Autumn Reading, 2021

Autumn (I also like the American ‘fall’, which I used in my early childhood) is my favourite season, for all the usual reasons: Halloween, Bonfire Night, leaves changing colour, beautiful afternoon light, back-to-school, cozy jumpers, pumpkin spice lattes, comfortable boots. And some less-usual reasons: my birthday, days getting shorter, dogs allowed on the North Tyneside/Northumberland beaches, allowed to wear tights again. I always like to seek out some autumnal reading, which might be cozy or spooky or set in the fall, but sometimes just ends up feeling ‘autumnal’ to me for some unspecified reason. Here’s some thoughts on what I’ve been reading:

Something about Sarah Hall’s work always makes me think of autumn. In the case of Burntcoat, it’s the protagonist’s, Edith’s, art, which involves sculpting from wood using burning techniques she learnt in Japan, so the wood can bear the weather better. Edith describes the process:

There was incredible skill to it – collapsing the cell walls to strengthen the wood, preserving its integrity while enhancing its beauty. Too much heat and the piece was ruined, too little and the wood wasn’t sealed, could not achieve the finish. Shun called this experience. The wood is experiencing fire now. It will be improved.

This passage could serve as an epigraph for the whole book, which darts between Edith’s past and her present. In the present, she is nearing the end of her life, living with the aftereffects of the novavirus, a pandemic that ravaged the world several decades ago. In the past, she faces the pandemic in isolation with her lover, and remembers her mother’s struggle back to life after a brain haemorrhage. I found this all strongly reminiscent of some of the Nina Allan short stories I recently read, especially ‘Neptune’s Trident’, ‘Flying in the Face of God’, and ‘Four Abstracts’. Hall has the same knack as Allan of creating imaginary art that feels so real you almost believe it exists – next time I’m at Scotch Corner, I’ll expect to see Edith’s witch – and she’s also interested in those outcast by illness and dealing with its effects on their body.

I’ve read everything Sarah Hall has written, and her uncompromising, vivid prose is in full force in Burntcoat. I found her last collection of short stories, Madame Zero, somewhat disappointing, so for me this felt like a return to form, and I was glad to see her publish a longer work again. While this was not as distinctive and memorable for me as my favourite Hall, The Carhullan Army, it’s still a highly original take on a theme that was familiar in fiction long before coronavirus: how we survive mass illness and death, and what is left if we do.

I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

Tade Thompson’s new SF thriller, Far From The Light of Heaven, also fills the autumnal brief for me, as well as the RIP Challenge, by being pretty creepy. Shell Campion is the first mate on the starship Ragtime, and she expects an easy ride; she’ll be in deep sleep for most of her ten-year stint travelling to the new settlement of Bloodroot, and even when she’s awake, the AI captain will actually be in charge. However, when Shell is awakened abruptly from stasis, she realises something has gone terribly wrong; the AI has been compromised, and robots have killed a number of her sleeping passengers. Shell’s story intersects with that of a number of other characters, most hailing either from Bloodroot or from the space station Lagos, as she tries to find out what is going on and save her ship.

This gripping space-opera-cum-crime-thriller reminded me at times of James S.A. Corey’s Leviathan Wakes, especially in its touches of horror as vegetable contagion creeps through the spaceship, and in its use of multiple points-of-view. There’s also some hints of China Miéville in Thompson’s genre-mixing. I found Far From The Light of Heaven more compelling than the only other novel I’ve read by Thompson, Rosewater, which failed to emotionally engage me with its protagonist. Nevertheless, it does still have a few of the same issues as Rosewater – in short, it sometimes spreads itself too thin. Thompson has a habit of suddenly lurching into chunks of backstory in the middle of the narrative, which feel out of place, especially in a novel as fast-paced as this one, and could have been introduced more originally. There are rather too many points-of-view broken up into very small chunks, which adds to the reader’s disorientation. And while this isn’t billed as the first book in a series, it feels very much like it’s setting up for something bigger, especially in its introduction of the race of mysterious Lambers, which is wonderfully imaginative but feels like a distraction from the main goings-on in this book. Nevertheless, Thompson continues to impress me with his originality, and I’d certainly like to read more set in this world.

I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review. It’s out in the UK on 28th October.

