Blurb

Edie finds the world around her increasingly difficult to comprehend. Words are no longer at her beck and call, old friends won’t mind their own business and workmen have appeared in the neighbouring fields, preparing to obliterate the landscape she has known all her life. Rattling around in an old farmhouse on the cliffs, she’s beginning to run out of excuses to stop do-gooders interfering when one day she finds an uninvited guest in the barn and is thrown back into the past.

Jonah has finally made it to England – where everything, he’s been told, will be better. But the journey was fraught with danger, and many of his fellow travellers didn’t make it. Sights firmly set on London, but unsure which way to turn, he is unprepared for what happens when he breaks into Edie’s barn.

Haunted by the prospect of being locked away and unable to trust anyone else, the elderly woman stubbornly battling dementia and the traumatised illegal immigrant find solace in an unlikely companionship that helps them make sense of their worlds even as they struggle to understand each other. Crossing Over is a delicately spun tale that celebrates compassion and considers the transcendent language of humanity.

Review

Huge thanks to Will at Renard Press for providing me with a copy of Crossing Over in exchange for an honest review.

This book tackles some enormous themes, but it does so in an extremely intimate way. Its power comes from the fearlessness of the narration, which dives headfirst into the complex, fractured mental states of its two protagonists, Edie and Jonah. Their respective confusions are carefully rendered through Morgan’s disjointed, urgent prose and are also reflected in clever loops with chapter titles, incidents, misunderstandings – so that every situation we read about is kind of viewed through a double lens: the disorientated perspective of the character, and the reader’s own attempt to weave meaning out of the (intelligently presented and completely deliberate) chaos!

It’s no mean feat, but Ann Morgan manages to pull this off. I was concerned that I just wouldn’t be able to follow either narrative, but as Edie gets more confused, so Jonah finds more clarity, and it’s his journey that really had an emotional impact on me.

It is obvious that the author has taken the responsibility of writing a Black character very seriously – an author’s note explains that in fact she has revised this text since the audio version to provide a “richer, more complex” backstory for her character, and the acknowledgements mention several sensitivity readers. It’s to the author’s credit that this is not a simple “but look, we can all be friends” narrative – the weight of what Jonah has had to carry because of the circumstances he’s been forced to live through is more than anyone should have to bear, and the toll it has taken on him is really well depicted. There’s so much nuance here – and some really quite dark moments, as Jonah confronts the injustices so clearly on display to him.

Edie is another complicated character – she’s not your warm and fuzzy if slightly dotty granny – she’s also seen some terrible things, and she’s made some bad choices. As her memories bleed into her present, the pieces of the puzzle gradually start to slot together, but this is a puzzle with jagged edges, ones that cut deep.

I think what I admire most about this book is the way it swerves the easy wins of sentimentality and delves much deeper into the psyche of the two protagonists. In a book this ambitious, not everything is going to work for everyone, and there were one or two plot points which stretched my credulity, but on the whole, I found so much depth in this book, so much thought and care and rigour – it really impressed me, and I’d love to read more work by this author.

Crossing Over by Ann Morgan is published by Renard Press and is available to purchase here.

Blurb

Today I might trace the rungs of her larynx or tap at her trachea like the bones of a xylophone…

Something gleeful and malevolent is moving in Lia’s body, learning her life from the inside out. A shape-shifter. A disaster tourist. It’s travelling down the banks of her canals. It’s spreading.

When a sudden diagnosis upends Lia’s world, the boundaries between her past and her present begin to collapse. Deeply buried secrets stir awake. As the voice prowling in Lia takes hold of her story, and the landscape around becomes indistinguishable from the one within, Lia and her family are faced with some of the hardest questions of all: how can we move on from the events that have shaped us, when our bodies harbour everything? And what does it mean to die with grace, when you’re simply not ready to let go?

Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is a story of coming-of-age at the end of a life. Utterly heart-breaking yet darkly funny, Maddie Mortimer’s astonishing debut is a symphonic journey through one woman’s body: a wild and lyrical celebration of desire, forgiveness, and the darkness within us all.

Review

Many thanks to FMcM for sending me a copy of the book to review as part of their promotion of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year shortlist. The award was won by Tom Benn for Oxblood, but all four of the shortlisted books sound incredible – you can check them out here. I definitely want to read the others now!

Having read Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies, I’m not at all surprised that it has been shortlisted, and that it has appeared on so many other prize lists, including the Booker Prize longlist. It’s so inventive, playing around with form and language and a way that feels genuinely fresh. I do love a book that makes its own rules, and Maps does this in spades.

There’s a weird, witty, experimental ‘I’ which at first I thought was Lia’s cancer talking, but it actually seems more complex than that – it’s a narrator that can’t be pinned down, both bodiless and of the body. Its giddy use of language and random thought hops put me in mind of the brilliant Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann – the two books have something in common in their startlingly insightful understanding of the way the mind works, the looping and doubling back of thought processes, the way that snippets of knowledge, pop culture, lived experience all swirl together to make that peculiar stream of consciousness that we all carry within us.

