ADVENT BOOKS Week 1: revisiting some of our favourites from the last 8 years

 

 Thank you, as ever, to our many contributors - we couldn't possibly do this without you!

During the lead-up to Christmas, we're posting Advent Books - revisiting some of our favourite reviews and books from more than eight years of Writers Review. These can be found daily on Instagram @WritersReview, Facebook, Twitter @WritersReview1 and we're now on Bluesky too: @writersreview.bsky.social.

Hope you'll enjoy them and find some great new reads or old favourites to enjoy. Here are the choices from the first week. Thank you, as ever, to our many contributors - we couldn't possibly do this without you!

Reviewed by Linda Newbery: - our very first post! "Chevalier's ability to present historical events as if they're unfolding in front of us gives startling impact to the characters' bafflement at the 'monster' fossils Mary finds, seen through the lens of nineteenth-century religious belief..."

Reviewed by Adele Geras: "Although at first sight it’s a very simple story, its construction is enormously intricate and the words are put together with such finesse that you don’t realise what skill has gone into the plotting and how brilliantly each revelation is brought to your attention."

Celia answers questions from Adele and Linda:  "There is a definite magic in that first moment when the ideas begin to swarm together ..."

Reviewed by Nick Manns: "An exhilarating book ... open-minded, big-hearted and generous ... Paul Broks has a light touch and is able to guide us through a complex world."

Reviewed by Marcus Berkmann:   "In my opinion, one of the greatest post-war novels of them all, far ahead of anything else that Kazuo has written and liable (if it so moves you) to stay in your head for months if not years after you have finished it."

Reviewed by Yvonne Coppard: "From the tiny amount of information recorded about Lucrezia (Borgia), O’Farrell creates a novel full of tension and suspense."

Reviewed by Graeme Fife: "Du Maurier weaves a careful web of intrigue, the threads of which she untangles with great dexterity. This is adroitly worked mystery and suspense."

Guest review by Nick Manns: H IS FOR HAWK by Helen Macdonald

 

"The notion of ‘looking’ is a key term in this book, and a suitable one for someone on a quest."

Nick Manns taught English in comprehensive schools in south London and the Midlands for 20 years. He is the author of four novels for young adults, including Control Shift and Dead Negative, and is a founder and director of Dyslexia Lifeline, a company based at De Montfort University, Leicester.

'Grief has no distance,’ wrote Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking. ‘It comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.’ The ‘dailiness of life’ is that touching trust in stability; of everything in its place and all being right with the world.

With Didion that confidence crashed when her husband dropped dead one evening from a heart attack and she spent months trying to navigate a changed reality. With Helen Macdonald, her old world finished with a phone call: when her mother told her that her father, apparently recovering from a trivial injury to his arm, had suddenly died. His heart had stopped.

Whereas Didion struggled to believe John Gregory Dunne was really dead (she needed to be alone,' she wrote, ‘so that he could come back’), Macdonald describes her grief in Biblical terms: ‘the rain fell and the waters rose and I struggled to keep my head above them’. Worse still, this was a world that was indifferent to her suffering: ‘planes still landed, cars still drove, people still shopped’ and ‘nothing made any sense at all.’ She finds herself in Auden land, where the misery of the bereaved cannot be assuaged: clocks can’t be stopped; catastrophes are always someone else’s problem. Icarus drops into the water and no-one notices.

The likeness to Didion isn’t limited to a shared experience. As the American author believed (at some level) that her husband was still around (heading towards the front door), so Macdonald holds a similar fantasy about her father, except that she wasn’t hanging around for the doorbell to chime or for the phone to ring.

Although most readers (who aren’t writing book reviews) will probably pass by incidental details, a pleasure of this book is in the hints and clues that Macdonald builds into the narrative. Early on, whilst walking the blasted heath of the Brecklands – the broken lands – of Norfolk, in search of goshawks, she comments: ‘The goshawk is the birdwatcher’s dark grail.’ They’re rare and hard to see. And she adds, ‘Looking for goshawks is like looking for grace: it comes, but not often.’

Of course, the notion of the ‘grail’ is often the focus in stories of chivalry – of a search for something precious in the Christian tradition. The journey to attain the grail (or achieve some worthwhile end) may be uncertain and perilous. In Macdonald’s case, like Sir Gawain, she must find her own way and use her own resources. The ‘broken lands’ of East Anglia are as good a place to start as any.