Garth Nix’s Abhorsen books have been a favourite autumnal read for me since I was a teenager, and although none of the later titles in the series ever reached the heights of Sabriel or Lirael, I still always enjoy returning to the Old Kingdom. This latest instalment, Terciel and Elinor, jumps back in time to focus on Sabriel’s parents, moving between their stories and ultimately interweaving them. Terciel is the Abhorsen-in-Waiting, charged by the current Abhorsen to help her bind the Greater Dead creature Kerrigor, who we know will become significant later on in the history of this world. Elinor has grown up in Ancelstierre knowing nothing of the Old Kingdom, convinced that the Charter Mark she bears on her forehead is a disfiguring scar – until she is forced to come face to face with her heritage. I always get most out of the parts of the Old Kingdom books that are set in one of Nix’s marvellous set-piece locations (my favourite sequence in any of the novels is the part of Lirael where Lirael is still living with the Clayr) and so I was delighted to find that some of them feature here: Wyverley College and Abhorsen’s House (though sadly, we don’t see much of the Clayr’s Glacier). Like its predecessors Abhorsen and Goldenhand, Terciel and Elinor is fun and immersive, but doesn’t imaginatively introduce or expand this world in the ways that Sabriel and Lirael did; therefore, I can’t rank it as highly as the first two books, which were truly magical. Nevertheless, fans of the Old Kingdom series should like this.

I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review. It’s out in the UK on 2nd November.

(This may seem frivolous, but I think part of the reason I haven’t got as much out of the two more recently published Abhorsen novels – Goldenhand and now Terciel and Elinor* – is simply because I haven’t had the sheer pleasure of reading them in the beautiful American hardback editions of the original trilogy. I read both on Kindle, but the British and newer American editions are so hideous that I don’t think it would have helped if I bought them in hard copy. Sadly, there are no matching editions for the more recent novels.)

*I know Clariel exists but I wouldn’t have liked it regardless of what format I read it in

More Nuns in Novels: Matrix by Lauren Groff

Lauren Groff’s Matrix was my most anticipated book of 2021. I was captivated by the synopsis: ‘seventeen-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey… 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.’ I was also intrigued as to how a writer like Groff, who has only written very contemporary fiction before, would handle the distant twelfth-century past; I hoped this would avoid the ponderousness that drags down a lot of historical fiction, and lead to more freedom and inventiveness with the subject-matter. As regular readers of this blog will know, I’m also obsessed with novels about nuns at the moment: current favourites include Rumer Godden’s In This House of Brede (modern) and Sarah Dunant’s Sacred Hearts (early modern). Could Matrix possibly live up to all these expectations?

The answer is: yes, almost! Groff’s novel returns to a lot of the themes that novels about women’s religious communities are well-placed to explore: female solidarity, solitude, duty, sexuality. Unlike Godden’s and Dunant’s novels – which have protagonists, but which are very much ensemble stories – Groff focuses completely on the dominant figure of Marie herself, and how she transforms the abbey in her own image. (Marie has at least one historical counterpart; I knew nothing about this when I read the novel, so it didn’t affect my experience of it, but these Goodreads reviews – one negative and one positive! – give good background if you’re interested: Review 1; Review 2). Marie is both this novel’s strength and its weakness. Groff, refreshingly, isn’t interested in depicting women who get their comeuppance for exercising power, and while there are twists and turns in Marie’s life, she remains fiercely defiant. There’s more than a trace of Nicola Griffith’s Hild in her exceptional stature and intelligence. However, by exalting Marie, Groff misses the opportunity to more fully explore the lives of the other nuns and novices – and so presents a less interesting and less complex version of the convent as social community than do Godden and Dunant. She also goes full throttle on lesbian nuns, which – while I’m never going to complain there are too many lesbians in a book – focuses very much on sex between women rather than other aspects of close romantic attachment, and feels a bit like it was dropped in to be daring.

This also emerges in the way that Matrix is written. Groff skips across great swathes of years very quickly, relating the progress of the abbey to Marie’s own life, and particularly to her own biological ageing, as she suffers with painful periods and then with an early menopause. Even dramatic incidents don’t hold the pace back for too long; we are always moving forward. I thought that this worked beautifully in telling Marie’s own story, but again, less well in capturing the everyday texture of life at the abbey. There are also odd lacunae; I wanted to know more about how Marie initially resigned herself to the convent, and her turn to her Marian faith. All in all, this is not the best novel about nuns I’ve read, but it’s certainly one to add to reading lists.

