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 Mary Hoffman: BIRDCAGE WALK by Helen Dunmore

Mary’s first book, a YA novel, was published in 1975. Since then she has written 120 books, mainly for children and teenagers but lately also a couple of adult novels under pseudonyms. After graduating in English Literature from Cambridge and spending a couple of years studying Linguistics at UCL, Mary wrote courses for the Open University for five years but then went freelance. She recently started The Greystones Press, a small independent publishing house, with her husband. Mary’s books have been translated into 30 language and won some prizes. She runs the popular History Girls blog, which can be read every day. Mary lives in a converted barn in West Oxfordshire with her husband and three demanding Burmese cats. Her three daughters are all grown up: one is a writer, one a theatre producer and the youngest, a designer, is sailing round the world. Mary has four grandchildren and her latest picture book, Pirate Baby, is dedicated to the two on the boat.

Helen Dunmore’s death last year was a great loss to the world of literature. She had written fifteen novels, four short story collections, eight YA novels, seventeen books for younger readers and twelve poetry collections.

The last of these, Inside the Wave, posthumously won the Costa Book of the Year prize, announced at the beginning of this year, an award that met with universal approval and poignant pleasure. Helen Dunmore was, in words of the cliché, much loved. But clichés are sometimes true and no-one has a bad word to say about her, whose death at 64 robbed her friends and readers of surely more fiction and verse.

So what of her final novel, Birdcage Walk?

The ambience of the story is immediately arresting: Bristol in the late 18th century, a time when it was a meeting place of radicals, many producing political pamphlets and other ephemera. It was also the site of a property boom and canny developers were building grand terraces above Clifton.

One woman, Lizzie, the daughter of radical Julia Fawkes, forms a link between the two since her marriage to John Diner Tredevant, one of the speculators building a terrace above the gorge. That is an uneasy in-law relationship and Lizzie is torn between the political ideas she has been brought up on and the capitalist ideology that underlies the source of her husband’s potential wealth.

Helen Dunmore herself wrote two months before her death (Guardian, 4th March 2017: Facing mortality and what we leave behind) that she wanted to acknowledge the people who leave no mark on history, no legacy of written words: “Historical record does not know them but fiction can imagine them.”

Of course, at that stage she was aware of her terminal diagnosis and she does leave a great legacy of writing in so many genres but Julia Fawkes is a fictional unknown, whose overgrown grave is found by a man walking his Jack Russell in a rather awkward present day Prelude to the novel. Birdcage Walk is a path leading to a graveyard in Clifton, Bristol, where Dunmore had walked and explored for forty years.

The discovery of Julia’s grave leads the unnamed seeker to research on the Internet and in local archives but although he can find details of Julia’s second husband, Augustus Gleeson, nothing of her life remains. And the dog-walker fades out of the story, not returning at the end to add the second bracket to the framing device.

Still the main story doesn’t begin straightaway. After the Prelude there is a kind of prologue, in 1789, in which a man buries a woman in a deserted glade rear a river. Only eight pages and three years later does the action of the novel proper begin.

Lizzie wakes in a post-coital dawn and extracts herself from her husband’s heavy embrace. This is the powerful, strong John Tredevant, who prefers to be called Diner and who wants plenty of sex but no children. We know from the beginning that he has a temper and is possessive about his wife, not wanting to share her love with a child.

But a child there is and it’s not because Diner forbears to satisfy himself in other orifices or that Lizzie forgets her mother’s advice about what to do with a little sponge and some vinegar. It is Lizzie’s own mother, the great Julia Fawkes, who has the child, a boy, and the tragedy of his birth leaves him in need of mothering.

Diner is jealous of the love Lizzie lavishes on her little half-brother and issues a series of ultimatums. It is clear that all the women in the story are afraid of him and Lizzie’s true alliances are with Hannah, her mother’s old servant and young Philo the Tredevants’ own maid. There is a sort of conspiracy of sisterhood among the women to keep Diner pacified and the baby Thomas (named for Tom Paine, as the son of two radicals) properly cared for.

