Books from 2016 still in my TBR pile

Help! I’m getting that end-of-year panicky feeling that I haven’t read enough this year. Yes, I read a lot but when the best books of the year lists start rolling out I’m consumed with guilt that I haven’t had time to read half the books I’ve wanted to. Does anyone else get this feeling? I know it partly comes from a worry that when I make my own best books of the year list at the end of December I’ll have missed out on some vital book everyone agrees is genius. I know I’ll have the rest of my life to read these books, but I do find it hard to fight the desire to lock myself in a room for months and not emerge till I’ve read them all. So have a good look at this photo of books published in 2016 and let me know which ones you think I should prioritize reading before the end of the year.

Some books such as Sarah Perry’s “The Essex Serpent”, Megan Bradbury’s “Everyone is Watching” and Mia Gallagher’s “Beautiful Pictures of the Lost Homeland” I’ve been purposely saving because I have a fantasy of snuggling up in a comfy chair drinking endless cups of tea reading them while the winter storms rage outside my window. But the truth is December always gets really busy with finishing work before the holidays and meeting up with friends - so I never get as much reading time as I hope I’ll get. My strategy is to finish my Christmas shopping early so I can stay inside reading while everyone else climbs over each other in the shops – we’ll see how well I do!

Please comment letting me know what you think I should read or what have been your favourite books of the year that I should definitely read.

I also made a video about these and a few other books I acquired recently:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sMGfPH4jjo

The Sunday Times/Peters Fraser & Dunlop Young Writer of the Year 2016 Shadow Panel Winner

Who knew the first official shadow judging panel meeting to decide on our own winner for this fabulous young author award would be so bloody?!? Shouting matches, fist fights, eye scratching, hair pulling and that wild Simon Savidge even tore apart one of the books with his bare teeth in a Bjork-style fury! It was sheer mayhem. Actually, I’m kidding. It couldn’t have been more lovely. Our very organized and excellent chair of judges Dan Dalton kept us well in line. We sat chatting with cups of tea and slices of cake (a lemon-ginger layer cake with toasted marshmallow frosting I baked in honour of Naomi’s birthday) for two hours. We talked in detail and depth about the four totally diverse and absolutely fascinating books nominated for this prize. Honestly, everyone agreed they are all such strong books and all worth reading. But, since we had to choose one, after some well-reasoned arguing we selected our winner. Remember that this is only our shadow jury winner (a fan favourite, if you will) and the official winner will be announced on December 9th.

Fab group Charlie Place, me, Dan Dalton, Naomi Frisby, Simon Savidge & Kim Forrester

Our shadow jury winner is Jessie Greengrass for her daring and intelligent book of short stories “An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It”. We agreed that Greengrass is an extremely accomplished, interesting and promising writer. We were compelled by the frequent themes of loneliness and arctic weather in several stories. I particularly admire how Greengrass subtly challenges preconceptions of gender by purposefully leaving it obscure about whether the protagonist is male or female in several of her modern-day stories – similar to what Ali Smith does in her short stories but Greengrass' fiction explores such different ideas. Interestingly, we all had some favourite stories in the collection. Upon rereading many of the stories, I gravitated most towards the emotionally poignant ‘On Time Travel’ and the brutal humour of ‘The Lonesome Trials of Knut the Whaler’. There is such a rich diversity of ideas and subjects explored throughout the collection that I think Greengrass is an extremely exciting new author that you should all watch out for.

Be sure to check the PFD site where they’ve gathered lots of our reactions to all the books listed for the prize and where the official winner of the 2016 award will be listed on December 9th. Let me know your thoughts about our winner or any of the other nominated books!

Inch Levels by Neil Hegarty

Every family has their own social rules and ways of communicating with each other. Often things are left unsaid or hidden, but the way each family works around these areas of silence is unique. As a terminally ill man only in his 30s, Patrick is at a stage where he doesn’t need to mince his words. He’s laid up in a hospital where the nurses quietly recognize he’s close to death. When family members such as his mother Sarah, his sister Margaret or her husband Robert come to visit he makes it very clear whether they are wanted or not. The novel is framed around the mystery of a missing local girl and her mother’s subsequent suicide. However, the majority of this novel is concerned with the different points of view of this Northern Irish family through three generations, how the Troubles impacted them personally and patterns of abuse which trickle down their bloodline. It shows how at this crucial stage in his life Patrick chooses to be radically honest. This novel artfully gets at the subtleties of family life: what’s left unspoken and the impact this has on relations over time.

Whenever a painting is described in a novel I’m reading I like to go on a pilgrimage to actually view this work of art myself whenever possible. This happened when I read Ali Smith’s novel “How to be Both” which led me to The National Gallery to see a painting by Francesco del Cossa. In “Inch Levels” there is an emotional confrontation between Patrick and his sister Margaret when he’s visiting her in London and they take a trip to Tate Britain. Here they see Pegwell Bay, a 19th century painting by William Dyce. So I went to see this painting for myself one morning. It feels significant to this novel for the way the painter portrays a family on a seaside trip engaged in their own activities. Many scenes in the novel (including a trip to a coastal area that gives this book its title) are described in a similar way where each member of the family is entirely consumed in their own world of emotion and aren’t able to connect with the family members around them. It’s haunting the way the painting suggests a family that is unified in their activity, but psychologically distant from one another.

A crucial character at the centre of this novel is a woman named Cassie. She’s an orphan who enters the family when Sarah was a girl and her mother died. Rather than find a new wife to help keep up his household, her father chooses to take in this girl who is described as simplistic and may suffer from some form of autism. She forms a crucial kind of centre for the family and sometimes becomes a confidant for the things which the rest of the family can’t confess to one another. There are also some wonderful touches of humour she brings – such as a scene when Margaret and Patrick are children stealing from the kitchen’s treat jar (which are treats meant for a pet). It’s interesting the way she offers a perspective on the family to the reader – even if she doesn’t often make her opinions known to those around her.

with William Dyce's painting Pegwell Bay at Tate Britain

The changing political climate of the country serves as a backdrop for several parts of the novel. Sometimes characters are direct witnesses to conflict such as the Bogside Massacre and other times larger events make little personal impact such as a scene of national independence where Sarah finds “Her mind strayed from history: she worried about the stew Cassie had made and left for tea; gone too long and it would dry up.” Hegarty is skilful in the way he describes these larger events being absorbed into every day life such as frequently bombings where it’s felt “It was abnormal and it was normal, all at the same time.” It gives a powerful sense of the way we are both connected to and outside of the history we inhabit.

“Inch Levels” is a novel which becomes quietly absorbing over time as the intricacies of this family’s life and their relationships become clear. Rather than create scenes of high drama, Hegarty conveys deep levels of emotion through what is left unsaid and unacknowledged in the cramped parameters of family life.

