CHRISTMAS ROUND-UP Part 1: contributors' books of the year

What have our guest reviewers most enjoyed this year? Here's the first of two round-up features. Unlike those you see in the broadsheets, ours include books published at any time, not just this year - so selections, over the two posts, range from Marcus Aurelius to Pussy Riot. Big thanks to our impressive line-up of guests (and we have plenty more to come) - WRITERS REVIEW couldn't happen without them. Come back next week for more recommendations!

KEREN DAVID:

Reading NW by Zadie Smith was like a masterclass in how to write voice. Four narrators tell an overlapping story of life and death in London, each one utterly distinct and completely convincing, brilliantly understood and observed. If I could write a book a tenth as good as this, I'd be satisfied forever.

Troublemakers by Catherine Barter was my favourite YA book of the year. Like NW it's an account of contemporary London life that feels authentic and real, there's a cast of diverse likeable characters and questions of ethics and family to engage head and heart. I read it once, and then went back to the beginning and read it all over again.

PAUL DOWSWELL: 

Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War (Penguin Classics) A harrowing but deeply moving tribute to the Russian women who fought in The Great Patriotic War. ‘Mama waited at the station for several days to see us transported,’ says Tatyana. ‘She saw us going to the train, gave me a pie and a dozen eggs, and fainted…’

Hayley Long’s The Nearest Faraway Place (Hot Key) Despite all the ‘celebrity’ novelist nonsense currently afflicting children’s publishing, it’s heartening to see a YA novel as heartfelt and beautifully written as this still being launched into the world.

BALI RAI:

Zana Fraillon's The Bone Sparrow: timely, powerful and heartbreaking, this story cuts deep. And in Subhi, the author has created an unforgettable narrator whose voice we must hear. An outstanding story that is rightly acclaimed.

Kit de Waal's My Name Is Leon  is moving, unflinchingly authentic and brilliant. It gives voice to the unheard British underclass, in a poignant story that lays bare the social inequalities of the 1980s. A superb debut novel.

SOPHIE MASSON:

I've chosen two fantastic crime metafictions: Anthony Horowitz's The Word is Murder is crime fiction with a difference, this bold and brilliant tour de force by a master storyteller takes big risks with literary conventions and reader expectations, and pulls it off triumphantly.

My second choice is Sulari Gentill's Crossing the Lines. Known for her popular Rowland Sinclair series of detective mysteries set in 1930's Sydney, Australian author Sulari Gentill has broken new ground with this novel, a haunting exploration, through the lens of a crime story, of creative process.

PAUL MAGRS:


Pierre Gripari's anarchic and strange fairy tales included The Witch in the Broom Cupboard published by Pushkin Press. The children who lived in his street in Paris' Latin Quarter and hung around the same coffee bar helped him compile this book in the 1960s and it's only recently been translated. 

Also, the autobiographical essays by Bob Smith, Treehab, published by the University of Wisconsin Press, are harrowing and beautiful and hilarious. He talks about life with illness, having children, loving the natural world, and having hot dates in cold Alaska.

My novel of the year must be Rachel Joyce's life-affirming The Music Shop. It's got a lovely ensemble cast and goes in just the directions it bloody-mindedly wants to. Every book of hers I love - each one even more than the last.

ANN TURNBULL:

The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. I was given this as a beautiful little hardback (only 6” x 4” - Collector’s Library 2011, translated by A. S. L. Farquharson) last Christmas. I’ve been reading it in snippets ever since and have just finished. It’s extraordinary how fresh and modern the thoughts of this Roman emperor are today. Marcus Aurelius urges kindness and attention to duty. He puts you in your place in time and the cosmos, reflects on how brief all human life is and how pointless it is to worry about death, wealth or reputation, since the span of all our lives is infinitesimal.

