Guest review by Sue Purkiss: THE WOMEN OF TROY by Pat Barker

 

"Pat Barker doesn’t let the reader off the hook, doesn’t put a gloss on things. This is what war does, she tells us. This is how it is."

Sue Purkiss writes for children and young people. She has been a Royal Literary Fellow at Exeter and Bristol Universities, and has also taught English and worked with young offenders. Her latest novel for children, Jack Fortune and the Search for the Hidden Valley, is an adventure story set in the Himalayas at the end of the 18th century, featuring plant hunters, a sacred mountain – and its mysterious guardian! For more information, see Sue's website. She also has her own literary review blog, A Fool on a Hill, and is a contributor to The History Girls.

One of the joys of Christmas is that, in my family, we’re very big on giving books for presents. One year this all went horribly wrong, when nearly every book one of us had loving selected had also been lovingly selected by someone else, so at least half of them had to be exchanged – but this year all was well, and this book was part of my haul.

It follows on from Pat Barker’s first book about the Trojan War, The Silence of the Girls, which I had not read before reading this one, though I have now. It’s perfectly possible to read the second one without having read its predecessor – partly, I suppose, because the legend on which both books are based is very familiar: but also because Briseis, the narrator, naturally refers to the past as she takes up her story.

I write books for children, and I think, if I was setting out to write one about the Trojan War and its aftermath, I would seek out a child character – who would need to have some agency: to be a hero in some measure – to make things better. But this retelling concerns war in all its horror and savagery: it’s a bleak tale with few shafts of light. There are certainly heroes, but they all have the capacity for horrifying violence and unthinking cruelty. And, incidentally, the only children in this narrative are girls – because when the Greeks finally conquered the Trojans by means of Odysseus’ wooden horse, they slaughtered the boys. They even, Briseis tells us, killed pregnant women in case the children in their wombs were boys.

Briseis had been a queen, captured when her city was laid waste by the Greeks almost as a sideshow to the main war against the Trojans. When we read retellings of the Greek legends, what we remember and enjoy are the exploits of the famous heroes. Pat Barker, through Briseis, lays bare the brutal treatment of the vanquished by the victors. The Trojan men are almost all slaughtered, while the women are raped and led into slavery. Briseis is relatively fortunate: as a high status captive, she is made available to be a trophy for one of the ‘heroes’. She is chosen by Achilles. In some books, this could have been the prelude to a romance, but there is no romance here. She is a commodity, no more. She only finally receives any consideration when she becomes pregnant with Achilles’ child, and is given in marriage to one of his friends: Achilles knows he is going to die, and knows also that his slave girl could easily be given after his death as a plaything for the ordinary soldiers. Because she bears his son, he doesn’t want that to happen – but only because of that, not because of any tender feelings towards Briseis herself.

The story takes place in the Greek camp on the shores of Troy. The Greeks want to go home, but the winds are against them, and they cannot leave. There is no beauty in this place: it’s windswept and desolate. “On the shoreline, there were stinking heaps of bladderwrack studded with dead creatures, thousands of them…The sea was murdering its children.”

There is another dead creature on this beach. It is the body of Priam, the King of Troy and one of the few characters in this story who retains nobility – until, that is, he is dishonoured by his killer, Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles, who drags Priam’s body behind his chariot every day round the walls of Troy, and refuses to allow it to be cremated. One of the Trojan women is determined to put a stop to this, and buries the body, to the fury of Pyrrhus. In a bewildered way he observes that there are only two Trojans in the camp, a priest called Calchas and one of Hector’s brothers, and that neither of these would have defied him in this way, so who can have defied him so flagrantly? He is quite oblivious to the women: they are slaves, and they are women – they simply don’t count. They are invisible to him.

But Briseis renders herself visible to us, because she tells us her story, and those of the other women in the camp: Helen, Cassandra, Andromache – but also the women of lower status, who nevertheless have their own stories, their own individual tragedies. She is courageous and she is kind: I look forward to reading the next book, which I suspect will bring her happiness in some degree.

It’s a wonderful book but a bleak read, harsh in many ways. The language reflects this. Pat Barker doesn’t let the reader off the hook, doesn’t put a gloss on things. This is what war does, she tells us. This is how it is.

How it still is, in many parts of the world.

The Women of Troy is published by Hamish Hamilton

See also: Circe by Madeline Miller, reviewed by Judith Lennox

Awards Season! Part 2

Here's the second batch of virtual awards, made by our contributors to a book of their choice. Thanks to all our reviewers for giving us such great recommendations! Come back next week for the final part.

