‘The Train Was on Time’ by Heinrich Böll ****

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. 

‘No Place to Lay One’s Head’ by Françoise Frenkel ****

No Place to Lay One’s Head is an incredibly important piece of social history. Françoise Frenkel, a Jewish woman, was forced to flee from Berlin, where she had opened the city’s first French bookshop in 1921, during the Second World War.

Originally planning to open a French bookshop in Poland, she found the market so saturated that she went to Berlin instead. Frenkel’s bookshop attracted ‘artists and diplomats, celebrities and poets’, and brought her ‘peace, friendship and prosperity’. Of her customers, Frenkel notes: ‘Over time I grew to know my bookish clientele. I would try to fathom their desires, understand their tastes, their beliefs and their leanings, try to guess at the reasons behind their admiration of, their enthusiasm for, their delight or displease with a work.’

Despite booming business, and a slew of regular customers, Frenkel’s dream was crushed following Kristallnacht. After nobody stood up for her, and she felt her position becoming more and more precarious, Frenkel was advised by the French consulate to make the move to France just a few weeks before the start of World War Two. On the eve of her departure, she tells us: ‘That night, I understood how I had been able to withstand the oppressive atmosphere of those last years in Berlin… I loved my bookstore the way a woman loves, that is to say, truly.’

When Paris, the city in which she has made her home, is bombed, Frenkel has to flee once again, first to Avignon, and then to Nice. Of the Nazi Occupation, she describes: ‘What an image, the birth of this monstrous and ever-growing human termite colony spreading swiftly through the country with a sinister grinding of metal; a colony with the potential for incalculable collective strength.’ Horrified by the scenes she sees, she goes into hiding, and ‘survives only because strangers risk their lives to protect her.’

The detail which Frenkel includes about the myriad ways in which life is changed is both important, and appreciated by this reader. When she is residing in Nice, she comments on the difficulties which she faces every single day, often to do the simplest things, like buy food: ‘The background to this existence was the waiting, a canvas upon which ever more meagre hopes and ever gloomier thoughts together embroidered their nostalgic motifs.’

I warmed to Frenkel immediately, finding her at once dreamy and pragmatic. On the very first page of No Place to Lay One’s Head, for example, she describes the following: ‘For my sixteenth birthday, my parents allowed me to order my own bookcase. To the astonishment of the joiner, I designed and had built a cabinet with glass on all four sides. I positioned this piece of furniture, conjured from my dreams, in the middle of my bedroom.’ Of the books which took pride of place here, she writes: ‘Balzac came dressed in red leather, Sienkiewicz in yellow morocco, Tolstoy in parchment, Reymont’s Paysants clad in the fabric of an old peasant’s neckerchief.’

No Place to Lay One’s Head is a remarkable book. We sadly know very little about Frenkel herself, aside from basic biographical details, such as that the memoir was written ‘on the shores of Lake Lucerne’ between 1943 and 1944. However, I found myself utterly fascinated by her; by her choices, and her words. Her memoir, which was originally published in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1945, was rediscovered in an Emmaus Companions charity jumble sale in 2010, and was republished in its original French. The memoir is now being translated and into numerous languages for the first time. Stephanie Smee’s English translation is fantastic; nuanced and incredibly readable. I read every sentence with a deep, consuming interest. There is a real immediacy to what Frenkel relays, an urgency.

Novelist Patrick Modiano, who penned the preface, comments that from his own research, Frenkel ran her bookshop with her husband, Simon Ratchenstein, ‘about whom she says not a word in her book’. Indeed, I got the impression throughout that Frenkel was an incredibly independent woman, almost astonishingly so for the time in which she was living. Modiano goes on: ‘What makes No Place to Lay One’s Head unique is that we cannot precisely identify its author. This eyewitness account of the life of a woman hunted through the south of France and Haute-Savoie during the Occupation is all the more striking in that it reads like the testimony of an anonymous woman, much as A Woman in Berlin… was thought to be for a long time.’

Of course, No Place to Lay One’s Head is heartbreaking and harrowing. However, Frenkel is sure to include comic moments from time to time. Her writing is so controlled, and she was always aware of which tone to strike. The thought of her family, many of whom she receives no news about throughout her narrative, keeps her going, and stops her from giving up.

By far the biggest emotion Frenkel shares is gratitude toward all of those who helped her. Even in instances where she is betrayed, she displays very little anger or resentment. I will close my review with the rather moving dedication she added to her absorbing memoir: ‘I dedicate this book to the MEN AND WOMEN OF GOODWILL who, generously, with unfailing courage, opposed the will to violence and resisted to the end.’

‘Send for Me’ by Lauren Fox ****

I hadn’t heard of Lauren Fox’s novel, Send for Me, before spotting it whilst browsing in my local library, and finding that it sounded like just my kind of book. Described as ‘an achingly beautiful work of historical fiction that moves between Germany on the eve of World War II and present-day Wisconsin’, Fox’s fourth novel uses two intertwined storylines, a technique which I love in fiction.