I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

Nina Allan: The Art of Space Travel and Other Stories

Everything I’ve read by Nina Allan has been good, but not all of it has been to my taste. I feel like there are two versions of Allan; the speculative writer whose fiction is always tinged with a thread of horror, and the writer more concerned with magical suburbia, whose style feels deliberately old-fashioned, harking back to the 1950s and 1960s. In the first camp, I’d put her brilliant novels The Race and The Rift; in the second, The Dollmaker and The Silver Wind, which were undoubtedly accomplished but just didn’t create worlds I was interested in inhabiting; both felt too narrow and twee-archaic for me. The joy, then, of this collection of short stories, The Art of Space Travel, which spans her writing career, is that it brings together these different versions of Allan, and so has something for everyone.

My favourite stories, not surprisingly, were those that had the strongest tinges of either science fiction or horror.  ‘Flying in the Face of God’, which looks at astronauts who undergo a process known as ‘the Kushnev drain’, which wears down their bodies so they can be fit for space travel, combines elements of both, and was my joint favourite story in this collection. My other favourite was ‘Four Abstracts’, a wonderfully creepy story about an artist who believes her family are part-spider. I didn’t read the stories in this collection in order, and only realised later that this is a kind of sequel to an earlier story, ‘A Thread of Truth’; I’m pleased, however, that I came to ‘Four Abstracts’ first, because I felt ‘A Thread of Truth’ was the weaker story, spelling out too much of what had been so carefully implied in ‘Four Abstracts’. And this is really the theme of this collection: the stories where Allan knows just how much to say are simply superb (‘The Art of Space Travel’ is another example) whereas others tell us either a bit too much (‘The Science of Chance’, ‘Microcosmos’) or, more usually, too little (‘Amethyst’, ‘Heroes’, ‘Marielena’). Allan is also brilliant at invented films, novels and other works of art, to the point where I found it difficult to distinguish between real references and imaginary ones; these imaginary artworks and their creators haunt many of her stories.

For me, an uneven collection, then, but one that contained some unforgettable worlds.

I received a free proof copy of this collection from the publisher for review.

Do What Is Right, Not What Is Easy: Naomi Novik’s The Last Graduate & The Harry Potter Books

This post contains spoilers for A Deadly Education but not for The Last Graduate.

For most of my teenage years, I was a highly dedicated and committed Harry Potter fan. I was exactly the right age to ‘grow up with Harry’, reading the first book when I was eleven (and actually having to wait for the second one to come out!) and I spent a great deal of time on forums discussing the books and what might happen next, starting on Amazon.com’s Harry Potter forum (which was deleted abruptly in 2001, to my distress) and moving onto Fictionalley. As well as working out complicated theories, I also wrote some fan fiction (have a read here if you’re curious!) However, after Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was published in the summer of 2005, when I was eighteen, I abruptly and painfully fell out of love with the series. When I see Harry Potter fans discussing how betrayed they feel by JK Rowling in recent years, I feel a little amused and a little frustrated, because for me the series’ moral compass was always a little dodgy and crashed and burnt spectacularly with the last two books, so I don’t feel surprised at anything that’s happened since. In particular, I feel uncomfortable when I see fans lamenting that JKR hasn’t lived up to some of the moral platitudes in the series, because frankly, it’s a moral sinkhole, and shouldn’t be framed as Good Books vs their Bad Creator. I keep meaning to write a long post explaining why but it keeps on getting out of hand (for example, I managed to write more than 1550 words mostly on why The Twins are Terrible People, so you can see why I can’t keep my more extensive thoughts blog-length). 

Perhaps Harry Potter was never meant to be a series about ethics; indeed, I’ve seen some convincing essays on why it is really a series about grief and death. However, if that were the case, it certainly puts a lot of emphasis on the difference between ‘doing what is right and what is easy’ and on Harry’s own fears of becoming like Voldemort, especially in book two (where Harry’s fakeout revelation that he might be the Heir of Slytherin made eleven-year-old me screech loudly in a train, to my mum’s annoyance) and book five, where Sirius tells him ‘the world isn’t divided into good people and Death Eaters‘. The problem is, by book six – where Voldemort is portrayed as evil from birth, a creepy baby who never cried – and certainly by book seven, we find out that actually the world is so divided. Either you are Good or you are Bad; if you are Good, all your actions can be justified, whereas if you are Bad, none of them can. Choosing what is right is choosing what is easy if you are a Good person, like Harry; and choosing what is right, however hard it is, rarely comes with long-term consequences (it’s interesting that the book that is arguably not the strongest of the series, but, for my money, has the most ‘adult’ feel, is Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which is the only book of the seven to try and deal seriously with trauma).

