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The Nutmeg Tree by Margery Sharp

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Gosh, I love Margery Sharp. The more I read by her, the more I think she is one of the great underrated novelists of the twentieth century.

I first read her fifteen or sixteen years ago, buying The Foolish Gentlewoman because P.G. Wodehouse mentioned it as a book he loved in a letter somewhere. It wasn’t for a good number of years that I read more by her, but I’ve yet to read a dud – with Cluny Brown and The Gipsy in the Parlour being my favourite. She does funny, she does serious, she sometimes combines them. And we can add The Nutmeg Tree (1937) to the funny shelf, though it’s not without its moments of poignancy.

I don’t really understand why she chose this title. There is a nutmeg tree but it’s not particularly dominant, and I think the title of the film is much better: Julia Misbehaves. I haven’t seen the film, but am told that it is a very loose adaptation.

Julia is misbehaving in the first scene we see her – a glorious opening, where she is in the bath, surrounded by her few possessions. How’s this for an opening line:

Julia, by marriage Mrs Packett, by courtesy Mrs Macdermot, lay in her bath singing the Marseillaise.

We can already guess a little about her character from that ‘by courtesy’. But it takes a few more lines before we realise why her bathroom is filled with a table, a clock, and other potentially valuable items: it’s because the bailiffs are in, and she’s pretty sure they won’t intrude on a lady in the bath.

Julia is a chancer, and has had to be. As we see throughout the novel, she has had to spend much of her life seeking the next source of income – and that has involved a bit of deceit, a bit of flirtation, and a crowd of friends who wouldn’t be received in polite society and, though loyal, are sometimes necessarily fleeting. As she describes herself, she is ‘the sort of woman any one talks to about anything’. Which has its ups and downs.

And, yes, the reader loves her. This one did, anyway.

She is Mrs Packett by name, but the marriage lasted rather less than a year – a war bride, her husband was killed not long after their hasty wedding. Hasty because of war, but also because of Susan: the daughter they had. Her parents-in-law are affluent and kind, if not accustomed to women like Julia, and housed both daughter-in-law and granddaughter. But ultimately Julia decided she would be better off away from them, and that Susan would be better off – financially and otherwise – being raised by her paternal grandparents.

As The Nutmeg Tree opens, she has received an unexpected letter from Susan, now on the cusp of adulthood. She wants to get married, and her grandparents don’t approve of the speed with which she and Bryan wish to wed. Can Julia come and persuade them otherwise? And, with one eye on the bailiffs, Julia decides to go. She hasn’t seen her daughter for sixteen years.

It may be that ‘someone goes on a journey’ and ‘a stranger comes to town’ are the only plots in the world, but I think Sharp is very good at putting a cuckoo in the nest – with either comic or unsettling results. In The Nutmeg Tree, there is a lot of comedy to be got from Julia trying to behave, while not being completely able to keep her true nature hidden. She is the sort of person, for instance, who accidentally joins a circus on the way. But there is always an undercurrent of poignancy here too. Julia is trying to improve herself. She is not an unkind or dishonest person. She has simply had to do what she has to do. And she’s tired.

Once she arrives, she gets tangled in all the relationships there, and a handful of others yet to emerge. It’s just wonderful. Julia is drawn so consistently and with impressive nuance for a character that could have been simply bombast and delight. If the glorious initial scene isn’t matched by a series of equally delicious set pieces, the novel becomes more thoughtful than that opening might leave one to infer – without losing the humour.

Basically, Sharp is brilliant. She should be a household name, in my opinion, and it’s rare to find an author who is so varied and so good at different things. Julia, I’ll miss you, and it was a joy.

A House in the Country by Ruth Adam

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It’s always exciting when there’s a new set of Furrowed Middlebrow titles from Dean Street Press, and I always want to read all of them. I got a couple as review copies, and went straight to A House in the Country (1957), partly because I thought I’d already read it and realised I hadn’t.

I love books about houses, and particularly about rambling old mansions. This one is enormous and in a little village – and is the place that Ruth Adam, her husband, and a handful of relatives and friends decide to rent together. What they couldn’t afford on their own, they can manage as a household of eight. Incidentally, A House in the Country is marketed as a novel, but it is very heavily based on real life, including the names. So is it a memoir or a novel? Probably a fictionalised version of real life, in the mould of the Provincial Lady series. It doesn’t really matter. It’s just a delight.

