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."

A SINGLE THREAD by Tracy Chevalier, reviewed by Adele Geras

"I'm not going to spoil the pleasure of new readers by outlining the plot, but this is not a 'breakneck speed' sort of book. Take your time with it. Look at the details ..."

Adele Geras has written many books for children and young adults and six novels for adults, the latest of which is Love or Nearest Offer, published by Quercus in paperback. She lives in Cambridge.A historical novel for adults will be published by Michael Joseph in June 2020 under a pseudonym yet to be publicly revealed.

I've been a fan of Tracy Chevalier's work since her wonderful novel, Girl with a Pearl Earring, swept all before it twenty years ago. She's written many novels but the ones I like best seem to be, when I list them in my head, the ones where needlework of some kind plays an important part. The Lady and the Unicorn is about the miraculous tapestries of the same name now to be seen in the Musée de Cluny in Paris. The Last Runaway is about patchwork and quilting, which is another of Chevalier's interests. I've also read her book The Sleep Quilt which is all about the fascinating exhibition of prisoners' work which she curated together with the charity Fine Cell Work.

Fine Cell Work teaches prisoners to sew and embroider. It's part of the process of rehabilitation for sometimes very violent and troubled men. I have a small lavender pillow embroidered with a poppy which I bought in the exhibition and it sits on my bed all the time. I mention this charity not only because I'm always eager to draw it to people's attention but also because it's relevant to Chevalier's new book which demonstrates most beautifully the power of stitching to mend and heal.

My own relationship with sewing and embroidery is chequered to say the least. That's much too polite. I'm useless. I give my trousers to an alteration shop to be turned up. In the Junior House at my boarding school, we all had to embroider things like traycloths while our Housemistress read aloud to us from books like Brother Dusty Feet by Rosemary Sutcliff. The pattern was printed on the fabric and at the beginning, I had visions of perfectly even stitches, executed in shining silky thread. The reality was very different. To be precise, it was a mess. I cannot embroider neatly. The back of my work was always a tangled jungle of silks. Ghastly is too good a word for what I produced.

But I love the idea of embroidery. In fact, it's been an obsession of mine since childhood. I adore it. I'm mad about the Bayeux tapestry which is an embroidery and not a tapestry at all. I've written many poems about sewing and embroidery, It appears in some of my own books and most recently, I've written on the History Girls blog about an exhibition of embroidery at Ely Cathedral. Here is a link to that.

Then a proof of A Single Thread arrived in my house, and of course I read it at once, and I loved it. It embodies in its story the notion that sewing, particularly in the company of others, is soothing, calming, and helpful to anyone whose emotions are in turmoil.

Violet Speedwell is one of the 'surplus women' whose fiancés and boyfriends, husband and lovers, have been killed in the Great War. She moves from living with her mother (a very particular kind of monster) in Southampton to living on her own in a boarding-house in Winchester. She is both escaping and recovering. Her lover is dead and her mother is somewhere else, and Violet has taken a job in an office. She has almost no money. She lives on practically no food at all. Then one day she sees the beautiful needlepoint-covered kneelers in the Cathedral, all hand stitched, and she meets 'the broderers'. The true story of these women, under the guidance of Louisa Pesel, is woven into the fiction Chevalier has created. You can, she tells us in an afterword, still see these kneelers in the Cathedral and use them yourself. Pesel was a real person and the novel places her slightly to the side of the main narrative, but still very important in the book as a factual anchor to the fiction Chevalier has created.

The fiction is Violet's story. How she comes out of the shade and blooms in the warmth of shared work and a very unusual romance. I'm not going to spoil the pleasure of new readers by outlining the plot, but this is not a 'breakneck speed' sort of book. Take your time with it. Look at the details. Learn about bell-ringing, which is vital to the story. Enjoy the glimpses of life in the Cathedral. Follow Violet's progress to the end, stitch by stitch by stitch. It's a very satisfying book and if I had to describe it, I'd say it was the sort of novel which, if it hadn't been written this year, feels like the books published by the excellent Persephone Books in elegant dove-grey covers. Lovers of these volumes know exactly what I mean. If anyone doesn't know them, I recommend a trip to the Persephone Books website or shop. Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy following The Single Thread as much as I did.

A Single Thread is published by Borough Press.

FIRST ANNIVERSARY guest post by Tracy Chevalier: THE OPTICIAN OF LAMPEDUSA by Emma-Jane Kirby

It's our birthday! We are a year old this week. Huge thanks to all the guest contributors who make this possible by lending us their time, expertise and enthusiasms - we wouldn't be able to do it without their willing help. Special thanks to this week's guest, Tracy Chevalier, for helping us to mark the occasion. Her brilliant novel Remarkable Creatures was our very first review, and we're delighted to welcome her now in person with this timely recommendation.

