Book Serendipity, November to December 2024
I call it “Book Serendipity” when two or more books that I read at the same time or in quick succession have something in common – the more bizarre, the better. This is a regular feature of mine every couple of months. Because I usually have 20–30 books on the go at once, I suppose I’m more prone to such incidents. People frequently ask how I remember all of these coincidences. The answer is: I jot them down on scraps of paper or input them immediately into a file on my PC desktop; otherwise, they would flit away! The following are in roughly chronological order.
- Characters who were in a chess club and debating society in high school/college in Playground by Richard Powers and Intermezzo by Sally Rooney.
- Pondering the point of a memorial and a mention of hiring mourners in Immemorial by Lauren Markham and Basket of Deplorables by Tom Rachman.
- A mention of Rachel Carson, and her The Sea Around Us in particular, in Playground by Richard Powers, while I was also reading for review Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love by Lida Maxwell.
- A character pretends to be asleep when someone comes into the room to check on them in Knulp by Hermann Hesse and Rental House by Weike Wang.
- A mention of where a partner puts his pistachio shells in After the Rites and Sandwiches by Kathy Pimlott and Rental House by Weike Wang.
A character who startles very easily (in the last two cases because of PTSD) in Life before Man by Margaret Atwood, A History of Sound by Ben Shattuck, and Disconnected by Eleanor Vincent.
- The husband is named Nate in Life before Man by Margaret Atwood and Rental House by Weike Wang.
- In People Collide by Isle McElroy, there’s a mention of Elizabeth reading “a popular feminist book about how men explained things to women.” The day I finished reading the novel, I started reading the book in question: Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit.
- I learned about the “he’s-at-home” (19th-century dildo) being used by whalers’ wives on Nantucket while the husbands are away at sea through historical fiction – Daughters of Nantucket by Julie Gerstenblatt, which I read last year – and encountered the practice again through an artefact found in the present day in The History of Sound by Ben Shattuck. Awfully specific!
- A week after I finished reading Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, it turned up in a discussion of Vancouver Island in Island by Julian Hanna.
- A Cape Cod setting in Sandwich by Catherine Newman (earlier in the year) plus The History of Sound by Ben Shattuck and Rental House by Weike Wang.
- A gay character references Mulder and Scully (of The X-Files) in the context of determining sexual preference, and there’s a female character named Kit, in The Old Haunts by Allan Radcliffe and one story of Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld.
- A mention of The Truman Show in the context of delusions in The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs and You Don’t Have to Be Mad to Work Here by Benji Waterhouse.
- St. Lucia is mentioned in Beasts by Ingvild Bjerkeland, Brightly Shining by Ingvild Rishøi (two Norwegian authors named Ingvild there!), and Mudhouse Sabbath by Lauren Winner.
- A pet named Darwin: in Levels of Life by Julian Barnes it’s Sarah Bernhardt’s monkey; in Cold Kitchen by Caroline Eden it’s her beagle. Within days I met another pet beagle named Darwin in Island by Julian Hanna. (It took me a moment to realize why it’s a clever choice!)
- A character named Henrik in The Place of Tides by James Rebanks and one story of Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld, and a Hendrik in The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden.
- A hat with a green ribbon in The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden and one story of Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld (in which it’s an emoji).
- Romanian neighbours who speak very good English in Island by Julian Hanna and Rental House by Weike Wang.
- A scene of returning to a house one used to live in in Hyper by Agri Ismaïl, The Old Haunts by Allan Radcliffe, and one story of Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld.
- A woman has had three abortions in The House of Dolls by Barbara Comyns and Without Exception by Pam Houston.
- Household items keep going missing and there’s broken china in The House of Dolls by Barbara Comyns and The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden.
- Punctuated equilibrium (a term from evolutionary biology) is used as a metaphor in Hyper by Agri Ismaïl and Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit.
The author’s mother repeatedly asked her daughter a rhetorical question along the lines of “Do you know what I gave up to have you?” in Permission by Elissa Altman and Without Exception by Pam Houston.
- The author/character looks in the mirror at the end of a long day and hardly recognizes him/herself in The Place of Tides by James Rebanks, You Don’t Have to Be Mad to Work Here by Benji Waterhouse, and Amphibian by Tyler Wetherall.
- A man is afraid to hold his boyfriend’s hand in public in another country because he’s unsure about the cultural attitudes towards homosexuality in Clinical Intimacy by Ewan Gass and Small Rain by Garth Greenwell.
- The author’s mother is a therapist/psychologist and the author her/himself is undergoing some kind of mental health treatment in Unattached by Reannon Muth and You Don’t Have to Be Mad to Work Here by Benji Waterhouse.
- A man declares that dying in one’s mid-40s is nothing to complain about in A Beginner’s Guide to Dying by Simon Boas and Small Rain by Garth Greenwell.
- A woman ponders whether her ongoing anxiety is related to the stressful circumstances of her birth in Unattached by Reannon Muth and When the World Explodes by Amy Lee Scott.
What’s the weirdest reading coincidence you’ve had lately?
#MARM2024: Life before Man and Interlunar by Margaret Atwood
Hard to believe, but it’s my seventh year participating in the annual Margaret Atwood Reading Month (#MARM) hosted by indomitable Canadian blogger Marcie of Buried in Print. In previous years, I’ve read Surfacing and The Edible Woman, The Robber Bride and Moral Disorder, Wilderness Tips, The Door, and Bodily Harm and Stone Mattress; and reread The Blind Assassin. I’m wishing a happy belated birthday to Atwood, who turned 85 earlier this month. Novembers are my excuse to catch up on her extensive back catalogue. In recent years, I’ve scoured the university library holdings to find works by her that I often had never heard of, as was the case with this early novel and mid-career poetry collection.
