Bret Easton Ellis and The Other Dogs by Lina Wolff (translated by Frank Perry)

It feels like a provocation for an author to include another author's name in the title of her book – especially if she calls that other author a dog within the subtitle. The name comes out of a section of the novel about a brothel in a run-down town called Caudal in Spain. There's a kennel at the back filled only with male dogs who are given the names of male authors after a feminist comes to visit the prostitutes who work there. There's also a canary bird called Harold Bloom. When clients are cruel to the prostitutes they take it out on the dogs by feeding them rotten meat. Later this image of consuming rotten meat is repeated when a man named Rodrigo dreams of a starving man who is only given putrid scraps from a butcher to eat. Images of putrid sustenance in place of nourishment for men who have heretofore escaped punishment have a strong resonance in this “civilized” society. Rodrigo is telling this story to a girl named Araceli who comes to see him at a hotel on her very first job as a call girl. Araceli is fascinated by a neighbouring woman named Alba Cambo who writes dark short stories that she and her mother seek out to read. It's difficult to pin down a single plot for this novel set in the Spanish landscape. It's essentially a collection of anecdotes, yet they all feel eerily tied together and are frequently fascinating. What Wolff gets at through all her divergences and stories within dreams within stories is a special commentary on the way self-perception works in conjunction with the way others view us.

There are stories in here about people who sell themselves, who cheat on their spouses and who live in unbearably bitter loneliness. Characters seem guided more by instinct than by logic. It's stated that “You never really know anything about anything. At best you have an aching feeling in your stomach and a compass that sometimes points right, and other times spins crazily.” Much of the time there is a slightly surreal edge to things so that when a man slips and falls unconscious in the middle of a Sitges dinner party it doesn't seem strange that conversation just carries on. People feel on guard about becoming too close to others or allowing them into their lives. They feel caution is needed because “beneath the thick skin of even the most armour-plated person there is always a crack that runs straight to the centre and you should think it over very carefully before raising a hand to signal your willingness to fall inside.” Indeed when a group of students surprise their teacher with a bottle of bubbly she unexpectedly opens up about her severe disappointment with life in a direct and uncomfortable way. So too when Araceli takes Rodrigo on as a client, but it turns out he's not after sex as he was sent to her by Alba and her own mother. Instead he wants to talk all night which strikes Araceli as in some ways more difficult to take because “Selling your body was one thing – but your mind, that was prostitution on an unparalleled scale.”

In this novel Lina Wolff is saying something really striking and original about human relationships and our relationship with literary culture. Children attending a school see literature as a diet which must be as balanced and nutritious as the food they consume: 'As literary anorexics we have to make sure we get some Borges inside us,' Muriel said. 'A few words a day, a few words that are the extremely nutritious parts of the tuna. Those are the bits that will feed us, and those are the bits from which we will be born.' This resonates strongly as I often feel that consuming the right books is important as eating right. There's a loutish man named Ilich who has an affair with Alba and blackmails Rodrigo who takes it upon himself to read “The Old Man and The Sea.” His crass interpretation of the book is laughable to Rodrigo who is more cultured. Yet, it is Ilich who ultimately succeeds in business and with Rodrigo's wife despite living a life which has been devoid of literary nourishment. When he flips through some salacious pages of Houellebecq's novel “Platform” he comments: “So this is what literature is all about? A bunch of wankers who stick pages together with their own sperm? Ha! It's enough to make you weep.” Wolff expresses in her stories a frustration with the hard economic realities of the world, but also a suspicion of the male-dominated literary culture. Her approach to depicting this reality is disarming and refreshing. “Bret Easton Ellis and The Other Dogs” is a highly unusual and haunting read.

Slade House by David Mitchell

I was hesitant about reading “Slade House” when it came out a few months ago because I didn't finish his previous novel “The Bone Clocks.” Mitchell's recurring technique is to write really involving smaller realistic stories within larger, ambitious and fantastical narratives that say something meaningful about time and humanity. This was most successfully realized in his tremendous novel “Cloud Atlas.” The problem is that I come to feel really involved with some of the smaller enclosed stories and grow impatient with the larger all-encompassing story. This is the reason I put aside “The Bone Clocks” because I didn't care enough about the supernatural elements that tied disparate stories set in different time periods together. He uses the same structure in “Slade House” building quieter short tales of an insecure boy, a philandering detective inspector, a teenage girl self conscious about her weight, a lesbian journalist and a black Canadian psychiatrist into a chilling narrative of a pair of twins' paranormal existence. One by one these people are lured to a grand old house and then they are never seen again. The difference is that the length of “Slade House” better suits this technique. “Slade House” is only 240 pages compared to “The Bone Clocks” which totals 640 pages. This makes “Slade House” a much more fast-paced and thrilling read.

David Mitchell is such a skilled writer in the way he quickly and convincingly creates narrators that are immediately identifiable. Switching between all the different personalities I listed above over a 36 year time period could feel jarring to a reader, but Mitchell uses choice details and compelling voices which grab your attention. Even with an unlikeable character like Inspector Gordon Edmonds who makes sexist and racist remarks, he's a dynamic and vivid personality who is engaging to read about. Mitchell confidently brings in points of reference from the high-brow like famed musician Yehudi Menuhin to the ever-loveable Miss Piggy. At times Michell scrambles too much to invoke an atmosphere for the time period by flipping through news events or popular culture from the time period so it can begin to read like a wikipedia page for the year in question. But, on the whole, their stories feel layered and deeply thought out.

In the section 'Oink, Oink' teenage Sally Timms wears a Miss Piggy mask at a party in Slade House 

Mitchell gives a great sense for the depth of personality and the way people present version of themselves: “People are masks, with masks under those masks, and masks under those, and down you go.” It's interesting to see how over the course of the novel the sinister twins Norah and Jonah's characters gradually develop. The various people these mystic beings inhabit break apart to reveal their foibles and tensions between the pair. So, by the end, I felt as involved with their stories as I did with the tales of the individuals they lure into the supernatural house.

“Slade House” is essentially a group of short stories held in the framework of a fantasy novel. I admire Mitchell's ambition and the scope of his imagination to meaningfully tease larger questions out of tales that straddle great swaths of time. But such scale isn't always needed. In Mitchell's novel “Black Swan Green” he confines his narrative to a year in the life of a thirteen year old boy to great effect. “Slade House” is a thoroughly entertaining read and a refreshing new spin on a haunted house story, but I hope Mitchell doesn't always feel the need to contain micro stories within grandiose macro narratives. Sometimes a whole world of meaning can be felt the smallest of spaces.

