Poetry Month Reviews & Interview: Amy Gerstler, Richard Scott, Etc.
April is National Poetry Month in the USA, and I was delighted to have several of my reviews plus an interview featured in a special poetry issue of Shelf Awareness on Friday. I’ve also recently read Richard Scott’s second collection.
Wrong Winds by Ahmad Almallah
Palestinian poet Ahmad Almallah’s razor-sharp third collection bears witness to the devastation of Gaza.
Through allusions, Almallah participates in an ancient lineage of poets, opening the collection with an homage to Al-Shanfarā and ending with “A Lament” for Zbigniew Herbert. Federico García Lorca is also a major influence. Occasional snippets of Arabic, French, and German, and accounts of travels in Berlin and Granada, reveal a cosmopolitan background. The speaker in “Loose Strings” considers exile, engaged in the potentially futile search for a homeland that is being destroyed: “What does it mean to be a poet, another ‘Homer’/ going home? Trying to find one?”
Tonally, anger and grief alternate, while alliteration and slant rhymes (sweat/sweet) create entrancing rhythms. In “Before Gaza, a Fall” and “My Tongue Is Tied Up Today,” staccato phrasing and spaced-out stanzas leave room for the unspeakable. The pièce de résistance is “A Holy Land, Wasted” (co-written with Huda Fakhreddine), which situates T.S. Eliot’s existential ruin in Palestine. Almallah contrasts Gaza then and now via childhood memories and adult experiences at checkpoints. His pastiche of “The Waste Land” starts off funny (“April is not that bad actually”) but quickly darkens, scorning those who turn away from tragedy: “It’s not good/ for your nerves to watch/ all that news, the sights/ of dead children.” The wordplay dazzles again here: “to motes the world crumbles, shattered/ like these useless mots.”
For Almallah, who now lives in Philadelphia, Gaza is elusive, enduringly potent—and mourned. Sometimes earnest, sometimes jaded, Wrong Winds is a remarkable memorial. 
Is This My Final Form? by Amy Gerstler
Amy Gerstler’s exceptional book of poetry leaps from surrealism to elegy as it ponders life’s unpredictability.
The language of transformation is integrated throughout. Aging and the seasons are examples of everyday changes. “As Winter Sets In” delivers “every day/ a new face you can’t renounce or forsake.” “When I was a bird,” with its interspecies metamorphoses, introduces a more fantastical concept: “I once observed a scurry of squirrels,/ concealed in a hollow tree, wearing seventeenth/ century clothes. Alas, no one believes me.” Elsewhere, speakers fall in love with the bride of Frankenstein or turn to dinosaur urine for a wellness regimen.
The collection contains five thematic slices. Part I spotlights women behaving badly (such as “Marigold,” about a wild friend; and “Mae West Sonnet,” in an hourglass shape); Part II focuses on music and sound. The third section veers from the inherited grief of “Schmaltz Alert” to the miniplay “Siren Island,” a tragicomic Shakespearean pastiche. Part IV spins elegies for lives and works cut short. The final subset includes a tongue-in-cheek account of pandemic lockdown activities (“The Cure”) and wry advice for coping (“Wound Care Instructions”).
Monologues and sonnets recur—the title’s “form” refers to poetic structures as much as to personal identity. Alliteration plus internal and end rhymes create satisfying resonance. In the closing poem, “Night Herons,” nature puts life into perspective: “the whir of wings/ real or imagined/ blurs trivial things.”
This delightfully odd collection amazes with its range of voices and techniques.
I also had the chance to interview Amy Gerstler, whose work was new to me. (I’ll certainly be reading more!) We chatted about animals, poetic forms and tone, Covid, the Los Angeles fires, and women behaving ‘badly’. 
Little Mercy by Robin Walter
In Robin Walter’s refined debut collection, nature and language are saving graces.
Many of Walter’s poems are as economical as haiku. “Lilies” entrances with its brief lines, alliteration, and sibilance: “Come/ dark, white/ petals// pull/close// —small fists// of night—.” A poem’s title often leads directly into the text: “Here” continues “the body, yes,/ sometimes// a river—little/ mercy.” Vocabulary and imagery reverberate, as the blessings of morning sunshine and a snow-covered meadow salve an unquiet soul (“how often, really, I want/ to end my life”).
Frequent dashes suggest affinity with Emily Dickinson, whose trademark themes of loss, nature, and loneliness are ubiquitous here, too. Vistas of the American West are a backdrop for pronghorn antelope, timothy grass, and especially the wrens nesting in Walter’s porch. Animals are also seen in peril sometimes: the family dog her father kicked in anger or a roadkilled fox she encounters. Despite the occasional fragility of the natural world, the speaker is “held by” it and granted “kinship” with its creatures. (How appropriate, she writes, that her mother named her for a bird.)
The collection skillfully illustrates how language arises from nature (“while picking raspberries/ yesterday I wanted to hold in my head// the delicious names of the things I saw/ so as to fold them into a poem later”—a lovely internal rhyme) and becomes a memorial: “Here, on earth,/ we honor our dead// by holding their names/ gentle in our hollow mouths—.”
This poised, place-saturated collection illuminates life’s little mercies. 
The three reviews above are posted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
That Broke into Shining Crystals by Richard Scott
I’ve never forgotten how powerful it was to hear Richard Scott read aloud from his forthcoming collection, Soho, at the Faber Spring Party in February 2018. Back then I called his work “amazingly intimate,” and that is true of this second collection as well.
It also mirrors his debut in that the book is in several discrete sections – like movements of a musical composition – and there are extended allusions to particular poets (there, Paul Verlaine and Walt Whitman; here, Andrew Marvell and Arthur Rimbaud). But there is one overall theme, and it’s a tough one: Scott’s boyhood grooming and molestation by a male adult, and how the trauma continues to affect him.
Part I contains 21 “Still Life” poems based on particular paintings, mostly by Dutch or French artists (see the Notes at the end for details). I preferred to read the poems blind so that I didn’t have the visual inspiration in my head. The imagery is startlingly erotic: the collection opens with “Like a foreskin being pulled back, the damask / reveals – pelvic bowl of pink-fringed shadow” (“Still Life with Rose”) and “Still Life with Bananas” starts “curved like dicks they sit – cosy in wicker – an orgy / of total yellowness – all plenty and arching – beyond / erect – a basketful of morning sex and sugar and sunlight”.
“O I should have been the / snail,” the poet laments; “Living phallus that can hide when threatened. But / I’m the oyster. … Cold jelly mess of a / boy shucked wide open.” The still life format allows him to freeze himself at particular moments of abuse or personal growth; “still” can refer to his passivity then as well as to his ongoing struggle with PTSD.
Part II, “Coy,” is what Scott calls a found poem or “vocabularyclept,” rearranging the words from Marvell’s 1681 “To His Coy Mistress” into 21 stanzas. The constraint means the phrases are not always grammatical, and the section as a whole is quite repetitive.
The title of the book (and of its final section) comes from Rimbaud and, according to the Notes, the 22 poems “all speak back to Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations but through the prism of various crystals and semi-precious stones – and their geological and healing properties.” My lack of familiarity with Rimbaud and his circle made me wonder if I was missing something, yet I thrilled to how visual the poems in this section were.
