I somehow hadn’t heard of Alba Donati’s Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop, despite it being the kind of memoir I always gravitate towards. Luckily, I spotted a copy in my local library, and found it to be the perfect reading for rather a rainy day, where I could transport myself to beautiful rural Italy through Donati’s words, which were translated into English by Elena Pala.
Prior to relocating to the small village of Lucignana in Northern Tuscany where she grew up, Donati lived a busy life in Florence where she worked as a publisher; this ‘made her happy but also left her feeling like a woman constantly on the run.’ A slower pace of life is something she strove for, and so she decided to open a small bookshop for the village’s 180 residents. As she writes in her first diary entry, ‘The idea for the bookshop must have been lying in wait, ensconced in the folds of that dark and joyous country we call childhood.’
The bookshop itself, which was named Libreria Sopra La Penna, opened in December 2019; Donati’s Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop begins over a year later, on the 20th of January 2021. Her second entry, written the following day, includes more background about her venture: ‘The idea to open the bookshop knocked on my door one night… It was the thirtieth of March 2019. I had the space: there was this little hill by the house where my mother used to grow lettuce… What I didn’t have was the money: opening a bookshop is expensive.’
It was lovely to see the tight-knit community’s effort involved throughout Donati’s reflections. When it began, the bookshop was ‘a project shared with 70 per cent of the village, volunteers doing shifts so that there would always be three people around at any given time…’. A lot of the money to enable the bookshop to open was also raised through a fundraising campaign.
As one might expect from this timepoint, Donati’s venture was rather affected by the COVID-19 lockdowns. She receives a lot of support from the online community in periods where the physical bookshop has to close, and visitors flock from local towns and cities as soon as lockdowns are lifted and it is open again. Throughout, Donati is never downbeat, although she is open about the myriad challenges a new bookshop faces in the modern world; rather, she is appreciative of everything around her, in terms of people, the natural world, and the books she so loves to read. Her focus on the small positives was a real breath of fresh air in the quite bewildering world of narratives occurring during the pandemic: ‘The pandemic (despite itself, I’m sure) gifted us these new rituals. It gave us our Sundays back, it gave us time with nothing to do and nowhere to go. Time for ourselves, for the little things.’
Something I found quite charming about Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop is that each entry ends with a list of the books purchased on that particular day, both in-person and online. If you are reading this review, I am sure that this little delight of a book will appeal to you, and I hope you enjoy the reading experience as much as I did. Even in translation, Donati’s voice is so soothing, and the book’s pace is delightful. Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop exemplifies just how magical books can be, and how they have the power to bond us together during the most difficult times.
Heinrich Böll’s novella, The Train Was on Time, was first published in 1949, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972, two years after its translation into English. Aside from one book of his which I did not much enjoy (The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum), I was not hugely familiar with Böll’s work. I chose to reserve a very old hardback, and slightly battered, copy of this book from my local library. The edition I borrowed had been translated from its original German by Leila Vennewitz. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, although I admit the blurb did appeal to me and my more depressing reading tendencies.
The protagonist of the piece, Private Andreas, is a 24-year-old who finds himself on a train heading from Germany to rejoin his unit in Poland during the Second World War. On said train, Böll writes: ‘… it is suddenly borne on him that he has very little longer to live.’ On his journey, despite the crippling knowledge that dawns upon him, Andreas is ‘shocked to find that he can still make friends, play cards, sleep, eat and drink… Most of the time life goes on despite Andreas’ knowledge that he is to die soon.’
We first meet Andreas when a chaplain is asking him to board the train; the response he gives is as follows: ‘“Why, I might want to hurl myself under the wheels, I might want to desert… What’s the hurry? I might go crazy, I’ve a perfect right to… I don’t want to die, that’s what’s so horrible – that I don’t want to die.”’