Yvonne Coppard: The Evie Award for best unreliable narrator goes to Notes on a Scandal  by Zoe Heller.  Barbara is a frumpish, unpopular history teacher whom nobody warms to. Sheba, the new new pottery teacher, is the opposite: a charismatic free spirit who seems to have it all. When Sheba starts a sexual relationship with a pupil, Barbara becomes her confidante.

The depth of Barbara’s sexual repression, jealousy and malice, hidden from the world and from herself, is revealed only to the reader in this gripping, masterly novel. Shortlisted for the Booker, it’s up there with Lolita and The Great Gatsby.

Amanda Craig awards the Craig Cup for Most Underrated Children's Book to: Philip Womack's Wildlord. It's one of a clutch of recent new YA titles about the intersection between the mortal world and supernatural beings that readers will recognise as the fiercer kind of fairy.

In the English and Celtic tradition, proper fairies aren't twee and pretty, but unpredictable, frightening, mischievous and even dangerous manifestations of nature; and these stories often also address mankind's selfish destructiveness of the natural world, and the possible revenge of it upon us.

This is Womack's eighth novel, and one with a propulsive plot, a sympathetically vulnerable hero and an evocative style. Most of all, it has a moral centre about the importance of love and trust. This story, with its universal appeal ,deserves a wider audience.

Anne Cassidy: A Book I read Again and Again - awarded to Kate Atkinson for Case Histories.  I read a lot of crime. Every couple of years I feel the need to revisit this almost perfect book. It's a crime novel that foregrounds the stories of the families of victims. This wasn’t a whodunnit but more an examination of the devastation caused by murder and loss. The examination of family life before and after the crimes is knife edge and utterly believable. The focus is on three unsolved murders and then we meet Jackson Brodie, the ex-cop, the damaged hero, who seems to blunder his way through the terrain to find the killers, to bring peace to the loved ones. There are bits of this book that I unashamedly cry at every time. A terrific crime story. Can’t wait until I read it next time!

The Celia Rees Award for Most Influential Children's Fantasy Novel goes to: The Box of Delights.

John Masefield's novel, published in 1935, is exactly that - a box of delights. It contains themes, characters and motifs that occur again and again in British children's fantasy fiction: shapeshifting, time travelling, a young protagonist on the cusp of adolescence singled out as having special powers, a wise old magician, a magical object that must be guarded at all cost, an epic battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness, an evil, cunning and ruthless enemy and his equally unpleasant female companion, a midwinter setting with extreme weather, the timely intervention of mythical figures from British folklore - it's all there!

Katie Fforde gives The Fforde Award for the book she didn't expect to fall in love with to The Dictionary of Lost Words, by Pip Williams. Quirky, imaginative and beautifully written, this is for people who love words, who are feminists in the very best sense. It’s about a little girl who is the daughter of a man among a team of many who are writing the dictionary. She discovers that some words are considered to be no longer useful. They are often words to do with women. We follow her life and the life of the dictionary and others involved in its creation. Highly recommended.

Adèle Geras' prize is the Snowglobe Award for the Best Short Book which Creates an Entire World, and the first winner is Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These.

A few days ago, I found a book which is as close to perfection as any I've read all year. It's tiny: a mere 75 pages and I read it in two sittings. I could have read it in one, but needed to think about it. It's the most extraordinarily beautifully- written tale, which encompasses huge themes and enormous emotions and manages to take you to the heart of a family in a specific place and time. Bill Furlong is a coal merchant in a small Irish town. He and his wife have six daughters. It's Christmas Eve, and the day before that. By the end, we are part of this town. I felt as if I'd been handed the most beautiful snowglobe, even though this place has darkness deep within it. A worthy winner of my award.

Sue Purkiss awards the Purkiss Prize for a book (actually a whole series) that brings comfort - to the Inspector Gamache series by Louise Penny. 

Life’s a bit on the tough side at the moment, isn’t it? Of course, there are lots of good things too – but sometimes they threaten to be overwhelmed by the bad stuff.

The Inspector Gamache series offers a retreat from all this. Three Pines, where the books are mostly set, is a tiny village in the forest in Quebec. It’s not on any map, it doesn’t show up on a satnav: it’s a refuge. It’s peopled by eccentrics: Ruth, the mad old poet, Gabri and Olivier, who run the bistro and the B&B, Clara the artist – and eventually, Inspector Gamache himself, who is strong, clever, kind and incorruptible.

The characters are complex and satisfying, the stories are gripping – and the food! Ah, if only I had time to tell you about the food… Plus, there are seventeen books in the series.

John Newman of Newham Bookshop awards Newman’s Page Turner of the Year or A Reason to Remain to Sarah Winman.