Throughout – and running as a parallel narrative – she shares with us the tale of another traveller, who went before, and we realise that finding the grail or receiving grace isn’t a given. Although there are no maps to this terra incognita and no guarantees, in good medieval tradition, she takes guidance from those who had asked the important questions and knew the likely trail. For Freud and Klein, the grail for each of us is authenticity and this is earned through self-knowledge.

In the early days, after the fateful call from her mother, Macdonald had groped her way out of ‘madness’ by connecting with the certainties of her childhood. She says: ‘When you are broken, you run. But you don’t always run away. Sometimes, helplessly, you run towards’. She recalls that years before, when working in a falconry centre, an injured goshawk had been brought in for assessment. The bird was not seriously harmed and they took her outside and then, like a magic trick (or something out of Philip Pullman), ‘She opened her wings and in a second was gone. She disappeared over a hedge slant-wise into nothing. It was as if she’d found a rent in the damp Gloucestershire air and slipped through it.’

Years later, following her father’s death, and after a series of dreams about hawks, she drove to Scotland, to meet an Irishman, who would hand over a young female goshawk. Although she had been advised against this project (‘Hiding to nothing,’ comments her friend), she was by this time an experienced falconer and disregarded the note of caution. And yet. The travelling box is opened and the bird ‘came out like a Victorian melodrama: a sort of madwoman in the attack.’

Her training of the incongruously named ‘Mabel’ dominates the rest of the book. We’re educated in the process of feeding the young bird and how Macdonald painstakingly built trust. This is a creature that is given ‘roughly torn day-old chicks’ and bits of rabbit. She’s also a creature straight from the menagerie of Ted Hughes: ‘I see it all; I own all this world and more.’

The notion of ‘looking’ is a key term in this book, and a suitable one for someone on a quest. As a child Macdonald describes herself as a ‘watcher’ who would climb the hill behind her home, crawl under a rhododendron bush and ‘look down on the world below.’ This habit of quiet observation is reinforced by her companionship with her father, who worked as a press photographer and transmitted the need for patience.

At one point Macdonald recounts a dream in which she looks down on a Second World War bombsite and sees a boy amidst the rubble. He turns and she sees it is a figure of her father as a child, who points to an approaching aircraft. She later reflects: ‘I’ve come to realise that we were watching the same things: or at least the things that history conspires to make the same. Since the dawn of military aviation, birds of prey had been thought of as warplanes made flesh…Hawks fly and hunt and kill: aircraft do the same.’ She concludes: ‘I must have inherited being a birdwatcher from Dad.’

There’s also something of the photographer in the exactness of her metaphors: long-tailed tits in a willow were like ‘animated cotton buds’; the feathers down the front of the young goshawk are the colour of ‘sunned newsprint.’ She describes fieldfares as ‘netting the sky …like a 16th century sleeve sewn with pearls.’

To understand Mabel, to train her so that they can become a hunting partnership, she reads widely and returns to the work of T. H. White. She had read The Goshawk as a child, and as then, so now, she is disturbed by the cruelty meted out by White in his attempt to make his wild bird biddable. This cruelty contrasts with her own sensitivity and kindness to the young bird in her care.

For Macdonald, ‘running towards’ the source of her feelings, enabled her to get in touch with important elements of her childhood: she was able to make sense of her life by inspecting her past. White’s past included neglect at home and physical abuse at boarding school: a history in which the school sanctioned the punishment of younger children by older pupils. As a gay adult he tried to ‘pass’ as a straight man (with upper class pretensions.) His repeated attempts to form relationships with women were predictable failures. Macdonald sees his efforts to train ‘Gos’ as an (unconscious) desire to tame the ‘wild’ parts of himself. She writes: ‘White found himself in a strange, locked battle with a bird that was all the things he longed for but had always fought against.’

Whereas White’s training methods would today elicit a call to the RSPCA, Macdonald is able to empathise with Mabel: she’s a ‘baby’ who could be ‘happy’ or ‘contented’. She doesn’t have to control this creature but to collaborate with it: she isn’t conflicted in her role. White was both stern schoolmaster and wild child: both roles which would be depicted in his children’s novel of Arthurian adventure, The Sword in the Stone.