The Kevin and Sadie stories, by Joan Lingard, were first published in the 1970s by Puffin. Across the Barricades and The Twelfth Day of July can be obtained second-hand or as e-books, and now Kevin and Sadie: the Story Continues is available (in print; no e-book). I came across the second book in this series of five and was instantly gripped by its story of life in Belfast during the Troubles. Then I got the first book on Kindle. Finally I tracked down a bind-up of the last three, and gobbled up the rest of the saga, which is about Kevin and Sadie’s time in England, where they get married, have a baby and struggle to keep a home. Wonderful, lovable, engaging characters from a first-rate storyteller. For readers of 11 or over.

CAROLINE PITCHER: 

The last poem in the late Helen Dunmore's Inside the Wave has the startling, moving image of Death as the mother welcoming her dying child. The collection is of spare, lyrical, eloquent poems set in the borderline between the living and the dead, for:

Who would have thought that pain

And weakness had such gifts
Hidden in their rough hearts?

I've found the smack-in-the-face titles of `psychological best-sellers' easy to confuse and the novels often disappointing, but was gripped by Sabine Durrant's Lie With Me. Creepy, deceitful Paul won me over and his ghastly `friends', the manipulative teenagers and the particular kind of Greek holiday resort were utterly convincing.

LINDA SARGENT:

Daemon Voices by Philip Pullman. A collection of thirty plus essays on storytelling, utterly compelling and should be essential reading for every aspiring artist. In the author’s words, “if something doesn’t help, it’ll hinder”: this helps – and inspires.

Wolf Hollow by Lauren Wolk. Set in 1940s rural America, this is a story of the far-reaching damage wrought by war and its effects across the generations, with a wonderfully drawn young main protagonist. Full of compassion and completely gripping: I didn’t want it to end! I also highly recommend her second book, Beyond the Bright Sea.

JON APPLETON:

So many authors are reinventing themselves under new guises. I’d hate for people to forget that William Brodrick is the author of a handful of brilliant P.D.Jamesian/Ellis Petersish novels about Brother Anselm (see The Discourtesy of Death), but I was delighted to meet his new incarnation as John Fairfax, who is writing about William Benson, an ex-con turned lawyer. Summary Justice (Abacus) is a brilliant, memorable crime novel - can’t wait for next year’s instalment.

A lot of people wouldn’t lament a lack of comedies about middle-aged male writers, but I’d be very sad to be without Less  by Andrew Sean Greer (Little Brown US). Approaching fifty, Arthur Less travels the world to avoid, mostly, himself. There are some wonderful comments on being mid-list in publishing and possibly in life, in this very human, humane novel. I hope it’s published in the UK very soon.

NICOLA MORGAN:

My top reads this year have been Human Acts by Han Kang (brutal student uprising of 1980 in South Korea), A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson (humans wrecked by a combination of WW2 and being human - full review coming early next year), Days Without End by Sebastian Barry (more brutality - sorry - this time in the massacres of native Americans after the US Civil War) and Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult (who pulled off the incredible feat of making me feel brief sympathy for a deeply repellent white supremacist). Great plots, big emotions - just what I need.

JOCELYN FERGUSON:

I absolutely loved The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. I always look forward to new work by her. She never disappoints!

PATRICIA ELLIOTT:

Philip Pullman's Daemon Voices is an inspiring and engaging collection of his talks and articles dating from 1998 to the present day that all writers should read and, indeed, anyone interested in story and storytelling. It includes essays on the origin and creation of Pullman's own novels and much about the craft of writing itself.

Natasha Pulley's The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, about the extraordinary, intertwined relationships in the Victorian era between a quiet telegrapher in the Home Office, a brilliant and mysterious Japanese clockwork maker and a young female physicist, with its mixture of history and fantasy and its deeper themes about human destination, is different and on the whole delightful. It could do with cutting and its charm almost tips over into whimsy at times, but I love its exuberant and inventive writing.

