Van has finished reading… The Mahogany Pod by Jill Hopper

There are times when you’re reading fiction – when it’s really good fiction – that you forget it’s fiction. It doesn’t matter what the genre is, there’s a strange sense of delight as all these possibilities unfold and you start to wonder, and perhaps even hope you know where the story is going to go. Characters you root for will get their due, and those you hate will get theirs too. Come the last page almost everything will be neat and tidy, though one or two questions may continue to tantalise, and a sense of satisfaction will abound. Jill Hopper’s The Mahogany Pod is the first memoir I’ve read where I had to keep reminding myself that this isn’t fiction, that there is no plot, that these are things that really did happen.

If Jill Hopper’s The Mahogany Pod were a novel it would be a quiet one. Astutely titled to pique your expectation of that last page, keenly structured to keep you glued to the plot and invested in the timelines, and finely written to open up all the sense and emotion of the journey you’re about to go on. And perhaps there’s a good object lesson for the novelist in Jill Hopper’s approach to the people involved in the events she recounts. There are no layers of description, or starkly drawn idiosyncrasies to bog the reader down, no heavy character building to make each person more visible or understandable. Instead there are people interacting and reacting, saying and doing things in that consistent way people do so we build that opinion of them naturally.

At heart this is a very personal story, as you would expect. It is unequivocally brutal at times, and also beautiful. It’s uplifting in a way, too, and I think that’s down to the personalities involved. It’s what we feel, I think, that imprints more strongly than what we say or see or do. And what we feel is never the same as what other people feel, even when the words we choose to express that are the same.

The Mahogany Pod was published by Saraband in February 2021 ISBN:9781912235933

You can find Jill on Twitter @JillHopper1

My thanks to Bex at #IndieBookNetwork for allowing me to review this book

Van has finished reading…The Prophets by Robert Jones Jnr

Since their first meeting as children on Empty, a plantation in the American South, Isaiah and Samuel have been inseparable. Working together in the barn, they tended the animals and tended each other, growing into young men, negotiating the rituals and retributions of slave life with each as the other’s pole star. In the life of a slave everything is a commodity, and when fellow slave Amos sees a means to secure the object of his desire by preaching the master’s Gospel, Isaiah and Samuel’s love becomes a source of danger for everyone.

Blessed be the quiet ones. Even when those quiet ones have no business being quiet at all, when there’s such a fire raging in their pages your neighbours should be able to hear you reading through the walls. This is Robert Jones Jnr’s The Prophets: quiet and tender and brutal and glorious and you really, really, really have to read it.

I guess it’s hard not to read any story about slavery in relation to other stories about slavery you’ve read. One of the things I really enjoyed about Robert Jones Jnr’s The Prophets is that it’s a love story, and it very much feels like it’s a love story before it’s a story about slavery. For me, it’s the way Isaiah and Samuel revolve around each other. It’s so acutely drawn, so vivid that you could pick them up and put them in a factory in the twenties, or an office in the nineties or anywhere at any time and the magic of them would ripple out and ruffle the world around them. It’s a little like a love letter to love, too. Robert Jones Jnr seems to revel in the possibilities of that transformative power without shying away from any of the consequences of their particular situation. The author is astute regarding what love looks like, and what looks like love but is not, bringing eloquence to what uplifts, and what degrades. Like any moment of love in effect, it makes you want to pick them up and keep them safe from everything. Of course, that can never happen, and those consequences will have their day.

The characterisation is sublime, driving action and reaction across enslaved and owners alike. Even the plantation takes on an air of mutability according to the eyes it’s seen through. It’s the tensions between the slaves of Empty that really bring the characters and the novel to life. Robert Jones Jnr’s grip on all the intertwining character arcs is tight and precise, and as a reader there’s nothing like watching on as each one reasons through what’s tradeable against their claim to some semblance of joy or comfort. There’s a powerful underlining of identity too, a very deliberate focus on what’s been stolen in that brutal separation from the homeland, on what’s half-remembered and what’s lost to time. There’s a fine line between what’s clung to and what’s idealised or invented, but there’s no doubting the strength of ‘the circle’ and their stating that what they recall is ‘in the blood’.

