Blurb

In The Geography of First Kisses, one finds portrayals of quiet elegance reminiscent of early-20th-century art films. The fourteen ethereal stories are tethered to the bays and backwaters of southern Louisiana, the fields of Iowa and Oklahoma, the pine woods of Florida, places where girls and women seek love and belonging, and instead discover relationships as complicated, bewildering, even sorrowful. A New Orleans girl spends a year collecting boyfriends and all the while considers the reach of her misadventures; a newlywed couple travels to Tulsa in search of a horse gone missing, perhaps more in search of themselves; a new mother is faced with understanding the miracles and mysteries of faith when her baby disappears; a young daughter travels to Tallahassee with her mother, trying to unravel the meaning of love crossed with abandonment. Saturated with poetic illusion and powered with prose of a dark, pulsating circuitry, the collection combines joy, heartache, and tenacity in a manner sorely missed in today’s super-structured literature.

Review

Huge thanks to the author for sending me an eARC to read in exchange for an honest review, and even bigger apologies for taking so long! I’m generally behind on everything book-related this year, but with this book there was an added reason: I loved it so much, I wanted to read it again before writing my review. This is really rare for me, as my toppling TBR glares accusingly at me if I so much as think about rereading, but this short story collection more than deserves extra time – it is really special.

I was looking forward to The Geography of First Kisses immensely, as Karin Cecile Davidson’s writing holds a special place in my heart. Her debut novel, Sybelia Drive, had a real effect on me – the story is so intricate, the prose so beautiful – it’s a book I did a lot of shouting about on Twitter, and I urge you to read it if you haven’t already. This collection had a lot to live up to for me, and it exceeded my high expectations.

The fourteen stories that make up The Geography of First Kisses hit the short story collection sweet spot of being tonally similar enough to form a cohesive whole, but individually full of variation and surprises. Like an album, there are repeated themes and strands, refrains that run throughout the book, but each story is its own song. The title story is the perfect opener – a coming of age tale with the scents and sounds of Louisiana woven into the prose, dreamlike and beautiful but punctured with occasional sharp shocks of reality. The writing oozes gorgeousness like honey, and lobster pots and oyster shells and shrimp trawlers set the scene for the journey in and out of the bayous that this collection is going to take us on.

Location is key, as you might expect from the title, but we don’t stay in Louisiana for all of the tales. One of my favourite stores, ‘We Are Here Because of a Horse,’ opens: “Tulsa by night shines like a shattered gold watch,” and depicts a wild goose (horse?) chase that somehow encapsulates a whole relationship and the layers that make it up. I loved Meli, the character searching for the horse – I’m always in such admiration when a short story, across its brief pages, can make a character seem so nuanced and real.

I think that is Karin Cecile Davidson’s gift with these stories – she presents moments that contain within them hundreds of other moments. The prose flicks seamlessly between present and past, and there’s such wisdom in the understanding of how time works, how those defining moments of our childhood live with us and yet are so hard to recapture: “The moment stumbled forward. Later, Celia would remember it as fleeting, a lissom second, like a flower, blown away, buried by sand” (From ‘Soon The First Star’). There’s a description in ‘The Biker and the Girl,’ a story pulsing with subtle menace and tension, that feels so innocent, so nostalgic, that it tips the story away from the sense of foreboding for a moment: “There was a way the days fell into each other, one after the other, warm and unencumbered.” It took me back to times in the past where I’ve experienced exactly that feeling – days without pressure, slipping into each other. When an author describes feelings you’ve had but never articulated, I think that’s one of the most special things about reading.

There are so many characters in the stories who have remained with me – the narrator of ‘One Night, One Afternoon, Sooner or Later,’ who whiles away days and nights with Jude and Micah, the three of them “twisted together, trying to figure things out by doing them, by not doing them;” Eliza, whose sister we are addressed as in her story about the thrill of a hurricane; Howdy and Morgan in Sweet Iowa, whose love story has the strangest beginning (hint: it involves pig tossing); Carly’s cousin Robbie in ‘Bobwhite,’ haunted by the big brother who died in the war: “Carly wondered if Robbie knew it would be okay to cry.” There is such power in these stories, from the simmering brutality of ‘Gorilla’ to the surreal, mythical touches that creep into stories like ‘In The Great Wide.’