Definitely not the best-plotted Harry Potter book, but the one that I still get the most joy from rereading.

SO. Where does Naomi Novik’s Scholomance series fit into all this? The Scholomance trilogy has been seen, and rightly so in my opinion, to be in direct conversation with Harry Potter. Set at a magical and part-sentient school and engaging explicitly with the trope of the Chosen One, there are some obvious lines of inspiration (although Rowling didn’t invent any of these things). The first book in the Scholomance series, A Deadly Education, introduced us to El, a deeply traumatised teenage girl who can barely keep her penchant for destructive magic under control, is certain that everybody hates her, and tries to hide all of this from her peers and from the reader by keeping up an ironic running commentary about everything she knows about the Scholomance and how to survive there. One of the things that was so brilliant about A Deadly Education, in my opinion, was its head-first engagement with morality. Magically gifted children, in El’s world, fight to get into the dangerous Scholomance because their odds of surviving to adulthood in the outside world are even worse. But once on the inside, those with money, power and family connections (‘enclavers’) up their own odds even further by exploiting their fellow students. El starts off the series by thinking that she wants to get a spot in an enclave for herself after graduation, but by the end of A Deadly Education, she’s realised she actually wants to burn the whole system down.

In short, in A Deadly Education and in its sequel, The Last Graduate, doing what is right is emphatically not what is easy, and Novik shows how El has to fight this internal battle multiple times, rather than simply setting herself on the path of Good and never looking back. Even more importantly, though, Novik’s commitment to portraying the trauma that every inhabitant of the Scholomance has suffered (there’s a particularly painful sequence in The Last Graduate where the students get a glimpse of the outside world through an enchanted facsimile and experience it as a punishment because they miss it so much) means that there are no real villains here. Bar a few maleficers, El doesn’t encounter a group of ‘bad’ kids equivalent to Rowling’s Slytherins, even though there are students who try and get in her way; Novik understands that the problem lies in the power structure of El’s world rather than with specific people. And while I would argue the Scholomance series is neither as ‘dark’ nor as morally complex as my all-time favourite children’s/YA series, K.A. Applegate’s Animorphs – which shows its characters as not only traumatised but as fundamentally altered for the worse by their trauma – it shares more in common with that series than it does with Harry Potter.

Three cheers for the Scholomance books, then? Not yet. The Last Graduate wasn’t, in my opinion, quite as good as A Deadly Education, but it was still a great book that took some unexpected, thoughtful turns, even if it ended with exactly the cliffhanger I’d expected. Nevertheless, it will be the third book in this trilogy that will really decide whether Novik has achieved what I want her to achieve or not, and unfortunately, I do think it could go either way. Will El and Orion continue to be the true heroes they’ve showed themselves to be so far, or will something go badly wrong for one (or ideally, both) of them? A Deadly Education worked so well for me because El couldn’t accept her inner goodness; in The Last Graduate, I had had a bit too much of her inner goodness by the end. Furthermore, the cliffhanger from book one may or may not have been resolved here, and I really hope it hasn’t been, because if it has, that indicates the series is not going the way I’d like it to go. On the plus side: a lot of stuff happens in this book that I would usually expect in the final book of a trilogy, so Novik has given herself a lot of space to play with by clearing up some of the most obvious problems. On the minus side: the cliffhanger in book two sets up the potential of a rather traditional YA plotline that could take us away from what’s most interesting in this series. So we have to wait and see.

I’ve written a more straightforward review of The Last Graduate here.

A Deadly Education was accused of racist representation; I’ve summarised my thoughts on this issue at the end of my review here, and they remain the same.

I received a free proof copy of The Last Graduate from the publisher for review.

