Some more recent reads

Just clearing some books from my pile to be reviewed – and while the blog post is called ‘some more recent reads’, let’s be SUPER lax with what we mean by ‘recent’. A few of these have been waiting for a while… I also find it hard to write about audiobooks because I can’t go back and add quotes, so shall pop a couple into this round-up.

A Countryman’s Winter Notebook by Adrian Bell

This was a review copy from the lovely Slightly Foxed, which I couldn’t find after it first arrived and I later discovered under a pile of things in the kitchen. Note to self: don’t unpack parcels in the kitchen. It’s a collection of Bell’s articles from the Eastern Daily Press, where he wrote a countryside common between 1950 and 1980. I think this collection, published last year, is the first time they’ve been brought together.

I’m not sure how they’ve been organised, but it’s a fun meander through all manner of countryside topics from across the decades. I enjoyed guessing which era I thought it would be from when I started, discovering how accurate I’d been when I turned the page. He writes gently about gardens, farming, the home – it all blurs into a contented, cosy whole. I particularly liked this line:

I think every village has a double population: those who live in it, and those who remember it fondly for having been reared in it, or having stayed in it, or even passed through it adn said, “Here is a place […] where I should like to live if ever I had the chance.”

Mr Fox (2011) by Helen Oyeyemi

I got my book group to read Oyeyemi’s fourth novel, which I’ve had on my shelves ever since it came out – well, a little before, as it was a review copy. Oops, sorry! Anyway, it’s set in the 1930s and it’s about a writer (St John Fox) and the character he has created (Mary Foxe) and their tussle. The boundaries of reality and fiction aren’t so much porous as totally non-existent – the pair start telling each other stories, and Mr Fox really resembles a short story collection more than a novel. Along the way, St John’s real wife begins to get jealous of this illusory woman with whom he becomes obsessed. The stories the two tell each other often seem barely to connect to the main narrative, and the whole thing is an ambitious and slightly confusing tour de force.

I don’t want to suggest limits on anybody’s imagination, but I have to say I prefer Oyeyemi when she has one foot on the ground. Though that doesn’t happen very often. Considering I’ve read all her books, I only *really* love one of them – Boy, Snow, Bird – but always get something out of them. Even if that’s just admiration.

The Spectator Bird (1976) by Wallace Stegner

A few Stegner novels are among the free audiobooks available with Audible Plus, so I downloaded The Spectator Bird, having previously only read his most famous (?) novel Crossing To Safety. It is about a retired literary agent, Joe Allston, who is coming to terms with increasing inactivity and ill health. Not that he is extremely ill – just all the aches and restrictions of getting a bit older, and you can tell 60-something Stegner was aware of the loss of his youngest days.

The short novel is half set in the present day, where Joe and his wife are in amiable, squabbly, grumpy normal life – and half in the past, mostly told through a diary kept 20 years earlier. The diary is about their time in Denmark, and the friendship they had with a Danish countess. It is a sensitively told story, even despite moments of high drama and shocking plot. As mentioned recently, I’m not sure fine writing is a good fit for an audio experience, for me. Whenever I stopped listening to The Spectator Bird, I seemed to forget everything that had passed – but, having said that, I still thought the book good.

The Memory Illusion (2016) by Dr Julia Shaw

But this book worked much better as an audiobook – a non-fiction book about memory, and largely about how bad memory is. Shaw writes about how faulty memory can be, how easy it is to plant false memories in people, the dangers of relying on memories solely in legal cases, and so on. It is a fascinating read/listen, covering all sorts of academic material about memory in a very accessible way. I felt a bit smug, because at least I *know* my memory is terrible.

Yes, it’s also a bit alarming to learn about false memories – and sections on false sexual abuse memories are quite confronting. But if that is content you can cope with, then I really recommend getting hold of this. Get ready to have a lot of things you thought you knew about yourself and the world blown out of the water.