The Train Was on Time is certainly not a cheerful read, but I found immense power in its 110 pages. Böll’s prose is incredibly visceral: ‘As Andreas was slowly groping his way back into the center of the car, the word soon entered him like a bullet, painlessly and almost imperceptibly flesh, tissue, cells, nerves…’. This concept of ‘Soon’ goes on to haunt the remainder of the novella: ‘Soon. Soon. Soon. Soon. When is Soon? What a terrible word: Soon. Soon can mean in one second, Soon can mean in one year… Soon is nothing and Soon is a lot. Soon is everything.’
Andreas becomes more and more convinced that his time on earth is nigh: ‘Soon I’m going to die, before the war is over. I shan’t ever know peacetime again. No more peacetime. There’ll be no more of anything, no music… no flowers… no poetry… no more human joy…’.
The Train Was on Time really probes its protagonist; against the context of a real conflict, it describes the internal conflict he is constantly experiencing, too. This is such a powerful topic, particularly to explore in the brief space of a novella. I found Böll’s character study fascinating from the outset, and liked the author’s approach of a continual narrative, which has the odd paragraph break but no chapters as such. The omniscient perspective, with flashes of our protagonist’s thoughts, was a really satisfying approach. The novella feels momentous; it propels its readers forward at speed, and has an unmistakeable intensity to it. The story is a little peculiar at times, but overall, I found it quite moving. I would not describe The Train Was on Time as an easy read by any means, but it is a story that I believe will stay with me for a long time to come.
I have wanted to read Icelandic author Kristín Ómarsdóttir’s work for years now, and I had my eye on the first of her books to be translated into English, the endearingly titled Children in Reindeer Woods. To my surprise, my library had a copy of her newest work, Swanfolk, which was shortlisted for the Icelandic Women’s Literature Prize, and has been translated into English by Vala Thorodds.
The novel opens, quite mesmerisingly, toward the end of March: ‘I came from a county that didn’t exist and lived from birth in its capital, by a blue bay and a violet mountain where slopes were scaled by a verdurous green in summer and in winter were veiled by snow… On the horizon, the sun curtsied politely like a chorus girl.’ We learn that Elísabet Eva’s parents disappeared when she was just twelve, and she and her brother were raised by their grandmother.
There are a lot of unusual components to Swanfolk. The novel is dystopic, and is set in the ‘not-too-distant future’, whilst still holding onto, and examining, some quite old-fashioned societal structures. Our protagonist is ‘a young spy’ named Elísabet Eva, who enjoys solitude. She is often found, when not at work at the secretive Special Unit in the Ministry of the Interior, taking long walks around a local lake. On one such occasion, she sees ‘two creatures emerging from the water, half-human, half-swan. She follows them through tangles of thickets into a strange new reality.’ When she first sees the Swanfolk, Ómarsdóttir describes them as involved with a myriad of quite ordinary tasks: ‘One creature bounced a fishing line in the water, another washed her hair, others swam the evening rounds like townsfolk milling about in warm summer twilight. Yet the earth was still frozen underfoot, as befitted the season.’
When reflecting on what she has seen after she returns home, Elísabet Eva reflects: ‘… I lay down in bed… and doubted everything I had seen. Surely no one would credit the word of a person who had fallen asleep in a bush.’ She goes on: ‘I was out in the open air, mixed up with a mysterious and strange realm of which few stories existed – certainly none that I had heard, and I was meant to be better informed than most of my countrymen in fundamental matters of human life in the under- and overworlds and all of the worlds between.’
The Swanfolk are intelligent, and hold a lot of agency. One of them tells Elísabet Eva: ‘It’s a strange thing to be half human and miss the other half, to be half swan and miss the other half… It gives rise to a complicated emotional life. Sometimes we think like humans even while we feel like birds, think like birds but feel like humans – we are jealous of swans, jealous of humans; despise swans, admire humans.’
I found Ómarsdóttir’s prose, and the ideas it conveyed, strange yet compelling, and admired the way in which the author provides a showcase of very unusual perspectives. The second chapter, for instance, opens: ‘During the night a flower grew in my throat, and by midday it had bloomed.’ Elísabet Eva was a most unusual protagonist; she allowed us into her world, and I was compelled to read her story. She is perhaps one of the strangest characters I have read about in quite a while; she has an imaginary sister and an imaginary dog, both of whom she sees everywhere.