Everybody loves a feel-good book and this year we really needed stories which celebrate friendship and the ties that bind. Sarah Winman gave us a real gift in the shape of  Still Life and I want to both celebrate it and of course unconditionally recommend it to you all. Spanning several decades of the last century we encounter lives interlinked by war, tragedy and change. Its roots are in London's East End but the core and real heart of it is very much centred in Italy and most especially the city of Florence which the author clearly loves. The big themes of the novel are addressed with a light touch via suitably diverse characters you quickly care about and leave behind with reluctance. This was my page turner of the year and one I felt privileged and confident to place in the hands of other like-minded souls.

Guest review by Sue Purkiss: THE WILD SILENCE by Raynor Winn

 

"Often, a sequel is a rather paler version of the book it follows. That is not the case here ..." 

Sue Purkiss writes for children and young people. She has been a Royal Literary Fellow at Exeter and Bristol Universities, and has also taught English and worked with young offenders. Her latest novel for children, Jack Fortune and the Search for the Hidden Valley, is an adventure story set in the Himalayas at the end of the 18th century, featuring plant hunters, a sacred mountain – and its mysterious guardian! For more information, see Sue's website. She also has her own literary review blog, A Fool on a Hill (where this review first appeared), and is a contributor to The History Girls.

This book is a sequel to The Salt Path (which I reviewed in 2018 - the link is below). That was the story of how Raynor Winn and her husband Moth, in their fifties, lost everything after a dispute with someone who had been a lifelong friend over investments: they had to walk out of their beloved Welsh farmhouse with virtually nothing. On top of that, Moth was diagnosed with a cruel terminal disease, corticobasal degeneration, or CBD; he had about two years, they were told.

There are many things that emerge from The Salt Path and its successor, The Wild Silence. But one of the main elements is the rock-solid relationship between Raynor and Moth. So when they found themselves in this terrible situation, the one thing Raynor was not going to do was to simply accept the diagnosis and the doctor's advice - which was to avoid all strain and rest as much as possible.

Another element - which is explored even more thoroughly in this second book - is Raynor's profound connection with the land, with nature. Brought up on a farm, shy with other people, nature is her solace and her inspiration. So perhaps it wasn't surprising that she should turn to nature for relief. She suggested that, against all the dictates of caution and common sense, they should take to the wild and walk the South-West Coastal Path - despite the fact that Moth could hardly walk and would have trouble carrying a pack. (In any case, they had so little money to buy food or any other necessities that their packs must have been relatively - but only relatively - light.)

And it worked. They had an extraordinary journey, which resulted not in a miracle cure, but certainly in an improvement in Moth's condition. And at the end of it, a stranger offered them a refuge - a flat in Polruan, where they could live while Moth did a degree in sustainable agriculture, which he hoped would then bring him emploment.

This is where the second book picks up the story.

Often, a sequel is a rather paler version of the book it follows. That is not the case here. It seems to me that Raynor has gained confidence in her writing - not surprisingly, considering the huge success of The Salt Path. She writes absolutely beautifully in this book, and very effectively investigates subtle and complex ideas and emotions - as well, of course, as providing rich and evocative descriptions of nature.

The structure of the book is complex. She is exploring different aspects and periods of her life simultaneously; in the first section she is taking care of her mother, who has been taken to hospital following a stroke. Alongside this we find that she and Moth are still, three years later, in Polruan, and that Moth, despite increasing weakness, is nearing completion of his degree - whereas Raynor has become increasingly reclusive and anxious about meeting people. She has to make a terrible decision about her mother's care, and, staying in her mother's cottage, memories come back to her of her childhood. We begin to see that her current state is rooted in the past, and we find out how she met Moth, and how their relationship developed.

Later, she describes how the writing of The Salt Path  came about. In the beginning, she knows nothing about publishing and has no expectations of success - she is writing about their extraordinary journey in order to capture it for Moth, who, to her dismay, is losing his memories of it. But of course it does become a success, and this leads to a new phase of their lives, when a wealthy businessman asks the two of them to take care of a farm he has bought, which is exhausted from intensive farming and almost devoid of wildlife. He wants them to bring it back to life, to re-nature it. At first, they are doubtful: the house is a damp and crumbling wreck, the farm will take a lot of work to enable the land to recover. But, never able to resist a challenge, they take it on.

In the last section of the book, they decide to undertake another ambitious walk: Moth is getting weaker, and they are convinced that what he needs, as before, is to literally and metaphorically stretch himself.

So they go to Iceland, with their friends Dave and Julie, whom they met on their first walk. They only have two weeks, which unfortunately fall at the end of the Icelandic summer and at the beginning of its fierce winter. Crazy? Well, perhaps - but when did that ever stop them?