There are other original facets of this book, too – the central relationship between Lia and Matthew is destructive, but we’re not pushed to judge them for it, again, there’s a piercing insight about that kind of magnetic attraction that is so hard to break free from. Lia’s daughter, Iris, is another fascinating character – in fact, I think she was my favourite character in the novel.

The heady mix of intellectual heft and fun and humour makes for an intoxicating read – I had no idea where the book was going to go next, and that freefall sensation is a very exciting one as a reader. If you like a straightforward, conventional narrative, this isn’t the book for you, but if you enjoy seeing boundaries pushed, watching fiction stretch and play with the fabric of reality, I highly recommend this brilliant novel.

I’m looking forward to reading the other books on the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year list – let m know if you’ve read any of them!

Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies by Maddie Mortimer is published by Picador and has just been released in paperback – available to purchase here.

Blurb

Madurai, 1992.

A young mother in a poor family, Janani is told she is useless if she can’t produce a son – or worse, bears daughters. They let her keep her first baby girl, but the rest are taken away as soon as they are born – murdered before they have a chance to live. The fate of her children has never been in her hands. But Janani can’t forget the daughters she was never allowed to love.

Sydney, 2019. Nila has a secret, one she’s been keeping from her parents for far too long. Before she can say anything, her grandfather in India falls ill and she agrees to join her parents on a trip to Madurai – the first in over ten years.

Growing up in Australia, Nila knows very little about where she or her family came from, or who they left behind. What she’s about to learn will change her forever.

Review

Many thanks to the publisher for sending me a beautiful proof copy of The Daughters of Madurai in exchange for an honest review.

I knew this novel would be an emotional read – centering on the horrific practice of female infanticide, even the blurb is deeply moving – but I wasn’t prepared for the journey this book would take me on. The elegance of the prose, the back and forth of the shifting timelines, and above all the quiet strength of Janani, one of most finely drawn characters I’ve come across in a long time, all adds up to an incredibly powerful reading experience.

The structure of the book is really clever – questions are raised by the gaps in the story, and the answers come gradually, naturally, with all the realism of uncovering family secrets from tight-lipped relatives who prefer to leave the past untouched. While Janani had my heart, her daughter, Nila, is also a fascinating character, trying to carve out her own identity from a rockface of silence, looking to the past and the future at the same time, acting as a guide for the reader as we travel back to India and to her parents’ past.

There are brutal scenes, and tragedies that feel all too real, but there is also love and tenderness in these pages – romantic love, and the deep connection of friendship and shared experiences. The way the characters interact with each other in the book is a masterclass in characterisation, in that push and pull between what can and can’t be spoken aloud. It aches with emotion, bruised souls bumping up against each other and pressing on invisible wounds. I finished the novel feeling as if I really knew these people, particularly Janani, for whom I had so much admiration. The author makes the characters come to life so vividly that I whispered goodbye to them when I finished reading, and wished them well.

The Daughters of Madurai is a powerful, important, beautifully written novel, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

The Daughters of Madurai by Rajasree Variyar is published by Orion and is available to preorder here.

Blurb

Three best friends. A weekend away. And a whole lot of baggage.

 Alice, Nina and Jules have been best friends for twenty years. They met in Paris and return there once a year, to relive their youth, leave the troubles of home behind, and indulge in each other’s friendship and warmth. But this year, aged thirty-nine, the cracks in their relationships are starting to show…

After their weekend together in Paris, the three women never speak again. Each claims the other two ghosted them. But is there more to the story?

Review

Many thanks to the publisher and to the Squadpod for sending me a copy of the book ahead of the paperback release in exchange for an honest review.

I love books about female friendship – the complexity of it, the way that those relationships can be more important, more constant, and sometimes more dramatic, than the romantic relationships in our lives. I love it even more when the protagonists are the same age as me, and I’ll never pass up a vicarious trip to Paris, a city I’ve only been to twice, and each time only for 24 hours, but one which I love to read about.

The structure of After Paris is reminiscent of One Day, as we flit in and out of different Parisian visits throughout the years of Alice, Nina and Jules’ friendship. It’s very cleverly done, and it gradually builds up a complex picture of the three women’s lives, and their friendship dynamics. There’s a boy, of course, and he’s significant to their story, but it’s the women who are the focus.

What I admired most about this book is the way that it dives into so many big themes: motherhood, fertility struggles, addiction, infidelity, without falling into the traps of either becoming preachy or of skimming over the surface of these important issues. It feels like a deep, heartfelt exploration of the myriad challenges that so many people face, and yet there is also a lightness, brought into the novel by the humorous touches and, of course, the wonderful backdrop of Paris. Nicole Kennedy describes the city beautifully – its sights, smells, and above all, its tastes – if you manage to get through this book without craving a delicately flavoured almond pastry or an air-light macaron, then I’m sorry but I don’t think we can be friends.

I have to say, I enjoyed this book even more than I expected to – I genuinely came to care deeply about the characters, and was left with that lovely feeling that their lives would go on without me as I turned the last page. That’s when you know the writer has done an amazing job. I think this novel is the perfect spring read, and I highly recommend you get hold of a copy, along with a patisserie treat or two!

After Paris by Nicole Kennedy is published by Head of Zeus and is available to purchase here.