Swanfolk is rather dark, in both its tone and subject matter. This imaginative novel really drew me in, and whilst I did not love it, I admired the author’s writing and the power of Thorodds’ translation. Ómarsdóttir blurs the lines between realistic and otherworldly, and there is something really quite magical about this strange novel.
First published in 1941, Country Moods and Tenses is an interesting non-fiction account of grammar and the English language, and how both relate to life within the countryside – that of Olivier’s native Wiltshire, to be exact. Olivier has begun her account by setting out her ‘grammarless education’, which she feels has debarred her ‘from the familiar use of a good many attractive and expressive words’.
Throughout, it is clear that Olivier is passionate about the subject of which she is writing; she speaks of her delight of perusing the dictionary in her introduction, and discusses such grammatical elements as the infinitive and the imperative, all the while relating them to the experiences of her family and neighbours in their small English village. Olivier uses the examples of other writers and experts in certain fields to further reinforce the points which she makes.
In Country Moods and Tenses, Olivier continually demonstrates the differences between town and country living – for example, ‘the store cupboard, so easily filled in London by the benificence of Messrs. Fortnum and Mason. To them it is merely a matter of indifferently turning to another shelf and with equal facility they will hand over the counter Guaya Jelly, Hymettus Honey or Sloe Gin. But in the country, a May frost may put an end to all hopes of strawberry jam for the year, and a wet September can ruin the blackberry harvest’. Of the utmost importance, she believes, is never to take anything for granted. One gets the impression that she would like city folk to adopt the mentality of the countryside, where the communities which she describes are grateful for everything which Mother Nature offers them.
Country Moods and Tenses is both quaint and charming. Olivier presents an interesting and quite original mixture of travelogue and linguistics. The subjects which she writes about range from public work to literary pilgrimages, and are diverse enough to hold something for every reader.
I have read, and rather enjoyed, quite a large chunk of Sarah Hall’s oeuvre to date. When I saw a copy of her debut novel, Haweswater, in my favourite local charity shop for just 50 pence, I had to pick it up. I hadn’t read any reviews of Haweswater before I started to read, and I admit that I was rather intrigued by it. The novel won the Commonwealth Writers First Book Award just after its publication in 2002.
Set in 1936, in the ‘old, northern county of Westmorland’, which has since been absorbed into Cumbria, Haweswater is described as a ‘first novel of love, obsession and the destruction of a community told with grace and artistry.’ In the dale, there arrives a man named Jack Liggett, a ‘spokesman for a vast industrial project to create a new reservoir.’ Based in Manchester, Jack soon begins ‘a troubled and intense’ affair with a local woman, Janet Lightburn. Janet is ‘a woman of force and strength of mind, [and] her natural orthodoxy deeply influences him.’
This is not just a novel about a relationship; rather, it focuses more on the valley itself, and the changes brought upon it. All of the villagers are forced to move away before the reservoir can be completed, with their houses, many of which have been lived in by their families for generations, forecast to be completely underwater.
In the novel’s prologue, Hall sets up the changed landscape: ‘This was a monumental flood, water of epic proportions. It turned through the wooden spokes relentlessly, and as it did so it became like a music that is accidental, deeply beautiful and made only once. Somatic music that fills in space and time. A corrugated harp of orchestral rivers… And even as the man hated this water, he could not help but find it beautiful. It stood for more than itself and it sang of its presence.’
From the first, I was struck by the way Hall has with words; her descriptions are quite unusual, but perfectly capture things. She is particularly skilled at doing so with the emotions of her characters: ‘Then there is the matter of his heart. Inside his old heart a new one was growing and pushing to get out, and inside that one another one, and another, all pushing to get out. So many hearts. And that was how grief worked inside the man. Filling his chest cavity he stooped over with the weight. So much of his life was gone. More than his home and his fields, more than the valley…’.