Though the first page of the book warns the reader that it will be far from an unalloyed delight for the group experimenting with this venture:

This is a cautionary tale, and true.

Never fall in love with a house. The one we fell in love with wasn’t even ours. If she had been, she would have ruined us just the same. We found out some things about her afterwards, among them what she did to that poor old parson, back in the eighteen-seventies. If we had found them out earlier…? It wouldn’t have made any difference. We were in that maudlin state when reasonable argument is quite useless. Our old parents tried it. We wouldn’t listen. “If only you could see her,” we said.

She first came into our lives through the Personal Column of The Times. I have the advertisement still. Sometimes I look at it bitterly, as if it were an old dance-programme, with some scrawled initials on it which I had since learned to hate.

If that sounds like quite a bitter opening, then don’t worry. It’s better that we know all will not end well, to ameliorate the sadness when things start to go wrong – but I was still about to dive into the joyfulness of the first chapters. Quite a lot of space in the book is devoted to finding, taking, and inhabiting the house. They assign rooms, they decorate, they marvel at the extraordinary beauty of a magnolia tree on the lawn.

Moving house is one of my favourite themes in literature. Moving somewhere this magical is a dream to read about, with hope in the air offset by the gentle bite of the narrative. Because Adam writes very amusingly, somewhere between the self-deprecation of E.M. Delafield and the snark of Beverley Nichols. She sees herself and her companions and her new neighbours with clear eyes, willing to see the best in all and unable to avoid highlighting the less good. It’s a complete joy to read, and the through-line of mild cynicism prevents it from being cloying.

The only difficulty with the book being heavily based on real events is that it messes up the structure of A House in the Country a little. The second half of the book covers a great deal more time than the first, as inhabitants splinter off and are replaced – sometimes by new long-termers and sometimes by short-term rentals who might deserve more than the few, funny paragraphs they are given. But Adam has to cover a lot of similar years in a short space, and she chooses to rush through some events and characters rather than let the book become repetitive.

And the end of the book, as they have to leave the house, is as sad a description of mourning as I’ve ever read – prepared as we were from the outset. Yet, somehow, I still look back on the book as fun, light, joyous. I suppose it has a bit of every emotion felt in a love affair – albeit a love affair with a house.

 

C is for Crompton

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This is part of an ongoing series where I write about a different author for each letter of the alphabet. You can see them all here.

I’m going through the alphabet, and had a bit of a choice for C. Well, lots of choices, of course, but there are two authors I’ve been avidly collecting for years who begin with C – Ivy Compton-Burnett and Richmal Crompton. I’ve gone for Crompton, but maybe I’ll do ICB for I as a sneaky way in.

How many books do I have by Richmal Crompton?

For the sake of this post, I haven’t included any of the William books, though I do have about ten of them. Mostly so I can make this manageable. Because, even just looking at the novels and short stories she wrote for adults, I have 41. Our Richmal was prolific.

I do have Family Roundabout in the Persephone edition too, but forgot when I took the photo, since it’s in a different part of the house.

How many of these have I read?

I’ve put them in piles of read and unread here – the pile on the right being the ones I’ve read. I think. Most of my avid Crompton reading was around 2002-2004, and I’m a bit hazy on some of them. But I think I’ve read 30 of her books.

How did I start reading Crompton?

I don’t remember when I first read the William books, though I suspect I came to them first through Martin Jarvis’s wonderful narration. I know that I played Ginger (and Colin played William) in a village show when we were 8 or 9.

But I started reading her books for adults in 2002, when I was in Hay-on-Wye and happened to see one on a shelf. I think it was Frost at Morning, though it might have been Weatherley Parade or Family Roundabout. Those were certainly the first three I read.

And fun fact, it’s how I discovered Persephone – I’d read Family Roundabout in an early edition before I knew Persephone existed, and when I saw their edition at my local library, it got me thinking what other books they’d published that I might like.

General impressions….

I was obsessed for a few years, binge reading Crompton. And this was in that sweet spot of the internet – where a world of booksellers were opened up, but before everyone knew exactly how much their books were worth and before everybody was buying books online. It would be much more expensive to get these piles of Cromptons now, though thankfully Bello and Greyladies have brought quite a few of her books back into print.

I don’t know if I read all her best books early on or if my taste is changing, but when I read more Crompton now, I do find her to be lacking a little in finesse. It’s undoubtedly true that the same sorts of characters appear time and ago, and she is far too given to ellipses for effect. They aren’t great writing. But they are still delightful places of comfort to go, and at her best, she can be deliciously funny and suddenly poignant.