White never resolved the different parts of himself: the relationship with Gos (spoiler alert) ends tragically: the hawk escaped. Macdonald notes that he remained alone all his life. At the end of her book, Macdonald can symbolically ‘let go’ of Mabel (the hawk spends several months in an aviary so that she can moult) and Macdonald emerges from crushing grief: she ‘lets go’ of her father.

This ending takes us back to the start of the book: she notes that Melanie Klein had commented that children deal with states of mind akin to mourning and that adults return to this emotional world whenever grief is experienced. Macdonald tells us that as a child she comforted herself that White’s Gos wasn’t really dead, he was ‘out there’ in the woods and she had wanted to go and ‘bring him back’. As an adult, she had wanted to ‘slip through that rent in the air’ and fly her hawk to find her lost father.

In the early days of training Mabel, Macdonald had riffed on lines by John Keats: ‘My arm aches and a damp tiredness grips my heart’. The poet had been meditating on the beguiling charms of a nearby nightingale, a ‘deceiving elf’, who might help him escape ‘the weariness, the fever and the fret’ of life. At the very end of her book, Macdonald fully returns to the human world: she recognises that goshawks are ‘things of death and blood and gore’. The world we inhabit is shared – but separate. She concludes, ‘Hands are for other human hands to hold. They should not be reserved exclusively as perches for hawks.’

H is for Hawk is published by Vintage.

See Nick's previous reviews:

The Antidote: Happiness for People who can't stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkmann

The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars by Paul Broks

Guest review by Nick Manns: BILLY NO-MATES by Max Dickins

 

 " ... he discovers that his predicament is universal. Men have a friendship problem."

Nick Manns taught English in comprehensive schools in south London and the Midlands for 20 years. He is the author of four novels for young adults, including Control Shift and Dead Negative, and is a founder and director of Dyslexia Lifeline, a company based at De Montfort University, Leicester.

‘Our friends are curators and co-authors of our life stories. They have a voice in much of what we’re doing, in our characters and in many of the memories that we make together.’ So said Professor William Rawlings in a recent Radio 4 programme called To Absent Friends.

‘Absent friends’ would have been a good title for Max Dickins’s book, because it focuses on the fact that in Western society most 30-something men have vanishingly few close friends – just under half in a recent large-scale survey said they had no male friend with whom they could share their worries or seek advice. In the UK, three in four suicides are male. Suicide is the biggest cause of male death in the under-45 age group. Compared with women, men fare badly once involuntarily separated from a life partner. Three-quarters of the public funerals in Britain each year – roughly 4,000 – are for men.

But Dickins didn’t start from this end of the telescope, and nor is his book written in shades of black. Part autobiography; part dissertation and part comedy script, it hurtles through the lanes and byways of the strange and lonely world of (straight) men, asking the right questions, taking part in activities (think Louis Theroux) – and brimming with compassion and good humour. In the right hands, this book can spark conversations and change lives.

So much for the blurb. Billy No-Mates is a quest – a journey of discovery – and it begins with a problem. Dickins confides to his two (female) flatmates that he’s going to ask his long-term girlfriend (Naomi) if she’ll marry him. One of his cohabitees asks, ‘Tell us then – who are you thinking for best man?’

This becomes the blue touch paper for what follows. Working at glacial speed, Dickins writes down the names of (very few) candidates on Post-its and sticks them on his bedroom wall. Standing back and surveying his work, he describes his list as ‘a cemetery of friendships’ – and promptly Googles ‘Getting married – no best man’. To his astonishment (and to this reader’s), he discovers that his predicament is universal. Men have a friendship problem.

One of the academics he consults – an American psychologist – is very direct:

‘You don’t have any friends to call your best man because of the culture in which you were raised. It doesn’t have anything to do with who you are naturally. How you feel now is not the way you were born. What happened to you, Max? What specifically got in the way?’

This response comes down firmly on one side of the nature/nurture divide. But it isn’t the only view. Some evolutionary psychologists posit a genetic disposition, that men’s social isolation reflects a pre-historic division of labour (hunter-gatherer). Women looking after hearth and home; big butch men building alliances and killing creatures (and each other). The problem with this way of thinking is that it lets men off a shed-load of hooks (‘Can’t clean the bathroom darling, I’ve not got the right genes’). It’s also pretty depressing (kill me now).

