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)

Guest review by Jon Appleton: THE WELL by Elizabeth Jolley

"Wickedly funny, harrowing, mischievous and moving, The Well deserves its status as modern Australian classic."

Jon Appleton is a freelance writer and editor based in London.

‘I don’t want other people coming here poking about in our lives. Kathy I want to tell you this so that we can go on the way we were.’

The 1980s were a fantastic time for Australian women writers. Interest was high: platforms to read and speak abounded in every state, awards and grants liberated authors from teaching loads and other work, colour supplements profiled their lives with each new book. There were even critical books and collections of essays devoted solely to women writers.

No wonder. The standard was dazzling, the personnel intriguingly diverse. There were younger writers like Helen Garner and Kate Grenville, writers embarking on the literary life in their 40s and 50s, like Marion Halligan and Olga Masters, and long-established writers being given new consideration, like Thea Astley, Jessica Anderson and Amy Witting.

Then there was Elizabeth Jolley, something of an outlier.

Jolley was born in Birmingham, in 1923, and migrated to Australia in 1959 with her academic husband and three children. (One of whom had been born within weeks of Mr Jolley’s first wife’s daughter’s birth …) Elizabeth Jolley had a trunkload of manuscripts on arrival which were relentlessly rejected by editors for 15 years until a local press snapped up a collection of short stories, and then another, and then a novel.

After which novels and short story collections poured forth, making her one of the most prolific of all Australian writers, which was a distorted picture as much of the work had been begun, and abandoned, and refashioned, before making it into print. She won award after award and attracted ravishing reviews, domestically and abroad – her books regularly appeared in the UK and America.

On panels, she cut a striking figure – with short, cropped grey hair, she had a clipped, almost girlish voice. She was very tall and habitually wore hippyish skirts and flat sandals. She peered out through squinty spectacles.

I read her stories avidly but if you’ve never encountered her work, here’s a list of reliable ingredients in a work by Elizabeth Jolley.

· Sexual obsession, especially between women

· Fathers and daughters

· Sexual abuse

· Leider music (Jolley’s mother was Viennese)

· The liberating sensation of dance

· Small-town oppression

· Nurses and patients

· Sexual repression, especially in prim, professional women

· The freedom and danger of frontier country

· A novelist’s obsession with their subject material (and its consumption of them)

You’ll find them all in her 1986 novel, The Well, one of Jolley’s best known works, and winner of Australia’s top literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award.

Late in the book, Jolley rallies: ‘She had not come home, at sixteen, from boarding school, in the middle of a term, to keep house for her father, her grandmother having died suddenly, and not learned how to speak to the men.’

The woman in question is Hester Harper, middle-aged or older, fighting to keep control of the only person she has been allowed to love; a feckless, rather vapid social-climber called Kathy, who she takes in from an orphanage – or was it jail? – as a young teenager and with whom she cultivates a totally interdependent life in a remote country town.

But inevitably the outside world encroaches, perhaps most dangerously of all, a young man they strike down whilst driving at night. There are no witnesses, and they pitch the body into an abandoned well on their property. But it turns out he isn’t dead – he’s also a thief - and he joins a throng of men determined to destroy the women’s privacy.

‘She understood too, at once, that she needed to be looked after, cared for, more than ever. She had never felt so afraid and so alone.’

And so resourceful, determined Miss Hester Harper – despite her ailing physical and mental well-being – will stop at nothing to preserve her sanctuary – but at what cost?

Wickedly funny, harrowing, mischievous and moving, The Well deserves its status as modern Australian classic. I’m pleased it’s just been reissued by Virago for today’s readers to enjoy.

The Well is published by Virago Modern Classics.

More of Jon's recommendations:

Whistler by Ann Patchett

Clock Dance by Anne Tyler

An Honest Man by Ben Fergusson

Special feature Q&A: John Ironmonger on THE ANGEL OF ST PIRAN

 

"Dr Kat Hoobaiter has documented a repertoire of around 80 distinct chimpanzee gestures, showing how apes use them intentionally. It isn’t a huge leap from here to the apes in The Angel of St Piran."

Stephen Joseph Photography

John Ironmonger was born and brought up in Kenya and took a degree in zoology, followed by a PhD on the ecology of freshwater leeches. His first novel, The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder, was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award in 2012. His novel Not Forgetting the Whale (also known as The Whale at the End of the World) was an international bestseller. His new novel, The Angel of St Piran, is published this week by Fly on the Wall Press.