Meanwhile, Lizzie and Diner have moved into one of the terraced houses he has built – what we’d now call a “show home” - to encourage buyers but the terrace and the pavement outside it are incomplete, suppliers are demanding payment, the workers are threatening to down tools and buyers are not forthcoming. None of this is good for Diner’s temper and Lizzie lives in an atmosphere of brooding menace.

At the same time, in Paris, the deposed King Louis has gone on trial. Lizzie is living in a time of great change both personally and publicly. It seems almost inevitable that she will meet someone else and she does: a young man being sheltered by her stepfather Augustus. Will Forest is everything that Diner is not – tender, a poet and interested in Lizzie’s opinions.

And into this powder keg of high emotions is dropped the match of Diner’s dead first wife, Lucie. Her godmother turns up, asking to see Lucie’s grave.

This must be Helen Dunmore’s last novel and it is laced through with forebodings about death. Because of her previous prize-winning output and the sadness at her loss, we want it to be a masterpiece but unfortunately, it isn’t.

It is, as you would expect, very well-written and often fascinating but the construction is off -putting and the prologue of the man burying the woman leaches all the tension out of Diner’s story. There are little nods to other treatments of the same theme, as when Diner says of Lucie, “one may smile too often,” evoking Browning’s My Last Duchess and “all smiles stopped together.”

In her Afterword, Dunmore says, “I am writing not only about a particular period of history but also about the ways in which the individual vanishes from historical record.” This is where the interest of the novel lies, in the imagining of Julia Fawkes as one of those “lost people,” albeit a fictional one, whose mark on history disappears like a fingerprint in kneaded dough but whose influence lives on.

Her Words Remain Our Inheritance is carved on Julia Fawkes’ headstone. It might as well stand as Helen Dunmore’s own epitaph.

Birdcage Walk is published by Windmill Press.

Read Writers Review's tribute to Helen Dunmore here.

Our tribute to Helen Dunmore, poet and novelist, 1952-2017

"Helen Dunmore died much too young. But we have her books and they abide."

Celia Rees: 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.

I remember sitting opposite her at a jolly Hay Festival dinner hosted by Scholastic. I confess to being more than a little star struck but she was as charming as she was beautiful. Her fame was immaterial. She joined in happily with the table talk and laughter, all writers together. We will all miss her. I can’t believe she’s gone.

Linda Newbery: I never met Helen Dunmore or heard her speak, but somehow feel that I have, through the impact her books have made on me as both reader and writer.

She died just two days before the announcement of the Baileys Prize for Women's Fiction, of which she was the first winner (in its original incarnation as the Orange Prize) for A Spell of Winter. In her last few days she wrote a poignant poem about the approach of death, Hold Out Your Arms. She was a poet as well as a novelist, and it showed in everything she wrote: in the precision and sensuousness of her language and the seductiveness of her rhythms.

Her first novel, Zennor in Darkness, was widely praised for its freshness and immediacy and the luminosity of its prose. I read that on publication and have read most of her books since. Her subjects were wide-ranging: the First World War and its aftermath, the Siege of Leningrad, the French Revolution seen from England, domestic life with its tensions and rivalries. The Greatcoat was a novella for Random House's Hammer series in which a haunted figure brings back the terrible losses of aircrew in the war (a subject which resonates with me, as my father was a navigator in Bomber Command). She could be deeply unsettling, as in the relationship between brother and sister in A Spell of Winter and between sisters in Talking to the Dead. Everything she wrote had her distinctive stamp of honesty, insightfulness and lyricism.

She wrote wonderfully about landscapes and weather, especially in the coastal settings she loved. Here is Daniel, in The Lie, looking down from a cottage roof. "There was the brown, bare, sinewy land running down to the cliffs. There were the Garracks, and Giant's Cap, and the Island. There was the swell, like a muscle under the sea, moving in long, slow pulses to Porthgwyn. I looked west and saw rainclouds, damson-coloured and making a bloom of shadow on the sea." She was always good on food, as here, when Nina in Talking to the Dead makes a tart: "the apples must be cut evenly, in fine crescents of equal thickness, which will lap around in ring after ring, hooping inwards, glazed with apricot jam. The tart must cook until the tips of the apple rings are almost black, but the fruit itself is still plump and moist. When you close your eyes and bite you must taste caramel, sharp apple, juice and the short, sandy texture of sweet pastry all at once." It's enough to make you salivate. Food is abundant in this novel, while in The Siege she wrote powerfully and unforgettably about hunger and cold, desperation and survival.