Thankfully, that’s not the only game in town. Dickins discovers that pre-school boys are more emotionally expressive – both in range and intensity – than little girls. But once they start school (‘shades of the prison house’ and all that) they slowly but surely change: boys ‘start to behave like boys and girls start to behave like girls.’ And boys learn to stifle emotions: they stuff them away because tender feelings aren’t for public display. They start to invest in their future of isolation. Boys’ friendships grow thinner and noticeably cooler from the age of 16 and by the time they’re 30, many men are so caught up in the responsibilities of romantic relationships, family commitments and work, that old friendships wither and die.

This isn’t the same for women. Dickins reports on numerous studies that suggest women are better at maintaining (and deepening) their relationships. They have more freedom to acknowledge and express feelings without the risk of the usual male put-downs (‘Shut up you wuss’). They invest more time on keeping in touch; friendship is seen as a valuable component of who they are.

Taking stock of all this, Dickins is characteristically upfront: ‘Somewhere along the way I’d let work dominate my identity. I had let a vague notion of “my career” crowd out almost everything else. I was working all the time, often way past the point of being productive. I didn’t know who I was when I wasn’t working: I didn’t know what to do. Ambition was not just a healthy part of my ‘self’ – there was nothing else there at all. I wasn’t so much a human being, as a human doing.’

Many men will recognise themselves from Dickins’s account. They know that male response to experience is carefully policed; that expressing feelings can invite either an awkward silence or a move to shift a conversation onto something more congenial. Men keep the lock turned on each other’s lives.

But acknowledging a problem isn't the same as fixing it and in the second half of the book, armed with research findings and with a modicum of self-knowledge, Dickins starts to do some field work: society becomes his lab. Does he have the capacity to revive old friendships? Can he make new friends? What support is there out there?

To make new friends, a psychologist suggests that rowing might be a good place to start, yet when he arrives for his first session, he discovers that his co-rowers are all fifty-something women, which wasn’t really part of the plan. He joins a male choir (apparently a sure-fire way of making friends) and finds the experience powerfully satisfying. Attending a stag weekend is repulsive (for all the usual reasons) and organising a weekly five-a-side football match ends in failure. But he finds a men’s group rewarding.

Although he had gone to the group full of preconceptions – expecting that it would be run by ‘an old bloke known as White Falcon who would be wanging on about the rejuvenating power of eating tiger hearts’, it was nothing like that. It was a strictly no-banter zone: a place where men of all ages and ethnicities could discuss issues that concerned them. The watchword, Dickins writes, was ‘responsibility’. The men worked together to find solutions to problems ‘that men tend to push on to the women in their lives’ – the ‘emotional labour’ that is mysteriously absent from the obligations recited in conventional marriage ceremonies.

Although he goes on to recount other experiences (a day with a woman from RentAFriend; an absorbing interview with a man who peopled his house with sex dolls), the men’s group seems to offer a way to help attendees reconnect with buried bits of themselves. Kenny – the convenor of the group – says of men: ‘Showing off: we’re good at that, but showing up? That’s a new thing. A different sort of energy.’

Soooh, what did Dickins learn – and did he find a best man? To answer the last question first – yes, he did – but you’ll have to read the book to find out what happened on the great day (no spoilers). And as for learning, it is obvious that Dickins has the capacity for prolonged introspection and a powerful desire to fix what he regards as broken. He does the research and explores options but at the end of it all, the role models live within his domestic sphere. He writes of his flatmates: ‘It was how they showed up that was crucial. Unafraid to show emotion, nor to disclose information about themselves. Through their approach and example, the space that (they) created allowed me to express the full breadth of myself. To rediscover the bits of me that I had hidden until I couldn’t see myself any more. This was full-fat friendship.’

Billy No-Mates is published by Canongate.

More of Nick's reviews:

The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars by Paul Broks

The Antidote - Happiness for People who can't stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkmann

Lockdown Sunday extra: THE ANTIDOTE - Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking, by Oliver Burkeman, reviewed by Nick Manns

"What would Keats do?"

Nick Manns taught English in comprehensive schools in south London and the Midlands for 20 years. He is the author of four novels for young adults, including Control Shift and Dead Negative, and is a founder (and director) of Dyslexia Lifeline, a company based at De Montfort University, Leicester. 

Imagine: you’re standing in a tube carriage and as the train slows to enter a station, you announce to everyone, in a big, loud confident voice the name of the approaching stop… ‘Chancery Lane’, say. And then continue your journey, loudly advising your fellow travellers of different destinations: ‘Holborn…Tottenham Court Road…Oxford Circus…’ and so on. Ceasing only when your own stopping-off point has arrived.