Life before Man (1979)
Atwood’s fourth novel is from three rotating third-person POVs: Toronto museum curator Elizabeth, her toy-making husband Nate, and Lesje (pronounced “Lashia,” according to a note at the front), Elizabeth’s paleontologist colleague. The dated chapters span nearly two years, October 1976 to August 1978; often we visit with two or three protagonists on the same day. Elizabeth and Nate, parents to two daughters, have each had a string of lovers. Elizabeth’s most recent, Chris, has died by suicide. Nate disposes of his latest mistress, Martha, and replaces her with Lesje, who is initially confused by his interest in her. She’s more attracted to rocks and dinosaurs than to people, in a way that could be interpreted as consistent with neurodivergence.
It was neat to follow along seasonally with Halloween and Remembrance Day and so on, and see the Quebec independence movement simmering away in the background. To start with, I was engrossed in the characters’ perspectives and taken with Atwood’s witty descriptions and dialogue: “[Nate]’s heard Unitarianism called a featherbed for falling Christians” and (Lesje:) “Elizabeth needs support like a nun needs tits.” My favourite passage encapsulates a previous relationship of Lesje’s perfectly, in just the sort of no-nonsense language she would use:
The geologist had been fine; they could compromise on rock strata. They went on hikes with their little picks and kits, and chipped samples off cliffs; then they ate jelly sandwiches and copulated in a friendly way behind clumps of goldenrod and thistles. She found this pleasurable but not extremely so. She still has a collection of rock chips left over from this relationship; looking at it does not fill her with bitterness. He was a nice boy but she wasn’t in love with him.
Elizabeth’s formidable Auntie Muriel is a terrific secondary presence. But this really is just a novel about (repeated) adultery and its aftermath. The first line has Elizabeth thinking “I don’t know how I should live,” and after some complications, all three characters are trapped in a similar stasis by the end. By the halfway point I’d mostly lost interest and started skimming. The grief motif and museum setting weren’t the draws I’d expected them to be. Lesje is a promising character but, disappointingly, gets snared in clichéd circumstances. No doubt that is part of the point; “life before man” would have been better for her. (University library) 
This prophetic passage from Life before Man leads nicely into the themes of Interlunar:
The real question is: Does [Lesje] care whether the human race survives or not? She doesn’t know. The dinosaurs didn’t survive and it wasn’t the end of the world. In her bleaker moments, … she feels the human race has it coming. Nature will think up something else. Or not, as the case may be.
The posthuman prospect is echoed in Interlunar in the lines: “Which is the sound / the earth will make for itself / without us. A stone echoing a stone.”
Interlunar (1984)
Some familiar Atwood elements in this volume, including death, mythology, nature, and stays at a lake house; you’ll even recognize a couple of her other works in poem titles “The Robber Bridegroom” and “The Burned House.” The opening set of “Snake Poems” got me the “green” and “scales” squares on Marcie’s Bingo card (in addition to various other scattered ones, I’m gonna say I’ve filled the whole right-hand column thanks to these two books).
This one brilliantly likens the creature to the sinuous ways of language:
“A Holiday” imagines a mother–daughter camping vacation presaging a postapocalyptic struggle for survival: “This could be where we / end up, learning the minimal / with maybe no tree, no rain, / no shelter, no roast carcasses / of animals to renew us … So far we do it / for fun.” As in her later collection The Door, portals and thresholds are of key importance. “Doorway” intones, “November is the month of entrance, / month of descent. Which has passed easily, / which has been lenient with me this year. / Nobody’s blood on the floor.” There are menace and melancholy here. But as “Orpheus (2)” suggests at its close, art can be an ongoing act of resistance: “To sing is either praise / or defiance. Praise is defiance.” I do recommend Atwood’s poetry if you haven’t tried it before, even if you’re not typically a poetry reader. Her poems are concrete and forceful, driven by imagery and voice; not as abstract as you might fear. Alas, I wasn’t sent a review copy of her collected poems, Paper Boat, as I’d hoped, but I will continue to enjoy encountering them piecemeal. (University library) 
Eve Smith Event & Absurd Person Singular
Two literary events I attended recently…
On Friday afternoon I volunteered on stewarding and refreshments for an author chat held at my local public library. It was our first such event since before Covid! I’d not heard of Eve Smith, who is based outside Oxford and writes speculative – not exactly dystopian, despite the related display below – novels inspired by scientific and medical advancements encountered in the headlines. Genetics, in particular, has been a recurring topic in The Waiting Rooms (about antibiotic resistance), Off Target (gene editing of embryos), One (a one-child policy introduced in climate-ravaged future Britain) and The Cure (forthcoming in April 2025; transhumanism or extreme anti-ageing measures).
Smith used to work for an environmental organization and said that she likes to write about what scares her – which tends not to be outlandish horror but tweaked real-life situations. Margaret Atwood has been a big influence on her, and she often includes mother–daughter relationships. In the middle of the interview, she read from the opening of her latest novel, One. I reckon I’ll give her debut, The Waiting Rooms, a try. (I was interested to note that the library has classed it under Science Fiction but her other two novels with General Fiction.)
Then last night we went to see my husband’s oldest friend (since age four!) in his community theatre group’s production of Absurd Person Singular, a 1972 play by Alan Ayckbourn. I’ve seen and read The Norman Conquests trilogy plus another Ayckbourn play and was prepared for a suburban British farce, but perhaps not for how dated it would feel.
The small cast consists of three married couples. Ronald Brewster-Wright is a banker with an alcoholic wife, Marion. Sidney Hopcroft (wife: Jane) is a construction contractor and rising property tycoon and Geoffrey Jackson is a philandering architect with a mentally ill wife, Eva. Weaving all through is the prospect of a business connection between the three men: “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours,” as Sidney puts it to Ronald several times. After one of Geoffrey’s buildings suffers a disastrous collapse, he has to consider humbling himself enough to ask Sidney for work.