Ranking 14 books I’ve read recently

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Thank you SO much for all your kind words and support recently. I’m not out of the woods yet, but I’m going to make a gradual return to book blogging. And I wanted to clear the decks on the books that have been waiting to be reviewed, some of them for many months.

And, you know me. I love to rank things. So I put 14 books in order, from least liked to most liked. In fact, I only disliked one of them, but I also didn’t fall in love with many of them either. Let’s start at the bottom of the pile.

14. Nice Work by David Lodge

This is my first novel by Lodge, and it’s sort of an updating of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, where an academic type starts shadowing someone at a factory. Everyone in it is annoying, and Lodge is obSESSed with writing scenes of people going to the toilet. There are more in the first third of this novel than in all the other novels I’ve read, combined. Also, his satire (?) of academic speak isn’t heightened or exaggerated, and thus is the sort of conversation I’m so familiar with that it didn’t seem funny at all.

13. Kind Hearts and Coronets by Roy Horniman

This 1908 novel is actually called Israel Rank, but this reprint has changed the title to match the famous film it inspired. In the novel, Israel Rank realises he can inherit a title and great wealth if he bumps off all the people in between. His motivation is the antisemitism he has faced – though the novel decries antisemitism in quite an antisemitic way. It’s described as a dark comedy but I couldn’t really see where it was funny. It’s just rather horrible, and pretty methodical so not especially pacey.

12. She and I by Pamela Frankau

I’d love to suggest a Frankau for the British Library Women Writers series, but this one won’t be it. It’s about a love triangle – and then a later love triangle with the same two men and a different woman, who may or may not be a reincarnation of sorts of the first. An interesting idea, but all very abstract and hard to pin down. And, sign, antisemitic.

11. The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes

This is a novel about Shostakovitch, about whom I know nothing. I think it would be better for people who do – though perhaps then it would be too predictable. As with my other Barnes experience, I found it readable but not more than ‘quite good’.

10. Slowness by Milan Kundera

I love Kundera and I enjoyed reading this, so it’s only placed here because I don’t remember a single thing about it.

9. A field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

When I picked this up, I didn’t know that Solnit is a widely-known and loved essayist. And I loved the more personal essays here. She lost me a bit when she got too historical – and I found the register slightly difficult to grab hold of at time. Maybe a little too academic for my liking. But an undeniably good prose stylist.

8. The Glory and the Dream by Viola Larkins

A preacher falls in love with an adventurous, frivolous woman (despite her being more or less engaged to another man). Passion overwhelms them – but after they are married, they realise how unsuitable they are for each other. Enjoyable 1930s stuff, but misses that vital spark to make it something wonderful.

7. Shelf Life by Suzanne Strempek Shea

A memoir about working in a bookshop – fun! It also covers a range of other things, including Shea’s time touring as a writer and her experience of cancer. I mainly came away with the intrigue that she hates when people pronounce her surname She-ah, but doesn’t tell us how it is actually pronounced.

6. The Wildings by Richmal Crompton

Crompton obviously liked this novel, because she wrote a couple of sequels. It starts a bit unpromisingly, with every paragraph ending in intriguing ellipses, but I liked it more as it went on – seeing how David Wilding copes with leaving the family firm, and manages his attachments to his jealous wife and his overlooked sister.

5. Thornyhold by Mary Stewart

This is my first Stewart and it was good fun – a woman inherits her aunt’s enormous house, and becomes part of a secretive community. And… could she be a witch? I think I’d love this more if the writing had been a bit better. She does pace rip-roaringly but, sentence by sentence, it’s a little workmanlike. Maybe (and I so seldom say this) it needed to be a bit longer?

4. Across the Common by Elizabeth Berridge

My read of this kicked off a few people buying Berridge, largely because of Reg Cartwright’s wonderful covers – see tweet – but it’s worth a read on its own merits too. It is not the Angela Carteresque surreal novel that the blurb suggests, but a tale of memory, regret, forgiveness that comes out when the heroine leaves her husband and moves in with three elderly aunts.

3. The Game by A.S. Byatt

My goodness, Byatt writes good sentences. I haven’t read her for ages, but this novel about sister rivalry between an academic and a novelist – thrown to the surface when a childhood friend re-emerges – was startling good, sentence by sentence. The reason it didn’t top my list is because I didn’t quite know what was going on in some flashbacks, and felt the whole was not quite the sum of its parts. But I think it would reward a re-read one day.

