Guest review by Leslie Wilson: BEHIND THE WALLS OF RAIN by Geoff Sawers

 

"Reading the book is like walking round an exhibition of paintings. You fall into the world of one, then you move on to be entranced by the next ..."

Leslie Wilson is the author of two novels for adults and two for young adults. Last Train from Kummersdorf was shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and the Branford Boase Award; Saving Rafael was nominated for the Carnegie Medal and Highly Commended for the Southern Schools Book Award. Both deal with Nazi Germany. Leslie Wilson is half German, was brought up bilingual, and has spent considerable amounts of time in Germany. She is currently working on a novel for adults, set in the very early nineteenth century.

‘When Sandra had gone to bed the night before the one single thought in her head had been how to find a husband, but she woke up as a pear. Maybe a bear. She felt comfy in her new pelt, coiled power in her shoulders, keen sense of smell. The milk in her fridge was on the turn and she binned it but there was a block of cheese at the back and she gulped that down in one. Then she threw open the front door and shambled off to work, people scattering neatly aside as she went, cars slowing up or pulling over. She didn't miss having a waistline.’

A woman called Beth gets back together with her one-time boyfriend, who’s now the lead singer in a band – and earns the hatred of the fans and the other band members. You expect disaster, but the story changes gear and Beth wins, at least for the present, as the band travels on in their bus. ‘Beth can charm the birds from the air, stars from the dawn and she watches the world drift by the bus window, stroking his hair as he dozes in her lap. She can put the whole world to sleep if she wants to.’ Enigmatic; who is Beth, anyway? Is she a woman or a goddess?

People are shut up in institutions, prisons, and yet perhaps they are their own gaolers. When they turn away from the occupations they use to while away the time - building three-metre high models of Stamford Bridge from used matchsticks, making little pyrotechnic displays with the phosphorus scraped off boxloads of matches, the staff are gone. ‘I open the windows and the dining hall floods with song.'

Reading the book is like walking round an exhibition of paintings. You fall into the world of one, then you move on to be entranced by the next, and some of the stories continue intermittently throughout the book; the story of the maidservant who saves a young prince from enemy forces; a common soldier who rescues a duchess in a time of internecine chaos (arrogant, unappreciative, she’s not an easy person to befriend). The longest of these stories is that of Helen, a maidservant who falls in love with and marries her employer’s artist son when he comes back from prisoner of war camp in Germany after the First World War. Their lives, and those of their children, continue into the Second World War, and I for one would have loved to go on reading about them. Perhaps Sawers will write about them again: I certainly hope so. Not hearing more about them was my one disappointment in the book.

Sawers’s themes throughout are loneliness, the difficulty of communication, of knowing another person; love and suspicion, betrayals and reconciliation, with a good dollop of existential angst. He gets under your skin, finds the uncertainties of the early morning and the times you wake up at two a.m and you’re not quite sure who you are. And it’s hauntingly, evocatively written. ‘The ferny tramp of horses’ feet’; yes, you think, that is what they sound like on turf. ‘High grey clouds scudding across a granite-pink evening sky; gulls flooding by, clamouring in the dusk.’ ‘Silence is a spirit, a grain, a texture, silver in your soft eyes.’

It’s a book to immerse yourself in, letting go of expectations, to pick up again and again.

Behind the Walls of Rain is published by Diehard Fiction. It can be obtained £12 post paid directly from geoff@hallsawers.com)

More choices by Leslie:

Elizabeth Heyrick: the making of an anti-slavery campaigner by Jocelyn Robson

Babylon Berlin by Volker Kutscher, translated by Niall Sellar

Special feature Q&A: Cindy Jefferies talks to Linda Newbery about THE HIDE

 

"I wanted to explore ways in which passionate involvement could either tip over into obsession or become a defining purpose in life."

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. Cindy Jefferies is a regular contributor here.

Cindy: Congratulations on your new novel, Linda, including a wonderful jacket illustration, which really intrigued me, making me want to pick up the book and start reading. I think you commissioned the illustration. Can you tell me a little about what went into your decision to commission original work?