Booker Prize 2021: Bewilderment and Great Circle

Astrobiologist Theo Byrne spends his time looking for life on other planets but is most concerned about the welfare of his nine-year-old son, Robin. Since Theo’s wife and Robin’s mother, Alyssa, died two years ago, Robin has struggled at school and with life in general, and Theo has come under increasing pressure to accept a psychological diagnosis for his son and put him on meditation. Instead, Theo turns to an experimental treatment being pioneered by one of his colleagues, ‘Decoded Neurofeedback’, which guides ‘trainees’ to mimic the brain states of ‘targets’ who have deliberately elicited particular emotions in themselves while their brains were scanned with fMRI. Because Alyssa participated in an earlier phase of the experiment, Robin can be matched to his mother’s euphoric brain patterns – a process which puts him into a state of beatific calm. Having been constantly screaming at the pain of living in a dying world, Robin now embraces the beauty of endangered species and becomes a viral news story. At the same time, Theo witnesses the world beginning to unravel. Bewilderment, Richard Powers’s thirteenth novel, is uneasily set between our present and a slightly different version of it, giving the book a speculative twist while not allowing us to feel safely distant from the America it describes:

That first Tuesday in November, online conspiracy theories, compromised ballots, and bands of armed poll protesters undermined the integrity of the vote in six different battleground states. The country slid into three days of chaos. On Saturday, the President declared the entire election invalid. He ordered a repeat, claiming it would require at least three more months to secure and implement.

As readers of Powers’s previous novel, the brilliant The Overstory, will know, Powers has a bleak view of our environmental future, and Bewilderment is, if possible, even darker than its predecessor. However, it’s also lit up by the stories about other planets, other peoples and other extinctions and rebirths that Theo tells Robin, and by Robin himself, who seems to symbolically switch between two ways of responding to our current predicament: mourning what we have lost or embracing it before it’s gone. If there’s a fault in this novel, it’s that Powers occasionally gives into the temptation to end paragraphs with a too-easy, too-sentimental line; but in general, he keeps impressively far away from sentimentality for a book about a ‘special’ child. A beautiful, if discomforting read that ought to make the shortlist.

I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review. It’s out in the UK on 21st September.

Marian Graves was a pioneering inter-war and wartime aviator whose career abruptly ended after she circumnavigated the globe in 1949 and disappeared in the Antarctic. In the present day, Hadley Baxter has been hired to portray Marian in a biopic, sensing a chance to get her career back on track after cheating on her co-star in a thinly veiled version of the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise. The bulk of Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle is a family saga, focused largely on Marian but circling back before her birth and outwards to explore the lives of other characters like her brother Jamie, while the Hollywood episodes with Hadley seem to belong to a lighter kind of book altogether. I have to confess that, at the point of writing this review, I’m only slightly over halfway through Great Circle, so it may make a sudden turnabout in its second half; however, it’s an incredibly long book, and 300+ pages in, I’m looking for a payback that I’m not getting. Shipstead’s prose is pedestrian, and the story she’s telling is very familiar; I found particular resonances with Michael Christie’s far superior Greenwood, but there are so many sagas of this kind. Great Circle is plodding along enjoyably enough to keep me reading, but it’s a massive potboiler that I don’t think belongs on the Booker longlist.

***

The Booker shortlist will be announced on September 14th, and I don’t think I’ll be able to get to any more of the longlisted titles before then, so here’s my ranking of the six I’ve read:

1. Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford
2. Bewilderment by Richard Powers
3. China Room by Sunjeev Sahota
4. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
5. Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead
6. No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

I would really like to see the Spufford, Powers and Sahota on the shortlist, but I don’t know the Booker Prize well enough or have read enough of the longlist to be confident in making any predictions!

Have you read any of the longlisted titles? Who do you think will make it to the shortlist?

10 Books of Summer 2021: A Retrospective

10 Books of Summer 2021 is over! I thought I’d made it easy on myself by choosing 10 instead of 20 books, but I still ended up rushing to the finish line. I read much less than usual during July because I got a new puppy, and although August partly made up for it, this didn’t help with my reading challenge. I was also distracted by books that weren’t on this list.

The ten books I chose this year also had fewer standouts than previous sets of twenty I’ve picked. I guess there were fewer chances to read something really amazing? Anyway, I didn’t read anything this time that will be in contention for my book of the year. The ten reads stacked up as follows [links to my reviews]:

The good books that I’d strongly recommend, even though they didn’t completely blow me away: The Startup Wife; The Women of Troy; Easy Meat; Milk Fed. (I feel especially warmly towards The Startup Wife, despite the issues I had with it, as it was the first ‘real’ book I managed to read after puppy madness commenced).

The books I enjoyed but about which I had reservations, ranging from more to less serious: How The One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House; The Sleeping Beauties; Holding Her Breath.