Physical – Andrew McMillan (guest review by Naomi Frisby)

Here is Naomi’s next review of another outstanding book shortlisted for this year’s Sunday Times/Peter Fraser & Dunlop Young Writer of the Year award. When I first read this book of poetry last year I was so struck by its distinct direct voice and connected so strongly with McMillan’s original perspective that it became one of my favourite books of the year. If you want to read my review of ‘Physical’ click here.

Since the publication of his debut poetry collection Physical, Andrew McMillan has been hailed as the poet of masculinity. It was interesting to be aware of this approaching the collection as a feminist and – if I may be so bold – I’d dare to say that McMillan is also a feminist, at least to the extent that he understands that patriarchal ideas of masculinity are as damaging to men as they are to women.

The collection’s divided into three sections. In the first, also titled ‘physical’, McMillan explores what it means to be male in the 21st century, alongside experiences of loving relationships and one night stands. In ‘Strongman’ the narrator bench presses his nephew asking ‘what is masculinity if not taking the weight/of a boy and straining it from oneself?’ while conceding that his own attempt is one ‘not even a minor Greek would see as fit to sculpt’. While in ‘The Men Are Weeping in the Gym’, McMillan creates a picture of those who do sculpt themselves ‘and because they have built themselves/as statues this must mean that God/has entered them’ but juxtaposes this with the vulnerability that lies beneath, created with an image of the muscle tearing ‘itself/from itself’.

McMillan excels in moving from the general to the specific. In ‘Urination’ (the poem he tells us at the Young Writer of the Year Award bloggers’ event his mum has asked him never to read again), the narrator begins by describing the potential horror of bumping someone at the urinals, leading to thoughts of the times the bathroom is shared in intimate settings and the specific moment when he takes ‘the whole of him in your hand/and feel the water moving through him/and knowing that this is love…’. It’s these moments when he writes of love – whether of a one night stand in ‘Just Because I Do This, Doesn’t Mean’ where ‘the kisses that wanted to stay for longer than a night’; or a lover who’s with someone else in ‘If It Wasn’t for the Nights’: ‘if it wasn’t for the nights       Steffan       I’d come home’; or the rescued relationship in ‘Choke’ ‘we talked ourselves together’; or the break-up in ‘Today’

today    you will break the life of someone
or you’ll break yourself apart from them
and   having dressed themselves in you for months
they will be naked and half in shadow as you close the door

– where you find yourself catching your breath. McMillan captures the vulnerability that close relationships bring in many of their different forms.

The third section ‘degradation’ deals with death, whether literal or metaphorical, and again ties into ideas of masculinity and how men are expected to face death in a society that equates masculinity with bravery and stoicism.

For me, however, it was the second section ‘protest of the physical’ which really interested me. This interest was twofold: firstly, in terms of structure, this is the most ambitious section of the collection. Here nine untitled poems – five leading on to a second page; four very short and all beginning with the word ‘graffiti’ interweave moments in relationships, McMillan’s love for the poet Thom Gunn and snapshots of the northern town, Barnsley. The latter is the second thing that interests me, having grown up in Barnsley, like McMillan (although I was born eleven years prior to him). The poems that begin and end the section both start with a crane: ‘lame arm of the crane       circling/unstocked shelves of half built car park’, a nod to the town which still hasn’t recovered from the miner’s strike and Thatcherism (call centres and ASOS and Next warehouses aren’t enough to replace an industry). In the second of the longer pieces, McMillan juxtaposes a relationship – ‘love/is giving everything too easily/then staying to try and claw it back’ – with the decimation of the town – ‘town coughing something up/watching    breathless    as it rolls into a crack in the earth’ – using a structure and a rhythm that echoes the town’s industrial heritage – ‘people were shouldertoshoulder/as in a cage waiting to descend’. It’s no coincidence that the industry the town was built upon is one synonymous with masculinity and that part of the town’s challenge is also that of 21st century men: how to reconcile itself with having that stereotypical, patriarchal view of what a man should be stripped away.

Physical is an interesting, often ambitious, sometimes breath-taking look at love and masculinity. If this is what Andrew McMillan is capable of in his debut collection then I can’t wait to witness the rest of his career.

The Ecliptic – Benjamin Wood (guest review by Naomi Frisby)

As I wrote in a previous post, I was invited to be a shadow judge for this year’s Sunday Times/Peter Fraser & Dunlop Young Writer of the Year award alongside some other fantastic bloggers including Naomi from TheWritesofWomen. Given that the self-defined mission of her blog is to only cover books by women, I’m very proud to host Naomi’s reviews of the three shortlisted male authors on my blog and it’s interesting what different views she has compared to my own thoughts about the books. If you want to read my review of The Ecliptic click here.

Elspeth ‘Knell’ Conway, celebrated artist, is holed up in Portmantle, a retreat on a Turkish island. Directed to this mystery location by her sponsor, she befriends playwright MacKinney, novelist Quickman and architect Pettifer. Into their world arrives seventeen-year-old, Fullerton.

From our very first glimpse of him, we understood that he was one of us. He had the rapid footfalls of a fugitive, the grave hurriedness of a soldier who had seen a grenade drop somewhere in the track behind. We could recognise the ghosts that haunted him because they were the same ghosts we had carried through the gates ourselves and were still trying to excise.

As the quartet keep watch over the troubled youngster, they also battle their own creative demons. Portmantle, Knell explains, exists out of time – as does art – as well as providing a sanctuary where artists can relocate their artistic desires. Each has a failed project which has driven them to the retreat. For Knell it’s a commission for which she was attempting to render The Ecliptic – ‘a great circle on the celestial sphere representing the sun’s apparent path among the stars during the year’ – on a mural for the Willard Observatory.

While the first and third sections of the novel take place at Portmantle, the second takes us back into Knell’s past documenting how she became an artist, her rise to prominence and her relationship with the artist Jim Culvers.

Elspeth’s from a Clydebank family and attends Glasgow School of Art on a scholarship – a detail far more plausible in the 1950s and ’60s of the novel than the present day. There she’s taught by Henry Holden who tells her to ‘Paint what you believe’. When the external assessor finds Elspeth’s blasphemous painting Deputation unworthy of a grade, the school denies her graduation and she goes off to London – thanks to Holden – to be Jim Culvers’ assistant. Holden says it’ll take a while for Culvers to realise she’s better than him. When that does happen, Culvers’ agent sets up Elspeth’s first show.

While at Portmantle, Knell comments on her name:

I always suspected my work was undermined by that label, Elspeth Conway. Did people exact their judgements upon me in galleries when they noticed my name? Did they see my gender on the wall, my nationality, my class, my type, and fail to connect with the truth of my paintings? It is impossible to know. I made my reputation as an artist with this label attached and it became the thing by which people defined and categorised me. I was a Scottish female painter, and thus I was recorded in the glossary of history.