Here is an example of Raynor's writing. She is describing the process of writing, of reliving, the coastal walk.

I stood in the dim evening light, faced the wall and spread my arms wide and the rain came stinging on gale-force winds, pounding my face, battering the rucksack. Winds roaring through granite-block cliffs, hurling crows through wild grey skies.

Here's another:

The soft rain became vertical rods of connection between land and sky, drops bouncing from the river with the force of a pebble, leaving ripples expanding and reflecting.

Enjoy.

The Wild Silence is published by Michael Joseph.

Read Sue Purkiss' review of The Salt Path

Reading ahead - New Year anticipation, part 3

Here's the third and final part of our Reading Ahead feature, and again we take the chance to thank all our contributors for supplying us with great reviews and recommendations all year round. This last part includes a number of titles due for publication this year, so - whatever tier we're in - none of us will be short of tempting books to read. Several of the titles mentioned here will feature on the blog in the coming months. 

Happy New Year reading!

Paul Dowswell: I’ve enjoyed retreating into music non-fiction during the pandemic. It’s a perfect comfort read for an anxious time. Rock writer and music magazine creator, David Hepworth, has been churning out a book a year since 2016’s 1971 – Never a Dull Moment. It’s a particular pleasure to read his work because his brilliant but defunct monthly music magazine The Word is greatly missed. From its marvellous title and fabulous cover shot of the Rolling Stones dressed in drag onwards, Overpaid, Oversexed and Over There - How a Few Brits with Bad Teeth Rocked America promises a fascinating journey through an era (1960s to 80s) when British bands dominated American popular music. His previous books have shown that Hepworth excels in the quirky anecdote, and being a publishing entrepreneur as well as a music fan, he is always able to present a perceptive insight into the business side of ‘show business’. I’m snapping this up as soon as it comes out in paperback.

Pippa Goodhart: I bought a book for my daughter Mary that I’m longing to read myself. It’s The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow. Hadlow has taken middle Bennet daughter, Mary, from Jane Austen’s Pride And Prejudice, and imagined what happened to her after Austen’s novel finishes. Mary is the plain and serious sister amongst lively beauties, and she fails to find a man to marry within P&P, but this novel promises to see her ‘grow into herself’, and, yes, find love. Perfect, I hope, for some escapism during cold Brexit January.

​Talking of ‘hope’, a treat I’m very much looking forward to in March is Hope Adams (a.k.a. Adèle Geras)’s novel set in 1841 on a ship bound for Australia with 180 women convicts on board. I know that the seed of this story was planted by a quilt in the V&A Quilt Exhibition from a few years ago that I saw. I love real history woven into rich story! Reading Dangerous Women, I look forward to jumping aboard that convict ship!

Michelle Lovric: I read up to my thighs during lockdown 1: when I put them in a pile, that’s where the books reached. I wasn’t surprised to hear Bloomsbury are doing well: my literature consumption definitely increased with Covid. Books on my looking-forward-to list: Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, Dangerous Women by Hope Adams, a.k.a Adèle Geras of this parish; Casanoviana, including an account of 2019’s symposium – in a real room, with touchable international scholars – on the World’s Most Misunderstood Venetian. I discovered Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart recently, so now the rest of his oeuvre’s beside the bed. What else to do when you run out of Niall Williams and Sebastian Barry? (Hint, gentlemen!) For three wonderful years, I attended a poetry masterclass with Robert Vas Dias. Just arrived: his The Poetics of Still Life. For my own work, lately much taken up with puffins and millinery, I’m about to start Denise Dreher’s From the Neck Up.

Jane Rogers: This year I have been on the lookout for fiction about the Climate Emergency. Because it’s such a vital and overwhelming topic, I’m curious to see how other writers are dealing with it. And I should admit I’m hoping to write a climate novel myself.

In the interests of this research I’ve read Chris Beckett’s America City (recommended) and Jenny Offill’s Weather (well written, but doesn’t live up to the hype). I was delighted to hear a recent Open Book on Radio 4 devote a full programme to climate change fiction, or Cli-fi, as they are now calling it. It has become a sub-genre all of its own! Apparently there is lots in the pipe-line; I want to start with Carys Bray’s new novel, When the Lights Go Out, which is set in the near future, with floods outdoors and a collapsing marriage indoors. Carys writes beautifully - I loved her short story collection Sweet Home. And Diana McCaulay’s Daylight, Come, set in a fictional island closely resembling Jamaica, where she lives, in a future where the days are so hot everyone has to sleep in the day and work at night, sounds fascinating.