What I did find really interesting with Robert Jones Jr’s The Prophets is how I found myself considering the impact of slavery today, how that wilful dehumanising of black people shaped attitudes, and how that shaped commerce, and how that shaped legislation, and how that’s a bell that tolls and tolls and tolls through generations so that albeit I grew up a working class kid my chances were still mine, and those chances were different to those afforded to many of the working class kids growing up around me. I don’t recall any other slavery novel I’ve read prompting such a specific line of focus in me up to the present day.

Robert Jones Jnr’s The Prophets is a captivating read. Joyous, exuberant and unexpected, relentless and devastating, it’s a very human story that connects the before with the now and the soon to come. Put on your TBR pile, right at the top.

The Prophets was published by riverrun on 5^th January 2021 ISBN:9781529405705

You can find Robert Jones Jnr on Twitter @sonofbaldwin

My especial thanks to Elizabeth Masters at Riverrun for allowing me to review this exceptional book.

Van has read Sugar And Snails by Anne Goodwin

I first read Anne Goodwin’s Sugar And Snails nearly six years ago, and it has lingered in my consciousness ever since. A lot has changed in those six years, and a lot hasn’t but what I can guarantee you is that all the things I said about it when I reviewed it are still true today.

But here’s something new. You can get to read it FOR FREE in February 2021! All you need to do is subscribe on Anne’s page, HERE.

Oh, my! Where to begin? Perhaps I should start simply: READ THIS BOOK!

Diana’s boyfriend, Simon, is leaving for Cairo in the morning. Their evening hasn’t gone according to plan. As he leaves Simon pleads with her to talk about it but Diana is compelled to open old wounds in private. What is it in Diana’s life that keeps her from the intimacy she craves? And what happened to Diana in Cairo at the age of fifteen that could prevent her from even travelling abroad for the next thirty years of her life?

In psychology lecturer Dr Diana Dodsworth, Anne Goodwin presents us with a remarkable protagonist. Anne leads us expertly through Diana’s dilemma, from the terror of her own day-to-day indecision to the memories and reminiscences of the past that shaped the person she is today. As a character she’s hard to stay close to, though that’s no criticism. That’s just Diana! At times you might want to shake her, as frustrated with her as she is with herself, but make no mistake you’ll be rooting for her by the end.

There’s some very neatly laid foreshadowing too. Entirely unobtrusive when you first meet it, there comes that moment when you think, Oh, really? I wonder!

It’s a very touching story, not least I think because Anne Goodwin doesn’t allow Diana to feel sorry for herself. There’s little sympathy in there, and when it does rear its head Diana’s response feels wholly characteristic. The family interaction is perfect and presented through the prism of Diana’s view, often very moving without the taint of sentimentality.

Oh, and the title – not out-and-out strange or eye-catching, but almost ordinary enough to make you wonder – is spot on.

We’re encouraged to sometimes read outside of our comfort zone, which always strikes me as an interesting thing to say. Fiction, after all, is fiction. What can it ‘do’ to us that we should have a sense of a line that it is somehow daring to cross? This book has brought me to a different understanding of that phrase. A book well-written is to an extent a life experienced. If it gets you under the skin of its characters you can come out the other side in some small way changed. The way it does this is by making us think, making us question. There are likely millions of us who think we’re pretty well-rounded, fairly okay people with a healthy respect for other people’s beliefs, thoughts, feelings, proclivities. But how much of that is a barrier to actually understanding something of those beliefs, thoughts etc? This book did more than bring me subjects on which I have little or no direct experience. It made me think about them, made me question them. What if I…what would I…And if someone I knew, how would I…? This makes it more than just a good book. It makes it an important book.

I both did and didn’t find this an easy read. It was easy in the sense that it’s well put together, that the language and the voices and the characters fit or clash where they should. I could meet Diana Dodsworth in the street and it wouldn’t surprise me to discover she’s an actual living person (I’d love to know what Anne Goodwin’s response will be when one of those people who says, ‘is it autobiographical, then?’ turns up!). It was easy in the sense that it drew me into a life I have no experience of. It wasn’t easy in the best possible way because after each time I sat down to read some I went away with questions. It wasn’t easy because it held a mirror up to my own prepared responses. Honestly, it asked, what would you really do?