While Knell sees an issue with her name and gender, Wood does something few male novelists do well in portraying her purely as an artist and a human. Knell reads precisely as a female painter because Wood never treats her as one. His focus is on the creative process and her relationships with fellow creatives.

The Ecliptic focuses on the creative process throughout the novel. At Portmantle, Knell and her friends worry that they have lost their abilities. They over analyse their work, attempting – and failing – to recreate past highs, or avoid artistic endeavour altogether. They work in secret, rarely discussing their progress, or lack of it. In the novel’s second – and strongest section – Elspeth learns her craft, encountering the disparity between the public’s, the critics’ and her own views of her work. Wood uses this section to consider the effect on an artist’s confidence and, therefore, their work when external forces begin to exert pressure on the creative process. It’s no surprise that Elspeth, still only twenty-six, struggles to cope.

In his attempt to explore how the creative process works, Wood pulls a sleight of hand on the reader which is revealed in the fourth and final section. At the Young Writer of the Year Award bloggers’ event, Wood said that he knew he was taking a risk with this. Whether or not he pulls it off will, I suspect, depend on the taste of each of the novel’s readers. For me, it was an ambitious – and an interesting – undertaking and I’d rather see a novelist challenge themselves to produce something unusual and difficult than play it safe. Whilst I wasn’t wholly convinced, the very end of the novel is inspired and very clever; it left me feeling that Benjamin Wood is one to watch, I suspect he’s going to produce something very special indeed. 

Looking at the Stars edited by Kerrie O'Brien

It was reported on RTE at the beginning of this month that the number of homeless families in Dublin has surpassed 1000 and the number of homeless individuals totals over 5000. The property crash in 2007 created an economic strain on the country which is still being felt today with many people being rendered homeless primarily because rental prices are rising to an unaffordable degree. Writer Kerrie O'Brien has witnessed the increasing amount of people living on the street in Dublin for years. She decided to take action raising money for Simon Communities, one of Ireland's leading homeless charities, by creating and editing the beautiful anthology “Looking at the Stars” which features fiction, poetry and nonfiction by some of Ireland's leading writers. All the money earned from selling this book is going to the Rough Sleeper Team at the Dublin Simon Community.

This writing gives a dynamic look at the condition of homelessness – from inside perspectives of children, families and individuals left without anywhere to live to people working on the front lines assisting those in need to ordinary citizens who witness its effects only peripherally. Not all the writing deals directly with homelessness, but considers different angles of loss, empathy or hope. There are several moving and thoughtful accounts written by people who have experienced homelessness themselves. A piece by Tara Flynn creatively addresses issues of safety and security. Some of the fiction gives vivid depictions of people in need. A mother and her baby are scammed out of money in Sarah Bannan's 'Because Privacy'. The story 'Louise' by Belinda McKeon gives voice to an eleven year old girl living with her family in emergency shelter at a hotel where she must learn the restrictive rules and policies which make them into second class citizens. Whereas Donal Ryan's 'Detached' shows a man trying to care for his family and explain to his children why their house now belongs to an American bank even though it will be left vacant. One of the most vivid accounts of the grimy harsh reality of homelessness comes in Sinéad Gleeson's 'Counting Bridges' which makes you feel the bitter chill and continuous humiliation of living on the street.

Anyone who has spent time in a city encounters homelessness in some form and it always creates a personal dilemma. You can reach out to someone obviously in need by offering some form of support or walk past them. Poetry by Afric McGlinchey confronts this awkward question. Mary O'Donnell considers how the homeless can become merely “shapes” to us. Although we have statistics about homelessness we never know how many people are truly in need because they might not be counted in these collated numbers. Madeline D’Arcy presents the story ‘Census’ about a boy who has gone off the grid, but ironically finds himself being counted anyway. Meanwhile, Jane Casey's tense story ‘Runaways’ shows girls whose home lives have become untenable and embark on an unknown journey. Similarly the protagonist of Danielle McLaughlin's ‘The Woman in the Bowl’ can no endure her home life so takes drastic and much darker action.

More troubling to consider are people in need who are understandably tempestuous from the considerable strain they live under. Colin Barrett presents an intense inner view of an irascible character's thought process when he's plagued by feelings of isolation and feels disconnected from others. Nuala O'Connor's story 'Eulogy' considers the problematic life of a woman who can no longer be saved. Similarly, Jaki McCarrick gives us the point of view of a character who only witnesses the aftermath of a troubled individual's life and recognises how “this sensation of life being weirdly 'alien' must worsen, deepen” when someone is plagued by mental illness or absolute poverty. Dermot Bolger's striking poem considers a more complex meaning for the word home whereas Patrick Cotter's inventive poem 'The View' gives an entirely different perspective.

Issues of faith come up in several pieces in this book. Stephen James Smith's poem ‘Relit Flame’ shows a faithless person seeking solace in a church because he/she has nowhere else to go. Similarly, Mary O'Malley finds that “Habit takes you to an empty church”. In 'Jamie' by Christopher McCaffrey the issue of extreme faith is considered from the perspective of a person who can't stop himself from helping the homeless. The story '1988, Sabina' by Kevin Barry shows how an ordinary object like leather police boots can become something sacred when it takes on a historic and symbolic personal significance.

In a society where the division between the rich and poor is widening it's shocking to consider how ostentatious wealth can sit so smugly alongside cruel poverty. Gerard Smyth looks at the way prized horses receive much better treatment than people in 'The Horses of Kildare'. Anne Enright writes a story about absolute resistance in the face of these untenable gaps in society. Rick O'Shea considers the reality of the situation by looking at developments on a particular street in his piece 'Molesworth Street' where he recognises “We're living in a time where things are going to get harder for those on the margins, not easier.”

It's heartening to see writers take direct action not only be creating an anthology whose profits will go to combat homelessness, but which also make readers consider the issue from so many points of view. As Kerrie O'Brien writes in her introduction “Our government is not doing enough for homelessness – so maybe we all need to do something as individuals – be it a gig, a bake sale, a sponsored run, anything.” Buying this book is certainly a good place to start and reading it will leave you enriched and inspired. You can find out more about this anthology, the Dublin Simon Community and where to purchase the book here: http://www.lookingatthestars.ie/

Guapa by Saleem Haddad

It’s important for any oppressed minority group to have a physical location where people can come together to socialize, organize and form a sense of identity together. In Saleem Haddad’s striking debut novel that place is a bar called Guapa with its bustling mixed clientele on one level and a more radically charged groups who watch cabaret performances on a lower level. It's interesting how the descriptions of this place feel very recognizable to read about as if it were any gay-friendly bar in Berlin or New York City, but the bar's patrons and the issues they raise when speaking to narrator Rasa are specific to the location. This is within an unnamed Middle Eastern city undergoing extreme political turmoil. The novel follows a day in the life of Rasa, a young gay man who lives with his grandmother and has been working to found a new media company after a period studying in America. As the city teeters on revolt against the authoritarian military regime, closeted Rasa's personal life undergoes its own upheaval having been discovered in bed with his boyfriend/habibi Taymour by his grandmother. This highly engaging story describes with great passion and intelligence how Rasa feels isolated within a society which is divided by Eastern/Western values and straight/gay culture.