The outright disappointments: The Wild Laughter; Unsettled Ground; True Story.

Will I do 10/20 Books of Summer again next year? I still fancy doing it as a re-reading challenge, so hopefully next year I’ll focus on re-reading any 10 or 20 books from my shelves – depending on how I’m feeling!

Did you do the Books of Summer challenge this year? How did it go?

PS a gratuitous picture of the puppy (right) chewing on a cardboard tube with my mum’s sprocker puppy! she is a lot bigger now so I need to take more up-to-date photos!

 

10 Books of Summer, #9 and #10: The Sleeping Beauties and The Wild Laughter

After reading Suzanne O’Sullivan’s recent article in the Guardian on ‘mystery illnesses’, I knew I wanted to seek out the book in which she explores these ideas further, Sleeping Beauties, though I found it patchier then its précis version. It worked best for me when O’Sullivan used a case study to link together wider issues, as she does in the opening chapter on ‘resignation syndrome’ among refugee children in Sweden, and in the final chapter on how Western medical labels are as open to question as indigenous explanations for illness; less well when she got too bogged down in the minutae of a single example, which was the case in most of the other chapters. The thread that links all of the outbreaks that O’Sullivan explores is the idea of a ‘functional neurological disorder’: in these disorders, patients experience nervous symptoms that are genuine but not linked to any observable physical problem. O’Sullivan understands why people resist being told that their debilitating experience of illness is ‘psychosomatic’, and emphasises that this diagnosis in no way suggests that their suffering is not real, or that they are making up their symptoms. Drawing on a biopsychosocial model of health, she suggests that the causes of these disorders arise from the interaction between body, mind and environment, and that all three of these things can be equally important in understanding certain conditions. Overall, I found this argument very interesting, and there are sections here I’ll definitely return to, but the book becomes a bit repetitive, and I felt that a couple of the chapters could have been cut.

Thanks to Rebecca from Bookish Beck for kindly passing on her proof copy of this book to me.

Caoilinn Hughes’ The Wild Laughter is a smart, short novel with a brilliant, utterly convincing narrative voice; unfortunately, I found it hard to inhabit rather than simply admire. Hart is the younger of a pair of Irish brothers who are watching their father slowly dying after the economic crash in Ireland leaves him bankrupt. His voice initially reminded me of Lisa McInerney’s The Glorious Heresies (with perhaps a bit of Edward Docx’s Let Go My Hand thrown in), but Hughes’s dense prose, which needs to be read and digested line by line, is closer to Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. And while I adored the two former novels, I also found myself at arm’s length from McBride’s book, recognising her skill but not able to quite connect. Hughes is fond of complicated, poetic similes that are all wonderful in their own right but kept catching me off-balance when I tried to sink into the flow of this book, because I had to work out what they meant. At an agricultural show, ‘peach udders drooped everywhere like the rear end of a birthday party.’ The ‘restless landscape’ is ‘sporadically moonlamped, as if the night was giving sign to a dangerous reef up ahead.’ A hairstyle is ‘a bun like a hare’s tail, but rained on.’ Alongside this, Hughes comes up with many more arresting lines – but they feel buried in the rest of the prose. For me, the writing got in the way of the story she was telling.

Thanks to Rebecca from Bookish Beck for kindly passing on her proof copy of this book to me.

This concludes my 10 Books of Summer! How did you do with your summer reading?

The Booker Prize Longlist, 2021

I never shadow the Booker Prize. I almost always find its longlists and shortlists highly disappointing, and this was epitomised by last year’s shortlist, which for me reached a new nadir, put together by a panel whose idea of literary fiction was clearly the stereotype of literary fiction – weighty, miserable and tortured – rather than all the other things literary fiction can be. I was also furious when, in 2019, it forced Bernardine Evaristo to share the 2019 prize with Margaret Atwood, especially given that Girl, Woman, Other was incredible and The Testaments terrible. So why am I writing this post? For the first time EVER, I was pleasantly surprised by a Booker Prize announcement when I saw the 2021 longlist. I’d already read four of the novels on the list – always a good sign that a prize is on my wavelength – and was intrigued by a number of the others. The list seemed to showcase authors I hadn’t heard of before and kinds of novels that don’t usually get considered for the Booker.

