Christmas round-up by Adèle, Celia and Linda

 

Christmas greetings to all our followers! 

To mark the day, Adèle Geras, Celia Rees and Linda Newbery (left to right above) have each chosen three books - two they've read and one they plan to read in the New Year. 

What would your choices be? Tell us in the comments!

Linda's choices

Don't Even Think About It - why our brains are wired to ignore climate change, by George Marshall. 

Do you wonder why people aren't talking about the multiple threats of climate emergency all the time? Or why politicians repeatedly fail to address climate breakdown as a top priority? Don't they get it, and what would it take to make them treat the climate emergency as if it is an emergency? This is permanently on my mind, so I grabbed the book when I saw it in an Oxfam shop window. George Marshall, with the help of various specialists, explores the psychology of how we respond to dangers and why climate breakdown somehow doesn't make the cut. There are various explanations, including: "It provides us with none of the defining qualities that would give it a clear identity: no deadlines, no geographic location, no single cause, solution, or enemy." Even when people have faced a climate-change-induced disaster such as flooding or wildfire, they're more intent on getting back to 'normal' than on acknowledging its cause and probable repetition. So how will we confront the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced? Marshall's book is almost ten years old, but just as relevant and pressing as when it was published. It should be required reading for politicians, especially those attending COP summits and failing to reach effective agreement on curbing emissions.

Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo by Michael McCarthy

In this poignant, wide-ranging book, Michael McCarthy gives a chapter to each of our summer visitors, or 'springbringers' as he calls them: cuckoos, nightingales, turtle doves, the various warblers, swifts, swallows and house martins. He examines their habitats and behaviours and how they're part of our culture, represented in folklore and literature. For each bird he meets someone with particular devotion and knowledge, accompanies them to experience that special intimacy and to appreciate how much would be lost if the species were to continue its decline or even be lost for ever. "During my quest for them they were not all gone, the summer migrant birds: some of them had made it back from Africa, and for that unforgettable springtime, the world was still working. But for how much longer?"

The book I can't wait to read in 2024:

Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth

This book and its key concept have gained such traction in the environmental movement that even without having read it, I understand its central concept: namely that governments must wrench themselves away from the goal of endless economic growth on a planet with finite resources. Instead, Kate Raworth suggests viewing the economy as a ring doughnut. The central hole, representing poverty and destitution, is a space into which no one should fall; the outer rim of the doughnut represents an 'ecological ceiling', the limit of expansion, so that wealth and resources beyond that are turned back in, to the benefit of all. "Today we have economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive: what we need are economies that make us thrive, whether or not they grow."  Like many great ideas, it's so simple as to make obvious sense. I've heard Kate Raworth speak and have heard others embrace these ideas, so it's about time I read the book for myself.

Adèle's choices

  

A Memoir of my Former Self   by Hilary Mantel  

We have recently lost two wonderful writers. Hilary Mantel died in September 2022 and Antonia Byatt (my next choice) in October 2023.

This posthumous collection is a joy for Mantel's many thousands of fans. It has all sorts of delicious things in it, including her film reviews and sundry articles that I somehow managed to miss when they were first published. There are pieces about her health, about her stay in Saudi Arabia  (particularly interesting for those who love Eight Months on Ghazzah Street) as well as many other gems. It's the perfect book to sit on a bedside table. However tired you're feeling, there's always a small piece of Mantel's characteristic wisdom, humour and out of left field view of things to enjoy before you got to sleep. A very comforting and hugely enjoyable book.

The Virgin  in the Garden  by A S Byatt

I read this novel when it was first published in 1978. It was the first of a series of novels that became known as the Frederika novels, after one of its main protagonists. I was knocked out then and now, picking it up again after nearly half a century, I am still open mouthed with admiration and love.

It is 1953. We are introduced to the Potter family, who live in Yorkshire. Bill Potter teaches at a school which is about to put on a school play celebrating both the glories of Elizabeth 1st and the coronation of the young Elizabeth ll. The Potters have three children: two girls and a boy who suffers from autism. This is a family story, the story of a community, the story of a particular time. I am loving it just as much now as I did then, but now I appreciate something that may not have struck me so forcibly in the 70s.  Byatt takes her time. She never skimps. She describes things, in huge detail and because she does it so brilliantly, you do not resent the time it takes you to read the pages. A whole  chapter describing the décor of a country house; a long passage about what a butcher's shop looks like and smells like and  is like.  We come away from the book seeing more, knowing more, and aware of so many things that we hadn't previously thought of. Byatt knows an enormous amount and she's generous with her knowledge. In other hands, this might become tiresome, but she's also so good at emotions, and interactions between characters and her writing is leavened with humour and understanding of how a scene should be played. I say 'played' deliberately. This is a very theatrical book, which is just right for the subject. I do hope readers will read it now and follow the Potter family into other books. But a warning: Still Life contains the saddest death I've ever read in modern fiction. 