Haweswater is not the most action-packed novel; however, I personally love reading about small, rural communities. I found Hall’s perspective on this particular village, in the face of a huge amount of change, very interesting indeed. In my opinion, Haweswater is not her best novel, but I did really enjoy the reading experience.
Set during the summer of 1952, Zoe Somerville’s The Night of the Flood focuses on protagonist Verity Frost, who is on the cusp of going to University. Verity, ‘stranded on her family farm on the Norfolk coast’, is utterly beloved by Arthur, her childhood friend, whom she has a strange new desire’ to escape from. Arthur, whom she has known since ‘he was a skinny eight-year-old evacuee, brought home by her mother’, also longs to escape from his similar existence, ‘but only with Verity by his side’. The Night of the Flood centres around something of a love triangle, when ‘charismatic American pilot’ Jack is stationed at an airbase in the local area.
I found Somerville’s scenes to be well evoked, and effective in capturing this particular period in time: ‘Pollen caught in her nose, making her sneeze. It had been a day like this then too, the day her mother died. The same sudden heat and sunlight. The same grass-green and dazzling white sprung up on all sides. The same tang of manure from the fields. Everything erupting, spilling over with life. It had been the wrong kind of day to die.’ Somerville focuses on the landscapes of Norfolk, her home county, very well, and infuses so many of the scenes with its landscapes. For me, this was a real strength of the novel; for instance, the way in which Somerville evokes the flood: ‘Breathing heavily, they looked at the water, ruining the winter-sown crops. She could smell it too – the smarting salt of the sea. Saltwater… glistening in the moonlight, beautiful and destructive.’
The character dynamics are interesting here. During their first meeting, Somerville writes that Arthur finds Jack has ‘a litheness and swagger that spoke of complex confidence’, and feels ‘a shiver of something close to dislike’. I also liked how Somerville explored Verity’s inner world: ‘I have all these separate boxes inside me, she thought. And in all of them are bits of me but I don’t know in which one is the important bit. I don’t know how to choose the right box.’ I did find there was a lot of depth to Verity, but perhaps the same cannot be said about the other protagonists here.
I found The Night of the Flood very readable, and found the omniscient perspective worked well. However, I perhaps would not have remembered a great deal about the minutiae of the story had I not made extensive notes for this review. In terms of the historical novel genre, I would not say the novel is entirely gripping at any point. The historical setting also became a little unmoored at times; it felt as though the characters could have been transported to a different decade without too much trouble on the author’s part.
I first encountered Barbara Pym’s work some years ago now, and became aware that I was quickly reaching the end of her oeuvre. A Few Green Leaves was one of the few outstanding titles I had to read, and late spring felt like just the right time to read the newly reissued Virago edition.
A Few Green Leaves, Pym’s final novel, was published in 1980; this was the year she passed away, as well as thirty years after her first book, Some Tame Gazelle, was released. Although Pym’s early books achieved commercial success, her work remained unpublished between 1963 and 1977; at this point in time, she was ‘rediscovered’, and wrote a ‘comeback novel’, the quietly beautiful Quartet in Autumn.
Our protagonist is Emma Howick, an anthropologist who has just moved to her mother’s cottage, charmingly named Robin Cottage, in the West Oxfordshire countryside. We meet Emma during her first weekend in the village; Pym describes that although ‘she had been planning to observe the inhabitants in the time-honoured manner from behind the shadow of her curtains’, she is unable to resist the lure of the Low Sunday walk an annual occasion where ‘villagers were permitted to walk in the park and woods surrounding the manor.’
As ever, Pym takes rather a deep dive into her characters’ backstories, which largely end up being rather revealing. Emma has never married, ‘or formed any other kind of attachment’. Amusingly, the village rector observes Emma ‘only as a sensible person in her thirties, dark-haired, thin and possibly capable of talking intelligently about local history…’. Pym is an excellent guide, who leads us into the microcosm of village life: the organising of a jumble sale, flower arrangements made especially for church services, and involvement in the local history society, which the rector is keen for ‘meek’ women in their later years to attend. Emma begins to make ‘social studies’ of such events; of a bring-and-buy sale, for instance: ‘No doubt there was plenty of criticism of others’ efforts, even if not openly expressed – who, for example, was the bringer of the not-quite-right marmalade which had been boiled past the setting point and gone syrupy? Whoever it was could have saved face by buying it back herself and in the general bustle this ruse might not be spotted.’