John answers questions from Linda Newbery.

Linda: First, congratulations on the publication of The Angel of St Piran. I’ve read an advance copy – it’s based on a striking but certainly not implausible concept, that chimpanzees and humans can communicate verbally, and is very topical with its focus on trophy hunting, as well as being a gripping page-turner.

With your background in zoology, it’s not surprising that animals – and human interactions with animals – are the foundation of much of your fiction. Did you have a career in zoology before turning to writing fiction?

John: Ahh … only very briefly. I worked for three years as a research assistant in Liverpool looking at freshwater leeches, and afterwards I travelled with my wife Sue to Nigeria to lecture in zoology at a new university in the north of the country; but for a whole host of reasons the job didn’t work out and we came back to England. After that I went to work in the IT industry and there I stayed until I started to sell books.

Linda: You came relatively late to writing fiction – what prompted that?

John: I really didn’t come late to writing – I just came late to being published. I’ve been writing fiction since my teens, and over the years I wrote several novels and quite a few that were never finished. I never had much confidence in my skills as a writer, so no one ever read these early stories, and now all are lost forever; this is probably a good thing though because I’m sure they were terrible. But it was a good way to learn the craft.

Linda: Clearly the ground-breaking work of the late Jane Goodall, living and making relationships with chimpanzees, was one of the inspirations for your novel, as you acknowledge in the afternotes. I’ve read of other recent advances, too, in our understanding of how various animals communicate – whales, apes, birds. Is this a field you’ve worked in, professionally or otherwise?

John: As a teenager I worked one long vacation at a research station in Tsavo National Park, Kenya, on a project tracking family groups of elephants in the reserve. It wasn’t intentionally focussed on animal communication, but it was a fascinating introduction to fieldwork. We would often remark to each other that the elephants seemed to communicate. We simply didn’t know how. At university, Jane Goodall’s book ‘In the Shadow of Man,’ was one of our set books. I was gripped by it. I had seen chimps in Uganda, but I had never heard of a researcher living with the apes. It struck me then (and still does now) as an extraordinarily courageous and exciting thing to do. I often thought of it as potential material for a novel. Since Jane Goodall’s work other researchers have pushed forward our understanding of chimpanzee communication. Most recently Dr Kat Hoobaiter from Stirling University, working with chimpanzees in Uganda, has documented a repertoire of around 80 distinct chimpanzee gestures, showing how apes use them intentionally. It isn’t a huge leap from here to the apes in The Angel of St Piran.

Linda: Many of us are revolted by photographs of trophy-hunters posing with their kills, but often this is countered by the idea that managed trophy-hunting can benefit habitats, animal populations and local communities. What’s your view of this argument?

John: Any activity that revels in the killing of a wild animal is morally indefensible in my view. I know trophy hunters will claim to be conservationists, but I don’t accept this for one moment. It is a baseless smoke-screen for their blood lust. Local communities earn almost nothing from hunting, despite the high fees charged by operators. There is far more sustainable income from wildlife tourism. And trophy hunters shoot the largest, strongest, and most reproductively important animals. If trophy hunters were conservationists they would swap their rifles for cameras and become wildlife photographers. But they are too slow witted to handle a camera, and they are too vain to indulge in an activity where they don’t get to appear in the photograph.

Linda: Although the setting for this novel is mainly a Tanzanian island, some sections take place in Cornwall, and two earlier novels, Not Forgetting the Whale and The Wager and the Bear, are set there too. You live in Cheshire now, but do you have links to Cornwall?

John: My mother was Cornish. She grew up in the seaside village of Mevagissey. When I was 17 my parents decided to retire to Mevagissey from our home in Nairobi. They bought the village shop, and I found myself reluctantly dropped into this little isolated community far from anywhere. I hated it. But only for a very short while. Unexpectedly I grew to love it, and for years I wanted to write about it. The village of St Piran in my novels is loosely based on my memories of Mevagissey. It turns out to be a location full of interesting people, with fascinating stories to tell. I’ve used it in three novels so far. As for my links to Cornwall, I still have cousins there, and I still visit when I can. Never often enough, of course.

Linda: Fly on the Wall Press sounds like an interesting independent publisher. How did you come to be published by them – and are there plans for more books?