Linda:  Cover art is important to me, especially as art is of key importance in the novel! Having been given a range of covers in the past, ranging from excellent to mediocre and sometimes with little choice in the selection of artist or image, it was a novelty to be able to choose the artist myself. I found the brilliant Owen Gent when I was looking for a cover designer for The One True Thing, my previous novel, and was delighted with what he did, so he was the obvious choice for this one, too. I love his colour palettes and the distinctiveness of his work. (I've written a Substack post about this.)

Cindy: What particularly spoke to you about the picture you chose?

Linda: Owen sent me four rough ideas to choose from. I liked all four, and was tempted by one that showed Alys in a gallery looking at an Egon Schiele nude (and this would have been the choice of my editor, Jon) but I think this one suits the title better, allowing for more than one meaning of the hide. The cottage looks isolated and vulnerable, which is how Alys often feels, and the shadows give a sense of creeping menace, offset by the soaring red kite on the spine suggestive of freedom.

Cindy: The title is so mysterious. To begin with, I wondered if the novel was going to be about someone who studies animals and birds, but that’s not exactly it, is it?

Linda: Thanks! There is a bird hide near the village Alys has moved to for her new job, and she comes across it on one of her explorations with her camera, but the metaphorical meanings are more important. Alys is secretive about her past, from a deep sense of guilt and shame - and this is set against posing naked or semi-naked as Leon's model, which is the opposite of hiding. In Rowan's story, there's the concealment of animal exploitation from the public on intensive farms and in laboratories, and also the ways in which most people hide from the truth by closing their eyes to the cruelty behind their everyday choices.

Cindy: Why did you fix on using both of the main female characters to unfold the plot? It works really well!

Linda: Thanks - it's a favourite structural device of mine to use more than one viewpoint and more than one time-frame, too. So here we have Alys in the present, taking up her new job as head of art in a rural comprehensive school and hoping for a fresh start but bumping up against troubling reminders of the past; Allie (Alys's younger self) as an art student, through which perspective her damaging relationships with Leon and Fraser are slowly revealed; and Rowan in the present, deciding to take a gap year, becoming increasingly involved in animal activism and finding independence away from her parents (Alys and Rowan's father have never lived together). The juxtaposing of past and present and different viewpoints gives, I hope, a freshness and variety and allows for the links between the sections to become apparent to the reader.

Cindy: I love your opening paragraph and was going to ask if you had a specific photograph in mind but on Substack you reveal that it’s a photograph of the artist Schiele. What was it about that particular photograph, and indeed that artist, that drew your attention?

Linda: I became fascinated with Egon Schiele many years ago when I saw his work in the Shönbrunn Palace in Vienna, and my interest grew from then on. More recently I saw his work at the Klimt : Schiele exhibition at the Royal Academy (which I've moved to the present for the purposes of the novel). The appeal? It's the blend of sureness and vulnerability, of provocation and tenderness, of beauty and what often seems like deliberate ugliness. His work looks as fresh and compelling as it did over a hundred years ago. I've written about him in this article - about his life, work and early death.

Cindy: I think you were at one time interested in studying art, but writing became your choice. Do you see yourself making different choices in the future, or is writing always going to be the main way of expressing yourself?

Linda: Recently I've been trying to re-establish the habit of drawing, and have attended classes, but I can't see it replacing writing as a priority. Photography is a keen interest now, as it becomes for Alys in the novel.

Cindy: There is a strong animal rights thread running through this novel. Are you involved in animal rights or was online research and reading articles the limit of your involvement?

Linda: I don't think I could have conveyed Rowan's depth of feeling on the subject of animal exploitation if I didn't completely share it. I've been advocating for animals for years now, in various ways, and have been vegetarian since my twenties, vegan for the last nine years, vegan for life. I believe that future generations will look back with shame and horror at the ways in which we abuse animals, and will find it hard to believe that this was acceptable to most of the public.

Cindy: There are two really interesting themes in this novel: one is the art, and Alys's involvement with that, and the other is her daughter's involvement with animal rights. How are the two linked?

