Old Filth by Jane Gardam (2004)

This book is a wonderful example of how to build up a portrait of a character, in this case the eponymous ‘Filth’ (which stands for Failed In London, Try Hong Kong), real name Edward Feathers, a retired judge who grew up as a ‘Raj orphan’ and has recently become a widower. The novel flits back and forth between his childhood and adulthood, and we gradually learn more about his life in a way that is both engaging and naturalistic. There is a playfulness to the overheard conversations, presented as scripts, which give us other people’s views of Filth, and these contrast nicely with the more straightforward narrative of his life.

At the heart of the book is the repressed trauma of the absence of parental love – his mother died giving birth to him, and his father, a district head in Malaysia, sent the young boy to England, as was the custom. The subtle tragedy of being taken away from his Malay nanny is poignantly and beautifully depicted at this point in the book. The adventures of Feathers’ life are both eccentric and engaging, and Gardam never leans too heavily on comedy or farce, as might be the temptation with such a deliciously old-fashioned creation. This is a clever, quiet book, and I was pleased to learn that it is the first in a trilogy – I shall certainly be reading the rest.

The Beggar Maid by Alice Munro (1972)

There’s always another Munro collection to read, and it is always a pleasure. This one, subtitled ‘Stories of Flo and Rose’, is more novel-like than previous collections I have read. Spanning nearly forty years, it explores the complex relationship between Flo and her stepdaughter Rose, though the focus is more on the latter. These linked stories are, as I have come to expect from Munro, insightful and true, and helped me to define what it is that I find so extraordinary about her work. Nothing is simple or universal in Munro’s world: every interaction is unique, a product of the whole of the characters’ histories, everything they are and that has shaped them.

I find myself wondering how on earth she writes with so much truth – is it by keeping her subject matter close to her own experience, following the infamous advice to ‘write what you know’? Whatever the secret, reading a Munro story is like reading a document of reality rather than anything that could be termed mere fiction – a very special experience indeed.

The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswarmy (2002; translated by Humphrey T. Davies in 2009)

Considering that I spent a fairly large portion of my childhood in the Middle East, I have read shamefully little Arabic literature, something I mean to rectify. This bestselling Arabic novel has been sensitively and effectively translated by Davies, and presents an insight into life in Cairo, showing characters from different walks of life, flicking between them in an almost cinematic way. The building at the heart of the novel is a literal representation of the split between the upper classes, who inhabit its posh apartments and offices, and the working class who form a community in the former storage units on the roof. From Zaki Bey, a womaniser in his sixties used to the finer things in life, to Taha, the pious son of the doorman, whose involvement with a militant Muslim group has an easily traceable cause after he is tortured at the hands of the Egyptian police, characters appear and disappear, sometimes too quickly, their tales presented in short sharp bursts that occasionally left me slightly frustrated. However, I feel I learned an awful lot about a place I didn’t really know anything about, and for me, that is always an exciting way to feel about a novel.

Lullaby by Leila Slimani (2016; translated by Sam Taylor in 2018)

Let me begin by saying that you do not want to embark upon reading this novel at 1am when you can’t sleep, fooled by the title into thinking that it might help you nod off. The horrific opening makes this crystal clear: “The baby is dead.” From the very start, we learn that the nanny, Louise, has murdered the two children in her care; as such, this thriller sets itself up as one of motive rather than a who-done-it. Quite apart from the fact that I now never want to leave my kids’ side ever, ever again, I found it very hard to get over the horror of the premise, which jarred with the clipped, almost terse tone of the narration. I never felt that the book came close to explaining Louise as a character – the third person narration kept her firmly at a distance, and by the end, I felt that nothing had been resolved, and I was left wondering why I had endured the horrors of this story. (I also went straight into the kids’ bedroom to check on them, obviously).

Flights by Olga Tokarczuk (2007; translated by Jennifer Croft in 2017)

This book, which won the Man Booker International Prize in 2018, has been compared to the work of W.G. Sebald, for most a ringing endorsement, but enough to put me off had I known it before I began reading. Luckily, it is far more playful than Sebald’s work, offering vignettes and musings on modern-day travel, interspersed with historical sections, often based on real figures from the past.

The narrator, the author’s alter-ego, has some insightful things to say about travel, such as a passage in which she perfectly describes that seemingly endless hour before a plane lands in the early morning. There is also an intriguing fascination with anatomy, and details of dissections, preserving methods and collections of body parts tread just the right side of gruesome to be interesting. There were one or two points where the disjointed nature of the book annoyed me, such as when the thriller-ish story of Kunicki, whose family disappears on a Croatian island, was interrupted and ‘cut out’ for many, many pages. But that is the kind of book this is – not a single, cohesive story, but a wide-ranging and brilliantly imaginative project. It gave me the impression of having access to a highly polished writing notebook, as if all those midnight scrawlings and 3am ideas had been given space to breathe and develop, but not corralled into a conventional narrative shape. There are moments of sheer brilliance here, which is the pay off for such a bold experiment.

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez (2018)

There is also something of the writer’s notebook, perhaps even more overtly, in Nunez’s novel, which depicts a woman mourning a friend and fellow writer who has committed suicide. In a set-up which sounds irresistibly comic, he leaves her his Great Dane, despite the fact that she lives in a tiny rented apartment. Despite the potential humour of this situation, what is wrought instead is a poignant and deeply moving meditation on the nature of grief, the writing life, and friendship. This is a thought-provoking and philosophical book, written in a careful and deliberate tone, though it still maintains elements of humour and a deep sense of empathy. It is perhaps the only book I have read which also does not trivialise our relationships with our pets, understanding instead that humans’ relationships with animals can be just as profound as their relationships with other people.

Heads of The Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires (2018)

This short story collection is full of self-awareness and a cool irony, delving into the needling questions of what it means to be an upper-middle-class black person in modern America. Set apart as much by privilege as by race, the characters in these stories find themselves the only black students at a private school, in a yoga class, and so on. The humour here is biting – in the letters between two highly educated mothers of private school girls, Thompson-Spires flirts with total parody, and in a later story, she manages to make a story about a woman with a fetish for amputees very funny indeed. Social media references abound, with one story in particular, ‘Suicide, Watch’, exploring the Instagram lifestyle in full comi-tragic glory, posing the question of what it means to be ‘black’ when there are so many other identities to worry about these days. The collection as a whole is strengthened by recurring characters, and I found it full of a refreshing sharpness, zesty and full of life. I hope to read more by this author.