LESLIE WILSON:

The Cutting Season, by Attica Locke, is an exciting, thought-provoking thriller; the black heroine/investigator works at a historic plantation house in Louisiana. The plot revolves as much round Caren's feelings about working at this place where her ancestors were slaves as about the issue of who's the murderer, though you do find that out, and the ending is perfect.

Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens. What is disturbing about this book is how relevant it is to nowadays; financial instability, the gulf between rich and poor, and a corrupt government, embodied in the Circumlocution Office, which exists to shore up the status quo of privilege. Dickens may have been terrible at writing about women, but he's an amazing, surreal storyteller.

What have you most enjoyed this year? What would you like to recommend? Please leave your comments below.

Guest Review by Jocelyn Ferguson: COLD EARTH by Ann Cleeves

Jocelyn Ferguson was born in Scotland and grew up there and New York. She is author of Rope Tricks (Virago) and Anne Hathaway, an award winning play performed at Birmingham Centre for the Arts. She has won both an Arts Council Award and a Hawthornden Castle Residency. She has taught Creative Writing at Keele University and, most recently, at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Queens University, Belfast. She now lives in the south of France.

Crime Fiction fans of Ann Cleeves have come to expect a compelling narrative, a powerful sense of place and atmosphere, acute characterisation and pared back prose, and with Cold Earth, her seventh novel in the Shetland series, she does not disappoint.

It has been raining so hard and for so long on Shetland that while DI Jimmy Perez attends a funeral, the hillside behind the graveyard begins to slip relentlessly down towards the sea. Tombstones tumble, the road vanishes, and the stout stone walls of a cottage collapse and disappear. In the aftermath, the body of a woman is discovered with the detritus from that cottage. Considering the weather and the terrain, she is curiously dressed in red silk. And, more curious still, no one on the island appears to know who she is. A post-mortem reveals that her death was not, as assumed, a tragic consequence of the landslide. It was “violent and quite unnatural”: she’d been strangled. At which point Jimmy Perez digs his teeth in; he becomes a man possessed.

But unlike single-minded Vera Stanhope, Cleeves’s best known detective, Jimmy has other pressing issues to deal with, most of them of his own hyper-sensitive making, He frets about his step-daughter and about the (possible) blossoming romance with detective Willow Reeves. Is it too soon after the death of his ex, Fran, he wonders? Is Willow really interested, he wonders? He’s not very good at reading the signs, and Willow, in turn, can’t tell his come-ons from his confusion.

These ‘other issues’ form the backdrop to the gradual unravelling of the central mystery. And it’s in this that Ann Cleeves’s strength as a writer lies. Her characters are so warmly and solidly depicted, they steam in the dank atmosphere of a Shetland winter. Jimmy’s personal fears and uncertainties keep his feet firmly on the ground, while his astute perceptiveness (Willow notwithstanding) and dogged tenacity make him a fearsome detective. We like him a lot. He’s a very good egg: he’s nice to children and quietly considerate of others, especially women, even while he notes the smallest discrepancy in each conversation. DC Sandy Wilson, Jimmy’s insecure bagman and the island's other main police presence, regards him with some awe.

Discovering the dead woman’s identity is essential to uncovering her killer, and the former has to be done before Jimmy can really get to grips with the latter. There are implications in this for tension and pace. Cleeves deals with the pitfalls by focusing our attention on a handful of islanders with edgy secrets, who may or may not have links to the woman. And thus we get much too of local Shetland culture. At the same time, the geography of the island solidifies. At every turn we view with Jimmy the bleakly beautiful landscape he has chosen for his home. It’s a fitting context for disturbing undercurrents.

Cleeves is on record as saying that she may well kill her hero off in the next, final book in the series. She fears the absurdity of so many murders within the confines of a relatively small (and relatively peaceful) island – a kind of ‘Midsomer’s Murder’ effect. We can only commend the fact that her work is rooted in the plausible but I, for one, would emphatically regret Jimmy Perez’s passing.


Cold Earth is published by Macmillan, 2016