In 1930s Germany, we meet Annelise, who works in the small town of Feldenheim at her parents’ bakery: ‘On her mother’s strict orders, she’ll put on her cheeriest face for the customers… This is her job, although of course she doesn’t get paid. It’s the family business, so it’s her duty, her burden, and, she has no reason to doubt, her inheritance.’ She and her family ‘can’t quite believe’ that they will be affected by the anti-Jewish sentiment which is gaining traction in the country.

Annelise is focused only on forging a life for herself. Early in the novel she gets married to Walter, and has a daughter, Ruthie. However, by this point, everything in Germany has changed for the worse. When she and her husband are given the chance to board a ship travelling to America, they are uncertain at first, as her parents, who cannot get a visa, will have to be left behind.

The narrative then shifts to the present day in a ‘small Midwestern city’, where Annelise’s granddaughter, Clare, is living. As is quite a common trope in historical fiction, Clare uncovers a cache of letters sent to Annelise from her mother throughout the war. Clare is able to understand the ‘history of her family’s sacrifices in a new light, and suddenly she’s faced with an impossible choice: the past, or her future…’.

The novel opens with the sound of sharp knocking on Annelise’s door: ‘Is there something else in the churning flood of terror? In the squeeze of panic, the slightest slackening, relief? She’s been waiting so long for this moment, dread her constant companion, and now it’s here. Whatever horror is about to befall her, she won’t have to fear it any longer.’ Later, when the Nazi laws tighten for Jewish citizens, Fox describes the following: ‘The municipal parks she is no longer allowed to enjoy. The restaurants at which she may no longer dine. The swimming pools where, should she desire a cool dip, she may not swim. She exists – they all do – in this liminal state of bitter confusion, in the warped moment of watching a water glass slip out of a hand, staring at the winking shards that had been, seconds ago, solid, the memory of the drinking glass more real, more true, than its fragments.’ She goes on: ‘Everyday terror, making itself as comfortable as a houseguest. The neighbours who won’t speak to her, won’t even look at her – and the one who does look at her, who glares at her as if he wants her dead, his lip curled in a sneer, the one with the strange child. Customers shunning the bakery, the business barely afloat. Whispers of arrests, homes ransacked. Police on the street, ugly graffiti, stores that will not allow her through the door. This breathless fog of hate.’

Fox is very attuned to the emotions and feelings of her characters. This is more a character-driven novel than a plot-driven one, I would say; although set against the backdrop of war and emigration, much of the narrative is taken up with relationships, and how they shift over time. I felt as though I got to know each of the characters quite early on in the narrative. Fox pays a lot of attention to detail, particularly with regard to small shifts in mood.

The prose is interspersed with short, sometimes incomplete, fragments of letters. I learnt in Fox’s afterword that these were written by her own great-grandmother, and sent when her grandmother emigrated to the United States. This was rather a moving touch, which reminded me of the reality of this experience for thousands of families at this time.

I very much enjoyed Fox’s writing style in Send for Me, and will definitely be on the lookout for more of her work in future. The dual storyline was well handled, and I feel they meshed together very well indeed. I appreciated the expressive writing, and really enjoyed the way in which the story slips back and forth in time.

‘When the Emperor Was Divine’ by Julie Otsuka ****

I picked up a lovely hardback edition of Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine in a charming little secondhand bookshop at the National Trust’s Cliveden Estate in Buckinghamshire. After reading Otsuka’s most recent novel, The Swimmers, I was keen to read the rest of her small oeuvre. I picked up this, her debut, with delight, and began it just days later.

First published in 2002, When the Emperor Was Divine begins in 1942 in Berkeley, California. At the outset of this slim novel, a Japanese-American woman learns from posters plastered all over the city that she and her family have been ‘reclassified, virtually overnight, as enemy aliens’, and face expulsion to the Utah desert. The novel opens: ‘The sign had appeared overnight. On billboards and trees and the backs of the bus-stop benches. It hung in the window of Woolworth’s. It hung by the entrance to the YMCA. It was stapled to the door of the municipal court and nailed, at eye level, to every telephone pole along University Avenue.’

Otsuka uses five different perspectives to tell her story, and has based the happenings on real events. All of these narrative voices are part of the same family, and include the daughter’s experience of the long train ride to the camp, to the family’s return to their Californian home. The first chapter follows the unnamed mother, as she spends all of her time packing up their lives: ‘Tomorrow she and the children would be leaving. She did not know where they were going or how long they would be gone or who would be living in their house while they were away. She knew only that tomorrow they had to go.’ At this point in time, Otsuka notes: ‘It was late April. It was the fourth week of the fifth month of the war and the women, who did not always follow the rules, followed the rules.’

Her husband has already been taken away, arrested some months previously, and taken to Texas: ‘Every few days he was allowed to write her a letter. Usually he told her about the weather.’ We learn a great deal about the father before he takes centre stage in the narrative: ‘He was extremely polite. Whenever he walked into a room he closed the door behind him softly. He was always on time. He wore beautiful suits and did not yell at waiters. He loved pistachio nuts. He believed that fruit juice was the ideal drink. He liked to doodle. He was especially fond of drawing a box and then making it into three dimensions.’ His presence loops in and out of the narrative, and is often the central thought of his son, particularly.