I’m already slightly behind my goal if I want to read 100 books this year, so will be speeding through as many works as possible in February. If you have any reading suggestions, please let me know in the comments!

Last 2019-related post – my best reads of last year!

1. Circe by Madeline Miller (2018)
2. Florida by Lauren Groff (2018)
3. There, There by Tommy Orange (2018)
4. The Toymakers by Robert Dinsdale (2018)
5. The Moons of Jupiter by Alice Munro (1982)
6. The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai (2018)
7. I’m Fine, But You Appear To Be Sinking by Leyna Krow (2017)
8. Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado (2017)
9. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (1940)
10. All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews (2014)

Let me know your best reads of 2019 in the comments!

1. Circe by Madeline Miller (2018)
2. The Needle’s Eye by Margaret Drabble (1972)
3. See What Can Be Done by Lorrie Moore (2018)
4. The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner (2018)
5. Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi (2018)
6. Gorilla, My Love by Toni Cade Bambara (1972)
7. The Only Story by Julian Barnes (2018)
8. Bitter Orange by Claire Fuller (2018)
9. An American Marriage by Tayari Jones (2018)
10. Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday (2018)
11. Feel Free by Zadie Smith (2018)
12. Florida by Lauren Groff (2018)
13. Immigrant, Montana by Amitava Kumar (2018)
14. A Grain of Wheat by Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1967)
15. There, There by Tommy Orange (2018)
16. The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson (2018)
17. Warlight by Michael Ondaatje (2018)
18. The Toymakers by Robert Dinsdale (2018)
19. Lost Boy by Christina Henry (2017)
20. A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman (2013)
21. Eleanor Olifant is Completely Fine (2017)
22. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (2009)
23. The Outlander by Gil Adamson (2007)
24. Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie (2017)
25. Day by A.L. Kennedy (2007)
26. The Moons of Jupiter by Alice Munro (1982)
27. Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff (2015)
28. Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler (2016)
29. Gingerbread by Robert Dinsdale (2014)
30. Arcadia by Lauren Groff (2012)
31. A Horse Walks into a Bar by David Grossman (2017)
32. Runaway by Alice Munro (2006)
33. Delicate Edible Birds by Lauren Groff (2009)
34. The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi (1990)
35. All That Man Is by David Szalay (2016)
36. Moonglow by Michael Chabon (2016)
37. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006)
38. The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro (2006)
39. Little Exiles by Robert Dinsdale (2013)
40. A Pair of Sharp Eyes by Kat Armstrong (2019)
41. Something Fierce by Carmen Aguirre (2012)
42. His Monkey Wife by John Collier (1930)
43. The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins (2015)
44. Washington Black by Esi Edugyan (2018)
45. Solar by Ian McEwan (2010)
46. Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (2017)
47. You Are Having a Good Time by Aimee Barrodale (2016)
48. I’m Fine, But You Appear To Be Sinking by Leyna Krow (2017)
49. Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You by Alice Munro (1974)
50. The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff (2008)
51. Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng (2017)
52. The Overstory by Richard Powers (2018)
53. The Art of Being Normal by Lisa Williamson (2015)
54. What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons (2017)
55. My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh (2018)
56. The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai (2018)
57. Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra (trans. 2016)
58. Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado (2017)
59. Our Town and Other Plays by Thornton Wilder (this edition 2016)
60. Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters (1915)
61. The Waves by Virgina Woolf (1931)
62. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (1940)
63. Plainsong by Kent Haruf (1999)
64. Shotgun Lovesongs by Nickolas Butler (2013)
65. Where All Light Tends To Go by David Joy (2015)
66. The Whole Town’s Talking by Fannie Flagg (2016)
67. Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson (1919)
68. Cape May by Chip Cheek (2019)
69. Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney (2017)
70. The Green Road by Anne Enright (2015)
71. All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews (2014)
72. Disobedience by Naomi Alderman (2006)
73. Hope: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander (2012)
74. Late in the Day by Tessa Hadley (2019)

Book titles in bold come highly recommended with the Ellie seal of approval!

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson (1919)

This book really belongs with ‘Small Town November,’ and it contrasts nicely with Flagg’s novel, The Whole Town’s Talking, which was my last November read. In many ways it is the total opposite of Flagg’s book, prioritising depth over entertainment, with no hint of frivolity. Subtitled ‘A Group of Tales of Small-Town Ohio Life’, it does read more like a collection of short stories which hang together than a novel, though the central recurring character of George Willard, the young reporter, links the book together.

Characters recurr and are explained in greater depth each time they appear, which builds up a picture of the inhabitants of Winesburg in a realistic, nuanced way. The plot is hard to pin down, which adds to the realism of small town life. The sombre, unassuming tone took me a while to get used to, especially after the unbridled exuberance of Flagg’s novel, but this book quietly grew on me, and I found myself quite moved by it in the end.

Cape May by Chip Cheek (2019)

I bought this book after hearing the author talking on a podcast about how he was writing a different, more ‘serious’ novel, but this love story kept distracting him, and finally he gave in and wrote the story that was calling out to him. Set in the 1950’s, a young couple, Henry and Effie, go to Cape May for their honeymoon. It is out of season, and the vibrant place of Effie’s childhood memories is shuttered and somewhat bleak; they almost decide to cut their two week trip short, but then they meet Clara and her glamorous acquaintances and get sucked into their world.

This book is a booze-soaked, sexy, slightly over-the-top interlude from real life, filled with debauched parties, sexual exploration and many, many cocktails. I enjoyed the book as a guilty pleasure, even as I found the young protagonists’ transformation from shy virgins to sexually liberated hedonists in a couple of weeks a little far-fetched. Probably best read on a beach rather than in the midst of a British winter, but fun and glitzy in a Gatsby-ish way nonetheless.

Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney (2017)

This was one of a couple of books I read this month which, while I can admire the great skill of the writer, is, unfortunately, not my cup of tea. The narrator, Frances, has recently broken up with her girlfriend, Bobbi, although they still perform spoken word poetry as a duo. They are on their summer holidays from Trinity College, Dublin, and stumble into the world of the older, more sophisticated couple, Melissa and Nick (echoes of Cape May here). Frances startles herself by entering into an affair with Nick, though she despairs at the cliche of being ‘the other woman’.

