Category Archives: Recommended

December 17, 2021 · 6:02 pm

The Redeemed – Tim Pears

The Redeemed – Tim Pears

This is the third in the West Country Trilogy and it is definitely a three-act story.

Here’s the blurb …

The final instalment in Tim Pears’s spellbinding chronicle of love, exile and belonging in a world on the brink of change Selected as a book of 2019 by the Guardian, Scotsman and The TimesIt is 1916. The world has gone to war, and young Leo Sercombe, hauling coal aboard the HMS Queen Mary, is a long way from home. The wild, unchanging West Country roads of his boyhood seem very far away from life aboard a battlecruiser, a universe of well-oiled steel, of smoke and spray and sweat, where death seems never more than a heartbeat away. Skimming through those West Country roads on her motorcycle, Lottie Prideaux defies the expectations of her class and sex as she covertly studies to be a vet. But the steady rhythms of Lottie’s practice, her comings and goings between her neighbours and their animals, will be blown apart by a violent act of betrayal, and a devastating loss.In a world torn asunder by war, everything dances in flux: how can the old ways life survive, and how can the future be imagined, in the face of such unimaginable change? How can Leo, lost and wandering in the strange and brave new world, ever hope to find his way home? The final instalment in Tim Pears’s exquisite West Country Trilogy, The Redeemed is a timeless, stirring and exquisitely wrought story of love, loss and destiny fulfilled, and a bittersweet elegy to a lost world.

I found this one fascinating -I had no idea about the scuttling of the German fleet, or the effort to raise these ships again. Or the fact that all steel manufactured after world war two contains radiation (from Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and so these ships are some of the last ‘pure’ steel left in the world.

It is a beautiful story, full of detail of a vanishing world. Horses replaced by tractors and fewer men required to work the fields.

A review

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December 5, 2021 · 11:15 am

The Horseman – Tim Pears

The Horseman – Tim Pears

I heard about this trilogy from the Slightly Foxed podcast and then a friend asked if I wanted to read them – how serendipitous.

Here’s the blurb …

From the prize-winning author of In the Place of Fallen Leaves comes a beautiful, hypnotic pastoral novel reminiscent of Thomas Hardy, about an unexpected friendship between two children, set in Devon in 1911. In a forgotten valley, on the Devon-Somerset border, the seasons unfold, marked only by the rituals of the farming calendar. Twelve-year-old Leopold Sercombe skips school to help his father, a carter. Skinny and pale, with eyes as dark as sloes, Leo dreams of a job on the Master ‘s stud farm. As ploughs furrow the hard January fields, the Master ‘s daughter, young Miss Charlotte, shocks the estate ‘s tenants by wielding a gun at the annual shoot. Spring comes, Leo watches swallows build their nests, hedgerows thrum with life and days lengthen into summer. Leo is breaking a colt for his father when a boy dressed in a Homburg, breeches and riding boots appears. Peering under the stranger ‘s hat, he discovers Charlotte.And so a friendship begins, bound by a deep love of horses, but divided by rigid social boundaries boundaries that become increasingly difficult to navigate as they approach adolescence – Hallucinatory, beautiful and suffused with the magic of nature, this tale of an unlikely friendship and the loss of innocence builds with a hypnotic power. Evoking the realities of agricultural life with precise, poetic brushstrokes, Tim Pears has created a masterful, Hardyesque pastoral novel. The first in a dazzling new trilogy, The Horseman is his greatest achievement.

This is a beautiful novel – the writing is poetic. It spans 18 months from January 1911 to June 1912. Each chapter is a different event, activity or thing in Leo’s life. We learn a lot about farming in the early 20th century and it looks hard and very labour intensive.

Leo is a quiet and extremely observant boy and I loved all of the sections about horses and nature.

Lottie is a fiercely independent soul who shares Leo’s love of horses. There is definitely going to be class tensions or at least problems in the future.

Another review

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December 1, 2021 · 3:47 pm

How Fiction Works – James Woods

How Fiction Works – James Wood

I heard about this book on twitter (I think).

Here is the blurb …

Rediscover this deep, practical anatomy of the novel from ‘the strongest … literary critic we have’ (New York Review of Books) in this new revised 10th anniversary edition.

What do we mean when we say we ‘know’ a fictional character?

What constitutes a ‘telling’ detail?

When is a metaphor successful?

Is realism realistic?

Why do most endings of novels disappoint?

In the tradition of E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and Milan Kundera’s The Art of the Novel, How Fiction Works is a study of the main elements of fiction, such as narrative, detail, characterization, dialogue, realism, and style. In his first full-length book of criticism, one of the most prominent critics of our time takes the machinery of story-telling apart to ask a series of fundamental questions.

Wood ranges widely, from Homer to Beatrix Potter, from the Bible to John Le Carré, and his book is both a study of the techniques of fiction-making and an alternative history of the novel. Playful and profound, it incisively sums up two decades of bold, often controversial, and now classic critical work, and will be enlightening to writers, readers, and anyone interested in what happens on the page.