Completing her final novel, Birdcage Walk, she knew of her terminal cancer. In its Afterword, she wrote: "The question of what is left behind by a life haunts the novel. While I finished and edited it I was already seriously ill, but not yet aware of this. I suppose that a writer’s creative self must have access to knowledge of which the conscious mind and the emotions are still ignorant, and that a novel written at such a time, under such a growing shadow, cannot help being full of a sharper light, as a landscape becomes brilliantly distinct in the last sunlight before a storm."

I'm glad now that there are Helen Dunmore novels and poems I haven't yet read. I will ration them out to myself, in order not to use up the new reading experience too quickly. She was an exhilarating, generous talent whose words sing from the page and will ensure that she is remembered.

Adèle Geras: I can't remember the year exactly, but it was in the early 1980s. I'd just started to write poems again. I'd not written any since leaving school in 1963. I entered a competition run by the Lancaster Festival and judged by Ian McMillan. Lancaster had a very kind way of awarding prize winners: all the poems the judge liked were published together in a pamphlet and the poets were invited to Lancaster for a reading.

Some of us went out to an Italian restaurant afterwards, and I can't account for why, but Helen Dunmore was at that meal and I was sitting opposite her at the table. Years later, when I started reading her novels with enormous pleasure, I would think back to that lunch and my memories of what she was like. Trivial as it may sound when you consider her gifts as a poet and novelist, my abiding memory is of her beauty. Photos don't do justice to it. I would say: radiant, but that sounds trite. Trite but true.

The last book I read by her was Exposure, which I really loved and couldn't put down. I read what she wrote as she published what she knew was to be her last book, and the grace and bravery of her words was some consolation in the face of the tragic news she was conveying. I defy anyone to read her final poem without weeping.

Helen Dunmore died much too young. But we have her books and they abide.

What are your memories of Helen Dunmore? Or your favourites of her novels, stories and poems? Do please add your comments as part of this tribute to an exceptional and much-loved writer.

Thank you!

PICK OF THE YEAR by Adèle Geras

There are an awful lot of variations of the name ANNE in my pick of the year but that's a pure coincidence. This list will leave out many  books I liked a lot, but that can't be helped.  It's not in order of merit but roughly in the order I read them.  I cannot account for why Tana French's cover image is larger than anyone else's. Here goes!

1) THE ESSEX SERPENT by Sarah Perry.

I was an early adopter of this splendid novel. I read it in a black and white covered proof so was not seduced by the astonishingly beautiful cover.  It's a most enjoyable and deliciously Gothic historical novel, with so much in it that you wonder how Perry has covered the ground, without losing impetus, structure or  interest. The prose is fabulous throughout. It's on the Costa shortlist and I'd be thrilled if it won.

2) THE GUSTAV  SONATA   by Rose Tremain. 

 Tremain has been a favourite writer of mine for many years but this is perhaps her most moving novel. Set in Switzerland and covering a period from the Second World War to the 70s, it is the story of a friendship like no other I've read. Warning: it is also almost unbearably sad at times. Also on the Costa shortlist and I would not be sorry if it won. Could we have two main prizes?

3) A LITTLE LIFE by Hanya Yanagihara.

This novel was very controversial when it appeared, dividing readers. Those who loved it were enthusiastic. Those who didn't said it was too violent, the child abuse themes were too graphic and so forth. They objected to the 'realism' of having four best friends in New York who were quite so successful. Unlikely, they said. Not convincing. They objected to a portrait of the city which didn't even mention 9/11. I read it over my summer holiday (it is 900 pages long but you don't notice on a Kindle) and I can truthfully say that it's the best novel I've read not just this year but for many years. I  think people misunderstood it. I reckon it's a fairytale. I think the child abuse elements are the Dark Forest we know from so many of the Grimm stories. And the moral: what will survive of us is love seems to me to be a good one.  Jude is a fairytale hero. I was moved, excited, and overcome with admiration for the writing and the way Yanagihara makes New York a magical place, full of strange enchantments and ogres in plenty. Do try it, but don't beat yourself up if it isn't your sort of thing. As I say: this book divided readers. 