One thing I love about Pym’s writing, alongside her sharp and often funny observations, is summed up perfectly in the Virago blurb, which notes that she is ‘an incomparable chronicler of ordinary, quiet lives’, who writes with ‘warmth, humour, precision and great vividness.’ As ever, Pym was on great form in A Few Green Leaves.
Reading a new-to-me novel by Barbara Pym gives me a feeling akin to settling down with an old friend I haven’t spoken to for a while. A Few Green Leaves is an excellent, character-driven novel, as all of Pym’s works have proven to be. Pym portrays such multidimensional relationships between her characters, which are continually shifting. I, for one, thoroughly enjoy her writing and approach, and I’m very much looking forward to seeking out the remaining couple of books from her back catalogue which I have not read yet; perhaps I will do so sooner rather than later.
As the majority of readers could safely say, I am sure, I have some very niche reading interests at times. Personally, I love reading about walking (and walking itself, of course!), and have been waiting to delve into Kerri Andrews’ Wanderers: A History of Women Walking since its publication in 2020. Wanderers has been introduced by Kathleen Jamie, a writer whose work I find both striking and beautiful. I do wish Jamie’s writing here was not so brief; her foreword covers just one and a half pages.
In Wanderers, Andrews has taken ten women as her focus, all of whom have lived within the last 300 years, and who have all ‘found walking essential to their sense of themselves, as people and as writers.’ The blurb declares that Wanderers ‘guides us through the different ways of seeing – of being’. Author Rachel Hewitt wrote in her review of this book: ‘Andrews unearths the forgotten women who have walked for creativity, for independence and self-discovery, to remember, to forget, to escape violence, to aid physical and emotional strength.’
The ten women featured here are Elizabeth Carter, Dorothy Wordsworth, Ellen Weeton, Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt, Harriet Martineau, Virginia Woolf, Nan Shepherd, Anaïs Nin, Cheryl Strayed, and Linda Cracknell. I appreciate the approach that Andrews has taken, in selecting some women who are already well-known for their perambulations (Wordsworth, Woolf, Shepherd, Nin, and Strayed), alongside those I knew nothing, or very little about (Carter, Weeton, and Stoddart Hazlitt in particular).
In her initial chapter, ‘Setting Off’, Andrews writes about bagging her hundredth munro, a mountain located in Scotland which stands at more than 3,000 feet. Andrews also sets out that women walking is rather a neglected topic in literature, before going on to introduce those she has selected for Wanderers. Elizabeth Carter, for instance, ‘began a lifetime of roaming as a young girl in the 1720s’; Andrews intriguingly describes her as ‘fearless and bold, and an aspiring vagrant.’
Andrews notes: ‘The meaning of walking has also changed for women writers over time, and has played different roles for women from different backgrounds… For all this richness, though, there has tended to be little discussion of women’s walking as a cultural or historical phenomenon, and less of how women’s experiences as human beings might have shaped their walking and writing, or how their walking or writing might have shaped their experiences as human beings.’
I like that a theme of Wanderers is not just walking for exercise, or to escape, but as recovery. Harriet Martineau, for example, was bedbound for 5 years ‘by a mysterious condition that left her fearing for her life. Cured by mesmerism, she measured the return of her health by the increasing number of miles she was able to cover… A move to the Lake District followed, and with it an earnest desire to become, like Dorothy Wordsworth and her brother William, entwined with the complex social, geographical and literary histories of the area.’