I feel honoured to have been able to review this book and more than inviting you to pick it up for yourself, I urge you to do so. It really is worth it.

Sugar And Snails by Anne Goodwin is published by Inspired Quill on 23 July 2015

ISBN 9781908600479 or for Kindle here

You can find Anne on Twitter @Annecdotist, at her website annegoodwin.weebly.com and on her You-Tube channel: Anne Goodwin’s YouTube channel

Van has finished reading… The Book Of Night Women by Marlon James

The voice is everything in Marlon James’s The Book Of Night Women. It weaves a particular kind of magic, unfolding a tale of brutality and degradation with lyrical precision, laying bare the intricate hierarchy of island life, and tricking you into waiting far longer than you normally would before questioning exactly who it is that’s telling the tale. It’s not quite contemporary, but its rhythms are perfect, a voice so sure I could nonetheless hear those island vowels as I read.

Women are at the heart of Marlon James’s story, and not only those of the title. The mistresses of the estates are as invested in events as the slaves who wait on them. It’s a rare occurrence indeed to discover it’s the men, and particularly the men in power, who are the ones fulfilling a role, reacting to rather than driving things on. Miss Isobel is particularly striking, a considerable distance from sympathetic, let alone likeable, and yet there’s an understanding of her drive to rise above her circumstances, to secure her future. Best not to talk about her methods though! As for the Night Women – slaves linked by more than the dark purpose they meet in the dead of night to discuss – Lilith and Homer are our main touchstones (and you’ve got to appreciate the well-chosen names). In taking Lilith under her wing, Homer is the perfect mirror, the perfect prophecy of a future that Lilith must kick against. And kick she will. With superstition and whispers of black magic rife among the slaves, Lilith’s green eyes set her apart and Lilith, still only a child, is all too ready to believe it. As if there’s not enough crammed into those pages already, you can throw a little coming-of-age into the mix too.

Though Marlon James’s The Book Of Night Women is a historical novel there’s much in these pages that feels all too prescient. An ideal of beauty still leans toward light skin and European features across most mainstream media. In the UK deprivation is a word that knows no ethnic boundary, but clings to BAME communities most vehemently. Visibility for people of colour continues to be an issue as the status quo begins to shift, and the inevitable push-back from the privileged begins. And then there’s the litany of flashpoints, the tumble of names that precede the moment when just one more tips the balance and the invisible can be individuals no more. George Floyd’s name echoes around the world, yet so little changes. For all the atrocities you’ll find in the pages of Marlon James’s The Book Of Night Women – or Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge, or Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black, or Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad – perhaps this is the biggest atrocity of them all: that as white people we still can’t see that racism isn’t anybody’s problem but ours.

The Book Of Night Women was published by Oneworld in 2009 ISBN:9781780746524

You can find Marlon on Twitter @MarlonJames5 or on his website marlonjameswriter.com

My particular thanks to my lovely neighbour, who lent me her copy to read.

Van has finished reading… Old Bones by Helen Kitson

Blessed be the quiet ones. None of your brash crash-bang and razzmatazz, they stoke the fire, plump up the cushions and bring the perfect cup of tea, and you don’t even realise that you’re here now and there is absolutely no way you’re leaving until you’ve turned the last page. Such is the stuff of Helen Kitson’s second novel, Old Bones.

We’re back to the village of Morevale in Shropshire (the setting of Helen Kitson’s debut novel, The Last Words Of Madeleine Anderson), where human remains have been discovered in the nearby quarry, and the lives of three older women are put under the microscope. Having grown up in the village, spinster sisters Diana and Antonia – now sharing their late mother’s house – and librarian Naomi have a shared history. Old animosities resurface, fracturing the peaceful façade of their lives and fuelling the pressure-cooker environment that is village life.

Humour abounds in the early chapters. Beryl-Bainbridge-dry and razor sharp, it feels in the best tradition of wry British humour that is funny until you suddenly realise it’s really not because it’s all too close and all too true. What’s not said is just as important as what is and I could see Old Bones adapted for the stage or the screen, where it’s all about the facial expressions, the hunching of a shoulder, the turning of a back. The writing is precise and unadorned, shifting effortlessly between voices so it’s the characters that really make the story fly. They’re brittle and flinty, brave and defiant, bruised and so very human. It feels as though the author really gets under the skin of her protagonists, so you’re there with every twist of guilt, every stab of envy, all the uncomfortable messiness a person can muster. Perhaps it’s not right to say they’re lovable characters, there’s more to it than that, but you will feel for each of them at some point, and one more than the others, depending on your own proclivities.