Linda: In both parts of the plot there is someone who is driven by purpose - Leon in Allie's sections, and Rowan in the present. I wanted to explore ways in which passionate involvement could either tip over into obsession or become a defining purpose in life. It's partly about identity: Leon strongly (and inexplicably, to Allie/Alys) identifies himself with Egon Schiele, while Rowan, throughout the novel, greatly admires the dynamic activist Vix, wanting to emulate her, before finding her own path and defining her own principles. At this early stage I'm wondering how readers will see Rowan. I know that vegans will identify with her feelings of 'vystopia' and probably be glad to see that represented in fiction, but how will her views and actions strike other readers? 

Cindy: Do you see Alys as a self destructive person because she can’t forgive herself for her behaviour a long time ago?

Linda: She's never had a satisfying relationship, partly because she's made herself believe that she's not deserving of love or attention. I want to leave it to the reader to speculate on whether she's right to have carried the sense of guilt and self-blame for so long, as the story unfolds of what happened in her student days. It's difficult to say more without spoilers, but at one crucial point someone tells her to stop making herself a victim. Has she? Or is her self-recrimination justified, and if so, what should she do with that?

Cindy: Looking into the future, art plays a part in several of your novels and animal rights inhabits this one. I wonder what you might tackle next?

Linda: I have in mind the beginnings of a new novel, but I certainly won't start immediately. First I have a children's book to revise - a continuation of Lob - and after that I plan to update and reissue my guide to compassionate living, This Book is Cruelty Free: Animals and Us. That title was the publisher's choice; I'll probably go for just Animals and Us for the reissue. It's a book about the daily choices we make - what to eat, buy, wear, use, waste - and how those choices affect animals and the environment. Even if we have no direct involvement with animals, for instance with pets, our choices have a direct impact on animal lives through what we pay for and use. We can choose cruelty or we can choose to avoid it wherever possible. 

Cindy: Thank you for your patience with my questions and your thoughtful answers. I will certainly be telling friends about The Hide and urging them to read it.

The Hide is published by Writers Review Publishing.

See also Linda's Q&A on her previous novel, The One True Thing.

Guest review by Fran Clark: KEEPER OF LOST CHILDREN by Sadeqa Johnson

 

"For readers who enjoy historical fiction inspired by real events, this is a must-read. It is also a masterclass for writers who want to understand how powerful emotional storytelling is achieved."

Fran Clark writes emotive women’s fiction inspired by the connection between London and the Caribbean. With titles including The Long Way Home, However Far We Fall and Wherever You Will Go, her work explores themes of identity, family, and resilience, often shaped by the storytelling traditions of her Dominican heritage. She holds an MA in Creative Writing and lives in the English countryside, where she also runs two community choirs and teaches vocals. Fran writes contemporary fiction as Rosa Temple.

Set in post-war Germany and the United States, Keeper of Lost Children confirms why Sadeqa Johnson has become one of the most celebrated voices in contemporary historical fiction. With its sweeping scope, emotional depth and compelling characters, it is easy to understand the anticipation that greeted its release.

The novel follows three interconnected storylines: a Black American soldier who is stationed in Germany after the war; a young girl who has always felt out of place in the family that raised her; and the wife of a Black officer based in Germany whose deepest wish is to conceive a child.

The emotional threads of each narrative gradually intertwine as the protagonists negotiate love, loss, identity and a programme that gave abandoned mixed-race German orphans the opportunity to find families after World War II.

I loved the gentle yet compelling language Johnson uses to weave this story together. She doesn't shy away from difficult subjects such as racism, alcoholism, abortion and abuse, but handles them in a way that feels authentic, necessary and never gratuitous. With every chapter, I found myself wishing I had discovered this author sooner, completely engrossed in a story inspired by real-life events.

This was a book I could not put down. As someone who isn't a particularly fast reader, I found myself frustrated by how long it took me to reach the end because I wanted to consume it all at once. That said, this is not a novel to rush through. Every scene feels purposeful and every page rewards careful attention.

