prologue. But O’Connor’s writing is quite lovely (“The milk had formed a film over the surface and puckered, like a strange kiss”; “All of my decisions felt like trying to catch a fish that did not exist until I caught it”) and the book is strong on atmosphere and tension. I’ll look out for her next work.
With thanks to Picador for the free copy for review.
Come Here to This Gate by Rory Waterman
I was most drawn to the poems in Part I, “All but Forgotten,” about his father’s last year or so.
The titles participate in telling the story: “Alcoholic Dementia,” followed by “Twin Oaks Nursing Home.”
The sheep-tracks of your mind were worn to trenches.
…
Then what you’ve turned yourself into – half there
on one side of a final single bed
you might not leave till the rest of you has left –
starts, stares through me, says ‘I’m being held
against my will!’, tells a nurse to ‘Just fuck off’
then thanks her. Old boy, when did you get like this?
The sheep-tracks of my mind are worn to trenches.
Then they moved you to a home
that still wasn’t home. ‘Why
am I in this fucking place?
Nothing’s wrong with me.’
So I’d tell you all over again,
but only the easy part (‘You’re
not remembering things well
at present.’ ‘Yes I fucking am’)
and you relearned that you’d
never learn – mindless torture,
until I stopped it. Your
silences were trains departing.
From the miscellany of Part II, I plucked out “Gooseberries” and “Perennials,” both of which conceal emotion among plants. Then Part III, “Lincolnshire Folk Tales,” turns the tone mischievous, with the ABCB end-rhymes of “Yallery Brown,” “The Metheringham Lass,” “The Lincoln Imp,” and “Nanny Rutt” (I felt I’d stumbled on a limerick with its rhythm: “Math Wood is a small plot of trees south of Bourne, / next to McDonald’s and Lidl. / It’s privately owned, full of shot-gun shells, pheasants – / but still, a bit of an idyll”). Plenty of good stuff, then, but it doesn’t all seem to fit together in the same collection.
With thanks to Carcanet Press for the advanced e-copy for review.
This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things by Naomi Wood
I requested this because a) I had enjoyed Wood’s novels Mrs. Hemingway and The Hiding Game and b) I couldn’t resist the title. These nine contemporary stories (five in the first person and four in the third person) all feature women who are pregnant and/or mothers of young children. Three dwell on work–life balance in particular, with the female protagonists of “Lesley, in Therapy” and “Dracula at the Movies” an animator and a filmmaker, respectively. The third, “Hurt Feelings,” in which a medical emergency forces a choice between career and motherhood, was my favourite. Claudia is working on an advertising campaign for a large pharmaceutical company whose newest product targets chronic pain. Although she suspects it’s a placebo, she knows how valuable it is for these people to have their pain acknowledged given it’s as invisible as her history of pregnancy loss.
Other highlights included “Peek-a-Boo,” in which pregnant twin sisters fly to Italy to remonstrate with their father, who refuses to cede a holiday flat to the next renters; and “Wedding Day,” about a woman bitter enough to try to sabotage her ex’s big day by demanding he bring their daughter, the flower girl, home by bedtime. “Flatten the Curve” is about restrictions and desires during Covid lockdown. Family, neighbour, and co-worker dynamics fuel the drama. In a few cases, Wood imagined promising situations but didn’t deliver on them. I could hardly believe “Comorbidities,” about a mother who films a sex tape with her husband to distract from her eco-anxiety, won the 2023 BBC National Short Story Award. If Wood was aiming for edgy, she landed on peevish instead. “Dino Moms,” the final story, was worst, with its absurd dinosaur-vet reality-TV setup. Overall, the collection is too one-note because of the obsession with motherhood (“It is not very interesting to be in love with your child; it’s commonplace, this sacrificial love”). Back to novels soon, please.
With thanks to Phoenix (Orion) for the free copy for review.
Does one of these catch your eye? What April releases can you recommend?