Helen Kitson’s Old Bones is a gloriously quiet novel. Thoughtful and honest, it will draw you gently in, it will peel away your defences and then it will lay a tenderness on you that will leave you wanting more.

Old Bones is published by Louise Walters Books on 18^th January 2021 (though early copies are available in November) ISBN:9781916112339

You can find Helen on Twitter @Jemima_Mae_7

My thanks to Louise at Louise Walters Books for allowing me to review this lovely book.

Van has finished reading… Fragile Monsters by Catherine Menon

Mary is a difficult grandmother for Durga to love, sharp-tongued, ferocious and with more demons than there are lines on her palms. When Durga visits her in rural Malaysia she only wants to endure Mary, and the dark memories home brings, for as long as it takes to escape. But a reckoning is coming. Stuck together in the rising heat, both women must untangle the truth from the myth of their past. What happened to Durga’s mother after she gave birth? Why did so many of their family members disappear during the war? And who is to blame for the childhood tragedy that haunts her to this day?

You know that tingle you get from a really good book, that hunching of anticipation, that comforting hug of language – welcome to your new favourite read! Catherine Menon’s Fragile Monsters is all the superlatives you could wish for.

The characters are fabulous. There’s no dead weight here, no passengers along for the ride. Everyone you meet is fully formed and woven inextricably into events. Some books have characters you’ll love and characters you’ll hate and Catherine Menon’s Fragile Monsters is no different (I’d taken against someone by page 8, and they only appeared on page 6) but there’s something deeper here. With the protagonists particularly, Ammuma and Durga are there to love in a way that’s as complicated, as messy, as vital as love is. They’re people. There is no higher praise than that.

  But let me tell you about the writing. The writing is glorious. The story unfolds in chapters more-or-less alternating between past and present and the subtle shifts in voice are sublime. There’s a real sense of the fabulous weaving through the book (especially in those past chapters), something that reminded me of Salman Rushdie with its blending of history and reality into folklore. And there’s a truly lovely pivot with chapter 8, by which time you think you’ve got a good handle on the bones of the thing, until the author neatly fillets your theory. By the time you reach the end of the book (and oh, what a gallop of closing chapters!) you’ll be wondering if you’ve come out with anything you can know for sure. And I can’t tell you how many times a sentence brought a smile to my face. Lots of instances of The Harvey Effect, and I think we may even be considering The Atkinson Experience.

Book clubs and reading groups are going to love Catherine Menon’s Fragile Monsters. I’m hard pressed to think of a book that fits so much in without crumbling under the weight of it all but there’s skill and experience in the writing. Catherine Menon knows her craft (although Fragile Monsters is her debut novel, her short story collection, Subjunctive Moods is available from Dahlia Books). There’s family and history and folklore. There’s love and need and betrayal. There are ghosts and there are secrets and there’s even maths and you won’t feel an ounce of burden. The writing is vivid, the story gripping and the author never once gives anything away.

Catherine Menon’s Fragile Monsters is exquisite. Vivid, gripping and as quick as a lie, it will have you second-guessing all the way to the heart-wrenching end. This book needs to be on your to-be-read pile!

Fragile Monsters is published by Viking on the 7^th January 2021 ISBN:9780241439289

You can find Catherine on Twitter @cg_menon

My thanks to Catherine for allowing me to review this glorious book.

Van has finished reading… Faces In The Crowd by Feng Jicai (tranlsated by Olivia Milburn)

 

Feng Jicai’s Faces In The Crowd (translated by Olivia Milburn) is an interesting prospect. The book is subtitled ’36 extraordinary tales of Tianjin’, and the distinction is valid. What you find are not short stories, not finely crafted arcs of prose drawing the reader from inciting incident to enlightening conclusion, but rather character studies. It’s a tell-tale’s voice we hear, a local gossip giving us the inside edge about the people of the neighbourhood, past and present, who stand out. The experts in their field, be they doctors, actors, gangsters or pickpockets. And it’s life, too. There’s no neatness of an ending here. Things happen, both good and bad, and life moves on. Some get their just desserts, some don’t and everybody has a nickname, even if it is just ‘two-faced bastard’. There’s tragedy and comedy and it’s all as deep as a puddle. Even so, a puddle is still going to get your feet wet.