The Widow by Fiona Barton

Every now and then I enjoy reading a good immersive thriller. Last year it was SJ Watson’s “Second Life” about a woman’s search for her missing sister and her adventures from creating a secret online identity. “The Widow” also taps into the nefarious corners of the internet at some points, but this psychological thriller centres on the case of a missing girl, the deceased man who was suspected of kidnapping her and his long-suffering wife-now-widow. This is Fiona Barton’s debut novel, but she’s had considerable practice writing about cases such as the dramatic one created in this story as she’s an experienced journalist. The story’s primary focus is not Glen Taylor, the primary suspect in a kidnapping case that’s been ongoing for four years, but Jean, the submissive and compliant wife who has stood always stood beside – but more often behind - him. The novel begins at a point when Glen has recently been killed in an accident and now Jean is left on her own with the media wanting her side of the story. What does she really think about her husband? How much does she know about the kidnapping? Is she lying to the police and reporters or is she lying to herself? These questions are explored over the course of this well-paced, suspenseful thriller.

At the beginning of the story I felt impatient with Jean because she’s initially so passive. She shows a wilful ignorance: “There is so much I want to ask, but so much I don't want to know.” While this is frustrating it’s also a true reflection of how some people evade looking at the truth. Without her husband to order her about, she knocks around her empty house until it’s invaded by skilled reporter Kate Waters who cosies up to Jean like a friend but really wants the big scoop. Gradually the extent of Jean’s introverted behaviour becomes more meaningful as her complex reasoning takes shape and she slowly reveals her version of events. The novel moves between 2010 when Jean is interviewed and 2006 when two-year-old Bella Elliot disappears from her single mother’s front garden. An investigation is launched by well-meaning detective inspector Bob Sparkes who becomes obsessed with solving the case. Bella’s mother Dawn launches her own campaign to find her daughter utilizing the media and stirring up public interest. The search eventually leads to Glen who becomes the focus of the case. What’s fascinating is the way his wife Jean gradually emerges from the background as she’s torn between her husband and the people investigating. Both sides try to manipulate her for their own purposes, but when she’s interviewed Jean is finally ready to assert her independence.

The novel really picks up pace half way through when a string of carefully placed clues start adding up, secrets are uncovered and Jean becomes more complex. I found the ending to be as satisfyingly dramatic as a thrilling crime drama. It’s particularly notable how well Barton writes about the methods journalists use to chase sensational stories like a kidnapping and how the media works in tandem with (or sometimes comes into conflict with) police investigations. “The Widow” is an engaging and well-executed thriller.

American Housewife by Helen Ellis

“American Housewife” is undoubtedly one of the funniest books I've read for some time. These short stories imitate the parlance of our modern day popular and online life to skewer the shallow values of a consumer-driven superficial culture. Sorrows are drowned with Chanel No. 5. Book clubs are more about potluck dinners and outfits than literature. Little pageant girls enter protection programs to hide them from their fame-driven parents. The satire of these tales is enriched with self-help guide speak which encourages you how to understand the subtext of what a “Southern Lady” says or how to be a “Grown-Ass Lady.” Longer stories push frivolous pastimes to extreme and absurd ends like being forced to be the surrogate for a group of ladies in a book club or neighbours who turn murderous over a decoration dispute of an apartment building’s common area. This bombastic horror exposes the underlying emptiness of trivial middle class standards of behaviour. Just like the self-portrait artist Cindy Sherman who inhabits personas of fictional characters distorted by the society they live in, Helen Ellis’ humorous imitation of women who bow to the values of popular culture serves to send up the shallow attitudes and seductive images we’re bombarded with in every day modern life.

Cindy Sherman Untitled #461

Beneath the playful humour, there is a relatable simmering anger driving these stories. Women feel compelled to “stallion-walk” in their kitchens like Beyoncé. Even though we know we can never be like Beyoncé, we can’t help wishing to be like her and thus making ourselves look ridiculous. These stories are also suffused with a sense of frustration that what is trivial is popularized more than what is thoughtful. For writers specifically, it’s as if there can be little drive to pen anything worthwhile because it will just be chewed up and twisted by the machine of popular culture or ignored by an easily distracted public. It’s remarked “Looks like, unless we're raging drunkards, writers are boring.” In this story a writer who hasn’t published anything for some time is drawn into joining a reality show called “Dumpster Diving with the Stars.” Another story focuses on an author commissioned to write a novel by Tampax. One of the most funny-but-cringeworthy stories ‘How to Be a Patron of the Arts’ features the transformation of an aspiring writer who gradually dumbs herself down to the point of being a monotonous socialite and wife. When having a conversation at an art exhibit she instructs you to “admit that you published one book. 'It was a novel.' Talk about it in the past tense as if it's a dead child.” This book is awash with satirical humour that anyone can relate to, but particularly to writers like me who once had a novel published and have since failed to successfully get that second book to press.

I’ve been reading a few novels recently that are excellent, but heavy and difficult. So the stories in “American Housewife” made fantastic intelligent, but easy and very funny reads. They also made me intensely self conscious of the ways I might also be like an American housewife with glitter in my desk drawer and spending the morning hunched over my desk in my pajamas.

The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt by Tracy Farr

There is something special about the character of Lena Gaunt that I strongly connected to. On the surface she and I have nothing in common. She’s a ninety year old musician living in a small cottage in a suburb of Perth, Australia. Her specialty is playing the theremin or the aetherphone which is a special electronic instrument controlled without physical contact. Even at her elderly age she still performs in concerts and then retires to her quarters to smoke opium. She’s an eccentric character who narrates the story of her colourful life from early days in Singapore to her affair with a famous artist to the peaks and troughs of her musical fame. What’s so entrancing and sympathetic about Lena is her intensely felt dialogue with herself:  “I could connect – but with myself, in a closed circuit.” There is an element of unashamedly clear independence about her life which is beautifully admirable. She is defined more by her relationship to the creative process than to other people. This makes Lena an inspiration and a joy to read about.

As the title suggests, this book is also about the people Lena loves. It’s difficult for her to connect with others mainly because she’s more interested in her music. Her childhood is spent mostly in solitude. She feels little connection to her parents, but strikes a stronger bond with her Uncle Valentine who inspires her interest in music. It’s fantastic to read about a character who creates her own family units rather than remaining confined into the one she was born into. She’s drawn more to outsiders than those who tread a safe and conservative path. So there is her uncle who takes her to an opium den, a painter named Trix who takes her to a queer bar called The Buzz Room, a large Russian cellist who recognizes her musical talent and a woman living by the ocean who provides steady company. Her companions are few, but carefully chosen. There is a great love of her life who she forges a strong romantic connection to: “every night, as we held each other, curved into one another, we cared not what the world thought of us. We were entire, within ourselves. Perfect.” Their relationship is sincerely felt and very touching.

