Tag: books

Some book recommendations from 2017

29th December 2017 / / 7 Comments

2017 was a year of ups and downs. With my reviewing hat on, I was especially pleased to make my debut at Minor Literature[s]. But I can’t escape the fact that this year was structured around illness as I’d never experienced before. It didn’t exactly stop me from reading, but it did have certain subtle effects on my reading choices, how I engaged with books, that sort of thing.

So, 2017 was not a normal reading year. When I tried to put together my usual countdown of twelve, I wasn’t happy with it, couldn’t recommend everything wholeheartedly. Instead I’m going to stick to a few books which were first published this year. I’ve got three books written in English and two translated from Spanish. I’m listing them here in no particular order, but they’ve all given me the shiver up the spine that I get from my favourite fiction.

Such Small Hands by Andrés Barba, tr. Lisa Dillman.  The claustrophobic tale of a young girl sent to an orphanage after losing her parents in a car crash. She barely has the language to describe her experiences, but her very individuality poses a threat to the other girls around her in the orphanage. The prose of Such Small Hands is beautifully – dangerously – fluid, as the mental worlds of its characters form and re-form. Probably the most intense piece of literature I read all year.

The Photographer by Meike Ziervogel. The story of how a German family is broken when forced to flee west in 1945, then heals itself in the years after the war. This is novel structured as photo album: whole lives narrated intermittently, each scene a moment of experience adding to a greater whole. Ziervogel explores themes of image and appearance, and the individual within the sweep of history, all with a wonderful openness to her writing. 

Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor. Oh, how I love Jon McGregor’s way with words, his ability to bring out the mystery within the everyday. In this novel, he starts with the disappearance of a teenage girl, and builds up, layer by layer, an extraordinary portrait of a rural community. A new year begins with each chapter; some faces go, others stay. The disappearance becomes another part of local lore; only nature retains any true semblance of constancy. The resulting work is spellbinding.

Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, tr. Megan McDowell. A discovery from this year’s Man Booker International Prize shadowing. Amanda is dying in hospital (or some dark liminal space) and talks to David, a child who is not her own. With David’s help, Amanda sorts through her memories of holidays, her own daughter, and a tale told by David’s mother (whom Amanda met on holiday). Fever Dream constantly shifts between levels of reality; it’s a thrilling ride.

One of the Boys by Daniel Magariel. A portrait of a violent family relationship, in extreme close-up. When it’s clear he will gain custody of his sons, a father takes them from Kansas to New Mexico, promising that the three can be kids again. Life turns out to be very different, though. Magariel keeps the father-and-sons unit at the centre of view, which distorts how we see the novel’s world, and helps give the book its distinctive power.

There are my recommendations for 2017; I hope you find something that interests you. You can also check out my previous best-of-year posts: 2016; 2015; 2014; 2013; 2012; 2011; 2010; and 2009. I’ll see you next year!

A Vineyard in Andalusia – Maria Dueñas: a snapshot review

24th December 2017 / / 1 Comment

This is a perfect example of the right book coming at the right time. I was in the mood for a long and welcoming novel that could round off the evening. Maria Dueñas’ new book proved to be just that.

It’s 1861. Mauro Larrera is a Spaniard who has made his wealth as a silver miner in Mexico. As the novel begins, Larrera learns that his latest risky investment has collapsed, and he’s going to lose everything. He then has to find a way to get out of his predicament, while maintaining appearances. Mauro’s family and associates have their suggestions, but it seems clear from the outset that Larrera has it in mind to flee. 

Mauro borrows some money from a creditor he’d rather not cross, then sets off hoping to repeat his earlier success. Amidst various scrapes, he goes to Havana, then eventually finds himself back in Spain as the owner of a vineyard, and caught up in the complicated affairs of the family who owned it previously.

A Vineyard in Andalusia is a glorious yarn, almost every chapter adding a new twist to Larrera’s travails. It was also great fun to read in self-imposed instalments – there are plenty of cliffhangers. There are times when certain events happen ‘off-stage’ that I’d have loved to read rather than being told about them after. However,  this doesn’t detract from a highly enjoyable tale, narrated in the snappy prose of Nick Caistor’s and Lorenza García’s translation.

A version of this review was previously published as a thread on Twitter.

Book details

A Vineyard in Andalusia (2015) by Maria Dueñas, translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza García (2017), Scribe Publications, 534 pages, paperback (review copy). 