As with the Still Lifes, there’s an elevated vocabulary, forming a rich panoply of plants, creatures, stones, and colours. Alliteration features prominently throughout, as in “Citrine”: “O citrine – patron saint of the molested, sunny eliminator – crown us with your polychromatic glittering and awe-flecks. Offer abundance to those of us quarried. A boy is igneous.”
I’ve photographed “Peridot” (which was my mother’s birthstone) as an example of the before-and-after setup, the gorgeous language including alliteration, the rhetorical questioning, and the longing for lost innocence.
It was surprising to me that Scott refers to molestation and trauma so often by name, rather than being more elliptical – as poetry would allow. Though I admire this collection, my warmth towards it ebbed and flowed: I loved the first section; felt alienated by the second; and then found the third rather too much of a good thing. Perhaps encountering Part I or III as a chapbook would have been more effective. As it is, I didn’t feel the sections fully meshed, and the theme loses energy the more obsessively it’s repeated. Nonetheless, I’d recommend it to readers of Mark Doty, Andrew McMillan and Brandon Taylor.
Published today. With thanks to Faber for the free copy for review. An abridged version of this review first appeared in my Instagram post of 11 April.
Read any good poetry recently?
20 Books of Summer, 11–13: Campbell, Julavits, Lu
Two solid servings of women’s life writing plus a novel about a Chinese woman stuck in roles she’s not sure she wants anymore.
Thunderstone: A true story of losing one home and discovering another by Nancy Campbell (2022)
Just before Covid hit, Campbell’s partner Anna had a partially disabling stroke. They had to adjust to lockdown and the rigours of Anna’s at-home care at once. It was complicated in that Campbell was already halfway out the door: after 10 years, their relationship had run its course and she knew it was time to go, but guilt lingered about abandoning Anna at her most vulnerable (“How dare I leave someone who needed me”). That is the backdrop to a quiet book largely formed of a diary spanning June to September 2021. Campbell recounts settling into a caravan by the canal and railway line in Oxford, getting plenty of help from friends and neighbours but also finding her own inner resources and enjoying her natural setting.
The title refers to a fossil that has been considered a talisman in various cultures, and she needed the good luck during a period that involved accidental carbon monoxide poisoning and surgery for an ovarian abnormality (but it didn’t protect her books, which were all destroyed in a leaking shipping container – the horror!). I most enjoyed the longer entries where she muses on “All the potential lives I moved on from” during 20 years in Oxford and elsewhere, which makes me think that I would have preferred a more traditional memoir by her. Covid narratives feel really dated now, unfortunately. (New (bargain) purchase from Hungerford Bookshop with birthday voucher)
Directions to Myself: A Memoir by Heidi Julavits (2023)
Julavits is a novelist and founding editor of The Believer. I loved her non-standard diary, The Folded Clock, back in 2017, so jumped at the chance to read her new memoir but then took more a year over reading it. The U.S. subtitle, “A Memoir of Four Years,” captures the focus: the change in her son from age five to age nine – from little boy to full-fledged individual. In later sections he sounds so like my American nephew with his Fortnite obsession and lawyerly levels of argumentation and self-justification. A famous author once told Julavits that writers should not have children because each one represents a book they will not write. This book is a rebuttal: something she could not have written without having had her son. Home is a New York City apartment near the Columbia University campus where she teaches – in fact, directly opposite a dorm at which rape allegations broke out – but more often the setting is their Maine vacations, where coastal navigation is a metaphor for traversing life.
Mostly the memoir takes readers through everyday conversations the author has with friends and family about situations of inequality or harassment. Through her words she tries to gently steer her son towards more open-minded ideas about gender roles. She also entrances him and his sleepover friends with a real-life horror story about being chased through the French countryside by a man in a car. The tenor of her musings appealed to me, but already the details are fading. I suspect this will mean much more to a parent.
With thanks to Bloomsbury for the free copy for review.
The Funeral Cryer by Wenyan Lu (2023)
The title character holds a traditional position in her Chinese village, performing mourning at ceremonies for the dead. It’s a steady source of income for her and her husband, but her career choice has stigma attached: “Now that I brought bad luck and I smelt of the dead, nobody would step into our house to play mah-jong or chat.” Exotic as the setup might seem at first, it underpins a familiar story of a woman caught in frustrating relationships and situations. A very readable but plain style to this McKitterick Prize winner.
With thanks to the Society of Authors for the free copy.
Reading about Mothers and Motherhood: Cosslett, Cusk, Emma Press Poetry, Heti, and Pachico
It was (North American) Mother’s Day at the weekend, an occasion I have complicated feelings about now that my mother is gone. But I don’t think I’ll ever stop reading and writing about mothering. At first I planned to divide my recent topical reads (one a reread) into two sets, one for ambivalence about becoming a mother and the other for mixed feelings about one’s mother. But the two are intertwined – especially in the poetry anthology I consider below – such that they feel more like facets of the same experience. I also review two memoirs (one classic; one not so much) and two novels (autofiction vs. science fiction).
The Year of the Cat: A Love Story by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett (2023)
This was on my Most Anticipated list last year. A Covid memoir that features adopting a cat and agonizing over the question of whether to have a baby sounded right up my street. And in the earlier pages, in which Cosslett brings Mackerel the kitten home during the first lockdown and interrogates the stereotype of the crazy cat lady from the days of witches’ familiars onwards, it indeed seemed to be so. But the further I got, the more my pace through the book slowed to a limp; it took me 10 months to read, in fits and starts.
I’ve struggled to pinpoint what I found so off-putting, but I have a few hypotheses: 1) By the time I got hold of this, I’d tired of Covid narratives. 2) Fragmentary narratives can seem like profound reflections on subjectivity and silences. But Cosslett’s strategy of bouncing between different topics – worry over her developmentally disabled brother, time working as an au pair in France, PTSD from an attempted strangling by a stranger in London and being in Paris on the day of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack – with every page or even every paragraph, feels more like laziness or arrogance. Of course the links are there; can’t you see them?
3) Cosslett claims to reject clichéd notions about pets being substitutes for children, then goes right along with them by presenting Mackerel as an object of mothering (“there is something about looking after her that has prodded the carer in me awake”) and setting up a parallel between her decision to adopt the kitten and her decision to have a child. “Though I had all these very valid reasons not to get a cat, I still wanted one,” she writes early on. And towards the end, even after she’s considered all the ‘very valid reasons’ not to have a baby, she does anyway. “I need to find another way of framing it, if I am to do it,” she says. So she decides that it’s an expression of bravery, proof of overcoming trauma. I was unconvinced. When people accuse memoirists of being navel-gazing, this is just the sort of book they have in mind. I wonder if those familiar with her Guardian journalism would agree. (Public library)
A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother by Rachel Cusk (2001)
When this was first published, Cusk was vilified for “hating” her child – that is, for writing honestly about the bewilderment and misery of early motherhood. We’ve moved on since then. Now women are allowed to admit that it’s not all cherubs and lullabies. I suspect what people objected to was the unemotional tone: Cusk writes like an anthropologist arriving in a new land. The style is similar to her novels’ in that she can seem detached because of her dry wit, elevated diction and frequent literary allusions.
I understand that crying, being the baby’s only means of communication, has any number of causes, which it falls to me, as her chief companion and link to the world, to interpret.
Have you taken her to toddler group, the health visitor enquired. I had not. Like vaccinations and mother and baby clinics, the notion instilled in me a deep administrative terror.