Rasa realizes that he's gay during his adolescence and after his first sexual encounter he experiences a divided sense of self which comes from being homosexual in a repressive heterosexual culture: “I was two people now, in two separate realities, where the rules in one were suspended and different from those in the other.” After his father dies from terminal cancer and his mother disappears he's left alone with his loving but conservative grandmother. He goes to university in America where he thinks he'll find the freedom to be himself and hangs a poster of George Michael above his bed. But interestingly he experiences a more intense level of aloneness here - especially because he's in America when the planes crash into the twin towers and he's made more aware of his “otherness”. He describes this with great feeling “I was no longer someone with thoughts and dreams and secrets. I was the by-product of an oppressive culture, an ambassador of a people at war with civilization.” While he struggles to connect with people socially and romantically in America, he does discover authors such as Amin Maalouf, Karl Marx, Partha Chatterjee and Edward Said. Their books introduce him to systems of thought which help give him perspective and better understand the world around him.

Rasa listen's to Oum Kalthoum's sing 'The Ruins' whose lyrics seem especially relevant to his troubled love affair with Taymour

When Rasa moves back to his grandmother's apartment in the Middle East he's determined to help facilitate change within society alongside his friend Maj who stages subversive drag acts. But they encounter many unique problems which make any progress extremely challenging. Maj in particular is frequently beaten and arrested because he's an effeminate man who is vociferous about his political opinions. When Rasa falls for Taymour he wishes to create a secret shared space where they can love in the way they naturally desire. It's moving when he describes how his feelings for Taymour are bound up with feelings for his homeland: “I loved Taymour because he was from here, because everything in him reminded me of everything here, because to love him was to love this city and its history. And yet I couldn’t love him because he was from here and so held ideas of how to be and how to love, which would never fit in with the love that we shared.” The contradictions and divisions in the society around them follow them into the privacy of the bedroom. This is what makes it a tragic love story.

“Guapa” is ultimately an inspiring novel written in a vigorous and convincing voice. Rasa forcefully asserts his individuality outside of any stereotypes or expectations of how any society wants him to conform. It was an immense joy and pleasure to read this book.

The Glass Shore edited by Sinéad Gleeson

Over my winter holiday last year I read the anthology “The Long Gaze Back” and was enraptured by the quality of writing included. This book helped me discover writers such as Lisa McInerney, Maeve Brennan, Anakana Schofield and Lucy Caldwell whose books I’ve gone on to read and enjoy over the course of this year. But, as well as being a group of engaging stories in themselves, this anthology served as a self conscious attempt to give a necessary platform to Irish women writers in a canon dominated by male voices. Editor Sinéad Gleeson has now brought together a second volume “The Glass Shore” which only includes women writers from the North of Ireland. It’s a diverse array of fascinating short stories from over two centuries of writing that represent a plethora of authors from this region. It was wonderful reading this anthology from start to finish as I was treated to a wide variety of excellent stories with varying styles and subject matter. But I also gained a sense of the progressing ideas and issues female writers from Northern Ireland have dealt with in their fiction over time. The act of reading the stories in “The Glass Shore” together builds a cumulative mental portrait of this country from a variety of strong female points of view.

A beautiful arch is created from the first story to the last. The book begins with a fable-like story 'The Mystery of Ora' by Rosa Mulholland where a traveller comes upon a remote house with an astronomer who keeps a beautiful woman confined there. In the exuberantly enjoyable final story of the collection by Roisín O'Donnell there is also a spark of the supernatural; 'The Seventh Man' is about a woman who weds men over the centuries to sap them of their energy to keep herself alive. It’s a fitting way to end this collection which includes many female characters that demonstration inventive ways of eluding society’s conventional expectations for how women should live. In ‘An Idealist’ by Erminda Renoult Esler a woman recalls an incident in her life when she was sharply belittled by her sister only to grow to become a respected writer. Margaret Barrington’s majestic story ‘Village without Men…’ is a complex depiction of a community of women who have lost all their men to a ship wreck leading them to carry on entirely independently. Whereas 'The Devil's Gift' by Frances Molloy presents a girl from a large family who tries to join a nunnery but finds this community of women far from welcoming. By contrast, Lucy Caldwell’s heart-wrenching story ‘Mayday’ is told from the point of view of a girl at university trying to illegally deal with an unwanted pregnancy. When she contemplates the responsibility of the man who got her pregnant she reasons “It should be his problem too, but it just isn't, the world doesn't work like that.” Considering that the issue of abortion in Northern Ireland has been hotly debated in recent times, the story of this young woman’s precarious state feels especially relevant.

There are a large amount of vivid female characters in the stories, but there are also several stories narrated by male characters and consider many different aspects of masculinity. Ethna Carbery’s creepy and emotionally-compelling ‘The Coming of Maire Ban’ shows a man on All Soul’s Night hoping for a visit from his wife who died in childbirth. He’s accompanied by a friend who also loved his wife and through the night he comes to a realization about the reality of their relationship. Caroline Blackwood’s alternately hilarious and tragic story ‘Taft’s Wife’ is written from the point of view of a male social worker reuniting society woman Mrs Ripstone with the boy who she gave up for adoption. He remarks that “She had an unpleasantly over-ladylike accent that masked some coarser, underlying accent with unmelodious results.” Mrs Ripstone's increasingly flirtatious/superficial manner with him and dismissal of her son conceals the way she’s felt compelled to construct an identity and life which doesn’t include the reality of her child. ‘The Girls’ by Janet McNeill focuses on the views of a man taken to a tedious dinner reuniting his wife with her old friends and the way this forms a communion with our past and present selves. Sheila Llewellyn’s 'Capering Penguins' sees its male narrator return from war to visit the bookshop whose titles have an entirely different meaning for him now that he’s experienced the bitter consequences of battle. This creates a crisis within him which drives him to take shocking action.