2. A Village in a Valley by Beverley Nichols

The last of Nichols’ Down the Garden Path trilogy, it’s still not in the same league as the Merry Hall trilogy but it’s good fun – particularly all the sweet stuff about helping a local woman open up a shop, despite the likelihood of it all going wrong.

1. Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope

The only book from the list that I really, REALLY loved is one that took me about six months to finish – because Trollope certainly isn’t concise. The plot is about secret inheritances and couples who might not be able to marry because of poverty, but the plot is dragged out and (especially in the second half) very predictable. What makes this wonderful is Trollope’s delightful turn of sentence, and the leisurely and assured way he takes us through each conversation, reflection, and narrative flourish. A protracted joy.

Quick update

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Thanks so, so much to everyone for your prayers and kind words. I wanted to give a quick update – still no diagnosis, and still doing various tests etc., but I have been back to more-or-less normal for reading in the past few days.

Throughout all of this, symptoms have come and gone a lot, so I’m not counting my chickens yet – and I’m going to extend my blogging break a little – but didn’t want to go completely radio silence.

Announcing the next batch of British Library Women Writers!

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First, a quick aside – I’m going to take a little break from blogging, I think, because I’ve had an ongoing and mysterious illness for a couple of months that has many and various symptoms, but most recently has affected my eyes – making it quite difficult to read (argh!!) and I’m limiting my screentime. Hopefully will get diagnosis or cure soon, or it’ll just go away! (Yes, have had covid test, but it was negative…) Praying folk, would welcome your prayers.

BUT before I slip away, I had to share that the next four British Library Women Writers books have been announced!

The first batch were partly my choices and partly the British Library’s (though all great!) – this time, they’re all mine! Here’s a quick guide to them…

Dangerous Ages by Rose Macaulay
Macaulay is perhaps best remembered for her final novels, The Towers of Trebizond and The World My Wilderness, but I prefer her prolific period in the 1920s. Her novels then are funnier, lighter, but equally penetrating into the contemporary world. In Dangerous Ages, she considers various different generations of women, and covers things like Freudianism, free love, employment for older women etc. It’s all there.

Father by Elizabeth von Arnim
An unjustly neglected E von A novel, about Jennifer – an unmarried woman trying to escape her father’s dominance. It’s got a lot to say about being a single woman in the 1930s, but it’s also extremely funny.

Tea Is So Intoxicating by Mary Essex
This is the one to get if you just want a laugh. It follows the ups and downs of opening a tea garden in post-WW2 rural England.

O, The Brave Music by Dorothy Evelyn Smith
The book I am MOST excited to see back in print! It’s a coming-of-age novel about Ruan, a young girl living on the edge of the Yorkshire moors, dealing with family tragedy and emotional turmoil, and finding solace with a make-shift family of other people. But I can’t do it justice. It’s an all-enveloping, glorious novel that should be the next I Capture the Castle, if there’s any justice in the world.

When are they coming out? Dangerous Ages is next month in the UK, and the others will follow in the autumn. I’ll keep you posted as they appear – not sure about dates in the US, though think they’ll be there at some point.

And aren’t they GORGEOUS?

T.H. White: A Biography by Sylvia Townsend Warner

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This week is Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week, organised by Helen at A Gallimaufry – I was mulling over which collection of short stories to take off the shelf when I decided to do a bit more of a curveball. I bought Warner’s biography of T.H. White (published 1967) nine years ago, and I can’t remember whether that was before or after I read her letters with David Garnett, in which they discuss it a lot. And, indeed, White’s letters – which Garnett edited.

Much like when I read Roger Fry by Virginia Woolf, this is one of those times when I’m more interested in biographer than subject – but a very intriguing portrait emerged nonetheless.

I’ve only read one book by White – Mistress Masham’s Repose, which is sort of a long-distance sequel to Gulliver’s Travels – but I probably saw the Disney Sword in the Stone at some point and he’s one of those names that is around a lot. For most people, he is best known for his Arthurian links – but I believe he has more recently taken on fame by association with Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, in which he features.

Hawking is one of the passions that comes out in Warner’s depiction of White. She is not a biographer who gives equal weight to all the different stages of a man’s life. She zooms straight through childhood in a handful of pages (which didn’t bother me at all; I always want to find out about an author being an author, not a child). What she draws out is White’s love of animals and particularly hawks, his writing, and his isolation.

