Advent Books part 3 - and that's a wrap! Festive greetings to all our followers!

 

The final days of Advent bring us more great recommendations. Christmas greetings to all our contributors and followers!

Which have you read? Please tell us in the comments!

Reviewed by Cindy Jefferies: "In 2012, Hassan Akkad was a refugee from Syria, where he had been imprisoned and tortured for protesting against the regime. His story, including the perilous journey across Europe in 2015, as borders began to close, was told in the BBC series Exodus, our journey to Europe, some of which he filmed himself. The programmes won a BAFTA for Best Factual Series in 2017, by which time he had settled in London, spending a while with a family who hosted refugees through the charity Refugees At Home ... His excellent English meant that he was able to travel around the country, speaking about his experiences. Now he has put all this down, and more, in this challenging and moving book. It is a story that needed to be told."

Reviewed by Jane Rogers: "The book started life as four lectures presented at the University of Chicago, and it retains the lean essay structure, with each part pursuing a specific line of argument as to why humanity has failed to engage with the climate emergency. He calls that inability ‘the great derangement’. Why do we continue to live as if the earth’s resources are infinite? Why do we burn coal, drive petrol cars, take flights, drill for oil, heat our homes with gas and destroy trees across the world, from the Brazilian rainforest to the ancient English woodlands being felled for HS2? We know these activities will cause catastrophe for our grandchildren. What is wrong with us?"

Reviewed by Simon Mason: "Temple’s love of language is evident in the urgent, evocative writing which strips away inessentials. What’s left are shrewd, concentrated descriptions (‘wicked-eyed gulls’, ‘the beach tightly muscled’) and bursts of dialogue which capture the sounds, moods and evasions of taciturn Australian men who live in danger."Story-lines, as likely to be personal as investigative, spiral outwards and continue to proliferate even at the end. Though its virtues are literary, its plot grips like a thriller. Its immediate focus is crime but its deeper enquiry is into human nature. It asks Who are we now, and by what appalling path did we get here?"

Reviewed by Philip Womack: "One of the worries many authors have about the increasing professionalisation of the writing life - creative writing courses, residencies, prizes, university posts and so forth - is that everything will shape into a corporate blandness. Writers are becoming a kind of bureaucrat, efficient administrators, reliable colleagues to the Academy. Workshops hone away rough edges and controversial ideas in prose and poetry; large publishers, worried about reputational consequences, discourage eccentricity.

Plug is a delicious, delirious antidote to all that. There is something impish about him, a kind of naughty nature spirit thrust into the world of the mundane. His optimism in the face of disaster is a tonic."

Reviewed by Celia Rees: In recollection, it seems a much longer novel, so much is contained within it and much of that actually goes on within the reader’s own head. The elliptical style, the sudden changes, the refusal to provide any easy explanations mark it as a true Young Adult novel defined, not by content, but by narrative sophistication. There is nothing easy about it but it is utterly compelling. Challenging in the true sense, it makes demands on the reader and demands to be read and read again.

Reviewed by Sara Collins: What really sets Goon Squad apart for me is the shape-shifting quality of its prose. From powerfully lyrical (Egan describes Sasha’s urge to pilfer an unattended wallet as feeling herself “contract around the object in a single yawn of appetite”) to character conjuring (“I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery”) to sucker punching (“Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?").

Reviewed by Hazel Gaynor: "Part murder-mystery, part publishing industry satire, Yellowface is a clever, dark, witty, provocative story that I devoured in a couple of days. I’m a very slow reader so this is a very good sign.

Through her two brilliant protagonists, Athena Liu and June Hayward, Kuang not only navigates the moral conundrum of plagiarism, but also addresses complex issues of toxic friendships, cancel culture, and the highly topical question of cultural appropriation that has been raised many times in the publishing industry in recent years."