It is hard to describe Karin Cecile Davidson’s style, except by saying that her stories remind me of almost all of my favourite short story writers, from classics such as Raymond Carver, Angela Carter and Alice Munro to contemporary favourites of mine like Lauren Groff and Carmen Maria Machado. These stories are at that level – they’re so layered and intricate, and just beautiful to read. I honestly feel quite evangelical about this writer – with her first novel and now this collection of stories, her talent is so awe-inspiring, and her words are such a rich pleasure to read. I’ll be looking out for what’s next, for sure. Do check out her work – you will not regret it!

The Geography of First Kisses by Karin Cecile Davidson is published by Kallisto Gaia Press and is available to purchase here.

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.

Blurb

It’s 1852 and Margaret Lennox, a young widow, is offered a position as governess at Hartwood Hall. She quickly accepts, hoping this isolated country house will allow her to leave her past behind.

Cut off from the village, Margaret soon starts to feel there’s something odd about her new home, despite her growing fondness for her bright, affectionate pupil, Louis. There are strange figures in the dark, tensions between servants and an abandoned east wing. Even stranger is the local gossip surrounding Mrs Eversham, Louis’s widowed mother, who is deeply distrusted in the village.

Margaret finds distraction in a forbidden relationship with the gardener, Paul. But despite his efforts to reassure her, Margaret is certain that everyone here has something hide. And as Margaret’s own past threatens to catch up with her, she must learn to trust her instincts before it’s too late…

The Secrets of Hartwood Hall is a chilling gothic mystery, and an authentic and atmospheric love letter to Victorian fiction.

Review

Many thanks to the publishers and to the Squadpod for my proof copy of The Secrets of Hartwood Hall. This has been an excellent pick for our Squadpod bookclub, as there’s so much to discuss!

I really enjoyed this story. It’s such a clever mix of familiar Victorian motifs and refreshingly original twists. We have a young governess, but she’s no naive innocent – she’s both an experienced teacher (who takes her profession seriously, unlike some governesses in Victorian literature!) and a formerly married woman, whose husband has passed away. We also have a crumbling stately home, ripe for all sorts of ghostly gothic adventures, but again, there’s a new take: there is no master of the house house here, just Mrs Eversham, her son, and a handful of servants. Things also get steamier than your typical Victorian novel would allow, with Paul the hot gardener gracing us with his literary-crush-worthy presence!

I won’t go into the plot too much, as the way it plays out is all part of the joy of reading this book, but I will say that it’s a gripping read, one of those ‘just one more chapter’ books that keep you reading until way past your bedtime! I was so engrossed by the story and the characters – especially poor Louis, Margaret’s charge, who has experienced so little of the world that his trips to church with Margaret feel like an adventure. The author does a wonderful job of capturing his personality, and it is easy to see why Margaret grows so fond of him. Their bond is a lovely thing to see develop – and as I mentioned before, it’s refreshing to see a governess who actually does a great deal of teaching! There are characters to loathe as well, such as the nasty piece of work that is Susan – although I will give her credit for the tension she injects into the plot, as I came to dread her next move as much as Margaret does!

The writing is really strong – Hartwood Hall comes to life in all its creepy, lonely glory, and there are moments of genuine fear provoked by the gothic atmosphere and strange events. Margaret, too, feels complex and rounded as a character as she wrestles with her conscience and big life decisions. And – no spoilers – when the ‘secrets’ finally come to light, they are both unexpected and everything you’d want them to be.

I loved this book because it gave me all the vibes of those hefty Victorian novels I read at university but with a much pacier, more intriguing plot, and characters whose sensibilities spoke to me more – the best of both worlds, nineteenth century and contemporary, you might say! I will definitely be looking out for more from this author after reading this fantastic debut.

The Secrets of Hartwood Hall by Katie Lumsden is published by Michael Joseph and is available to purchase here.

