The Binding: Bridget Collins

Leave a comment

★★★★

Colleagues at work have just set up a book club, which is an exciting development, especially because they’ve picked out some really interesting titles. The first meeting I’m able to make is devoted to The Binding, which I devoured yesterday during a long flight and which turned out to have a delicious mixture of flavours: historical fiction, fantasy, mystery and romance, all wrapped up in evocative prose. We follow Emmett Farmer, a young man who is recovering from a serious illness that has wiped out most of his summer. He’s just beginning to regain his strength when a troubling letter arrives for his parents. The binder has asked for him to be her apprentice. Emmett doesn’t understand why an old woman, shunned for her unspeakable craft and regarded with fear, could possibly want his help; but nor does he understand the new undertones of suspicion with which his family regard him. What happened during his illness? And why, when he reaches the binder’s lonely home, in the middle of the marshes, does he feel so sickened by certain rooms? Can Seredith, the binder, his new teacher, harness what she believes to be his deep natural talent? And what exactly does a binder do, anyway?

Continue reading →

Elizabeth is Missing: Emma Healey

Leave a comment

★★★★

This book had been sitting unread on my Kindle since August 2018, but I sought it out just before Christmas. I wanted to read it before watching the celebrated but very raw TV adaptation, with Glenda Jackson on splendid form in the lead role. Maud is an elderly woman, fiercely independent even though her world is becoming increasingly confusing. Her social life centres on visiting her best friend Elizabeth but, for some reason, Elizabeth doesn’t answer the door now when Maud goes to call. Where is she? Maud is determined to find out, and is baffled when her daughter Helen doesn’t seem to understand the urgency. As Maud turns detective, her mind begins to slip between past and present with ever-increasing frequency, for Elizabeth isn’t the only one who has disappeared. Maud’s present sense of loss echoes her distress when her elder sister Sukey disappeared back in the late 1940s, one mystery spilling into the next. But can any mystery be solved when you can’t even keep the days straight in your mind?

Continue reading →

Once Upon a River: Diane Setterfield

Leave a comment

★★★★½

Stories are like rivers. They have sources and meanders, tributaries and backwaters, and often they change along their length, swelling from modest little stream to raging torrent. The regulars of The Swan inn at Radcot, on the banks of the Thames, are famous for the stories they weave as the great river flows past their door, but none of them has yet come up with a tale as strange as the one that unfolds in their very own inn on one dark night. It’s solstice night in the depths of winter, and a half-drowned, bleeding man staggers through the inn’s door carrying a drowned child in his arms. The man needs care; the child, all assume, is dead. But when the local healer Rita goes to prepare the child’s corpse in the outhouse, she discovers to her shock that the little girl is alive. Silent; enigmatic; self-contained. But breathing. The resurrection of this strange child immediately makes The Swan famous – such stories there are to tell, now! – but it also stirs up old griefs, losses and desires. Who is the child? And who will claim her? This is my favourite of Setterfield’s books so far: a deliciously eerie fable which blurs the line between reality and myth, and suggests that stories might – just might – come true.

Continue reading →

Blackwing: Ed McDonald

Leave a comment

★★★½

The Raven’s Mark: Book 1

You want grimdark? You got it! In this debut novel, the first part of a trilogy (all of which has now been published), McDonald throws us deep into a frontier steampunk world struggling to defend itself against the forces of darkness. Our protagonist is Ryhalt Galharrow who, as far as most people know, makes his living seeking out those fugitives and thieves desperate enough to flee into the Misery – a blighted wasteland surrounding the city of Valengrad. But Ryhalt has another set of obligations. He bears a tattoo of a black bird, marking him out as Blackwing: sworn to the service of Crowfoot, one of the Nameless (ancient sorcerers whose great power was once all that stood between the Republic and the Deep Kings). But the Nameless’s power is fading and the drudge, the Deep Kings’ undead armies, are growing stronger. All is not well: Ryhalt doesn’t need a tattoo to tell him that. But it isn’t until his past returns to haunt him, in the person of the irritating scholar Ezabeth Tanza, that Ryhalt realises exactly how wrong things are.

Continue reading →

Affections: Rodrigo Hasbún

Leave a comment

★★★

Desire to read more widely in 2020 brought me to this novel by the young Bolivian author Rodrigo Hasbún, published in a translation by Sophie Hughes by Pushkin Press. Family saga meets political history in this turbulent story of three German-Bolivian sisters, their complex relationship with their father, and their growth to maturity in the violent years of the 1960s and 1970s. My knowledge of South American history at this period is embarrassingly patchy, despite an early teenage flirtation with Che Guevara, and so I learned a great deal from Hasbún’s book in that respect (more, as it turned out, than I realised!). As a novel, however, it feels strangely restrained – told through vignettes, there is much left unsaid and it feels more like flicking through a family photo album than a real chance to get to know these three very different women.