The three acts take place in each of their kitchens on subsequent Christmas Eves; the period kitchen fittings and festive decorations were a definite highlight. First, the Hopcrofts stress out over hosting the perfect cocktail party – which takes place off stage, with characters retreating in twos and threes to debrief in the kitchen. The next year, the jilted Eva makes multiple unsuccessful suicide attempts while her oblivious friends engage in cleaning and DIY. Finally, we’re at the Brewster-Wrights’ and the annoyingly cheerful Hopcrofts cajole the others, who aren’t in the Christmas spirit at all, into playing a silly musical chairs-like game.
With failure, adultery, alcoholism and suicidal ideation as strong themes, this was certainly a black comedy. Our friend Dave decided not to let his kids (10 and 7) come see it. He was brilliant as Sidney, not least because he genuinely is a DIY genius and has history of engaging people in dancing. But the mansplaining, criticism of his poor wife, and “Oh dear, oh dear” exclamations were pure Sidney. The other star of the show was Marion. Although the actress was probably several decades older than Ayckbourn’s intended thirtysomething characters, she brought Norma Desmond-style gravitas to the role. But it did mean that a pregnancy joke in relation to her and the reference to their young sons – the Brewster-Wrights are the only couple with children – felt off.
The director chose to give a mild content warning, printed in the program and spoken before the start: “Please be aware that this play was written in the 1970s and reflects the language and social attitudes of its time and includes themes of unsuccessful suicide attempts.” So the play was produced as is, complete with Marion’s quip about the cycles on Jane’s new washing machine: “Whites and Coloreds? It’s like apartheid!” The depiction of mental illness felt insensitive, although I like morbid comedy as much as the next person.
I can see why the small cast, silliness, and pre-Christmas domestic setting were tempting for amateur dramatics. There was good use of sound effects and the off-stage space, and a fun running gag about people getting soaked. I certainly grasped the message about not ignoring problems in hopes they’ll go away. But with so many plays out there, maybe this one could be retired?
20 Books of Summer, 7–9: Furies, The Earthquake Bird, and Greta & Valdin
It might seem that I’m very behind on 20 Books of Summer, and I am, but that’s mostly because I’ve done my usual trick of starting loads of books at once so that I’m currently in the middle of another nine with no prospect of finishing any particularly soon. I will eventually review more, but probably all in a rush and on the later side. It doesn’t help that quite a few happen to be lacklustre reads, such that I have to push myself through them instead of enjoying spending time with the stack. For today, though, I have a pretty readable trio made up of feminist short stories, a mild Japan-set mystery, and a highly random queer dysfunctional family novel that rose from indie obscurity in New Zealand. (Also a DNF.)
Furies: Stories of the Wicked, Wild and Untamed (2023)
It was my second attempt at this Virago anthology; I borrowed it from the library last year but never opened it, as far as I can remember. Each story is named after a synonym for “virago,” so the focus is on strong and unconventional women, but given that brief there is huge variety, including memoir (Ali Smith’s “Spitfire,” about her late mother’s WAAF service), historical research (CN Lester on sexology and early trans figures, Emma Donoghue on early-twentieth-century activist and lesbian Kathlyn Oliver, Stella Duffy on menopause) and even one graphic short, the mother–daughter horror story “She-Devil” by comics artist Eleanor Crewes.
As with any anthology, some pieces stand out more than others. Caroline O’Donoghue, Helen Oyeyemi and Kamila Shamsie’s contributions were unlikely to convert me into a fan. Margaret Atwood is ever sly and accessible, with “Siren” opening with the line “Today’s Liminal Beings Knitting Circle will now be called to order.” I was surprised to get on really well with Kirsty Logan’s “Wench,” about girls ostracized by their religious community because of their desire for each other – I’ll have to read Now She Is Witch, as it’s set in the same fictional world – and Chibundu Onuzo’s “Warrior,” about Deborah, an Israelite leader in the book of Judges. And while I doubt I need to read a whole novel by Rachel Seiffert, I did enjoy “Fury,” about a group of Polish women who fended off Nazi invaders.
A few of my favourites were “Harridan” by Linda Grant, about an older woman who frightens the young couple who share her flat’s garden during lockdown (“this old lady, this hag she sees, this bitter travesty of her celestial youth and beauty is not her. Inside she’s a flame, she’s a pistol”); “Muckraker” by Susie Boyt, in which a woman makes conquests of breast cancer widowers; and “Tygress” by Claire Kohda, where the stereotype of the Asian ‘tiger mother’ turns literal. Duffy’s “Dragon” closes the collection with a very interesting blend of autofiction, interviews and medical reportage about different experiences of objectification in youth and invisibility in ageing. It brings the whole together nicely: “Tell me your tale and, in the telling, feel it all drop away. You are, and you are not, your story. Keep what serves you now, make space for new maybes.” (Free from a neighbour) 
The Earthquake Bird: A Novel of Mystery by Susanna Jones (2001)
Susanna Jones’s When Nights Are Cold is one of my favourite novels that no one else has ever heard of, so I jumped at the chance to buy a bargain copy of her debut back in 2020. Lucy Fly has lived in Tokyo for ten years, working as a translator of machinery manuals. She wanted to get as far away as possible from her conventional family of six brothers, so she’s less than thrilled to meet fellow Yorkshire lass Lily Bridges, a nurse new to the country and looking for someone to help her find an apartment and learn some basic Japanese. Lucy is a prickly loner with only a few friends – and a lover, photographer Teiji – but she reluctantly agrees to be Lily’s guide.