I have studied the Second World War extensively over the years, but my knowledge about the expulsion of Japanese-American citizens living in the USA is relatively poor. I went into When the Emperor Was Divine in the hope that it would both educate me, and immerse me within a compelling story. I can confirm that it absolutely did both of these things.

Otsuka’s writing is incredibly precise, and she captures so much in just one or two sentences. I really appreciated the amount of detail included, and the sharply observed scenes. Otsuka is highly skilled with regard to managing the time period, and assessing its impact on the central family: ‘Far away, on the other side of the ocean, there was fighting, and at night the boy lay awake on his straw mattress and listened to the bulletins on the radio. Sometimes, in the darkness, he heard noises drifting from other rooms. The heavy thud of footsteps. The shuffling of cards.’ Later, she writes: ‘Mostly, though, they waited. For the mail. For the news. For the bells. For breakfast and lunch and dinner. For one day to be over and the next day to begin.’

As displayed above, there is an incredible poignancy here. Another example is taken from the third chapter, which begins: ‘In the beginning the boy thought he saw his father everywhere. Underneath the showers. Leaning against barrack doorways. Playing go with the other men in their floppy straw hats on the narrow wooden benches after lunch. Above them blue skies. The hot midday sun. No trees. No shade. Birds.’

What made When the Emperor Was Divine even more compelling to me was a simple narrative device; all of the central characters remain unnamed throughout. As well as the story of just a few individuals, Otsuka encapsulates an experience which affected an entire community of people. There are moments of profound sadness scattered throughout this slim novel, and there is also exquisite beauty. When the Emperor Was Divine is an evocative blend of fiction and reality, well executed and skilfully written.

Three Historical Fiction Picks

Historical fiction is one of my favourite genres to read, but I have discovered that I don’t often get around to reviewing books which fall into this category. Here, I have brought together three mini reviews of novels which I have read and very much enjoyed, and which I would urge those who like to read historical fiction to pick up. They provide wonderful escapism, which I have found very comforting during these couple of strange years.

The Glass Woman by Caroline Lea

I have had a galley copy of Caroline Lea’s debut novel, The Glass Woman, on my Kindle for quite some time, but for some reason did not get around to reading it very quickly. Set in Iceland during the 1680s, the novel follows a young married woman, Rósa, and her husband, Jón. Rósa has moved far from her home to an isolated croft, where she is left alone much of the day, and is urged not to speak to the locals. Lea captures her loneliness with care and understanding, and uses the third person perspective to examine her protagonist. One of the real strengths of the novel is the unsettling feel which it has; this builds as the story progresses. The reader is aware that something is not quite right, and that something sinister might be lurking in the croft’s attic space, which Rósa is banned from exploring.

Wonderfully descriptive, The Glass Woman captures space and place very well. She writes about the unforgiving landscape in which Rósa finds herself, and the sadness which she feels at being pulled away from her sick mother. A few other reviews which I have read have commented that The Glass Woman is not particularly well situated, and that its action could quite easily be moved to another location – and even perhaps another time period entirely. I do not agree. Lea mentions specific Icelandic sagas throughout, and also sprinkles a few Icelandic words throughout the narrative, which contribute to embedding the story in one place and time. I feel that this has been rather well done, personally.

Jón’s first person perspective is introduced quite far into the novel, something which I was not expecting to happen. Whilst, as other reviewers have noted, I can see why Lea chose to do this, I would have preferred the novel to use the third person narrative voice throughout. Regardless, my interest in the story did not wane, and I was pulled into Rósa’s world; Lea describes this as ‘a blizzard-blurred huddle of white drifts and blank hillocks, made of nothing more than ice and air. Everything has reduced to an arm’s length away, as if life beyond the croft no longer exists.’ Some of the tropes used within The Glass Woman are arguably a little obvious, but overall, it is a very effective novel, which has been well plotted, and moves along nicely.

We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter

I have heard so much buzz around Georgia Hunter’s novel, We Were the Lucky Ones. It is set largely during the Second World War, and encompasses one family who are fractured by the Holocaust. The novel opens in 1939, in Poland, where several generations of the Kurc family are trying their hardest to continue with their normal lives. However, like so many millions of Jews all across Europe, they are forced to try and survive in a terrifying new world, in which they are marginalised and persecuted.

Hunter’s novel is sweeping; it moves across five continents, and spans a period of eight years. The novel is based upon true events; the author’s own family, she discovered in her teenage years, were Holocaust survivors. Whilst some names have been changed here, a lot of the details echo reality, and the novel is the result of incredibly extensive research. The author is clearly attuned to the world of which she writes, and the numerous events which affect every single family member. Her characters become almost helpless, as they begin to lose control over every aspect of their lives.

From the outset, I very much admired Hunter’s approach, wherein she follows different members of the family as they move away from their home. A lot of what they have to face – the sacrifices which they are forced to make, and the acts of bravery which they choose to – is difficult to read, but it is obviously also incredibly important to remember. Hunter has interspersed her family’s story with brief factual details explaining the political situation at each particular point in history. The present tense which she uses throughout infuses We Were the Lucky Ones with a real sense of urgency, and the different threads of story have been wonderfully tied together.