We [new parents] are heroic and cruel, authoritative and then servile, cleaving to our guesses and inspirations and bizarre rituals in the absence of any real understanding of what we are doing or how it should properly be done.
She approaches mumsy things as an outsider, clinging to intellectualism even though it doesn’t seem to apply to this new world of bodily obligation, “the rambling dream of feeding and crying that my life has become.” By the end of the book, she does express love for and attachment to her daughter, built up over time and through constant presence. But she doesn’t downplay how difficult it was. “For the first year of her life work and love were bound together, fiercely, painfully.” This is a classic of motherhood literature, and more engaging than anything else I’ve read by Cusk. (Secondhand purchase – Awesomebooks.com)
The Emma Press Anthology of Motherhood, ed. by Rachel Piercey and Emma Wright (2014)
There’s a great variety of subject matter and tone here, despite the apparently narrow theme. There are poems about pregnancy (“I have a comfort house inside my body” by Ikhda Ayuning Maharsi), childbirth (“The Tempest” by Melinda Kallismae) and new motherhood, but also pieces imagining the babies that never were (“Daughters” by Catherine Smith) or revealing the complicated feelings adults have towards their mothers.
“All My Mad Mothers” by Jacqueline Saphra depicts a difficult bond through absurdist metaphors: “My mother was so hard to grasp: once we found her in a bath / of olive oil, or was it sesame, her skin well-slicked / … / to ease her way into this world. Or out of it.” I also loved her evocation of a mother–daughter relationship through a rundown of a cabinet’s contents in “My Mother’s Bathroom Armoury.”
In “My Mother Moves into Adolescence,” Deborah Alma expresses exasperation at the constant queries and calls for help from someone unconfident in English. “This, then, is how you should pray” by Flora de Falbe cleverly reuses the structure of the Lord’s Prayer as she sees her mother returning to independent life and a career as her daughter prepares to leave home. “I will hold you / as you held me / my mother – / yours are the bathroom catalogues / and the whole of a glorious future.”
I connected with these perhaps more so than the poems about becoming a mother, but there are lots of strong entries and very few unmemorable ones. Even within the mothers’ testimonials, there is ambivalence: the visceral vocabulary in “Collage” by Anna Kisby is rather morbid, partway to gruesome: “You look at me // like liver looks at me, like heart. You are familiar as innards. / In strip-light I clean your first shit. I’m not sure I do it right. / It sticks to me like funeral silk. … There is a window // guillotined into the wall. I scoop you up like a clod.”
A favourite pair: “Talisman” by Anna Kirk and “Grasshopper Warbler” by Liz Berry, on facing pages, for their nature imagery. “Child, you are grape / skins stretched over fishbones. … You are crab claws unfurling into cabbage leaves,” Kirk writes. Berry likens pregnancy to patient waiting for an elusive bird by a reedbed. (Free copy – newsletter giveaway)
Motherhood by Sheila Heti (2018)
I first read this nearly six years ago (see my original review), when I was 34; I’m now 40 and pretty much decided against having children, but FOMO is a lingering niggle. Even though I already owned it in hardback, I couldn’t resist picking up a nearly new paperback I saw going for 50 pence in a charity shop, if only for the Leanne Shapton cover – her simple, elegant watercolour style is instantly recognizable. Having a different copy also provided some novelty for my reread, which is ongoing; I’m about 80 pages from the end.
I’m not finding Heti’s autofiction musings quite as profound this time around, and I can’t deny that the book is starting to feel repetitive, but I’ve still marked more than a dozen passages. Pondering whether to have children is only part of the enquiry into what a woman artist’s life should be. The intergenerational setup stands out to me again as Heti compares her Holocaust survivor grandmother’s short life with her mother’s practical career and her own creative one.
For the past month or so, I’ve also been reading Alphabetical Diaries, so you could say that I’m pretty Heti-ed out right now, but I do so admire her for writing exactly what she wants to and sticking to no one else’s template. People probably react against Heti’s work as self-indulgent in the same way I did with Cosslett’s, but the former’s shtick works for me. (Secondhand purchase – Bas Books & Home, Newbury)
A few of the passages that have most struck me on this second reading:
I think that is how childbearing feels to me: a once-necessary, now sentimental gesture.
I don’t want ‘not a mother’ to be part of who I am—for my identity to be the negative of someone else’s positive identity.
The whole world needs to be mothered. I don’t need to invent a brand new life to give the warming effect to my life I imagine mothering will bring.
I have to think, If I wanted a kid, I already would have had one by now—or at least I would have tried.
Jungle House by Julianne Pachico (2023)
{BEWARE SPOILERS}
Pachico’s third novel is closer to sci-fi than I might have expected. Apart from Lena, the protagonist, all the major characters are machines or digital recreations: AI, droids, a drone, or a holograph of the consciousness of a dead girl. “Mother” is the AI security system that controls Jungle House, the Morel family’s vacation home in a country that resembles Colombia, where Pachico grew up and set her first two books. Lena, as the human caretaker, is forever grateful to Mother for rescuing her as a baby after the violent death of her parents, who were presumed rebels.
Mother is exacting but mercurial, strict about cleanliness yet apt to forget or overlook things during one of her “spells.” Lena pushes the boundaries of her independence, believing that Mother only wants to protect her but still longing to explore the degraded wilderness beyond the compound.
Mother was right, because Mother was always right about these kinds of things. The world was a complicated place, and Mother understood it much better than she did.
In the house, there was no privacy. In the house, Mother saw all.
Mother was Lena’s world. And Lena, in turn, was hers. No matter how angry they got at each other, no matter how much they fought, no matter the things that Mother did or didn’t do … they had each other.
It takes a while to work out just how tech-reliant this scenario is, what the repeated references to “the pit bull” are about, and how Lena emulated and resented Isabella, the Morel daughter, in equal measure. Even creepier than the satellites’ plan to digitize humans is the fact that Isabella’s security drone, Anton, can fabricate recorded memories. This reminded me a lot of Klara and the Sun. Tech themes aren’t my favourite, but I ultimately thought of this as an allegory of life with a narcissistic mother and the child’s essential task of breaking free. It’s not clinical and contrived, though; it’s a taut, subtle thriller with an evocative setting. (Public library)
See also: “Three on a Theme: Matrescence Memoirs”
Does one or more of these books take your fancy?
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?
Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, Writers’ Prize & Young Writer of the Year Award Catch-Up
This time of year, it’s hard to keep up with all of the literary prize announcements: longlists, shortlists, winners. I’m mostly focussing on the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction this year, but I like to dip a toe into the others where I can. I ask: What do I have time to read? What can I find at the library? and Which books are on multiple lists so I can tick off several at a go??
Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction
(Shortlist to be announced on 27 March.)
Read so far: Intervals by Marianne Brooker, Matrescence by Lucy Jones
&
A Flat Place by Noreen Masud
Past: Sunday Times/Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award shortlist
Currently: Jhalak Prize longlist
I also expect this to be a strong contender for the Wainwright Prize for nature writing, and hope it doesn’t end up being a multi-prize bridesmaid as it is an excellent book but an unusual one that is hard to pin down by genre. Most simply, it is a travel memoir taking in flat landscapes of the British Isles: the Cambridgeshire fens, Orford Ness in Suffolk, Morecambe Bay, Newcastle Moor, and the Orkney Islands.