The book is dripping with irony, and the characters are both intelligent and interrogative, questioning everyone and everything around them. The self-delusion of the protagonist plays out nicely, and the writing is confident and sophisticated. However, much as I objectively bow to Rooney’s talent and her creation of something that seems new, exciting and different, I found myself unmoved.

The Green Road by Anne Enright (2015)

A family saga with a difference, this novel is told from a third person perspective, moving between the members of the Madigan family: matriarch Rosaleen, and her four children, Dan, Emmet, Constance and Hanna. The plot centres around a Christmas reunion which threatens to be their last in the family home in west Clare, Ireland. The book dips in and out of their lives, from moments in Hanna’s childhood to Dan in 1990’s New York, to Emmet’s life as an aid worker in Mali. In doing this, Enright seems to me to have hit upon something very true about the way that family works, and how the separate lives that its adult members lead never quite come together when they are briefly reunited. The return to childhood that we feel when among our nearest and (possibly) dearest is cleverly exploited here, and it was a poignant read for me at this time of year!

All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews (2014)

This brave and beautiful novel is narrated by Yoli, whose main struggle (among many) in her adult life is to keep her suicidal sister, Elfrieda, alive. Flashing back to their upbringing in a Canadian Mennonite community and forward to Elf’s time in a psychiatric hospital, the novel manages to be both comic and tragic. Both sisters are fantastic characters; Elf is a famous concert pianist, who feels she has a ‘glass piano’ inside her which may break at any time. Yoli is, on the surface, far more chaotic and far less successful, but she is a fierce and admirable woman in ways she doesn’t even seem to realise, and a pleasure to have as a narrator.

The plot in itself is actually fairly slight: Yoli wonders whether she is wrong in her desire to prevent her sister from the death she craves, and even considers assisting her in her attempts as her friends and family anxiously attend Elf in hospital. However, the book crackles along with an exuberant, open-hearted energy, and handles its sensitive subject matter in a way which is honest, compassionate and, often, very funny.

Disobedience by Naomi Alderman (2006)

‘Funny’ is not a word I would use to describe this next novel. While Alderman’s book, set in the Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood of Hendon, provided me with an insight into a community I knew nothing about, the story was not one that will stay with me. Ronit, who has escaped her Orthodox upbringing and now lives in New York, where she is free to embrace her bisexuality, returns to Hendon upon the death of her Rabbi father, to find that his touted successor, her cousin Dovid, is married to a woman with whom Ronit once had a brief relationship. Dovid was, to me, a slightly more interesting character than Ronit, but neither of them really caught my attention, and Alderman’s long descriptions of Jewish customs and scripture seemed heavy-handed at times.

Hope: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander (2012)

A very different kind of Jewish book, Auslander’s novel is a delightfully satirical and surprising story of a man who discovers that an aged Anne Frank is living in the attic of his newly purchased American farm house (as one reviewer wrote, imagine the agent pitch on that one). Solomon Kugel, the protagonist/anti-hero of the novel, has moved his family to the rural town of Stockton precisely because he is trying to escape the oppressive weight of history, and Stockton is “famous for nothing.” Kugel’s mother, much to his wife’s chagrin, has moved in with them – she is a hilarious character, who imagines she is a Holocaust survivor despite being born in Brooklyn in 1946.

Kugel himself is a fantastic creation – he carries around a notebook to write down possible ‘last words’, swears profusely, and has the kind of terrible luck that leaves you eagerly anticipating his next misadventure. The discovery of ‘Anne Frank’, now an impossibly old and rather disgusting crone secretly living in his attic, is an absurdly brilliant notion – it is hard to convey how Auslander manages to create so much black humour from this situation, so just read the book and enjoy.

Late in the Day by Tessa Hadley (2019)

I’d hoped to finish my 2019 reading on a high, but sadly this was the third book this month to fall into the “very well written, but not for me” category. Three characters, Christine, Lydia and Alex, who have been friends for thirty years, are thrown into chaos by the death of Lydia’s husband, Zach, the cornerstone of their group. Hadley is an insightful and skilled writer, and the book is very clever, but I just couldn’t get under the skin of any of her characters. Their lives are relentlessly middle-class, full of gallery openings, restoring old buildings, trips to Venice and so on, and to me it all felt a bit self-indulgent. I just couldn’t empathise with any of them – similar to Rooney’s book, the intellect-over-emotion mood just wasn’t my bag.

I’ve got my first reading list for 2020 ready, but am always keen for further suggestions – let me know your best reads of 2019 in the comments, please!

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (1940)

November’s reading has been a journey through small town America, starting with this beautiful novel set in a mill town in Georgia in the 1930’s. At the centre of the novel is John Singer, a deaf-mute towards whom many of the other characters in the book gravitate. Singer is a brilliant literary creation, mysterious enough to allow both the other characters and the reader to project their own interpretation onto him, warm and sensitive enough to feel genuine affection for. The chapters are divided between third person viewpoints of different figures in the town, from the teenage girl Mick Kelly to diner owner Biff Brannon, as well as outsider Jake Blount and the world-weary Doctor Copeland.

McCullers writes with a light touch; her prose is clean, not unsentimental, but never cloying. Although the book deals with weighty issues such as social injustice, the race divide, war and fascism, the huge themes are writ small, so that their personal effects can be clearly observed. It is hard to believe that McCullers was only in her early 20’s when she wrote this stunning book – the level of talent on display is incredible. It is one of those novels that seems to pierce the heart of the human condition, and a book I will definitely be revisiting.

Plainsong by Kent Haruf (1999)

Another small town, this time the fictional Holt, Colorado. Again, this book uses the interlocking stories of different characters – Tom Guthrie, his sons Bobby and Ike, Victoria Roubideaux, and the McPherson brothers – to build up to a whole picture of life in the town. The epigraph to the novel defines ‘plainsong’ as “unisonous vocal music used in the Christian church from the earliest times; any simple or unadorned melody,” and this gives a good description of the book itself. The understated, plain prose is used to tell a story that creeps up on you – there is a quiet confidence to the storytelling that seems to add up to more than the sum of its parts.