The Last Interview (2016) by Oliver Sacks

My friend Malie got me this back in 2018, and it is a series of interviews with the late, great Oliver Sacks – ‘The Last Interview’ seems to be a series of books, and the small text ‘and other conversations’ on the front gives away that this covers a wide period. Sacks doesn’t seem to have given interviews all that often, and these are all transcripts – often of interviews given on radio. And it’s interesting largely for seeing the range of people Sacks spoke to. All the information in the interviews will be welcome but familiar territory to those of us who’ve read Sacks’ books, so it’s fun to sit back and interpret how Sacks felt about the interviewers. There is one who interrupts him constantly and blithely misinterprets everything…

Well, there we go, a handful of recent reads – all of them good in their own way.

Tea or Books? #101: Rachel explores Simon’s shelves

Rachel takes a look at Simon’s bookshelves – will she take any books away with her??

Way back in episode 70, I was in Rachel’s flat in London and took a look around her bookcases. We planned a return visit… and then the pandemic happened. But now travel and visiting is easier, we have finally got around to organising Rachel coming out to rural West Oxfordshire to look at my bookcases.

Trailing around with a mic was a bit tricky, so the sound isn’t perfect – but hopefully plenty to enjoy nonetheless.

You can support the podcast on Patreon – where, from this episode, you’ll get episodes a few days early! Find the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get podcasts – and you can get in touch at teaorbooks@gmail.com.

The (enormous number of!) books and authors we mention in this episode are:

A Natural History of Ghosts by Roger Clark
Contested Will 
by James Shapiro
A Woman of Passion: A Life of E. Nesbit by Julia Briggs
The Lark by E. Nesbit
The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit by Eleanor Fitzsimons
Five Windows by D.E. Stevenson
Four Gardens by Margery Sharp
Return to Cheltenham by Helen Ashton
The Half-Crown House by Helen Ashton
Jane Austen
Master Man by Ruby Ayres
Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker
Elizabeth Bowen
Illyrian Spring by Ann Spring
Her Son’s Wife by Dorothy Canfield Fisher
The Brimming Cup by Dorothy Canfield Fisher
The Deepening Stream by Dorothy Canfield Fisher
The Two Doctors by Elizabeth Cambridge
Susan and Joanna by Elizabeth Cambridge
Willa Cather
Children of the Archbishop by Norman Collins
London Belongs to Me by Norman Collins
The Double Heart by Lettice Cooper
Desirable Residence by Lettice Cooper
The Rising Tide by Margaret Deland
Will Shakespeare by Clemence Dane
Catchword and Claptrap by Rose Macaulay
Virginia Woolf
Tea Is So Intoxicating by Mary Essex
The Amorous Bicycle by Mary Essex
A Child in the Theatre by Rachel Ferguson
Alas, Poor Lady by Rachel Ferguson
The Brontes Went To Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson
The Matchmaker by Stella Gibbons
My American by Stella Gibbons
Miss Linsey and Pa by Stella Gibbons
Told In Winter by Jon Godden
Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden
Brief Candles by Aldous Huxley
The Honours Board by Pamela Hansford Johnson
An Error of Judgement by Pamela Hansford Johnson
The Unspeakable Skipton by Pamela Hansford Johnson
Love of Seven Dolls by Paul Gallico
Coronation by Paul Gallico
Too Many Ghosts by Paul Gallico
The Hand of Mary Constable by Paul Gallico
Stephen Leacock
The Tortoise and the Hare by Elizabeth Jenkins
Harriet by Elizabeth Jenkins
Honey by Elizabeth Jenkins
Robert and Helen by Elizabeth Jenkins
Herbert Jenkins
The World My Wilderness by Rose Macaulay
The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay
Dangerous Ages by Rose Macaulay
The Making of Bigot by Rose Macaulay
Mystery at Geneva by Rose Macaulay
What Not by Rose Macaulay
Told By An Idiot by Rose Macaulay
Summertime by Denis Mackail
We’re Here by Denis Mackail
Greenery Street by Denis Mackail
What Next? by Denis Mackail
Ian and Felicity by Denis Mackail
The House by William McElwee
The Heir by Vita Sackville-West
Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley
The Haunted Bookshop by Christopher Morley
Safety Pins by Christopher Morley
Thunder on the Left by Christopher Morley
Where The Blue Begins by Christopher Morley
An Unexpected Guest by Bernadette Murphy
Beverley Nichols
The Shoreless Sea by Mollie Panter-Downes
The Storm Bird by Mollie Panter-Downes
My Husband Simon by Mollie Panter-Downes
The Priory by Dorothy Whipple
Bewildering Cares by Winifred Peck
A Clear Dawn by Winifred Peck
Housebound by Winifred Peck
Lavender and Old Lace by Myrtle Reed
The White Shield by Myrtle Reed
Cluny Brown by Margery Sharp
The Gipsy in the Parlour by Margery Sharp
D.E. Stevenson
Elizabeth Taylor
Gin and Ginger by Lady Kitty Vincent
Lipstick by Lady Kitty Vincent
The Benefactress by Elizabeth von Arnim
Princess Priscilla’s Fortnight by Elizabeth von Arnim
Father by Elizabeth von Arnim
The Happy Ending by Leo Walmsley
The Golden Waterwheel by Leo Walmsley
Love in the Sun by Leo Walmsley
The True Heart by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Swans on an Autumn River by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day by Winifred Watson
Fell Top by Winifred Watson
Some Must Watch by Ethel Lina White
The Wheel Turns by Ethel Lina White
The Dragon in Shallow Waters by Vita Sackville-West
The Hills Sleep On by Joanna Cannan
Three Lives by Lettice Cooper
The Thinking Reed by Rebecca West
Elizabeth Berridge
Margaret Drabble
The East Window by Margaret Morrison
There is a Tide by Agnes Logan
The Dogs Do Bark by Barbara Willard
The Gothic House by Jean Ross
The Visitors by Mary MacMinni es
A Lion, A Mouse and a Motor-Car by Dorothea Townshend
Sally on the Rocks by Winifred Boggs
O, The Brave Music by Dorothy Evelyn Smith
Faster! Faster! by E.M. Delafield
The War Workers by E.M. Delafield
Mrs Harter by E.M. Delafield
The Heel of Achilles by E.M. Delafield
Tension by E.M. Delafield
The Pelicans by E.M. Delafield
Frost at Morning by Richmal Crompton
Matty and the Dearingroydes by Richmal Crompton
This Little Art by Kate Briggs
Edith Olivier
A Fairy Leapt Upon My Knee by Bea Howe
David Garnett
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Pride of Place by Patience McElwee
Miss Elizabeth Bennet by A.A. Milne
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Infused: Adventures in Tea by Henrietta Lovell
Beware of Children by Verily Anderson
Spam Tomorrow by Verily Anderson
The Three Brontes by May Sinclair
The Three Sisters by May Sinclair
Katherine Mansfield
Mitford sisters
As It Was and World Without End by Helen Thomas
Edward Thomas
Love, Interrupted by Simon Thomas
Leaves in the Wind by Alpha of the Plough
Wintering by Katherine May
The Electricity of Every Living Thing by Katherine May
Oliver Sacks
Random Commentary by Dorothy Whipple
The Other Day
by Dorothy Whipple

Forty-One False Starts by Janet Malcolm

Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers eBook : Malcolm,  Janet: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle StoreWhen I was two essays into this collection, published in 2013 but collecting pieces from across several decades before, I was certain it would be one of my best books of 2021. The first two essays are among the best non-fiction I’ve ever read.

After that, sadly, it became a bit more run-of-the-mill – but let me take you on that journey.