Carol Shields Prize Longlist Reads: Cocktail & Land of Milk and Honey
Two final reviews in advance of tomorrow’s shortlist announcement: a sophisticated, nostalgic short story collection and an intense future-set novel full of the pleasures of the flesh. Both make it onto my wish list at the end of this post.
Cocktail by Lisa Alward
The 12 stories of this debut collection brought to mind Tessa Hadley and Alice Munro for their look back at chic or sordid 1960s–1980s scenes and dysfunctional families or faltering marriages. They’re roughly half and half first-person and third-person (five versus seven). The title story opens the book with a fantastic line: “The problem with parties, my mother says, is people don’t drink enough.” Later, the narrator elaborates:
Her meaning is that if people drank more, they’d loosen up. Parties would be more fun, like they used to be. And I laugh along. Yes, I say, letting her top up my glass of Chardonnay. That’s it, not enough booze. But I’m thinking about Tom Collins.
Not the drink, but an alias a party guest used when he stumbled into her bedroom looking for a toilet. She was about eleven at this point and she and her brother vaguely resented being shut away from their parents’ parties. While for readers this is an uncomfortable moment as we wonder if she’s about to be molested, in memory it’s taken on a rosy glow for her – a taste of adult composure and freedom that she has sought with every partner and every glass of booze since. This was a pretty much perfect story, with a knock-out ending to boot.
Dependence on alcohol recurs, and “Hawthorne Yellow,” is also about a not-quite affair, between a restless stay-at-home mother and the decorator who discovers antique sketches in the old servants’ quarters of her home. “Orlando, 1974” again contrasts childhood nostalgia with seedy reality: Disney World should have been an idyll, but the narrator mostly remembers a lot of vomiting. “Old Growth” and “Bear Country” have Ray renegotiating his relationship with his son after divorcing Gwyneth. “Hyacinth Girl,” too, is about complicated stepfamilies, while “Wise Men Say” looks back at cross-class romance. The protagonist of “Maeve” feels she can’t match the title character’s perfect parenting skills; the first-person plural in “Pomegranate” portrays a group of wild convent schoolgirls.
“Little Girl Lost” was the most Hadley-meets-Munro, with an alcoholic painter’s daughter seen first as a half-feral child and later as a hippie young woman. “How the Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” was the least essential with its elderly narrator piecing things together in the aftermath of a burglary. Along with the title story, the standout for me was “Bundle of Joy,” about a persnickety grandmother going to her daughter’s place to spend time with her new grandson. She disapproves of just about every decision Erin has made (leaving the dogs’ frozen turds in the backyard all winter, for instance), but her interference threatens to have lasting consequences. Not a dud in the dozen, and a very strong voice I’ll expect to read much more from. (Read via Edelweiss; published by Biblioasis) 
Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang
We all die. We have only the choice, if we are privileged, of whether death comes with a whimper or a bang; of what worlds we taste before we go.
A real step up from How Much of These Hills Is Gold, which I read for book club last year – while it was interesting to see the queer, BIPOC spin Zhang put on the traditional Western, I found her Booker-longlisted debut bleak and strange in such a detached way that it was hard to care about. By contrast, I was fully involved in her sensuous and speculative second novel.
A 29-year-old Chinese American chef is exiled when the USA closes its borders while she’s working in London. 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 any ingredient desired and threatened foods are cultivated in a laboratory setting. While peasants survive on mung bean flour, wealthy backers indulge in classic French cuisine. The narrator’s job is to produce lavish, evocative multi-course meals to bring investors on board. Foie gras, oysters, fine wines; heirloom vegetables; fruits not seen for years. But also endangered creatures and mystery meat wrested back from extinction. Her employer’s 21-year-old daughter, Aida, oversees the lab where these rarities are kept alive.
Ironically, surrounded with such delicacies, the chef loses her appetite for all but cigarettes – yet another hunger takes over. Her relationship with Aida is a passionate secret made all the more peculiar by the fact that the chef’s other role is to impersonate Aida’s dead mother, Eun-Young. It’s clear this precarious setup can’t last; ambition and technology keep moving on. The novel presents such a striking picture of desire at the end of the world. Each sentence is honed to flawlessness, with whole paragraphs of fulsome descriptions of meals. Zhang’s prose reminded me of Stephanie Danler’s and R.O. Kwon’s – no surprise, then, that they’re on the Acknowledgments list, as are a cornucopia of foods and other literary influences.