The way seemingly unconnected strangers become linked across decades and continents creates a powerful sense of drama and emotional momentum. The author's use of dialogue never feels strained or artificial, and there were times when I felt as though I was living alongside these characters rather than reading about them. By the end, they felt like real people whose company I was reluctant to leave.

A couple of the central characters occasionally veered towards the saccharine, particularly given the hardships they endured, but Johnson wisely balances this by showing their flaws as well as their virtues. They make mistakes, experience envy, wrestle with difficult choices and suffer consequences, all of which make them feel more human and believable. Although each character faces an emotionally and physically arduous path, I honestly couldn't decide which storyline I found the most distressing.

Despite the immense hardship woven throughout the novel, there is also a sense of hope. Much of the book's emotional power comes from watching these characters navigate loss, uncertainty and disappointment while continuing to move forward.

I have no hesitation in recommending this book, and I have already added Johnson's backlist to my ever-growing to-be-read list.

Keeper of Lost Children is a classy and deeply moving work of historical fiction. Johnson demonstrates how emotion can be evoked through character, dialogue and circumstance rather than simply explained to the reader. In an era when many novels tell us what their characters feel rather than allowing us to experience those emotions for ourselves, that skill feels increasingly rare. For readers who enjoy historical fiction inspired by real events, this is a must-read. It is also a masterclass for writers who want to understand how powerful emotional storytelling is achieved.

Keeper of Lost Children is published by Renegade

Fran's latest novel, However Far We Fall, is available now. 

Guest review by Dennis Hamley: EARTH TO EARTH by John Cornwell

 

"The author had to revisit it and write a new conclusion, which survived an attempt by Ted Hughes to have the book pulped ..."

Dennis Hamley read English at Jesus College, Cambridge, and has a PhD from Leicester. After teaching, lecturing and acting as County English Advisor for Hertfordshire, he retired to write full-time. He has written widely for children and young adults; one of his best-known books, The War and Freddy, was shortlisted for the Smarties Prize. His recent adult novel, The Second Person from Porlock, is a fantasy riff on the chaotic life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge; with Writers Review Publishing he has reissued Spirit of the Place. He lives in Oxford with his wife Kay, an artist.

Earth to Earth is a true crime classic revisited. 

This extraordinary book was first published in 1982. It concerned an event in 1975. This event has reverberated through fifty years, causing renewed arguments and accusations, so much so that the author had to revisit it and write a new conclusion, which survived an attempt by Ted Hughes to have the book pulped.

The scene is Devon, in the strip of land which runs through the gap between Exmoor and Dartmoor. Near the village of Winkleigh is a farm, West Chapple. In 1975 it was farmed by the three Luxton siblings: Frances, born in 1908, Robert John (usually known as Robbie), born in 1911 and Alan, born in 1921.Their father, also Robert John, died in 1939 and Wilmot, his wife, in 1949.

On September 23rd, 1975, all three siblings, Robbie, Frances and Alan, were found dead. Each had been shot in the head with a shotgun. Bone, brain and blood had spread over the ground. Robbie had strange wounds on his face, Frances had a broken leg. The three doors and entrances were locked from the inside.

John Cornwell is a fellow emeritus of Jesus College, Cambridge. He is a working investigative journalist with a wide range of non-fiction books, including Coleridge, Poet and Revolutionary, which is how I encountered him when I was writing The Second Person from Porlock. His editor at Penguin Books read about the tragedy at West Chapple and asked John if he thought it was worth investigating. Well, John agreed and this extraordinary book was the result.

Though the Luxton family had farmed West Chapple for several generations, hardly any of their neighbours ever saw them. When they did, they observed strange eccentricity. Frances went to the village shop to buy a single shoelace, Robbie docked a labourer’s wages for picking one orchard apple.

Robbie did all the work on the farm, following the traditional practices of his overbearing father. New farming methods were ignored. The only labourer, Fred Lyne, was paid partly in money but mainly in produce, enough to keep him alive. He was sacked just a week before the killings. The only power on the farm was supplied by a waterwheel. West Chapple was locked into the early nineteenth century.