Leon Theremin playing the instrument he invented

Although these relationships are extremely intimate, she has a closer and more long-lasting relationship to her music and, by extension, to the elements of the world around her. For her, the rumblings of life are interpreted as a kind of music to her ears so that the sound of the sea roar is “basso profondo” and the engines of a ship beat “lentissimo.” In a more low-key sense, this sort of “music of the environment” reminds me so strongly of the Anna Smaill’s inventive novel “The Chimes.” However, this is a novel driven more by voice and its Lena’s personality that steers it. Inspired to reflect on her past by an ardent documentary film maker who persistently calls on her, Lena recounts the story of her life moving back and forth in time. For her “Time is all over the place, like a madwoman’s breakfast.” Like all great storytellers, all I wanted to do was pull up a chair and ardently listen for as long as she wanted to talk. This is Tracy Farr’s debut novel and it’s impressive that she’s created such an assured and compellingly voiced narrator who feels fully realized. “The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt” is an absolute pleasure to read.

Human Acts by Han Kang (Translated by Deborah Smith)

There is a disturbing thing which can occur when we’re faced with death on such a large scale as that which occurs in war or disasters. A group of individuals can be reduced to a number. Even when faced with piles of bodies we can start to think of them as things rather than people because the horror of what we’re seeing is too terrifying to deal with. This certainly happened to me a couple of years ago when I was watching the film ‘Night Will Fall’ about the process of creating a documentary with footage taken by Allied Forces inside German concentration camps. It’s a reality almost too nightmarish for the mind to deal with, but of course you can’t turn away from victims who’ve been rendered voiceless. “Human Acts” begins with such a startling confrontation and gradually reinstates the human face of those who’ve been lost as well as testifying to the struggle of those who survive. It starts with the immediate aftermath of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising in South Korea where hundreds of demonstrators protesting the military dictatorship were killed and beaten by government troops. This novel traces the survivors of this conflict using a radical style of writing to weave in and out of their perspectives, that of the dead and the reader her/himself who becomes inextricably drawn into the reality of their situation.

Adolescent school children work to prepare and organize bodies to be identified by their loved ones and readied for a funeral ceremony. A boy looks for one body in particular – his friend who was killed while by his side in the skirmish. When asked if he feels any fear working with so many corpses he replies: “'The soldiers are the scary ones… What's frightening about the dead?'” The consciousness of his dead friend persists in the narrative. Through it, he shifts the reader’s focus and the story’s point of view so we see the scenes from both the deceased and the characters still living in fear of the militia. It’s remarked at one point that “Being left as the sole survivor would have been the most frightening thing.” The novel follows the price of survival over many years until close to the present day. It includes stories of different aspects of the conflict and the society through the perspectives of a variety of characters including an editor dealing with state censorship, a prisoner, a factory girl and a grieving mother who demands official acknowledgement for the loss of her son. 

Han Kang's writing style changes throughout different sections of the book. At some points she invokes an interior voice or uses the confrontational second person "you" which could be directed at the reader or a specific character. Other times the narrative has a more documentary feel switching back and forth from the present to the past. Each shift in her method of telling better reflects these very different individuals’ stories which involve some recurring characters. It was interesting starting this new novel “Human Acts” having so recently read Kang’s book “The Vegetarian.” Whereas this earlier book explored a woman’s inwardly blossoming but outwardly deteriorating life through the perspective of three people close to her, “Human Acts” is simultaneously a novel with a broader political perspective and also more intensely personal to the author herself. It’s significant that the afterward is in the author’s own unmediated voice discussing the significance of the Gwangju Uprising on her family and how she approached this story. This is a novel about the legacy created by those members of the population living under a military regime who were willing to bravely stand up to it. Kang imaginatively takes readers into the reality of these victims’ lives and provokes serious questions about individual responsibility. She states: “Conscience, the most terrifying thing in the world.” Their actions and personal sacrifice made a statement which has shaped the country’s history. It’s also about the actions taken by the survivors of this conflict to memorialize those who lost their lives and are continuing their fight for human independence. “Human Acts” is a novel filled with significant insight.

Dinosaurs on Other Planets by Danielle McLaughlin

It's not till the last part of this debut short story collection by author Danielle McLaughlin that you reach the title story. If you've read all the stories in order (as I did) then you'll already have a sense of the title's more complex meaning. It’s a phrase taken from a conversation in one story where a child speculates that if dinosaurs were made extinct after a meteor hit Earth there could still be dinosaurs on other planets. However, a more layered understanding of how this image’s meaning connects with human relationships comes from the interactions of the characters throughout all of the stories. They convey a sensation that, even if we are emotionally destroyed in our own circumscribed existence, other lives still carry on independently. There is a feeling running through many of these varied and skilfully-written tales that the existence of others happens at a far remove from you and your own internal reality. Even if we live in close proximity to each other and especially if we're in a relationship with someone, the bulk of these other lives remains distinct and private. McLaughlin subtly handles this by creating deeply immersive and compelling stories which show a keen sense of how people relate to each other.

These stories centre on a broad spectrum of people from a university girl to a working class young man to a philandering husband to a grandmother. I admire how the author represents many different classes of Irish society. There is a story about a poor father and daughter who run a mink farm who take extreme actions to secure feed for their livestock. Another story directly references the Irish property bubble where a working mother loses faith in her husband who is searching for a job and she wanders through her decimated community which resembles a kind of post-apocalyptic landscape. The story ‘A Different Country’ shows the divide in understanding between urban dwellers and rural fishermen who take action against seals who meddle with their fishing nets. In ‘All About Alice’ a 45 year old woman feels bound to still live with and care for her father so on the rare occasions he is away she explores her hidden lascivious side. Together these stories form a complex portrait of society made up of different social groups all functioning in relative independence from each other.

McLaughlin also shows a complex understanding of gender. The first story 'The Art of Foot-Binding' features a daughter who takes a class project about an antiquated sexist practice to heart using it as a form of self harm because of her own insecurities about her weight. At the same time, her mother Janice emotionally binds herself in another way desperately trying to keep up appearances for her faltering relationship. Interspersed with Janice’s account are instructions about foot-binding coated in a poetic language which perversely emphasizes the barbarity of the practice. The juxtaposition of these instructions with the mother’s story creates a powerful new understanding about the way women have harmed themselves and each other throughout time because of social and misogynistic expectations that they live under.

Lily mistakenly identifies flowers by the side of her train as oleanders just as she mis-identifies the meaning of someone's friendly gesture

Other stories present very different kinds of challenges that women face. In 'Not Oleanders' a woman named Lily unexpectedly travels abroad in Italy when her companion cancels on her. On the train she meets a younger woman and believes that there is romantic potential between them. Interestingly, this is the first piece of fiction I’ve read that highlights a person’s clavicles as a part of the body to be desired! Because of some wrongfooted signals, there is a tragic misunderstanding. McLaughlin writes a beautiful line about the experience of humiliation: “The humiliation of earlier had faded a little. It would return, of course, as humiliations always did, it would wait for her in the long grass of memory.” I love how this captures the way in which our instances of shame recur in our minds over and over throughout our lives. The character of Aileen in ‘Silhouette’ lives in London but nervously returns to visit her mother in Ireland to tell her she’s pregnant. However, her aged and ailing mother has very traditional narrow values and Aileen is unwed and having an affair with a married man. A girl going to university in 'The Smell of Dead Flowers' acts somewhat as an agent of chaos in a household where she submits to a lodger's sexual advances and distracts her relative from the care of her mentally disabled daughter.