The title of the collection is also the title of the first essay, and it opens like this:

There are places in New York where the city’s anarchic, unaccommodating spirit, its fundamental, irrepressible aimlessness and heedlessness have found especially firm footholds. Certain transfers between subway lines, passageways of almost transcendent sordidness; certain sites of torn-down buildings where parking lots have silently sprung up like fungi; certain intersections created by illogical confluences of streets—these express with particular force the city’s penchant for the provisional and its resistance to permanence, order, closure.

Malcolm doesn’t go for sparse descriptions, so this might be off-putting to some. I think it is absolutely wonderful, and I was excited to dive in – to a piece about the artist David Salle. I’m afraid I hadn’t even heard of him. He was presumably a bigger name in 1994, when this essay was first published and before I’d reached double digits – something of an enfant terrible, disrupting art with collages and ‘quotes’ from other artwork and (or was it?) misogyny. He is a fascinating character, though I also imagine anybody that Malcolm meets and writes about is a fascinating character. She has a way of giving the details of a person that make them simultaneously extraordinary and ordinary. She will introduce someone with an unexpected comment on their handshake, or a piece of pottery they have, or how they exemplify a broader type – and they are instantly illuminated in a Malcolm-portrait that isn’t uncharitable but also is completely unsparing. She is never nasty or malicious, she is simply completely unhindered.

In ‘Forty-One False Starts’, though, we don’t just get this introduction once. As the title suggests, we get it 41 times. After a few paragraphs, Malcolm tries a different entrance to the essay. And over and over. Some are short, none are more than a page or two. Each looks at Salle and his work from a different angle – and while none paint a full picture, the composite is like the collages that they discuss. It’s such a brilliant idea for an essay and, more importantly, is brilliantly executed. (You don’t have to get a copy of the book to read it, either: it’s still on the New Yorker website.)

The second essay is almost as excellent. In it, Malcolm meets the photographer Thomas Struth and, in her conversation with him about photographing Queen Elizabeth II, gives us a vivid picture of the man. As usual, the way she conveys the conversations is odd, unexpected, and sublime. (My paperback doesn’t include any pictures, so I spent a lot of time on Google for the essays about artists, looking up the examples discussed.)

Sadly, the reason that Forty-One False Starts didn’t make my Top Books of 2021 is that it also includes a lot of essays where Malcolm doesn’t speak with her subjects. In most cases, admittedly, that is because they’re dead. There are essays on Edith Wharton, Vanessa Bell, Diane Arbus etc. She covers a range of artists and writers – the provenance of the essays isn’t always clear, but I think some must be introductions to books or intended to accompany exhibitions. And they are fine. There’s nothing wrong with her writing. But the spark is gone when Malcolm isn’t conveying conversations she has had.

There are still moments of Malcolm individuality. I loved ‘The Reef has been called Wharton’s most Jamesian novel, but it is merely her least cleverly plotted one’ and, from the Diane Arbus essay, ‘It is a measure of the power Doon wields in the Arbus world that no one dared protect her against saying something so breathtakingly silly in print.’ But they are few and far between.

I should add, there are still a couple of other essays where she is present, and those are wonderful. She is at her gossipy best while finding out the scandals and tantrums behind the magazine Artforum, and there is a great essay about meeting Rosalind Krauss that starts with a fantastic description of her apartment, including this:

But perhaps even stronger than the room’s aura of commanding originality is its sense of absences, its evocation of all the things that have been excluded, have been found wanting, have failed to capture the interest of Rosalind Krauss – which are most of the things in the world, the things of ‘good taste’ and fashion and consumerism, the things we see in stores and in one another’s houses. No one can leave this loft without feeling a little rebuked: one’s own house suddenly seems cluttered, inchoate, banal.

But the collection feels so diluted by those other pieces. The person Malcolm writes best about is herself – or, rather, she is brilliant at revealing two people in a conversation, where one of them is her. I would love a collection where she is front and centre alongside her subjects. It flies in the face of received wisdom about how to write an essay about an artist or writer, and it would be terrible in the hands of most essayists – but Malcolm was a genius, and she should be allowed to write her own rules.

