Van has finished reading… The Nine Chambered Heart by Janice Pariat

Sorry, Janice. Some really nice writing but in the end it wasn’t for me.

Van has finished reading… Hurry Up And Wait by Isabel Ashdown

Sorry, Isabel. It’s not for me.

Van didn’t finish reading… A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride

Sorry, Eimear. It’s an amazing commitment to the form and I really, really wanted to like it.

Van has finished reading… Mr Doubler Begins Again by Seni Glaister

A connoisseur of the potato and its many applications, Mr Doubler doesn’t find people so easy to understand. Living a reclusive life, his farm, his potatoes and visits from his housekeeper, Mrs Millwood are all Mr Doubler needs to get by. So when Mrs Millwood doesn’t show one day, Mr Doubler’s routine, his work, his very way of life threatens to unravel. Can the kindness of strangers draw Mr Doubler out of his retreat?

Seni Glaister’s Mr Doubler Begins Again is a delight. From the very first page there’s humour. A character’s quirky name, and their manner of being that tells you straight away you’re going to find them funny, and probably a little heart-warming. But that catch in the breath, that febrile something in the flow of the words – no, there will not be plain sailing, no mere frivolity.

But there will be tea, and the tea will be perfect.

I suspect this may prove to be the author’s oeuvre: telling the tale simply, with charm and wit yet without the sentimentality; and it’s a little later, when you think back over what you’ve read that the seriousness of it emerges, that you see the application of it in your own interactions. Although it is a tale told simply, an eminently readable book, don’t imagine that makes it mere fluff. Its very readability is testament to the skill and work that’s gone into the writing. It all brings back lovely memories of Seni Glaister’s debut, The Museum Of Things Left Behind.

The author tackles the notions of friendship and family, of kindness and second chances, and particularly of what it is to be older and alone with delicacy. It won’t be the author wagging her finger at you but rather your own conscience when you ponder the odd opportunity missed here or there. And as for Mr Doubler himself, God help me I can’t help thinking that if that pedantic streak I have really takes root… He’s a gem of a character and I particularly like the swing of his moods, the deftness with which Seni Glaister portrays them. It’s that visual I found myself starting to think about who might play him if someone has the good sense to option it for TV! When he’s on his ground and in full flow he is a sight to behold indeed. The overall feeling these characters are like to leave you with is that you know people like them, or at the very least know of people like them, and if it’s the latter then the hope that springs from this book is that before too long you will know them.

You don’t need outlandish events, extravagant locations and larger-than-life characters to tell a good story. In Mr Doubler Begins Again Seni Glaister takes a wholeheartedly everyday-story, full of everyday-people, and tells it perfectly. I guarantee it will make you smile. It might even make you laugh out loud.

 

Mr Doubler Begins Again will be published by HQ on the 24^th January 2019 ISBN:9780008284985

You can find Seni on Twitter @SeniGlaister

My thanks to Seni for allowing me to review this book

Vanya Demalovich has finished reading… Two Cousins Of Azov by Andrea Bennett

How nice it is to be back in Azov. How nice to involve oneself in the everyday of post-soviet, pre-Putin Russia. The eagle-eyed among you might recognise a certain Mr Goryoun Tigranovich Papasyan, co-protagonist of Andrea Bennett’s latest instalment on life in Azov (can we hope this will one day bloom into a Barsetshire-sized chronicle?), as the neighbour whose absence lays the first steps of Galina Petrovna’s Three-Legged Dog Story.

Things are not going well for the Two Cousins Of Azov. The aforementioned Gor finds himself plagued by inexplicable events, while his cousin Tolya is at the local sanatorium with no idea how he got there, lost in folklore and memory. Dry, sceptical Gor and artistic, impressionable Tolya each seek a route into their past to try and unpick the mystery of the things that haunt them in the present. A vivid and varied cast attend to help or hinder the search, including an appearance from a character from Galina Petrovna’s Three-Legged Dog Story that will delight fans of Andrea Bennett’s debut. I particularly liked Albina. She is unmistakably and infuriatingly teenaged, but also wonderfully and heart-warmingly teenaged. And she lisps, which never fails to make Mrs Van smile when I read it to her.