  Each of the tales is accompanied by a sketch made by the author, and these too form part of, and inform that feeling of looseness you wouldn’t expect in a finished story. With only a handful of tales it would be easy to pass this by, but over the course of the collection there’s a sense of accretion, a quiet realisation that in meeting these 36 characters we’ve come to understand something of the 37^th, of Tianjin itself.

Feng Jicai’s Faces In The Crowd (translated by Olivia Milburn) is a charming collection of tales. Each short enough that you can dip in and out, or settle down and stay a while in Tianjin’s teeming streets.

 

Faces In The Crowd was published by Sionist Books on the 2^nd November 2019 ISBN:9781838905019

 

My thanks to Bex at Ninja Book Box for allowing me to review this book

Van has finished reading… Dancers On The Shore by William Melvin Kelley

Is it the writer who, in describing so distinctly the particular shade of black a character’s skin is, thereby codifies it, or is it the reader? There is no mistaking the level of precision with which William Melvin Kelley (and indeed many other black writers – particularly, I think American black writers) describes this facet of his characters. As a reader do you examine it? There’s a lot of work gone into that description. Why make the effort if not to make the reader think, to make you notice. What is he telling us? Is it counter to received wisdom, or does it confirm what we’ve gleaned from elsewhere, heard by the wayside, somehow understood without realising?

  And here’s a touch of genius. In his preface to the short story collection Dancers On The Shore, William Melvin Kelley answers this for us, speaks of the fact that as a black writer he can’t avoid this happening. He tells us too that solutions are not his job, that asking questions is what a writer should do – ‘depict people, not symbols or ideas disguised as people’.

  That’s the preface. A handful of words before you’ve even turned to the first story. But tell me this, how on earth are you not going to see it now, on every single page.

  And what stories they are! From the first gut-punch of The Only Man On Liberty Street through to the bittersweet last of Cry For Me William Melvin Kelley is true to his word, laying out the lives of people as real as you and me. If you’ve not read Kelley’s A Different Drummer or A Drop Of Patience (where have you been!) do yourself a favour and get them on your TBR. You’ll meet characters from each of these novels in the stories in Dancers On The Shore, and will get to know the Dunsford family especially. Lives criss and cross through the various tales, gradually expanding the picture as they go, and for many of the characters ultimately leaving you wondering what the future has in store.

William Melvin Kelley’s Dancers On The Shore is a class act. Read it as a collection on its own or, better still, in conjunction with his novels, where each seems to enrich the others. And spread the word. Everyone should know how good a writer William Melvin Kelley was!

Dancers On The Shore was published by riverrun on 6^th August 2020 ISBN:9781787478053

My especial thanks to Ana McLaughlin at riverrun for allowing me to review this exceptional collection

Van has finished reading… The Revolt by Clara Dupont-Monod (translated by Ruth Diver)

In 1173, Eleanor Of Aquitaine instructs three of her sons to overthrow the King of England, Henry Plantagenet. Their father, her husband. When the unstoppable force meets the immovable object in an epic struggle for supremacy nobody will walk away unscathed.

Seen through the eyes of Richard The Lionheart, Clara Dupont-Monod’s The Revolt (translated by Ruth Diver) examines the life of Eleanor Of Aquitaine. Shrewd, wealthy and beautiful, Eleanor was admired, pursued, divorced from French and married to English royalty. In a world where loyalty is everything, where does it all go wrong? On whose side will her children stand?

 

The writing is a little more tell than the show you might be used to but that’s no criticism (and if ever there’s a story to convince you that rules are for other people it’s got to be Eleanor’s). This is after all a story being told, the style lends itself accordingly and informs that sense of hearing it all from someone in the know, from someone who was actually there.