‘Should find a place on every novel-lover’s shelf. It has the quality all useful works of criticism should have: refined taste, keen observation, and the ability to make the reader argue, passionately, with it’ Financial Times

It’s great, if you’re at all interested in literature and how it works, then you will love this book. It has a conversational style and there are lots of examples.

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November 30, 2021 · 7:08 pm

Oh, William – Elizabeth Strout

Oh William – Elizabeth Strout

I really like Elizabeth Strout, so I went to the book shop on the day it was published (of course they hadn’t unpacked it and I had to come back the next day).

Here’s the blurb

The Pulitzer Prize-winning, Booker-longlisted, bestselling author returns to her beloved heroine Lucy Barton in a luminous novel about love, loss, and the family secrets that can erupt and bewilder us at any point in life

Lucy Barton is a successful writer living in New York, navigating the second half of her life as a recent widow and parent to two adult daughters. A surprise encounter leads her to reconnect with William, her first husband – and longtime, on-again-off-again friend and confidante. Recalling their college years, the birth of their daughters, the painful dissolution of their marriage, and the lives they built with other people, Strout weaves a portrait, stunning in its subtlety, of a tender, complex, decades-long partnership.

Oh William! captures the joy and sorrow of watching children grow up and start families of their own; of discovering family secrets, late in life, that alter everything we think we know about those closest to us; and the way people live and love, against all odds. At the heart of this story is the unforgettable, indomitable voice of Lucy Barton, who once again offers a profound, lasting reflection on the mystery of existence. ‘This is the way of life,’ Lucy says. ‘The many things we do not know until it is too late.’

I thought that I had read My Name is Lucy Barton, but I can’t find it on my blog (and I am usually good at keeping records, so maybe I haven’t read it) anyway it’s not necessary to have read it to appreciate this new novel.

It’s written in a conversational, stream of consciousness method. Lucy thinks about her life with William and her two girls. There is not a huge amount of plot, it’s about the characters and the relationships between the characters. It’s about growing old and family and what it even means to be a family. And about how childhood experiences cast a long shadow over our lives.

A review.

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November 29, 2021 · 3:09 pm

The Lincoln Highway – Amor Towles

The Lincoln Highway – Amor Towles

I really enjoyed both Rules of Civility and A Gentleman in Moscow (Rules of Civility is my favourite), so I was very keen to read this one.

Here is the blurb …

Emmett returns home to pick-up his little brother Billy, tie-up his late father’s estate and get out of town for good. Since leaving the Kansas youth facility where he’s served time, Emmett has wanted one thing: to give them both a fresh start – and that means heading out to the sparkling west.

Young, precocious Billy has plans of his own – to get to San Francisco, where he believes their long-estranged mother is waiting for them. However, as soon as they’ve loaded Emmett’s bright blue Studebaker with their few belongings, trouble arrives and brings its sidekick in the form of Duchess and Woolly, two runaways from the very facility Emmett just left behind him.

Insatiable Duchess and his devoted, but slow companion Woolly soon wreck Billy’s plan to get onto the open road, one well-intentioned blunder at a time. Each young man sees this journey as his chance to pursue his dreams, settle scores and find riches. And a simple journey quickly becomes a dazzling odyssey filled with obstacles, villains and ruses fit only for heroes to overcome.

Bursting with life, charm and unforgettable characters, The Lincoln Highway is an extraordinary journey through 1950s America from a master storyteller.

This is a beautiful story told from different view points, each one unique and compelling.

Still Life by Sarah Winman is still my favourite for the year, but this is a close second.

Another review

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November 28, 2021 · 8:28 am

Matrix – Lauren Groff

Matrix – Lauren Groff

I read and enjoyed Fates and Furies, so grabbed this one when I saw it in Dymocks. It’s completely different from Fates and Furies.

Here’s the blurb …

Lauren Groff returns with her exhilarating first new novel since the groundbreaking Fates and Furies.

Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, 17-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease.

At first taken aback by the severity of her new life, Marie finds focus and love in collective life with her singular and mercurial sisters. In this crucible, Marie steadily supplants her desire for family, for her homeland, for the passions of her youth with something new to her: devotion to her sisters, and a conviction in her own divine visions. Marie, born the last in a long line of women warriors and crusaders, is determined to chart a bold new course for the women she now leads and protects. But in a world that is shifting and corroding in frightening ways, one that can never reconcile itself with her existence, will the sheer force of Marie’s vision be bulwark enough?

Equally alive to the sacred and the profane, Matrix gathers currents of violence, sensuality, and religious ecstasy in a mesmerizing portrait of consuming passion, aberrant faith, and a woman that history moves both through and around. Lauren Groff’s new novel, her first since Fates and Furies, is a defiant and timely exploration of the raw power of female creativity in a corrupted world.

I enjoyed this novel – I do like female-centred historical fiction. Marie is a formidable character, full of energy, drive, passion and very cunning. It is beautifully written.

A review from the Guardian

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November 27, 2021 · 12:24 pm

The Librarian – Salley Vickers

The Librarian – Salley Vickers

I have liked Salley Vickers ever since I read Miss Garnet’s Angel and I have blogged about Dancing Backwards (way back in 2010!). I borrowed this one from the library.