 

Reviewed by Jane Rogers: "Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, and owns Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore. Elements of the novel are clearly rooted in this biography, since most of the action takes place in a similar Minneapolis bookstore, which specialises in books by and about indigenous people. Tookie is a one off; tough, funny, sarcastic, prickly, thoroughly off the rails (in her early life, at least), and convinced she is unlovable ..."

Reviewed by Paula Knight: "Despite being left with no illusions as to the potential challenges of life in a remote and wild location, I still found myself searching Orkney house prices on the internet for a few weeks after reading The Outrun. The book confirmed a distinct notion that it’s as plausible to suffer loneliness living in close proximity to millions of human beings as it is on a far-flung island with mainly wildlife for company. The latter seems more palatable to me."

And finally: our joint tribute to the much-loved, much-missed Helen Dunmore. Celia: "Helen Dunmore was one of those writers who could do everything, seemingly effortlessly. As well as her prize-winning adult fiction, she wrote for children and young adults and she wrote poetry. It seems wrong to be writing about her in the past tense. She was the kind of writer you thought would always be there to show the rest of us how it is done ... 

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We hope you've enjoyed revisiting our Advent Books. Follow us for more great recommendations in 2025!

RED SHIFT by Alan Garner, reviewed by Celia Rees

"Challenging in the true sense, it makes demands on the reader and demands to be read and read again."

In a Lecture given in 1975, Alan Garner said that each of his books could be seen as an expression of a different myth. For Elidor we should look to Childe Rolande and Burd Ellen; The Owl Service to Lieu, Blodeuedd and Gronw from the Fourth Book of the Mabinogion. And Red Shift? The Ballad of Tam Lin. Unlike The Owl Service, the connection is not obvious, not to this reader anyway, but it is typical of Garner that, once seen, it is clear. The story of the earthly knight trapped in elfin form by the Fairy Queen then snatched from her clutches by plucky young Janet who pulls him from his horse, holds on to him through some fierce shape shifting and finally cloaks his naked body in her green mantle thus saving her love and the father of her child, informs and infuses the novel in a deep kind of way, barely discernable on the surface but THERE.

Once one knows, then this layer of this multi layered work becomes obvious.  At the beginning of the novel, modern star-crossed lovers, Tom and Jan, are separated by class and soon to be by distance. She is the daughter of doctors while he lives with his working class parents in a caravan. She is moving to London while he will be staying on at the caravan park. Tom is a troubled young man, highly intelligent, at odds with his parents, hypersensitive and barely in control of his emotions. Another reference, in a book with many references, is to Tom o’ Bedlam in King Lear. The novel starts with the two lovers looking down at the M6 motorway as they contemplate their parting. The novel is, of course, set in Cheshire, a county with deep resonance for Garner. As in all his novels, place is as important as myth (myth of the place most important of all) and place is key to the different strands of time that run through the book. The two modern lovers inhabit and wander through a landscape that has been inhabited before. Tom’s caravan park is at Wulvern, the site of an ancient burial mound; they take an ancient track leading from Crewe Station across railway sidings to the village of Barthomley and finally to Mow Cop, a place of ancient sanctuary and 'the netherstone of the world' on which 'the sky mill turns...to grind stars'. 

The novel shifts back and forth from the present to Roman Britain and the English Civil War. The times are linked not just by place, but by the night sky. The lovers are linked by the moon and Orion even when they are far apart. This links them, in turn, to pairs of lovers in the past.  They are also linked by a votive Bronze Age stone axe head that is discovered and kept by each of the troubled young men and the strong young women who protect them.

The stories are marked by quite shocking violence that twists and turns, looming and receding though time, and is centred on the young men. Macey, at Mow Cop, is a berserker with the Roman soldiers, who is capable of flipping and killing indiscriminately. Thomas is subject to fits and visions and is trapped with other villagers in the church tower at Barthomley by Civil War soldiers in a siege which becomes a historic massacre that occurred on Christmas Eve 1643.  Both of these young men are saved by the love of a strong young woman and both are troubled by visions that link them to the modern Tom. The violence resonates to the present with references to the Vietnam War which was going on when Garner was writing. The Roman soldiers have American nicknames and speak in army slang. 

