ADVENT BOOKS week 2 - revisiting some of our favourites from the last 8 years

Which have you read? Tell us in the comments!

Advent Books Week 2 brings more of our favourite books and reviews. Several of our regular contributors appear here - huge thanks to them and to everyone who sends us their recommendations. There are certainly some great reads here - which have you read, and what's your view? Tell us in the comments!

 

Reviewed by Rachel Morris: "Beautifully written, moves at pace, surges with a bitter poignancy and is laced with a very particular kind of magical realism. It is also strangely defiant and often very funny ... Gardam’s dialogue is to die for – supple, expressive, often startling. She can turn the direction of a story on a sixpence. (Oh, you think quite suddenly, so that’s where this is going.) She has a transfiguring talent, can flood a scene with an ecstatic strangeness, can turn the ordinary world momentarily into something glorious."

Reviewed by Judith Allnatt: "One of Tremain’s great strengths is that she looks unflinchingly at human darkness whilst still maintaining a feeling of authorial empathy and understanding. As did Trespass, The Road Home and The Gustav Sonata, this novel moved me to tears – it is heartrending, compassionate and brilliant."

Reviewed by Jon Appleton: "You could say the book is about Danny Conroy, a man who knowingly allows himself to become the ‘project’ of two strong-willed, passionate women – first of all Maeve and later his wife Celeste. Who, if anyone, is at fault in such a scenario when things don’t work out? (That’s not much of a spoiler, I promise you) ... It’s perhaps her best book but quite likely only till the next one. She’s that kind of writer." (Tom Lake has followed ... also reviewed by Jon.)

Reviewed by Katherine Langrish: "As I reached the end I realised that the writer with whose work I’m most drawn to compare The Golden Rule is Daphne du Maurier. She too told strong stories with strong characters in strong, often Cornish settings: her books live and are loved. Du Maurier has sometimes been belittled as a Gothic novelist, though why ‘Gothic’ should be regarded as in any way derogatory I do not know: frankly what was good enough for Charlotte and Emily Bronte ought to be good enough for anyone. Richly textured, modern, contemporary, literary, The Golden Rule  treads confidently in their footsteps."

Reviewed by Cindy Jefferies: "So who is the master here? Both men inhabit these pages. Characters, whether real or imagined must dance to the writer’s tune. James was a man of the mind, and Tóibín inhabits that mind to stunning effect. No one can truly know what thoughts inhabit the corners of another’s brain, but Tóibín is impressive at conjuring what might have been there."

Reviewed by Penny Dolan: "I read with a growing sense of solutions slowly arriving and wrongs steadily being gloriously righted. All in all, Lessons in Chemistry was a delight and one that made me feel better and stronger for having read it and met such a heroine, which is surely a good thing in a story, especially these days."

Reviewed by Anne Cassidy: "Maggie O’Farrell weaves such a wonderful story from these scant facts that I ended up feeling that I definitely knew more about Shakespeare than I had at the beginning. I wanted his life to have been like this. But while O’Farrell’s plot is convincing it’s the language she uses that sets her work above the ordinary. Of the tutor’s lesson and his two unwilling students she says, “They look towards him, plants turning to the sun. He smiles at their soft, unformed faces, pale as unrisen dough in the light from the window.” A wonderful book which I have thought about over and over since reading it."

Guest review by Cindy Jefferies: THE MASTER by Colm Tóibín

"Henry James was such a consummate observer, and Tóibín gives us this in spades."

First published in 2001 for children, Cindy Jefferies found success with her Fame School series with Usborne Books, obtaining 22 foreign rights deals. Latterly writing fiction for adults as Cynthia Jefferies, her first title The Outrageous Fortune of Abel Morgan was published in 2018, followed a year later by The Honourable Life of Thomas Chayne, set during the English Civil Wars. Both titles are now available in paperback.

One of the delights of reviewing for Writers Review is that one can choose any book for adults. Although we all, as writers, wish to see our most recent novel given as much favourable publicity as possible - sales, after all, are vital - there is something very pleasing, to me at any rate, about seeing one of my earlier books being appreciated. Perhaps that is why I am so often drawn to earlier works of authors I admire.

There is much to admire about Colm Tóibín's work. I first read The Blackwater Lightship, and was immediately captivated. But I had a fine copy of The Master on my shelves for a while and neglected to pick it up. Was it the subject? The Master is about Henry James, who I read voraciously in my teens and early twenties. Had I finished with James? Was he no longer interesting to me? Did I enjoy Tóibín so much only because I liked it when he wrote of Ireland, the land of my mother? How we so casually reject gems waiting patiently for our attention!

I had not finished with James, and Tóibín had many insights about him. But The Master is a novel. So who is the master here? Both men inhabit these pages. Characters, whether real or imagined must dance to the writer’s tune. James was a man of the mind, and Tóibín inhabits that mind to stunning effect. No one can truly know what thoughts inhabit the corners of another’s brain, but Tóibín is impressive at conjuring what might have been there.

We follow the Master as he travels from London, where Oscar Wilde is having more theatrical success than he, to Italy and France. He moves through society, lauded by many who invite him to more gatherings than he can cope with. He strives to remain polite to those who irritate him but often longs for solitude. He moves from place to place, haunted by memories, as are we all. It is hard to settle. He has no wife, no home of his own, but has no wish to return to America. He is a drifter in Europe, living in his mind.

I absolutely loved this novel. I was in James’ mind, travelling with him, relieved with him when he found the perfect place in England in which to finally settle. Henry James was such a consummate observer, and Tóibín gives us this in spades. We learn about the people he meets, his dearest friends as well as those for whom he has little time. His perhaps conflicted sexuality is there, love is there, grief at the loss of those most dear to him. He is not a perfect man, but he does his best.

Running throughout the novel is his work. He is having trouble with his hands, engaging a man to take dictation, which works wonderfully well. He is writing short stories, and when not writing them, thinking about them. It is this that most impressed me about an highly impressive novel. As with all writers, James’ life informs his work, and his work informs his life. The two are bound together in a private dance which only he, and we, through reading the novel can experience.

Leonard Woolf, in I think the second volume of his autobiography, Beginning Again, describes how even when quite traumatic things happen there is a corner of his writer’s mind which observes with interest, and stores away what he has seen or heard to be perhaps used at a later date. Woolf thinks that this splitting of the mind to enable both the observer and the experiencer is common to writers, and I think he is right. Tóibín describes it beautifully in The Master. It is just one of the things that gives this novel such great depth and I commend it to you.

The Master is published by Picador.

Cindy is a regular contributor to Writers Review. Here are some of her recent choices:

The Wolf Border by Sarah Hall

Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier

The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim

Read our Q&A with Cindy about The Honourable Life of Thomas Chayne