This unusual scenario was an exercise undertaken by the Guardian’s roving reporter on the psyche, Oliver Burkeman, at the behest of a New York psychologist. The exercise wasn’t just to expose him to pain and humiliation, but to enable him to recognise that his (and our) feelings about situations aren’t the result of stuff, ‘out there’, but the consequence of our attitudes towards them. The public announcements weren’t inherently ‘embarrassing’ – those (real) feelings were the result of Burkeman’s perception of the situation. These moments, where external events trigger an internal response, are two a penny, of course:

irritation at the man at the checkout who tries to (slowly) locate his debit card; anger at the idiot in the car ahead who’s barely doing 20 (in a 30 mph zone).

Burkeman has been reporting on psychology and philosophy for the Guardian’s This Column will Change Your Life, for donkey’s yonks and in The Antidote he reports on our fear of failure, uncertainty and insecurity. How come, he asks, is the affluent West, ‘so fixated on achieving happiness’, and so poor at delivering on that expectation? It’s with this conundrum that he sets out on his globe-trotting exploration to find out what might work – and report back on his findings. This journey takes him to a motivation seminar (for 15,000 people) in Texas (optimistically titled GET MOTIVATED!) to Africa’s second largest urban slum (Kibera, outside Nairobi). He walks through the hostile streets of Mexico City on the Day of the Dead (to share a communal vigil in a cemetery) and he reports back on the fad for goal setting.

He notes that there’s a huge ‘happiness industry’ out there (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, anyone?) whose failure can be measured in the annual increase of new titles. He notes that goal setting led to the bankruptcy of General Motors in 2009 and the death of eight climbers on Everest during one bleak day in 1996. And he goes to Kibera to find out why, despite the lack of running water, electricity and sanitation; the high rate of HIV and sexual violence, numerous surveys of the populace indicate that the people there are happier than those in the developed world.

So, what gives: what did he learn from his experiences? What can we take from this richly rewarding book?

There isn’t one ‘magic bullet’ that will solve all our difficulties: Waterstone’s isn’t going to slip you the keys to nirvana. Burkeman notes that goal setting can be useful (but not when it becomes dogma – as in the fetish for SMART targets); being positive can help get stuff done (but not when it means being upbeat at all costs) and he suggests a reassessment of ways of thinking and of apprehending the highs and lows of life.

He acknowledges the power and relevance of two (complementary) schools of thought: the approaches of both modern-day Stoics and Buddhists. Burkeman reports that the key lesson that the Stoics of Ancient Greece and Rome (and cognitive behavioural therapists) impart is the need to face-up to those things we fear, because our anxieties magnify possible outcomes and ‘struggling to escape our demons gives them their power’. You might not fancy announcing tube stops but it isn’t going to kill you. (He reports on other fun activities to test your mettle).

Burkeman also explores Buddhist thinking. During a week-long retreat in central Massachusetts, in which the key injunction was to focus on breathing, despite initial difficulties (he couldn’t get the irritating song Barbie Girl from intruding on his attempts at bliss), he learnt to observe and accept the stray thoughts – the fears, worries and anxieties – that came and went. There was no pressure to banish ‘pessimistic thinking’ or ‘be positive’: he learnt that it was all so much mental weather. And he also learnt a more profound lesson: that it’s a mistake to conflate mental chatter with any notions of ‘self’.

Burkeman acknowledges this approach to life is uncannily close to the thinking of a 22 year old, 200 years ago. While trudging back from a pantomime in December 1817, John Keats ruminated on how people might confront the vicissitudes of daily living. He felt that a ‘person of achievement’ possessed something he termed, ‘Negative Capability’. Such a person would be able to cope with ‘uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason…’.

In his gloss on this, Burkeman writes: ‘Sometimes, the most valuable of all talents is to be able not to seek resolution; to notice the craving for completeness or certainty or comfort, and not to be compelled to follow where it leads.’

And so, after braving Mexican gangsters and risking humiliation on the Central Line, Burkeman’s take-away is that although we might not be able to write Ode to a Nightingale, we could learn to resist the urge to clamber onto the stage of our mental theatre and try to fix that which we find disagreeable.

‘Bond Street, anyone?’

The Antidote is published by Vintage.