"The most moving and important book I’ve read in the past year..."

Tracy Chevalier FRSL is the author of nine novels. She is best known for the international bestseller Girl with a Pearl Earring, which has been translated into 39 languages, sold over 5 million copies worldwide, and made into a film. Her most recent books are the historical novel At the Edge of the Orchard, and New Boy, a retelling of Othello for the Shakespeare Project. She is President of the Royal Literary Fund, a Trustee of the British Library, former Chair of the Society of Authors, and holds honorary degrees from her alma maters, Oberlin College and the University of East Anglia. She grew up in Washington DC and in 1984 moved to London, where she lives with her husband and son.

The most moving and important book I’ve read in the past year is The Optician of Lampedusa by the journalist Emma-Jane Kirby. I don’t read a lot of non-fiction other than for research purposes; I’ve often found it slow-going and worthy, as if a determined lecturer is trying to force information into me. This book is different: short, urgent, devastating. Kirby first came across the story and reported it on BBC Radio 4. Now she has turned it into a clear, simply written true tale for our time. I read it in two hours and it will stay with me for life.

A few years ago an ordinary, unnamed optician who lives on the small island of Lampedusa off the coast of Sicily went on a fishing trip for a couple of days with his wife and six friends. One morning they woke to distant sounds of distress, and discovered that close by a boat full of migrants and refugees crossing from North Africa had sunk. The waters were churning with over 500 people struggling to stay afloat. The book describes in detail how the optician and his friends scrambled to rescue 47 people, pulling them onto a boat designed to hold only 10. If you have ever wondered how you might respond to an extreme crisis, the optician and his friends provide a model of how to connect with your vital inner humanitarianism.

The rest of the book deals with the aftermath of that harrowing experience and the group’s struggle with the resulting psychological trauma. Having thought little about migrants and refugees until then, they developed great concern for the people they rescued, and later managed to meet with them, in a heartfelt reunion. It is a lesson in how specific stories change people’s views of a general crisis.

The optician is realistic about the effect the influx of refugees has had on Lampedusa’s community and resources, but reveals a new understanding of what it means for people to risk so much to get to Europe and a new life.

Many of us have spent a lot of time talking about the refugee crisis without having any real experience of it. Whatever our views, most are unlikely ever to meet a refugee, much less save them from drowning. The Optician of Lampedusa makes concrete and personal what has been an abstraction. Once you’ve read it you’ll feel like a crucial piece of the jigsaw – the human piece – has been filled in. For that reason, it is a must-read.

The Optician of Lampedusa is published by Or Books.

PICK OF THE YEAR by Linda Newbery

          

      In 2016 I finally read War and Peace, spurred to do so by the Andrew Davies BBC version. I was sometimes ahead of the dramatisation and sometimes behind, boring anyone within earshot with a refrain of "It's not quite like that in the book ... " I found that simultaneous viewing and reading worked well, the TV drama helping me to identify the huge cast of characters; I enjoyed the BBC's glorious production values and superb acting (especially Paul Dano, so endearing as the well-meaning but often misguided Pierre Bezukhov, Jessie Buckley as Marya Bolkonskaya and Ade Edmundson as Count Rostov), while for epic scale and sweep the novel can't be rivalled. I'd happily both watch and read again.

     New novels that impressed me this year were Tracy Chevalier's At the Edge of the Orchard, Sarah Moss's The Tidal Zone and Sarah Perry's deservedly-praised Victorian Gothic The Essex Serpent. I'd already read several of Tracy Chevalier's titles (including the excellent Remarkable Creatures, which I've reviewed here) while Sarahs Moss and Perry are authors I'll be looking out for in future. I shall certainly re-read The Essex Serpent, and the same goes for Ali Smith's dazzling How to be Both – two linked but very different stories, one of a modern teenager undergoing therapy, the other of a Renaissance frieze-painter - which can be read in either order, with links and overlaps gradually revealed. In this ingenious jigsaw puzzle of a book, there's more than can easily be picked up in a single reading. 

It was thanks to my Reading Group that I read Katherine McMahon's The Crimson Rooms, set in the immediate aftermath of the First World War: a murder mystery, seen through the eyes of a young female lawyer, and a poignant and realistic portrayal of the effects of war on participants and others. My final fiction choice is Trio, by Sue Gee, which has all her hallmarks: powerful emotion rooted in realistic situations, wonderful sense of place and time (Northumberland, in this case, in the late 1930s), acute observation of weather, seasons and human behaviour. There's music too, in this latest novel; descriptions of performances by the Trio of the title will have you searching YouTube or your CD collection so that you can listen as they play. And reading Sue Gee always makes me want to write, which is a bonus.