As a collection, Forty-One False Starts is uneven. But I think it’s worth getting for the third or so of the essays that are truly extraordinary. Skim the rest.

The Small Room by May Sarton

When I bought The Small Room (1961), it was because I thought it might be about a house. I’m a simple man: I love books about houses, particularly if this would end up being about a hitherto undiscovered small room in a house. If anybody knows any books like that, lemme know. Well, The Small Room isn’t that, but I found an awful lot to like in it anyway.

I bought the novel on my first trip to the United States in 2013 – more specifically, in a lovely bookshop in Charlottesville, Virginia. Sadly, since then the little town has become renowned for the appalling far-right rally that ended in a woman’s death. At the time, it was simply a day out from DC.

I don’t think I’d read any May Sarton books at the time, but it is now my third – after The Magnificent Spinster and The Education of Harriet Hatfield. While I enjoyed both of them, I found the former less memorable than I’d hoped, and the latter very patchy. The Small Room takes us to a setting that is very distinct and probably a recommendation to many of us: a women’s college in New England.

Lucy Winter – surely a coy nod to Lucy Snowe in Charlotte Bronte’s Villette? – has just started there, and it is her first teaching job. She is young, idealistic, and keen to make a good impression. More than that, she is keen to be a good teacher – in every sense of the word ‘good’.

The girls arrived, and settled like flocks of garrulous starlings, perpetual chatter and perpetual motion. Lucy, looking down from her office on the fourth floor of one of the oldest buildings, compared the campus to a stage where a complicated ballet was being rehearsed. Small groups flowed together and parted; a girl in a blue blazer ran from one building to another; five or six others arranged themselves under an elm, in unconsciously romantic attitudes, a chorus of nymphs. The effect was enhanced by the freshmen’s required red Eton caps, and by the unrequired but almost universal uniform of short pleated skirts and blazers. Looking down on all this casual, yet intimate life from above, Lucy felt lonely and a little scared.

At the centre of the novel are the actions of one student. She is exemplary and feted, and widely regarded as having a promising future that would reflect well on the college. But when Lucy is marking one of her essays, she discovers that it is plagiarised. She feels she has to inform other members of the faculty – and sets in motion a series of actions that affect everybody in the college.

Lucy is a well-drawn and interesting character, partly because Sarton uses her to show that there are not simple choices between wrong and right, and that people might do the right thing for the wrong reasons, and vice versa. The girl who plagiarises is also written really interestingly, and reacts in a way that is both believable and unexpected. What stopped me wholeheartedly loving The Small Room is that these two, and perhaps one or two others, are the only nuanced characters in the novel. It’s not that the others are stereotypes, it’s just that Sarton doesn’t spend enough time delineating them and they all (particularly the other teachers and board members) blur into one amorphous mass.

Sarton does make up for this with beautiful, unpredictable writing. Here is one bit I noted down:

Lucy opened the window and knelt beside it, tasting the cool freshness, the stately, suspended, hypnotic fall, drank in the silence, and finally fell onto her bed as if she had been drugged, to sleep a dreamless sleep.

At the heart of The Small Room is a fascinating dilemma, done well and interestingly – with only a few flaws in the way the cast is put together. I don’t think I’ve yet found my perfect Sarton novel, but I think this is my favourite of the three I’ve read so far.

2021: Some Reading Stats

I’ve posted my Top Books of 2021, and now it’s time to turn my attention to some reading stats – the sort of blog post that so many of us love reading. And as I get older, increasingly a test of memory… I also think I’ve referred to 2020 as ‘last year’ quite a lot, but hopefully you can work out what’s going on.

Number of books read
I read 182 books in 2021, which is comfortably the most I have ever read in a year. In the previous year the total was 147, and the total has hovered around the 150 mark ever since I started living on my own.

Why was it bigger this year? Well, I did do A Novella A Day In November, but I also got more into audiobooks – and let’s not forget that three-month lockdown at the beginning of the year, where I didn’t have much to do.