See also: The Art of Possibility, by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander, reviewed by Ignaty Dyakov

The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars by Paul Broks, reviewed by Nick Manns

Guest review by Nick Manns: THE DARKER THE NIGHT, THE BRIGHTER THE STARS by Paul Broks

"An exhilarating book ... open-minded, big-hearted and generous."

Nick Manns taught English in comprehensive schools in south London and the Midlands for 20 years. He is the author of four novels for young adults, including Control Shift and Dead Negative, and is a founder (and director) of Dyslexia Lifeline, a company based at De Montfort University, Leicester. 

There’s a moment in the second episode of Informer (BBC iPlayer) where the central character, Gabe, is reading to his seven year old daughter, Laurie. The book is The Wizard of Oz. Laurie interrupts the narrative and says: ‘Is the Wizard real?’ Gabe answers: ‘No, the old man made him up’. To which Laurie replies: ‘But everyone believed him, so doesn’t that make him real anyway?’

What is interesting about this is not Laurie’s discussion of power in a fairy story, but the fact that the Wizard, Dorothy, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion had a reality for her and she had an emotional investment in them. Words on a page had created a world that could be interrogated; but in what sense is this world ‘real’?

This is one of the themes that Paul Broks explores in his exceptional book. Written in part as a response to the death of his wife, it’s a bookseller’s nightmare: at once a grief memoir, a work of science, a philosophical study and a piece of fantasy. There are ghosts and walk-on parts for characters from Greek myths and the Old Testament and Koran. We meet a patient who believes he’s dead and a man whose left hand has a vicious life of its own. And at one point our author finds himself walking through the back of a wardrobe to end up ‘standing underneath a lamppost, in the middle of a wood on a snowy night.’

Broks spent his professional career as a clinical neuropsychologist, and part of his job was to make connections between the physical stuff between our ears and observable behaviour and perception. The case histories are very much in the Oliver Sacks vein, but Broks’s focus is on what these case histories can tell us about our notion of reality; our sense of self; our experience of consciousness.

In the introduction, Broks makes the observation: ‘There is no clear dividing line in the brain between inner imaginings and perceptions of the real, solid ‘world out there’. Reality and fantasy are built into the same neural circuits.’ So, the Wizard of Oz; the smell of coffee; a lunar eclipse – it’s all one to the cerebral cortex.

He references Plato’s story of prisoners chained in a cave (since childhood), facing a wall, and who can only see the shadows of people and objects passing before them on the rocky surface. They have to form their impression of the world based on what they observe: it’s their reality. A parable that presents to us the problem of knowledge: how can we get at the ‘truth’ through the ‘distorting mirror of the human mind’? Isn’t the skull a kind of cave encasing the brain?

Although this discussion is exciting and is threaded through the book, by the end of the text, and despite the teasing presence of an Old Testament figure (packing Special Brew and a soupçon of quantum theory), I’m not sure that we’ve got further than the philosopher Lennon: ‘Nothing is real: nothing to get hung about’. But the trip has been compelling.

And as for the existence of the self, Broks makes the point that in terms of cell death and replication, none of us are (biologically) the same people we were ten years ago. Like an ancient galley in which all the timbers have been replaced over time, our old self is long gone. What is the relationship between the five year old photographed on a beach and the 62 year old packing the picture for a school reunion?

Broks explores this and suggests there’s an autobiographical self (our store of memories) and a core self that responds to the transient moment. The two systems are organised hierarchically: the autobiographical self entirely dependent on the core self. So, a condition like Alzheimer’s disease impairs the autobiographical self and condemns the individual to live in the perpetual present.

And what about consciousness - our awareness of the colours in a rainbow and the smell of a bonfire; the tap of a branch against the window and the excitement when meeting an old friend – what is it? Although it’s possible to identify those regions of the brain that are involved in consciousness, defining it is something else. Broks makes a valiant attempt, suggesting that consciousness isn’t one thing but a kind of integration of sensory and cognitive processes that give the impression of a unified experience. In this sense it’s like a siphonophore – those jellyfish-like creatures (such as the Portuguese man o’ war) - that consist of independent organisms that function as a larger animal.

This is an exhilarating book. In the hands of a lesser writer, the mixture of fact (Martin who thinks he’s dead) and fiction (‘Hello, Mr Tumnus’) would grate. But Paul Broks has a light touch and is able to guide us through a complex world, drawing together thinking from the distant past with the findings of modern science. It’s open-minded, big hearted and courageous.