The book, like McCullers’ novel, is unsentimental and yet gentle, and refreshingly un-ironic. It is firmly rooted in the present moment of the story it is narrating – long backstories are not needed here. The sense of the passing of seasons is well done, leaving the reader feeling as if they have indeed spent time immersed in this midwest prairie town.

Shotgun Lovesongs by Nickolas Butler (2013)

Continuing the small town theme, my next stop was Little Wing in rural Wisconsin. This book came as a sharp contrast to Haruf’s spare novel; Butler’s prose is lush, almost poetic. His five narrators, Hank, Lee, Kip, Ronny and Beth, unfortunately all sounded a bit too similar to me – only Ronny has a bit more personality and idiosyncracy in his first person narration. I do feel that if you are going to use the first person and have multiple narrators, you ought to make something of the different voices.

Lee is a famous musician who returns home to Little Wing from time to time. The other characters in his orbit are all affected by his comings and goings in one way or another. The book contains a LOT of weddings, as well as characters on their way to a wedding which doesn’t actually appear in the book, and I did find myself getting a little bit confused. Despite the poetry of the writing, I never got as strong a sense of Little Wing as I did of Holt and of McCullers’ mill town, and try as I might, I couldn’t muster an awful lot of sympathy for Butler’s characters, either.

Where All Light Tends To Go by David Joy (2015)

Simplifying things a bit, this novel only has one first person narrator, 18 year old Jacob McNeely. ‘Daddy’ is a meth king pin, and his Mama is an addict living in a cabin. At first it seems that Jacob has accepted his fate as the heir to his Daddy’s meth empire, but then he glimpses another chance at a future with his childhood sweetheart, Maggie, and the possibility of escape from this life begins to grow in his mind.

I had one or two small gripes with this novel, firstly that Maggie, whom Jacob orginally broke up with because he didn’t want to drag her down with him, is presented as almost too perfect to be realistic. The ending, while extremely powerful, is also flawed. However, there was much that did impress me in this book, notably the way that Joy handles the violent aspects of his story. Despite its horror, it never feels gratuitous, and Jacob’s reactions are well drawn – he never becomes numbed to the trauma of what he witnesses. It is cleverly done, and Jacob is a sympathetic protagonist to lead us around this murky underworld.

The Whole Town’s Talking by Fannie Flagg (2016)

Onwards, to Elmwood Springs, Missouri, my final stop on November’s ‘fictional American towns’ tour. In the town cemetary, Still Meadows, strange things are happening, and, like a comic version of the Spoon River Anthology, which I read last month, the dead are not quite as quiet or still as one might expect. The story spans over a century, skipping through the generations with ease, starting Lordor Nordstrom, the town’s founder, and exploring his legacy down through the years.

The characters are mostly endearing, not very deep, and a lot of fun to follow. They aren’t necessarily believable, nor do they leave a lasting impression, but this was an entertaining, somewhat frivolous read that gives lots of warm and fuzzy feelings about community. A feel-good, old-fashioned book, harking back to simpler times, and there ain’t nothing wrong with that.

Our Town and Other Plays by Thornton Wilder (Penguin Modern Classics edition 2000)

I have only managed to read three books this month, and my excuses are twofold: firstly, half term (enough said), and secondly, the books themselves were among the most dense, difficult works I have read this year, and since my reading habits involve reading in bed until my eyelids drop, I found myself having to go back and re-read almost every page of these works, sometimes several times. This is quite hard work for a skimmer like myself.

It has been a very long time since I read a play. It’s a strange experience reading something that is written to be performed, to be seen, but reading a script does give you the aforementioned advantage of being able to go back, to concentrate on things that might be missed in a performance. Our Town, first published in 1938, is set in the fictional town of Grover’s Corner. Via the town’s inhabitants, we are taken on a journey through the whole cycle of life; the three acts are named ‘Daily Life’, ‘Love and Marriage’, and ‘Death and Eternity’. There is a strong meta-theatrical element, with the Stage Manager offering commentary and scene changes happening in front of the audience. Wilder apparently wrote the play as a reaction against what he saw as the stagnation of American theatre at the time, and it is bold, thought-provoking and at times downright bizarre, though not as strange as the second play in this collection, ‘The Skin of Our Teeth’, which tells a deliberately confusing story of an Eternal Family, headed by George Antrobus, as they navigate their way through the triple perils of the Ice Age, flood and war. The final play, ‘The Matchmaker,’ is a more straightforward farce, with plenty of comic characters and moments. But it was ‘Our Town’ that stayed with me when I finished the book; its profound themes and deep exploration of the human condition also happened to lead neatly onto the second book I managed to read in this rather lean month.

Spoon River Anthology (1915)

From plays to poetry, this slim but densely packed volume represents the voices of over 200 inhabitants of another fictional town. Told in free verse, the people of Spoon River are each given a chance to speak from their graves in Oak Hill cemetary. Each poem is titled with the name of the citizen, all of whom speak with a brutal honesty that seems to come from at last being able to speak their truth. There is a surprising amount of narrative threaded through these fragments; we build up a picture of corruption, abusive marriages, love affairs, violence and shattered dreams, often seeing more than one side of each story. This curious cumulative effect builds up a cynical picture of Midwestern small-town values, a protest against sentimentality that has a powerful effect. I think I need to reread this work a few more times before I can comment on it properly; despite there being some parallels with Wilder’s play, it is unlike anything else I have read.

The Waves by Virginia Woolf (1931)

Speaking of works that are unlike anything else, my final read this month was another mind-bender. I think I assumed that I’d read more of Woolf than I actually have – if I had read this before, I would have remembered it. Described by Woolf as a ‘play-poem’ (thus making it the perfect follow-up to Our Town and Spoon River), The Waves takes stream-of-consciousness writing to the next level. The six main characters, Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis, narrate the novel in turns, their voices at times merging so that it is hard to keep track of who is speaking. This is, of course, part of the point; as we follow these characters from their school days to middle age, we see how much their identities are dependent on each other. These are characters drawn from the inside, and while there are a few anchoring ‘events’, the narrative is not concerned with conventional plot or story, but with the waves of inner life which, as Bernard says, make us “come up differently, for ever and ever.”