The author writes just as compellingly about struggles particular to men. In 'Those That I Fight I Do Not Hate' a married man attends a children’s party for the child of his former lover creating a tense environment for her and her husband. His intentions feel unknown even to himself. The man at the centre of 'Along the Heron-Studded River' has a wife with mental health issues who cares for their young child while he’s at work. There is a sense that care and attention for her must be handled delicately or there could be disastrous results. This is represented in a powerful image of him driving across icy pockets of water in wintertime “shattering membranes of ice stretched across the puddles.” In 'Night of the Silver Fox' a young man named Gerard finds his burgeoning feelings of romance squashed in the face of hard world economic realities. Throughout all of these diverse stories it’s compelling the way McLaughlin presents such varied portraits of the way gender roles can play into the way we relate to each other.

I first heard about this book when I attended an event chaired by Thomas Morris at the Southbank Centre in London towards the end of last year featuring authors Colin Barrett, Claire-Louise Bennett and Kevin Barry – all part of the so-called Irish New Wave. Barrett mentioned that this is one of the strongest books he’s read recently which made me really intrigued since I admired his debut story collection so much. I found each story in “Dinosaurs on Other Planets” captivating in its own way. McLaughlin has a talent for creating tension in her scenes of everyday reality so that every detail reflects deeper stories of hidden affairs, desperation, financial insecurity or love that has gone sour. I felt compelled to go back to the beginning of some stories after I finished them and reread them now that I had a fuller understanding of the characters. This is the mark of great fiction as these stories have real depth which isn’t immediately apparent. They are also so entertaining and beautifully-written that they made me want to spend more time with them. As this is only a debut collection, I think Danielle McLaughlin demonstrates tremendous skill and confidence in her writing. This is definitely a book to be savoured.

A Snow Garden by Rachel Joyce

I do like the holidays as much as most people – time off from work and an excuse to indulge – what's not to like? But I've never felt compelled to read something on theme whether that be something spooky around Halloween or jolly around Christmas. The only exceptions have been David Sedaris' fantastically irreverent “Santaland Diaries” or, as they are also known, “Holidays on Ice.” If I'm feeling in a particularly sentimental mood there is also Truman Capote's deeply-moving story 'A Christmas Memory.' So I had no plan to seek out holiday reading this year, but then I came upon Rachel Joyce's new book of short stories “A Snow Garden.” I love the understated beauty and quiet wisdom of her writing, especially in her novel “The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy.” That same power is carried through into these short stories which are all focused around the Christmas season, but these aren't syrupy tales of holiday cheer. Many of these stories focus on people on the margins like an irascible woman who feels isolated, a father with a history of mental illness trying to make things right with his sons, an older couple whose marriage is splintering apart or a girl's first tentative steps towards becoming social by attending a dance. These stories are very much about redemption and hope, but in a realistic and hard-won sense that won't leave you with a toothache.

Most of the stories are loosely connected to each other or with Joyce's past books. Mention of a flight delay in one story is carried through into another story focused on people stuck at an airport. An unused winter-themed film set for a pop star's holiday special becomes the focal point in another story where a father is trying to rekindle a connection with his sons. I greatly enjoy short story collections which are lightly related to each other because it gives a more fully rounded sense of a fictional world and gives little pleasure triggers when I'm able to join things up. Connections with Joyce's past books are gently done so I don't think a reader will feel left out by not recognizing characters which they've met before. It simply functions like an added bonus for a Rachel Joyce fan who is in the know. One enduring thing which recurs throughout this book is an advert with an image of a girl in a red coat who is in a snowy winter scene. This feels so effective because it seems so true to life: a sentimental image created for commercial purposes which nonetheless effects the mood of the characters who continuously encounter it.

Although these stories are firmly grounded in reality, I like how sometimes Joyce's writing starts stretching the seams. So, when in her touching story 'A Marriage Manual' the couple who have been together their whole lives reach a near breaking point when collaborating on a bicycle's construction, the very construction of the garage around them begins floundering and breaking apart. The only point where I don't feel this works is in her story 'Christmas Day at the Airport' which is a modern-day retelling of the nativity story replete with a lesbian who gives birth, women who bear fragrant gifts from Duty Free and a donkey being held in the animal redemption centre. The concept of this story took over making it feel too manufactured. However, I found every other story in this book to be genuinely moving.

Rachel Joyce has a talent for creating really vivid and intensely-felt characters like a difficult woman named Binny in 'A Faraway Smell of Lemon' and a vibrant rebellious adolescent girl named Patty Driscoll in 'The Boxing Day Ball'. Each line of dialogue builds their personalities to make them feel immediate and real. She doesn't shrink from showing the awkward pauses or repetition of speech which hint at the underlying emotions of her characters. In their normal exchanges and the mundane detail, Joyce reveals hints of profundity in the everyday. In this way she remind me very much of Anne Tyler's fiction. So I really enjoyed reading this book over the Christmas season. Rachel Joyce has another novel forthcoming this year and I'm greatly looking forward to it.

The Long Gaze Back edited by Sinéad Gleeson

What a thrill that a new anthology has been published that is entirely dedicated to Irish women writers! Over the past two years I've become particularly enthralled by Irish writing and much of it has been written by women such as Anne Enright, Mary Costello, Edna O'Brien, Eimear McBride, Audrey Magee, Sara Baume, Belinda McKeon and Liz Nugent (some of these authors are included in this anthology). While I've also read many fantastic books written by Irish men it's sadly unsurprising that looking over many anthologies of short stories from Ireland (and around the world) that the authors included are “heavily weighted towards male writers” - as editor Sinéad Gleeson notes in her introduction. “The Long Gaze Back” is a necessary correction giving a platform to the huge diversity of writing by Irish women over time. Even if the literary cannon hasn't always included them and some of these authors' books have gone out of print, this anthology proves that these voices have always been there.

As the title suggests, it's an anthology focused on looking back at a rich and varied literary history giving a sampling of stories that encompass a range of themes and writing styles. The first writer included was born in 1786 and the last story is by a writer born in 1986. This offers a fascinating oversight to how the tone and subject matter of fiction has changed over two centuries. Although the language and themes have evolved radically over this time, the emphatic sense each story gives that the author has something important to say has not.

There are also surprising parallels that can be drawn. For instance, a parable by Maria Edgeworth written in the early 1800s about the way appearances can be deceiving when impulsively buying something is echoed in contemporary writer Belinda McKeon's sentiment about online behaviour and internet purchases: “There is always, sunk into those pages, the feeling that an ordered, layered, perfectly furnished life is within reach; that the clicks will bring into being a settling experience, a fitting of everything needed and everything already, awkwardly in possession into their rightful slots.” Another story by Mary Lavin shows how a widowed woman maintains her independence fending off the advances of a man who comes calling while Eimear Ryan tells a story of a widow who deals with her grief by actively seeking men out. The farcical and hilarious story of a man's extended train journey with a salmon by writing-team cousins Somerville and Ross is echoed in Lisa McInerney's tragicomic and explicit tale of a man's drug-fuelled night out. The intense feeling for the loss of an infant child in Maeve Brennan's brilliant story is given a different slant in Lucy Caldwell's beautifully-descriptive and cleverly-structured story of the tense and precarious early days in the life of a newborn. Viewing this wide range of short stories as a group gives a special insight into how similar ideas can be approached from different ways that are more meaningful for the time in which they are written.