So while I am still definitely not shadowing the Booker Prize, I’m going to take the approach I did for this year’s Women’s Prize: read the titles from the longlist that appeal to me and then read the whole shortlist. The shortlist is announced on 14th September, so, rather ambitiously, I’m hoping to get three additional titles read by then. Here are my thoughts on the list overall.

The Ones I’d Already Read

• Francis Spufford, Light Perpetual. This is possibly my book of the year so far, so I was thrilled to see it on the longlist, and I so hope it advances to the shortlist. I think Spufford has achieved something really wonderful with this book. My review is here.
• Sunjeev Sahota, China Room. I was won over by the quiet folktale feel of this novel, set in the rural Punjab, which moves between a young woman in an arranged marriage in 1929 and a young man detoxing on his family’s farm in 1999. My review is here.
• Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This. I don’t understand the hype behind this novel, which felt to me like it was trying to say something clever about online culture but fell short. My review is here.
• Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun. I’m such an Ishiguro fan but I found this so disappointing. Unlike Never Let Me Go (possibly my favourite novel of all time) which transcended SF tropes, Ishiguro just wrote an inferior version of many SF novels I’ve read. It’s still hard to forget, because it’s Ishiguro, but its appearance on this list feels tokenistic.

The Ones I Now Want to Read/Am Reading

• Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle. I’m reading this right now! I loved the premise – moving between a pioneering female aviator and the actor who plays her in the present day – and I’m liking it so far, though the writing is perhaps a little light, and I’m a bit done with long family-saga-style histories.
• Richard Powers, Bewilderment. I loved The Overstory, so I’d already requested this from Netgalley before it was longlisted for the Booker. This focuses on an astrobiologist struggling with his nine-year-old son, and I love everything about the blurb.
• Rachel Cusk, Second Place. The latest from Cusk focuses on a woman who invites an acclaimed artist to her isolated home. I don’t often have time for this kind of elliptical literary fiction (and struggled with Cusk’s Arlington Park and In the Fold), but I loved Outline, so have decided to give her another try.

The Ones I Still Don’t Want To Read

• Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North. A young man reflects on Sri Lanka’s civil war. This sounded too schematic, and the prose too convoluted, for me.
• Damon Galgut, The Promise. I think of Galgut as the kind of writer who always gets longlisted for the Booker, which is not a plus for me. I’ve only read The Good Doctor, which I thought was massively overrated, so I’ll be giving his latest – which focuses on the undoing of a white South African family – a miss.
• Nathan Harris, The Sweetness of Water. To be fair this actually sounds quite good, I am just tired of novels set during the American Civil War and Reconstruction. I’ll read it if it’s shortlisted.
• Karen Jennings, An Island. This novel – focusing on two men trapped on an island – sounded too limited and allegorical for me.
• Mary Lawson, A Town Called Solace. This sounded very much like Anne Tyler, and I’m not a fan. The horribly cliched child’s narrative voice in the first few pages put me off as well.
• Nadifa Mohamed, The Fortune Men. This was initially one of the titles I had my eye on – it fictionalises a real-life story of a Somali seaman wrongly executed for murder in Wales, which sounded fascinating. However, when I flicked through it in the bookshop, I wasn’t impressed by the prose. Another one I’d return to if it were shortlisted.

Have you read any of the titles longlisted for the Booker Prize 2021? Are there any you want to read? Am I skipping any that I really should read?

Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021: Final Thoughts

I’ve now finished reading the ten titles from the Women’s Prize longlist that I wanted to read, including all six titles on the shortlist – so I’m going to post my round-up.

Overall, I think this was a stronger year for the Prize than 2019 or 2020, if not quite reaching the heights of 2018. Notably, all six shortlisted titles, even the ones I did not personally get on with, are distinguished by the quality and originality of their writing, which has not always been the case in previous years. Happily, this means that there’s no title on the shortlist that would totally outrage me if it won, which has definitely not been the case in previous years.

My overall ranking of the ten titles I’ve read is as follows, with quotes from my reviews. Shortlisted titles are starred (*).