We know from the start that Lucy is in custody being questioned about events leading up to Lily’s murder. She refuses to tell the police anything, but what we are reading is her confession, in which she does eventually tell all. We learn that there have already been three accidental deaths among her family and acquaintances – she seems cursed to attract them – and that her feelings about Lily changed over the months she showed the woman around. This short and reasonably compelling book gives glimpses of mountain scenery, noodle bars, and spartan apartments. Perhaps inevitably, it reminded me a bit of Murakami. It’s hard to resist an unreliable narrator. However, I felt Jones’s habit of having Lucy speak of herself in the third person was overdone. (Secondhand – Broad Street Book Centre, Hay-on-Wye)
Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly (2021; 2024)
The title characters are a brother and sister in their late twenties who share a flat and a tendency to sabotage romantic relationships. Both are matter-of-factly queer and biracial (Māori/Russian). The novel flips back and forth between their present-tense first-person narration with each short chapter. It takes quite a while to pick up on who is who in the extended Vladisavljevic clan and their New Zealand university milieu (their father is a science professor and Greta an English department PhD and tutor), so I was glad of the character list at the start.
I was expecting a breezy, snarky read and to an extent that’s what I got. Not a whole lot happens; situations advance infinitesimally through quirky dialogue thick with pop culture references. There are some quite funny one-liners, but the plot is so meandering and the voices so deadpan that I struggled to remain engaged. (On her website, Reilly, who is Māori, ascribes the book’s randomness to her neurodivergence.)
The protagonists seem so affectedly cynical that when they exhibit strong feelings for new partners, you’re a bit taken aback. Really, Reilly can do serious? One of the siblings is reunited with a former partner and starts to think about settling down and even adopting a child. This is the last novel I would have expected to end with a wedding, but so it does. If you’re a big fan of Elif Batuman and Naoise Dolan, this might be up your street. Below are some sample lines that should help you make up your mind (quotes unattributed to minimize spoilers).
I don’t really feel like anything these days, just a beautiful husk filled with opinions about globalism and a strong desire to go out for dinner.
I don’t think you’re the weirdest person I’ve ever met even though you do sometimes talk like a philosophical narrator in an independent film.
I’m trying to write my wedding speech, so I don’t go off on a tangent and start listing my favourite Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. I was thinking I could write an acrostic poem, but I’ve made the foolish decision of marrying someone whose name begins with X.
With thanks to Hutchinson Heinemann (Penguin Random House) for the free copy for review.
And a DNF:
The Lost Love Songs of Boysie Singh by Ingrid Persaud – I thought Persaud’s debut novel, Love after Love, was fantastic, but I was right to be daunted by the length of this follow-up. The strategy is similar to that in Mrs. Hemingway by Naomi Wood: giving sideways looks at a famous man through the women he collected around him. John Boysie Singh was a real-life Trinidadian gangster who was hanged for his crimes in 1957 (as the article reprinted on the first page reveals). The major problem here is that all four of the dialect voices sound much the same, so I couldn’t tell them apart. Each time I opened the book, I had to look back at the blurb to be reminded that Popo was his prostitute mistress while Mana Lala was the mother of his son Chunksee. In the 103 pages I read (less than one-fifth of the total), there were so few chapters by Doris and Rosie that I never got a handle on who they were. Nor did I come to understand, or care about, Boysie. The editor needed to make drastic changes to this to ensure widespread readability. (Signed copy won in a Faber Instagram giveaway)
The Bookshop Band in Abingdon & 20 Books of Summer, 6: Orphans of the Carnival by Carol Birch
The Bookshop Band have been among my favourite musical acts since I first saw play live at the Hungerford Literary Festival in 2014. Initially formed of three local musicians for hire, they got their start in 2010 as the house band at Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights in Bath, England. For their first four years, they wrote a pair of original songs about a new book, often the very day of an author’s event in the shop, and performed them on guitar, cello, and ukulele as an interlude to the evening’s reading and discussion.
Notable songs from their first 13 albums are based on Glow by Ned Beauman (“We Are the Foxes”), Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller (“Bobo and the Cattle”), The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce (“How Not to Woo a Woman”), and Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (“You Make the Best Plans, Thomas”). They have also written responses to classic literature, with songs inspired by Alice in Wonderland, various Shakespeare plays, and a compilation of first lines called “Once Upon a Time.”
I got to see the band live five times pre-pandemic, even after husband-and-wife-duo Ben Please and Beth Porter moved nearly 400 miles away to Wigtown, the Book Town of Scotland. During the first six months of Covid-19 lockdown, the livestream concerts from their attic were weekly treats to look forward to. They also interviewed authors for a breakfast chat show as part of the Wigtown Book Festival, which went online that year.
In the years since, the band has kept busy with other projects (not to mention two children). Porter sings and performs on the two Spell Songs albums based on Robert Macfarlane’s The Lost Words and its sequel. Together they composed the soundtrack to Aardman Animations’ short film, Robin Robin (2021) – winning Best Music at the British Animation Awards, and wrote an album of songs based on Scottish children’s literature. And they have continued writing one-off book songs, such as for the launch of Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton. (I’m disappointed their songs about All My Wild Mothers by Victoria Bennett and The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan still haven’t made it onto record.)
I’ve been enthusing about them for nearly a decade, but they’ve remained mostly under the radar in that time. Not so any longer; their recent album Emerge, Return was produced by Pete Townshend of The Who; the production value has notably advanced while retaining their indie spirit. Foreword Reviews kindly agreed to pay me to fangirl – er, write a blog – about Emerge, Return and the tour supporting it, so I’ll leave it there for the music criticism (their complete discography is now available on Bandcamp and Spotify). I’ll just add that a number of these ‘new’ songs have been kicking around for six to ten years but went unrecorded until now. For that reason, I worried that it might feel like a collection of cast-offs, but in fact they’ve managed to produce something sonically and thematically cohesive. It’s darker than some of their previous work, with moody minor chords and slightly sinister subjects.