William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives went with me on my first trip to India, two years ago, and this year City of Djinns: a Year in Delhi was the perfect companion – informative, personal, anecdotal - for my visit to the city in February. I’ve included Richard Mabey’s Flora Britannica because it’s a favourite non-fiction choice for not just this but every year, with its mix of botany, natural history and folklore – I always dip into it around the winter solstice. Finally: Fingers in the Sparkle Jar is part natural history, part memoir, by naturalist and Springwatch presenter Chris Packham. I greatly admire Chris Packham for his vast knowledge of wildlife and his ability as a communicator, and also for his outspokenness on matters of animal abuse and the environment. This was a revelation – a highly personal account, with striking literary echoes, of his teenage years, his close observation of - and at times identifcation with - birds and animals, and the therapy he underwent later when suffering from depression. I wonder what he’ll write next?

Linda Newbery

REMARKABLE CREATURES by Tracy Chevalier

"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..."

I've recently enjoyed Tracy Chevalier's latest novel, At the Edge of the Orchard, set in nineteenth-century Ohio and California, and now can't think why I hadn't read this one sooner, as its subject - Mary Anning and her fossil discoveries in the early 19th century - is so obviously appealing.

Chevalier's hallmark is to make historical settings and people seem fresh and immediate; she never lets research overload the story or weigh it down with archaic diction. We're soon immersed in the daily and domestic lives of the two first-person narrators. Within pages, we're at Lyme Regis and Charmouth, out on the beach, aware of the incoming tide and the dangers of landslips, eyes peeled for belemnites and the ammonites believed at that time to be coiled snakes.

Both alternating viewpoints are based on historic figures: Elizabeth Philpot, newcomer to Lyme Regis, unmarried in a household of women, finding a keen interest in fossil-hunting; and Mary Anning herself, only ten when the novel begins, uneducated and self-taught, whose regular finds of 'curios' on the beach help her family eke out a living, especially after the death of her father. In fact it's Mary's brother Joe who makes the first astonishing find: a fossilised creature believed at first to be a crocodile but later named ichthyosaurus. 

Despite the difference in class and an age gap of twenty years, a close association and friendship builds between these two women - Elizabeth at first learning from Mary, later warning her of the risks of a love affair with a man who will never marry her, and more than once taking decisive action to ensure that Mary is given credit for her remarkable discoveries. A serious quarrel between them causes a lasting rift, yet this relationship is the most important in the novel, and through it Chevalier shows us the difficulties for women engaged in science in the early nineteenth-century - how easily their achievements can be purloined by men, and their contributions dismissed as insignificant. The alternating narratives show us the passionate, impulsive yet practical Mary, who believes that she owes her special gift to her survival of a lightning strike as a baby, counterbalanced by the more worldly and rational Elizabeth, who tries to help the Annings through the ups and downs of financial hardship and whose links with London take her into male-dominated institutions such as the Geological Society.

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. If they are God's creatures, why are none like them alive today? The concept of extinction barely exists - were these animals, then, among those on Noah's Ark, Mary asks at one point? A clergyman, faced with Mary's reasonable question that since God made the land before the animals, how could fossils be embedded in rocks, replies that God must have placed the fossils there to test our faith. The novel places us at the dawn of understanding the true age of the Earth, then believed - according to Bishop Ussher's calculations - to have been a mere 6,000 years old. (Indeed, Bishop Ussher concluded that Heaven and Earth were created on the night preceding the 23rd October 4004 BC: 'I had always wondered at his precision,' Elizabeth reflects.) Mary Anning's discoveries of ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs were significant in shaping evolutionary theory - leading to ideas which revolutionised our view of the human population just as surely as the discovery that the sun, rather than the Earth, is the centre of our universe.

Such big ideas could have overwhelmed the novel in hands less skilled than Chevalier's. We're left with the picture shown on the rather beautiful cover: a headstrong, unconventional girl and her older, more cautious friend, a windswept beach, a search that may prove fruitless or may unlock more of Earth's secrets.

Both Mary and Elizabeth are given recurring motifs. Mary's is the lightning, which she believes courses through her body at moments of revelation, love and - on one occasion - sexual ecstasy. Elizabeth's is her habit of defining people according to which feature they 'lead by'. Mary Anning leads with her eyes; her sister Margaret leads with her hands. Meeting the attractive but possibly manipulative Captain Birch, Elizabeth comments: 'I have never trusted a man who leads with his hair. Only a vain, overconfident man does that.'

I don't know who Tracy Chevalier had in mind when she wrote that phrase. But I know who I'm thinking of now.

Remarkable Creatures is published by Harper Collins.