Robbie forbade marriage. Nobody was to leave his farm. Both Frances and Alan attempted relationships. Robbie squashed them all. They were virtual prisoners. This drove Alan mad, partly illustrated when he wandered around dressed only in a sack as a sort of loincloth.

So John started his investigation, which can be read as both a speculative crime reconstruction and a riveting novel. What had brought the three to this slaughter? Was it a suicide pact? Had one of the siblings murdered the other two and then ended their own life? The inquest came to no satisfactory conclusion.

John interviewed other branches of the Luxton family, of which there were several, and found examples of class, snobbery, envy and contempt, suggestions of madness and murder, and put them together in a first edition of Earth to Earth in 1982. But there was trouble before the publication. So many questions. Possibilities of libel, slander. A family curse? Legal opinion sought. At last the book was published and won the Crime Writers Gold Dagger award.

But still the arguments raged. The poet Ted Hughes, a near neighbour, joined in, opposing any new edition. His accusation was that the book had ruined the Satow brothers, who lived in a manor house, Westacott, and ran it as a sort of B&B. On the contrary, said the brothers. The notoriety brought by the book had increased their business hugely. Hughes suggested seeking the truth through a Ouija board, but Gabrielle, John’s Catholic wife, objected.

And so here is the new 2026 edition. Everything finally sorted? Probably not: this is a story which could still plague generations to come.

Meanwhile, here is the most compulsive, thrilling page-turner I have read for years.

Earth to Earth is published by Riverrun. 

Read a Q&A with Dennis on Spirit of the Place.

Guest review by Anna Caig: HOMEGOING by Yaa Gyasi

 

"If it’s true that ‘history is written by the victors’, then fiction not only has an important role to play in retelling history from marginalised perspectives, but also in bringing it home that there are as many ‘truths’ about what happened as there were people experiencing the events."

Photograph by Kate Plumridge

Anna Caig lives in the ‘howling wilderness’ of the Peak District and has worked in marketing for over 20 years. She grew up reading indiscriminately: Agatha Christie, Robert Louis Stevenson, Stephen King, Alexandre Dumas and the Brontës happily coexisted in precarious piles on her bedside table, and she's wanted to be an author since she was a young child.

Her debut novel, The Wise Witch of Orkney, was published earlier this year and is now available in paperback. It tells the story of Elspet Balfour, a wise woman and healer from Orkney. Some might call her a witch:

When the king's new bride, Anna of Denmark, summons her to deliver her baby and cast a binding spell over the child, Elspet is trapped between two impossible choices - she cannot refuse the queen, and she cannot be discovered by the king. While Elspet struggles to hide her secret identity in a court that wishes her dead, another woman seeks her aid: Kitty Muirhead, outcast, persecuted and desperate to escape the shadows of her past. Kitty and the queen could not be more different, but they may be each other's salvation.

Anna is obsessed with the hidden voices of women and a compelling underdog story. Luckily, history offers plenty of these. She's inspired by the glimpses into a woman’s life we get before the historical record moves onto something considered much more important. What was happening in these gaps?

When I was asked if I wanted to include an epigraph in my debut novel, I knew exactly what my dream choice would be. But I never imagined I’d actually be granted permission to use it.

It’s a quote that inspired me enormously when I first read it, and which has influenced my whole approach to writing historical fiction.

‘We believe the one who has the power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must ask yourself, “Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth?” Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there you get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture.’

Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi (2016)

When I received a response saying yes, I was over the moon. Homegoing is an extraordinary book, one I’d recommend to anyone who loves well-written historical fiction.

With her writing, Gyasi performs a magic trick. Homegoing contains the stories of people separated from me by centuries, race and continents. But somehow, it’s also a book about each of us as an individual: our ancestry, unique and separate from the grand narratives of ‘history’. This is a book that prompts you to consider your own forefathers, and mothers, who you are and how you came to be the way you are (even if that is far from straightforward.)

Gyasi starts her story in Fante and Asante, in what is now Ghana, in the eighteenth century. We meet two half-sisters whose lives take very different paths as one is sold and enslaved, and the other sold to be a wife to a white slave trader. We trace eight generations forward, meeting the descendents of the sisters from these two branches of the same family.