Political conflict enters into the narratives much more as the stories progress through time and the bitter consequences of The Troubles affect the writers and their characters. Mary Beckett’s enigmatic story ‘Flags and Emblems’ shows the power of symbols in a community with sharp Unionist/Loyalist divides. The tense mood is so pervasive it feels like it influences the physical environment itself as in this poetic line: “The distant, lipping whisper on the sand and the sucking puffs of little breezes from the hills taunted her with their lack of violence.” There is a different slant taken on symbols in 'Cornucopia' by Anne Devlin where her narrator becomes a scholar working in Germany far from her Irish roots. The main character of Linda Anderson’s evocative story 'The Turn' has also left her homeland and is now confined in a Cambridge hospital. She thinks bitterly of Northern Ireland that it is “A fragment of a country, a blood-soaked tatter of a place with its 'peace walls' still standing, more than fifteen years after the ceasefires.” The couple in Jan Carson’s ‘Settling’ feel similarly disillusioned with available opportunities in Belfast and move to England, but the narrator eerily finds that the presence of her deceased grandmother has travelled with her.

Evelyn Conlon’s powerful 'Disturbing Words' gives an impression of the practical reality of new physical borders and individual resistance to regimental change. This is something which will no doubt be newly felt in Northern Ireland over the coming years as the government sorts out the mess of Brexit with its new borders. An act of individual protest also occurs in ‘The Mural Painter’ by Rosemary Jenkinson where a man commissioned to spray paint a mural for Armistice Day creates something entirely different from what his paramilitary employers want. Annemarie Neary presents social/political clashes abroad in her story ‘The Negotiators’ where a woman seeks capitalist opportunities in Algiers but isn’t prepared for the realities of the rapidly transforming playing field. An example of the more subtle long-lasting consequences of political conflict is shown in ‘No Other Place’ by Martina Devlin where an aging poet’s opinions clash with a police constable. Here you can feel a writer’s frustration with her work not being read, but she comes to the practical conclusion that “Perhaps it’s irrelevant if they listen or not – maybe what matters is the act of writing.” Luckily this anthology brings together this rich variety of writing to give a complex personal understanding of political turbulence within Northern Ireland.

While there are many interesting issues explored, I also highly admire the technical innovation and experimentation of form demonstrated in many of these stories as well. Polly Devlin gives a realistic take on a mythological story in her ‘The Countess & Icarus’ with tragic-comic results and some cracking lines such as “Martine’s crust now remained intact as far as Dora knew, but presumably had, once upon a time, yielded and oozed nicely for Victor.” Una Woods shows absurdist flair in her fascinating story 'The Diary: An Everyday Fable' which includes intense conversations about the purpose for being between metal objects. ‘The Cure for Too Much Feeling’ by Bernie McGill makes a woman’s lack of empathy into a medical condition where “She was laid low by other people’s misery, it sapped her energy, brought her out in a rash.” It forces her to become increasingly confined and cut off from society until she’s entirely isolated. The emotionally devastating story ‘The Speaking and the Dead’ by Tara West plays upon popular emotional and financial investments people make in the supernatural to deal with un-reconciled feelings of loss and grief. Many stories in the collection show highly creative ways for conveying complex ideas and emotions through forms of writing uniquely tailored to suit their subject matter.

I’m excited to read more from many writers included in “The Glass Shore”. Many of the contemporary writers included have novels and collections of stories published. It will also be thrilling to track down the books of some of the lesser known deceased writers in this book. I currently have on my shelves book published this year by Roisín O'Donnell and Annemarie Neary and I’ve been browsing through books by many more of the authors included. This anthology certainly stands on its own, but makes the most wonderful starting point for discovering writers I haven’t encountered before. While each story stands on its own, there is an intelligent flow from story to story which touch upon connected ideas, concepts or themes. The care and passion Sinéad Gleeson has shown in compiling this collection and the previous anthology is commendable. “The Glass Shore” is a necessary celebration of great women writers.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

I was halfway through reading “The Underground Railroad” this past week when the American election results came through. It was difficult to do anything on that devastating day as I was so depressed, but I did keep reading Colson Whitehead’s novel because it took on an added poignancy. It merges a modern consciousness with representations of inequality, oppression and racial discrimination to create a new kind of historical novel about the struggle for freedom. It’s the tale of Cora who lives on a southern plantation owned by the Randall family in the 1820s. She’s invited by a fellow slave named Caesar to escape the enslavement of the south through a connection he has in The Underground Railroad. Her journey takes her through a number of states which all have distinct social characteristics and exhibit different forms of prejudice. Over time she’s pursued by vicious slave catcher Arnold Ridgeway who is motivated primarily by his belief that America belongs to whites and that he’s restoring order by profitably returning slaves to their owners. It’s a novel which is both fantastical for the way it invents a physical underground railroad used to transport escaped slaves and starkly realistic for the brutality with which slaves and abolitionists are suppressed, beaten and killed. Whitehead has created a story with phenomenal momentum and moving insights into our society.

We currently face at least four years of Trump leading America. Because his campaign was imbued with many overtly racist and isolationist statements, we’re going to have to keep asking ourselves over time: who does America belong to? The sentiment of Trump and many people who voted for him feels not too dissimilar from the logic of slavers in Whitehead’s novel: “If the white man wasn’t destined to take this new world, he wouldn’t own it now.” A bi-racial writer, orator and intellectual named Lander in the story states at one point: “America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes – believes with all its heart – that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn’t exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are.” To many people’s astonishment here we are in Trump’s America, a country half filled with citizens who believe they are entitled to imprison, throw out or build a wall against anyone who is different. It’s a reactionary stance which will no doubt lead to further discrimination and animosity between factions of society. Whitehead shows how little these sentiments have changed in America over time.

It’s fascinating how Cora finds various levels of tyranny in the different states she lives in and at the plantation she’s born into. After losing her imposing grandmother and her mother runs away from the plantation, Cora is left vulnerably alone and must live in a place called the Hob which is for female outcasts within the community of slaves. Amongst the slave cabins “There was no recourse, were no laws but the ones rewritten every day.” Here she has to learn to protect herself and what belongs to her not only against the slave owners and fierce overseer, but the threatening individuals amongst the slaves. Once Cora finds her freedom she becomes attuned to other forms of oppression including becoming an actor in a museum simulating white people’s ideas of African communities and slaver ships, sterilization, and all out annihilation of the black population. The logic behind these methods is to quell the difficulty and complication of difference. Rather than embrace the challenges involved with trying to live together they are radically inhumane strategies to maintain white people’s sole ownership of America.

Cora inhabits a series of different possibilities for how America can deal with its historically racist past. In this way Whitehead plays with history to say something urgent about the present. It’s remarked that “She had never learned history proper, but sometimes one’s eyes are teacher enough.” Although we should learn as much about the past as possible, you don’t need a special knowledge of it to see that the ideologies and values exemplified by Trump and his supporters will lead to a dangerously fractious society. I was greatly moved by the way “The Underground Railroad” depicted Cora’s struggle for both a mental and physical independence within this viciously divided America. Her journey and intellectual development elucidates strategies for survival in a country plagued by such deeply embedded prejudice. It’s foolish to pretend this doesn’t exist: “Here’s one delusion: that we can escape slavery. We can’t. Its scars will never fade.” It is this country’s original sin. Whitehead brings alive a large cast of characters who present different points of view to form a disarming portrait of America past, present and future.