Julia Pastrana after death. George Wick, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
I’ve often found that the band will zero in on a detail, scene, or idea that never would have stood out to me while reading a book but, in retrospect, evokes the whole with great success. I decided to test this out by reading Carol Birch’s Orphans of the Carnival in the weeks leading up to seeing them on their months-long UK summer/autumn tour. It’s a historical novel about real-life 1850s Mexican circus “freak” Julia Pastrana, who had congenital conditions that caused her face and body to be covered in thick hair and her jaw and lips to protrude. Cruel contemporaries called her the world’s ugliest woman and warned that pregnant women should not be allowed to see her on tour lest the shock cause them to miscarry. Medical doctors posited, in all seriousness, that she was a link between humans and orangutans.
My copy of Birch’s novel was a remainder, and it is certainly a minor work compared to the Booker Prize-shortlisted Jamrach’s Menagerie. Facts about Julia’s travel itinerary and fellow oddballs quickly grow tedious, and while one of course sympathizes when children throw rocks at her, she never becomes a fully realized character rather than a curiosity.
There is also a bizarre secondary storyline set in 1983, in which Rose fills her London apartment with hoarded objects, including a doll she rescues from a skip and names Tattoo. She becomes obsessed with the idea of visiting a doll museum in Mexico. I thought that Tattoo would turn out to be Julia’s childhood doll Yatzi (similar to in A Council of Dolls by Mona Susan Power, where dolls have sentimental and magical power across the centuries), but the connection, though literal, was not as I expected. It’s more grotesque than that. And stranger than fiction, frankly.
{SPOILERS AHEAD}
Birch sticks to the known details of Julia’s life. She had various agents, the final one being Theo Lent, who married her. (In the novel, he can’t bring himself to kiss her, but he can, you know, impregnate her.) She died of a fever soon after childbirth. Her son, Theo Junior, who inherited her hypertrichosis, also died within days. Both bodies were embalmed, sold, and exhibited. Theo then married another hairy woman, Marie Bartel of Germany, who took the name “Zenora” and posed as Julia’s sister. Theo died, syphilitic (or so Birch implies) and insane, in a Russian asylum. Julia and Theo Junior’s remains were displayed and mislaid at various points over the years, with Julia’s finally repatriated to Mexico for a proper burial in 2013. In the novel, Tattoo is, in fact, Theo Junior’s mummy.
Two Bookshop Band songs from the new album are about the novel: “Doll” and “Waggons and Wheels.” “Doll” is one of the few more lighthearted numbers on the album. It ended up being a surprise favourite track for me (along with the creepy “Eve in Your Garden,” about Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, and “Room for Three,” a sombre yet resolute epic written for the launch of Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage) because of its jaunty music-hall tempo; the pattern of repeating most nouns three times; and the hand claps, “deedily” vocal fills, unhinged recorder playing, and springy sound effects. The lyrics are almost a riddle: “When’s a doll (doll doll) not a doll (doll doll)?” They somehow avoid all spoilers while conveying something of the mental instability of a couple of characters.
The gorgeous “Waggons and Wheels” picks up on the melancholy tone and parental worries of earlier tracks from the album. The chorus has a wistful air as Julia ponders the passage of time and her constant isolation: “old friends, new deals / Winter or spring, I am hiding … Winter or spring, I’ll be travelling.” Porter’s mellow soprano tempers Julia’s outrage at mistreatment: “who are you to shout / Indecency and shame? / Shocking, I shock, so lock me out / I’m locked into this face.” She fears, too, what will happen to her child, “a beast or a boy, a monster or joy”. Listening to the song, I feel that the band saw past the specifics to plumb the universal feelings that get readers empathizing with Julia as a protagonist. They’ve gotten to the essence of the story in a way that Birch perhaps never did. Mediocre book; lovely songs. (New (bargain) purchase – Dollar Tree, Bowie, Maryland) 
I caught the Emerge, Return tour at St Nicolas’ Church in Abingdon (an event hosted by Mostly Books) last night. It was my sixth time seeing the Bookshop Band in concert – see also my write-ups of two 2016 events plus one in 2018 and another in 2019 – but the first time in person since the pandemic. I got to show off my limited-edition T-shirt. How nice it was to meet up again with blogger friend Annabel, too! Fun fact for you: Ben was born in Abingdon but hadn’t been back since he was two. Beth’s cousin turned up to the show as well. Although they have their daughters, 2 and 7, on the tour with them, they were being looked after elsewhere for the evening so the parents could relax a bit. Across the two sets, they played seven tracks from the new album, six old favourites, and two curios: one Spell Song, and an untitled song they wrote for the audiobook of Jackie Morris’s The Unwinding. It was a brilliant evening!
Carol Shields Prize Longlist Reading: The Future and Chrysalis
My first two dedicated reads for our informal Carol Shields Prize shadowing project exhibit one main way in which the prize is different from the Women’s Prize for Fiction: works in translation and short story collections are eligible. I have one of each to review today. Laura and I did a buddy read of an atmospheric dystopian novel translated from the French, and I caught up on a magical, erotic story collection I’d had on my Kindle for a long time. These were both very good, but my minor misgivings are such that I’d rate them the same:
The Future by Catherine Leroux (2020; 2023)
[Translated from the French by Susan Ouriou]
For such a monolithic title, this has a limited stage: a few derelict districts of the ailing city we know as Detroit, Michigan – but in Leroux’s alternate version, it remained part of French Canada, with lingering Indigenous influence, and so is known as Fort Détroit. No doubt she was inspired by the many vacant properties that characterized Detroit in the 2010s; there’s even a ruins tour bus. In her Fort Détroit, a handful of determined adults cling on in their own homes, but the streets and parks have been abandoned to animals and to a gang of half-feral children who have developed their own nicknames (Adidas, Lego, Wolfpup), social hierarchy and vernacular. Worlds meet when Gloria determines to find her granddaughters Cassandra and Mathilda, who ran away after their addict mother Judith’s suspicious death. At the same time, her neighbour Eunice wants to find out who ran her father down in the street.