This is a multi layered and complex novel which makes few concessions to the reader. The movement between time frames is abrupt. Most of the modern story is delivered in jittery, jagged dialogue between Tom and his girlfriend. It is a novel of high compression. Only155 pages long, it requires the reader to do most of the work. The brevity is a stark contrast to most modern YA novels, especially fantasy, and what Garner manages to achieve, the amount he packs in to those few pages, is breath taking. In recollection, it seems a much longer novel, so much is contained within it and much of that actually goes on within the reader’s own head. The elliptical style, the sudden changes, the refusal to provide any easy explanations mark it as a true Young Adult novel defined, not by content, but by narrative sophistication. There is nothing easy about it but it is utterly compelling. Challenging in the true sense, it makes demands on the reader and demands to be read and read again.

‘It contrasts to the deadweight tedium of so much other ‘teenage’ fiction. The virtuosity with which he manages pace and dialogue is dazzling.’

So said The Times in 1973 and still true today.  

I'm writing this review on the same weekend as Philip Pullman's much awaited The Book of Dust is being trailed and previewed and I'm wondering if Red Shift would even be published now, for Young Adults anyway, or would it be seen as too 'difficult', breaking just too many rules? 

Guest review by Katherine Langrish: THE THREE ROYAL MONKEYS by Walter de la Mare

"A rich, exotic beauty tinged with pathos and melancholy, relieved by sure touches of comedy."

Katherine Langrish is the author of a number of historical fantasies
including the trilogy West of the Moon, and Dark Angels (HarperCollins).
Her most recent book is Seven Miles of Steel Thistles (The Greystones
Press), a collection of essays on folklore and fairy tales based
on her award-winning blog of the same name.

Author photograph by Jo Cotterill

As far as I'm aware this is Walter de la Mare’s only novel-length book for children. It was first published in 1910 as ‘The Three Mullar-Mulgars’, a title so unhelpfully baffling even by early 20th century standards that by the time I read it in the 1960s it had been rechristened. Even as ‘The Three Royal Monkeys’ I think it’s not particularly well known. Which is a great pity.  As a child I was entranced by it, and I still am.

To explain the impression it made on me, here’s a bit of personal history. I began seriously to write stories when I was ten. I’d just finished all the Seven Chronicles of Narnia and CS Lewis was dead, so I knew there wouldn't be an eighth.  (‘The Last Battle’ was such a betrayal. The end of Narnia?  Nooooooo!  And I wasn’t fooled by all that ‘heaven is Narnia, but better’ stuff, either. There was no better place than Narnia.)

Aged ten therefore, my first 'book' was called ‘Tales of Narnia’: fan-fic before the term was invented.  My second, a full-length effort, was an historical novel which owed at least something to those of Mary Renault whose ‘The Bull From the Sea’ I had discovered in Ross-on-Wye public library. Then, aged 13 or so, I wrote another ‘book’ of short stories which I called ‘Mixed Magic’ (truly mixed: some not bad, some terrible) mainly derived from two more beloved writers, Edith Nesbit and Elizabeth Goudge. When I was 15 or 16 my fourth handwritten manuscript was heavily influenced by early Alan Garner (children encounter mysterious stranger in dripping English woods, pursued by minions of the triple Moon Goddess: standing stones and indifferent golden-faced elves figured largely). But my fifth effort, written in my late teens and early twenties, by which time I was beginning to find my own voice, owed a great deal to the enchantment I found in ‘The Three Royal Monkeys’.  I called my story 'The Magic Forest' and went on to write a sixth full-length ms (also unpublished) before eventually getting myself into print with ‘Troll Fell’.  And I enjoyed every minute of all of it.