Cove by Cynan Jones

There are some cataclysmic moments in life where it feels as if you’ve been totally thrown out of the normal flow of time. It might be a horrendous accident or the unexpected death of a loved one or the abrupt end of a relationship, but these moments often take on a kind of timelessness because it breaks our sense of identity; we become no one. The man at the centre of “Cove” experiences an extremely rare and dramatic event one day when fishing too far out at sea: a storm moves quickly in and he gets struck by lightening. He suddenly finds that “Time was a wide ocean.” Injured and confused he must painfully struggle to get back to shore. Written with a sparse, deft prose style, Cynan Jones conveys the man’s near hallucinatory state battling the elements and memories as he drifts in his kayak.

This is a novel where the author makes every word count. The painful physical descriptions of the man’s injuries and growing thirst are vividly written, yet Jones doesn’t indulge in an over-abundance of detail. It was just enough to make me feel the intensity of the situation and the full horror of it. At the same time, memories swell up in the man’s consciousness as he fumbles with the few supplies he has to hand. There is a sense of him being swallowed by the past with thoughts of U-boats in these waters and his father’s ashes scattered in the waves. But there are also thoughts of a woman and child who will be lost to him if he doesn’t return. He projects an idea of the physical ramifications of his potential absence in everyday objects such as “a coffee cup, never moved, the little left liquid growing into a ghost of dust.” It’s in something as small as this that an awareness of all he’ll lose grows in the reader’s mind: the way an individual can vanish from the pages of history.

It’s interesting thinking about this book in relation to Paul Kingsnorth’s recent novel “Beast” because they are both novels written in a pared down style and concern men who have become nearly anonymous. One big difference is that the protagonist of “Cove” seeks desperately to return to and regain his normal life whereas the narrator of “Beast” actively avoids returning to his home and family. The existential horror the man at the centre of “Cove” faces is triggered by being violently cut off from civilization so that he becomes his own island. It provokes a feeling at one point that the world may have vanished in his absence: “What if there has been some quiet apocalypse?” Also, rather than the eponymous beast which ominously stalks the narrator of Kingsnorth’s novel, Jones imagines for his protagonist the benign, comical figure of a sunfish guiding his kayak in a beautifully surreal moment of calm.

Reading “Cove” is a brisk, thrilling experience that creates a series of haunting images and will leave you in a contemplative state of mind.

The Sunday Times/Peters Fraser & Dunlop Young Writer of the Year 2016 Shortlist

I am absolutely thrilled that these four talented writers have been shortlisted for this year’s Sunday Times/Peters Fraser & Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award for 2016. I’ve had the pleasure of reading all four of their excellent books before (click on the titles below to see my full reviews of each book) – and I even interviewed Jessie Greengrass at an event in Waterstone’s recently!

The Ecliptic by Benjamin Wood

Physical by Andrew McMillan

An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It by Jessie Greengrass

Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

Most of them I read over a year ago so it’s going to be fascinating going back to these books to see if my feelings about them have altered and it’ll be especially exciting discussing them with the super fab official shadow panel which I’m part of. How to pick a winner between books which are so wildly different in content and form? There’s an epic novel about the creative process; poetry which gives a radical slant on masculinity/the body; creative, heartfelt, funny & philosophical short stories and… however you choose to define Max Porter’s deeply moving novella/poetry/dramatic monologue/literary criticism/self help book!

Comparing these books is going to be a huge challenge so I would absolutely love it if you would read some or all of them along with me and let me know your thoughts! Or, if you’ve read them already, which would you pick as the winner?

The official winner will be announced on December 9th with our own shadow panel selection being announced some time before that. So stay tuned!

The Letters Page Vol. 1 edited by Jon McGregor

Have you ever had penpals or do you still have penpals? As a teenager I loved writing letters – real physical letters with pen and paper. There used to be a whole culture based around finding other penpals with things called friendship books. You’d add your address and interests to a little booklet with dozens of other names and this would get mailed around by other enthusiastic pen pal folk. It was like a social network site before the internet. In this way I acquired hundreds of penpals from all over the world. It was so exciting learning about other people and cultures far away from my own small town in Maine. But a big part of the thrill was coming home and finding a mail box full of letters addressed to me. It also helped me to know myself better writing about my life to these virtual strangers. There’s a special pleasure in getting a handwritten letter – an art largely lost with the advent of email!

An early correspondence I had with Joyce Carol Oates

The Letters Page recaptures a bit of this magic by producing a literary journal around the form of the written letter and includes extracts, short stories, travelogue and poetry. They’ve just published their first collected volume and it’s a beautiful limited edition boxed set with loose-leaf reproductions of the contributor’s original handwritten letters with illustrations. As editor Jon McGregor discusses in his introduction sending and receiving letters involves lapses of time: the letter you send is sent to the future and the letter you receive is from the past. This completely changes how we read and interpret something as opposed to an email that pops up in an inbox. Also, our handwriting contains our personality and it conveys such a different feeling seeing a person’s scribbles than reading an impersonal type-written form. There can also be things crossed out and doodles in the margins. At the beginning of this volume, George Saunders also discusses how letters aide us in developing “our understanding of our relation to the greater world”. This is definitely something that was important for me writing so many letters as a teenager and discovering the physical world outside of my own little circumscribed existence.

This was one of the last letters my grandmother wrote me. She believed the protein in peanuts was essential for good health. Reading this makes me cry.

The anthology includes writing from some very bright and cutting-edge authors who are able to find a new flair for their subject matter in this concentrated form. I’ve read books by several of these authors recently including Joanna Walsh who writes a funny and touching story about the gradual loss of some special cargo in a journey across Europe, Naomi Alderman who takes a new view on practicing the Jewish faith (or not), Kevin Barry who writes about the spectre of death/communing with other writers in rural Ireland and the hilarious Karen McLeod who writes a chatty letter to Alan Bennett.

There’s also some really diverse and startling writing. Some is more impressionistic like poets cataloguing a travel experience complete with drawings. Then there is writing which is more direct like a heartbreaking letter from Claudia Reed to her father about his struggles in the civil rights movement. Cassie Gonzales letter about representations of race includes a number of strike outs and corrections so the reader gets a sense of the actual thought process learning in some ways more from what’s been crossed out than what’s left in. Each letter says something particular about the experience of letter writing and couldn’t convey what they do in traditional Microsoft Word formatted printed pages. There is a relationship formed in writing and reading letters which is so intimate like peering into someone else’s window. As someone who used to love exchanging letters so much, it’s thrilling to see this form being kept alive in such a creative format as The Letters Page. Find out more about this special anthology here and the publisher Book Ex Machina's ordering page here. 