Despite their fierce independence and acts of protest, the novel’s children still rely on the adult world. Ecosystems are awry and the river is toxic, but Gloria’s friend Solomon, a former jazz pianist, still manages to grow crops. He overlooks the children’s thefts from his greenhouse and eventually offers to help them grow their own food supply, and other adults volunteer to prepare a proper winter shelter to replace their shantytown. Puberty threatens their society, too: we learn that Fiji, the leader, has been binding her breasts to hide her age.
I expected to be reminded strongly of Station Eleven, and while there were elements that were reminiscent of Emily St John Mandel’s work, Leroux’s is a more consciously literary approach. The present-tense omniscient narration occupies many perspectives, including that of a dog, and the descriptions and musings are more lyrical than literal. Where another author would site high drama – sixtysomething Gloria’s night quest, a few children rafting down the river – Leroux moves on swiftly to other character interactions. What did bring Mandel to mind was the importance of art during societal collapse: the children spin nursery rhyme mash-ups and fairytales, Stutt rescues a makeshift library and insists on Huckleberry Finn going along on the river journey, and Solomon plays the piano again after decades.
The opening mysteries of death and disappearance are resolved before the end, but don’t seem to have been the point. The Future is more subtle and slippery than many dystopian novels I’ve read in that there’s not really a warning, or a message here. Instead, there’s an intriguing situation that opens out and alters slightly, but avoids resolution. It’s all about atmosphere and language – I was especially impressed by Ouriou’s rendering of Leroux’s made-up dialect via folksy slang (“She figgers she’s growed-up”). I loved the details and one-on-one moments more than the momentous scenes. On the whole, I found the story elegant but somewhat frustrating. You might be drawn to it if you enjoyed To Paradise or the MaddAddam books. (Read via Edelweiss; published by Biblioasis)
See also Laura’s review.
Chrysalis: Stories by Anuja Varghese (2023)
This debut collection of 15 stories brims with magic and horror, and teems with women of colour and queer people. Indeed, Varghese dedicates the book to “all the girls and women who don’t see themselves in most stories.” Most of the characters are of South Asian extraction. Adoption recurs in a couple of places. Two of the rarer realist stories, “Milk” and “Stories in the Language of the Fist,” have protagonists dealing with schoolgirl bullying and workplace microaggressions. More often, there are unexplained phenomena that position the players between life and death. “In the Bone Fields” focuses on the twin daughters of an Indian immigrant family on a Canadian farm. The house and the bone field behind are active and hungry, and only one twin will survive. (I got mild North Woods vibes.)
In the title story, Radhika visits her mother’s grave and wonders whether her life is here in Montreal with her lover or back in Toronto with her husband. Fangs and wings symbolize her desire for independence. Elsewhere, watery metaphors alternately evoke fear of drowning or sexual fluidity. “Midnight at the Oasis” charts the transformation of a trans woman and “Cherry Blossom Fever,” one of my two favourites, bounces between several POVs. Marjan is in love with Talia, but she’s married to Sunil, who’s also in love with Silas. “People do it — open their relationships and negotiate rules and write themselves into polyamorous fairy tales … Other people. Not brown people,” Talia sighs. They are better off, at least, than they would be back in India, where homophobia can be deadly (“The Vetala’s Song”).
My other favourite was “Bhupati,” about a man who sets up multiple Lakshmi figures in the backyard, hoping devotion will earn him and his wife a better future. The statues keep being burned up by lightning; we learn his wife may be petitioning for different things. “Chitra” is a straightforward Cinderella retelling whose title character lives with two mean stepsisters and works in food service at the mall. A Shoe Chateau BOGO closing sale gives her the chance to get a bargain – and catch the manager’s eye. Despite a striking ending signalled by the story’s subtitle, all I could conclude about this one was “cute.” The three flash horror stories (a murder hotel, ghosts in a basement, werewolves) were much the weakest for me.
There’s a pretty even split of third- and first-person stories (nine versus six) here, and the genre shifts frequently. The quality wasn’t as consistent as I’d hoped, but it was an engaging read. The overall blend of feminism and horror had me thinking of Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, but I’d be most likely to recommend this to fans of Julia Armfield, Violet Kupersmith and Vauhini Vara. (Read via Edelweiss; published by House of Anansi Press)
Both of these are worthwhile books and it’s great that readers outside of Canada can discover them. I wouldn’t personally shortlist either, but the judges may well be dazzled enough to do so. I don’t yet have a sense of where they’d fit for me in the rankings.
Up next:
Cocktail by Lisa Alward (short story collection from Edelweiss)
A Council of Dolls by Mona Susan Power (buddy read with Laura)
Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang (from library)
I’m aiming for one or two more batches of reviews before the shortlist is announced on 9 April.
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.
Some 2023 Reading Superlatives
Longest book read this year: The Weather Woman by Sally Gardner (457 pages) – not very impressive compared to last year’s 720-page To Paradise. That means I didn’t get through a single doorstopper this year. D’oh!
Shortest book read this year: Pitch Black by Youme Landowne and Anthony Horton (40 pages)
Authors I read the most by this year: Margaret Atwood, Deborah Levy and Brian Turner (3 books each); Amy Bloom, Simone de Beauvoir, Tove Jansson, John Lewis-Stempel, W. Somerset Maugham, L.M. Montgomery and Maggie O’Farrell (2 books each)
Publishers I read the most from: (Setting aside the ubiquitous Penguin and its many imprints) Carcanet (11 books) and Picador/Pan Macmillan (also 11), followed by Canongate (7).