The quality in ‘The Three Royal Monkeys’ which I endeavoured to reproduce in my fifth opus was a rich, exotic beauty tinged with pathos and melancholy, relieved by sure touches of comedy.  De la Mare tells the story of three monkey brothers who, upon their mother’s death, discover they are heirs to a great kingdom. This is how it begins.

On the borders of the Forest of Munza-Mulgar lived once an old grey Fruit Monkey of the name of Mutta-Matutta.  She had three sons, the eldest Thumma, the next Thimbulla, and the youngest, who was a Nizza-neela, Ummanodda.  And they called each other for short, Thumb, Thimble and Nod.  The rickety, tumble-down old wooden hut in which they lived had been built 319 Munza years before by a traveller, a Portugall or Portingal, lost in the forest 22,997 leagues from home.

The comic exactitude of this, and the strange names, entranced me. After the ‘Portingal’ dies, a monkey comes to live in the hut. He finds:

... all manner of strange and precious stuff half buried – pots for Subbub; pestles and basins for Manaka-cake, etc; three bags of great beads, clear, blue and emerald; a rusty musket; nine ephelantoes’ tusks; a bag of Margarita stones; and many other thing, besides cloth and spider-silk and dried-up fruits and fishes.  He made his dwelling there and died there.  This Mulgar, Zebbah, was Mutta-Matutta’s great-great-great grandfather.  Dead and gone were all.

But one day a royal traveller arrives, Seelem: ‘own brother to Assasimmon, Prince of the Valley of Tishnar’, accompanied by his servant.  Seelem becomes Mutta-Matutta’s husband. After thirteen years of marriage he leaves her to return to his heritage in the beautiful valleys of Tishnar. Seven years later on her deathbed, she urges her sons to follow their father.

“His country lies beyond and beyond,” she said, “forest and river, forest, swamp and river, the mountains of Arrakkaboa – leagues, leagues away.”  And as she paused, a feeble wind sighed through the open window, stirring the dangling bones of the Portingal, so that with their faint clicking, they too, seemed to echo, “leagues, leagues away.”

The rest of the book follows the brothers’ difficult and magical journey. Nod, the youngest, is ‘a Nizza-Neela, and has magic in him’: he is the possessor of the marvellous Wonder-Stone, which if rubbed when they are in great danger will bring the aid of Tishnar to them.

And who is Tishnar?  There are many mysteries in this book and she is one of them, with a whole chapter at the end dedicated to her.  She is ‘the Beautiful One of the Mountains’; ‘wind and stars, the sea and the endless unknown’.  She it is who instils in the heart a sense of longing; she brings peace and dreams and maybe, in her shadow form, death.

At any rate, the brothers’ journey is precipitated when Nod accidentally sets fire to the hut. In the fairytale tradition of the foolish yet wise younger brother, he makes many mistakes, but he is also the one who saves his brothers from the predicaments in which they find themselves as they trek through the deep moonlit snow of the winter forest – escaping the flesh-eating Minnimuls, tricking the terrifying hunting-cat Immanâla, riding striped Zevveras – the ‘Little Horses of Tishnar’ – finding friends and losing one another, quarrelling and making up.

It’s a deeply serious quest, an epic journey with no hint of tongue in cheek despite the fact that the protagonists are monkeys.  Delicately, de la Mare explores the transience of beauty, the poignancy of loss, the immanence of death: and his characters blaze all the more brightly in their course across this impermanent world. There’s a lovely chapter in which Nod meets and loses his heart to a beautiful Water Midden (water maiden) to whom he entrusts his Wonder-Stone.  Here is the song he overhears her singing ‘in the dark green dusk’ beside a waterfall:

Bubble, Bubble,

Swim to see

Oh, how beautiful

I be,

Fishes, fishes,

Finned and fine,

What’s your gold

Compared with mine?

Why, then, has

Wise Tishnar made

One so lovely,

One so sad?

Lone am I,

And can but make

A little song,

For singing’s sake.

If you haven’t read this book before and you’re looking for something at least as good as ‘The Hobbit’, this is for you.