Adèle Geras There’s much to look forward to in 2021, and these are the books I’m longing to read. First is Marika Cobbold’s On Hampstead Heath. I’m a big fan of this writer, and this will be published in April by Arcadia Books. It’s set in one of my favourite parts of London and concerns a journalist who invents a story, for the best possible reasons. Enticing.

Then there’s Caroline Lea’s The Metal Heart, which has a very striking cover. It’s a wartime love story set in a camp for Italian prisoners of war in Scotland. I suspect I will need tissues. Coming in April from Michael Joseph.

My last choice is Atomic Love, by US author Jennie Fields. (Michael Joseph) This is about a woman scientist working on the Manhattan project. I’ve read the first couple of pages and am drawn in already....

It’s going to be another good year for fiction.

Patricia Elliott: I'm intrigued to read Stuart Turton's new second novel, The Devil and the Dark Water, set on board a cursed ship sailing to Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, a dangerous voyage even without the murder and mayhem I'm promised. His first, The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, was an artful, twisty riff on a detective story, with a fiendishly complicated plot: a game he played with the reader. Turton is not a beautiful stylist but his writing is energetic and vivid, with startling similes. Also recently published, I think I shall enjoy Edward Parnell's Ghostland, in which the author goes on a cathartic journey after family tragedy, revisiting books and places in Britain's most haunted countryside. To reread? Among other books and inspired by the magnificent television adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, now finishing its second series, The Subtle Knife, my favourite of the trilogy, last read 25 years ago. Jon Appleton: Echoes of adored, established writers have lured me to some recent independent publishing.

Jon Appleton: Echoes of adored, established writers have lured me to some recent independent publishing.

The Continuity Girl by Patrick Kincaid (Unbound) promises ‘A lost movie. An elusive monster. One last chance…’ It’s billed as a novel for fans of Jonathan Coe (whose work I adore). There’s a fanatical fan and an old film retrieved and the stage is set for a glorious homage and reckoning with the world today. I can’t wait!

 Penelope Lively’s clashes of the mores of past and present (Treasures of Time, Judgement Day) remain reading highlights. (They’re funny, too.) I predict Simon Edge’s historical fiction will be equally beguiling. Anyone for Edmund (Lightning Books) pokes fun at Westminster culture and celebrates the cult of a medieval saint. I’ve also ordered his A Right Royal Face-off, which contrasts Gainsborough’s high art with celebrity TV.

Another indie publisher whose work impresses me is Louise Walters Books. I love novellas and The Sweep of the Bay by Cath Barton evokes the brilliant film 45 Years. Louise has just released Helen Kitson’s Old Bones ­– I can’t resist a quarry-found corpse and the repressed secrets of spinsters. Could we have another Ruth Rendell in the making?

Sue Purkiss: In the last few years, like many of us, I’ve become more and more concerned about our environment and what we’re doing to it. So in the New Year I shall look forward to reading more books about nature. One will be The Running Hare, by John Lewis-Stempel, which has been strongly recommended to me by my brother-in-law, who has a smallholding in Ireland. I’ve also heard good things about James Rebanks’ new book, English Pastoral: and I have my eye on Surfacing, by Kathleen Jamie, who writes about wild places with a poet’s perception, though this, like an earlier book, Sightlines, is prose. (Of the most elegant, spare and focused kind.)

I still have some excellent birthday books to look forward to as well – The Lying Life of Adults, by Elena Ferrante, and The Diary of a Young Naturalist, by Dara McAnulty.

Dara McAnulty's Diary of a Young Naturalist is reviewed here by Gill Lewis.

Susanna Clarke's Piranesi is reviewed here by Adèle Geras.

We will feature a Question and Answer with Hope Adams (Adèle Geras) to mark the publication of Dangerous Women.

Guest review by Sue Purkiss: SIGHTLINES by Kathleen Jamie

"... the reader is right there with her, feeling the force of a wind strong enough to knock you over, seeing how gannets glint against a storm cloud, shocked at the speed with which killer whales slice through the water."

Sue Purkiss writes for children and young people. She has been a Royal Literary Fellow at Exeter and Bristol Universities, and has also taught English and worked with young offenders. Her latest novel for children, Jack Fortune and the Search for the Hidden Valley, is an adventure story set in the Himalayas at the end of the 18th century, featuring plant hunters, a sacred mountain – and its mysterious guardian! For more information, see Sue's website. She also has her own literary review blog, A Fool on a Hill (where this review first appeared), and is a contributor to The History Girls.

A couple of months ago, I mentioned to a friend that I was about to go on a course on nature writing (at Ty Newydd – I wrote about this on my blog). She chuckled, and said, “Oh, but nature writing’s so boring, isn’t it?”