Blurb

One Wednesday morning in November 1912 the ageing Thomas Hardy, entombed by paper and books and increasingly estranged from his wife Emma, finds her dying in her bedroom. Between his speaking to her and taking her in his arms, she has gone.

The day before, he and Emma had exchanged bitter words – leading Hardy to wonder whether all husbands and wives end up as enemies to each other. His family and Florence Dugdale, the much younger woman with whom he has been in a relationship, assume that he will be happy and relieved to be set free. But he is left shattered by the loss.

Hardy’s bewilderment only increases when, sorting through Emma’s effects, he comes across a set of diaries that she had secretly kept about their life together, ominously titled ‘What I Think of My Husband’. He discovers what Emma had truly felt – that he had been cold, remote and incapable of ordinary human affection, and had kept her childless, a virtual prisoner for forty years. Why did they ever marry?

He is consumed by something worse than grief: a chaos in which all his certainties have been obliterated. He has to re-evaluate himself, and reimagine his unhappy wife as she was when they first met.

Hardy’s pained reflections on the choices he has made, and must now make, form a unique combination of love story and ghost story, by turns tender, surprising, comic and true. The Chosen – the extraordinary new novel by Elizabeth Lowry – hauntingly searches the unknowable spaces between man and wife; memory and regret; life and art.

Review

Many thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy of The Chosen in exchange for an honest review, and many apologies for taking so long post this! As penance (not really – I was very keen to go!), I recently took the book on a pilgrimage to Hardy’s Cottage, where he was born, and Max Gate, where he lived with Emma, hence the photos in this post.

I knew I would enjoy this novel, as I am a big fan of Hardy, and a Wessex girl to boot, but I have to admit I wasn’t expecting to be so caught up in the microcosm of time and place that the author creates in this book. It is appropriate that the late, great Hilary Mantel is quoted on the cover – Elizabeth Lowry’s Hardy comes to life as vividly as Mantel’s Cromwell, with that same almost uncanny quality of the writer seeming to possess the subject. Hardy’s innermost thoughts are laid bare, and as you’re reading, you believe them absolutely to be true.

The Chosen focuses on a specific time in Hardy’s long life, when his wife of forty years has passed away. Their relationship, so full of possibilities at the start, had become a twisted, bitter estrangement long before she dies, and yet he mourns deeply, so deeply, in fact, that he cannot shake the feeling that her presence lingers still. Hardy’s fragile state of mind, his ageing body, his accumulated disappointments, coat the pages of the novel in a fine dust of nostalgia and regret.

The depiction of grief for something long gone is almost unbearably poignant – it really moved me. The novel is an exploration of this very particular type of mourning, taking the essence of Hardy’s beautiful poem ‘The Voice,’ and building his world and his experiences back up around it. That is such a brave and brilliant premise for a novel – not to distil, but to expand, and I’m in awe of how the author pulls it off.

The prose is crisp and precise and wonderfully evocative – even in the most simple lines, there is so much to enjoy, from satisfying descriptions of the weather: “The rain of last week has thinned to a scrim,” to the image of Hardy as a boy licking jam off his fingers: “Jam is a daily treat he’s allowed because he is not strong. He licks his fingers slowly, trying to delay the disappointing moment when he will taste himself.”

This novel is jam-packed (sorry!) with perfect sentences, elevating domestic mundanities to things of beauty, and it is so clever, because this is exactly what a writer does, and here is a writer, doing it expertly, while capturing another brilliant writer on the page. It’s exactly the sort of layered, complex, carefully constructed but never artificial writing that honestly gets my nerdy writer side completely overwhelmed with excitement! I am really looking forward to reading more work by Elizabeth Lowry – I’m in awe of her talent.

This is not a warm, cosy, cheering book – if you know Hardy’s work, you know better than to expect that from a book about the writer – it is elegant and elegiac, rich with that particular tone of mourning that we also find in music, or in poetry. This novel meant a lot to me, because of its premise of giving yourself permission to mourn for something that really was over long ago, and I think it’s going to stay with me for a long time.