The author’s eye for the comedic scene remains sharp as ever. There’s a dryness to the humour that certainly suits me, and sits very well with the characters. Not being overplayed, it also serves to set up those necessary moments of pathos well. These are characters to feel for and identify with, and while the distance between them and us, and now and then may be great, the beauty of the book is that their problems are not so different to our problems. These are things that could happen anywhere. Who knows, you might even know someone like them!

Andrea Bennett’s Two Cousins Of Azov is ideal for your holiday reading, and if you’ve not caught up with Galina Petrovna’s Three-Legged Dog Story, I encourage you to pick up both books. You can laugh, and maybe cry a bit too, and feel the welcome chill of autumn in Azov while you slowly cook in the sun!

 

Two Cousins Of Azov will be published on 13^th July 2017 by Borough Press ISBN:9780008159573

You can find Andrea on Twitter @Andreawiderword

My thanks to Ann Bissell at HarperCollins for allowing me to review this book.

Van didn’t finish reading…The Children’s Book by A S Byatt

Sorry, Dame Antonia. It’s really not you, it’s me. The writing was lovely but there was so much of it.

Van has finished reading… Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal

No need to bother with the bad sex awards this year. In Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows, Balli Kaur Jaswal has the winner! Okay, maybe that’s not the praise this review should begin with but it should give you a clue to how achingly funny this book is. Intentionally achingly funny. The biggest laughs are definitely to be found in the telling of the aforementioned erotic stories, in both situation and in the language of euphemism. There are certain phrases that will, I think, live with me for a long time (I’d love to list some here but to do that would be to take away the pleasure of finding them for yourself). I read this book to Mrs Van and there were times we had to simply wait for the crying to stop before we could carry on.

Of course the laughs are just one side of the story. There was sadness too, moments of anxiety and empathy, and not a small dose of out-and-out anger (it’s always a good sign when Mrs Van starts wishing bodily harm on someone). All the things you’d expect from a well-crafted, well-layered novel.

The characters are fantastic. Albeit the world of Asians living in England may be unknown to you, the level of detail Balli Kaur Jaswal provides is excellently pitched so the experience is immersive, rather than feeling like you’re looking in from the outside – even when characters are indeed looking in from the outside. The author picks apart the various relationships with subtlety to reveal what it is to be a part of this community, what it is to be excluded as well as included, and she is never shy of showing the negatives along with the positives.

One of the things I really enjoyed about this book is the way your attention focuses, the way it makes you look and then look again at the characters. Consider the title: Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows, and alongside the frisson of excitement the humour is apparent because, you know, old women. Dour old women, obviously, seeing as they’re widows. Except they’re not – neither all old nor all dour – and you realise that you’re starting to key into the essence of their invisibility. There is something inherently funny about the idea of old women misbehaving or doing things they shouldn’t be doing (see John Niven’s The Sunshine Cruise Company), but hang on. Who says they shouldn’t be doing these things? And why not? Let’s face it, they must have done these things – or at least something similar – for their children to be around to censure them. And if it was good why on earth wouldn’t you want to remember it fondly? And if it wasn’t, well, who could possibly begrudge you for dreaming of or imagining something better?

 

Top, middle or bottom, it really doesn’t matter where in your To Be Read pile you put Balli Kaur Jaswal’s Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows as long as it’s on there somewhere. Holiday reading would definitely be a good bet, though there’s no reason why you should wait that long. It’s funny, it’s racy, it’s emotional and uplifting and thought-provoking, and did I mention it’s funny? And racy? It deserves to be a huge hit. I mean HUGE. Big as an aubergine.

 

Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows is published by HarperCollins on the 9^th March 2017 ISBN: 9780008209889

 

You can find Balli on Twitter @balli_jaswal, or at her website ballijaswal.com.

 

With thanks to the HarperCollins PR team, who allowed me to review this book.