This series of soliloquies is full of absolutely beautiful, shimmering prose, heaping simile upon simile until the richness of the language is almost overwhelming. The powerful, intoxicating effect of this is indeed like being pounded again and again by waves – there is something almost mystical about this book, so that you don’t so much read it as experience it. Again, despite me taking my time and trying to absorb the words as much as possible, I think this is another book that needs re-reading before I can really form an articulate opinion – I am still reeling from its effects.

So, three books, two of which I plan to re-read: not my most productive month. I hope it’s not too shameful to admit that in November I want some cracking yarns and straightforward prose, just to give my tired mind a break. At least the kids are back at school/preschool.

The Overstory by Richard Powers (2018)

My approach to creating reading lists is very haphazard; I’ll gather suggestions from articles or friends and note them down in small batches, and I often don’t get round to buying the books for months or even years. By the time I finally read them, I’ve forgotten who told me about them, and anything about the book at all. I mostly read on my Kindle, so I don’t even have a blurb to guide me before I dive in. I like this ‘blind reading’ – it throws up some good surprises. However, I sort of wish I had been aware of what a massive undertaking Powers’ novel was before I merrily embarked upon reading it – it is epic, both in size and concept, and I have to admit I did a fair bit of complaining about still being on ‘that tree book’ for the two whole weeks it took me to get through it.

It is worth the effort, though – it isn’t often that you come across a book that is truly transformative, that changes the way you think. Telling several different stories across over a hundred years, Powers’ novel challenges our notions of time and our relationship to the natural world by slowing down to the rhythms of ‘tree time’ and revealing the over-arching complexities of an ecosystem we so often ignore, or, more dangerously, destroy. This is a difficult one for me to review, as I can’t say I actively enjoyed the experience of reading it, even though I am very glad I did. The book is full of so many beautiful and loving descriptions of trees that I became almost numb to the technical brilliance of the writing, and although there is some pay-off for following the seemingly disparate stories of characters such as Nick Hoel, Mimi Ma and Patricia Westerford, the professor who argues that trees are far more communal than we might imagine, that they communicate with each other, there were other storylines, such as Neelay, the paralysed computer engineer whose world-building game is a revolutionary hit, that, for me, could have been pruned (excuse the pun) without hurting the text. My requirements for a novel are pretty basic: a good plot, and characters I genuinely care about, and this novel is not nearly as interested as I am in such trivialities. Instead, it is a far-reaching, profound study of our relationship with the natural environment, at a moment when such explorations are urgently necessary.

The Art of Being Normal by Lisa Williamson (2015)

Again, I had no real idea what this novel was before I started reading, although I had seen the cover and guessed it was about gender identity. It turns out to be a fantastic YA novel, easily digested in a couple of hours, and exactly what I needed as a palette cleanser after emerging from the tangled forests of Powers’ book.

Written in the present tense, with two first person narrators, the book zips along with enough tasty plot twists and funny but touching moments to maintain interest until the last page. Of the two protagonists, I much preferred Leo, finding David rather irritating, but both are well-drawn, and David’s struggle with his identity is very well-depicted. Alongside the issue of being a transgender teenager, plenty of other, more typical problems are explored, which helps to avoid defining characters in reference only to their gender identity. Williamson’s matter-of-fact approach to an important topic creates a great, refreshing read, and I am glad this book exists.

What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons (2017)

The first person narrator of this novel, Thandi, takes the reader on a journey through grief: her mother’s illness and subsequent death have a profound effect on her, calling into question all kinds of issues of identity and purpose. The book is experimental in form, a series of non-sequential vignettes, fragments of non-fiction texts, song lyrics, and so on, interspersed with more conventional narrative sections. The effect is that of a collage, reflecting how the human mind works, especially a grief-stricken one.

Thandi is the daughter of a South African mother and an African American father, and she feels the in-betweenness of her ‘light skin and foreign roots’. She visits South Africa quite often, but is never quite at home there, and in the States her family has its home in a fairly affluent, predominantly white neighbourhood. Layered on top of this is her own struggle with how to live well, her relationships, her own unexpected journey into motherhood. It adds up to a deeply nuanced, thought-provoking read that is one of the best examples of ‘auto-fiction’ I have read in a long time.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

Fiction is full of horrible male protagonists, ghastly men whose stories we follow with a mixture of revulsion and fascination. It is still thrilling to me to stumble across a deeply unlikable female main character who is nevertheless able to hold my attention, to demand that her story be read, no matter how unsympathetic she is. The unnamed narrator of Moshfegh’s novel is a tall, thin, blonde, beautiful (by her own frequent description) woman from a privileged background who has decided to sleep away a year of her life and hopefully emerge as a new person, finally able to engage with the world.

The attraction of retreating into sleep is obvious, a premise I can definitely get behind. The narrator is aided in her quest by the quackiest of all quacks, Dr Tuttle, a Yellow Pages doctor who provides some of the funniest scenes in this often funny book. The heady cocktail of prescribed drugs that the narrator takes to keep herself as near to sedated as possible is described in lovingly detailed recipes for getting the balance just right. Her best friend, Reva, is another genius creation, spouting self-help nonsense and reeking of desperation as she comes round from time to time to check on her hibernating pal. The absurdity and black humour hide a core of uncomfortable truth at the centre of the novel – who hasn’t fantasised about retreating from the world? When the narrator finally hits upon a terrifying new drug called Infermiterol, which causes three-day blackouts during which she loses all memory of what she does, she is able to fully realise her goal, and enlists the help of an artist to keep her secluded for the final months of her project. The ending of the book is divisive, I think, but it worked for me.

The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai (2018)

This brilliant novel opens with a funeral, plunging us straight into the midst of the AIDS crisis in 1980’s Chicago. The two main characters are Yale, a gay man who watches his friends succumb one by one to this terrible, still mysterious illness, and Fiona, the sister of the recently deceased Nico, whose memorial service/party creates one of the best openings for a novel I have read for a while. Fiona is also given a parallel narrative set in 2015, in which she searches for her missing adult daughter in Paris. At first, the two storylines seem unconnected, but as the novel progresses, it becomes clear that Fiona’s role as caregiver to so many of the young men during that awful time has had an indelible effect on her, and on her relationship with her family.