The Last Camellia by Sarah Jio

Sarah Jio is an author whom I have become really interested in reading of late. Every single one of her works of historical fiction appealed to me, and I ended up selecting The Last Camellia to begin with merely because my local library had a copy which I was able to reserve. I also love stories about botanists during the wars – rather niche, I know.

I very much enjoy novels with dual timelines, something which The Last Camellia uses to its advantage. Jio has crafted a clever familial saga which stretches across two timelines – the 1940s and the 2000s. The 1940s story, in which a young woman named Flora Lewis travels from New York to a small English village to take over as the nanny for the Livingston family – under false pretences – was my favourite, as I felt that the historical context had been really well thought out. There is also the trope of a mildly unsettling housekeeper, who is somehow still working at the house in 2000. In this more modern timeline, we meet Addison, whose husband’s family has just purchased the manor. She works as a landscaper, and this ties in nicely with the mystery of the rarest camellia in England, the Middlebury Pink, one of which is thought to be still living somewhere around the grounds of Livingston Manor.

I loved the element of mystery which has been woven in here, and it certainly kept me guessing throughout. The different threads of story were well handled, and whilst I felt that some of the denouements were a little far-fetched, I still very much enjoyed this absorbing reading experience, and the transporting stories within it. Jio’s prose is really quite nice; it did not make me swoon at all, as some historical fiction does, but it is undoubtedly vivid. I reserved another of Jio’s books from my local library before I had even finished The Last Camellia, and am hoping that she could fast become a new go-to historical fiction author for me.

‘Love Lessons’ by Joan Wyndham ****

I had had my eye on Joan Wyndham’s Love Lessons: A Wartime Diary for quite some time, and borrowed a gloriously musty second edition copy from my local library. First published in 1985, at the urging of Wyndham’s daughter, these diaries, which span the first two years of the Second World War, begin in August 1939. At this point, she is a student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in the capital, but it closes down just as war is declared. Along with its sequel, Love Is Blue, Love Lessons recounts Wyndham’s life during wartime.

At the outset of war, sixteen-year-old Wyndham lives with her mother and ‘her religious companion, the enigmatic Sid’. Her parents divorced when she was very young, and her father is a bristling, sometimes absent figure, in her life. Wyndham is described in the blurb as a ‘teenage Catholic virgin… [who] spent her days trying to remain pure and unsullied and her nights trying to stay alive.’ One critic rather memorably called its young author ‘a latterday Pepys in camiknickers’.

Wyndham is open in that she falls for people incredibly quickly. When she visits her local first-aid post for the war effort, she makes a friend, and comments on the 4th of September 1939: ‘At the moment, Laura and I are enjoying a gentle lesbianism of the mind, but I’m afraid it won’t last and soon I shall be in love with her properly.’ There are similar situations with various men, some of whom treat her very badly; many of them seem intent only upon taking her virginity.

Wyndham can be quite fickle, in the tradition of adolescents; she shifts admiration and adoration from one individual to another, and is often momentarily heartbroken between. She does impart wise comments upon her condition and position at times, though, and seems very aware of her own self. In April 1940, she writes: ‘What an extraordinary thing this love is that comes and goes, making a completely different person of you while it lasts… You have to be terribly careful when you are young.’

Nothing about this journal is typical, particularly given the time in which it was written, and I feel as though this account would probably shock a lot of her contemporaries in its frankness. From the very first, Love Lessons is wonderfully evocative, rather amusing, and quite risqué. In the first entry, for instance, Wyndham remarks: ‘Granny is a bit of a bore, always chasing me to wash my hands and wear a dress – but luckily she’s in bed a lot of the time, wearing a chin-strap and a little circle of tin pressed into the middle of her forehead to keep the wrinkles at bay – it’s hard work being an ageing beauty.’ She has a lot of affection for her Aunt Bunch, of whom she comments: ‘Mummy says she takes drugs and goes around with Negroes, but I don’t care.’

I found Wyndham’s entries immediately compelling, and her tone refreshing and quite modern. I was not expecting the explicit sexual content which crops up here from time to time, but it feels authentic to show just what a modern woman Wyndham was, and the shifting world in which she became an adult. She offers comments on everyone, and everything. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything so frank from this period, and it certainly opened my eyes a little. As a teenager, she ‘strayed into London’s Bohemian set’, meeting rather eccentric characters at every turn. One of her friends from drama school has a ‘sugar daddy’, and becomes ‘the first of my friends to go over the edge’ by losing her virginity. Another friend, Prudey, ‘married a Greek don who seduced her in every field in Cambridge. He used to make noises like a wolf and got very enraged if she wouldn’t bleat. When she was unfaithful to him he was so amazed he had her put into a lunatic asylum, but she ran away to Greece and got herself three lovers.’