I was taken aback and lost for words. Now, I would say to her: but what do you even mean by nature writing? How could it be ‘boring’ to read about something which I know she loves, just as I do? How could she not be interested in reading about what gives life to us, and makes our planet apparently unique - and how it is under profound threat?

Or perhaps I’d just give her this book by Kathleen Jamie and say, “Just give this a try. Go on – do.”

Kathleen was one of the tutors on the Ty Newydd course. I had heard of her before, but though I’d given this book to a couple of other people as a present, I hadn’t actually read it myself. I’ve just remedied this, and have found it completely engrossing – and therapeutic. It’s autumn, which is a beautiful season but has at its heart the fading of things – the fading of light, the falling of leaves, the gradual death of flowers. Of course it’s not all bad – there are birds that arrive as well as those that depart, and there are already buds on the bare branches. But still – it’s a season when it’s easy to succumb to a generalised feeling of sadness. And there are one or two things going on in the outside world which are also just a tad worrying.

So there have been mornings when I’ve woken up feeling gloomy. But as soon as I begin to read a chapter of Sightlines, I am taken into another place - and what a relief that is. That is perhaps a cliché: certainly, it’s my stock, easy answer when someone asks me what I like about reading: “A book can take you into another world…” But in this case, it really feels true. The book is a collection of essays. In most of them, Kathleen travels to Scottish islands, though there’s also one where she goes to a Norwegian museum and reflects on whale skeletons (in other essays, she writes about encounters with living whales); another where she decides she needs to see inside the body, not just outside, and examines pathogens under a microscope; another where she recalls an archaeology dig, from which the discovery of the ancient skeleton of a young girl lingers in her mind.

Wherever she goes, she is supremely attentive. She looks, she listens, she tastes, she touches, she thinks, she explores, she reflects. And she does this so effectively that the reader is right there with her, feeling the force of a wind strong enough to knock you over, seeing how gannets glint against a storm cloud, shocked at the speed with which killer whales slice through the water.

But she doesn’t simply describe what she sees. She muses, considers, makes analogies, asks questions. The reader follows not just her physical journeys, but the path her thoughts take. At the back of it all is an awareness of transience. As she says in the book’s final paragraph: "There are myths and fragments which suggest that the sea that we were flying over was once land. Once upon a time, and not so long ago, it was a forest with trees, but the sea rose and covered it over. The wind and sea. Everything else is provisional. A wing’s beat and it’s gone."

(She is flying in a helicopter as she leaves a remote, storm-swept island, where she had found a dead swan, describing its outstretched wing as a full metre of gleaming quartz-white, a white cascade: the swan’s wing, the wind, the helicopter flight – they all link into a chain of thought.)

Boring? Not remotely.

Sightlines is published by Sort Of Books.

See also: The Salt Path by Raynor Winn, reviewed by Sue Purkiss

A Telling of Stones by Neil Rackham, reviewed by Graeme Fife

The Outrun by Amy Liptrot, reviewed by Paula Knight

Guest review by Sue Purkiss: ANY HUMAN HEART by William Boyd

"What a read it is! I feel as if I'm tottering out of a cave, blinking in the daylight, after a long and intense journey..."

Sue Purkiss writes for children and young people. She has been a Royal Literary Fellow at Exeter and Bristol Universities, and has also taught English and worked with young offenders. Her latest novel for children, Jack Fortune and the Search for the Hidden Valley, is an adventure story set in the Himalayas at the end of the 18th century, featuring plant hunters, a sacred mountain – and its mysterious guardian! For more information, see Sue's website. She also has her own literary review blog, A Fool on a Hill, and is a contributor to The History Girls, blogging there once each month.

(This review first appeared on A Fool on a Hill.)

Have just finished this, and what a read it is! I feel as if I'm tottering out of a cave, blinking in the daylight, after a long and intense journey through a goodly portion of the twentieth century, during which I've met Virginia Woolf, Picasso, James Joyce, Hemingway, the Duke of Windsor and heaven knows who else, experienced the Spanish Civil War, been a spy in the Second World War, witnessed the civil war in Nigeria and been a slightly baffled hanger-on of the Baader Meinhof Gang.

The story is told through the character of Logan Mountstuart, and purports to be a collection of his journals, with occasional additional notes from an anonymous editor. Born in 1906, Mountstuart's early childhood is spent in Uruguay, where his father runs a meat processing factory: his mother is Uruguayan. When he's eight, his father has a promotion and they move to England, to Birmingham. Logan is sent to boarding school, and begins his first journal when he's seventeen. Friends he meets there recur throughout the book.