The men in the sections set in the mid-to-late 1980’s are a well-drawn and realistic a group of characters, and I felt utterly convinced by them, mourning the inevitable losses as if I knew them. Yale is a truly wonderful character, and the subplot involving his work for an art gallery and his attempts to secure works from a former model for great artists in pre-war Paris, Nora, added another layer to the narrative. Nora’s comment that they share an experience of losing loved ones to a kind of war is a poignant moment. Fiona, too, is a fantastic character – it is through her that the boys’ memories are held, and I think her inclusion is useful for Makkai’s determination, as stated in the afterword, to stay on the right side of allyship vs appropriation in writing this novel. This book managed to inform me about a period of history of which I was pretty much ignorant while also introducing me to some of the best, most endearing characters I have met this year.

Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra, translated by Megan McDowell (2016)

One of the strangest novels I have read this year, Multiple Choice is structured like the Chilean Academic Aptitude Test, which Zambra took at school. As such, it functions as a kind of ‘choose your own adventure’, with different options open to you as you work your way through. It starts with a section where you must choose from a list of single words, and then onto ordering sentences, and then whole texts followed by ‘comprehension questions’, with full rubrics provided before each section.

At first glance, this is the kind of thing that might send me into a traditionalist huff about post-modern (or post-post-modern, who knows where we’re up to now) nonsense, and I will admit to reading the first section with a very sceptical face indeed. However, as the book progressed, not only was there far more narrative than I expected, but the close focus on the constructive act of reading began to have an odd effect on me. By drawing such explicit attention to the role of the reader in interpreting texts, Zambra makes you complicit in a way that is actually quite exciting. The silly moments in which the pretentiousness of the whole exercise is cut through with humour do not undermine the reflective nature of the endeavour. And complicity is a theme here – the shadow of Pinochet looms large, along with Zambra’s assertion that no one at the time could claim ignorance of what was really going on behind the scenes. This is a book which demands rereading, as it is assuredly going to be different each time. A special mention must go to the excellent skills of the translator, McDowell.

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado (2017)

A heady blend of genres, the eight stories in this collection had me once again marvelling at the sheer power of the short story as a form. The first story, ‘The Husband Stitch,’ ostensibly takes us through the narrator’s rather conventional journey through marriage and child-rearing, but the undercurrents are anything but normal. From the mysterious green ribbon around the woman’s neck to the swirl of folk tales, ghost stories and old wives’ tales that infuse the narrative, this story announces itself as Something Different. And so it is with all of the stories in this fantastic, and fantastical collection: Machado has created a brand of speculative fiction that is startling in its originality.

From ‘Inventory’, a list of a woman’s sexual experiences against a backdrop of a lethal virus spreading across the country, to the novella-length story in the form of episode synopses for Law & Order: SVU, to the fading women who are literally disappearing in ‘Real Women Have Bodies’, these stories amazed me with their innovation, bravery and freshness. There are hints of Angela Carter, among others, but my main takeaway from this book is that this is a writer speaking entirely in her own voice, of which I want to hear much, much more.

I’m Fine, But You Appear to Be Sinking by Leyna Krow (2017)

Having just read Aimee Barrodale’s short story collection, I was delighted to find that the stories in this book were equally quirky and original, albeit very different in style. There are fifteen stories in Krow’s book, seven of which share the title ‘Spud & Spud II’ and are a continuation of the same tale (although each Spud story is narrated by a different character). In between the linked stories are standalone works that nevertheless share certain themes – a fascination with the natural world, and the changes it has undergone in our lifetime and, in Krow’s vision, beyond. There is a tinge of darkness, particularly in ‘Excitable Creatures,’ which has a fantastic ending, but there is also humour and warmth here, as well as great originality.

What struck me most about this beautiful collection was the sense of wonder contained within the stories, a love of the natural world even as the shadow of climate change (and in one story, the apocalypse itself) hangs over us. Much as I admired Barrodale’s stories, Krow’s work has more heart, and resonated more with me than ‘You Are Having a Good Time’. The characters show real compassion, and relate to each other in a less brittle, more forgiving way. There is a kindness and sense of connection in these weird and wonderful stories that left me with a warm glow, as well as a lot of questions about squid.

Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You by Alice Munro (1974)

My third short story collection in a row with a great big title, this is the earliest collection of Munro’s stories that I have read since I belatedly ‘discovered’ her earlier this year. Her second collection, in fact, containing thirteen stories whose main defining feature seems to be their open-endedness. I feel that these stories in particular demand rereading, so I will keep my initial comments brief.

Once again, Munro presents ordinary life in simple prose, but the perceptive nature of her observations reveals the complexity of her work. ‘How I Met My Husband’ is a kind of anti-romance, riffing off the expectations of that genre and gently subverting them. The title story is definitely one that I need to revisit – I confess I read it too quickly, and I think I missed some important details. There is limited scope here in one sense – her female narrators are all concerned with relationships, without exception, but isn’t that an almost limitless subject? Above all, I continue to be awed by the way Munro uses her clear, simple language as a conduit to her thoughts, avoiding the frills and flourishes that other writers might indulge in. This was not my favourite collection by Munro so far (it falls somewhere in the middle) but it has made me determined to embark on a future project of re-reading all of her works in order. One day!

The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff (2008)

(A little side-note: this is the 50th book I have read this year, a figure so much higher than any other recent year that I might allow myself a little virtual high-five. Okay, done.)

I wanted to love this, having become a recent Groff convert; I was so excited to read her first novel, and the opening lines, in which an actual monster is discovered in the lake of the town of Templeton, promised much. However, I have to admit I came away disappointed. The main narrative concerns Willie Upton, a graduate student returning to her hometown in disgrace, and her search for the answer to a riddle posed by her mother, Vi, who informs her that her father is a man from the town that she is not prepared to name, but will give her certain clues in order to help her work it out. Hum – this was one of my problems – the central mystery is so contrived, and could be so easily solved by her mother JUST TELLING HER, that I immediately became frustrated with the whole premise. The idea of Willie digging through her family tree and unearthing secrets and voices who speak in their own right is a good one, but I was so turned off by the lack of plausibility that I read the book quite sulkily (not unlike Willie herself, who is pretty petulant for a 28-year-old).