My top author discoveries of the year: Michelle Huneven and Julie Marie Wade
My proudest bookish accomplishment: Helping to launch the Little Free Library in my neighbourhood in May, and curating it through the rest of the year (nearly daily tidying; occasional culling; requesting book donations)
Most pinching-myself bookish moments: Attending the Booker Prize ceremony; interviewing Lydia Davis and Anne Enright over e-mail; singing carols after-hours at Shakespeare and Company in Paris
Books that made me laugh: Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson, The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt, two by Katherine Heiny, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals by Patricia Lockwood
Books that made me cry: A Heart that Works by Rob Delaney, Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout, Family Meal by Bryan Washington
The book that was the most fun to read: Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld
Best book club selections: By the Sea by Abdulrazak Gurnah and The Woman in Black by Susan Hill
Best last lines encountered this year: “And I stood there holding on to this man as though he were the very last person left on this sweet sad place that we call Earth.” (Lucy by the Sea, Elizabeth Strout)
A book that put a song in my head every time I picked it up: Here and Now by Henri Nouwen (Aqualung song here)
Shortest book title encountered: Lo (the poetry collection by Melissa Crowe), followed by Bear, Dirt, Milk and They
Best 2023 book titles: These Envoys of Beauty and You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis
Best book titles from other years: I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times, The Cats We Meet Along the Way, We All Want Impossible Things
Favourite title and cover combo of the year: I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore (shame the contents didn’t live up to it!)
Biggest disappointment: Speak to Me by Paula Cocozza
A 2023 book that everyone was reading but I decided not to: Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
The worst books I read this year: Monica by Daniel Clowes, They by Kay Dick, Swallowing Geography by Deborah Levy and Self-Portrait in Green by Marie Ndiaye (1-star ratings are extremely rare for me; these were this year’s four)
The downright strangest book I read this year: Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals by Patricia Lockwood
Bodily Harm and Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood (#MARM)
It’s my sixth year participating in the annual Margaret Atwood Reading Month (#MARM), hosted by indomitable Canadian blogger Marcie of Buried in Print. In previous years, I’ve read Surfacing and The Edible Woman, The Robber Bride and Moral Disorder, Wilderness Tips, and The Door; and reread The Blind Assassin. Wish a happy belated birthday to MA, who turned 84 earlier this month. As it happens, today is my husband’s 40th birthday and I am tapping away at this in the passenger’s seat of the car as we hurtle through the freezing fog toward Slimbridge for some wintry birdwatching. I spent much of yesterday making his German chocolate cake (delicious but very involved) from a Hummingbird Bakery cookbook.
Bodily Harm (1982)
I had literally never heard of her fifth novel before I spotted it on the library catalogue and decided to have a go. The fact that nobody talks about it is evidence, I think, of an overbaked plot and more successful treatment of her trademark themes in other books. Nonetheless, it was perfectly readable and had its highlights. Renata Wilford, “Rennie,” is a journalist for hire from Ontario who has recently had her life turned upside down by breast cancer and the departure of her boyfriend, Jake. She flies to the Caribbean island nation of St. Antoine to write a travel piece, coinciding with the first elections since the British left. It’s a febrile postcolonial setting of shantytowns and shortages. Rennie tries to focus on boat trips, cocktails and beach lounging, but Dr. Minnow, who she met on the plane, is determined to show her the reality of his country – cold truths that include assassination and imprisonment.
Alongside the thriller plot are the more expected literary flashbacks to Rennie’s childhood, her life with Jake, and the cancer surgery and her crush on her surgeon. Her old friend Jocasta is an amusingly punky feminist and a counterpoint to Lora, the fellow Canadian and bad girl Rennie meets in St. Antoine. There are no speech marks in the sections set in the past, and there are some passages of direct monologue from Lora recounting her abusive upbringing. I felt Atwood was stretching to make points about cultural imperialism and violence, whereas the title is more applicable to the physical threats women face from illness and misogyny:
“The body, sinister twin, taking its revenge for whatever crimes the mind was supposed to have committed on it. Nothing had prepared her for her own outrage, the feeling that she’d been betrayed by a close friend. She’d given her body swimming twice a week, forbidden it junk food and cigarette smoke, allowed it a normal amount of sexual release. She’d trusted it. Why then had it turned against her?”
(University library) 
Stone Mattress (2014)
I was tempted to call this my first ever audiobook, but that is not technically true: 11 years ago, we had a David Attenborough book on in the car on the way to Cornwall. However, this definitely felt like a landmark. I’d long meant to catch up on Atwood’s last but one story collection, but my library had withdrawn the physical copy and only had the book on CD. How would I fit it into my life, I wondered? Others have told me they listen to audiobooks while commuting, cooking or cleaning … er, I don’t really do any of those! But I amassed a goodly list of tasks involving my hands but not much of my brain to complete while listening to the CDs through my PC speakers:
• Prepared two clothing recycling parcels (37 socks off to the London Sock Company’s Sock Amnesty programme; 3 shirts and 2 sets of pyjamas to Rapanui’s 100% cotton recycling scheme)
• Mended 13 socks, 4 shirts, 3 gloves, 2 cardigans, a shoulder bag strap, and a purse strap and lining
• Framed a photo for a Christmas gift
• Baked the aforementioned German chocolate cake
• Wrapped my husband’s birthday presents
• Wrote a couple of Christmas cards
Nonetheless, I found it frustrating that it took so long to get through a story/disc, surely longer than I would have spent reading with my eyes (and so I have only managed 7.5 of 9 stories so far), and it was slightly harder for me to concentrate. It was also disorienting to not have visual cues, such that I had no idea how much of a story was remaining, and sometimes didn’t know how place or character names were spelt. One interesting novelty, though, was the reader voices. There are five different voice actors on this audiobook, three women (including MA herself on the title story) and two men. It is interesting to ponder how their intonation might affect my reaction to a story. For instance, Rob Delaney’s deadpan delivery really makes “The Freeze-Dried Groom,” a witty work of mild horror in which a fraudulent antiques dealer finds an entire wedding, complete with groom, abandoned in a storage unit.
