Tag: contemporary fiction

Bite-Sized Fiction

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Bite-Sized Books

I’m thoroughly enjoying this bite-sized books theme. It’s given me the chance to leap in at the deep end with all sorts of books, offering a taster of different genres or themes that might lead on to new explorations, but which don’t require too much investment of time or money. So here’s a further selection of stories to see you through commutes or short journeys. They include tales by some of the great names of modern literature, several of whom I hadn’t encountered before, namely William Trevor, Anita Brookner (shameful, I know), and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. From works of searing feminism to bittersweet studies of modern life and reworked fairy stories, there’s something here for everyone.

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The Two Houses (2018): Fran Cooper

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★★★★

When I discovered a copy of Fran Cooper’s new novel the other week, I couldn’t believe my luck. You might remember that I thoroughly enjoyed her debut, These Dividing Walls, a compassionate story of tensions within the walls of a Parisian apartment block. Her new novel is of a different stripe: a tale of Londoners Jay and Simon, whose dream holiday home in Yorkshire turns out to have unexpected baggage. The aptly-named Two Houses used to be one building, but its central rooms were cut out, levelled to the ground after the tragic death of its former owner’s wife, and rumoured to have housed a ghostly presence. From the moment she arrives, Jay feels a strange rapport with the unloved building, but she and Simon will discover that the villagers take a grim view of the new arrivals, and that Two Houses has yet to give up all its dark secrets…

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Lullaby (2016): Leïla Slimani

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★★★½

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Leïla Slimani’s bestselling novel evidently strikes a chord with its readers and it isn’t hard to see why. It plays on the deepest fears that any parent can have. What if our children are most at risk from those we’ve hired to care for them? On the very first page, we’re shown a horrific scene: two children brutally murdered, their nanny lying with self-inflicted wounds beside them. It’s a shocking, apparently senseless crime. But then Slimani takes us back, to tell the story of the family, the nanny and the children. Her novel raises uncomfortable but necessary questions about domestic service, modern parenting, class, and the desire to be needed.

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Friend Request (2017): Laura Marshall

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★★★

Occasionally we all get moments, perhaps after reading a surfeit of very serious Russian short stories, when we’d quite like to read something a little less demanding. So it was that this much-publicised thriller arrived on my Kindle. I’d spotted posters for Friend Request all over the Tube a few months ago and the premise intrigued me. What would you do if you had a Facebook friend request one morning from an old classmate whom you believed to have died twenty-five years before? (Personally I wouldn’t accept it and would report it to Facebook; but I suppose that’s why I’m not the protagonist of a thriller.) It was a tantalising, eerie scenario. I plunged into the story with gusto, reading it in an afternoon, but, maybe inevitably, it didn’t quite live up to expectations. A taut tale of rising tension is muddied towards the end by too many plot strands and a much-hyped twist that felt more melodramatic than plausible.

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Girl Meets Boy (2007): Ali Smith

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★★★

People have been telling me to read Ali Smith for years, but I haven’t yet got round to any of her novels, not even How to Be Both, which has been urged enthusiastically on me by my friend I. However, I hope to exculpate myself now, because I’ve finally embarked on Smith’s oeuvre in the form of Girl Meets Boy, one of the Canongate Myths series. I found it charming, if not overwhelming: it’s a sweet story of first love and how to have courage; a dreamlike tale of how we love most truly when we love the person rather than the outward shell. Based on Ovid’s story of Iphis, it uses the Scottish city of Inverness as the stage on which to thumb its nose at gender norms.

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The Radleys (2010): Matt Haig

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★★★

Nothing much ever happens in the Yorkshire village of Bishopthorpe. That’s exactly why the Radleys moved there from London before their children were born. With their unremarkable middle-class villa, their predictable middle-class people-carrier, their unobjectionable middle-class existence, their book clubs and their Sunday dinners, and their two shy and rather sickly teenage children, Helen and Peter Radley are barely worth a second glance. And that’s the way they like it. Unfortunately, their children are getting to a difficult age and events soon rapidly spiral out of control. It turns out that teenage self-discovery is much harder to handle when your entire family are vampires.

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The List of My Desires (2012): Grégoire Delacourt

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★★★½

We all have dreams about what we’d do if we won the lottery. In my case, it’d involve a lovely house in a garden square in Kensington, with enough room for a proper library; and even more travelling. We like to imagine that these things would make us happy and finally allow us to become the people we’re meant to be. But is that really so? What would it really be like to find our bumbling, workaday lives transformed by the sudden influx of riches? This bittersweet little novel is based around the eternal truth that wealth and happiness don’t always enjoy a positive correlation. With its modest heroine and cosy small-town air, it’s a moral fable with a surprisingly bleak sting in its tail.

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A Man Called Ove (2012): Fredrik Backman

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★★★★

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll know that I have a huge soft spot for Fredrik Backman. He has a talent for writing charming, heartwarming stories about human nature in small communities. Here are the vulnerable, real people beneath the spiny carapaces of the curmudgeons we meet in our daily life, laid bare with compassion and gentleness. And there’s no curmudgeon quite like Ove. This was Backmann’s debut novel and, while already displaying the hallmarks he would develop in his later books, it’s probably the darkest of the three I’ve read so far. That’s mainly because, when we first meet Ove, he’s very carefully preparing to commit suicide.

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The Infatuations (2011): Javier Marías

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★★★

I’ve wanted to read one of Javier Marías’s novels for ages and this has been quietly sitting on my shelf, waiting. It’s a story I heard about years ago and which captured my attention: a young woman, breakfasting every morning in the same Madrid café, has become accustomed to seeing a married couple there every day at the same time. They are so much in love, so deeply connected and content, that she shyly adopts them as an ideal. But then, one day, they fail to appear and our narrator María reads with a shock, in the papers, that the man has been murdered in a senseless attack. Due to her fondness for them – her infatuation, perhaps, with the idea of them – she can’t leave it there. Now, given my high expectations for the book, I was a little disappointed. It wasn’t quite what I expected: more detached, more intellectual; a philosophical analysis more than a mystery. And the story’s several infatuations manifest themselves not as glorious passions, but as states of mind that can drive us to accept terrible situations as the norm.

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Before I Go To Sleep (2011): S.J. Watson

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★★★★

Further thanks to everyone for your support and messages over the last few days. Give yourselves a pat on the back for being wonderful human beings. For my part, I’ve decided that life is far too rich and busy to sit around feeling sorry for myself, so let’s forge onward and get back to thinking about good books and gorgeous art and crazy operas and all sorts of other lovely things. I was so afraid I wouldn’t be able to focus on my blog but, you know what? I’ve realised that writing The Idle Woman is one of the great joys in my life and the best possible tonic for my spirits. So you can all imagine me right now, curling up contentedly with a cup of tea after a busy day, in order to thrash out my thoughts on my most recent read. And this one requires a bit of thrashing.

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