The narrative illuminates the politics of slavery over centuries: the different ways the Fante and Asante peoples were involved and affected by it. And its lasting legacy for people in both the US and Africa.

Homegoing is essentially a book of short stories, as we are given just a snapshot of the life of one person in each generation before moving on to the next. But Gyasi has an impressive knack of finding enough to pull us quickly into each new focus.

There are some huge historical events covered: the Fugitive Slave Act, the Jim Crow segregation laws, the civil rights movement. But Gyasi is more interested in the experiences of individuals, and the subjective nature of history. “History is storytelling,” says Yaw, a teacher in Ghana in the penultimate generation of the book.

“Kojo Nyarko says that when the warriors came to his village their coats were red, but Kwame Adu says that they were blue. Whose story do we believe then?”

If it’s true that ‘history is written by the victors’, then fiction not only has an important role to play in retelling history from marginalised perspectives, but also in bringing it home that there are as many ‘truths’ about what happened as there were people experiencing the events. And this is what Gyasi achieves, with bells on.

I don’t claim to have been anything approaching as successful in my own writing. But her work certainly inspired me to seek out lesser-known stories from history, in my case, women we catch enticing glimpses of before the record moves onto something considered more important. I’m fascinated by what might have been happening in these gaps.

As I closed the back cover of Homegoing, I wiped tears from my face. Each of us is the product of what came before; the people and events that shaped the life we were born into. We leave the book not only with the beautiful image of people swimming in the Ghanaian sea, making peace with their heritage, but also with a renewed appreciation for the importance of the stories in our own history.

Homegoing is published by Penguin.

The Wise Witch of Orkney is published by Black & White Publishing.

Guest review by Graeme Fife: STILL - a mindful practice for photographers, by Paul Sanders

 

"Superb account of a mind near broken and repaired, through the curative hard task of art and creativity ... "

Graeme Fife is a regular reviewer here. He has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography, works of history and fiction. His novel of the French Revolution, No Common Assassin, tells the story of Charlotte Corday. His new novel, Memory's Ransom, a compelling wartime story, is published by Conrad Press.

‘Art is deliberate, peremptory, love and arrogance' - Seamus Heaney

‘I have been to Hell and back, and let me tell you, it was wonderful.’ - Louise Bourgeois

Sanders might well echo what Bourgeois said. Under extreme pressure as a working photo journalist, latterly Pictures Editor of The Times and having to review up to 50,000 images a day in order to choose which to use in the paper, he had a nervous breakdown which led to severe depression and once to the very brink of self-destruction. What ghosts patrol those precipitous cliffs above the sea, whispering their sinister insinuative urgings to the desolate individual, what sinuous provocations and what moral strength to bid them hush. This mental turmoil he describes without compunction but neither is he mawkish. I find what he writes and how he writes very moving not least because somehow he hauled himself back from the edge of this doom and, by the help of his love of photography, with him since childhood, he restored his mental and emotional balance. That in itself is inspiring and this book, featuring a goodly selection of his photographs, contains one image, the first he took after his recovery, which offers a summation of his feelings in sharp terms: a broken post sticking out of the sea, stark black, broad, lone splinter of wood against a hazy white ground. The story that tells is eloquent, I feel, and the very best photography – and examples of it abound, here – tells a story. Photography: in Greek ‘writing with light’.

Citing Cartier-Bresson, who said that we do not take photographs - photographs take us, they are a gift, from who knows where? - Sanders also confronts the grim truth that ‘the battle we have within ourselves is a bloody and unforgiving war’. I am reviewing this book, not only because I find the images it contains arresting but because as a journal of recovery and even redemption from that inner war it is so very compelling and also because Sanders writes in limpid, direct prose of beautiful insight and gives me, as a writer, a parallel to the similar struggles we have with words as he does with light, framing, composition, subject … how to do it, where to stand and at what height, even, how to approach our work ...

Just as we, maybe highly articulate from early on, nevertheless had to learn that whereas words make good servants they are very poor masters, so picking up a camera and pointing it, clicking the shutter, is meaningless, unless there is feeling in the person holding the camera or writing the words, above all sensibility.