Wanderers is filled with such charming and enlightening details; of Elizabeth Carter, Andrews says: ‘Carter relished solitude, but also enjoyed the company of other women on her walks, when it could be had. This was a rare treat, however, as few of Carter’s friends lived nearby or came to visit her in Deal. More frequently, Carter walked imaginatively with her friends, either taking their literary works with her, or holding their conversation in her thoughts. Thus Carter rarely went walking without a woman by her side, either in physical, spirit or bibliographic form.’ Ellen Weeton, a governess, chose to largely walk alone; she consistently ‘selects the more difficult route, preferring challenge and scenery to safety.’
Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt undertook walking tours, solo, through Scotland, during a tumultuous period in her life in the 1820s. Indeed, for the earlier women focused on in Wanderers, there were rarely well-trodden tourist paths, as there are today; rather, they struck out by themselves.
To me, Wanderers sounded like the perfect book to settle down with on a hot summer Sunday, after I had finished my own morning constitutional. It absolutely met my expectations in this regard. Andrews herself is a ‘keen hill walker and member of Mountaineering Scotland’, and her passion for the subject shone through at intervals. I really appreciate that throughout, the curator of these wonderful women quoted so much from their own work. All ten of those chosen are inspiring, and a lot of them challenged conventions in myriad ways.
Wanderers is an excellent read, which I found engaging from the outset. I really enjoyed the chronological approach, which allowed some overlap between participants; I felt that such a structure worked really well here. Andrews weaving in her own walking experiences at the end of each chapter adds even more value, and ties the whole of Wanderers together marvellously. The entire book is really thoughtful, and well put together; it is definitely a great read for anyone remotely adventurous.
This is my first Book Trail in such a long time; I feel a little rusty, if I’m honest! As ever, I have used a recent read as a jumping off point on Goodreads, and the ‘Readers Also Enjoyed’ function has helped me to generate this list. Have you read any of these titles?
1. The Scent of Flowers at Nightby Leila Slimani
‘Night is the land of reinvention, whispered prayers, erotic passions. Night is the place where utopias have the scent of the possible, where we no longer feel constrained by petty reality. Night is the country of dreams where we discover that, in the secrecy of our heart, we are host to a multitude of voices and an infinity of worlds…’
Over one night, alone in the Punta della Dogana Museum in Venice, Leila Slimani grapples with the self as it is revealed in solitude. In a place of old and new, she confronts her past and her present, through her life as a Moroccan woman, as a writer, and as a daughter. Surrounded by art, she explores what it means to behold and clasp beauty; enveloped by night, she confronts the meaning of life and death.
2. Happening by Annie Ernaux
In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: Understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep that child.
This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ends up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly dies.
In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days. Clearly, cleanly, she gleans the meanings of her experience.
3. Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel
For readers of Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti, Still Born is a profound novel about motherhood, creativity, and the power of friendship and community to make caretaking easier from “one of the leading lights in contemporary Latin American literature” (Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive).
Alina and Laura are independent and career-driven women in their mid-thirties, neither of whom have built their future around the prospect of a family. Laura is so determined not to become a mother that she has taken the drastic decision to have her tubes tied. But when she announces this to her friend, she learns that Alina has made the opposite decision and is preparing to have a child of her own.
Alina’s pregnancy shakes the women’s lives, first creating distance and then a remarkable closeness between them. When Alina’s daughter survives childbirth – after a diagnosis that predicted the opposite – and Laura becomes attached to her neighbor’s son, both women are forced to reckon with the complexity of their emotions, their needs, and the needs of the people who are dependent upon them.
In prose that is as gripping as it is insightful, Guadalupe Nettel explores maternal ambivalence with a surgeon’s touch, carefully dissecting the contradictions that make up the lived experiences of women.
4. The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier
A painter contends with the ghosts of the French countryside in a psychological literary thriller by a major French writer.
Buried deep in rural France, little remains of the isolated hamlet of the Three Lone Girls, save a few houses and a curiously assembled quartet: Patrice Bergogne, inheritor of his family’s farm; his wife, Marion; their daughter, Ida; and their neighbor, Christine, an artist. While Patrice plans a surprise for his wife’s fortieth birthday, inexplicable events start to disrupt the hamlet’s quiet existence: anonymous, menacing letters, an unfamiliar car rolling up the driveway. And as night falls, strangers stalk the houses, unleashing a nightmarish chain of events.