But flatness is a psychological motif as well as a physical reality here. Growing up in Pakistan with a violent Pakistani father and a passive Scottish mother, Masud chose the “freeze” option when in fight-or-flight situations. When she was 15, her father disowned her and she moved with her mother and sisters to Scotland. Though no particularly awful things happened, a childhood lack of safety, belonging and love left her with complex PTSD that still affects how she relates to her body and to other people, even after her father’s death.
Masud is clear-eyed about her self and gains a new understanding of what her mother went through during their trip to Orkney. The Newcastle chapter explores lockdown as a literal Covid-era circumstance but also as a state of mind – the enforced solitude and stillness suited her just fine. Her descriptions of landscapes and journeys are engaging and her metaphors are vibrant: “South Nuns Moor stretched wide, like mint in my throat”; “I couldn’t stop thinking about the Holm of Grimbister, floating like a communion wafer on the blue water.” Although she is an academic, her language is never off-puttingly scholarly. There is a political message here about the fundamental trauma of colonialism and its ongoing effects on people of colour. “I don’t want ever to be wholly relaxed, wholly at home, in a world of flowing fresh water built on the parched pain of others,” she writes.
What initially seems like a flat authorial affect softens through the book as Masud learns strategies for relating to her past. “All families are cults. All parents let their children down.” Geography, history and social justice are all a backdrop for a stirring personal story. Literally my only annoyance was the pseudonyms she gives to her sisters (Rabbit, Spot and Forget-Me-Not). (Read via Edelweiss) 
And a quick skim:
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein
Past: Writers’ Prize shortlist, nonfiction category
For years people have been confusing Naomi Klein (geography professor, climate commentator, author of No Logo, etc.) with Naomi Wolf (feminist author of The Beauty Myth, Vagina, etc.). This became problematic when “Other Naomi” espoused various right-wing conspiracy theories, culminating with allying herself with Steve Bannon in antivaxxer propaganda. Klein theorizes on Wolf’s ideological journey and motivations, weaving in information about the doppelganger in popular culture (e.g., Philip Roth’s novels) and her own concerns about personal branding. I’m not politically minded enough to stay engaged with this but what I did read I found interesting and shrewdly written. I do wonder how her publisher was confident this wouldn’t attract libel allegations? (Public library)
Predictions: Cumming (see below) and Klein are very likely to advance. I’m less drawn to the history or popular science/tech titles. I’d most like to read Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in the Philippines by Patricia Evangelista, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder, and How to Say Babylon: A Jamaican Memoir by Safiya Sinclair. I’d be delighted for Brooker, Jones and Masud to be on the shortlist. Three or more by BIPOC would seem appropriate. I expect they’ll go for diversity of subject matter as well.
Writers’ Prize
Last year I read most books from the shortlists and so was able to make informed (and, amazingly, thoroughly correct) predictions of the winners. I didn’t do as well this year. In particular, I failed with the nonfiction list in that I DNFed Mark O’Connell’s book and twice borrowed the Cumming from the library but never managed to make myself start it; I thought her On Chapel Sands overrated. (I did skim the Klein, as above.) But at least I read the poetry shortlist in full:
Self-Portrait as Othello by Jason Allen-Paisant: I found more to sink my teeth into here than I did with his debut collection, Thinking with Trees (2021). Part I’s childhood memories of Jamaica open out into a wider world as the poet travels to London, Paris and Venice, working in snippets of French and Italian and engaging with art and literature. “I’m haunted as much by the character Othello as by the silences in the story.” Part III returns home for the death of his grandmother and a coming to terms with identity. [Winner: Forward Prize for Best Collection; Past: T.S. Eliot Prize shortlist] (Public library)
The Home Child by Liz Berry: A novel in verse “loosely inspired,” as Berry puts it, by her great-aunt Eliza Showell’s experience: she was a 12-year-old orphan when, in 1908, she was forcibly migrated from the English Midlands to Nova Scotia. The scenes follow her from her home to the Children’s Emigration Home in Birmingham, on the sea voyage, and in her new situation as a maid to an elderly invalid. Life is gruelling and lonely until a boy named Daniel also comes to the McPhail farm. This was a slow and not especially engaging read because of the use of dialect, which for me really got in the way of the story. (Public library)
& Bright Fear by Mary Jean Chan (Current: Dylan Thomas Prize shortlist)
Three category winners:
- The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright (Fiction)
- Thunderclap by Laura Cumming (Nonfiction) (Current: Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction longlist)
- The Home Child by Liz Berry (Poetry)
Overall winner: The Home Child by Liz Berry
Observations: The academy values books that cross genres. It appreciates when authors try something new, or use language in interesting ways (e.g. dialect – there’s also some in the Allen-Paisant, but not as much as in the Berry). But my taste rarely aligns with theirs, such that I am unlikely to agree with its judgements. Based on my reading, I would have given the category awards to Murray, Klein and Chan and the overall award perhaps to Murray. (He recently won the inaugural Nero Book Awards’ Gold Prize instead.)
World Poetry Day stack last week
Young Writer of the Year Award
Shortlist:
- The New Life by Tom Crewe
(Past: Nero Book Award shortlist, debut fiction) - Close to Home by Michael Magee (Winner: Nero Book Award, debut fiction category)
- A Flat Place by Noreen Masud (see above)
&
Bad Diaspora Poems by Momtaza Mehri
Winner: Forward Prize for Best First Collection
Nostalgia is bidirectional. Vantage point makes all the difference. Africa becomes a repository of unceasing fantasies, the sublimation of our curdled angst.
Crossing between Somalia, Italy and London and proceeding from the 1830s to the present day, this debut collection sets family history amid wider global movements. It’s peopled with nomads, colonisers, immigrants and refugees. In stanzas and prose paragraphs, wordplay and truth-telling, Mehri captures the welter of emotions for those whose identity is split between countries and complicated by conflict and migration. I particularly admired “Wink Wink,” which is presented in two columns and opens with the suspension of time before the speaker knew their father was safe after a terrorist attack. There’s super-clever enjambment in this one: “this time it happened / after evening prayer // cascade of iced tea / & sugared straws // then a line / break // hot spray of bullets & / reverb & // in less than thirty minutes we / they the land // lose twenty of our children”. Confident and sophisticated, this is a first-rate debut.
A few more favourite lines:
IX. Art is something we do when the war ends.
X. Even when no one dies on the journey, something always does.
(from “A Few Facts We Hesitantly Know to Be Somewhat True”)
You think of how casually our bodies are overruled by kin,
by blood, by heartaches disguised as homelands.
How you can count the years you have lived for yourself on one hand.
History is the hammer. You are the nail.
(from “Reciprocity is a Two-way Street”)
With thanks to Jonathan Cape (Penguin) for the free copy for review.
I hadn’t been following the Award on Instagram so totally missed the news of them bringing back a shadow panel for the first time since 2020. The four young female Bookstagrammers chose Mehri’s collection as their winner – well deserved.
Winner: The New Life by Tom Crewe
This was no surprise given that it was the Sunday Times book of the year last year (and my book of the year, to be fair). I’ve had no interest in reading the Magee. It’s a shame that a young woman of colour did not win as this year would have been a good opportunity for it. (What happened last year, seriously?!) But in that this award is supposed to be tied into the zeitgeist and honour an author on their way up in the world – as with Sally Rooney in my shadowing year – I do think the judges got it right.
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.
