bookswelike

bwl 99 - Winter 2021

Fiction

Sebastian Barry - Days Without End

17-year old Thomas McNulty, an Irish émigré, stows away on a ship bound for America where he befriends and falls in love with a part-Indian boy, John Cole. They survive as cross-dressers dancing in seedy nightclubs until they enlist in the Cavalry, become immersed in the Indian and Civil Wars and then take under their wing the little daughter of an Indian Chief. Barry's lyrical prose held me captive from one page to the next. He never disappoints. (Jenny Baker)

William Boyd - Trio

1968, a movie-set in Brighton: the director's wife Elfrida a novelist with writer's block, Talbot the producer and American film-star Anny - all have secrets but when the CIA comes knocking, events are precipitated which makes each of them take responsibility for themselves. The narrative switches in quite brief chunks between the trio which I found irritating but this may be due to my brain stagnating because of lockdown. Hey! - it's a William Boyd, it must be good. (Jenny Baker)

Carys Bray - When the Lights Go Out

Chris and Emma care deeply about social issues and climate change but, while Chris obsesses about the big issues and stockpiles food and medicine, Emma deals with more manageable local and domestic ones. Their marriage disintegrates as the rain falls constantly. Through their back stories we empathise with the characters and a marriage that is fiercely tested. Bray is a lapsed Mormon and loss of faith is also integral to the story. A book for our time. (Christine Miller)

Tracy Chevalier - A Single Thread

This is a lovely read. The heroine is from that generation of women whose lives were blighted by the First World War and who struggled to find a role in the aftermath. It explores embroidery, cathedral architecture, bellringing, the south of England and female relationships. But fundamentally it is the story of a woman who is lonely, loveless and trapped who finds salvation in unexpected ways. And it certainly demands a trip to Winchester Cathedral once lockdown is over. (Annie Noble)

Joseph Coelho - The Girl who Became a Tree

Daphne is struggling with the death of her father. Taking refuge in the library she follows her memories as a means of coping. But you can become trapped in memories. Coelho is a poet and here he tells his story through poems finding a parallel with his contemporary Daphne and the Greek myth of Daphne who also turned from real life to become a tree. One to think about - and reread. (Ferelith Hordon)

Jeanine Cummins - American Dirt

And if you are in lockdown and want an engrossing read that will convince you that you really have nothing to complain about, download this book on your Kindle! Totally absorbing story, and some stunningly beautiful writing. (Margaret Teh)

J G Farrell - Troubles

WWI has just ended and an English Major arrives in Ireland to visit his fiancée. Her father owns the once grand Majestic Hotel, now dilapidated and in need of urgent repair. The Major finds himself in charge of running the hotel and coping with its eccentric, long term inhabitants. There are many funny and memorable incidents but the claustrophobic atmosphere is imbued with the escalating tensions of the Troubles occurring on the fringes of daily life. Brilliant! (Denise Lewis)

Elena Ferrante - The Lying Life of Adults

Teenager Giovanna - well-brought-up, living in up-market Naples with her adored father and refined mother - overhears a chance remark which leads to the discovery of a ferocious, charismatic Aunt. Under her spell Giovanna begins to question everything, what are her roots and are her parents as perfect as she imagines? Ferrante brilliantly evokes all the agonies of those teenage years, the consciousness of self, the black and white judgments, the fluctuating moods, the discovery of sex. (Jenny Baker)

Richard Flanagan - The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Flanagan graphically portrays the horrors of Australian POWs in WWII, building a railway through the jungle for the Japanese. Some of these descriptions are disturbing. The title refers to a journey taken by the Japanese Haiku poet Basho to the north of Japan in the 17th century. This novel shows a different and terrible Japanese mind. As the story unfolds, the emphasis is on the Aussies, but we are asked to reflect on post-war guilt by the Japanese, and recovery by the prisoners themselves. It is humankind at its harshest. (Herb Roselle)

Dick Francis - Field of Thirteen

Short stories come in two types - the crafted reflective stories that subtly explore emotions, situations and relationships and the stories that are condensed - or perhaps concise novels. Dick Francis delivers the latter in this vintage collection where the reader will find all kinds of racing shenanigans, criminal activity and a certain amount of sentimentality to help the reading experience. This is one to pick up and put down for that enjoyable coffee break. (Ferelith Hordon)

Dawn French - Because of You

An absorbing tale based on two mothers and their new born daughters. 17 years after some tragic and shocking events the truth begins to emerge with serious life changing consequences for everyone. Very sad in places but also humorous and heart warming. (Clare Gratton)