The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars is published by Allen Lane.

READING AHEAD Part 2: what's in our sights?

More of our contributors - including some new faces to the blog - give us their reading choices. What was on their Christmas list? What have they been hoarding for a special treat? Old favourites, new publications, authors recently discovered ... 

As ever, a big thank you to our guests, thanks to whose generosity we post a new review every Monday. We hope you'll find something here to add to your own to-be-read pile.

Savita Kalhan: I am eagerly awaiting Crossfire by Malorie Blackman, the fifth book in the iconic Noughts and Crosses series, which is to be published next summer. The original series for children was inspired by political events and racial discrimination. Crossfire is no different. Brexit, Trump and the rise of the far right, have inspired Crossfire, and will no doubt spark discussions amongst teenagers and adults alike.

Can We All Be Feminists is a collection of essays by seventeen writers from diverse backgrounds. Listening to some of the essayists at a Waterstones’ event, and reading Eishar Kaur’s essay on the way home on the train highlights how slow change continues to be – she is writing as a third generation British Asian woman and I am second generation – and also how ‘feminism’ can mean radically different things according to your background, ethnicity and colour.

Hilary McKay: Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk was my car book. I have car books, I’ve had them for years. Comes from the days of waiting with hot water bottles in the dark outside music lessons, party venues, gyms, schools, all those places that I don’t wait outside of anymore because the children are grown up(ish). So I’ve brought it into the warm, thing of beauty that it is, with that cover. That hawk. Now I’m two chapters in, and it’s as I guessed and as I’ve heard, long distance poetry. I have no fear of finishing it because I know already I’ll just turn to the beginning and start again.

Jon Appleton: A few years ago Paul Burston made the seamless transition from writing hilarious comedies to dark, searching crime fiction. I enjoyed The Black Path hugely so am looking forward to Paul’s creative exploration of the dark side of social media in The Closer I Get (Orenda Books, May). Paul is massively savvy about the online world so I’m sure his take will be insightful and persuasive and his story compelling.

I love it when Jill Dawson takes characters from real life and immerses them in turbulent semi-fictional scenarios - her next book, The Language of Birds (Sceptre, April) plunges us into the 1970s and the infamous disappearance of Lord Lucan. Can’t wait! In the meantime why not read The Crime Writer, her most recent novel which is about Patricia Highsmith? Chilling.

Leslie Wilson: I'm looking forward to reading The Pursuit of Power, Europe 1815-1914, by Richard J Evans. Evans is an author who I greatly esteem, because he has written about Nazi Germany in a dispassionate, enlightening and scholarly way. This book, however, deals with the period between Waterloo and the outbreak of World War 1, the era that my English and Silesian-German grandparents were born into (the latter part, anyway). There was so much going on during that period; the revolutions of 1848, the growth of cultural and political nationalism, colonialism, technological change, but also feminism and trade unionism. Can't wait.

Nick Manns: I caught Paul Broks on Radio 4 last Spring. From this fleeting hearing I gathered that he was a respected neuropsychologist, talking about the importance of magical thinking. The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars defies categorisation (so is every bookseller’s nightmare). Depending on where you jump in – and Broks is happy for readers to work through in any order – it’s autobiography, speculative philosophy, neuroscience, grief memoir and ghost story. It's also unsettling: “There is no clear dividing line in the brain between inner imaginings and perceptions of the real, solid ‘world out there’. Reality and fantasy are built into the same neural circuits." I’m about to reread it, letting into the house the quotidian, the strange, the dead.

Gwen Grant: A Place in the Woods, by Helen Hoover, is one of my most treasured books. Chicagoans Helen and her husband, Adrian, move to the vast forests on the edge of Minnesota’s northern wilderness. Helen’s deep love and respect for the forest and its wild inhabitants shines through as she shares the beauty and
danger of this world..

Environmentalists, they face many challenges. A violent storm almost destroys their cabin. Hunters appear. Their money runs out. Only when Helen starts to sell her detailed and lovely stories about the woods, illustrated with Ade’s beautiful pen and ink drawings, does the threat to their new life begin to lessen.

Chris Priestley: Having had the privilege of illustrating Jason Reynolds’ Long Way Down and hearing him speak at the Edinburgh Book Festival in August, I intend to work my way through his other books. I’m going to start with When I Was the Greatest. 