Male/female writers
126 of those books were written by women, 55 by men, and one book was by a husband and wife team. That means 70% of the books I read were written by women, which has been steadily and unintentionally going up every year. Again, it’s partly because of reading for possible British Library Women Writers titles… but mostly just because those are the books I’m drawn to, I suppose.

Fiction/non-fiction
I read 135 works of fiction – 101 by women – and 47 works of non-fiction. That is a much higher percentage of fiction than usual. Over the past few years, about a third of the books I’ve read are non-fiction, but for some reason I really needed to step out of the real world more in 2021…

Books in translation
Partly because of reading some EUPL prizewinners, I matched my all-time high for books in translation – albeit it’s still only 11 books. There were four from Finnish, including three by Tove Jansson, and the others were from Polish, Slovenian, Serbian, Russian, Danish, French, and German.

Re-reads
I re-read 13 books in 2021, and I think every single one of them was either for a podcast, book group, or writing British Library afterwords. I still don’t really re-read just because I want to experience the book again.

Number of audiobooks
This is where things really amped up. In 2020 I listened to eight audiobooks and that was my most ever – and I trounced that with 21 in 2021.

New-to-me authors
Counting these was a bit of a revelation. I only read 64 new-to-me authors this year, meaning that only 35% of the books I read were experiments on new names. It used to be about half, and has been getting lower. Apparently there is some need for dependability in the pandemic, but I do want to think outside the box more in 2022.

Most disappointing book
There were a few disappointments with books by authors I love turning out not to be my cuppa tea. I’d saved Sun City by Tove Jansson for years, but it was definitely her worst book. Even my love for Michael Cunningham couldn’t overrule my distaste for sci-fi in Specimen Days. Oh, and Heritage by Vita SackvilleWest was appalling and showed that she got the zeitgeisty rural novel out of her system early in her writing career, thankfully.

Worst book I read this year
I guess it was also a disappointment, but James Acaster’s Perfect Sound Whatever – an audiobook – was bizarrely bad. It’s about getting obsessed with music from 2016, when Acaster went through an extremely difficult year in 2017. When he was writing about his own life it was funny and insightful and honest. But almost the entire book is descriptions of albums that seem to be unquestioningly copied and pasted from earnest press releases.

Happiest discovery
On the other hand, I have been meaning to read Georgette Heyer for many years, and was always a little nervous that I’d dislike her – given how beloved she is. But thankfully my first experience, with April Lady, was a total delight. Phew!

Favourite book-related moment
It’s not a reading stat, but my happiest book moment of the year was being asked to be a guest on the Backlisted podcast, discussing the brilliant Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker, which was just as brilliant on a re-read. A close second is, of course, seeing more British Library Women Writers books come back into print, and watching as people discover them.

Persephones
I’ve had a fairly non-rigorous goal to read more of the Persephones on my shelves. In 2020 I only managed one, but in 2021 I read One Woman’s Year by Stella Martin Currey, The Crowded Street by Winifred Holtby, Brook Evans by Susan Glaspell, and Julian Grenfell by Nicholas Mosley.

Most failed challenge
I decided I’d read all of Angela Thirkell’s novels in order. Not all this year, of course, but I’d make a good start. Maybe one a month?? Well… I read one.

Most expensive book
While I got Infused by Henrietta Lovell as a gift from my friend Lorna, I have a feeling it’ll end up being my most expensive read – because this non-fic book about tea has persuaded me to ditch the teabags and get into loose leaf tea. At least for a bit.

Names in book titles
Ever since doing Project Names, I’ve been intrigued to see how often names turn up in book titles if I’m not deliberately seeking them out. In 2020 it was 20 – in 2021, it was 35. They pop up a lot.