Isabella Hammad - The Parisian

This debut historical novel is drawn from family stories. Midhat Kamal leaves Palestine to study to become a doctor in Montpelier during WW1. He falls irrevocably in love but, feeling betrayed, he leaves for the hotbed of Paris. Returning to Palestine, he remains an outsider - the Parisian. Through him and an interesting cast of characters we experience the beginning of Palestine's fight for an independent state. It is so imaginatively written with its many layers demanding concentration. (Christine Miller)

Kiran Hargrave - The Deathless Girls

We all know the legend of Vlad the Drac and the vampire. Here Kiran Millwood Hargrave tells the story from the point of view of two girls Lil and Kizzy who find themselves captured and enslaved to become gifts for The Dragon. A dark tale full of jeopardy with an unexpected ending for a teenage audience that I didn't want to read but could not put down. (Ferelith Hordon)

Robert Harris - V 2

It was Rudi Graf's dream to send a rocket to the moon, instead he finds himself in charge of firing the deadly V2's pummelling London. In newly liberated Belgium, Kaye, a young Englishwoman is one of the WAAFs equipped with slide-rules and equations tasked with tracking them mid-flight. For Robert Harris fans this is a thrilling and immersive read. (James Baker)

Samantha Harvey - The Western Wind

1491: A priest narrates a death and its impact on his remote and poor Somerset village. How and why did the largest landowner, a cultivated friend, die? And what are the intentions of the investigating Dean? Will and should the bridge, main lifeline to the outside world, be rebuilt? Not a conventional whodunnit, although there are mysteries to be unravelled, but an unfolding of the inner lives of two troubled men and a vivid portrait of village life in its austere struggle for survival. Beautifully written. (Tony Pratt)

Georgette Heyer - Regency Buck - The Grand Sophy - Cousin Kate

Don't wince! Searching for something to read in my lock-down retreat I came across a stash of these elderly romances and thought Why not see how they have aged?Well I am romping through them with a certain glee. Perfect escapism for these dismal times, surprisingly engagingly written and with a guaranteed happy ending. What more could we want? So I am unapologetic . . . (Annabel Bedini)

Alexis Jenni - The French Art of War

This prize winning French novel tells the story of a soldier artist seen through the eyes of a troubled narrator. Moving from the Resistance to Indo China and Algeria, it shows brutal conflicts creating a legacy of violence and racial blindness from which France cannot escape. Sometimes feels overlong but there are brilliantly vivid evocations of jungle warfare and the nightmare of unwinnable conflicts. Bravura passages, on subjects as diverse as De Gaulle and a meal from the slaughterhouse, pepper the narrative. Strong meat. (Tony Pratt)

Antoine Laurain - The Red Notebook

On the way home from his shop Laurent Letellier, a young Parisien bookseller, finds a beautiful handbag lying on the top of a rubbish bin. In order to return it to its owner, he must search inside . . . A charming and romantic French story. Very short, 170 pages, but you may want to read it more than once! (Jenny Freeman)

Patrick McCabe - The Butcher Boy

The reader is privy to the mind of an odious child who does hateful things, and you gradually realise that this boy is tragically psychotic. His escalating behaviour can't evoke sympathy, but you, the reader, will feel pity. This is a heartbreaking story, told in a compelling and unconventional way. Mark Twain used the voice of a child in Huckleberry Finn, but this is no Huck but a deeply flawed human being, unsparingly revealed. (Herb Roselle)

Sally Nicholls - The Silent Stars Go By

Though written for a young adult audience this is also adultvjust much shorter than many novels telling similar tales. The war - World War I is over; a time of rejoicing. Harry, who three years ago was reported missing in action, is alive and coming home but for Margot there is a secret to be kept at all costs. Beautifully written, Sally Nicholls captures the period, the place and the people perfectly. (Ferelith Hordon)

Maggie O'Farrell - The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

Two sisters: one of them will steal the other's life. Now Kitty has dementia and Esme whom no-one knew existed has reappeared. Slowly their story unfolds going backwards and forwards from their childhood in India to their coming of age in stuffy, upper-class Edinburgh. What did Kitty not mean to do and who is the baby that haunts them? If you're after a straight-forward read this is not for you but if you enjoy unravelling puzzles, it's a must. (Jenny Baker)

Valerie Perrin - Fresh Water for Flowers (translated from the French by Hildegarde Serle)

Despite mostly revolving around a cemetery, this is about life and above all love. Violette is keeper at the cemetery in a small French town. Filled with grief she finds peace in the confidences and companionship of fellow workers and visitors, together with her garden. However the arrival of one visitor disrupts this quiet rhythm and challenges her to open up her heart. The book has enormous charm with characters and places readily visualised. (Christine Miller)