Recent Releases by Nathan Hill, Hisham Matar, Sigrid Nunez and More
One key way in which 2024’s reading has already differed from previous years’ is that I no longer avoid doorstoppers. I now classify any book with over 400 pages as a doorstopper, and by that definition I have already gotten through three this year: The Tidal Year plus two of the below, with Wellness standing out as the true whopper at 597 small-print pages. January offered a set of releases full of variety: gritty yet funny flash fiction; a novel of big ideas and big empathy for its flawed characters; an exile’s elegant love letter to Libya from London; a coy pandemic-era reflection on connection and creation; and a tour of nature close to home.
Universally Adored and Other One Dollar Stories by Elizabeth Bruce
This was a great collection of 33 stories, all of them beginning with the words “One Dollar” and most of flash fiction length. Bruce has a knack for quickly introducing a setup and protagonist. The voice and setting vary enough that no two stories sound the same. What is the worth of a dollar? In some cases, where there’s a more contemporary frame of reference, a dollar is a sign of desperation (for the man who’s lost house, job and wife in “Little Jimmy,” for the coupon-cutting penny-pincher whose unbroken monologue makes up the whole of “Grocery List”), or maybe just enough for a small treat for a child (as in “Mouse Socks” or “Boogie Board”). In the historical stories, a dollar can buy a lot more. It’s a tank of gas – and a lesson on the evils of segregation – in “Gas Station”; it’s a huckster’s exorbitant charge for a mocked-up relic in “The Grass Jesus Walked On.”
The tone ranges from black comedy (“Festus”) to high tragedy (“Votive Candle”), but the book mostly falls within the realm of dirty realism with the attention to working-class country folk, so I’d recommend the collection to fans of authors who perch on the lighter side of that subgenre, such as Barbara Kingsolver or Denis Johnson. A few of my favorite stories, in addition to the above, were “Ice-Cold Water,” which I appreciated for the Washington D.C. setting and the way that an assumption about who would be racist was overturned by a moment of simple compassion; “Dolores,” in which a slick humanitarian fundraiser meets a waitress who has his number; and “Boiling the Buggers,” a window onto Covid-exacerbated mental illness. (Read via BookSirens)
Wellness by Nathan Hill
Somehow nearly eight years have passed since Hill’s debut novel, The Nix, which I dubbed “a rich, multi-layered story about family curses and failure.” I admired it as much for its prose as for its ideas, and Wellness is just as effervescent and insightful. It’s a state-of-the-nation novel filtered through one Chicago family: experimental photographer and 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 and are considering trendy features like open shelves and separate master bedrooms. It would be oversimplifying, but true, to say that this couple is experiencing midlife and marital crises. Their nineties college romance – and a time of life when everything felt open and possible – is so remote now. When Elizabeth suggests they join a friend at a swingers’ club and a patient of hers who’s also a parent at Toby’s school sees them outside, chaos ensues.
Some elements from The Nix carry over, such as campus politics, the American Midwest, and mother–son relationships, but also broader questions of authenticity, purpose and nurture. Is love itself a placebo? The novel spends time with Jack and Elizabeth at the dawn of their relationship and in the present day, but also looks back to their early careers and first years of parenthood. Hill is clearly fascinated with the sort of psychological experimentation Elizabeth engages in (there’s a whole bibliography of scientific papers consulted) but also turns it to humorous effect, as when Elizabeth subjects Toby to the marshmallow test. A lot of information is conveyed through dialogue, yet it never feels forced. A couple of long asides, on Elizabeth’s family history and the algorithms guiding Jack’s interactions with his conspiracy theorist father, tried my patience, but I loved a four-page chapter on a funeral supper where every sentence starts “There was.” Sooooo many quotable lines throughout.
The only fault in an addictive and spot-on novel (how did he know?! you’ll find yourself thinking about your own attitude to work/marriage/children) is that Hill is so committed to excavating these characters’ backstory of stunted emotion – Jack estranged from his religious Kansas farmer parents after a traumatic incident you feel right in the gut; Elizabeth glad to jettison her father’s wealth with his anger – that he hurries through the denouement. Still, this is sure to be a fiction highlight of my year. It’s one for readers of Jonathan Franzen, sure, but I also thought it reminiscent of Katherine Heiny’s Standard Deviation and Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings.
With thanks to Picador for the proof copy for review.
My Friends by Hisham Matar
“Benghazi was the one place I longed for the most, it was also the place I most feared to return to.”
Taking a long walk through London one day, Khaled looks back from midlife on the choices he and his two best friends have made. He first came to the UK as an eighteen-year-old student at Edinburgh University. Everything that came after stemmed from one fateful day. Matar places Khaled and his university friend Mustafa at a real-life demonstration outside the Libyan embassy in London in 1984, which ended in a rain of bullets and the accidental death of a female police officer. Khaled’s physical wound is less crippling than the sense of being cut off from his homeland and his family. As he continues his literary studies and begins teaching, he decides to keep his injury a secret from them, as from nearly everyone else in his life. On a trip to Paris to support a female friend undergoing surgery, he happens to meet Hosam, a writer whose work enraptured him when he heard it on the radio back home long ago. Decades pass and the Arab Spring prompts his friends to take different paths.
I’d previously only read Matar’s short nonfiction work A Month in Siena. The slow, meditative style I enjoyed so much there didn’t translate well into doorstopper length; by the 300-page mark I found myself skimming to see if anything else might happen. Despite the title, we come to know Mustafa and Hosam much less well than we do Khaled. I would happily have had the book’s plot and sentiment concentrated into a taut 200 pages. However, I’m still interested in trying other books by Matar. In the Country of Men is significantly shorter and available from the backroom storage area of my library, and his Folio Prize-winning memoir The Return, too, is on shelf and I reckon will be right up my street.
With thanks to Viking (Penguin) for the proof copy for review.
The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez
I’m a huge Nunez fan after reading The Friend, What Are You Going Through, and especially A Feather on the Breath of God. Her last three books have been very much of a piece: autofiction voiced by an unnamed woman who has a duty of care towards a friend or a friend’s pet and ponders, in wry meta fashion, the nature of autobiographical writing and the meaning of life and death at a time of climate breakdown. Alas, The Vulnerables seems like no more than a rehashing of The Friend, with flanking main characters chosen at random from central casting: a parrot named Eureka and a mentally ill college drop-out called Vetch. This quirky trio is thrown together in a lavish New York City apartment during lockdown and nothing much happens but conversation brings them closer.
A second problem: Covid-19 stories feel dated. For the first two years of the pandemic I read obsessively about it, mostly nonfiction accounts from healthcare workers or ordinary people looking for community or turning to nature in a time of collective crisis. But now when I come across it as a major element in a book, it feels like an out-of-place artefact; I’m almost embarrassed for the author: so sorry, but you missed your moment. My disappointment may primarily be because my expectations were so high. I’ve noted that two blogger friends new to Nunez were enthusiastic about this (but so was Susan, who’d enjoyed her before). That’s not to say this wasn’t a pleasantly fluid and incisive read, even if its message of essential human vulnerability is an obvious one. Anyway, I’ll take Nunez musing on familiar subjects over most other contemporary writers any day:
“Never write ‘I don’t remember,’ Editor says; it undermines your authority. But write as if you remember everything and Reader will smell a rat.”
“You can start with fiction or start with documentary, according to Jean-Luc Goddard. Either way, you will inevitably find the other.”