Republic of Consciousness Prize longlist 2017

10th December 2017 / / 1 Comment

One of my favourite literary awards announced its longlist the other day. The Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses, now in its second year, is open to UK and Irish publishers who have a maximum of five full-time paid people working for them. It sums up its criteria for winning as “hardcore literary fiction and gorgeous prose”. 

The 13 longlisted titles, in alphabetical order of publisher, are:

  • Playing Possum by Kevin Davey (Aaaargh! Press)
  • Sorry to Disrupt the Peace by Patty Yumi Cottrell (And Other Stories)
  • The Gallows Pole by Benjamin Myers (Bluemoose Books)
  • An Overcoat by Jack Robinson (CB Editions)
  • Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz, tr. Sarah Moses and Carolina Orloff (Charco Press)
  • Gaudy Bauble by Isabel Waidner (Dostoyevsky Wannabe)
  • Compass by Mathias Énard, tr. Charlotte Mandell (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
  • Blue Self-Portrait by Noémi Lefebvre, tr. Sophie Lewis (Les Fugitives)
  • We that are young by Preti Taneja (Galley Beggar Press)
  • Attrib. and other stories by Eley Williams (Influx Press)
  • Darker with the Lights on by David Hayden (Little Island Press)
  • In the Absence of Absalon by Simon Okotie (Salt Publishing)
  • The Iron Age by Arja Kajermo (Tramp Press)

Last year’s longlist had introduced me to some new writers, and even a few new publishers. So I was quite surprised to find that I’d heard of all 13 of this year’s books. I concluded that I must be more immersed in the world of the small press than I’d thought.

Well, I counted up and found that I had copies of nine books on the longlist… but I’d read only one, Compass. So I’ve decided I want to read the longlist. The winner is not announced until March, so there’s plenty of time; and the ethos of the prize is right up my street. This could be just the thing to get me back in the swing of reading (and, hopefully, blogging).

I Am Behind You – John Ajvide Lindqvist: a EuroLitNetwork review 

1st November 2017 / / 2 Comments

The European Literature Network has been celebrating Nordic fiction lately. I’ve contributed a review of I Am Behind You by John Ajvide Lindqvist, the Swedish horror writer known for Let the Right One In. This new novel concerns the occupants of four caravans who find themselves transported to a strange empty space, where their characters will be pressured until the flaws rise to the surface.  The translation is by Marlaine Delargy. 

You can find my review here, but do spend some time looking around, because there’s a lot to see. You can also download The Nordic Riveter, a 100-page PDF magazine collecting the new material.

Book details

I Am Behind You (2014) by John Ajvide Lindqvist, tr. Marlaine Delargy (2016), riverrun, 464 pages, hardback (review copy). 

Reading something old, reading something new…

9th October 2017 / / 7 Comments

I’m changing the way that I read.

Mostly, I’ve always been a one-book-at-a-time reader, and if I ever had more than one on the go at once, they stayed where they were in my mind. I’ve never questioned that.

But recently I’d read a number of new releases in a row, and I enjoyed them, but still felt I was… in a rut somehow. Talking about it on Twitter reminded me that reading can inspire deeply emotional, transformative responses – the sort of thing, after all, that got me into reading as a hobby in the first place. I felt that I wanted to bring my blog closer to the actual reading, even if it meant that a straightforward review might not always be the best way to capture the experience.

First, though, I wanted a different approach to reading: my one-book linear method just tends towards a cycle of read-review-read-review-etc-etc, which I want to break. So now I’m going to have two books on the go at once, at least one of which will be a ‘classic’ or older book. The idea is to increase the potential for the books to bounce off each other (metaphorically!) while I read them. As I go along, I’ll see where the inspiration for blogging strikes.

The first books I’m reading under this ‘system’ are Scar by Sara Mesa (tr. Adriana Nodal-Tarafa), newly published by Dalkey Archive; and A Kind of Loving by Stan Barstow, originally published in 1960 and recently reissued by Parthian Books. There was nothing deliberate about those choices; but it seems they have a certain thematic connection, so we’ll see how it turns out… 

BBC National Short Story Award 2017: ‘if a book is locked there’s probably a good reason for that, don’t you think’ by Helen Oyeyemi

3rd October 2017 / / 1 Comment

This post is part of a series on the 2017 BBC National Short Story Award. 