It seems odd to talk about characterisation when you’re dealing with real people. If anything I would imagine it’s a bigger hill to climb than fiction. There will be people out there with very definite ideas on what Eleanor was really like! For someone with no definite idea I’m happy to say Clara Dupont-Monod’s The Revolt delivers. Although we’re seeing the world (mostly) through Richard’s eyes we get a deep and rounded sense not just of Eleanor and Richard but of all the main personalities in play.

For me the really interesting choice is that of perspective. Since the book is effectively Eleanor’s story, why tell it from her son’s standpoint? There are at least x good reasons for doing so. First and most obvious is that more people will recognise the name Richard The Lionheart than Eleanor Of Aquitaine. For those of us not steeped in history’s minutiae (yes, I count myself among that number) this gives us a frame of reference – albeit for some that might be a little skewed by Robin Hood. When you consider just how much influence Eleanor held it also underlines how patriarchal our view of history is (Eleanor who? Oh, Richard The Lionheart’s mum). How much attention has history really paid to so visible a woman? But there’s also a statement that threads oh so subtly through this premise too: how well do we really know the person behind the cult of personality? Seen through Richard’s eyes we get beyond the clamour for wealth and beauty, the dominions, the royal marriages. Through Richard we can glimpse the strategist, the politician, the adventurer, the warrior, the mother, the woman. In a time when the received wisdom is that women were effectively chattels, and a means to secure a son’s future here is a woman who understood power and influence. She denied all bonds and restrictions, was keenly aware of what was expected of her, and ruthlessly efficient at turning that expectation to her own ends. And when it comes down to it it’s not that she was prepared to defy a King that is so extraordinary, not that she was so coveted, loved, mistreated or marginalised. The thing that really sings in all this is that she was a woman in an archetypal man’s world, and she was better at it than all of them.

 

The Revolt was published by Quercus on the 6^th August 2020 ISBN:9781529402889

You can find Ruth Diver, who translated The Revolt, on Twitter @ruthldiver

My thanks to Corinna Zifko at Quercus for allowing me to review this book.

Van has finished reading… Latitudes Of Longing by Shubhangi Swarup

 

 

In 1948 on the far-flung post-partition Andaman Islands, botanist Girija Prasad is confronted with the unfamiliar terrain of married life. As he strives to understand his extraordinary bride who speaks to the trees he studies, he comes to learn too of the precarious geology of his beloved island home. Their happiness rests on a Faultline, and when change comes it is instant and devastating. Events will take us from islands to mainland, from sea to mountains through a chain reaction of people and places, each affecting the next, each of them searching, longing for something lost.

 

Shubhangi Swarup’s Latitudes Of Longing is a rare find indeed. An immersive read, the prose is lush and vivid, the trajectory original, the research evidently detailed, though very lightly worn. I come away with the impression the author could – indeed would – talk happily at length on the geology, history, botany or ethnography of this region. There is a palpable love of her subject that thrums in these pages where the world we live in is a much a character in the list of players as any of the people we meet along the way.

As you might expect from the title it’s a bit of a devastating read, though for all its heart-breaking moments there is something joyous about it. It’s something I find hard to pin down. It’s not that it’s uplifting as such, more that it’s persistent, that the joy is there to be found, that there are wonders in this life, if we only take the trouble to find them.

Of the four sections it’s the first, Girija and Chanda’s story, that really shines. Shubhangi Swarup seems to revel in her characters and the setting with lush and emotional writing. Past and present, fantastical and quotidian blend in a way I found reminiscent of Salman Rushdie as the author guides us through a truly epic sweep of history. For all it’s a human story we’re watching unfold, the landscape is always there and it’s in this that the prose finds its tremulous air. With the explosive backdrop of history as geography you never quite feel sure in your footing, disaster lurking a mere paragraph away.

 

Shubhangi Swarup’s Latitudes Of Longing is lush and lyrical, a heart-breaker and a joy-bringer. It’s a world – our world – to get lost in. Do yourself a favour and take the time.

 

Latitudes Of Longing was published by riverrun on the 19^th May 2020 ISBN:9781529405132

You can find Shubhangi on Twitter @shubhangisapien

 

My particular thanks to Ana McLaughlin for allowing me to review this lovely book.