As in a number of Atwood’s later works, recurring themes of ageing and the writer’s craft intertwine. I most enjoyed the opening linked trio of “Alphinland,” “Revenant” and “Dark Lady,” which orbit SFF writer Constance and her one-time lover, macho poet Gavin. The first story has Constance slipping between her fictional world and the real one, in which a winter storm is impending and her husband Ewan has been dead for four days. In “Revenant,” an elderly Gavin holds court as a scholar comes to interview him. Imagine his ire when he learns she is there to question him about Constance for her PhD research. “Dark Lady” brings the three major women from Gavin’s life into a face-off.
Funniest was “I Dream of Zenia with the Bright Red Teeth,” a The Robber Bride mini-sequel in which three ageing women fend off an interfering male with the help of a potential reincarnation of their late friend. I was reminded of the setup of Charlotte Wood’s The Weekend, not least for the presence of an annoying dog. Least engaging has been “The Dead Hand Loves You,” about Jack Dace, the author of an international horror classic who has always resented having to share his profits four ways with his early adulthood housemates because of his promise to catch up on his back rent from his creative earnings. I thought this one would never end. In general, though, this has been classic MA, mixing realism and fantasy in clever and witty ways. And I’m sure it won’t be my last audiobook. I was gifted an Audible book for my birthday by a blind friend, to start with. Now to store up some more busy work… (Public library audiobook) 
The Booker Prize 2023 Ceremony
Yesterday evening Eleanor Franzen of Elle Thinks and I had the enormous pleasure of attending the Booker Prize awards ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London. I won tickets through “The Booker Prize Book Club” Facebook group, which launched just 10 or so weeks ago but has already garnered over 6000 members from around the world. They ran a competition for shortlist book reviews and probably did not attract nearly as many entries as they expected to. This probably worked to my advantage, but as it’s the only prize I can recall winning for my writing, I am going to take it as a compliment nonetheless! I submitted versions of my reviews of If I Survive You and Western Lane – the only shortlistees that I’ve read – and it was the latter that won us tickets.
We arrived at the venue 15 minutes before the doors opened, sheltering from the drizzle under an overhang and keeping a keen eye on arrivals (Paul Lynch and sodden Giller Prize winner Sarah Bernstein, her partner wearing both a kilt and their several-week-old baby). Elle has a gift for small talk and we had a nice little chat with Jonathan Escoffery and his 4th Estate publicist before they were whisked inside. His head was spinning from the events of the week, including being part of a Booker delegation that met Queen Camilla.
There was a glitzy atmosphere, with a photographer-surrounded red carpet and large banners for each shortlisted novel along the opposite wall, plus an exhibit of the hand-bound editions created for each book. We enjoyed some glasses of champagne and canapés (the haddock tart was the winner) and collared Eric Karl Anderson of Lonesome Reader. It was lovely to catch up with him and Eleanor and do plenty of literary celebrity spotting: Graeme Macrae Burnet, Eleanor Catton, judge Mary Jean Chan, Natalie Haynes, Alan Hollinghurst, Anna James, Jean McNeil, Johanna Thomas-Corr (literary editor of the Sunday Times) and Sarah Waters. Later we were also able to chat with Julianne Pachico, our Sunday Times Young Writer Award shadow panel winner from 2017. She has recently gotten married and released her third novel.
We were allocated to Table 11 in the front right corner. Also at our table were some Booker Prize editorial staff members, the other competition winner (for a video review) and her guest, an Instagram influencer, a Reading Agency employee, and several more people. The three-course dinner was of a very high standard for mass catering and the wine flowed generously. I thoroughly enjoyed my meal. Afterward we had a bit of time for taking red carpet photos and one of Eleanor with the banner for our predicted winner, Prophet Song.
Some of you may have watched the YouTube livestream, or listened to the Radio 4 live broadcast. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s speech was a highlight. She spoke about the secret library at the Iranian prison where she was held for six years. Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (there was a long waiting list among the prisoners and wardens, she said), and especially The Return by Hisham Matar meant a lot to her. From earlier on in the evening, I also enjoyed judge Adjoa Andoh’s dramatic reading of an excerpt from Possession in honour of the late Booker winner A.S. Byatt, and Shehan Karunatilaka’s tongue-in-cheek reflections on winning the Booker – he warned the next winner that they won’t write a word for a whole year.
There was a real variety of opinion in the room as to who would win. Earlier in the evening we’d spoken to people who favoured Western Lane, This Other Eden and The Bee Sting. But both Elle and I were convinced that Prophet Song would take home the trophy, and so it did. Despite his genuine display of shock, Paul Lynch was well prepared with an excellent speech in which he cited the apocrypha and Albert Camus. In a rapid-fire interview with host Samira Ahmed, he added that he can still remember sitting down and weeping after finishing The Mayor of Casterbridge, age 15 or 16, and hopes that his work might elicit similar emotion. I’m not sure that I plan on reading it myself, but from what I’ve heard it’s a powerfully convincing dystopian novel that brings political and social collapse home in a realistic way.
All in all, a great experience for which I am very grateful! (Thanks to Eleanor for all the photos.)
Have you read Prophet Song? Did you expect it to win the Booker Prize?
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 