There are glimmers of Groff’s beautiful later prose style here, but not nearly enough, and the different historical figures who surface to tell their stories didn’t have sufficiently distinct voices. It was also hard to keep Willie’s increasingly complicated family tree straight, despite the use of portraits and diagrams included in the text. It is certainly an ambitious book, and the imagination displayed is impressive, but it felt overstuffed and flawed in a way I just couldn’t overlook. On the plus side, Groff’s later novels and short stories are so masterful that I suppose I can forgive her a shaky start, and, as I plod on writing my own first novel, I can comfort myself that I, too, can only get better.

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng (2017)

Set in Shaker Heights, a planned community in Ohio with privilege and order coming out of its ears, this book opens with the Richardson family’s beautiful house burning to the ground. Another promising start, and, for me, another slight disappointment as I continued to read. The novel is very well-written, and the characters are strong, particularly the contrast between Mrs Richardson and Mia Warren, her artist tenant, who moves to Shaker with her teenage daughter, Pearl, but the plotting is almost too tight, the twists and turns too contrived.

The book contains three main subplots, all focusing on babies: the Richardsons’ friends are in the process of adopting an abandoned baby when the mother makes a reappearance; Mia has a secret about Pearl’s birth that Mrs Richardson sets out to discover; Lexie, one of the Richardsons’ four teenage children, has an abortion. Thematically, this is strong, and there is some lovely writing on motherhood, including a moving section about how parents have to cope with the gradual withdrawal of physical contact from their children as they get older, which may or may not have made me slightly misty-eyed and perhaps even squeeze my too-young-to-object kids a bit tighter. However, as a whole, the book lacks urgency; it unfolds in a carefully controlled manner, ironically devoid, as Lionel Shriver points out in a review for the Guardian, of fire. I quite enjoyed reading it, but there was no aftertaste, nothing to make it linger in my thoughts after I closed the book. To quote Shriver’s review, it is well-designed, “But does it have a point?”

Something Fierce by Carmen Aguirre (2012)

This book, subtitled ‘Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter,’ is the true story of the author’s extraordinary childhood and adolescence. Aged 11, Carmen returns to South America from exile in Canada along with her revolutionary mother and her partner, as well as her younger sister. Between 1979 and 1989 the family leads a nomadic existence, living in Peru, Bolivia, Argentina and Chile.

Aguirre’s voice is honest, searching and darkly funny; she is careful to tell her own story and not try to analyse the thoughts and feelings of her family members. There is also no sense of judgement on her mother and (largely absent) father for dragging her into this way of life -indeed, she later joins the Resistance in her own right – although as a reader, I felt enormous relief for her when she is finally released from duty and able to begin a ‘normal’ life, freeing her from the Terror that clutches at her even as she tries to be brave beyond her years. Carmen is a sympathetic, engaging narrator, who loves fiercely – countries, friends, family members, lovers. She is told by one superior that all experience is good experience, and she seems to live by that.

This is a moving, informative, truly remarkable book – I am not sure how it ended up on my bookshelf a few years back, but I’m very glad I finally got round to reading it.

His Monkey Wife by John Collier (1930)

I bought this strange novel years ago in Daunt Books, without knowing anything about the book or the author. I was merely intrigued by the title, and the book itself lives up to its oddness. Collier takes a ridiculous idea and runs with it to the fullest extent: a highly intelligent chimpanzee falls in love with her British owner, Mr Fatigay, and travels with him to London, keeping the full extent of her mental capabilities under wraps, where she tries to make him see that marrying his flawed fiancee is a mistake.

Emily, the ‘monkey’ in question, is finely drawn, and her heightened sensibilities are evident in every sentence. This is a parody, of course, poking fun at the idea of the ‘new woman’ among other things, but it is sensitively done, and a hell of a lot of fun to read. The sentences are wonderfully convoluted, and deserve to be puzzled out; what’s not to love about descriptions such as the following:

“As the tormented water sinks into a momentary quiescence when the cold egg is cast in, so Emily’s seething heart subsided into a hot stillness at these words, that she might better catch the answer.”

The book is chock-full of racism, sexism and colonialist attitudes, and yet if you manage to keep your politically correct hackles from rising, this is a brilliantly entertaining novel. Collier throws himself into his absurd conceit so fully, you can’t help but be swept along.

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins (2015)

I don’t make a point of snootily avoiding bestselling sensations, but I do like to come to them a little later, when all the fuss has died down. I can see why Hawkins’ novel was so successful. It is gripping – I read it in less than 24 hours. The short chapters and many twists and turns kept my interest, and although I did figure out who the ‘bad guy’ was quite early on, it didn’t spoil the fun.

I thought that Rachel’s alcoholism was a rather convenient way of creating mystery in the plot, but to be fair, it was also well-depicted, and a fairly unique character trait for a female protagonist. The three first person narrators, Rachel, Megan and Anna, all had very similar voices, and I would have liked a bit more variation. I wasn’t sure I needed to hear from Anna at all, and it was slightly wearisome to follow three very flawed women who defined themselves in terms of their relationships with men. The denouement left me a bit cold – I wanted more of an ‘ooh’ reaction, where things suddenly make sense. A solid read, but it didn’t wow me.

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan (2018)

The protagonist of this novel, ‘Wash’, is born a slave on a plantation called Faith in Barbados. He is (slightly ambiguously) rescued by his master’s brother, Titch, who takes him on as his assistant in scientific investigations. The story is far-ranging, as we follow Wash from Barbados to America to the Arctic, and later to Canada, England, Amsterdam and Morocco. Edugyan has created a very clever, intriguing mix of literary and adventure genres, rejecting out-and-out realism in favour of a kind of imaginative freedom for her character.

Parent/child relationships are explored in various iterations in the novel, beginning with Wash’s bond with Big Kit at the plantation. The fact that I almost wanted more of the plantation section before Wash set off on his travels created an interesting conflict/guilt in me. Wash also wrestles with guilt over his freedom, though it is not without its fears: the bounty hunter who stalks him, his abandonment by Titch and so on. The scientific elements of the book were particularly quirky and interesting, from Titch’s ‘cloud cutter’ to the Goffs’ interest in marine biology – the book is rich in more than just geographical reach. It also has a lot of humour in it, which contrasts again with the traditional ‘slave narrative’ from which Edugyan liberates her protagonist.