John: I don’t have a short answer to this question I’m afraid. Can I get away with saying that Orion Books and I parted company after a novel of mine failed to set the world alight. Which was a shame because it was my personal favourite. But it launched when the bookshops were closed during Covid, and big publishers have algorithms that don’t take account of these things. The up-side was that I discovered Fly on the Wall, a small indie with loads of energy that punches way above its weight, and this is where I want to stay. If they’ll have me.

Linda: Your first published book was a non-fiction title, The Good Zoo Guide, published in 1994. Have you any plans to update it? Since writing it, have your views on keeping animals in captivity changed at all? Do you think public attitudes to captive animals, not just in zoos but in dolphinariums and other tourist attractions, are changing?

John: The thought of updating The Good Zoo Guide gives me heart palpitations. It was so much work. I had to visit around 150 zoos, aquariums, bird gardens, safari parks and some grim menageries, and once done, I re-visited the top fifty … twice. It was exhausting. After the book was published it was about ten years before I went back to a zoo. I don’t disapprove of zoos. I would say instead that I really like good zoos and I hate bad ones. There are some animals that, in my view, should never be kept in captivity - like dolphins, polar bears, and whales … but there are many others that can be kept in high welfare habitats, and there are plenty of species that actively need a reservoir of individuals in safe captive conditions because they really aren’t safe in the wild. Public attitudes have certainly changed. The small cages and the city zoos that were popular fifty years ago have almost all been replaced by spacious, out-of-town zoos and specialist collections. And that’s a good thing. So now I visit zoos occasionally. But I’m particular about the zoos I visit.

Linda: Two of your titles, The Year of the Dugong and The Wager and the Bear, could be described as ‘cli-fi’. When writing about animals in particular, the impacts of climate change and nature loss are hard to ignore. Do you think fiction can help to raise awareness and inspire change?

John: I hope fiction can change minds, but I worry that the impact is only marginal. The scale of the climate threat is far beyond any crisis that mankind has ever faced. The changes we are making to our climate are irreversible, and catastrophic. I don’t know how we convince a sceptical political class and an apathetic electorate that we need to act decisively and massively if we are to slow down and maybe halt the damage we are doing. But fiction is all I know, so it is my way of railing against fossil fuel apologists and the forces of climate denial.

Linda: Your books have had impressive reach, being recognised in awards and translated into fifteen languages. Has this, and your zoological background, led to opportunities to take part in animal advocacy?

John: I am very lucky to have been able to reach a wide audience, and I am so grateful to all those publishers around the world who have believed in my books. To be honest it hasn’t led to any particular advocacy opportunities, although I know from my email inbox that readers have been inspired by the stories.

Linda: It’s easy to feel despair when we read about the sheer scale of animal cruelty, on farms, in laboratories, in wildlife crime and in entertainment. But do you see hope for a more compassionate future, and if so, where?

John: Without a doubt we are all much more aware of animal cruelty now than we ever were. Public attitudes have undergone a generational shift. Across the world, people now speak openly about animal sentience, suffering, and rights in a way that would have been fringe even 20 years ago. Factory farming is increasingly seen as ethically indefensible. Cosmetic testing on animals has become socially unacceptable. Circuses no longer keep elephants or lions. No one goes to bull fights when they visit Spain. Catwalk models no longer wear furs. So I do see good reasons for hope. And I applaud people who name and shame trophy hunters online. It is one of the last bastions of animal cruelty.

Linda: Finally, can you give us some recommendations – either of cli-fi novels, or of books that increase our understanding of animals?

John: I’m going to recommend two books that I read this year, although I realise as I say this that both deal with animal extinction. Beasts of the Sea by Ida Turpeinen is a novel that traces the discovery, exploitation, and eventual extinction of a marine mammal known as ‘Steller’s Sea Cow.’ It is a beautiful, lyrical book – translated from Finnish, and it has profound lessons for us on the way we treat the natural world. Today, I’m halfway through reading The Last of its Kind, by Gisli Palsson – a nonfiction book and an impressive piece of scholarship, about the search for the Great Auk – a bird they used to call the ‘northern penguin,’ and how the disappearance of this bird led to the first awakening in the public mind of the reality and finality of extinction.

Linda: Thank you, John. We at Writers Review wish you every success for The Angel of St Piran.  

The Angel of St Piran is published by Fly on the Wall Press