The Night Brother (2017): Rosie Garland

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★★★½

Edie and her brother Herbert, nicknamed Gnome, do everything together. As children, growing up above their mother’s pub in late 19th-century Manchester, they roam the streets by night, sneaking into firework shows and exploring their town. But, as the years go on, Edie begins to resent Gnome. Every night he drags her out, forcing her to be more daring and naughtier than she wants to be. By day she’s left empty and ragged. And the worst thing is that Ma and Nan tell her Gnome doesn’t even exist. But he does. He comes every night, regular as clockwork, and Edie begins to dream of ways to control him…

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The Underground Girls of Kabul (2014): Jenny Nordberg

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© Magnus Forsberg

★★★★½

The Hidden Lives of Afghan Girls Disguised as Boys

Necessity is the mother of invention. That’s the message of this astonishing work by the Swedish journalist Jenny Nordberg, who worked with women in and around Kabul in Afghanistan between 2009 and 2011. When she was told, discreetly, that a contact’s six-year-old son was actually a cross-dressed girl, Nordberg discovered that this was merely the tip of an iceberg. Her enquiries led her to unearth an open secret in Afghan society: an entire social practice, hitherto  unreported in the wider world, of bacha posh, literally meaning ‘dressed as a boy’. Mixing biography, psychology and anthropology, this is a deeply illuminating journey into the social constructs of an unfamiliar world.

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Wadjda (2012)

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Wadjda

★★★★

Wadjda is ten years old. She likes sneakers, rock music and making mix tapes for her friends. She sings pop songs with her mum when they’re washing up and wonders why her dad doesn’t spend more time at home. She makes friendship bracelets to sell at school, and dreams of saving up to buy the green bike in the toy shop down the road. In many ways, she’s just like any little girl you know.

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The President’s Gardens (2012): Muhsin Al-Ramli

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★★★★

For many of us, Iraq as an entity is summed up by the images of air strikes on the news and by the rhetoric of politicians and military leaders. It is a place that for all my life has seemed profoundly ‘other’: my earliest memories of seeing war on television are of the Gulf War, when I was five years old. So I came to this book with curiosity, hoping to learn more about the people who have suffered such an existence. Written by the expatriate Iraqi author Muhsin Al-Ramli, it’s a haunting, often horrific tale of three close friends in a rural community, whose lives intersect with the tragedy and chaos of their country.

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The Eagle Huntress (2016)

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Aisholpan and her eagle

★★★★★

Many of the films and books tackled as part of my ‘wider world awareness’ project have thrown a pretty grim light on being a woman in other cultures, so I was thrilled to find this magnificent documentary about a very feisty 13-year-old girl in Mongolia. Aisholpan has grown up in a nomadic tradition where the grown men of a family hunt with golden eagles in order to feed their families. Her beloved father and grandfather are both celebrated hunters and she has longed to join them since she was a little girl. There’s just one problem. Female eagle hunters aren’t exactly common, let alone when they’re barely into their teens. And so Aisholpan and her father set out to prove, to the Mongolian eagle-hunting community, that anything a man can do, a girl can match.

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The Bone Thief (2012): V.M. Whitworth

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★★★

Wulfgar: Book I

I seem to be drawn to early medieval historical fiction at the moment. The Bone Thief has been floating on the edge of my awareness for a while so, when I spotted it at the library the other day, I decided it was time to find out more about it. Happily, it turned out to offer a useful sequel both to the tale of (St) Oswald told in the novels of Edoardo Albert, and to the story of Alfred’s struggle against the Danes, as narrated by Bernard Cornwell in the Uhtred novels. It’s a perfectly engaging adventure story, even if I couldn’t escape the niggling feeling that the characters never quite come to life.

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The Beautiful Bureaucrat (2015): Helen Phillips

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★★★

Helen Phillips’s novel is a curious blend of existentialist thriller, dystopian sci-fi and morality fable, which nevertheless has its roots firmly in the present. Our protagonists, Josephine and Joseph, are a newly-married couple suffering all the problems of modern youth: a sluggish job market; debts; a lack of self-confidence; and a life that seems to be on hold. Desperate to take charge of things, they move into a series of squalid sublets while they hunt for work. And yet, when they do both find jobs, something begins to prey on Josephine’s mind. Something, in this long, hot summer, just isn’t quite right.

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The Silver Pigs (1989): Lindsey Davis

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★★★

Marcus Didius Falco: Book I

Falco and I have been waiting for a long time to get to know each other. Now, as I come to the end of my review copies (just three to go before I have a clean slate!), I’ve decided to treat myself to an introduction to everyone’s favourite Roman sleuth. As you’ll have noticed, I tend to avoid historical mysteries, simply because they’ve become so much of a cliché in recent years; but I’m willing to make exceptions for Falco and for Cadfael, both of whom were in on the act before it became a bandwagon. Thanks to Master and God, I already knew that I loved Lindsey Davis’s writing style. This first Falco novel isn’t as polished as her more recent work, but it was heaps of fun and I’m eager to carry on.

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Lawrence Zazzo: Weeping Philosophers

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Lawrence Zazzo

(BBC Radio 3 Lunchtime Concert, at the Wigmore Hall, 1 May 2017)

I’ve been waiting for two-and-a-half years to see Lawrence Zazzo in the flesh. In the first flush of my Baroque obsession, back in October 2014, I bought his album A Royal Trio and fell in love with his rendition of Handel’s Va tacito e nascosto. Ever since, I’ve longed to see him live and finally got my wish in this BBC Radio 3 Lunchtime Concert at the Wigmore Hall. Languishing in the realms of the early Baroque, this recital presented a cornucopia of lute-songs and cantatas by Caccini, Frescobaldi, Strozzi and Durante. Zazzo was accompanied by three gifted musicians: Silas Wollston on organ and harpsichord; Daniele Caminiti on archlute and baroque guitar; and Jonathan Rees on bass viol and viola da gamba. By heaven, it was worth the wait.

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The Willow King (2012): Meelis Friedenthal

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★★★½

The Birds of the Muses

Originally published in Estonian as Mesilased (The Bees), this novel was awarded the 2013 European Union Prize for Literature and is now presented in an English translation by Matthew Hyde. Dense and allusive, it evokes the philosophical world of the late 17th century through the story of Laurentius Hylas, a young student who comes to study at the university of Dorpat (modern Tartu). I can’t say that I enjoyed the book, which is intellectually rigorous and unrelentingly bleak – but I did appreciate Friedenthal’s ability to capture the contradictions of the early modern mind.

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