Continue reading →

The Last Wish: Andrzej Sapkowski

Leave a comment

★★★½

The Witcher: Book 1

Everything has suddenly become much clearer. Boys and girls, don’t follow my example and start with the earliest date of publication in the Witcher series. The Last Wish is definitely the place to start and I now have answers to several of the questions that were troubling me at the end of Sword of Destiny. That’s not to say that everything will be laid out nice and neatly: The Last Wish, like Sword of Destiny, is a collection of six short stories and these dart around chronologically within the story of our hero Geralt. They are all bound together, however, by parts of a seventh story, taking place in the ‘present day’ – although the ‘present day’ sits somewhere between the timelines of the stories ‘Sword of Destiny’ and ‘Something More’ from the collection Sword of Destiny. It’s all a little bit confusing, but worth the effort: to my relief, one of the stories in The Last Wish even links in with the first episode of the Netflix TV series. And, while these stories aren’t as light-hearted as those in Sword of Destiny, Sapkowski still has a lot of irreverent fun undermining some of the most cherished fairy tales in the European canon.

Continue reading →

Sword of Destiny: Andrzej Sapkowski

Leave a comment

★★★★

The Witcher: Book 3*

We’d finished Game of Thrones and Stranger Things and needed a new series to get our teeth into, so I suggested The Witcher on Netflix. I’d bought the Witcher books by Andrzej Sapkowski back in the autumn, when the Kindle versions were on sale and, though I hadn’t yet read any of them, I was intrigued to see what the series was like. The result was an hour of complete bafflement, with both of us trying to get a handle on this new world while also remembering the names of a dizzying number of characters. We haven’t yet moved on to the next episode, but I decided that I needed to do some preparation first. Although Sword of Destiny isn’t the first book in terms of the series’s inner chronology, it was the first to be published, and I hoped this collection of six short stories would give me a better understanding of the context. As it happens, there’s only the very slightest crossover, but the stories turned out to be an unexpected joy. Far funnier than the TV show, they were the perfect way to whet my appetite before plunging deeper into this engaging world of old-school sword-and-sorcery.

*Opinion seems to differ on the reading order, but this seems the most common.

Continue reading →

The Man on the Middle Floor: Elizabeth S. Moore

Leave a comment

★★★½

If Standard Deviation showed us a picture of a modern family dealing with autism in a compassionate, caring and progressive way, The Man on the Middle Floor offers a picture of what can happen when people don’t get the support they need. We zoom in on Kilburn, North London, where three people share a converted Victorian house. They live the typical atomised lives of Londoners, who are often strangers even to their neighbours. On the ground floor there’s Tam, invalided out of his beloved police force by a bullet to the leg and taking (far too much) solace from his local pub. Upstairs there’s Nick, determined to succeed at the challenge of living alone despite his Asperger’s. Finally, on the top floor, there’s Karen: specialist in autism, devoted to her work at the expense of her family, certain that her next article will finally bring her the recognition she deserves. Three lives, about to be linked in the most unexpected way.

Continue reading →

Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies’ Delight): Émile Zola

Leave a comment

★★★★

Les Rougon-Macquart: Book 11

My first book of 2020 was Au Bonheur des Dames or The Ladies’ Delight, part of Zola’s sweeping Rougon-Macquart cycle, which explores various facets of 19th-century French life. This is the first time I’ve read Zola and I wondered whether it would matter that I was leaping right in at Book 11 of the series, but in fact Au Bonheur des Dames works perfectly as a standalone novel. No doubt I would have recognised certain characters if I’d read the other books, and I may have known a little more background about Octave Mouret, but I didn’t feel that I was missing out. I chose to start here because it’s supposed to be one of Zola’s more upbeat and cheerful novels – perfect for the start of a new year – and it was rather fitting for January, in that it focuses on the rise and development of a great department store. Zola writes of ‘the continuous purring of a machine at work, the customers shovelled in, heaped in front of the displays and dazzled by the goods, before being hurled against the cash desks‘. Well, in last week’s sales I was one of those being hurled, and so it added an extra level of interest and amusement to hear about how such great shops came into being. A fascinating story of a time of frenzied change.

Continue reading →

Love Without End: Melvyn Bragg

1 Comment

★★½

A few days ago, Helen reviewed Love Without End, which reminded me that I’d read a galley of this novel back in August and had, embarrassingly, failed to do anything about it. I’d been attracted to the book by its story of Abelard and Heloise, the brilliant medieval scholars whose love story captivated me at university and who have never quite released their hold on me. Bragg’s novel, however, is not straightforward historical fiction, as it weaves another story in and out of the past, entwining Abelard and Heloise’s story with that of the modern writer Arthur. He (we’re told) is the author of the historical chapters that we read and, in the modern chapters, we’re invited to follow his progress as he wanders through Paris, having long lunches and intellectual conversations with his daughter Julia. The major difficulty that Bragg faces with the book is that intellect is prized over humanity, which may mean that we get closer to what Abelard and Heloise actually believed, but robs the reader of any chance of truly engaging with them.

Continue reading →