Told in rhythmic, propulsive prose that weaves seamlessly from one consciousness to the next over the course of a day, Laurent Mauvignier’s The Birthday Party is a deft unraveling of the stories we hide from others and from ourselves, a gripping tale of the violent irruptions of the past into the present, written by a major contemporary French writer.
5. Western Lane by Chetna Maroo
A taut, enthralling first novel about grief, sisterhood, and a young athlete’s struggle to transcend herself.
Eleven-year-old Gopi has been playing squash since she was old enough to hold a racket. When her mother dies, her father enlists her in a quietly brutal training regimen, and the game becomes her world. Slowly, she grows apart from her sisters. Her life is reduced to the sport, guided by its the serve, the volley, the drive, the shot and its echo.
But on the court, she is not alone. She is with her pa. She is with Ged, a thirteen-year-old boy with his own formidable talent. She is with the players who have come before her. She is in awe.
An indelible coming-of-age story, Chetna Maroo’s first novel captures the ordinary and annihilates it with beauty. Western Lane is a valentine to innocence, to the closeness of sisterhood, to the strange ways we come to know ourselves and each other.
6. Pearl by Sian Hughes
Marianne is eight years old when her mother goes missing. Left behind with her baby brother and grieving father in a ramshackle house on the edge of a small village, she clings to the fragmented memories of her mother’ s love; the smell of fresh herbs, the games they played, and the songs and stories of her childhood. As time passes, Marianne struggles to adjust, fixated on her mother’ s disappearance and the secrets she’ s sure her father is keeping from her. Discovering a medieval poem called Pearl and trusting in its promise of consolation, Marianne sets out to make a visual illustration of it, a task that she returns to over and over but somehow never manages to complete. Tormented by an unmarked gravestone in an abandoned chapel and the tidal pull of the river, her childhood home begins to crumble as the past leads her down a path of self-destruction. But can art heal Marianne? And will her own future as a mother help her find peace?
7. Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein
For readers of Shirley Jackson, Iain Reid, and Claire-Louise Bennett, a haunting, compressed masterwork from an extraordinary new voice in Canadian fiction.
A young woman moves from the place of her birth to the remote northern country of her forebears to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has recently left him.
Soon after her arrival, a series of inexplicable events occurs – collective bovine hysteria; the demise of a ewe and her nearly born lamb; a local dog’s phantom pregnancy; a potato blight. She notices that the local suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed with some intensity at her and she senses a mounting threat that lies ‘just beyond the garden gate.’ And as she feels the hostility growing, pressing at the edges of her brother’s property, she fears that, should the rumblings in the town gather themselves into a more defined shape, who knows what might happen, what one might be capable of doing.
With a sharp, lyrical voice, Sarah Bernstein powerfully explores questions of complicity and power, displacement and inheritance. Study for Obedience is a finely tuned, unsettling novel that confirms Bernstein as one of the most exciting voices of her generation.
8. All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow
Sunday lives with her sixteen year old daughter Dolly, the same house she has lived in all her life. She does things differently from other people, but mostly it works. On her “quiet days” she must eat only white foods. For social situations, she has her etiquette hand book, and for solace her beloved treasury of Sicilian folklore. But the one thing very much out of her control is Dolly – beautiful, headstrong Dolly who is on the cusp of leaving home.
Into this carefully ordered life step Vita and Rollo, a glamorous London couple who move in next door, disarm Sunday with their wit and charm, and proceed to deliciously break just about every rule in her etiquette manual. Soon the two families are in and out of each others houses, and Sunday feels loved and accepted like never before. But beneath Vita and Rollo’s charm and wealth there is something else, something darker. And Sunday has something that Vita has always wanted for herself, a beautiful, clever daughter of her own.
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