I’m not usually one for a dystopian novel, but the emotional territory keeps this one grounded even as the plot grows more sinister. My only complaint is that I would have left off the final chapter as I don’t think tracing the protagonist through four more decades of life adds much. I would rather have left this world in limbo than thought of the episode as a blip in a facile regeneration process – that’s the most unrealistic element of all. But this has still been my favourite read from the longlist so far. And there’s even a faithful pet cat, a “recalcitrant beast” that keeps coming back to the chef despite benign neglect. (Public library)
My ideal shortlist, based on what I’ve read and still want to read, would be:
Cocktail by Lisa Alward
Dances by Nicole Cuffey
Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan
I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai
Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang
I wouldn’t be averse to seeing The Future or Chrysalis on there either. (Just not Loot, please!)
See Laura’s post for a recap of her reviews and her wish list. Marcie has also been reading from the longlist; see her first write-up here.
A Bookshop of One’s Own by Jane Cholmeley (Blog Tour)
Silver Moon, one of the Charing Cross Road bookshops, was a London institution from 1984 until its closure in 2001. “Feminism and business are strange bedfellows,” Jane Cholmeley soon realised, and this book is her record of the challenges of combining the two. On the spectrum of personal to political, this is much more manifesto than memoir. She dispenses with her own story (vicar’s tomboy daughter, boarding school, observing racism on a year abroad in Virginia, secretarial and publishing jobs, meeting her partner) via a 10-page “Who Am I?” opening chapter. However, snippets of autobiography do enter into the book later on; in one of my favourite short chapters, “Coming Out,” Cholmeley recalls finally telling her mother that she was a lesbian after she and Sue had been together nearly a decade.
The mid-1980s context plays a major role: Thatcherite policies (Section 28 outlawing the “promotion of homosexuality”), negotiations with the Greater London Council, and trying to share the landscape with other feminist bookshops like Sisterwrite and Virago. Although there were some low-key rivalries and mean-spirited vandalism, a spirit of camaraderie generally prevailed. Cholmeley estimates that about 30% of the shop’s customers were men, but the focus here was always on women. The events programme featured talks by an amazing who’s-who of women authors, Cholmeley was part of the initial roundtable discussions in 1992 that launched the Orange Prize for Fiction (now the Women’s Prize), and the café was designated a members’ club so that it could legally be a women-only space.
I’ve always loved reading about what goes on behind the scenes in bookshops (The Diary of a Bookseller, Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop, The Sentence, The Education of Harriet Hatfield, The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap, and so on), and Cholmeley ably conveys the buzzing girl-power atmosphere of hers. There is a fun sense of humour, too: “Dyke and Doughnut” was a potential shop name, and a letter to one potential business partner read, “you already eat lentils, and ride a bicycle, so your standard of living hasn’t got much further to fall, we happen to like you an awful lot, and think we could all work together in relative harmony”.
However, the book does not have a narrative per se; the “A Day in the Life of… (1996)” chapter comes closest to what those hoping for a bookseller memoir might be expecting, in that it actually recreates scenes and dialogue. The rest is a thematic chronicle, complete with lists, sales figures, profitability charts, and excerpted documents, and I often got lost in the detail. The fact that this gives the comprehensive history of one establishment makes it a nostalgic yearbook that will appeal most to readers who have a head for business, were dedicated Silver Moon customers, and/or hold a particular personal or academic interest in the politics of the time and the development of the feminist and LGBT movements.
With thanks to Random Things Tours and Mudlark for the free copy for review.
Buy A Bookshop of One’s Own from Bookshop.org [affiliate link]
I was happy to be part of the blog tour for the release of this book. See below for details of where other reviews have appeared or will be appearing soon.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 