Here’s the blurb

A charmingly subversive novel about a library in 1950s England, by the acclaimed author of The Cleaner of Chartres

Sylvia Blackwell, a young woman in her twenties, moves to East Mole, a quaint market town in middle England, to start a new job as a children’s librarian. But the apparently pleasant town is not all it seems. Sylvia falls in love with an older man – but it’s her connection to his precocious young daughter and her neighbours’ son which will change her life and put them, the library and her job under threat.

How does the library alter the young children’s lives and how do the children fare as a result of the books Sylvia introduces them to?

This was written in a contemporary style (it felt very 1950s to me). It is a story about books and reading, but also about relationships and betrayal.

A review from the Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/03/mirror-shoulder-signal-curry-eating-reading-and-race-the-librarian-salley-vickersreviews-arifa-akbar

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November 25, 2021 · 3:32 pm

A Town Called Solace – Mary Lawson

A Town Called Solace – Mary Lawson

I have read Road Ends and Crow Lake and enjoyed both, and then this one was longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, so I was super keen to read it.

Here’s the blurb …

A Town Called Solace–the brilliant and emotionally radiant new novel from Mary Lawson, her first in nearly a decade–opens on a family in crisis: rebellious teenager Rose been missing for weeks with no word, and Rose’s younger sister, the feisty and fierce Clara, keeps a daily vigil at the living-room window, hoping for her sibling’s return.

Enter thirtyish Liam Kane, newly divorced, newly unemployed, newly arrived in this small northern town, where he promptly moves into the house next door–watched suspiciously by astonished and dismayed Clara, whose elderly friend, Mrs. Orchard, owns that home. Around the time of Rose’s disappearance, Mrs. Orchard was sent for a short stay in hospital, and Clara promised to keep an eye on the house and its remaining occupant, Mrs. Orchard’s cat, Moses. As the novel unfolds, so does the mystery of what has transpired between Mrs Orchard and the newly arrived stranger.

Told through three distinct, compelling points of view–Clara’s, Mrs. Orchard’s, and Liam Kane’s–the novel cuts back and forth among these unforgettable characters to uncover the layers of grief, remorse, and love that connect families, both the ones we’re born into and the ones we choose. A Town Called Solace is a masterful, suspenseful and deeply humane novel by one of our great storytellers.

This is a beautiful book, the story is told from three very different perspectives and each voice was unique and compelling. It moves through different times and places, and it’s about relationships, connections and family (our biological one and the ones we create for ourselves).

Another review

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November 24, 2021 · 5:56 pm

Sorrow and Bliss – Meg Mason

Sorrow and Bliss – Meg Mason

I listened to an interview that Meg Mason did on the ABC Big Weekend of Books and decided I had to read it.

Here’s the blurb …

This novel is about a woman called Martha. She knows there is something wrong with her but she doesn’t know what it is. Her husband Patrick thinks she is fine. He says everyone has something, the thing is just to keep going.

Martha told Patrick before they got married that she didn’t want to have children. He said he didn’t mind either way because he has loved her since he was fourteen and making her happy is all that matters, although he does not seem able to do it.

By the time Martha finds out what is wrong, it doesn’t really matter anymore. It is too late to get the only thing she has ever wanted. Or maybe it will turn out that you can stop loving someone and start again from nothing – if you can find something else to want

This is a fabulous book, incredibly funny, but moving as well. Being inside Martha’s head gives us a chance to understand (perhaps empathise) with mental illness.

A review from the Guardian.

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November 22, 2021 · 2:27 pm

Light Perpetual – Francis Spufford

Light Perpetual – Francis Spufford

I really enjoyed Golden Hill and then I listened to this podcast and I was super keen to read this book.

Here’s the blurb …

From the critically acclaimed and award?winning author of Golden Hill, an “extraordinary…symphonic…casually stunning” (The Wall Street Journal) novel tracing the infinite possibilities of five lives in the bustling neighborhoods of 20th-century London.

Lunchtime on a Saturday, 1944: the Woolworths on Bexford High Street in South London receives a delivery of aluminum saucepans. A crowd gathers to see the first new metal in ages—after all, everything’s been melted down for the war effort. An instant later, the crowd is gone; incinerated. Among the shoppers were five young children.

Who were they? What futures did they lose? This brilliantly constructed novel, inspired by real events, lets an alternative reel of time run, imagining the lives of these five souls as they live through the extraordinary, unimaginable changes of the bustling immensity of twentieth-century London. Their intimate everyday dramas, as sons and daughters, spouses, parents, grandparents; as the separated, the remarried, the bereaved. Through decades of social, sexual, and technological transformation, as bus conductors and landlords, as swindlers and teachers, patients and inmates. Days of personal triumphs and disasters; of second chances and redemption.

Ingenious and profound, full of warmth and beauty, Light Perpetual “offers a moving view of how people confront the gap between their expectations and their reality” (The New Yorker) and illuminates the shapes of experience, the extraordinariness of the ordinary, the mysteries of memory, and the preciousness of life.

This was a lovely book, I particularly enjoyed seeing what happened to everyone after the gap in the narrative – a reminder that things change and life moves forward.

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