This story was first published in Helen Oyeyemi’s 2016 collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, a book that I found quite difficult to grasp as a whole, even though I’ve enjoyed Oyeyemi’s work in the past. It has been good to come to ‘if a book is locked’ afresh as part of the NSSA shortlist.

Oyeyemi’s protagonist (the “you” of her second-person narration) works analysing anonymised data on other organisations’ employees. A new colleague joins the company: Eva is subtly chic in a way that leads her female co-workers to try to compete. That’s until her lover’s wife visits the office to denounce her. At that point, the protagonist is the closest Eva has to a friend in her workplace. But the protagonist is preoccupied with what might be in Eva’s mysterious locked diary.

Oyeyemi always creates her own distinctive world with her words, even when she’s writing about somewhere ostensibly as mundane as an office. There are some neat parallels between the way Eva is treated by her colleagues; the protagonist’s family background; and the work that the company does. More, the ending blossoms into the beautiful strangeness typical of Helen Oyeyemi.

Listen to a reading of ‘if a book is locked’. 

BBC National Short Story Award 2017: ‘The Collector’ by Benjamin Markovits

2nd October 2017 / / 0 Comments

This post is part of a series on the 2017 BBC National Short Story Award. 

Somewhere near the border with Canada, Robin Bright’s wife Amy dies when she is swept off the road in a storm. Robin struggles to accept what has happened, and retreats to his big house and hobby of collecting. The story switches between the past and the present, in which Robin discovers that Amy may not be the person he thought he knew.

‘The Collector’ is written in a more conventional literary style than the previous three stories. This is less to my personal taste (I find Markovits’ technique of anonymising places, such as “H___”, particularly irritating in a contemporary story); nevertheless, there are aspects of this story that work well. There’s some effective use of metaphor, playing all of Robin’s material possessions against what little knowledge he has of Amy. And I found the ending of ‘The Collector’ especially powerful.

Listen to a reading of ‘The Collector’.

BBC National Short Story Award 2017: ‘The Edge of the Shoal’ by Cynan Jones

1st October 2017 / / 0 Comments

This post is part of a series on the 2017 BBC National Short Story Award. 

I loved Cynan Jones’s 2014 novel The Dig, found it vivid and unflinching. I was hoping for something similar from ‘The Edge of the Shoal’ (a story drawn from Jones’s most recent novel, Cove). I wasn’t disappointed.

The unnamed protagonist of Jones’s tale is in a kayak off the coast, catching fish and about to scatter his father’s ashes, when something goes terribly wrong. After that, his goal is to reach land. It can be summarised succinctly, but the experience of it is so much richer, thanks to Jones’s pin-sharp description and a prose that breaks apart and re-forms like waves on the sea.

What I’ve written there feels at once inadequate and just enough to capture it. ‘The Edge of the Shoal’ is simply that kind of story. 

Listen to a reading of ‘The Edge of the Shoal’. 

BBC National Short Story Award 2017: Q&A with Will Eaves 

30th September 2017 / / 0 Comments

This post is part of a series on the 2017 BBC National Short Story Award. 

Today, I’m delighted to be hosting a Q&A with one of the authors shortlisted for the NSSA, Will Eaves. (Read my review of his story ‘Murmur’ here.) 

How does it feel to have been shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award 2017?

It’s an honour, of course. I like in particular the NSSA’s relationship with radio, which is an intimate medium. A radio voice speaks to listeners one by one, in their rooms, in their cars, in the bath. One hears that voice with a dramatic sense of others caught in the act of listening.

Can you give us a bit of background information to your shortlisted story? What inspired you to write it?

It’s a story that comes at the beginning of something longer – a chain of linked stories about a scientist struggling to maintain physical and emotional equilibrium in the wake of his conviction for Gross Indecency. Alan Turing is an obvious inspiration; but equally clearly the story spins away – far away – from his recorded circumstances. “Murmur” and its companion pieces are collectively a fantasia on the life of the mind, logical paradox, loyalty, and love.

The unique element of the BBC NSSA is that your story will be read by an actor and broadcast to Radio 4 listeners. Have you thought about what your characters’ voices might sound like, or do you have a particular voice in your head?

The speaker is a man in his forties. His voice might have an edge; he’s sharp but not severe; careful; quick to notice things, sad; occasionally vexed, not short-tempered.

What do you enjoy most about writing in the short story form, as opposed to longer-form or novels?