Van has finished reading…An Account Of The Decline Of The Great Auk, According To One W by Jessie Greengrass

While it’s catchy, the story that gives Jessie Greengrass’s debut collection its title, An Account Of The Decline Of The Great Auk, According To One Who Saw It isn’t really about great auks and their decline. Neither is the title fad-following or trying to be quirky when it’s not. Actually it captures a lot of what follows: a voice unfamiliar with addressing an audience; inadvertent comedy; bleakness. It’s a tale that leaks sadness the more it goes on and yet all the while, as the number of birds steadily falls it remains difficult to feel sorry for them. As difficult as it is to maintain a sense of eye contact with our narrator because deep down we both know… And then there it is in the close.

That sense of bleakness, of isolation and anaesthesia infects the whole collection so that the idea of a happy ending seems more illogical than unachievable. And yet, in The Comfort Of The Dead and Scropton, Sudbury, Marchington, Uttoxeter, there is a sense of something approaching that – at least a sense of a circle squared.

If all this gives you the jitters fear not. As with all good short stories, Jessie’s collection is apt to make you think and feel. What ultimately comes through is that we are seeing, perhaps even confronting aspects of ourselves that may well be latent but are most assuredly inherent.

On the first reading my favourite story is Winter 2058. It’s the fifth story in the collection and at first feels like a step-change. The opening is more familiar in its approach, less internalised than the voices of the previous stories, and then the growing sense that this one might be something akin to science fiction. It utterly sucked me in. Of course good science fiction, like any other genre, is still about who we are and how we live. Winter 2058 is no different. What I enjoyed most about this story is the way the tension builds. What’s revealed about what’s going on and what isn’t, and the overriding sense of unease by the time I reached the last word. Read it on a train and then look around the carriage at all the other passengers…

An Account Of The Decline Of The Great Auk, According To One Who Saw It isn’t a light-hearted, feel-good read. Albeit it’s not a long collection (I read it in a few hours and I’m a sow reader) it will make you think, and it’ll leave you time to go back and look again. We should all make time for a short story collection and for my part, Jessie Greengrass’s debut is well worth making the time for.

 

An Account Of the Decline Of The Great Auk, According To One Who Saw It was published by JM Originals in 2015 and comes out in paperback on 23^rd March 2017 ISBN:9781473652040

You can find Jessie on Twitter @JessGreengrass

My thanks to Ruby Mitchell at Hodder for allowing me to review this book.

Van has finished reading…The Keeper Of Lost Things by Ruth Hogan

For all the sadness that wreathes Ruth Hogan’s The Keeper Of Lost Things, it seems to me to be a very happy book. It’s the kind of book we could really do with at the moment, given the current dizzying tilt of global politics. It’s a book to lose yourself in, and of course therein find yourself again. It’s not a surprising book in terms of staggering twists or unexpected trajectory, though there are small revelations aplenty. Being a fan of untidy endings, of mysteries left you might be surprised to hear me say that this one ended up exactly where I expected it to, and when I got there I could think of no more fitting conclusion. In fact, I’d have been disappointed if it had veered.

While it might not be a book to make you view the world entire in a new way, it may well prod you to linger at the small things a little more, to examine the whys and the wherefores of how things have arrived at your door. It’s a clever device Ruth Hogan uses, to touch on the million little back-stories that cross our paths each day, and an even smarter device she uses to allow us as readers in on the veracity of those stories. Here’s where we get to the real magic of this book: the characters are excellent (there is one, in particular who I think will steal the show for many readers), and the humour is flawlessly pitched. It’s the kind of humour that ambushes you, not overt or brash or flashy but, much like the book, quiet and steady and rather irresistible. The sly digs at the literary world are particularly good, not because there’s anything sour-grapes about them but because they recognise entirely the truth that rests on both sides of the coin. And as for the memorial finale, well let’s just say I’m looking forward to someone commissioning this book for television. That’ll be a show-stopper and no mistake!

If you’re looking for something uplifting to read, something that might well make you cry, will definitely make you laugh, and will leave feeling decidedly warm and glowy then Ruth Hogan’s The Keeper Of Lost Things should be on your reading list.

The Keeper Of Lost Things is published by Two Roads on 26^th January 2017 ISBN:9781473635463

You can find Ruth on Twitter @ruthmariehogan and at Instagram.com/ruthmariehogan

My thanks to Emma Petfield at John Murray Press for allowing me to review this book.

Van didn’t finish reading…Lie With Me by Sabine Durrant

Sorry, Sabine