Some years are dwelt on for so long that I began to feel trapped – 1939, for instance – whereas others flash by. We learn that White’s one real love in life was a dog called Brownie, and she is perhaps the most vivid secondary character of them all. His grief when she dies is long and painful. We also learn quite a lot about his writing processes, mostly from his own perspective. Rather wisely, Warner relies extensively on quotation. Why paraphrase what already exists? The biography becomes almost a patchwork of other people – White’s letters and diary, the letters of others, the memoirs of others. It’s hard to say, at times, whether Warner is a biographer or a collagist.

Chief among these is White’s friend and encourager David Garnett, author of Lady Into Fox and much else. It’s hard to know whether he would be considered quite so significant a figure in White’s life if he had not also been such a good friend of Warner’s, and thus able to provide her with a great deal of written material. But if the share of perspectives is a little skewed, it is none the less interesting for that.

We chart White’s shifting interests and anxieties. There is a curious attachment towards the end with a boy called Zed, about which Warner is coy and oblique. It certainly raises disconcerting questions about the suitability of their relationship, and any more recent biographer would investigate the issue more thoroughly. Warner introduces it mysteriously and leaves it mysterious.

What we see, collectively, is that White was sporadically successful and seldom content. The sentence that sums up the whole comes near the end: ‘He had been unlucky with his happinesses’.

Warner writes biography in some ways like her fiction and in some ways not. It shares the tone of her fiction in the belief that everything is marvellous, in the true sense of that word, but that nothing is especially so. But it has fewer of those sentences that crystallise everything in a suspended moment. Fewer of those sentences that jolt you slightly by their unexpected rightness. But I did write down one such, about Brownie:

There are photographs of her in his Shooting Diary for 1934 -slender, leggy, newly full-grown, with the grieving Vandyke portrait expression of her kind.

I had expected something a little more distinctive stylistically from this deeply distinctive writer. But perhaps she decided not to make herself the star of the book. Yet she cannot help sometimes writing as an exasperated friend – ‘Of course, he should have gone to see her. Rush on by new projects, he didn’t.’ – and sometimes as a fellow author giving her opinion on a work in progress.

There is enough in here to delight the reader who comes because they love Warner. There could be more, and I would have welcomed it, but then it might have cloaked the emerging of the curious, sad, impassioned, conflicted, enthusiastic, inventive, restricted T.H. White.

B is for Baker

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This is part of an ongoing series where I write about a different author for each letter of the alphabet. You can see them all here.

Thanks for your lovely comments on my first post in this series, A is for Athill. I should have said – if anybody else wants to use the idea too, I’d be delighted to see which authors you come up with. And it’s a good gap-filler when you don’t feel inspired to review a book!

My choice of author today won’t surprise long-term StuckinaBook readers, and well done Andrea, who was the first to guess that Frank Baker would be the author I’d choose for B.

How many books do I have by Frank Baker?

There are two ways to answer this. On the one hand, there are twelve books in this pile – on the other, five of them are Miss Hargreaves. It’s my favourite novel and I get every edition I can find – I still don’t have the early editions with their lovely dustjacket, but maybe one day. At the bottom is the gorgeous Tartarus Press edition (which was published just after I recommended it to Persephone, who rejected it) – the blue ones are the Bloomsbury reprint that they did on my recommendation, which is still one of the most exciting moments in my life! Why two? Well, I lend it so often and don’t want to lose the Bloomsbury edition. And since I once had four of them, you can see why I’m nervous about not getting them back!

How many of these have I read?

I’ve read Miss Hargreaves, of course, and a handful of the others – Before I Go Hence, Stories of the Strange and Sinister, The Birds (which he claimed Alfred Hitchcock and/or Daphne du Maurier had plagiarised), and his autobiography, I Follow But Myself. I’ve also read Mr Allenby Loses The Way, in the Bodleian Library.

How did I start reading Baker?

I never particularly liked learning the piano, but I did discover that my piano teacher have very similar taste in books to me. Or, indeed, she helped form my taste. It was she who first lent me a copy of Miss Hargreaves (which has a lot of music stuff in it), and I was entranced. For the few who don’t know, it’s a novel about a man who invents an old, eccentric lady to get out of an awkward conversation. He and his friend give her all sorts of curious attributes, and send a letter inviting her to visit, as a joke. The joke turns on them when she arrives… it’s a book that really does make you laugh and cry. I’m so grateful to Lylah for introducing Miss Hargreaves to me, and vice versa.

