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!

Guest review by Paula Knight: THE OUTRUN by Amy Liptrot

"The tug of love between urban and rural life is what stitched me into the core of this book." 

Paula Knight is an author, illustrator and comics creator. She has illustrated over 60 children’s books and written three picture books.

Her latest book, The Facts of Life, is a graphic novel memoir for adults, published in 2017 by Myriad Editions after six years in the making. An extract of it reached Myriad’s inaugural First Graphic Novel competition in 2012, chosen by judges including Ian Rankin, Corinne Pearlman and Steve Bell. She was awarded an Arts Council England grant for the work.

Paula is currently exploring new ways of working within her limits of being semi-disabled due to chronic illness. She is also an enthusiastic amateur photographer interested in nature, wildlife and abstraction. The former and latter are likely on a creative collision course - albeit tethered in sketchbooks waiting to be set free.

IG (Illustration): @paulajkstudio
IG (Photography): @paulajknight
Twitter: @Paula_JKnight
www.paulaknight.co.uk

As a city dweller who nurses romantic notions of living somewhere less peopled, I’d been meaning to read this for a while. I’ve long been interested in ‘overcoming adversity’ memoirs since reading Maya Angelou’s autobiography in my twenties. I’m also a wildlife lover and bird-fan (albeit not a fully fledged twitcher), so there was much to absorb me in this book.

Liptrot’s memoir is set in Orkney and London, and springs from a backdrop of extremes: her father’s mental illness; her parents’ separation; her mother’s subsequent religious fervour; and the author’s struggles with addiction. The opening pages take place on Mainland’s airstrip: Her father is waiting to be taken to a mental institution in Aberdeen as her mother arrives to introduce his newborn daughter (Liptrot). This sets the tone and premise for her story - one of leaving and returning, excess and retreat.

The book continues with Liptrot’s return to the island after a young adulthood spent partying in London. A mingling of childhood memories with exposition of the island’s landscape and wildlife is not only a backdrop to her story but the very fabric of it. The prose is pure without being flowery or too sentimental, and her close knowledge and respect for the wild Orcadian landscape is evident. She recalls memories of rural life and how, as a teenager, she yearned to spread her wings. Migrate she did - and the book tells of her chaotic life in London descending into alcohol addiction, difficult relationships, lack of direction and a distressing adverse event that is the catalyst for her return to Orkney in search of healing.

The narrative structure moves between how she spent her time on the islands and how life unfolded then imploded in London, including time attending AA meetings.

What I found most gratifying about this book was how Liptrot makes sense of her life in the seamless connections between nature and the human condition, and the enlightenment that can be gained from recognising these introjections of states. She likens the destructive action of ‘shoaling’ waves eroding the cliffs to the physiological effects of alcoholism on her body, which exacerbated seizures; and how geological tremors felt by islanders were tied up with the myth of the destructive Stoor Worm. Facts about Orkney are intertwined with folklore, mythology and stories of shipwrecksm suggesting that Liptrot is similarly washed up in this landscape from her own personal storm. Although some metaphors are explicitly explained, there is plenty of room for readers to make their own connections. For example, Liptrot engages in conservation work counting the elusive corncrake by listening for their calls at night. I interpreted this as a metaphor for personal desolation - a casting around in the dark for reassurance from at least one solitary voice confirming that life is still thriving in the gloom. The corncrake doesn’t want to be found, but it is a human need to know that the world is in order with everything in its rightful place. This is the crux of how Liptrot sets anchor - by engaging in nature; in what is real.

The tug of love between urban and rural life is what stitched me into the core of this book. The damage wreaked by alcoholism in the wilds of a heaving city versus retreating back to the expansive skies of her Orkney homeland in search of recovery is perhaps a cliche. However, Liptrot explores this in a way that throws out assumptions of rural romanticism as healer and city life as destructor. I appreciated how nature was not offered on a plate as a magical cure-all and that she makes clear that recovery is an ongoing process.

Liptrot writes about being drawn to ‘the edge’, and throughout the course of the book she at once moves geographically closer to it and metaphorically further from it: By eventually choosing to inhabit one of Orkney’s most northerly islands, Papa Westray, her deep immersion in the natural world facilitates her turning away from a life lived on the edge of self-destruction. It’s truly a human/ nature story - one that defines how the two are in no way separable.

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.

The Outrun is published by Canongate. 

Read our review of Paula Knight's The Facts of Life here.