The book’s secondary, but to Sanders crucial purpose, the core of his freelance work, after all, is to offer counsel to those who love the camera and are looking to find better ways of expressing themselves through what its obedient lens looks at. Teaching and guiding those eager to learn how to make the camera work for them, through them, is what rescued him financially and spiritually, and the story of how he achieved that is a valuable lesson to each of us, in my view.

There is wisdom here, in the way that Sanders has looked unflinchingly inside himself and his art and brought the two analyses together and I commend it for that reason alone, whether you ascribe to the idea of mindfulness or not. At heart, doesn’t that simply amount, for us all, the vital need in everything we do, see hear, experience, to pay attention, to replace ‘should’ with ‘could’ and see what difference that makes? I think so and however we make it to that decision, the path will have been a good path to tread.

He also emphasises the fact that there is never a perfect answer, never a wholesale solution … at bottom we all flounder, one way or another, and in that floundering, we do, or should do, the difficult thing: we ask questions, of ourself or others, of what we are looking at or thinking about. Out of the comfort zone? You had better believe it, nothing ever got done in the comfort zone. King George III, visiting the royal naval dockyard at Chatham, observed a man standing outside an open air woodshed, staring at the timber baulks on the racks. The king asked a staff member why the man wasn’t doing any work and the man said that he was working, he was assessing the timber for size, by eye. Sanders has a good eye and this book gives a precious opportunity to see and appreciate, feel the worth of, the beauty round us, even in the lonely bullrush and a patch of grass, through that eye.

So much of what Sanders says, both in this superb account of a mind near broken and repaired, through the curative hard task of art and creativity, resonates with me and, as I put it somewhere: ‘There is never a full stop, only ever a hanging comma on which we sit, as on a swing in a secret garden.’

Still is published by Ilex Press.

More of Graeme's choices:

The Mighty Dead - Why Homer Matters, also by Adam Nicolson

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

The Go-Between by L P Hartley

Guest review by Sarah LeFanu: KINDRED by Octavia E Butler

 

"Butler is acclaimed ... not just for her trail-blazing dual role as a Black woman writer of SF but for the way she embraced its rich literary and political possibilities."

Photograph: Lindsey Fiddler

Sarah LeFanu is a biographer whose subjects include Rose Macaulay, Samora Machel, Mary Kingsley, Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle. She has published two memoirs that focus on the process of biographical writing: Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer’s Journal and Talking to the Dead: Travels of a Biographer. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

When in the early 1970s Octavia E. Butler was publishing her first short stories, the number of Black writers working in science fiction could be counted on the fingers of one hand. The number of women writers was not much higher. Butler is acclaimed now, however, not just for her trail-blazing dual role as a Black woman writer of SF but for the way she embraced its rich literary and political possibilities. Nowhere is this more apparent than in her dazzling, disturbing time travel novel Kindred.

Time travel has served as a significant science fictional trope since the publication in 1895 of The Time Machine, H. G. Wells’s frightening tale of class struggle and the end of times. Half a century later, SF writers such as Philip K Dick and Robert Heinlein were playing with the paradoxical consequences of time travel and exploring questions of causality, free will and determinism. In Kindred Butler uses a narrative of time travel to foreground political questions around race, sexuality and gender.

Kindred is a novel that confronts America’s history of slavery, and its legacy. It is concerned with the interrelationship of intimacy and oppression. Because it is about race and also about female sexuality, it necessarily explores the uses of violence and violent coercion.

A young Black writer called Dana (short for Edana) Franklin, married to Kevin, an older white writer and living with him in California in 1976, is suddenly and then repeatedly pulled back to the early 19th century to a plantation in Maryland, one of the slave states of the ante bellum South. She is being summoned back to the past, she discovers, in order to save the life of one of her ancestors and thus ensure her own future existence. Rufus Weylin, the man whose life she saves over and over, is a white man. He is the son of the owner of the plantation. During the course of the novel he inherits the plantation and all the enslaved people who live and work there, and fathers on Alice, initially a free woman but later a slave, the mixed-race child who will become Dana’s great-grandmother.

