The Irish Sea, from Cardigan Bay © C A Lovegrove Foster by Claire Keegan. Faber & Faber, 2022 (2010). At the end of the lane there’s a long, white house with trees whose limbs are trailing the ground. ‘Da,’ I say. ‘The trees.’ ‘What about ’em?’ ‘They’re sick,’ I say. ‘They’re weeping willows,’ he says, and clears his throat. It’s the hot summer of 1981 and a young girl is being taken by car in her father’s car from her family farm, near where County Carlow becomes County Wicklow, to stay with relatives on another farm not far from the shores of the Irish Sea. Why is being taken away from ..read more

© C A Lovegrove Peter Camenzind by Hermann Hesse, translated by W J Strachan (1973). Penguin, 1974 (1904). Born in an isolated German-speaking Alpine village in the last half of the 19th century, Peter Camenzind is a solitary lad who loves communing with nature, walking and climbing in the mountains, and rowing on the lake adjoining the village. But he’s also fond of books and jumps at a chance to be educated at a nearby religious institution. This proves to be a springboard to a life spent travelling and writing, but also an existence in which he searches for meaning and direction, not always ..read more

The Basque Ikurriña flag (photo credit Muhamedmesic) The Dinner Guest by Gabriela Ybarra. El comensal (2015) translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer. Harvill Secker, 2018. ‘My mother was many of the things that are said about the dead, but in her case they were all true.’ XVI As a teenager staying with a French family from southwest France in the sixties I seem to remember seeing the slogan 4+3=1 occasionally painted on walls. I thus became aware then of a nationalist movement of the Basque people on either side of the Franco-Spanish border and learned to recognise words related to the ..read more

War memorial, Hadfield, Derbyshire © Copyright David Dixon (https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/3174486) Fludd by Hilary Mantel. Fourth Estate, 2010 (1989). ‘Patterns can alter,’ Fludd said. ‘A soul is a thing in a state of flux. Your fate is mutable. Your will is free.’ Chapter Ten This short novel by the late Hilary Mantel is all about the state of flux that the title character alludes to. The anticipated call in the waiting room. That moment when you realise that all it takes to emerge from that rut is that first step; the point at which you finally decide to stand up to the bully, to change ..read more

#WitchWeek2022 The days are getting shorter and the nights … well, longer, and my thoughts are heading towards considering what to read as the dark gathers outside the window. Of course there is Annabel’s readalong of The Dark is Rising sequence which is due to take us up to midwinter, but what else beckons? So, there’s Witch Week 2022, an annual meme run by Lizzie Ross and myself, focused on fantasy themes that suit the period between Halloween and Bonfire Night. This year highlights Polychromancy, a theme looking at fiction related to diverse cultures and stories, and runs till 6th November ..read more

WordPress Free Photo Library After Midnight by Irmgard Keun. Nach Mitternacht, translated by Anthea Bell (1985). Penguin Classics, 2020 (1937). ‘The roofs that you see are not built for you. The bread that you smell is not baked for you. And the language that you hear is not spoken for you.’ March 1936. Nazi Germany’s Führer is visiting the town of Frankfurt, bringing disruption to the streets, exhilaration to some, anxiety to others. 19-year-old Susanne – Sanna to her friends – is increasingly feeling as though everyone she knows is living on borrowed time. Her friend Gerti is infatuated wi ..read more

Kensington in the 1950s (Roger Mayne Archive) A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark. Introduction by Ali Smith. Virago Books, 2009 (1988). Spark’s novel is a deliciously piquant story about truth-telling, told by a character one almost suspects at times to be an unreliable narrator when her account is so spiky and vicious. Yet how can one doubt that war-bride Mrs Hawkins, whose training as a copy-editor is to shear away redundant prose, is giving us the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Her nemesis is Hector Bartlett, a dreadful literary hack whom she calls to his face un pisseur de c ..read more

© C A Lovegrove Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss. Granta Books, 2019 (2018). A vivid image comes to me: a rudimentary fence of thin branches stripped of leaves, two or three sheep skulls perched atop uprights. It’s the 70s, on a Welsh hillside, and the kids – this is a family holiday after all, though some of us adults are excavating an early medieval site – have, unconsciously imitating The Lord of the Flies, fashioned their ramshackle barrier to keep us out of their den. This memory emerged like a body exhumed from a peat bog as I read Sarah Moss’s novella. Set in the late 80s or early 90s after the ..read more

Frontispiece by Philippe Jullian Nursery Rhymes. An essay by V Sackville-West. Illustrated by Philippe Jullian. Michael Joseph, 1950 (1947). “Coleridge had a proper appreciation of the preposterous, astounding, yet entirely acceptable propositions which go to make up the thaumaturgy of the nursery. No one lacking that appreciation is advised to read any further in this essay.” p 7 Well, I’m one of those who, like Coleridge, appreciate the preposterous thaumaturgy of nursery rhymes, so Vita Sackville-West’s enthusiastic paddling in the shoreless pool of childhood lore naturally appealed to me ..read more

Tokyo at night: WordPress Free Photo Library Convenience Store Woman (Konbini Ningen) by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori. Granta Books, 2019 (2016). Quirky. Hilarious. Weird. Funny. Comical. Cute. Dreamy. Just some of the adjectives from press reviews littering the cover of the edition I read of Sayaka Murata’s Konbini Ningen. Yet, strangely, these wouldn’t have been the words I’d’ve used, which perhaps only goes to show that I’m an atypical reader. Sad. Affirmative. Blistering. Honest. Critical. Familiar. Unconventional. These are the terms that come to my mind after having ..read more