At this stage, Logan seems pretty bumptious - a vivid character, but not necessarily a likeable one. And that's a feature of him: all through his life, he does things he should probably be ashamed of - as we all do - and sometimes you find yourself feeling really cross with him. But then you catch him out in an unexpected act of kindness and you think, oh, well, he's not so bad after all. Which can happen with real people, but not so much with characters in books, who are generally expected to be consistent. So he sleeps with his best friend's wife, Gloria, quite carelessly - but years later, when she's impoverished and dying, he takes her in and cares for her, even though by this stage he's extremely poor himself. He drifts into his first marriage carelessly and is unkind to his wife - but his relationship with his second wife is deep and lovely. The title of the novel comes from a quotation from Henry James, Never say you know the last word about any human heart: and clearly, the human heart, its complexity, its shallowness and its depths, is one of the things Boyd is exploring in this book

Boyd puts his character right in the middle of so many significant places and situations in the 20th century. And he does it so skilfully that it all seems entirely plausible - even, just about, his involvement with the Baader-Meinhof gang, which begins when he finds a leaflet in a phone box asking for volunteers to join a group interested in social justice - just when he's looking for a new purpose in life in old age. He proves to be rather good at selling the group's newspapers, and becomes more and more involved, eventually finding himself smuggling gelignite in Europe - at which point he finds himself bemused but not disconcerted, and yet again extricates himself from what seems an impossible situation.

I found it a remarkable book - one of the best I've read in a long while.

Any Human Heart is published by Penguin.

READING AHEAD part 1: what's in our sights?

What's on our reading piles? New publications, old favourites to return to, neglected classics, authors we've sampled and intend to read more fully? Here are the choices by ourselves and guests - including some new faces. A big thank you, as ever, to our many contributors - this wouldn't happen without them. We hope you'll find something to entice you here - and don't miss part 2 on New Year's Eve! 

Stephanie Butland: I was lucky enough to read an early copy of The Confessions Of Frannie Langton, by Sara Collins, which comes out in April 2019, and it was one of the highlights of my reading year. A dark and beautifully written tale of murder, slavery, sugar and opium, it’s also a historical novel that feels painfully relevant to our times. I felt as though I held my breath through most of it. Gloriously good.

Philip Womack:   I'm most looking forward to continuing my way through Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time - I've reached volume 5, and have been savouring it, coming to love its slow, perceptive movements. Ben Schott's P G Wodehouse homage, Jeeves and the King of Clubs, looks like it will prove a treat over Christmas. On the children’s side, I’m excited about Alison Moore’s Sunny and the Ghosts, about a boy whose parents buy an antiques shop full of spectral presences. And, as ever, like a warm bath I’m returning to my eternal dip in Samuel Pepys’s diaries, which I’ve been reading, on and off, for almost 15 years.

Linda Sargent: Dreams of the Good Life by Richard Mabey has been on my to-be-read pile for some time and it’s not through any lack of enthusiasm that it’s still there, quite the contrary. I’m an admirer of both Mabey’s writings and also the subject of this book, Flora Thompson. I first read her Lark Rise to Candleford in the early seventies while studying Economic History at the University of Sussex and was immediately captivated. Despite being set in the nineteenth century, the rural Oxfordshire life she describes and the stories she tells, strongly resonated with my own background as the child of a farm worker in mid twentieth century Kent, as did her ambition to be a writer (although in my case that is still a work in progress...). It’s a book I’m savouring, for me part of the pleasure of this pile.

Adele Geras: I’m going to start 2019 by reading The Wych Elm, the latest novel by Tana French. I’ve loved many of her previous Dublin-set thrillers, especially Faithful Place and Broken Harbour but have deliberately avoided finding out about this one, which is meant to be somewhat different. I’ll begin as soon as I’ve finished Lethal White by Robert Galbraith (J K Rowling) which is my Big Christmas Treat Read!

Yvonne Coppard: For 2019, I’m returning to If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino, first read some years ago. It defies categorisation: a combination of narrative sequence and a journey into the reader’s own consciousness, intellect and experience. This time I will read more slowly, and uninterrupted; maybe I’ll finally understand what’s going on.

As a fan of Khaled Hosseini, I’m also keen to read his beautiful but devastating Sea Prayer, inspired by the death of a three-year-old Syrian refugee, Alan Kurdi.

Graeme Fife: I’ve come to many authors late but, stoutly rejecting any sense of embarrassment about it, I rejoice, rather, in the discovery. James Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain, the autobiographical novel about his coming to maturity in Harlem, grappling with a difficult relationship with his preacher father, introduced me to new riches in American fiction. Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt…? Essential reading, I’d say. Scalpel in one hand, tickle stick in the other and huge compassion and humanity between. I’d not be without Seamus Heaney’s 100 Poems, a posthumous collection made by his family. Ah, but doesn’t his fine-tuned observation and framing speak for us all in our searching and contradictions.