The book I  can't wait to read in 2024:

Young Jane Young  by Gabrielle Zevin

I feel quite proud of myself and this blog for being among the very first lovers of  Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, by the same writer. It's been a huge bestseller and has spent something like half the year in the Sunday Times Top Ten. The success is well-deserved. 

I have heard wonderful reports of this book, from people in general and my younger daughter in particular and I trust her judgement completely. It's going to be a treat, I know. Zevin's track record speaks for itself. She's incapable of writing a dull book. Go on, treat yourself! 

Celia's choices

The Fever of the World: Merrily Watkins Mysteries by Phil Rickman

I have been reading Phil Rickman’s Merrily Watkins novels, off and on, for a while now. I first discovered him when I was writing spooky stuff for Young Adults. The novels centre round his engaging main character, Merrily Watkins, the Diocesan Exorcist for Hereford, or Deliverance Minister, as they are currently titled. The Church of England moves with the times. The books interweave the vicissitudes of Merrily’s professional and personal life with her investigations into mysterious and suspicious doings in the border country in and around Hereford. In The Fever of the World, she is asked to help with the investigation into a mysterious death on the banks of the Severn. Like all his books, the case is not straightforward and may contain elements beyond the remit of the local police. Phil Rickman is very good at weaving together the everyday and familiar with elements of the ‘other’. He’s helped in this by his choice of location: the haunted and hauntingly beautiful border country between England and Wales.

Holly by Stephen King

I haven’t read any Stephen King for a while now but I was led back to him by my fellow Writers Reviewer, Adèle Geras. He is such a consummate story teller; you know you are in a safe pair of hands from the very first page. The novel follows investigator Holly Gibney who made her first appearance in Mr Mecedes and also appeared in Finders Keepers, End of Watch and The Outsider. Of course, I had to go back and read all those, too!

The book I can't wait to read in 2024:

The Year of Living Dangerously by Christopher Koch

The film version directed by Peter Weir, starring a young Mel Gibson and smouldering Sigourney Weaver, is one of my favourites. It follows a group of foreign correspondents in Jakarta on the eve of an attempted coup against Sukarno and in its depiction of corrupt dictatorship and ruthless repression it is as relevant now as it was then, maybe more so when every year feels increasingly dangerous. I’ve only just discovered that the film was adapted from Australian writer Christopher Koch’s 1978 novel. I’ve managed to get a copy and it’s top of my 2024 to-be-read pile.

FOURTH ANNIVERSARY round-up: our Books of the Year (so far), by Adèle Geras, Celia Rees and Linda Newbery

Now we are four! That's four years' worth of great reviews and recommendations, all by authors or independent booksellers. Huge thanks to all those who contribute - we couldn't do it without you. Here Adele Geras, Celia Rees and Linda Newbery choose their favourite reads of the year so far (not necessarily newly-published).  

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All three of us could have chosen The Mirror and the Light, but Adèle bagged it first ...

Adèle: The timing of this novel's publication was fortunate. It came out in March, just before lockdown and it's been keeping thousands of readers happy for a very long time. I thought I was going to race through it, because I'd loved both Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies but it took me weeks because I was so bound up in following the pandemic as it unrolled that I only read it at night, in short sessions. Everything you've read about it is true: it's a wonderfully exciting story written in the most dazzling prose by a writer at the height of her powers. The word that kept coming into my mind was 'richness.'  There's an abundance of everything and I do think it ought to have been shorter, but overall it's a marvel. I compare it to Christmas pudding, which is one of my favourite desserts. I adore it, especially with brandy butter, but can only ever eat one helping at a time. It's very rich, just like this book.

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Linda: The Garden of Vegan, by top garden designer Cleve West, could have been written specially for me. Increasingly, alongside his high-profile design career, Cleve puts his energies into campaigning for animals. His book covers so much of importance: green gardening, animal welfare, sustainability, veganism, simple appreciation of wildlife and our environment. I hope it'll find its way into the RHS shops and be recommended in gardening magazines.