She and her friends discuss taboo subjects with regularity, and she seems to recount each of these episodes. In May 1940, she writes, for instance, of a married male acquaintance, Leonard: ‘I think he would have kissed me, but I gracefully freed myself and ran down the steps, because it’s rather embarrassing to kiss a man smaller than yourself standing up. I think I’m becoming the most awful bitch.’

Of the war, which is of course all around her, Wyndham writes of her confusion in May 1940: ‘I don’t seem to be able to react or to feel anything. I don’t know what’s real any more. I don’t think I’m real or that this life is real. Before this last winter everything seemed real, but since then I seem to have been dreaming.’ When the air raids in London become too much, her mother has her ‘evacuated’ to the Kent town of Tunbridge Wells, to stay with her aunt. Although Wyndham is only here for a couple of weeks in the end, when she is first sent away, she recounts her discontent: ‘This morning was zero hour – the place, the country, seemed unbearably remote, cut off from the warm stream of life.’

I had only read the first two weeks of entries in this book before requesting Love is Blue from the library. Throughout Love Lessons, Wyndham gives important commentary about being a young woman in the context of wartime London, whilst being really very funny about it. There are some serious moments here, of course, but her sense of humour really shines through. Wyndham is warm and witty, charming and candid, and readers are sure to have so much fun with her highly readable accounts of wartime life.

Five Great Memoirs

I have always delighted in learning about the lives of others, and have tried to incorporate as many memoirs into my reading as is possible.  I enjoy reading about individuals, particularly women, whose lives are very different to my own, and always find this a highly enriching experience.  With this in mind, I have gathered together five wonderful memoirs of women which I have read of late, and which I would highly recommend.  There are illness narratives, translated books, works set during wartime, and quiet meditations in the list, and I dearly hope that you find something new to pick up.

1. The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying by Nina Riggs *****
‘An exquisite memoir about how to live–and love–every day with “death in the room,” from poet Nina Riggs, mother of two young sons and the direct descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the tradition of When Breath Becomes Air.  Nina Riggs was just thirty-seven years old when initially diagnosed with breast cancer–one small spot. Within a year, the mother of two sons, ages seven and nine, and married sixteen years to her best friend, received the devastating news that her cancer was terminal.  How does one live each day, “unattached to outcome”? How does one approach the moments, big and small, with both love and honesty?  Exploring motherhood, marriage, friendship, and memory, even as she wrestles with the legacy of her great-great-great grandfather, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nina Riggs’s breathtaking memoir continues the urgent conversation that Paul Kalanithi began in his gorgeous When Breath Becomes Air. She asks, what makes a meaningful life when one has limited time?  Brilliantly written, disarmingly funny, and deeply moving, The Bright Hour is about how to love all the days, even the bad ones, and it’s about the way literature, especially Emerson, and Nina’s other muse, Montaigne, can be a balm and a form of prayer. It’s a book about looking death squarely in the face and saying “this is what will be.”  Especially poignant in these uncertain times, The Bright Hour urges us to live well and not lose sight of what makes us human: love, art, music, words.‘

2. When a Toy Dog Became a Wolf and the Moon Broke Curfew by Hendrika de Vries ****
‘Born in the Netherlands at a time when girls are to be housewives and mothers and nothing else, Hendrika de Vries is a “daddy’s girl” until her father is deported from Nazi-occupied Amsterdam to a POW camp in Germany and her mother joins the Resistance. In the aftermath of her father’s departure, Hendrika watches as freedoms formerly taken for granted are eroded with escalating brutality by men with swastika armbands who aim to exterminate those they deem “inferior” and those who do not obey.  As time goes on, Hendrika absorbs her mother’s strength and faith, and learns about moral choice and forced silence. She sees her hidden Jewish “stepsister” betrayed, and her mother interrogated at gunpoint. She and her mother suffer near starvation, and they narrowly escape death on the day of liberation. But they survive it all—and through these harrowing experiences, Hendrika discovers the woman she wants to become.‘

3. The Book Collectors: A Band of Syrian Rebels and the Stories That Carried Them Through a War by Delphine Minoui ****
‘Award-winning journalist Delphine Minoui recounts the true story of a band of young rebels in a besieged Syrian town, who find hope and connection making an underground library from the rubble of war.  Day in, day out, bombs fall on Daraya, a town outside Damascus, the very spot where the Syrian Civil War began. In the midst of chaos and bloodshed, a group searching for survivors stumbles on a cache of books. They collect the books, then look for more. In a week they have six thousand volumes. In a month, fifteen thousand. A sanctuary is born: a library where the people of Daraya can explore beyond the blockade.  Long a site of peaceful resistance to the Assad regimes, Daraya was under siege for four years. No one entered or left, and international aid was blocked.  In 2015, French-Iranian journalist Delphine Minoui saw a post on Facebook about this secret library and tracked down one of its founders, twenty-three-year-old Ahmad, an aspiring photojournalist himself. Over WhatsApp and Facebook, Minoui learned about the young men who gathered in the library, exchanged ideas, learned English, and imagined how to shape the future, even as bombs fell above. They devoured a marvelous range of books–from American self-help like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People to international bestsellers like The Alchemist, from Arabic poetry by Mahmoud Darwish to Shakespearean plays to stories of war in other times and places, such as the siege of Sarajevo. They also shared photos and stories of their lives before and during the war, planned how to build a democracy, and began to sustain a community in shell-shocked soil.  As these everyday heroes struggle to hold their ground, they become as much an inspiration as the books they read. And in the course of telling their stories, Delphine Minoui makes this far-off, complicated war immediate. In the vein of classic tales of the triumph of the human spirit–like All the Beautiful Forevers, A Long Way Gone, and Reading Lolita in Tehran—The Book Collectors will inspire readers and encourage them to imagine the wider world.‘