I’m going to finish this review by copying Hardy’s poem below, as it gives a much better sense of the feeling of this novel than my ramblings ever could:

The Voice

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.

Thomas Hardy, 1912

The Chosen by Elizabeth Lowry is published by riverrun and is available to purchase here.

Blurb

Nik has lots of questions about his late father but knows better than to ask his mother, Avani. It’s their unspoken rule.

When his grandfather dies, Nik has the opportunity to learn about the man he never met. Armed with a key and new knowledge about his parents’ past, Nik sets out to unlock the secrets that his mother has been holding onto his whole life.

As the carefully crafted portrait Avani has painted for her son begins to crack, and painful truths emerge, can the two of them find their way back to each other?

The Things That We Lost is a beautifully tender exploration of family, loss and the lengths to which we go to protect the ones we love.

Review

Many thanks to the publisher for providing me with a proof copy in exchange for an honest review. Apologies for not managing to post this before publication!

The Things That We Lost is a beautiful debut. It is in some ways a quiet book, despite the dramatic events buried within it, focusing on the intricacies of family dynamics and the nuances of British Asian identity, and the novel is all the richer for it. The complexity of the characters brings them to life – Nik and Avani are especially layered and realistic, but all of the characters in the book exist within a web of unspoken words and past regrets that feels poignantly believable.

There is a steady accumulation of details, and of secrets, that carefully excavates the stories these characters carry within them. The way that Nik’s father, Elliot, gradually comes into focus is so cleverly done – sometimes when a character is only revealed to us through flashbacks, it can be hard to feel invested in him, but the author does a fantastic job of slowly bringing him out of the shadows of the past and letting us get to know him in a brilliant echo of the way that Nik, finally, comes to know more about his father.

The writing is lyrical and gentle, but full of piercing insight. What I admired most about it is the fact that both Nik and Avani are such sympathetic characters, despite the fact that their actions are sometimes misguided. They feel so real – and we see Nik, especially, in so many different contexts that it feels like we get a rich and full picture of the many complicated strands of his personality. We come to a really deep understanding of their feelings and motivations, and by the end of the novel, which is left slightly open, the satisfaction comes from knowing that they have both taken ownership of their stories.

The Things That We Lost is an act of recovery, of excavation, of reclaiming the past and putting its pieces back together in the hands of those who need it most. It’s beautiful and moving, and it’s a book that will stay with me. I can’t wait to see what Jyoti Patel writes next.

The Things That We Lost by Jyoti Patel is out now with Merky Books and is available to purchase here.

Blurb

The second novel by the author of the acclaimed Dodge and Burn (Dodo Ink, 2016) is surreal, speculative, read-in-one-sitting, feminist literary fiction inspired by The Master and Margarita and narrated by a djinn who is obsessed with the young American woman who has released him from a bottle.  

 
“With sorcery, as everyone knows, there is no stopping it.” 

 

Born into Evangelical trailer trash poverty, Aurora finds her way into an elite prep school where she’s drawn into a circle of girls who form a Surrealist coven. Hell-bent on tapping into magic to subvert and transform reality, they encounter forces they should have left alone… A surreal adventure, an infernal fairy-tale, Aurora is a stunning novel that explores witchcraft from a radical new angle.

Review

Huge thanks to Sam at Dodo Ink for sending me a copy of Aurora in exchange for an honest review. I did read this back in January but it has taken me a while to get my review up – apologies!

‘Witch lit’ is having a moment – it’s everywhere, it seems, and I for one am all for it. If you pick up Seraphina’s new novel expecting a bit of a spooky, hazily ambiguous, is magic real or isn’t it story, however, you’re in for a shock. This brilliant book feels more like a potentially dangerous source text, something I could imagine being locked up in the ‘strictly forbidden’ section of an occult library, perhaps put under a curse so that no one escapes reading it unscathed. I simultaneously absolutely loved it, and was genuinely afraid that in reading it, I was at risk of shattering my own notions of reality. That’s a powerful book right there.