Swing Time by Zadie Smith

“Swing Time” is being published this month, but I first read it in July because I had the great honour of being invited to interview Zadie Smith at this wonderful preview event. Having been a long time fan of Smith’s writing, it’s so interesting to see how this new novel differs from her other books in some ways but also develops further some of her most prevalent themes. Many of her novels give equal time and focus to several characters, yet “Swing Time” is written entirely from the perspective of a single nameless narrator. This gives the novel a more nostalgic feel because it vividly recounts an adolescent girl coming of age during the 1980s in North London. She befriends an energetic girl named Tracey (because their skin colour is similar) who claims her absent father is a backup dancer for Michael Jackson. The girls develop a love of dancing in a class and through watching scenes from Old Hollywood musicals that often involve Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers or semi-obscure African American actress Jeni LeGon. The novel follows the gradual breakup of their friendship and the narrator’s early adulthood when she works as a personal assistant for a famous pop star who wants to found a school for girls in West Africa. Eventually these two aspects of the story weave together showing how the narrator arrives at a crisis point. It’s an extremely engaging and intelligent novel about friendship, racial identity and our perception of time.

Central to the narrator's life are three strong-minded, wilful and (some might say) difficult women: friend Tracey, the narrator’s (nameless) feminist mother and the pop star Aimee. Tracey is a wilful girl who often leads the narrator and their friends into delinquent behaviour. It’s easy relating how as an adolescent you would be easily drawn to but secretly repulsed by her behaviour. It’s also touching the way Smith relates how at that age you overlook obvious lies that friends sometimes tell you so as not to embarrass them. There are also startling scenes involving abusive sexual behaviour from schoolboys towards the girls at their school. Smith delicately handles how the girls were not simply victims to this outrageous behaviour, but in some cases participated in it. This definitely doesn’t excuse the behaviour of the boys, but shows the complexity of burgeoning sexuality. It’s also skilfully presented how their friendship ebbs and flows until a point at which the girls’ paths in life sharply split apart. 

The narrator’s mother (who also remains nameless) is an absolutely fascinating individual. She's one of those characters I find utterly compelling to read about, but I'd be terrified of meeting her in real life because she can verbally cut people to shreds and often does. She has an impatient attitude towards all the usual domestic duties and interests that other women (such as Tracey’s mother) on the council estate engage in. Instead she spends as much time as possible reading, educating herself and developing social projects such as a hilariously disastrous scene where she tries to turn a square of grass on the estate into a community garden for local children. As well as being fiercely driven and community minded (even when it goes against the opinions of those around her) she has a touching vulnerable side which comes out especially when her partner’s children from a previous marriage arrive at their apartment one day.

Finally, Aimee is an American mega pop star who first rose to fame in the 80s. She’s a white singer and a great dancer whose image has evolved through decades of continuing popularity with a strong gay fan base and a keen interest in philanthropy work in Africa – any guesses who she might be partly inspired by? Through a quirk of fate when the narrator works at a music company she ends up becoming Aimee’s personal assistant. The pop star operates on some other level of reality where she wants to magnanimously found a school for girls in an impoverished part of Africa, but doesn’t want to involve herself in the complexities of local politics. Yet, being mixed race the narrator finds her time in Africa and the connections she makes with some people there has a profoundly personal affect upon her. It’s also her entanglements with some of these people that put her working relationship with Aimee in jeopardy.

At the centre of the novel are the very personal and thoughtful observations of the narrator who we get to know intimately (even though we never learn her name). She has an interesting way of considering perceptions of identity and how she views herself by watching many old musicals and interacting with people in Africa. There’s a remove from experience whether its watching these films with their dodgy representations of black people or the teaspoons of truth she gets from her African friends: “great care was taken at all times to protect me from reality. They’d met people like me before. They knew how little reality we can take.” It’s moving the way she is searching throughout the novel to find reflections of herself and struggles to understand where she fits into society.

Fred Astaire dancing in black face in the film 'Swing Time' - the narrator watches this clip at the novel's opening when seeing a director being interviewed. Coincidentally, I actually went to this talk with Herzog at the Southbank Centre where this clip was shown.

Smith wrote a fascinating article about Christian Marclay’s art piece The Clock. This is an installation which is a looped 24-hour montage with scenes from films and television that make real-time references to the time of day. It’s really one of the most extraordinary artworks I’ve ever seen and I sat hypnotized watching it for several hours when it was showing at the Hayward Gallery in London. It feels like Smith was influenced by this when writing about the way the narrator views old musicals. She’s a girl from the 80s watching a film ‘Ali Baba Goes to Town’ from 1937 which is a Hollywood interpretation of an African tribe acting like dancers from Harlem. It’s a complex, layered look at time with versions of identity being refracted through multiple lenses and it leaves the narrator somewhat lost. In this way, it makes an interesting companion read to recent Booker winner Paul Beatty’s The Sellout which also looks at depictions of race in early television and film. Late in the novel the narrator befriends a gay couple who seem to embody something she herself can’t quite obtain. She makes the observation that they are “Two people creating the time of their own lives, protected somehow by love, not ignorant of history but not deformed by it, either.” The narrator seems in some way to have been deformed by these images from the past and the novel’s story is her journey to arrive at a more cohesive sense of self.

I don’t want to classify this as a post-Brexit novel (Smith also wrote a very strong article called ‘Fences’ about our post-Brexit world). But the novel’s portrayal of growing economic, social and political division over the course of a few decades feels very timely – particularly in how it’s portrayed with the gap in understanding between the narrator’s mother and Tracey– both lived in the same estate in the 80s but arrive at very different places and positions in life. The way their stories plays out show how there’s been breaks in how different factions of society are able to communicate with each other. In a technological age where we should be more united because we have easier means for creating dialogue it seems like we’re becoming more closed to other people’s opinions and isolated. The novel plays out a scenario between these characters where this is intensely felt.

It feels like this could be Zadie Smith’s most straightforward novel in a way as it’s told only through the voice of a single narrator. Yet, it’s also one of her most complex for the finely textured way it represents sexual awakening, friendship, fame, racial identity and history. I’m still thinking about it months later and some of its most vivid scenes really stick out in my mind. I also couldn’t help looking up on Youtube some scenes from musicals mentioned in the novel and it’s really shocking some of the things they portray. The story provokes me to think about these artefacts from the past in a more complex way. “Swing Time” is a masterful, highly intelligent and deeply enjoyable novel that will really stick with you.