4. These Silent Mansions: A Life in Graveyards by Jean Sprackland ****
‘Graveyards are oases: places of escape, of peace and reflection. Each is a garden or nature reserve, but also a site of commemoration, where the past is close enough to touch: a liminal place, at the border of the living world.  Jean Sprackland’s prize-winning book, Strands, brought to life the histories of objects found on a beach. These Silent Mansions is also an uncovering of individual stories: vivid, touching and intimately told. Sprackland travels back through her own life, revisiting graveyards in the ordinary towns and cities she has called home, seeking out others who lived, died and are remembered or forgotten there. With her poet’s eye, she makes chance discoveries among the stones and inscriptions: a notorious smuggler tucked up in a sleepy churchyard; ancient coins unearthed on a secret burial ground; a slow-worm basking in the sun.  These Silent Mansions is an elegant, exhilarating meditation on the relationship between the living and the dead, the nature of time and loss, and how – in this restless, accelerated world – we can connect the here with the elsewhere, the present with the past.‘

5. Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul by Taran N. Khan ****
‘For most Indians, Kabul is a city that is near, yet far-familiar, yet unknown. When Taran N. Khan arrived in Kabul in the spring of 2006, five years after the overthrow of the Taliban regime, she was earnestly cautioned never to walk. Her instincts compelled her to do the opposite: to take that precarious first step and enter the life of the city with the unique, tactile intimacy that comes from being a walker. She didn’t stop until 2013, when she returned to India.  In Shadow City, Taran N. Khan paints a lyrical, personal, and meditative portrait of a city we know primarily in terms of conflict and peace. As a Muslim woman raised in a small town in India, Taran discovered that she had access to parts of Kabul uncharted by travellers before her. The result reads like an elegiac prose map of the city, rich with surprises-from the glitter of wedding halls that shine like a bizarre version of Las Vegas; to the mental health hospital where women are abandoned and isolated but exist in a rare space of freedom and solitude; to the bookseller behind The Bookseller of Kabul, who sued Åsne Seierstad for her portrayal of him and then published the rebuttal which he displays proudly in his shop window.‘

‘The Choice’ by Edith Eger ****

I have wanted to read Edith Eger’s Holocaust memoir, The Choice, since it was first published in 2017, and picked up a cheap secondhand copy in a local branch of Oxfam before Christmas.  Eger’s memoir has been so highly reviewed, with many pointing to the courage which she showed even at her bleakest moments.  The New York Times Book Review goes one step further, urging everyone who cares ‘about both their inner freedom and the future of humanity’ to read it.

In 1944, sixteen-year-old ballerina, Edith Eger, was sent to Auschwitz.  She was immediately separated from her parents, and was later made to dance before notorious camp doctor, Josef Mengele.  Despite everything she went through, the book’s blurb insists that ‘the horrors of the Holocaust didn’t break Edith.  In fact, they helped her learn to live again with a life-affirming strength and a truly remarkable resilience.’

The Choice has been split into four distinct sections – ‘Prison’, ‘Escape’, ‘Freedom’, and ‘Healing’.  She gives her account chronologically, and makes clear in her introduction that she only began to write her memoir in 1980, whilst working as a psychologist.  Of her troubled patient Jason, whom she also introduces here, she finds so much wholly applicable to her own past: ‘… despite our obvious differences, there was much we shared.  We both knew violence.  And we both knew what it was like to become frozen.  I also carried a wound within me, a sorrow so deep that for many years I hadn’t been able to speak of it at all, to anyone.’

Eger goes on to write about time and its healing process: ‘What happened can never be forgotten and can never be changed.  But over time I learned that I can choose how to respond to the past.  I can be miserable, or I can be hopeful – I can be depressed, or I can be happy.  We always have that choice, that opportunity for control.’

Eger was born in the town of Kassa, Hungary, which was renamed Košice and became part of Czechoslovakia.  At this point, Eger writes that ‘my family became double minorities.  We were ethnic Hungarians living in a predominantly Czech country, and we were Jewish.’  The town became part of Hungary again in 1938.  Throughout The Choice, she speaks about her childhood, her memories, and the relationship which she had with her parents and siblings.  Her father is taken to a work camp, and is only released eight months afterwards.  After this, Eger is captured and taken to Auschwitz, along with her mother and sister, Magda.  Her mother is taken immediately to the gas chambers.  Here, Eger touchingly reflects on the state which this left her in: ‘I am numb.  I can’t think about the incomprehensible things that are happening, that have already happened.  I can’t picture my mother consumed by flames.  I can’t fully grasp that she is gone.’