“I like this clarification by the narrator of a book by Stendhal: ‘It is not out of egotism that I say “I”; it is simply the quickest way to tell the story.’)”
(À propos of the doorstoppers above)
“Does that mean a long novel is easier to write than a short one? / Um, no. But, to borrow from a certain critic, in almost every long book I read I see a short one shirking its job.”
With thanks to Virago for the proof copy for review.
And a bonus work of nonfiction:
Local: A Search for Nearby Nature and Wildness by Alastair Humphreys
Lev Parikian alerted me to this amiable record of weekly discoveries of the nature on one’s home turf. Humphreys has been an international adventure traveller and written many books about his exploits. Here, by contrast, he zooms the lens in about as far as it will go, ordering a custom-made 20-km-square OS map that has his house at the centre and choosing one surrounding grid square per week (so 52 out of a total of 400) to cycle to and explore. He’s chosen to leave his town unnamed so this can function as an Everyman’s journey through edgelands. And his descriptions and black-and-white photographs really do present an accurate microcosm of modern England: fields, woods, waterways, suburban streets.
From one November to the next, he watches the seasons advance and finds many magical spaces with everyday wonders to appreciate. “This project was already beginning to challenge my assumptions of what was beautiful or natural in the landscape,” he writes in his second week. True, he also finds distressing amounts of litter, no-access signs and evidence of environmental degradation. But curiosity is his watchword: “The more I pay attention, the more I notice. The more I notice, the more I learn.”
Each week’s observations send him down a research rabbit hole, with topics including caves, land management, mudlarking, plant species, and much more. The nature of the short chapters means that there can only ever be a cursory look at huge issues like rewilding and veganism, but Humphreys is nimble in weaving in the brief, matter-of-fact discussions. His eagerness is irrepressible. “How you look, what you see, and the way all this makes you feel: a single map and the best of all possible worlds.” (See also: Paul’s review.)
With thanks to the author for the free copy for review.
Best Books from 2023
Keeping it simple again this year with one post covering all genres: the 24 (or, actually 26) current-year releases that stood out the most for me. (No rankings; anything from my Best of First Half that didn’t make it through can be considered a runner-up, along with The Librarianist.)
Fiction
The New Life by Tom Crewe: Two 1890s English sex researchers (based on John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis) write a book called Sexual Inversion drawing on ancient Greek history and containing case studies of homosexual behaviour. Oscar Wilde’s trial puts everyone on edge; not long afterwards, their own book becomes the subject of an obscenity trial, and each man has to decide what he’s willing to give up in devotion to his principles. This is deeply, frankly erotic stuff, and, on the sentence level, just exquisite writing.
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff: Groff’s fifth novel combines visceral detail and magisterial sweep as it chronicles a runaway Jamestown servant’s struggle to endure the winter of 1610. Flashbacks to traumatic events seep into her mind as she copes with the harsh reality of life in the wilderness. The style is archaic and postmodern all at once. Evocative and affecting – and as brutal as anything Cormac McCarthy wrote. A potent, timely fable as much as a historical novel.
Counting as one this thematic trio of women’s true crime pastiches; I liked the Makkai best.
Penance by Eliza Clark: A compelling account of teenage feuds and bullying that went too far and ended in murder. It’s a pretty gruesome crime, but memorable, not least because it coincided with the day of the Brexit vote. I loved Clark’s portrait of Crow-on-Sea, a down-at-heel seaside town near Scarborough, and the depth of character that comes through via interviews and documents. She also nails teenage dialogue and social media use, podcasts, true crime obsession and so on.
Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll: An engrossing story of a Type A sorority president whose perfect life goes askew when a serial killer targets the house and kills two of her friends. She and the domestic partner of one of his previous victims are determined to see “the Defendant” brought to justice. 1970s Florida/Washington were interesting settings, and I liked the focus on the victims. The judge in the Defendant’s case lamented that such a bright young man would come to grief; think of the bright young women he extinguished instead.
I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai: When an invitation comes from her boarding school alma mater, Granby, to teach a two-week course on podcasting, Bodie indulges her obsession with the 1995 murder of her former roommate. Makkai has taken her cues from the true crime genre and constructed a convincing mesh of evidence and theories. She so carefully crafts her pen portraits, and so intimately involves us in Bodie’s psyche, that it’s impossible not to get invested. This is timely, daring, intelligent, enthralling storytelling.
Sidle Creek by Jolene McIlwain: In this debut collection of 22 short stories, loosely linked by their location in the Appalachian hills in western Pennsylvania and a couple of recurring minor characters, McIlwain softens the harsh realities of addiction, poverty and violence with the tender bruises of infertility and lost love. Grief is a resonant theme in many of the stories, with pregnancy or infant loss a recurring element. At times harrowing, always clear-eyed, these stories are true to life and compassionate about human foibles and animal pain.
Mrs S by K Patrick: Patrick’s unnamed narrator is an early-twenties Australian butch lesbian who has come to England to be a matron at a girls’ boarding school. Mrs S is the headmaster’s wife, perhaps 20 years her senior. A heat wave gives a sultry atmosphere as hints of attraction between them give way to explicit scenes. Summer romances never last, but their intensity is legendary, and this feels like an instant standard. Not your average coming-of-age story, seduction narrative or cougar stereotype. It’s a new queer classic.
Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld: Through her work as a writer for a sketch comedy show modelled on Saturday Night Live, Sally Milz meets Noah Brewster, a pop star with surfer-boy good looks. Plain Jane getting the hot guy – that never happens, right? In fact, Sally has a theory about this very dilemma… As always, Sittenfeld’s inhabiting of a first-person narrator is flawless, and Sally’s backstory and Covid-lockdown existence endeared her to me. Could this be called predictable? Well, what does one want from a romcom?
The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng: In 1921, “Willie” Somerset Maugham and his secretary/lover, Gerald, stay with old friends Robert and Lesley Hamlyn in Penang, Malaysia. Willie’s marriage is floundering and he faces financial ruin. He needs a story that will sell and gets one when Lesley starts recounting the momentous events of 1910: volunteering at the party office of Dr Sun Yat Sen and trying to save her friend from a murder charge. Tan weaves it all into a Maugham-esque plot with sumptuous scene-setting and atmosphere.
Absolutely and Forever by Rose Tremain: At age 15, Marianne falls in love. She imagines her romance with Simon as a grand adventure (and escape from her parents’ ordinariness), but his post-school life in Paris doesn’t have room for her. Much changes over the next 15 years, but never her attachment to her first love. This has the chic, convincing 1960s setting of Tessa Hadley’s work, and Marianne’s droll narration is a delight. It put me through an emotional wringer – no cheap tear-jerker but a tender depiction of love in all its forms.
In Memoriam by Alice Winn: Heartstopper on the Western Front; swoon! Will Sidney Ellwood and Henry Gaunt both acknowledge that this is love and not just sex, as it is for so many teenage boys at their English boarding school? And will one or both survive the trenches of the First World War? Winn depicts the full horror of war, but in between there is banter, friendship and poetry. Some moments are downright jolly. This debut is obsessively researched, but Winn has a light touch with it. Engaging, thrilling, and, yes, romantic.