Some of the stories deliver suspense and tremendously climactic scenes such as a tale by Elizabeth Bowen about the return of an old lover or Nuala Ní Chonchúir's story of sisterhood between women at odds with each other in a time of great need. Other stories focus on quiet moments of reflection as in Siobhán Mannion's story of a woman stealing privacy in a morning swim or Evelyn Conlon's story of a sister she believes to be lost in Australia. Some of this fiction such as the urgent and impactful 'Beneath the Taps: A Testimonial' by Anakana Schofield shows a tremendously inventive style of writing that breaks boundaries for how a story can be related. There are fantastic moments of quiet transgression in stories by Mary Costello about a woman who steals her neighbour's dog that is being abused and Kate O'Brien about a woman touring Italy who receives an emphatic and spontaneous proposition for an alternative life from a stranger. Stories by Roisín O'Donnell and E.M. Reapy hint at the process of change in Ireland, the coming and going from other countires creating national and racial diversity in the country's culture. And this wouldn't be a proper Irish book without a good deal of mulling over death such as the story by Eilis Ni Dhuibhne where a woman tends a grave or Bernie McGill's tale of how a family emotionally deals with a funeral or Niamh Boyce who invokes a voice from beyond.

I really enjoyed taking my time reading this entire anthology over a long period of time and I'd suggest you do the same. These are stories to be savoured and enjoyed. They invite you to seek out more work by these talented authors as each story is proceeded by a biographical brief that lists the authors' other publications. And I do now feel compelled to read much more by these writers. It's somehow reassuring that the voices in stories by authors I've read before like Eimear McBride and Anne Enright are most assuredly from those writers, but their technique and subject range prove to be dramatically different in this new work. Other stories by authors I haven't read before like Maeve Brennan and Christine Dwyer Hickey hit me like a slap making me wonder why I've never encountered their writing before. This is an anthology with many different points that you can spring off from, but it's also an important book with tremendous scope to be savoured by itself.

My Top 10 Books of 2015

This has been a year of great personal change for me. More than ever, I'm aware of how books work like a conversation informing our lives and that it's important to talk back. (This blog is me talking back.) My reading this year increased somewhat largely because I joined in on a shadow jury for the Baileys Prize and as a judge for this year’s Green Carnation Prize. I read 96 books in total, but this doesn’t count the dozens of books I started but put aside after fifty or even two hundred pages. I’ve become more cutthroat because the truth is there isn’t enough time to keep reading a book that’s not doing it for you. You might not connect with it only because of where you are in your life, but I think it’s best to move onto something you feel passionately engaged with rather than slogging through something you feel you should read. There are rare examples like “The Country of Ice Cream Star” which took me longer to read than any other book this year and which I found incredibly difficult. Ultimately it was rewarding and I’m glad I stuck with it till the end, but such cases are rare.

There are dozens of really superb books I’ve read this year. I’m always passionate about reading short stories and the books I’ve read by Donal Ryan, Tom Barbash, Ali Smith, Mahesh Rao, Stuart Evers and Thomas Morris all contain stories which have really stuck with me. Because the Green Carnation Prize is open to books in all genres, I also read more memoirs, young adult novels, poetry and nonfiction than I usually do. I hope to continue reading more widely as some of these books like Erwin Mortier’s profound/heart-wrenching memoir and Mark Vonhoenacker’s meditation on flying have been truly fantastic.

Book podcasts have also been a welcome new presence for me this year. I’ve always avidly listened to The Readers, hosted by two of my favourite book bloggers. But I’ve also started regularly listening to Sinéad Gleeson’s The Book Show and Castaway’s Bookish, hosted by the owners of two Irish bookshops. These two definitely have struck a chord with me because I’ve been reading so much Irish fiction. The country does seem to be going through something of a renaissance producing a profuse amount of writing of sterling quality. This has been debated about in the media such as this Irish Times article about a Guardian article which highlighted the “new Irish literary boom.” Although, to my mind, the best Irish book of the year is Mrs Engels which seems strangely missing from all these lists.
If you have favourite book podcasts please do comment and let me know about them as I enjoy finding more.

Finally, here are my top ten books of the year which have all made such a strong impact on me and left me thinking about them long after finishing the last page. Click on each title's name to read my full thoughts about these books.

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
It’s funny looking back on this post I made last year about books I wanted to read and hadn’t yet got to (including this one). At that point, Marlon James’ most recent novel had received praise from critics, but hadn’t made many sales. I didn’t get to reading it until this summer as part of judging the Green Carnation Prize. It went on to win as well as taking that obscure award called the Booker. What a difference a year can make in the life of a book!

The Green Road by Anne Enright
I felt slightly suspicious starting this novel because I was worried it wouldn’t do anything new, but Enright proves again with this novel that she's an enormously creative writer. She creates a fresh structure for this book and takes her characters into territories unlike any of her other tremendous novels. It all works to present a complex and entirely new kind of portrait of a family.

Mrs Engels by Gavin McCrea
Lizzie is headstrong and tough, but she possesses rare passion which bleeds through every page of this beautiful novel. It pierced my heart and stayed with me like nothing else I’ve read this year. Sometimes it's like I can still feel her near me with all her earnest judgement, wisdom, humour and tender feeling. I'm deeply saddened she isn't a part of my life any more.

Lila by Marilynne Robinson
I wasn’t expecting to like this novel much since I’d only felt a mild response to Robinson’s writing in the past. To my delight, it gripped me and held me all the way through. Lila is a girl who came from nothing but through the generosity of a scant few people and her own determination she makes a life for herself and finds a rare kind of love. This is writing which is profoundly moving and it’s a story which completely captured my imagination.

Almost Famous Women by Megan Mayhew Bergman
History books are strewn with footnotes about fascinating women like Lizzie Burns in "Mrs Engels" who probably never became more famous because of the simple fact that they were women or from a lower class. Bergman honours a select and fascinating few to create mesmerizing short stories with immense emotional depth. The points of view they pose allow us to re-enter history and question what we find there.

Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff
I was introduced to Groff’s writing last year when I read her impactful story in the Best American Short Stories 2014. What a thrill it was to discover that her compressed and strong style of writing can also work in such a long novel. This book was an absolute pleasure to read giving such a unique perspective on relationships and the secrets we keep from those closest to us.