Celia Rees: I very much admired Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life and A God in Ruins and I’ve been saving Transcription as a special treat for the New Year. Female spies, Second World War and the post war period, all subjects and themes close to my heart. I’ve already reserved it for a post on Writers Review. Pebbles on the Beach, by Clarence Ellis, was first published in 1954 and is now reissued with an introduction from Robert Macfarlane. I’ve collected pebbles since I was a small child, so pounced on it when I saw it in the wonderful South Kensington Books. I’m really looking forward to reading it and applying my new knowledge on beach and shore side. Another on my list of New Year Intended Reading is Deborah Robertson’s Declutter - the get real guide to creating calm from chaos. That could present something of a challenge…

Sue Purkiss: I'm looking forward to reading Elly Griffiths' new book, Stranger Diaries. I'm a big fan of her Ruth Galloway series, and this has had great reviews, so I'm sure it's a treat in store.

And I intend to revisit an author I haven't read for many, many years - A J Cronin. He wrote hard-hitting books which often dealt with poverty and inequality in the 1930s, and I'd be interested to see if I still find them as impressive as I did when I first came across them.

Sally Prue: My reading is haphazard and serendipitous, and the classics I haven't yet read are the ones I've been putting-off for half a century, so in some ways it's easier to say what I won't be reading (Proust and Anthony Powell are strong contenders, here). But Zola's Germinal was amazing, so perhaps some more of Les Rougon-Macquart if I happen to come across anything; and of course there's nothing quite as comforting as nestling down with a good old Trollope.

Caroline Pitcher: My mind keeps returning to a novel I read earlier this year, Sugar Money by Jane Harris. Based on a true story, it is told in lilting, rhythmic Creole by young Lucien from Martinique in 1765. He hero-worships his elder brother Emile and insists on joining him on a mission to smuggle back slaves from English owners on Grenada and return them to French friars. The vicious rivalry between slave-owning nations had not really occurred to me before reading this novel. Jane Harris has written a rollicking adventure with a touching sibling relationship, told in Lucian’s charming voice. All this serves to highlight the grisly cruelty and violence of the slave trade.

All my life, over and over again, the same scene, repeating in my mind.

Katherine Langrish: Among the books I'm looking forward to (re-)reading this Christmas is Ursula LeGuin's novel The Lathe of Heaven which I loved as a teenager. It doesn't seem to get the same attention as The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness (all such wonderful titles) but is just as brilliant. Quiet George Orr is too terrified to sleep because he believes his dreams change reality. When his initially sceptical shrink discovers this is true and starts manipulating George's powers for the good of humankind, things get really serious. Original, poignant, often funny, the book is a magnificent exploration of unintended consequences and the dangers of uncontrolled power.

K M Lockwood: I admit I do judge a book by its cover. When I saw Lucy Rose’s artwork for The Familiars written by Stacey Halls, I knew I coveted it. I pleaded and received a review copy. A glance reveals a noose, a fox, parchment and plumes. Inside, you find women, witchcraft and Pendle Hill. My sort of book - due out in February.

Help the Witch is a short story collection from Tom Cox published by Unbound and illustrated by Joe Mclaren. It too looks dark and imbued with foklore – but far more modern. Interesting to compare and contrast.

Paul Magrs: There are two reading projects that I must return to when 2019 begins. I am reading Blockbusters – one for each year since my birth. I began with Mario Puzo’s The Godfather from 1969 and I’ve been having an amazing, eye-opening time. I’ve been through Love Story and Jaws and I’m as far as 1977. Judith Guest’s Ordinary People is next.

My other project is tackling the Beach House Books – i.e. the accumulation of heaps of novels everywhere in our house, overspilling into the Beach House. I’m putting myself on a book-buying ban once again, and I’m hiding from the world all January.

Anne Fine: I suddenly realised that neither of my daughters was living in this country while Posy Simmonds was doing her cartoons for the Guardian. Everyone’s coming for Christmas, so I’ve bought both daughters her superb collection, Literary Life Revisited. Posy is unbelievably clever. She’s put her finger on every aspect of the writing trade. You recognise everyone in every frame, and all of the situations and dilemmas.

And the greatest joy is that these books are so (comparatively) heavy that, though both my daughters will devour them during the holiday, at least one is likely to abandon her copy before the flight home. So that’ll be me in the New Year, steeped in delicious, genius Posy. I can’t WAIT.