Throughout, Eger speaks so honestly about her own experiences.  There is, understandably, a lot of horror within her past, and she does not shy away from describing this to the reader.  She writes of the way in which she was able to hold onto her humanity, and the bravery which this took is quite astounding.  Eger says: ‘The words I heard inside my head made a tremendous difference in my ability to maintain hope.  This was true for other inmates as well.  We were able to discover an inner strength we could draw on – a way to talk to ourselves that helped us feel free inside, that kept us grounded in our own morality, that gave us foundation and assurance even when the external forces sought to control and obliterate us.’

The imagery which Eger relays is often haunting.  On their liberation, she reflects: ‘What are we now?  Our bones look obscene, our eyes are caverns, blank, dark, empty.  Hollow faces.  Blue-black fingernails.  We are trauma in motion.  We are a slow moving parade of ghouls.’  She tends not to write only about her experiences in the camps, and directly afterwards; rather, she focuses upon the ways in which she came to terms with it after her liberation.  Like the vast majority of survivors, she was left with major issues with her health, and had to come to terms with what it meant to live back in the world.  She was also forced to cope with the absence of her parents, and her boyfriend, Eric.

The second half of Eger’s memoir is focused upon her marriage, the career which she works so hard to have, and the patients whom she meets, all of whom seem able to teach her something about her own life and perspectives.  Occasionally, these recollections of patients do feel a little preachy, and overall, I feel as though I personally got a lot more out of the first half of the book than the second.

The Choice is a wonderful memoir, filled with sadness but also an unbreakable sense of hope, which carried Eger through into her present.  One cannot help but be moved by Eger’s words, and the attitude which she takes toward her past.  Her prose is engaging, and filled to the brim with emotion and compassion.  The Choice leans toward the philosophical at times, and certainly gives a lot of food for thought.

‘Transcription’ by Kate Atkinson *****

Kate Atkinson has been one of my absolute favourite authors since I was in my mid-teens and, like many other readers, I was eager to pick up a copy of her newest standalone novel, Transcription.  Here, as in her other books, she focuses upon a cast of unusual and realistic protagonists, using her characteristically intelligent and quirky prose.  The Sunday Telegraph comments that ‘no other contemporary novelist has such supreme mastery of that sweet spot between high and low, literary and compulsively readable as Kate Atkinson.’  I could not agree more.

The heroine of the piece, Juliet Armstrong, is ‘reluctantly recruited into the world of espionage’ during the Second World War.  ‘Sent to an obscure department of MI5 tasked with monitoring the comings and goings of British Fascist sympathizers, she discovers the work to be by turns both tedious and terrifying.’  Once the war finishes and Juliet’s contract is terminated, she tries to put the experience firmly behind her.

When she is working as a producer at the BBC some ten years later, however, she is ‘unexpectedly confronted by figures from her past.  A different war is being fought now, on a different battleground, but Juliet finds herself once more under threat.’  At first, Juliet is taken, along with many other young women, to work at Wormwood Scrubs prison, but she is soon transferred to a residential flat, where she has to transcribe conversations between a man posing as German Intelligence, and the Fascist sympathisers who come to speak to him.

We first meet Juliet in 1981, when she is sixty years old.  In this brief introduction, she has just been hit by a car, and confusedly reflects upon her life and achievements: ‘… it had probably been a long enough life.  Yet suddenly it all seemed like an illusion, a dream that had happened to someone else.  What an odd thing existence was.’  Atkinson then moves back in time to 1950, when Juliet is employed by the BBC, working in the ‘Schools’ department.  From this point onward, Juliet’s dark humour is apparent: ‘The girls on Schools reception came and went with astonishing rapidity.  Juliet liked to imagine they were being eaten by something monstrous – a minotaur, perhaps, in the many bowels of the building – although actually they were simply transferring to more glamorous departments across the road in Broadcasting House.’

I very much enjoyed the tangents which Juliet embarks on.  When eating in a local cafe on her lunch break, for instance, she notices a ‘trollish’ man who looked ‘as if he had been put together from leftovers…  A hunched shoulder, eyes like pebbles – slightly uneven, as if one had slipped a little – and pockmarked skin that looked as if it had been peppered with shot.  (Perhaps it had been.)  The wounds of war, Juliet thought, rather pleased with the way the words sounded in her head.  It could be the title of a novel.  Perhaps she should write one.  But wasn’t artistic endeavour the final refuge of the uncommitted?’  Juliet is plucky and rare; her quirks and character traits are so memorable.  She feels fully formed, and we learn a great deal about her as the novel goes on.

I find it such a treat to meet new Kate Atkinson characters, and warmed to Juliet almost immediately.  The transitions made between different periods in her life felt fluid, and Atkinson’s prose has such command, as well as a wonderful tone.  Each era is deftly set, and characters seem to spring to life against the wonderfully crafted backgrounds.  There is such intrigue throughout, and the plot twists have been carefully placed; some of them I did not see coming at all.  A variety of literary devices and changes of scene throughout keep everything moving along nicely, and help to sustain both interest and surprise.