Richard Powers - The Overstory

Nine wanderers range across cultures, history, science, landscapes, artificial intelligence, ecology, love, and especially TREES, arriving independently at a redwood forest. It is a sweeping narrative filled with poetic language and awe. Their stories are absorbing, and the arboreal themes skilfully woven. This is not a book to be gulped down - you chew each paragraph and savour. You will never see a TREE in the same way again. My vote for America's best writer today. (Herb Roselle)

Douglas Stuart - Shuggie Bain

Rejoice! The Booker judges really have chosen a title that is not just a literary triumph but is absolutely un-put-downable. I'm only half way through but couldn't resist having my say! (Jenny Baker)

Kate Summerscale - The Haunting of Alma Fielding

The late 30's - a psychical researcher investigates a suburban housewife's links with the supernatural: fraud, genuine or both? The focus widens to the researcher himself, the bereavement-fed psychic movement and the growing influence of psychology as an explanatory tool. In the background, war is coming step by step. Some of this feels like padding and the mystery is not very mysterious but for me the main interest was the insights into working class life and mores. (Tony Pratt)

William Trevor - Two Lives: Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria

Two haunting novellas, published under one title, tell the stories of two disparate women, one introverted, trapped in a loveless marriage, the other extroverted who knows all about the business side of love - both escape reality by taking refuge in the world of romantic fiction. Trevor insists that when writing them he had no plan to connect them, they just seemed to belong together. He's quoted as saying: "Most things in art of any kind happen by accident, and this is a case in point." A very happy accident for his fans. (Jenny Baker)

Non-Fiction

Anthony Amore - The Woman who Stole Vermeer: The True Story of Rose Dugdale and the Russborough House Art Heist

This is the story of Rose Dugdale a woman born into wealth and privilege who threw it all over and became a revolutionary and was involved in a famous art heist in Ireland of the great Dutch painter Jan Vermeer for which she served a prison sentence. It is a riveting read. She is for me not a person to admire. Now an ancient-of-days she lives quietly in Ireland. (David Graham)

Shaun Bythell - Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops

An enjoyable romp by the author of The Diary of a Bookseller on the customers who irritate him most grouped into seven categories: The Expert, Young Family, Occultist, Loiterer, Bearded Pensioner, Not-so-Silent Traveller and the Historian. As you read it you wonder if you will recognise yourself or if not someone you know. You might think this a risky undertaking for someone wanting to sell his stock but his self-deprecating humour will disarm anyone who might have been offended. (Jenny Baker)

John Carey - A Little History of Poetry

Any history of "language made special" covering 4,000 years on four continents is bound to be highly selective but, if the test is to communicate a love of poetry making you revisit poets you know and try those you don't, this passes the test triumphantly. English and American poetry of the last two centuries dominate but there are delights from earlier eras and different cultures. The comments on Chaucer and Yeats are especially illuminating but there are any number of insights. A good escape from the world of lockdown. (Tony Pratt)

Clive James - Unreliable Memoirs

This is the funniest book I have ever read. Clive James's memories of growing up in Australia say as much about the country as they do about him and, being a near contemporary Australian, this was a real nostalgia trip. 'Unreliable' they may be, but so much is true. My English husband read it as well, and we were both still laughing days later. Has to be the perfect antidote to COVID gloom and lockdown blues. (Denise Lewis)

Christina Lamb - House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-Torn Zimbabwe

Robert Mugabe was seen as a liberation hero by the indigenous people of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and received an Honorary Knighthood from the Queen. However he turned one of the most prosperous countries in Africa into a wasteland. The history is interspersed with interviews between a white farmer and the family's black maid who later joined the war veterans in seizing his property. It crosses the bounds between history, biography and autobiography and is a fascinating study of the inner growth through conflict of the farmer and the maid. (Lynda Johnson)

Mary Laven - Virgins of Venice:

With the astronomical cost of Venetian wedding dowries, a much cheaper option for 'spare' daughters was for them to marry Christ instead. Subsequent convent life was made slightly more palatable by joining sisters and aunts in one of those rare institutions run and managed by the women themselves. However, legal and religious archives reveal a reputation for good living, political intrigue, less than perfect standards and becoming the inevitable focus of male fantasy and oppression . . . (Clive Yelf)

Marc Levinson - The Box : How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger

A boring title for a fascinating book. Transport visionary Malcolm Maclean should be as well known as Bill Gates for the effect he had on our lives but his epic struggle to develop the container against hostile port authorities, unions, shipping lines and bureaucracy is almost forgotten. To turn an entire industry around from 'On the Waterfront', tramp steamers and the London docks to todays 'just in time' system makes for a surprisingly engrossing read. (Clive Yelf)

Bjorn Lomborg - False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs us Trillions.