Diary of a Young Naturalist  by Dara McAnulty is another delight. Dara is an autistic teenager from Northern Ireland whose blogging about wildlife and the threats it faces has attracted support from Chris Packham and Robert Macfarlane. He records his fifteenth year in close and eloquent observations of the natural world in which he finds both intense joy and escape from his social difficulties, which include being badly bullied at school. A wildlife presenter and campaigner for the future? “This churning in me, it’s got to go somewhere."

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Adèle:  Magpie Lane has been one of the Books of the Lockdown and I take some of the credit for its success because I've been Tweeting about it like mad, and retweeting every word of praise of it I find. I raced through it, (yes...it's a frying onions book...one you hold in one hand as you cook!) and have subsequently read Lucy Atkins' previous novel, The Night Visitor, which is also very good indeed. I was attracted to Magpie Lane because it's set in Oxford in the house of a Master of a College and it involves elements of the Gothic and a narrator who may or may not be unreliable but is certainly spellbinding. It's also a love story and a mystery. I adored it and can't wait to read Atkins' next novel.

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Celia: I have to confess to not having read much during lockdown. A lot of my reading was taken up by The Mirror and The Light which Adèle snaffled. Pre-Covid, most of my reading time was spent gobbling up Mick Herron's Slough House Series. Mick Herron makes John Le Carré's spies and spymasters look like James Bond and Q.  The novels have their own argot with Suits and Stoats, Dogs and Achievers and the eponymous Slow Horses who are are stabled at Slough House in a grimy, grungy area of London far from their Secret Services' HQ in Regent's Park. They are a bunch of cock up merchants and misfits with drug, alcohol and anger issues, working under the jaundiced eye of Jackson Lamb who supervises them toiling over a never ending stream of totally pointless tasks that have been set in the hope that they will give up, resign and therefore not qualify for redundancy. They are there because they do not follow orders and in each book it is this that saves the day. 

Through the series, Mick Herron explores and uncovers the devious, back stabbing duplicity, chicanery, cover-ups and mendacious ruthlessness of modern British political life. From a boy hunted because of something he should not have seen involving a  Royal, to Brexit and the underhand doings of a ruthless senior politician who hides his true nature behind blustering, boyish bonhomie, this is the nearest thing we have to a satire of our times. The books are constantly unsettling: achingly funny scenes become shockingly violent and visa versa. There are many reversals of fortune for the Slow Horses and Mick Herron is as casually violent with his characters as they are as spies. There is also a reverse morality. Jackson Lamb who appears to have no moral sense is true to his Joes - his agents. Those above them are exposed as having no moral compass at all. I must confess to feeling rather bereft when I finished Joe Country, which I thought was the last in the series but a quick look on Amazon shows me he's published another one, Slough House. I missed that in all this Covid business  - I'm off to order it now.

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Linda: The Golden Rule, Amanda Craig's new novel, kept me hooked with its twistiness, its likeable, brave central character, Hannah, and its mainly Cornish setting. Gothic overtones of Jane Eyre and Beauty and the Beast combine with a plot that owes something to Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train. As always, Amanda Craig is sharp on details of rural poverty and class inequality. Equally gripping was Celia Rees' impressive first adult novel, Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook - more next week, in a special Q&A with Celia to mark publication.

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Adèle:  This is not the done thing at all: reviewing a book by a friend of yours, but I've done it for years and I will defend my right to put before readers books that I enjoy, whether I happen to know the writer or not. Mostly, the same few books get into everyone's hands so when I can recommend a book I know many, many people will love, I do so whether I know the writer or not. The Secrets Between Us, by Judith Lennox, shares with Judith's other novels a wonderful sense of time and place and a story about relationships which all of us can understand and appreciate. She's also very good at houses and clothes and details of every kind, which I really appreciate. In this book, a woman discovers after his death that her husband had a second, entirely other family....I'm not saying any more than that, for fear of spoilers. It's set in and around the Second World War and that adds to the drama. There's love and anguish and disappointment and triumph. I think it's terrific.