• *Transcendent Kingdom: ‘wise and thoughtful… thematically resonant… technically brilliant’
• Consent: ‘I thought this novel was fantastic, but I’m struggling to say why’
• Detransition, Baby: ‘so clever and so interesting… [though] it feels rather hastily put together’
• *Piranesi: ‘it didn’t enchant me quite as much as I expected… vivid and troubling’
• *The Vanishing Half: ‘a strong second novel that takes Bennett’s highly readable writing to the next level’
• Exciting Times: ‘really cleverly handled… although I didn’t quite fall for Exciting Times, I definitely admired it’
• *How The One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House: ‘great potential depth… [but] its ending is arguably too neat’
• Small Pleasures: ‘a lot to love… and a little that made me uncomfortable’
• *No-One Is Talking About This: ‘I guess I wasn’t convinced that I wasn’t just seeing things that weren’t there’
• *Unsettled Ground: ‘a powerful writer inexplicably deciding to concern themselves with an incredibly dull story’

Looking back at my original post on the shortlist, this means that reading three extra shortlisted titles hasn’t actually changed my top six at all – and I’m only really glad to have read one of them (How The One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House). This, to me, confirms that my approach of only reading the longlisted titles that actually appealed to me this year was the right one.

The winner of the Women’s Prize 2021 will be announced on 8th September.

Who do I want to win? And who do I think will win? This year, it’s the same book:

I know a lot of people are betting on The Vanishing Half, but I’m holding out hope that a judging panel that seems so interested in prose, structural experimentation and originality will do the right thing and give the Prize to Transcendent Kingdom, which stands head and shoulders above the rest of the shortlist.

Who do you want to win the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021? And who do you think will win?

Women’s Prize for Fiction, 2021: How The One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House

Cherie Jones’s debut novel, How The One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House, starts with a grandmother telling a story to her granddaughter about two sisters, one of whom was ‘gifted with good sense’ while the other was ‘own-way and like to give the mother mouth’. The sisters are warned against entering the network of tunnels that riddle the ground, as ‘the tunnels is where bad men go where they die‘. In the way of stories, we know what will happen; the bad sister goes into the tunnel and her good sister tries to pull her back. The bad sister escapes, but at a price: she’s missing one of her arms. The granddaughter, Lala, is not especially impressed by this story, and tells her grandmother, Wilma, so:

‘Well I bet it not so bad having one arm.” says Lala. “She can still do things like everybody else, she can still get a husband and some children and a house.”

“Stupid girl,” says Wilma. “How she gonna sweep it?”

Set in Barbados in the mid 1980s, How The One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House is a vividly painful exploration of how a violent fate haunts three generations of women. Wilma has her own explanation for why she, her daughter and her granddaughter have suffered so: ‘She assumes it is a curse… this way the Wilkinson women have with men, this ability to so bewitch a man that he becomes besotted.’ Wilma thinks that, like the bad sister, they all grow up too fast, and it is this premature sexuality that leads them into trouble. Jones shows us how this pattern of belief makes Wilma culpable in the fates of Lala and her mother Esme, as well as how the men who abuse them are themselves shaped by poverty.

Some reviewers have criticised How The One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House for being too schematic – its cast defined by what happens to them rather than by who they are as people – but that wasn’t exactly my experience of it. I felt that Jones’s characters did have great potential depth, although I wished she had given more page-time to exploring their inner lives. Jones has a gift for set-piece, and particular scenes showcase how much she does know about her characters; for example, when Wilma is tending to Esme after she’s been raped or when Lala walks out on the beach to braid hair. Lala’s abusive husband, Adan, is perhaps closest to caricature, displaying classic psychopath tropes as a boy, but that still isn’t all he is; when Lala is trying to remember how her mother used to sing her name, Adan ‘had sung her name in every tone he could think of to see if she would recognise it’. And Jones’s present-tense, fluid writing is perfectly suited to this story, moving effortlessly between a ring of characters who surround Lala.

I was surprised that so many reviewers, such as Rhiannon Lucy Coslett in the Guardian, describe this book as relentlessly miserable. It’s certainly a difficult read, but I didn’t find How The One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House especially grim compared to many other novels that have made it onto Women’s Prize shortlists and longlists in recent years. Indeed, its ending is arguably too neat and hopeful, sweeping Lala too easily away from this cycle of intergenerational violence without really answering the question it poses at the start: how do you carry on living when you have been so wounded by the world around you? How does the one-armed sister sweep her house?

I’m not aiming to read all sixteen books on the Women’s Prize longlist this year, but I’ve selected ten titles that I do want to read. This is number ten. I’ve already read The Vanishing Half, Transcendent Kingdom, Piranesi, Consent, Exciting Times, Small Pleasures, Detransition, Baby, No One Is Talking About This and Unsettled Ground.

This is also #8 of my 10 Books of Summer.