Animals in book titles
I always forget to keep an eye out for this during the year… but they appear whether I’m looking or not. The Butterfly Lampshade by Aimee Bender, The Place of the Lion by Charles Williams, Catch the Rabbit by Lana Bastašić, Magpie Lane by Lucy Atkins, Mr Fox by Helen Oyeyemi, Bear by Marian Engel, A Wild Swan and other stories by Michael Cunningham, The Birds of the Innocent Wood by Deirdre Madden, Particularly Cats by Doris Lessing, and The Elephants in My Backyard by Rajeev Surandra. I think that must be a record – though only a handful of them actually had prominent animals.

Food in book titles
The Poisoned Chocolates Case by Anthony Berkley, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard by Kiran Desai, One Apple Tasted by Josa Young – and, at the other end of the spectrum, Thank Heaven Fasting by E.M. Delafield.

Numbers in book titles
In ascending order, One Apple Tasted by Josa Young, One Year’s Time by Angela Milne, One Woman’s Year by Stella Martin Currey, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee, Two-Part Invention by Madeleine L’Engle, Three To See The King by Magnus Mills, I Ordered A Table For Six by Noel Streatfeild, Thirteen Guests by J Jefferson Farjeon, Twenty-Five by Beverley Nichols, Forty-One False Starts by Janet Malcolm.

Strange things that happened in books this year
A woman’s life keeps restarting, a door is a portal between countries, a murderous doppelgänger turns up, a boat rolls through a town, a railway runs underneath a country, an iceberg falls from the sky, a man gets struck by lightning multiple times, a man and a boy swap bodies, a collection of Victoriana magically appears in a front garden, butterflies fly from a patterned lampshade, a carpenter is swallowed by a whale, a cult starts in a quarry, lichen promises prolonged youth, an invisible wall entraps a woman, a man moves into a tree, a baby is left in a box, a woman falls in love with a bear, a robot quotes Whitman, a dance hall disappears from a city and reappears on a Scottish island, and the main characters turn out to have been dead the whole time.

Top Books of 2021

I always wait until New Year’s Eve to compile my best reads of the year, because you never know when something brilliant will sneak in, do you? As it happens, this year has had lots of Very Good Reads, and even some Very, Very Good Reads, but nothing that is likely to enter my all-time favourites pantheon. So I love all twelve of the books on the list, and a good many that didn’t quite make it, but I didn’t have a life-changing book this year.

But, as I say, these 12 books are all wonderful! As usual, I have excluded re-reads and can only include an author once. The links take you back to the original reviews…

12. The Familiar Faces by David Garnett (1962)

I haven’t read the first two volumes of Garnett’s autobiography – I went straight for the one where he becomes an author, because that is the stage of his life I am most interested in. As it happens, and as the title perhaps implies, this is more about portraits of people he knew, often very gossipy, including Dorothy Edwards, T.E. Lawrence, and George Moore.

11. The Painful Truth by Monty Lyman (2021)

When my friends publish books, I try to read them – or at least buy them. But it’s no hardship when they are as brilliant as my friend Monty’s. His previous book was about the skin; this one, on pain, is even better. Which four-letter word ending in ‘in’ will be next?? Vein? Shin?? Anyway, Monty writes about a wide range of issues to do with pain that are fascinating and, above all, compassionate. I don’t read much popular science, but if more of it was like this then I would.

10. Brook Evans by Susan Glaspell (1928)

Rachel and I read a couple of Persephones for an episode of Tea or Books?, and it helped me get Brook Evans off the shelf where it’s been for many years. I love Glaspell’s spare, insightful prose, and the way she shows us a moral dilemma that works it’s way through three generations of a passionate, unhappy family.

9. Ignorance by Milan Kundera (2002)

The first of several Top Books that I read during A Novella A Day in November – I wrote ‘Like most of Kundera’s novels, the plot is a simple thread through the centre of the book – but what makes the book so wonderful are the tangents, the reflections, the aleatory connections between fictional characters and moments in time.’ Translated by Linda Asher, this is another Kundera success for me.