The Lost Landscape by Joyce Carol Oates
It’s so rare for Oates to reflect on her own life in her writing. It’s unsurprising that she approaches the subject of childhood and her formative years in a deeply questioning and philosophical manner. In this creative and deeply-personal book she reflectively looks at her own life and her life as a writer/reader to produce a profoundly surprising point of view about the nature of identity.

The Long Gaze Back edited by Sinéad Gleeson
Many anthologies of short stories are a patchwork of good and fair stories, but few contain great after great like this revelatory volume of Irish women writers. Several stories are by writers whose books I've read and admired over the past couple of years such as Anne Enright, Mary Costello, Eimear McBride and Belinda McKeon. Other writers like Kate O'Brien, Maeve Brennan, Molly McCloskey and Anakana Schofield are new to me. There are stories of high drama and stories of subtle power, but all utilise language to capture exactly what it is they need to say. In addition to the fascinating diversity of styles and subject matters covered in this entertaining and lovingly-assembled anthology this book serves as a fantastic jumping off point for reading more of these talented writers' work which I'm now eager to track down. Each story is prefaced by compelling short bios for each writer which serve as helpful prompts for discovering more. This is a book to always keep by your bedside. 

Sophie and the Sybil by Patricia Duncker
It’s rare that I find a book where I love every minute of the reading experience. This novel which functions as both a love letter and critique of George Eliot is tremendously fun, immensely clever and makes a truly romantic story. It takes a lot of bravado for an author to insert herself into a narrative, but Duncker does so with fantastic results.

Physical by Andrew McMillan
Poetry can be such an intimidating form of writing to engage with because much of it can feel opaque. McMillan’s extraordinary writing spoke directly to me. I’ve found myself going back to several poems in this book again and again. I’ve also recommended this book to a huge amount of people because I think these revelatory poems will connect with many.

Have you read any of these or are you now curious to give them a try? I've enjoyed reading through many end of year book lists so please comment to let me know your own favourites. 

My Top 10 New Films of 2015

I saw 78 new films at the cinema this year. There were some great adaptations of books including ‘Brooklyn’ which reminded me what an extraordinary novel this is and ‘Macbeth’ which gives a new perspective on and interpretation of the play. Some of the most entertaining films this year were the foreign episodic film ‘Wild Tales’, the successful remake of ‘Mad Max’, Pixar’s brainy animation ‘Inside Out’, the successful return of the Star Wars epic ‘The Force Awakens’, heartfelt comic drama 'Grandma' and the wild revenge-tale ‘Tangerine.’ But here are ten fantastic films which were a pleasure to watch, changed my perception of things and left the most lasting impression upon me.

Selma
This is one of the first films I saw this year as I got to see a preview. I don’t often cry in films but this emotionally floored me. Not because it’s a new story. Although there were some details that were new to me, at school in America I was taught a lot about the Civil Rights movement. What this film does so well is take the viewer into the experience of the protesters. It makes it feel immediate and real.

Girlhood
It seemed like an irresistible provocation to create a film called ‘Girlhood’ after the success of the critically-acclaimed ‘Boyhood.’ However, this film isn’t just an exercise to explore a girl’s coming of age. It sensitively acknowledges the difficult choices a young black girl from a lower class background faces in modern France. The story opens several paths for her to take in life and her decisions are ambiguous. Newcomer Karidja Toure gives one of the best performances of the year.

Tab Hunter Confidential
This is a documentary that gives a comprehensive history of the life of 1950s matinee idol Tab Hunter. He lived the American dream being transformed from a country boy into one of the country’s most desired pin-ups. He had to hide his sexuality for many years and faced difficult choices when the starring roles dried up. This is a story which is in some ways the male equivalent of the life of Marilyn Monroe as sensitively written about in Joyce Carol Oates’ masterpiece “Blonde.”

The Look of Silence
Another documentary and a sequel to the devastating film ‘The Act of Killing’ which explores the terrifying Indonesian genocide in the years 1965-66. I felt this film was more focused in a way as it concentrated upon one family and a particular man who works as an eye doctor and lost his brother in the killings. He travels around the country interviewing men involved in the killings while testing their eyes. He literally and metaphorically tries to make them see reality more clearly. It’s amazing and it’s my top film of the year.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl
The style of this coming of age film set in 1970s San Francisco faithfully mimics Phoebe Gloeckner’s graphic novel. It’s a story of imaginative beauty and goes into some dark, twisted areas of sexuality both for the girl and her wayward mother – a performance that allowed Kristen Wiig to take on an unusually dramatic role. I love that the film also invokes the voice of comics artist Aline Kominsky giving a touching portrayal of a writer’s apprenticeship.

Carol
Adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s novel which she originally published under a pseudonym, ‘Carol’ allows extraordinary director Todd Haynes to re-enter the 1950s period which he evoked so beautifully in ‘Far from Heaven.’ This is another “forbidden love story” but one done so powerfully and isn’t afraid to show the unlikeable aspects of its protagonists while still making you care deeply about the difficulty of their dilemma.

45 Years
It’s not often that issues of sex and emotional connection between couples who have had successful long term relationships are portrayed in films. ‘Hope Springs’ is the only other film that comes to mind. A couple played by Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay are nearing their 45th wedding anniversary and find their comfortable routine existence disrupted by a secret that’s uncovered and introduces an element of doubt. This is a subtle and powerful film directed by Andrew Haigh who seems to me to be one of the most exciting directors around. There's nothing visually daring about his dramas - just solid stories that get to the heart of relationships.

Son of Saul
I was lucky enough to see this at the London Film Festival. You may dread the idea of going to yet another fictional representation of a WWII concentration camp, yet this film is such a stylistically-daring and emotionally-powerful story it had me gripped from beginning to end. A Hungarian-Jewish prisoner named Saul works in the prison burying the dead. The camera’s focus remains on actor Géza Röhrig the entire time while unspeakable horrors occur in the background around him and he embarks on a personal mission of faith. It’s amazing.

Chevalier
Another film I saw at the London Film Festival, this is a humorous tale of a yacht holiday between several male friends that nonetheless sensitively and hilariously explores the subtleties of male companionship. I believe it also shows how Greek female director Athina Rachel Tsangari is another one of the most exciting directors around. I wrote more about this film here.

The Lobster
This is absolutely the most daring and absurd film I saw this year. Single people are forced to remain in a resort to find a partner in a certain amount of time or else they will be transformed into an animal of their choosing. Though comic and strange, it says something so striking and meaningful about the pressures society places upon people to conform to either have a relationship or remain single. Plus Olivia Colman is always an absolute joy to watch. I absolutely loved this film.

What did you like watching in the cinema this year? 