The prose is a heady cocktail of the base and the sublime, sometimes switching modes within sentences, full of grit and beauty all at once. Narrated by a cherry pop downing djinn, whose footnotes zip forwards and backwards through the narrative, clarifying and complicating all at once, the story stretches and compresses time in a fascinating way. Sometimes years zip by within pages, at other times, a single episode is described in minute detail from several different perspectives. It’s mind-bendingly clever, and I felt disorientated whenever I took a (brief) break from reading.

Aurora is a compelling protagonist, and I found her as mesmerising as the narrator clearly does. Her early life, her treatment by the pastors, her grandmother’s determination for her to rise up out of the circumstances she was born into all make for a gripping start to the book. And we move on to the elite school, and the coven she forms with Sylvia and the Californian girls – there is a slight The Secret History vibe to this section, but the density of the intellectual and philosophical rigour behind the girls’ champagne-soaked exploration of magic sets it apart. Key texts are woven into the narrative – Jungian psychology, Surrealism, spiritualism of all kind, and so much more, thicken the intoxicating brew of the girls’ risky journey. As they go deeper into their investigations, you really feel that they are on the cusp of totally new discoveries – the narrative is so probing and urgent in its pursuit of the other side of reality that it creates a kind of tension and momentum that is unlike anything I’ve read before.

There is a shift again, towards the end of the book, and without spoilers, these sections were some of the hardest to read. Aurora’s power and trauma collide, and the results are dark and unexpected and shocking. It takes an incredibly skilled writer to drive a book of this intellectual heft to such a dramatic conclusion, and the last pages had me gasping out loud. There is so much in this book – art, literature, philosophy, religion, a sweet little bird called Dinky and an excellent black cat called Tu-tu – you’ll finish this with your mind fizzing and your sense of reality less stable than it was when you began. It’s an incredible achievement to write a novel from which the reader emerges dizzy and blinking, struggling to readjust, changed by what they just read, and that it what Seraphina Madsen has done with Aurora.

Aurora by Seraphina Madsen is published by Dodo Ink and is available to purchase here.

Blurb

Perfect for fans of Liane Moriarty and Celeste Ng.

You want your sister to have all her heart desires.

But – what if she wants your children?

Maggie has everything her sister Rose always wanted. A handsome husband and two adorable children, Emily and Elliot.

But what Rose doesn’t see is that Maggie is struggling. Every day is a fog of sleep loss and mess made by two tiny children. Left alone in her distress by husband Stephen, Maggie drifts ever closer to the edge.

When Maggie finally cracks, walking out one day and not returning, Rose is right there to step into the breach . . .

You trust your sister to look after your children. But should you?

Review

Many thanks to the author for providing me with a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

At first glance, The Cuckoo Sister looked to be a little outside of my usual genres – I don’t read very many thrillers, although I do enjoy the occasional foray! However, on reading, I discovered that the novel is more nuanced than the tagline might suggest. It’s more psychological family drama than straight-up thriller, and I found the subtleties and complexities of the book really intriguing.

The writing is confident and pacey, and as we flick between the two sisters’ points of view, a complex picture emerges. What I found really clever about The Cuckoo Sister is the way it constantly made me reassess my assumptions. Every time I made a snap judgement about a character, I’d find my opinion unravelling in the next few chapters, and I became really invested in trying to figure out what was for the best. You know it is a strong story when the central dilemma has you just as worked up about it as the characters are!

Conversely, I sometimes found myself sympathising with a character, nodding along, only for them to go a step to far and for me to recoil at having empathised with them. It’s a morally grey, tangled situation, and I loved puzzling it all out and thinking about the wider implications.

Underpinning the narrative is the important message that families are messy, complex, imperfect; that mistakes, even huge ones, do not make someone inherently ‘bad,’ and that there is always more to a situation than meets the eye. The ending left me thinking for a long time, and I can imagine this book being ripe for discussion – lots of juicy issues to get stuck into!

The Cuckoo Sister is a strong debut, and I look forward to reading more from this author.

The Cuckoo Sister by Alison Stockham is published by Boldwood Books and is available to purchase here. It was an Amazon First Reads pick last month.