I am a big fan of the short story form as a writer and reader, but for some reason I’ve never got round to reading any Flannery O’Connor. I’m about to put that right with A Good Man Is Hard to Find. I also have Alice Munro’s Moons of Jupiter to look forward to.

Mary Hoffman: The book I am most looking forward to is Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light, whenever it comes out. I adored the first two, which I have read twice - and seen the stage plays and TV adaptation twice too. Meanwhile I am on the London Library's waiting list for Diarmaid MacCullough’s Thomas Cromwell: a Life, and I do have the 642 pages of Giles Tremlett’s Isabella of Castile: Europe’s first Great Queen, waiting by my bedside, for when I’ve finished Charles Ross’s Edward lV. Almost all my non-fiction reading is history these days. On the fiction front, I shall wait till Kate Atkinson’s Transcription comes out in paperback in March, since I don’t buy fiction in hardback (I make an exception for Hilary Mantel). Anne Tyler’s Clock Dance isn’t available till July next year but Madeleine Miller’s Circe is on my Christmas list. 

Paul Dowswell: Francis Spufford’s Golden Hill is now on my ‘read again pile’, and I’m happy to recommend it to anyone looking for a riveting read. Spufford’s tale, of a young man recently arrived in colonial New York with an exceedingly large cheque, is a glorious cinematic, smell-o-vision adventure. I can’t remember the last time I read a book I could see so clearly in my mind’s eye. Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Wilkinson and Oona Chaplin strutted the stage and read the pages for me. Spufford teaches creative writing at Goldsmiths. If he teaches half as well as he writes they are very lucky to have him.

Patricia Elliott: Rosie, the wonderful writer Rose Tremain's memories of growing up in sooty post-war London, with school holidays spent at the country paradise of Linkenholt, her grandparents' home, is both delightful and disturbing. Her father deserts the family when Rose is ten. Her bleak childhood, dominated by her cold, unkind mother, is alleviated only by her loving nanny, and by teachers who encourage her creativity when she is banished to boarding school so her mother can marry a new man. Only after being 'finished' in France, does she finally rebel and escape to Oxford. Some of the most interesting parts refer to incidents that have inspired her novels.

Cynthia Jefferies: Having recently discovered the British Library Crime Classics, what better title to choose for Christmas reading than J.Jefferson Farjeon’s Mystery in White, his Christmas Crime story? First published in 1937 it has an evocative cover complete with deep snow, stars twinkling and a steam train stuck in a snow drift. Four murders in a dozen hours! I reckon I’ve earned my bit of turkey. So says the police inspector, belatedly arriving at the scene. Eleanor Farjeon’s brother was prolific so I will be looking out for more. I love crime within this period a lot, almost enough to try it myself!

Sheena Wilkinson: Christmas is a time for old friends. This year Linda Newbery’s The Key to Flambards sent me back to K.M. Peyton’s originals. My own work in progress is set in 1921, so revisiting the post-war atmosphere of Flambards Divided is fascinating– though my book is set in Belfast which had its mind on things other than horses and racing cars. I’ve recently loved Kate Atkinson’s Transcription, and I hear there’s a new Jackson Brodie on the horizon next year. So that has settled my Christmas reading – a leisurely reread of the first four Jackson Brodie books to get me in the mood.

Linda Newbery:  I keep seeing clips and mentions of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (not least interviewing Michelle Obama at the Festival Hall!) and am impressed by everything she says.  Americanah, a story of two returned Nigerian exiles, former lovers, sounds enticing - and I've just seen that Barack Obama has chosen it as one of his books of the year, too. Having been gripped by Michelle Paver's chilling Dark Matter, I've now got Thin Air, a ghost story set in the Himalayas in the 1930s. And I have high expectations of The Binding, a first adult novel by Bridget Collins, known for her bold and accomplished teenage fiction. We'll hear more about this for sure, and just look at that sumptuous cover!

Finally here is Bridget herself, who'll be a January guest:

Bridget Collins: I’m really looking forward to re-reading Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver. It’s a

Photo: Symon Hamer

brilliant, immersive reworking of the Rumpelstiltskin story, with wonderfully rich world-building and great characters. The images that stay with me are so beautiful (think silver, ice, dissolving mirrors, silk) that I can’t wait to rediscover them. The first time I read it I just devoured it – but then, because it was so in demand, I had to give it straight back to the library! So I’m going to buy it and go more slowly this time, relishing every word.