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Linda: The Leopard, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, had been on my wish list for ages, since I kept seeing it recommended on various people's life lists. Lockdown was the perfect time to read it - or rather listen to the audio version, read by David Horovitch (translated by Archibald.Colquhoun). Set in 1860s Sicily, it's the story of Sicilian prince Don Fabrizio, in his mid-40s and presiding over his family and wealthy estate. The rise of Garibaldi and the move towards unification threaten the luxurious way of life he's loth to change, yet he sees potential to adapt in his young soldier nephew, Tancredi. In some ways Don Fabrizio isn't an admirable character, but his reflections, self-justifications and thoughts of the future, together with sumptuous descriptions of palaces, social gatherings and the sweltering summer landscape, make for a compelling read.

Finally, Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell. Until I started it I'd have thought that Hilary Mantel had the Women's Prize in the bag for The Mirror and the Light, but this must surely be an equally serious contender (and I should add that there are three shortlisted titles I haven't yet read). It's a sensuous, intense imagining of the life of Shakespeare's wife, Agnes - relating her first meeting with the man only ever referred to as 'the tutor', 'the son', 'the husband', and the death of their son, Hamnet, at the age of eleven. Rich with detail of domestic life and with searing insight into love, death and grief, this is a joy from the start to its perfectly-pitched ending.

What are your best reads of the year so far? Please tell us in the comments!

See also:

Q&A with Cleve West on The Garden of Vegan

The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel, reviewed by Celia Rees

Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell, reviewed by Anne Cassidy

THE MIRROR AND THE LIGHT by Hilary Mantel, reviewed by Celia Rees

"I doubt I'll read a better book this year, or any year."

Celia Rees is a leading writer for Young Adults with an international reputation. Her titles include Witch Child (shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize), Sorceress, (shortlisted for the Whitbread - now Costa - Children's Book Award), Pirates!, Sovay and Glass Town Wars. The chance discovery of an old family cookery book has now taken her writing in a new and different direction. In 2012, she began researching and writing her first novel for adults, Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook, to be published by HarperCollins in July, 2020.
Twitter: @CeliaRees  instagram: @celiarees1

For me, Hilary Mantel is the consummate writers' writer. She has such great range from Beyond Black, through A Place of Greater Safety,  to the The Mirror and The Light, the final part of the Wolf Hall trilogy; she conducts daring experiments with style; her use of language is deft but precise and she effortlessly handles complex historical events and great casts of characters with consummate skill. There seems to be nothing she cannot do. In choosing to present real events and real people through the guise of fiction, she inevitably invites criticism from a certain historians, criticism she handles with panache and brio, as if to say, 'bring it on!' She lends courage and conviction to any writer of historical fiction. It is our right and our duty to shine a new light on what is known of the past, bring long dead time to life. 

Hilary Mantel

I studied Tudor history for 'A' level and at university. For me, Thomas Cromwell was a soulless bureaucrat, ruthless and machiavellian, responsible for the destruction of the monasteries and the death of Anne Boleyn. But worse than that, he was an uninteresting, shadowy, backroom figure, as colourless as his Holbein portrait, which might as well be in black and white. Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy changed my view of him instantly and forever. The unusual use of the third person present tense, allowing the reader to be simultaneously both inside and outside his consciousness, brought him roaring into life. We enter into him, thinking with his mind; seeing with his eyes The details are provided by Hilary Mantel's immaculate and meticulously detailed research which is reflected through the mirror of her imagination and ruthlessly and perfectly tailored to the tale. There are no 'info dumps' here. The known facts are amplified by what could have happened, what was possible, what was likely. 

Thomas Cromwell - Hans Holbein 

The novel is framed by two executions. The first of Anne Boleyn. Hilary Mantel takes the well known fact that Anne Boleyn was be-headed with a sword and makes it starkly graphic and very real by adding that sword was made fromToledo steel. Cromwell would know this, being the son of a blacksmith. In turn these two things, the death of Anne Boleyn and Cromwell's lowly origins, will be the cause of his downfall. The book abounds with these kinds of skillful interweavings, sometimes stretching between all three volumes. It is as carefully crafted and honed as sharp as the Toledo blade. 

Anne Boleyn

There is so much here. So much more I could say about The Mirror and The Light.  Mirrors and light flash throughout the novel. Speculum Justiciae, ora pro nobis – mirror of justice pray for us – is inscribed on the executioner's sword. This central exchange between Henry and Cromwell gives the book its title:

“Your majesty is the only prince. The mirror and the light to other kings. 