Nonfiction
All My Wild Mothers by Victoria Bennett: A lovely memoir about grief and gardening, caring for an ill child and a dying parent. The book is composed of dozens of brief autobiographical, present-tense essays, each titled after a wildflower with traditional healing properties. The format realistically presents bereavement and caring as ongoing, cyclical challenges rather than one-time events. Sitting somewhere between creative nonfiction and nature essays, it’s a beautiful read for any fan of women’s life writing.
Monsters by Claire Dederer: The question posed by this hybrid work of memoir and cultural criticism is “Are we still allowed to enjoy the art made by horrible people?” It begins, in the wake of #MeToo, by reassessing the work of film directors Roman Polanski and Woody Allen. The book is as compassionate as it is incisive. While there is plenty of outrage, there is also much nuance. Dederer’s prose is forthright and funny; lucid even when tackling thorny issues. Erudite, empathetic and engaging from start to finish.
Womb by Leah Hazard: A wide-ranging and accessible study of the uterus, this casts a feminist eye over history and future alike. Blending medical knowledge and cultural commentary, it cannot fail to have both personal and political significance for readers of any gender. The thematic structure of the chapters also functions as a roughly chronological tour of how life with a uterus might proceed: menstruation, conception, pregnancy, labour, caesarean section, ongoing health issues, menopause. Inclusive and respectful of diversity.
Sea Bean by Sally Huband: Stories of motherhood, the quest to find effective treatment in a patriarchal medical system, volunteer citizen science projects, and studying Shetland’s history and customs mingle in a fascinating way. Huband travels around the archipelago and further afield, finding vibrant beachcombing cultures. In many ways, this is about coming to terms with loss, and the author presents the facts about climate crisis with sombre determination. She writes with such poetic tenderness in this radiant debut memoir.
La Vie by John Lewis-Stempel: The author has written much about his Herefordshire haunts, but he’s now relocated permanently to southwest France (La Roche, in the Charente). He proudly calls himself a peasant farmer, growing what he can and bartering for much of the rest. La Vie chronicles a year in his quest to become self-sufficient. It opens one January and continues through the December, an occasional diary with recipes. It’s a peaceful, comforting read that’s attuned to the seasons and the land. Lewis-Stempel’s best book in an age.
All of Us Together in the End by Matthew Vollmer: In 2019, Vollmer’s mother died of complications of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Months later, his father reported blinking lights in the woods near the family cemetery. Although Vollmer had left the Seventh-Day Adventist Church in college, his religious upbringing influenced his investigation, which overlapped with COVID-19. Grief, mysticism, and acceptance of the unexplained are resonant themes. An unforgettable record of “a collision with the ineffable.”
Otherwise by Julie Marie Wade: Nine intricate autobiographical essays reflect on risk, bodily autonomy, and poetry versus prose. A series of meditations composed across Wade’s thirties arranges snapshots of her growing frustration with gendered stereotypes. In particular, she interrogates her rosy childhood notions of marriage. As she explored feminism and accepted her lesbian identity—though not before leaving a man at the altar—she found ways to be “a secular humanist by day and a hopeless romantic by night.” Superb.
Eggs in Purgatory by Genanne Walsh: This autobiographical essay tells the story of the last few months of her father’s life. Aged 89, he lived downstairs from Walsh and her wife in San Francisco. He was quite the character: idealist, stubborn, outspoken; a former Catholic priest. Although he had no terminal conditions, he was sick of old age and its indignities and ready to exit. The task of a memoir is to fully mine the personal details of a situation but make of it something universal, and that’s just what she does here. Stunning.
Poetry
More Sky by Joe Carrick-Varty: In this debut collection, the fact of his alcoholic father’s suicide is inescapable. The poet alternates between an intimate “you” address and third-person scenarios, auditioning coping mechanisms. His frame of reference is wide: football, rappers, Buddhist cosmology. The word “suicide” itself is repeated to the point where it becomes just a sibilant collection of syllables. The tone is often bitter, as is to be expected, but there is joy in the deft use of language.
Bright Fear by Mary Jean Chan: This follow-up to Flèche takes up many of the same foundational subjects: race, family, language and sexuality. But this time, the pandemic is the lens through which all is filtered. At a time when Asian heritage merited extra suspicion, English was both a means of frank expression and a source of ambivalence. At the centre of the book, “Ars Poetica,” a multi-part collage incorporating lines from other poets, forms a kind of autobiography in verse. Chan also questions the lines between genres. Excellent.
Lo by Melissa Crowe: This incandescent autobiographical collection delves into the reality of sexual abuse and growing up in rural poverty. Guns are insidious, used for hunting or mass shootings. Trauma lingers. “Maybe home is what gets on you and can’t / be shaken loose.” The collection is so carefully balanced in tone that it never feels bleak. In elegies and epithalamiums (poems celebrating marriage), Crowe honors family ties that bring solace. The collection has emotional range: sensuality, fear, and wonder at natural beauty.
A Whistling of Birds by Isobel Dixon: I was drawn to this for its acknowledged debt to D.H. Lawrence’s Birds, Beasts and Flowers. Snakes, bees, bats and foxes are some of the creatures that scamper through the text. There are poems for marine life, fruit and wildflowers. You get a sense of the seasons turning, and the natural wonders to prize from each. Dixon’s poetry is formal yet playful, the structures and line and stanza lengths varying. There are portraits and elegies. The book is in collaboration with Scottish artist Douglas Robertson. A real gem.
Standing in the Forest of Being Alive by Katie Farris: This debut collection addresses the symptoms and side effects of breast cancer treatment at age 36, but often in oblique or cheeky ways – it can be no mistake that “assistance” appears two lines before a mention of hemorrhoids, for instance, even though it closes an epithalamium distinguished by its gentle sibilance (Farris’s husband is Ukrainian American poet Ilya Kaminsky.) She crafts sensual love poems, and exhibits Japanese influences. (Discussed in my review essay for The Rumpus.)
The House of the Interpreter by Lisa Kelly: Kelly is half-Danish and has single-sided deafness, and her second collection engages with questions of split identity. One section ends with the Deaf community’s outrage that the Prime Minister’s Covid briefings were not translated into BSL. Bizarre but delightful is the sequence of alliteration-rich poems about fungi, followed by a miscellany of autobiographical poems full of references to colour, language, nature and travel.
Hard Drive by Paul Stephenson: This wry, wrenching debut collection is an extended elegy for his partner, Tod Hartman, an American anthropologist who died of heart failure at 38. There’s every style, tone and structure imaginable here. Stephenson riffs on his partner’s oft-misspelled name (German for death), and writes of discovery, autopsy, sadmin and rituals. In “The Only Book I Took” he opens up Tod’s copy of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking – which came from Wonder Book, the bookstore chain I worked at in Maryland!
Okay, twist my arm … if I had to pick my overall books of the year, I’d concur with the Times in picking The New Life. In nonfiction: Monsters. In poetry: Standing in the Forest of Being Alive.
Have you read any of my favourites? What 2023 releases do I need to catch up on right away?
And Finally by Henry Marsh & Sinkhole by Juliet Patterson
As I mentioned about my first batch of September releases, the nonfiction was on two broad themes: books about books (two still to come), and books about death (with What Remains? by Rupert Callender still to come). Here’s two from the latter camp.