4) THE TRESPASSER by Tana French.

French ought to be more widely read and much more admired. Her novels, set in Ireland, are just as good as many of the Irish books which win  prizes, but with added crime. Do not miss FAITHFUL PLACE and BROKEN HARBOUR. This one is also terrific and different from those. It's a first person police procedural which will make you feel part of the group of cops at this particular station. Good crime, characters you can warm to and a narrator who has a great line in humour too. If you like detective/crime/psychological thrillers, make 2017 the year you get to know Tana French. 

5) EXPOSURE by Helen Dunmore.

Dunmore is a safe pair of hands and this novel is very good indeed. It's a rather unusual spy story with elements that will remind you of Graham Greene. A moral dilemma, interesting characters, a spot-on evocation of the post-War period and just ripe to be turned into a television series. Read it first before that happens. Dunmore is also a poet and it shows.

6) THE SEARCH WARRANT:DORA BRUDER  by Patrick Modiano.

Prize for the most extraordinary reading experience of the year goes to this book by the Nobel prizewinning French writer. When he won the Nobel, I had not heard of him. I have now downloaded three more books. This one is very short, and in a way, not really a novel at all. Nothing much happens. A man looks for someone. That's it. It's a novel full of spaces, gaps in narrative, holes in the fabric of the world and it manages to say so much precisely because of these gaps about the Occupation of Paris in the Second World War. It reads very easily. The narrator tells us street names. What was there once. What is now there. He mentions people and speculates on what has happened to them. He walks around. At the end, you're shattered and wonder what the magic of this book is, exactly. It was a complete eye-opener.

7) LES PARISIENNES by Anne Sebba.

After reading Modiano, I really wanted to know more about the time of the Occupation of Paris and this book came along right on cue.  Sebba takes us in detail through those days as seen through the lives of the women of the city: those who resisted, those who collaborated, those who did the best they could. It's a lavishly produced doorstopper with lots of photographs and by the time you've read it, you have lived vicariously through those days and experienced them through the words, and memories of the living and the dead. Sebba interviews many survivors of that time and their testimony is particularly moving. For anyone who loves truly readable history.

8)VINEGAR GIRL by Anne Tyler.

There's no question in my mind that Tyler is the Great American  Novelist and I would love her to win the Nobel prize. For decades, she's written about a small corner of the USA, (Baltimore) and made it her own. She is an elegant but unostentatious writer; one of those whose prose seems organic, as though it has grown naturally on the page with no  discernible effort  from the writer. Her subject is families and their eccentricities and emotions and relationships, which is probably why she is not a Nobel Laureate.  Her books count as  Domestic Fiction which of course is regarded as Lesser. It's not War. It's not Politics. It's not Fantasy. It's not Crime...it's people doing the best they can to get through life. 
VINEGAR GIRL is her take on Shakespeare's  The Taming of the Shrew, part of the Hogarth series of novellas,  and it's quite delightful. It's short and slight and perfect. You will laugh, and cry and fall in love with the heroine and her unlikely hero. I thought it was great. 

9) MILLER'S VALLEY by Anna Quindlen.

I love Quindlen's novels. She ought to be better known here and I thought this book was so good I reviewed it on this site, so won't go on about it too much... do read it, and try also STILL LIFE WITH BREADCRUMBS which is also very good indeed.

10) COMMONWEALTH by Ann Patchett.

Almost at the end of the year comes one of the best novels of all. Patchett has used her own family history, I think, to write about what are now known as Blended Families and she does it so well and so movingly and sensitively that you feel by the end as if you've met and known every one of the many characters. It's a warm-hearted, generous and enthralling story of flawed but very recognisable people. I really loved it.

Merry Christmas and Happy 2017 to all readers of this blog. Hope  your own reading experiences prove enjoyable. DO NOT READ A BOOK  YOU'RE NOT ENJOYING....your life is too short.