Henry repeats the phrase, as if cherishing it: the mirror and the light.”

Henry is cast as a living specula principum, the model for all princes,when he is anything but and the image of the bloated and ageing King reflected back to him in the eyes of the the young Anne of Cleves is the moment of truth which causes her rejection and Cromwell's ultimate.demise.

It is is a long book, 882 pages, as dense and rich as chocolate ganache. It took me through the first weeks of the lockdown. I'm usually a fast reader but I found I could only read a bit at a time. To say I didn't want it to end would be an understatement. It is another testament to Hilary Mantel's skill that, although you knows what is going to happen, the end approaches with slow, inexorable heart-in-mouth dread. 

I doubt I'll read a better book this year, or any year. Thank you, Hilary Mantel.

The Mirror and the Light is published by Fourth Estate.

See also: A Place of Greater Safety reviewed by Jean Ure.

Guest review by Jean Ure: A PLACE OF GREATER SAFETY by Hilary Mantel

"One of those rare books which has lived with me over the years and which I shall doubtless go back to again and again."

I had my first book published while I was still at school and have been at it ever since, writing mainly for children and young adults. My first book was pure wish fulfilment, about a girl who became a dancer, and with the recent publication of a ballet trilogy – Born to Dance, Star Quality and Showtime – I seem to have come full circle. - Jean Ure

I’m not at all sure that I can even begin to do justice to Hilary Mantel’s great sprawling novel about the French Revolution. I may, in fact - both book and subject matter being so complicated - end up writing more about my own reaction to it than an actual bona fide review.

First off, I have to confess that when I originally picked up the book I found the opening chapters somewhat dry and uninspiring. It was only an act of faith – I came to it direct from the spellbinding Wolf Hall – which kept me going. It was by the great Hilary Mantel, and that was enough for me. So I kept at it, and little by little it began to grip me, until, having reached the end, I felt an immense sense of loss and had immediately to go back and re-immerse myself; and then, having reached the end for a second time, could still hardly bear to say goodbye. So great a hold did it have over me that I began quite obsessively to seek out every book I could lay hands on that dealt either with the Revolution itself or with the principal players. I soaked myself in the period. I even learnt all the words of the Marseillaise and drove my husband half demented by breaking into song as we drove the dogs up to the park every morning.

So, yes, it is one of those rare books which has lived with me over the years and which I shall doubtless go back to again and again. Having said that, I recognise that for some it will not be the same transcendent experience it has been for me. It depends, I think, on what one looks for in a book. Mantel deals meticulously, in absorbing detail, with both the causes and the course of the Revolution, but she is no drama queen. There is none of Dickens’ lurid storytelling or fevered activity. Even during the Terror, as heads roll and the streets run with blood, she keeps a firm control over her measured prose. She has no need to invent subplots of horror: the horror is all around, part of the everyday landscape, and the reader lives through it along with her characters.

And it is these characters which for me make the book such compulsive reading. From schooldays on we are taught to regard Robespierre and Danton as evil incarnate, on a par with Hitler and with Stalin: Mantel brings off the not inconsiderable feat of presenting them as fully rounded human beings. Deeply flawed, to be sure, and possibly by the time of the Terror unbalanced, at least in the case of Robespierre. The Sea Green Incorruptible clung tenaciously to the bitter end to his purity of belief, whilst the larger than life Danton, less wedded to his principles and consequently far more of a pragmatist, was not above seizing the opportunity to enrich himself.

The huge cast of characters is what brings the book so vividly alive, the women as well as the men. To be sure, Mantel takes authorial liberties. Who can fail to be entranced by the mercurial Camille Desmoulins, enfant terrible of the Revolution? In reality, history would seem to tell us, a decidedly unwholesome and unprepossessing creature. But who is to say that history can be relied on when it comes to fixing a person’s character? Mantel has done exhaustive research, has all the facts at her fingertips, and interprets them though a novelist’s eye to create a richly colourful, if violent and disturbing, world .

Ultimately, without the need for heightened drama – she doesn’t even depict the death of Robespierre. Could she not bring herself to do so, perhaps? – she draws us into the very heart of those troubled times. You feel, by the end, that you have not so much been reading a book about the French Revolution as having actually been part of the experience.

Not the easiest read, I will admit. It does require a degree of perseverance and effort, but how rewarding!

A Place of Greater Safety is published by Fourth Estate.