Solar by Ian McEwan (2010)

More humour in unexpected places – a comic McEwan novel came as something of a surprise. Following the farcical misadventures of an ageing physicist, Michael Beard, Solar sticks very closely to its protagonist’s point of view, which is, in my opinion, unfortunate, as Beard is unpleasant company: bloated, self-interested, an excessive consumer of everything from booze to food to women. With five marriages and multiple affairs behind him, I found it hard to see why he is so irresistible to seemingly intelligent women.

The novel spans nine years, and is divided into three parts, each chronicling his larger-than-life career and personal mistakes. The science is convincing, and never feels shoe-horned in – it is an extension of how Beard thinks. For me, the ending was a disappointment, but I am not sure how I could have found it otherwise – despite his many lucky escapes (including from a polar bear in the Arctic), I never found myself rooting for him, and I am not sure I cared what happened to him one way or the other.

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (2017)

Although this tells the story of a modern black family in Mississippi, there is a timeless quality to the book; you can feel the weight of a history of struggle behind it. Jojo, the first narrator, is the most sympathetic character in the book, and his relationship with his little sister Kayla is beautifully drawn. His mother, Leonie, is also given a voice – I found her a very difficult character to process, due to her lack of maternal feeling. Neither she nor her partner Michael seem to know how to be parents, although they never fully abandon their children (who are mostly in the care of Leonie’s parents) – the couple are blinded by their love for each other, which eclipses their sense of responsibility to their children.

Jojo’s grandfather, Pop, is haunted by his time at Parchman penitentiary, where Michael is doing a stint at the story’s opening. Leonie, too, has visions of her dead brother, Given, when she is high. This echoing of the past is an important theme, and as the book progresses, the ghosts in the novel become more real, until one, Richie, appears as a character and a narrator. The past, in this book, intrudes upon the present constantly, as if the lives lived before us are overlapped onto the now. There is a dream-like quality to Ward’s writing in this lyrical and evocative novel that makes even the familiar tropes of the family road trip or the police pulling over a black driver feel fresh, new and unsettling.

You Are Having A Good Time by Aimee Barrodale (2016)

This book of ten short stories is unlike anything I’ve read – eerie and spiky, the stories tell of a deep weirdness that runs parallel to, and sometimes overspills into, our everyday lives. The first story, ‘William Wei,’ introduces Barrodale’s spare, bare prose, with short descriptive sentences giving hard, boiled-down nuggets of information. A few of the stories are interlinked: ‘Animals’ contains a screenplay that is later brought to life in ‘The Imp’, but for the most part the feeling is one of short, sharp shocks of strangeness barrelling at you as you read.

These funny (Barrodale is a former staff writer for The Onion), original, unsettling stories possess a kind of Twin Peaks oddness that gets under your skin. They are courageous and brutal – it takes a special kind of honesty and bravery to lay bare such a strange and subversive imagination, and I am full of admiration.

Set in early 18th century Bristol, this historical crime novel tells the story of Coronation (Corrie) Amesbury, a young girl who leaves rural Wiltshire to try and obtain a ‘place’ in the city. She arrives to find Bristol reeling from a series of murders of young boys, rumoured to be the work of a criminal nicknamed Red John. What follows is a deliciously pleasurable journey through the various spheres of Bristol life, from the merchant traders gambling on the price of sugar and slaves and retiring to their fine houses, to the poorest members of society trying to eke out a living alongside them.

From the very start, the reader is thrown into the action, and the intricately detailed world that the author has created. I have to admit that it took me a few pages to acclimatise to the language – Armstrong takes no prisoners and writes in a style that is so convincingly of the time that it is as if this novel has found its way here from the 18th century – but once I had adjusted, I was hooked. Corrie may be young, but she is not the naive, innocent girl that the reader might be expecting, and right from the start we see her negotiate her way through dangerous situations with admirable skill. There are subtle hints of a backstory that is never quite fully revealed; a touch which pleased me, as it gave her an unexpected depth: her defiant ‘that’s not for you to know’ attitude extends outward to the reader, and also avoids taking the novel into treacly romance territory.

What struck me most on reading this novel was the devilishly clever balancing act that the author performs. The plot has enough twists and turns to maintain a lively pace, but not so many as to be overwhelming. The dialogue is utterly convincing, as are the details of the food, clothes, and the sights, sounds and smells of the streets of Bristol. The modern sensibility that creeps in never compromises the book’s authenticity; rather, it allows for what feels like a ‘peek behind the curtain’: it is like reading an eighteenth century novel that has been freed from the constraints and censorship of the day, able to look square in the face issues such as slavery and prostitution that novels of the time had to draw a veil over. Corrie herself is an excellent protagonist and a pleasure to follow as she picks her way through the various obstacles and pitfalls that the city places in front of her. She, too, is a tightrope performer; treading a careful line between prudence and a sharp wit, her occasional flares of temper provide some of the most comic lines in this often hilarious book.

There are scenes of genuine tension in the book, too: the depiction of the storm that rages through Bristol is both frightening and exhilarating, and the discoveries of the murdered boys provide a chilling jolt in the narrative each time they occur. Once again, a careful balancing act restrains any tipping over into melodrama, while maintaining the thrill of a dramatic story well-told.

The supporting characters work hard in this book – each one is more than you expect, and as the connections between them are teased out, it becomes clear that there are many levels at play here. Mrs Tuffnell, Corrie’s capricious employer, is a complex and intriguing woman; there is something unsettling about the way she blows hot and cold, alternately rewarding and punishing depending on her whims, making her even more dangerous than a purely cruel mistress might be. The dynamics of the domestic servants in the Tuffnell household are well-drawn, and the relationships between Corrie and both her peers and her ‘betters’ are nuanced and realistic.

A Pair of Sharp Eyes is a joyously fast-paced yet intricate book: a treat for fans of eighteenth century novels, historical fiction, crime writing, or anything in between. On finishing this tightly-packed, immersive book, I was left feeling as if I had just been taken on a whirlwind tour of 18th century Bristol in all its colourful, deceitful glory, led by both a protagonist and an author into whose capable hands I was quite happy to entrust myself entirely.

Note: I received an advance copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

A Pair of Sharp Eyes will be released in September 2019, and is available to pre-order now.