Midwinter by Fiona Melrose

Like a lot of people, I have a real affection for foxes. I guess it’s something about the bushy tails and that beautiful red/copper colour of their fur that makes them so attractive. One of the things I love most about London is coming home late at night and seeing a fox trotting down an empty street. At the heart of Fiona Melrose’s debut novel “Midwinter” is a female fox that lives on the periphery of a farm inhabited by a father and son. She’s only seen occasionally by the father Landyn who feels a connection to her and a growing sense of protectiveness as he notices her becoming ill. The fox is just a small part of the story but she seems to represent something much bigger. The missing part of this family is the mother Cecelia who died in a brutal way while they were living in Zambia several years before. Landyn and his son Vale never discuss the emotional repercussions of this traumatic loss, but a horrific accident between Vale and his friend Tom which happens at the start of the novel forces the father and son to confront their shared grief. “Midwinter” is a beautifully written novel that movingly shows the way lives become embittered when communication breaks down and how new routes for connection can be formed over time.

I really respond to fiction that sympathetically deals with individuals and families facing hard economic realities – something many of us struggle with in our everyday lives but I find that this is often left out of contemporary literature. Like many British farmers, Landyn Midwinter finds that his profits are steadily dwindling over a number of years to the point where he’s facing bankruptcy and this has a painfully difficult impact upon his home life. It’s astutely observed that “Everyone has a fine and deep-bedded family when the cash is rolling in but take that away, and you’ll find out soon enough how well the centre holds.” In a desperate attempt to save his family and make a new start he uproots them and responds to an ad seeking people experienced in agriculture to manage farms in Zambia. Here his family faces a whole new set of challenges which build to the tragic loss of Cecelia.

It’s impressive the way Melrose so fully explores the particularly masculine way the father and son deal with their feelings. The story alternates between Vale and Landyn’s perspectives which gives a rounded understanding of the individual emotional pain each man is suffering from and why they aren’t able to express this to the other. Many men deal with emotional suppression through drinking and violence. This is what Vale resorts to because he can’t rationally explain the residual anger he feels towards his father over the loss of his mother and it leads to unfortunate consequences. But there is also a touching tenderness to the way he is aware of his father’s peculiarities and does small things to support him. Although Landyn has a really nurturing personality and fiercely protects the welfare of animals, he’s not able to bring himself to discuss his son’s anger or openly express his own mourning.

A fox I came upon when walking home recently one night.

One of the most moving passages comes when Landyn contemplates the way both he and his son are acting irrationally because of their grief. He reasons that “Hauntings aren’t about being afraid, they’re about longing. If you don’t crave the thing that stalks you it’s just a thing, or a person or a fox, maybe, because it has no meaning. What a haunting is, though, is all your longing for someone in a shape you can wrap your brain around.” The mental projection of the mother looms large in their present lives and the reason she torments them both so much is that they’re not acknowledging to each other that she’s there. Vale longs for her guidance and Landyn is steeped in loss, but without openly discussing these difficult issues they give in to destructive impulses.

Fiona Melrose artfully handles the oftentimes brutal reality of rural life and these characters’ violent outbreaks with a poetic and philosophical beauty. I was totally immersed in the story which slides back and forth in time to show the conflict and scarred existence of this father and son. Interesting James Kelman’s most recent novel “Dirt Road” also shows a father and son who find it difficult to emotionally deal with the loss of the mother of the family. However, the story and the statements Melrose make are very different. I highly recommend “Midwinter” – especially as an absorbing read as we enter the colder months of the year and it’s worth mentioning that as an object I think the book has an exceptionally beautiful cover.

The Power by Naomi Alderman

Standing for women’s equality is something I feel really strongly about. So reading Naomi Alderman’s deeply imaginative novel “The Power” which charts ten years of a matriarchy’s rise to global power is such a thrilling experience. The novel begins with groups of adolescent girls suddenly finding they possess special powers to generate and control powerful electric currents. They can train themselves to use this electricity as a weapon. As more and more women find this strength awakening within them, control at all levels of society shifts to favour women. But just because women rise to power doesn’t mean that this is a utopia. Soon the battle for dominance leads to the equally horrifying psychological, physical and sexual subjugation of men just as has been the case for women over the course of history.

The story concentrates on several diverse characters including an abused foster child who reinvents herself as Mother Eve to lead a religious following, the daughter of an English gangster who takes control of a lucrative drug trafficking business, a Nigerian man who discovers a flair for journalism in recording the women’s rise to power and a female US politician and her conflicted daughter. Much of the action of the novel takes place in an Eastern European country ruled by a queen named Tatiana. This at first seems like it will be the seed state for the new female order of the world, but it soon experiences heavy conflict in the chaotic tussle for power. These different characters’ stories come together in a dramatic and fascinating way.

There are some quite disturbing scenes in the novel with violence enacted against both men and women. But it’s interesting how I felt conflicted about certain scenes where men were being taken control of through humiliation, abuse and rape in the way many women have been in the past and continue to be in the present. I naturally feel repulsed by any violence, but part of me couldn’t help feeling that such punishment was only just after years of similar subjugation that women have experienced. It’s clever how the novel makes you question yourself and your own values in this way – as well as to what degree we blind ourselves to other people’s suffering when we’ve grown up thinking certain power imbalances are natural.

I found it really effective and moving how Alderman writes about women’s development and the formation of identity. She does this particularly well in describing adolescent girls and the radical changes which occur at this period of their lives. In one vividly dramatic scene she writes: “Nothing special has happened today; no one can say she was more provoked than usual. It is only that every day one grows a little, every day something is different, so that in the heaping up of days suddenly a thing that was impossible has become possible. This is how a girl becomes a grown woman.” This beautifully encapsulates the way we gradually change and how we find ourselves capable of things we didn’t believe we could do before. So the fable of women controlling an electric power can be seen more as the way physical and psychological changes occur in stages of development.

One of the difficult things about considering gender issues is not to fall into lazy generalizations such as women are nurturing and men are aggressive. Certainly all of us exhibit these traits at certain times. A character writes: “Gender is a shell game. What is a man? Whatever a woman isn’t. What is a woman? Whatever a man is not. Tap on it and it’s hollow. Look under the shells: it’s not there.” Our society operates so heavily based on gender binaries, but if you examine individuals closely gender just becomes another malleable identity trait. The story has an innovative way of questioning such categories.

Scattered throughout the text are drawings of artefacts which purportedly show how at certain points of history women have possessed this special power. This adds to the feeling that such an evolutionary change is natural. It’s quite a fun way of reconsidering history. The author also compels us to think carefully about what we don’t know about the past: “This is the trouble with history. You can’t see what’s not there. You can look at an empty space and see that something’s missing, but there’s no way to know what it was.” The novel is framed within a written correspondence between two friends Neil and Naomi. In doing so, Alderman cleverly changes the entire context which the novel’s text exists within just as Margaret Atwood did at the end of “The Handmaid’s Tale”. The way that the author has structured this novel elevates it out of a pure fantasy story to provoke compelling questions about the way society is organized and how we might think about it differently.

“The Power” is a thoroughly engrossing story that questions the meaning of gender and inventively inverts the order of society to suggest new perspectives.