General impressions…

Sadly, it’s rather diminishing returns after that. I was so excited to discover a new favourite author, but Miss Hargreaves is worlds better than the others I’ve tried. It’s hard to pinpoint what’s wrong with the others, but they just don’t have much spark or vitality.

My second favourite book by Baker is his autobiography, I Follow But Myself, told through portraits of various people he knew, including the famous (Edward Garnett, Arthur Machen) but mostly the unknown. It’s worth reading for the portrait of Amy Carr alone.

I still have three of his novels unread on my shelves, a couple of which have been there for nearly two decades. And several of his novels I haven’t found. Maybe lightning struck twice with Baker, and I’ll keep reading. But if it doesn’t, to have created Miss Hargreaves is more than enough for any author.

The City and The City by China Miéville

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You know those books that are always on the cusp of being read? Like a word on the tip of your tongue, you’ve constantly been ‘about to read it’, even if always remains fourth or fifth or fifteenth in the mental queue. Well, I got The City and The City (2009) by China Miéville for my birthday in 2010, and finally I’ve read it – I originally wanted to read it after reading a review by Sakura, who used to blog at Chasing Bawa.

The concept is what fascinated me. The narrator is Inspector Borlu, who lives in Beszel – those words should have an accent on the u and z respectively; please imagine them there. Beszel is a slightly run-down city somewhere in Eastern Europe – it also occupies the same space as the city Ul Qoma.

This isn’t fantasy, though. Rather, it’s a development of the sort of tension between cities that happened with East and West Berlin – taken to a logical extreme. Certain parts of the ‘glossotopia’ are Ul Qoma and certain parts of Beszel, but there is also a substantial ‘cross-hatched’ region, where the cities co-exist. And it is not an amicable coexistence.

Neighbouring houses might be in different cities. Pedestrians on the same street are citizens of different places. And acknowledging the other city in any way is illegal – and will get you taken away by Breach, a sort of secret police. Citizens of each city train themselves to ‘unsee’ the buildings and people of the other city – recognising, in a glimpse, an architecture or a style of dress that marks somebody as unseeable. Here is Borlu at the checkpoint between the cities:

Pedestrians and vehicles came and went. Cars and vans drove into it near us, to wait at the easternmost point, where passports and papers were checked and motorists were given permission – or sometimes refused it – to leave Beszel. A steady current. More metres, through the inter-checkpoint interstice under the hall’s arc, another wait at the buildings’ western gates, for entry into Ul Qoma. A reversed process in the other lanes.

Then the vehicles with their stamped permissions-to-cross emerged at the opposite end from where they entered, and drove into a foreign city. Often they doubled back, on the cross-hatched streets in the Old Town or the Old Town, to the same space they had minutes earlier occupied, though in a new juridic realm.

If someone needed to go to a house physically next door to their own but in the neighbouring city, it was in a different road in an unfriendly power. That is what foreigners rarely understand. A Besz dweller cannot walk a few paces next door into an alter house without breach.

But a book can’t just be its setting, of course. The story is about a horrific murder, of a Besz woman who had been an academic. Her particular area of interest was controversial: a rumoured third city, hidden between the other two and not known by either… Her parents come to the city/cities to try to find their daughter’s murderer, and naturally do not understand the divisions they must respect.

Police procedurals are not usually my cup of tea, and I did have to skim over some of the more graphic passages, but there aren’t many of those. Borlu is a good protagonist for this set up – obeying the rules of the city and its ‘hidden’ counterpart, while mentally thinking them absurd. He is not quite Winston Smith from Nineteen Eighty-Four, and he has no dawning revelation or rebellion against a corrupt and bizarre system. Instead, he has to work within the confines of this curious world, determined to find the killer. The quest for justice gets increasingly dangerous as fraught secrets threaten to become discovered…

The City and the City isn’t a novel I’d look twice at if it were just a modern crime novel, and the plot didn’t overwhelm me. But what kept me captivated was that brilliant concept. Somehow, Miéville kept it original and enthralling. I did wonder if it would be the same idea repeated over and over, burning out after a flare of novelty. but it’s not. Dealing with the nuances of simultaneous cities complicates the plot, but I could honestly have read Miéville’s descriptions of them and their inhabitants as much as he cared to write. A brilliant idea is fully realised.

Part of me wishes this idea was used for something other than a crime novel – but the two are really inseparable in the way the novel develops. Not my usual fare, but recommended for the extraordinary and sustained cleverness of the concept.