Transcription is, as I expected, an immensely readable and wonderfully written novel, which feels realistic from the start.  Atkinson’s writing is controlled, and humour is thrown in at just the right moments.  I found Transcription transporting.  The bulk of its action takes place during wartime, as I expected, but each time period really comes to life.  As in all of Atkinson’s work, this is a novel which has an awful lot to say, and which explores many different themes through its central character.  There are elements of the coming-of-age novel, as well as the thriller.  Transcription is both plot and character-driven, and the balance between the two is perfect.  Gripping and well tied together, I absolutely loved this novel of espionage, and can’t wait to read Atkinson’s next standalone.

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‘Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves’ by Rachel Malik ****

I have wanted to read Rachel Malik’s debut novel, Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves, since its 2017 publication.  I have seen relatively few reviews of the book, but my interest was piqued by the praise on its cover.  Penelope Lively calls it ‘a skilful recreation of a time and a climate of mind, enriched by persuasive period detail’, and Elizabeth Buchan says that it is ‘quietly gripping and intriguing’.  The novel is loosely based upon the life of the author’s grandmother, who left her family home and three children to become a Land Girl during the Second World War.

The protagonists of the piece are two women, Rene Hargreaves and Elsie Boston.  Rene is billeted to the rural Starlight Farm in Berkshire, far from her home in Manchester, in the summer of 1940.  At first, she finds Elsie ‘and her country ways’ decidedly odd.  However, once the women come to know one another, a mutual understanding and dependence is formed.  Their life with one another is quiet, almost idyllic, until the peace is shattered by the arrival on Starlight Farm of someone from Rene’s past.  At this point, they face trials which endanger everything which they have built, ‘a life that has always kept others at a careful distance.’

The prologue, in which the figure of a solitary woman standing at a window is captured, is beautifully sculpted, and sets the tone of the rest of the novel.  Malik writes: ‘Closer, and you would see that she is waiting.  There is something of that slightly fidgety intensity, that unwilling patience.  A good deal of her life has been spent waiting, one way and another. She’ll carry on waiting, but from today the waiting will be different.’  Chapter one then opens with Elsie’s preparations for her new guest, and Rene’s journey.

Elsie has been alone in her familial home for some time; her parents and three brothers ‘died such a long time ago’, and her sisters have variously married and moved away.  The arrival of the Land Girl fills her with dread and uncertainty: ‘She was seeing everything double and she didn’t like it, it put her all at sea.  She pulled off her scarf and and rubbed her hands through her hair, trying to clear her thoughts.’  When Rene arrives, her first impressions of the place leave her a little doubtful too: ‘She found it hard to imagine a woman, or a man, living here on their own.  It seemed a little strange.  Yet she liked the soft red brick of the house, and the orchard with its shrunken fruit trees.’  Interesting dynamics are apparent between the protagonists as soon as they have become acquainted: ‘Rene found herself thinking back to that first afternoon.  She had offered her hand to Elsie, and Elsie had reached out hers but it wasn’t a greeting – Elsie had reached out as if she were trapped and needed to be pulled out, pulled free.’

As time goes on, and their anxiety settles, Malik writes of the women’s growing relationship with one another: ‘Elsie wasn’t quite like other people, but that didn’t matter to Rene.  Elsie, who had been to the pictures only twice, so long ago, and hated it; Elsie, who didn’t know how to gossip, who had never been to a dance or ever seen the sea; none of it mattered to Rene one bit, because she had fallen hook, line and sinker for Elsie’s lonely power.’  The friendship between Rene and Elsie grows quickly; they come to reveal things about themselves in embarrassment at first, and then with real feeling.  Both characters are unusual and believable.

Throughout, I enjoyed Malik’s writing; in the early few chapters, many of the gloriously structured sentences are filled with curious information about her characters.  I really liked the gentle way in which she introduced new topics into the story, particularly when these connected with the problems in the wider world.  She writes, for instance: ‘As is common when fates are being decided, the two women had no sense of gathering storm clouds.’  The sense of place which Malik crafts, and the way in which this has been woven throughout the novel, feels almost like a point of anchorage: ‘Elsie had known the canal all her life.  It was already falling into disrepair when the Bostons came to Starlight.  Now, for long stretches, the canal was a memory, an imprint: some overhanging branches where shape suggested a curve below, a patch of bricked walkway of a sudden uneasy flatness in the view ahead; Rene could pick out the weeping willows. And then you came upon the soft red curve of a broken bridge, a sudden hole-punched hole of black water, visible only for a moment.’  Malik’s authorial touch is gentle at times, and firm at moments of crisis; there is a lovely balance struck between the two.

Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves is a novel which has a quiet power.  A few reviews have mentioned that it starts almost too slowly, but I did not personally feel that this was the case.  Malik simply takes a great deal of care in setting her scenes and building the complex relationships between her main characters.  I found Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves a lovely, thoughtful, and immersive novel.  It is not a happy book, and it took a series of turns which I was not expecting, but this made it all the more compelling.