The Vegetarian by Han Kang (translated by Deborah Smith)

I've been wanting to read this novel since it was published earlier this year. It's interesting getting to it now so soon after reading "Fates and Furies" because both novels are concerned with the way women's points of view are suppressed in narratives, but they have very different approaches. In "The Vegetarian" the novel begins with a conventional man's perspective complaining how his unremarkable wife Yeong-hye suddenly became a vegetarian, thus passively disrupting their blandly ordered existence. His cruelly reductive opinions about his wife suggest that she is especially unspecial: “She really had been the most ordinary woman in the world” but his perspective is interspersed with short intense italicised passages revealing this wife's inner monologue. Like a modern day Bartleby, by resisting to observe convention and quietly refusing to do what's expected of her, the wife's family become incensed and her life completely changes. What follows is a novel of strange beauty as a woman's strong inner-life is gradually revealed and the constrictive society around her is forced to acknowledge the power of her independent perspective.

An artist is inspired by the radical and colourful artist Yayoi Kusama to paint nude bodies with flowers. 

In some ways this is a surreal story where a woman believes that she's gradually transforming into a plant. The reasons for this transformation are very different from the narrator in Ali Smith's story 'The beholder' in “Public Library” who experiences a real blossoming of branches and flowers out of her/his body. At the same time “The Vegetarian” is a brutally realistic tale about the long-term effects of child abuse and the diminishment of women in society. Her transition begins in earnest when in the second section her sister's artist husband creates a video installation centred on painting flowers on Yeong-hye's naked body. This is a project bourne out of his sexual obsession and was in part inspired by the artist Yayoi Kusama who colourfully painted her subjects bodies and let them interact with each other. The brother-in-law's project is more sinister as his secret desire to possess and have sex with Yeong-hye builds to a terrifying scene.

The novel's focus eventually shifts to her sister In-hye's perspective and concerns Yeong-hye's being sectioned after her total mental breakdown. Here the story becomes much more intimate and confessional. The spectre of an abusive father looms large so that Yeong-hye's transition from submissive wife to outright rebellion seems entirely logical. Normality is inverted because beneath the veneer of civilization there is a world of hidden pain. So it feels that “sometimes it's the tranquil streets filled with so-called 'normal' people that end up seeming strange.” I admired how the novel gradually builds a complex portrait of a woman's inner life created entirely from the points of view of the people around her. The reader is given hints and suggestions of a radically different form of consciousness that wants to rapidly evolve to a more organic existence, yet she's suppressed by the social world that uses limited terms to define her life. “The Vegetarian” is a novel of rebellion, hope and rare passion.

Green Glowing Skull by Gavin Corbett

Who are you? Are you the physical body you inhabit, the family/country you were born into or the person that you believe yourself to be? Trapped as you are in your own consciousness the boundaries between these states of being flow effortlessly from moment to moment. In other words “One day you’re yourself, the next you’re not quite.”  Traditional narratives construct stories that lead you through a character’s journey that often hint at the tensions between that character’s internal and external reality. Gavin Corbett breaks all those walls down in his novel “Green Glowing Skull” so the separate containers of identity all slosh into one riotous head fuck. It’s absolute chaos, but it’s also true.

I know that all sounds abstract, but it’s what I think the novel is really about. I’ll try to give an approximate summary of the story. An Irish man named Rickard Velily moves to New York City where he meets two older long-time Irish immigrants named Denny and Clive. The later was actually born as a woman named Jean Dotsy. There is a belief about Ireland that “The country’s gone to ruin and there’s no going back. The rot has set right in deep now.” Aidan Brown (nicknamed “Quicklime”) is a man who works for a charity seeking to convince “valued” Irish expats to return to their native land. He tries to target Clive who persistently resists his entreaties. Rickard, Denny and Clive form a tenor group singing folk songs that remind Irish expatriates of their homeland. Many of these expats meet in the city’s Cha Bum Kun clubhouse which supports Irish men freshly arrived in the city who are in need of housing. The historic clubhouse might be in its final days with a billion dollar offer on the table for the property which could give these men personal freedom, but also sever the ties to their native country. The story also contains wild shih tsu who prowl the city’s sewers like vermin, exploding heads and a man that turns himself into a bowling ball.

The overriding preoccupation of this entertaining and wild novel is national identity. In many ways it’s a familiar tale. Someone from Ireland moves to New York City. It’s a story that’s been told in many forms – even in recent great novels like “Brooklyn,” “Academy Street” and “We Are Not Ourselves.” Corbett resists traditional forms of narrative because he doesn’t want his protagonist to “feel like a tragic cabbage-scented character in a Irish rural drama.” Rather, the three main characters pursue their singing which conjures Ireland as a place more powerfully as a state of mind than a physical location. It’s stated that “It was a dream Ireland, yes, they both admitted, finally and without any provocation; but it was an Ireland that they once had been prepared to fight and die for to make real, just like those Young Irelanders.” Equally, the New York City that these immigrants come to is also a state of mind, something Rickard wanted to enter into after seeing it portrayed in his favourite film. The trouble is that the reality of either place doesn’t align with how people imagine it to be. People cast about desperately and without a home to call their country. They lose their heads.

Klein Blue IKB_191

There is also a sense in this novel that technology is changing our consciousness, the way we communicate and even the physical world. There is a coding underlying reality. Back in Ireland, Rickard worked for a company which harvested redundant text from the internet. “The world of information, he was told, was not just a paperless one but a wireless one now too. The medium was the air – even matter – itself; its bore limitless. Moving in three dimensions these days was to move through a fourth dimension, and for it to move through him.” There is a curious sense of synaesthesia which occurs when someone sees a string of nonsense lettering, numbers and symbols where that can instantly translate within the mind into a colour. Corbett also has a talent for combining humour and social observation with playfully-expressed nonsense. A colleague of Rickard’s enthusiastically decrees that “we stand on the threshold of a new conceptual framework for non-augmented non-experiential eventfulness.” This could be the nonsense speak of a corporate ethos, but here it’s revealed to be the gibberish it really is.

I have a particular fondness for absurdity in literature and I loved this novel. Some of my favourite books are Eugene Ionesco’s only novel “The Hermit” and Samuel Beckett’s novels which twist identity and time so that the physical world becomes wildly distorted and, consequently, a more accurate representation of the loose foundations of the stripped-down consciousness. Corbett’s writing unapologetically takes similar liberties disregarding what is realistic for what feels right. However, I often found in this novel that just when I felt I was being taken to the brink where I couldn’t comprehend what was happening at all, Corbett reeled me back in with absolutely tender and honest scenes. For instance, there is a section of dialogue between Denny and his wife where he says: “Do you know what is great about you? I can tell you things that I don’t tell myself.” This is such a romantic and true way of expressing how we reveal ourselves to those we love when we can’t even understand who we are, yet it doesn’t deviate from Corbett’s absurdist style.

“Green Glowing Skull” is a wholly-original, cleverly-filthy and entertaining novel that shifts your perspective of reality.

Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

A potential danger when reading novels is that we can become a passive audience. The narrative should be designed to lead us down the path of a story without giving all the answers. If you’re not questioning what’s being told or asking what’s missing from the tale, reading ceases to be a participatory experience. Too often in literature it’s the wives who are left by the wayside. It’s observed in this novel that “Women in narratives were always defined by their relations.” They become a prop within the narrative or part of the background to flesh out the meatier story of the husband. The atrocious thing about this isn’t just that the writer has failed to honour the psychological reality of the female characters, but that readers don’t always ask what the wives’ perspectives might be. Instead we can become complacent, receive what the author tells us about the heroic life of the man and wonder nothing more about their faithful wives. In “Fates and Furies” Lauren Groff gives us such a story and skewers it with an iron spear. She challenges the expectations of the reader and creates an invigoratingly new kind of novel about how the participants in a marriage are first and foremost individuals.

A man named Lancelot or “Lotto” struggles to succeed in life, but he's driven by an overwhelming conviction that he was destined for something great. Although he comes from a privileged background, Lotto experiences a difficult childhood. Groff has a particular talent for summing up great swaths of emotion with terse prose. She states: “The world was precarious, Lotto had learned. People could be subtracted from it with swift bad math.” He escapes from his troubled family life with teenage rebellion and a keen drive for sexual conquest – up until he meets Mathilde. Their spontaneous marriage provides a bedrock upon which he can build a career and realize his full potential.

Although Mathilde is always present in the narrative she hovers in the background and never gets a voice. But, with the second half of the novel, her story comes to the forefront and her life is (of course) much more complex than Lotto assumed it was. Both Lotto and Mathilde keep many secrets from each other. It's noted that “Marriage is made of lies. Kindly ones, mostly. Omissions.” Mostly this isn't done out of malice; overall their marriage is a successful and happy one. It's unusual to read about a couple who are married for so many years yet never lose their vigorous physical connection or break apart because of an affair. As a team they are well suited as Lotto harbours grand ambitions which Mathilde can support him in realizing. In turn, Lotto gives her stability and affection: things which she sorely lacked in her unusual and emotionally-deprived childhood. Even so, their long-term relationship isn't a happily ever after story. Chance plays a role in the highs and lows of their years together. Groff writes “There is no absolute anything. The gods love to fuck with us.”

Lauren Groff in conversation at Politics and Prose bookstore

The writing in this novel is so sharp and clever. I loved the astute observations Groff makes especially about the changes and transformations we make throughout our lives. When the very sociable couple find their circle of friends being whittled down over the years it's stated that “The ones who remained were heart wood, marrow.” This is such a beautiful way of summarizing how people that stay closest to us throughout our lives remain so because they are the people who feel vital. She's equally good at making observations about how the body changes over time. When Lotto looks down at himself one day in his middle age “He poked at the belly the size of a six-month-old baby glued to his midsection.” It's a comical way of describing how our bodies are things we inhabit our whole lives, but there is a curious distance between the way we feel we are and the way we physically appear in reality. Groff's wry humour amidst making pointed and often surprising observations makes this novel such a pleasure to read. She can take something as serious and personal as the loss of a dear loved one and comment upon the irrational behaviour that follows “What was grief but an extended tantrum to be salved by sex and candy?” The characters are handled sympathetically and their struggles feel so personal, but there is always a healthy level of objective distance taken.

There is a lot in this novel about the nature of storytelling itself. The characters are cast in dramas which subtly mimic mythic tales. Yet it feels so invigorating, new and relevant to our time period. There are tropes that are familiar, but “This isn’t Oliver Twist.” Long periods of Lotto's life are conveyed through the plays he writes. Mathilde's narrative is much more fragmented and skips around wildly between periods of her life – as is fitting for her mental state at the time we join her story. Groff could be speaking about her own impatience with traditional narratives when she writes in this novel “She was so tired of the old ways of telling stories, all those too-worn narrative paths, the familiar plot thickets, the fat social novels. She needed something messier, something sharper, something like a bomb going off.” For it's gripping richly-plotted drama and its deep understanding of the complexity of identity, “Fates and Furies” feels explosive.

High Dive by Jonathan Lee

Sometimes part of the pleasure of reading new fiction is coming to it with no preconceived notions or expectations. In the case of “High Dive” I hadn't even read a description of the plot despite it being published at the end of October. It was a book that was sent to me and I decided to plunge in without knowing anything about it. The novel begins with an incredibly chilling scene of a young man named Dan undergoing an initiation for joining the IRA in 1978. Then the story shifts to 1984 with a teenage girl named Freya and her father Philip or “Moose” who is the assistant general manager of The Grand Hotel in Brighton. I felt instantly gripped as I realized I had entered a story leading up to the infamous IRA bombing of the Conservative Party conference. I knew the incident came close to taking Margaret Thatcher's life, but beyond that I had little knowledge or understanding about the history of this attack other than it was a significant incident amidst The Troubles. Jonathan Lee fictionally creates characters surrounding the event including the perpetrator of the bombing who went under the alias Roy Walsh to sympathetically show both sides' stories and the emotional tension and political conflict leading to this horrendous bombing.

Since this is entirely a fictional story set within a historical event, even readers who are familiar with the people involved with the bombing in October 1984 won't know the fates of Lee's primary characters. There is a chilling atmosphere surrounding the otherwise normal and emotionally-engaging story of single father Philip, a one-time Olympic hopeful high diver, who plans to be promoted to full manager of the hotel and his daughter Freya who is struggling to realize who she is and what she wants in life. The father-daughter relationship is particularly poignant when Philip becomes ill and Freya finds herself getting annoyed by his illness. She is conscious that such a reaction is selfish, yet she can’t prevent herself from feeling it and acting out because of it.

On 12 October 1984, the IRA carried out the most audacious terrorist attack in its history. Programme about the Brighting bombing.

Alongside this, Lee writes with great empathy about Irish Dan whose father was killed in a skirmish with police when he was an adolescent and who wants to make a radical change to end British rule in Ireland. He hides his activities from his mother and this secret plays out unspoken between them in a dramatic way. His charismatic and terrifying mentor Dawson eloquently summarizes the power imbalance between the two nations and how they had locked horns in conflict: “History clears away the blood, records the results, but that doesn’t mean the blood wasn’t there. An Ireland occupied by the Brits will never be free. An Ireland unfree will never be at peace.” There is a strong sense that the rhetoric of the time and the history books since haven’t recorded the full extent of the damage and death caused by the English oppression. In vivid, emotional scenes you’re made to feel the anger and outrage of the Irish Republicans and their desperate need to strike back against Thatcher: “Thatcher might govern in her own tight circle but she’s no right to power here, none at all. She’s queen of nothing, and we’ll treat her with the same respect she’s granted us. Let her taste a little bit of equality.” Lee shows the way these boiling tensions might have led to such desperate acts, laying out the battling ideologies at play and how people can justify acts of terror to themselves in order to make a grander statement and force change.

Although rooted in history, this is a novel that speaks very much about familiar issues we deal with today. Deadly political divisions. Wars of terror. Innocent victims. “High Dive” is a heart-wrenching drama that cleverly shows how the intensely personal becomes political and the war to dominate the narrative of history.