I’ve been busy reading for Karen and Lizzy’s #ReadIndies month, and here are three of the books that came off my tbr pile for it. They could scarcely be more different!
The book: Bramton Wick by Elizabeth Fair
The publisher: Dean Street Press (their Furrowed Middlebrow series)
The date: originally 1952, reprinted by DSP in 2017
My friend Barbara bought me a whole pile of Furrowed Middlebrow titles, very excitingly, and a few people recommend I pick Bramton Wick off the pile. It’s a classic story of small village life – one of my favourite things – including a group of young people who might fall in love, and a host of wealthy neighbours and neighbours who used to be wealthy. The introduction compares it to Angela Thirkell, which is a fair comparison – perhaps the humour is a bit different, but the characters wouldn’t be out of place in Thirkell’s Barsetshire.
I particularly liked the dog-obsessive women living together, and enjoyed hating the venomous sister among the Misses Cleve. There an awful lot of characters, in fact, and I occasionally wondered if Fair should have narrowed her canvas a little – but I quickly determined the ones whose lives I felt most invested in, and they also turned out to be the ones who got the most focus. Unlikely to be an accident!
The book: Stardust Nation by Deborah Levy and Andrzej Klimowski
The publisher: SelfMadeHero
The date: 2016
I can’t remember if this was a review copy or if I bought it, but it came in a period where I was trying to expand my knowledge of graphic novels. This one is based on Levy’s earlier short story ‘Stardust Nation’ (2013), and is essentially a story of contagious trauma. Tom is the main character – one day his colleague Nick phones him to say that his (Nick’s) father beat him as a child. But this is Tom’s life, not Nick’s. Memories become shared and stolen and it’s all quite unsettling. I loved Levy’s words, but wasn’t sure about Klimowski’s illustration. A lot looks quite poor draughtsmanship to me, but I suspect it’s deliberate and I don’t fully understand it.
The book: Hello Friend We Missed You by Richard Owain Roberts
The publisher: Parthian
The date: 2020
This novel won ‘Not the Booker Prize’, which is probably why my book group is reading it. It’s a novel on a small Welsh island where ‘Hill’ goes to visit his invalid father, have an affair with his father’s nurse, wonder if Jack Black is ever going to get back to him about his ‘promising’ film script. It’s all built up of minute, often banal, observations – usually on separate lines, and often ending ‘thinks Hill’. There are no speech marks, which seems to be a thing people do.
I quite enjoyed it, and it’s certainly an unusual and confident prose style. What confuses me is how funny the blurb and puff quotes claim Hello Friend We Missed You is, because I didn’t find it remotely funny – i.e. I would have no idea it was meant to be a comic novel if the back cover hadn’t told me. Confusing. Maybe book group will clear it up. Not really my cup of tea, overall, but always interesting to see something so out of the ordinary.
Don’t get me started with the missing speechmarks thing! Why, oh why is it necessary to leave them out to signal that you are edgy or experimental or something? We are so well trained in reading them that our brain doesn’t even register them – unless we leave them out, and then it becomes annoying!
I can foresee I will have to do a mass purchase of Dean Street Books at some point… so many tempting titles.
It’s so annoying, isn’t it? It seems to be so in vogue and I can’t imagine why.
Re: Hello, Friend
Wasn’t it the protagonist’s father?
I read an Amazon sample a while back.
That sample didn’t grab me, so I didn’t look to acquire the book.
oh, you’re quite right – thanks :D
Thanks for promoting a Welsh indie :) Parthian do publish some unusual books. I’ve given this one a miss just because of the description of it as ‘funny. I know this makes me sound as if I don’t have a sense of humour but I find most books labelled as comic are anything but. The lack of punctuation would be another turn off
Yes, it’s such a gamble, isn’t it! I could enjoy this one if I pretended it wasn’t meant to be funny.
As a Brit abroad I have found myself buying a decent amount of books from Parthian too due to my Welsh heritage. Although funnily enough this one only came to my attention after it won the Guardian Not the Booker prize. I was worried I was a bit too long in the tooth for it but found it an absolute delight!
Glad to hear it! I actually ended up liking it more after the book group discussion.
Um. One of these I would be interested in reading, two not – but thank you for bringing some original publishers and books to the table for #ReadIndies! :D
It is amazing how many are on my shelves when I started looking!
Bramton Wick is one of my planned indie reads this month too. I hope I enjoy it.
Fingers crossed!
I will be doing a DSP book, too! I think I have that one buried on my Kindle from when they kindly sent me all six of the novels – I have loved the three I’ve read so far!
Perfect!
I want to read ALL the Furrowed Middlebrow books – each and every one! But Dean Street Press just sent me ARCs of the first two books in the Tessa Crichton mystery novels by Anne Morice. They’re rereleasing all 10 books of the series in April, apparently!
I know! So tempting – I’ve got far more than I can read quickly, yet I just want them all.
The Elizabeth Fair sounds wonderful, right up my street. Like you, I have a fondness for novels that explore village life, complete with all its petty jealousies and snobberies. Plus it’s good to hear that there are plenty engaging characters to invest in here, that’s always a joy in this kind of story!
Yes, you might need to draw a little dramatis personae, but it is an engaging read :)
We read Hello Friend We Missed You in our bookclub and it certainly divided opinion between those who enjoyed it tremendously and others who simply did not. Personally I found it very funny?
It is always impossible to explain why you find something funny, but I’m still gonna quiz people :D
Indeed. My best attempt at explaining it was that I found the deadpan observational aspects and references to be up my street, and there were some set piece moments where social awkwardness was pushed to the limits. Very funny for some, but evidently and naturally not for all. It was a novel that really got us talking. Will there be reports of your bookclub’s findings?
We don’t have a proper report anywhere, but I will say that two people loved it and the rest of us were a bit more lukewarm, but nobody really disliked it. I ended up appreciating it more after the discussion, which is always nice.
I’m curious about the appeal of small village life. It does to me, too, along with other confined, communal settings like boarding schools, convents, etc. Do you think you’d enjoy it as much as you enjoy reading about it?
I actually live in a small village! There are about 150 of us, and I love it – I love the closeness of people knowing each other. I lived in a city for 13 years, but grew up in a village and missed it throughout.