And Finally: Matters of Life and Death by Henry Marsh
Marsh is a retired brain surgeon and the author of Do No Harm, one of the very best medical memoirs out there, as well as Admissions. As he was turning 70 a couple of years ago, two specific happenings prompted this third book. One: he volunteered for a brain scan as part of a medical study and, though he was part of a healthy cohort, was appalled at the degeneration his results showed. The other was that, after years of ignoring symptoms, he was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer and a someday, far-off mortality started to seem a lot closer. The pandemic amplified his health worries and sense of isolation, so he threw himself into various domestic projects like clearing his loft, home renovations, and remodelling his daughter’s dollhouse to give to his beloved granddaughters.
As in Admissions, the book flits between topics: the hypoxia he experienced on a trip to Nepal, surgical mistakes made (he once operated on the wrong side of the neck), balcony gardens he created on his hospital’s neurosurgery wards, a potter friend who died of a brain tumour, and so on. Along with details of his cancer treatment, he discusses its typical course and waxes lyrical about the meaning of dreams, what we know about consciousness, and the fairy stories he made up to tell his granddaughters over Zoom during lockdown. He acknowledges his own limitations – he was conned not once but twice by cowboy builders, and declined to operate on a young Ukrainian doctor, leaving it to a colleague – and speaks out against technologies to extend the human lifespan and in favour of assisted dying.
In general, the book feels quite scattered and repetitious. However, I appreciated Marsh’s usual candour and could see how he would want to finish this quickly and get it out into the world, even if it would have benefited from further editing to make each chapter a more polished stand-alone essay. The good news is that his scan results were promising as of spring 2022 and I’ve seen on Twitter that he’s now in Ukraine with Rachel Clarke to speak at the Lviv BookForum. Is it selfish to hope we’ll get another book from him? 
With thanks to Jonathan Cape for the free copy for review.
Sinkhole: A Legacy of Suicide by Juliet Patterson
In December 2008, poet Juliet Patterson’s father died by suicide, hanging himself from a bridge near his Minnesota home in the middle of the night. When the news came, Patterson was recovering from a car accident the week before and in the middle of debates with her partner Rachel about whether they would have a child. Her father had been in his late seventies, in fine health and with full mental capacity; he left his affairs ship-shape, and his suicide note was mostly practicalities about insurance, bank accounts and car ownership.
On the face of it, he wasn’t an obvious candidate, not someone you would worry about. Yet there was family history: both of Patterson’s parents lost their fathers to suicide. And there was a bizarre direct connection between their two Kansas-based families: her maternal grandmother’s best friend became her paternal grandfather’s secretary and mistress.
Patterson returns to Kansas on research trips to unearth her grandfathers’ lives: William a pottery manager who later struck it rich through Gulf Oil and Edward a New Deal Democratic congressman who lost his second bid for re-election. She pairs archival evidence – photographs and newspaper clippings – with skillfully imagined accounts of what each of her three ancestors did and felt on the day of his suicide. Her thinking is guided especially by the work of Edwin Shneidman, a psychologist who studied suicide notes.
Throughout, sinkholes, which are common in Kansas due to coal mining (one even opened up near her grandmother’s house), are both reality and metaphor for the chasm a suicide leaves. This gorgeously written family memoir approaches its difficult subject matter with brave tenderness and is one of my nonfiction favorites from the year so far. 
Published by Milkweed Editions in the USA. With thanks to Nectar Literary for the advanced e-copy for review.
May Releases: Barrera, Cornwell, Jones, Ruhl
Greetings from the English Channel! I’m putting this quick post together on an outdoor deck as we leave Plymouth harbour on the ferry to Spain. I’ve taken a seasickness pill and am wearing acupressure bracelets, and so far I’m feeling pretty well here taking in a sea breeze; fingers crossed that it will continue to be a smooth voyage.
Have a look at all the lovely May releases above. How I wish that I’d had a chance to read some of them this month! Alas, things have been so busy with our move that I have only cracked one open so far (the Shipstead), but I’m looking forward to reading the rest soon after we get back. For now, I’ll give snippets of early reviews I’ve published elsewhere: two memoirs of pregnancy and early motherhood (the one focusing on postnatal depression), a varied short story collection, and an accessible volume of poetry written during Covid lockdowns.
Linea Nigra: An Essay on Pregnancy and Earthquakes by Jazmina Barrera
(Translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney)
In a fragmentary work of autobiography and cultural commentary, the Mexican author investigates pregnancy as both physical reality and liminal state. The linea nigra is a stripe of dark hair down a pregnant woman’s belly. It’s a potent metaphor for the author’s matriarchal line: her grandmother was a doula; her mother is a painter. In short passages that dart between topics, Barrera muses on motherhood, monitors her health, and recounts her dreams. Her son, Silvestre, is born halfway through the book. She gives impressionistic memories of the delivery and chronicles her attempts to write while someone else watches the baby. This is both diary and philosophical appeal—for pregnancy and motherhood to become subjects for serious literature. (See my full review for Foreword.)
Birth Notes: A Memoir of Recovery by Jessica Cornwell
It so happens that May is Maternal Mental Health Awareness Month. Cornwell comes from a deeply literary family; the late John le Carré was her grandfather. Her memoir shimmers with visceral memories of delivering her twin sons in 2018 and the postnatal depression and infections that followed. The details, precise and haunting, twine around a historical collage of words from other writers on motherhood and mental illness, ranging from Margery Kempe to Natalia Ginzburg. Childbirth caused other traumatic experiences from her past to resurface. How to cope? For Cornwell, therapy and writing went hand in hand. This is vivid and resolute, and perfect for readers of Catherine Cho, Sinéad Gleeson and Maggie O’Farrell. (See my full review for Shiny New Books.)
With thanks to Virago for the proof copy for review.
Antipodes: Stories by Holly Goddard Jones
Jones’s fourth work of fiction contains 11 riveting stories of contemporary life in the American South and Midwest. Some have pandemic settings and others are gently magical; all are true to the anxieties of modern careers, marriage and parenthood. In the title story, the narrator, a harried mother and business school student in Kentucky, seeks to balance the opposing forces of her life and wonders what she might have to sacrifice. The ending elicits a gasp, as does the audacious inconclusiveness of “Exhaust,” a tense tale of a quarreling couple driving through a blizzard. Worry over environmental crises fuels “Ark,” about a pyramid scheme for doomsday preppers. Fans of Nickolas Butler and Lorrie Moore will find much to admire. (Read via Edelweiss. See my full review for Shelf Awareness.)
Love Poems in Quarantine by Sarah Ruhl
Having read Ruhl’s memoir Smile, I recognized the contours of her life and the members of her family. In early poems, cooking and laundry recur, everyday duties that mark time as she tries to write and supervises virtual learning for three children. “Let this all be poetry,” she incants. Part Two contains poems written after George Floyd’s murder, the structure mimicking how abrupt the change in focus was for a nation. Part Three moves into haiku and tanka, culminating in a series of poems reflecting on the seasons. Like Margaret Atwood’s Dearly, I would recommend this even to people who think they don’t like poetry. A welcome addition to the body of Covid-19 literature. (Read via Edelweiss. See my full review on Goodreads.)
Two favourite poems:
“Shelter”
To love a house
not because it’s perfect but because it shelters you
To love a body
not because it’s perfect but because it shelters you
“Quarantine in August, the overripe month”
I’m tired of summer. I crave fall. Luckily fall comes after summer.
And if I get tired of it all, winter will come, then spring.
Have you read anything from my tempting stack?
What other May releases can you recommend?
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 