I’ve submitted to the NSSA before, always in the knowledge that I don’t write conventional short-form fiction. (I have a high regard for those who do: see reading suggestions below.) The truth is that I’m never sure what form I’m writing in. One has some idea of the material, the scale and shape, but these are rather different things. I’m not the sort of person who decides to write a poem or a novel or a story. The whole process is extremely uncertain. I tend to follow the voice. Form and content must grow together.

Which short story or collection by another author would you recommend to readers and why?

“Regret” by Guy de Maupassant. An old man confronts the woman he has always loved – the wife of a friend. Would she indeed have given herself to him, that sunny day years ago when they walked together by the riverside after lunch? A masterpiece of concision and tension, the whole story is strung upon the agony of a simple, devastating “what if?”

Also: “Millennium Blues” by Helen Simpson, from Hey Yeah Right Get A Life – an unimprovably great title that her US publisher wanted to change to: Getting A Life. 

Which short story writer would you recommend to readers and why?

Flaubert (Trois Contes, and “Herodias”, in particular), Maupassant, Chekhov. Among contemporaries: Alice Munro, for her handling of time, and brilliant voicing. The thought and the said run together effortlessly. Her best collection is probably Hateship, Friendship, Loveship, Courtship, Marriage (2001), but they are all good.

What are you reading at the moment?

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, by Barbara W. Tuchman. A historian friend introduced me to this. It’s a vivid commentary on the Black Death, the Hundred Years War, the Papal Schism, and the economic and tactical disaster of chivalric combat. You can only read a few pages at a time because the violence and suffering are so disgusting.

What was your favourite book as a child? 

I’m not sure. It changed from week to week, I think. My first great emotional experience was reading Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White, late into the night, under my covers, and feeling distraught. I cried myself to sleep – I’ve loved spiders ever since. I liked Conan Doyle and Saki as a young teen (“Tobermory”), and still do. Then Persuasion and Jane Austen. As an uncertain gay adolescent, I found Graham Chapman’s A Liar’s Autobiography uplifting, and very funny.

Was there one writer that inspired you to start writing?

No, because I didn’t think very much about who had written what. I liked reading on my own and the feeling of liberation and retreat that came with scribbling in exercise books. Music was as important to me as literature when I was growing up, and songs and piano and 60s/70s R&B and funk (Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder) still matter. Musical composition makes sense to me. When I started acting, I found myself drawn to Shakespeare’s late plays (The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale) for the transformations and magic. I’ve never set out to write anything in a particular style, although I do absorb the work of other writers and think about it over a long period of time. That’s essential. I try to notice and remember solutions to different technical problems. There’s a chapter in Beryl Bainbridge’s Injury Time (the whole book is lovely) that taught me how to move from one centre of consciousness to another. She makes it look so easy. Dickens helps one to be brave about changes in register and address.  

Will Eaves was born in Bath in 1967 and educated at Beechen Cliff Comprehensive and King’s College, Cambridge. He worked for twenty years as a journalist and was the Arts Editor of the Times Literary Supplement from 1995 to 2011. He teaches in the Writing Programme at the University of Warwick. He is the author of four novels: The Oversight (Picador, 2001; shortlisted for the Whitbread – now Costa – First Novel Award), Nothing To Be Afraid Of (Picador, 2005; shortlisted for the Encore Award), This Is Paradise (Picador, 2012), and The Absent Therapist (CB Editions, 2014; shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize); and two collections of poetry: Sound Houses (Carcanet, 2011) and The Inevitable Gift Shop (CB Editions, 2016; shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry). He lives in Brixton, London.

BBC National Short Story Award 2017: ‘The Waken’ by Jenni Fagan 

29th September 2017 / / 1 Comment

This post is part of a series on the 2017 BBC National Short Story Award. 

It fascinates me how vastly different styles of writing can draw me in equally effectively. Will Eaves’s piece was fragmented and formal; Jenni Fagan’s is rolling, with a gossamer touch. Both embody what they want to tell superbly.

We join Fagan’s protagonist, Jessie, as she makes precautions to ensure that her newly-deceased father’s soul will not return to the house. This is an old tradition carried on into the present day; contemporary details puncture the narrative, destabilising its folktale-like tone.

All the women on Jessie’s Hebridean island, except her, became selkies at the age of twelve; but she is about to undergo a transformation of her own. None of this feels in any way out of place: Fagan maintains that measured tone, and the story unfurls as she goes.

Listen to a reading of ‘The Waken’.

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