A Danish economist accepts the reality of global warming driven by human activity but regards our current 'panic' as far too simplistic in its remedies. We can adapt and mitigate if we have the economic resources to do so. These in turn will allow us to address the education and poverty issues which are critical in addressing climate change in future. They will also fund vital energy innovation. His forecasts may be a bit too glib for an uncertain long term but he makes a good case for cost/benefit analysis in place of hysteria. (Tony Pratt)

Robert Macfarlane - Underland: A Deep Time Journey

I hadn't come across Macfarlane before and can't wait to read his previous books. Here he explores the world under our surfaces, labyrinths beneath cities, underground rivers, communication between tree roots, aeons old glacier bottoms and on. Erudite, lyrical, wise, he is an explorer not only of deep, hidden places but of human relationships with depths, of both place and time. This is without doubt one of the most fascinating books I have ever read. (Annabel Bedini)

David McCullough - John Adams

There's no better time than the present - as the US has now elected an enlightened and caring President and made history with its choice of Vice-President - to read this well-researched and very fair biography of John Adams, second President of the fledgling United States. It also offers a heightened awareness of the issues then and still with us and all those rights which, in the slightly more than two centuries that have passed, have been wilfully undermined, but, as we see today, not irretrievably. (Kathie Somerwil Ayrton)

Thomas Pakenham - The Scramble for Africa

Triggered by the heroic death of Livingstone in 1873, in the following 30 years, five European powers had grabbed almost the whole of the 'dark' continent. Atrocities against indigenous populations were commonplace though by far the most villainous was Leopold II for whom the Congo State became his personal property. Pakenham recounts this tale of infamous and nefarious deeds with a fluency that belies its complexity. Be prepared for a stimulating but exceptionally long read. (Jeremy Miller)

Nicholas Rankin - Defending the Rock: How Gibraltar Defeated Hitler

Failure to take Gibraltar was often cited by Axis generals as being critical in their eventual defeat. Its capture would have excluded the British from the Mediterranean with the inevitable loss of North Africa and routes to India. So with Fascist Spain, Nazi Germany, Vichy France and the nascent Italian Empire all seeking its demise the fact it survived came down as much to political intriguing between their competing interests as to its fortress-like appearance. (Clive Yelf)

Phil Strongman - Pretty Vacant: A History of Punk

I'm not sure if there's anything particularly radical or groundbreaking to be found here other than a decent effort in covering all the key bases and players, an achievement in itself considering punks diverse cultural impact. However with the attention inevitably on a New York Dolls - Ramones - Sex Pistols - Clash lineage it does feel inevitably that a little more about other bands would have been welcome. That said, pretty vacant, pretty decent . . . (Clive Yelf)

Craig Symonds - World War II at Sea: A Global History

Although this is a well-trodden path, the author, who taught at the US Naval War College for over 30 years, brings a freshness and a welcome objectivity to this vast subject in a single volume. This is not, however, history written by the victors. Rather it is a forensic and scholarly examination of all the major protagonists but narrated in the finest traditions of a rollickingly good naval saga. Altogether, a must for non-landlubbers. (Jeremy Miller)

Michael Wood - The Story of China: A Portrait of a Civilisation and its People

The fly-leaf states that China is the oldest, living civilisation on Earth but it's history is still surprisingly little known. How true. Michael Wood's enthralling book is a must for anyone wanting to know more and for me, born in Tientsin and interred in Shanghai by the Japanese, it has of course an immediate and special appeal. It's worth too catching up on the BBC's series which he made in 2016. (James Baker)

Poetry

Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris - Lost Words

Born from the groundswell of indignation at the removal of nature words from the Oxford Junior Dictionary, this big, beautiful book gives some of them back, one by one, each gloriously illustrated by Morris and with its own 'spell' in the form of a poetic acrostic. Aimed at children, I defy any adult not to be entranced. It has been distributed to schools (take that OJD!) and a percentage of sales goes to Action for Conservation. Marvellous! (Annabel Bedini)

Feedback

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I recently read The Last Painting of Sara de Vos which was reviewed in the last bwl. I really enjoyed it too. Worth searching out if you are looking for something engrossing to read. (Denise Lewis)

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Thanks to Christine and Jeremy Miller we were introduced to the Italian TV series My Brilliant Friend based on Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels. An absolute must for anyone who loved the books though you don't have to read them to be captivated by this evocative, addictive adaptation. Series 1 and 2 (with English subtitles) are available on DVD and series 3 is in the making. Can't wait! (Jenny Baker)

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