Octavia Estelle Butler was born in Pasadena, California in 1947, into a society that she saw at an early age was profoundly racially divided. As a small child she would accompany her mother to the houses where she worked as a housemaid: the quiet, observant girl noticed that white people employed Black servants, and that those Black servants always came and went by the back door. She found her wider world through books in the public library, and knew early on that she wanted, and needed, to write. She was inspired to write science fiction while watching, when she was about 12, the British B-movie Devil Girl from Mars. She had a ‘series of revelations’: first, ‘Geez, I can write a better story than that!’, then, ‘Anybody can write a better story than that!’, and the clincher: ‘Somebody got paid for writing that story!’

Unlike other aspirational Black girls of her generation who saw training as a teacher or a nurse as a path to autonomy, Butler bravely chose to work at casual labouring jobs that would give her the freedom to think and to write. She gives this same choice to Dana in Kindred. Dana describes her work and her writing life: ‘You swept floors, stuffed envelopes, took inventory, sorted potato chips (really!), cleaned toilets, marked prices on merchandise … I did the work, I went home, I ate, and then slept for a few hours. Finally, I got up and wrote.’ Butler found her way on to writing courses (including the famous Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop), where she met and was encouraged by two older science fiction writers, Harlan Ellison and Samuel R. Delany. In the novel, Dana is encouraged by her writer husband.

Butler’s first novel, Patternmaster, was published in 1976, which is the year in Kindred when America’s history of slavery erupts into Dana’s life, an experience that she will transform into a first-person account, a memoir. Dana is the portrait of a writer-in-training.

Kindred opens with an image of bodily trauma. ‘I lost an arm on my last trip home,’ writes Dana. This opening statement hardly prepares the reader for the harrowing accounts of violence that will follow as Dana spends increasing amounts of time on the plantation in Maryland. On her second visit she witnesses a man being whipped: ‘I had seen people beaten on television and in the movies. I had seen the too-red blood substitute streaked across their backs and heard their well-rehearsed screams. But I hadn’t lain nearby and smelled their sweat or heard them pleading and praying, shamed before their families and themselves.’ Black and female, Dana too becomes an object of the violence inflicted on slaves to keep them in line, even although she is not, herself, a slave. In the course of the novel she is beaten, punched, kicked in the face, whipped until she loses consciousness. She witnesses other forms of violence: sexual abuse, families broken up, children seized and sold to other slave owners. She comes to understand the power inherent in the threat of that violence. Her thoughts begin to whisper to her, ‘See how easily slaves are made?’

Dana’s journeys into the past raise questions about power and powerlessness, about the many forms oppression takes, and about the possibilities and the risks of resistance. Her close entanglement with Rufus the white slave owner – a life-and-death entanglement – affects not only her increasingly close relationships with the community of slaves and free Blacks on the plantation, but also casts its shadow into her present-day. ‘I began writing about power,’ Octavia Butler once explained, speaking of her whole oeuvre and not just this one novel, ‘because I had so little.’

In the best SF tradition, Kindred is a novel of ideas. It is simultaneously a powerfully moving story that interrogates the price paid by those struggling for freedom and agency. At the end, Dana’s own history is marked by the loss of her arm, but she has survived to write the story that is Kindred. A pioneer in science fiction in the 1970s and 1980s, since her death in 2006 Butler has been acclaimed for her role in gaining recognition for science fiction as literature, and she is now celebrated for being a foremother of Afrofuturism.

Kindred is published by Headline. The cover shown above is for Headline's special hardback edition.

Note: The Headline paperback claims, incorrectly, that Kindred was first published in the UK by them in 2014. In fact it was first published in the UK quite a bit earlier - in 1988, by The Women’s Press, as part of their SF series. (I was an editor at The Women’s Press throughout the 1980s). Suzanne Perkins, Art Director at TWP from its beginnings in 1978, commissioned a painting by Rachel Ross for the cover.

The current Headline paperback cover

Octavia E Butler in 2005. Photograph by Nikolas Coukouma (Wikimedia Commons)