Tag: USA

Crippen (2004): John Boyne

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Photo: Alan Betson

★★★★

A Novel of Murder

In July 1910, the SS Montrose sets sail from Antwerp on her regular crossing to Canada, and the first-class passengers begin the cautious task of getting to know one another. The pushy Mrs Antoinette Drake and her daughter Victoria are, evidently, going to be trouble; so is the half-feral Tom, nephew of the mysterious Matthieu Zela who has bespoken the Presidential Suite. But there are some amenable characters on board too. Martha Hayes is a quiet spinster hoping to make a new life for herself in Canada; and the self-effacing John Robinson and his seventeen-year-old son Edmund are also escaping to a new world. Meanwhile, back in London, a horrific crime is discovered. Cora Crippen has been murdered and buried in tiny pieces in the cellar of her house. Her husband, Dr Crippen, has absconded with his mistress. But where can they be? And will there be enough time for Inspector Dew of Scotland Yard to track them down?

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Rules of Civility (2011): Amor Towles

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★★★★½

I’ve just returned from a business trip to New York, during which I had the perfect reading material: Amor Towles’s chic but shrewd Rules of Civility. While it shares the ineffable style of A Gentleman in Moscow, it has a different spirit: harder, wiser and more cynical. It conjures up Manhattan in the late 1930s: a city of walk-ups and steel fire-escapes; jazz quartets in smoky underground bars; and glittering parties in riverside mansions. And, at the book’s heart, are two young, scrappy and hungry heroines: Katey Kontent and Eve Ross. Both, in their own way, are self-fashioned and, as they wait on the brink of 1938, they can almost taste the potential in the air. Right now they might be eking out their last dollars in a downtown bar but, one day, New York is going to spill its gorgeous bounty right into their silken laps. It’s just a matter of finding the lever to get things moving. And, by happy chance, the catalyst is about to walk into both their lives…

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Blonde (1999): Joyce Carol Oates

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★★★★★

You may think I’m getting soft, seeing the second five-star rating in four days, but trust me on this. I’ve been reading this book since November and, at almost a thousand pages, it is a dazzling modern classic: a sprawling, daring, combative act of imagination. First published in 2000, it gains an even more fervent urgency when read in the light of last year’s snowballing Hollywood scandals. Hovering between fiction and non-fiction, it tells the story of the most iconic woman of the 20th century – so recognisable that you only need a wisp of platinum-blonde hair and the feathered end of a dark eyebrow to put a name to the face on the cover. Yet this is not a biography but a creative reconstruction of the life and times of the girl who started life as Norma Jeane Baker and ended up crushed beneath the glittering celebrity of her alter ego, Marilyn Monroe.

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The Roanoke Girls (2017): Amy Engel

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★★★★

It’s every girl’s dream. When Lane’s reclusive mother dies, she assumes she’ll be alone in the world, but to her astonishment her mother’s estranged parents seek her out. Moving back to her mother’s childhood home, Roanoke in Kansas, fifteen-year-old Lane is suddenly no longer an orphan but part of a wealthy, loving family presided over by her charismatic grandfather. She even has a new best friend in the form of her lively cousin Allegra. And so, as Lane adjusts to the life of a Roanoke girl – one of the golden few, the object of fascination, desire and envy for the rest of the folk in town – she begins to wonder what on earth drove her mother away. There’s just one strange coincidence that troubles her. As Allegra puts it herself, ‘Roanoke girls never last long around here. We either run or we die.’

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Saints for All Occasions (2017): J. Courtney Sullivan

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★★★★

When sisters Nora and Theresa Flynn make the journey to America in 1957, they are agog for a new world of opportunity. Nora, plain and sensible at twenty-one, dreams of finding something to excite her: an alternative to the planned marriage to the unexciting cousin who awaits her in Boston. For Theresa, in her late teens, life is full of sparkle and fun, crammed with new friends and boyfriends and a liberty she could never have known in their native Ireland. Fifty years later, in 2009, a family tragedy threatens to unearth a secret that has estranged the two sisters, and moulded both their lives into shapes they could never have imagined when arriving on the ship half a century before.

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Gather the Daughters (2017): Jennie Melamed

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★★★½

A rustic community on an isolated island: a simple society of farmers, wood-carvers and roofers. The men labour in the fields while the women bring forth children and keep the home; as a woman, one submits first to one’s father and then one’s husband; and, when one’s children have had children and one’s usefulness is outlived, one takes the fatal draught. Nobody questions the laws of the ancestors. It was doubt and sin, after all, which led to the great fire which has ravaged the old world, which is now nothing but a parched wasteland where none but the wanderers may go. Things are as they have always been – as they should be. But, for a group of girls teetering on the brink of womanhood, a dangerous question hovers in the air. Who makes the laws? And what truly lies beyond the island?

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My Name is Lucy Barton (2016): Elizabeth Strout

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★★★½

This book has been everywhere, the last year or so, and I’m aware that I’m coming to it rather late. I found it a strange novel: sobering, yes, but also frustrating. It flirts with the promise of autobiography; shares selectively; and sometimes overshares when it would have had more impact to leave questions open. I suspect its themes of the bond between mothers and daughters is what has made it such a book group favourite, but the bond it holds out to us is a troubling one: threaded through with incomprehension, abuse, misery, anxiety and – only at the last – the possibility of compassion and comprehension.

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New Boy (2017): Tracy Chevalier

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★★★

Hogarth Shakespeares are like buses, aren’t they? I haven’t picked one up for years and now there are two at once. Following on from the quirky, inoffensive Vinegar Girl (retelling The Taming of the Shrew) is New Boy, Tracey Chevalier’s reworking of Othello. I’m a great admirer of Chevalier and her concept is clever – to set the story among the ever-changing alliances and rivalries of an elementary-school playground. Certainly, this setting gives plausibility to the lightening-swift shifts of Shakespeare’s characters, but I just couldn’t shake off a certain… uneasiness. Such a story, which hinges so heavily on sexual jealousy and very adult violence, doesn’t sit comfortably in such a place. On one hand, we risk the complexities of the story being lost; on the other, we see children behaving in a way which feels too mature for eleven-year-olds. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting – and disturbing – experiment.

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Vinegar Girl (2016): Anne Tyler

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★★★

The Taming of the Shrew Retold

I’ve been reading quite a lot of serious books recently and I wanted a bit of a break with something light and upbeat. This installment in the Hogarth Shakespeare series, in which contemporary writers reimagine the playwright’s storylines, was just the trick. Now, I’ll be honest, no modern reworking of the Shrew can match 10 Things I Hate About You in my estimation but, that caveat stated, I thought Tyler’s take on things was light and fun.

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Golden Hill (2016): Francis Spufford

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★★★★

My boss was enthusing about this novel some months ago and so I decided it was high time to give it a go. Without any idea of what to expect, I found myself captivated by a swaggering tale of secrets and prejudice in mid-18th century New York, and by its enigmatic and mischievous protagonist who – at least at the beginning – had something distinctly Lymondesque about him.

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