8. Murder Included by Joanna Cannan (1950)

It was great fun to race through a murder mystery in a single day. This is on here partly because it was fun and pacy, with an enjoyable irritating detective, but also because it has a beautifully simple and clever twist in its solution.

7. Three To See The King by Magnus Mills (2001)

You never quite know where you are with Mills, and never more so than with this parable(?) about a man living in a tin house in a desert, miles from his nearest neighbour. His life starts to change when a friend of a friend turns up and moves in – and then rumours come of a charismatic man changing lives in the distance. Mills is so brilliant at making something eerie without being at all evident why it feels that way.

6. Love in the Sun by Leo Walmsley (1939)

This autobiographical novel tells of a man and his partner who have left Yorkshire for Cornwall, escaping some sort of ignominy. They have almost no money and craft a makeshift life in a rickety house in a cove. Walmsley writes about this corner of Cornwall with such tender love and clarity, and the novel is a slow-paced, winding joy.

5. The Invisible Host by Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning (1930)

A reprint from Dean Street Press that is getting a lot of love, The Invisible Host is curiously close to the premise of Agatha Christie’s later And Then There Were None. A group of strangers have been beckoned to a penthouse, each believing that a party is being thrown in their honour – whereas, in fact, they are going to be killed off, one-by-one, while a gramophone gives them instructions and warnings. The mechanics can be a little graceless, especially compared to Christie’s book, but it is still a brilliant read.

4. The Wreckage of My Presence by Casey Wilson (2021)

I didn’t get around to blogging about this one, which I listened to as an audiobook, but I do encourage people to seek it out. Casey Wilson is one of the funniest people alive, and stars in my favourite ever sitcom, Happy Endings. I’ve followed her work ever since, and was so delighted when she came out with a collection of essays – they are enormously funny, about bizarre moments in her life to date, but also very poignant: the loss of her mother, and Wilson’s grief, are front and centre.

3. Things That Fall From the Sky by Selja Ahava (2015)

Ahava’s novel won the EUPL prize a few years ago, and I read a translation by Emily and Fleur Jeremiah. It’s about people who experience extraordinary events – whether an ice berg falling from the sky, winning the lottery multiple times, or being struck repeatedly by lightning. I wrote, in my review: ‘the prose and characters that Ahava has created seem both dreamlike and vividly real – I don’t really understand how that combination is achieved, but it is done with astonishing consistency and assurance. I loved spending time in this world, and the way Ahava balances genuine pathos with a fairytalesque surreality is truly wonderful.’

2. Miss Linsey and Pa by Stella Gibbons (1936)

The beginning of my year had a lot of books but not all that many brilliant ones, which is perhaps one of the reasons I was so blown away by Gibbons’ novel, which I read for the 1936 Club. Miss Linsey and her father move to be nearer relations – rather reluctant relations – but the short novel encompasses enormous amounts more, with my favourite bit being a satire on Bloomsbury parents. There’s also a lot of heart, particularly in one character’s memories of a wartime romance.

1. The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson (2006)

Finally, here is an ode to keeping books on the shelf for years – and then discovering how wonderful they are. I bought this well over a decade ago, and its moment came in 2021. This novel of a farming community in Ontario in the 1930s and 1950s is beautifully immersive, and deserves comparison to Marilynne Robinson’s work. Lucky me, there are still a couple of her books I haven’t read – and I predict at least one of them will be a contender for next year’s best books list.

Enbury Heath by Stella Gibbons

I usually get at least a few books for Christmas, and I like to start one of them immediately – there is something lovely about starting a brand new book on Christmas Day. Particularly if it is as good as Enbury Heath (1935) by Stella Gibbons, which my parents got for me.

Yes, there are quite a few Gibbons novels waiting on my shelves, but a few Gibbons aficionados had said that this one was particularly good – so I was, of course, keen to read it. This is the seventh of her novels that I’ve read, and follows the pattern of her earliest books being the ones I most like – because this is wonderful. Just as wonderful as that cover illustration, by Kerry Hyndman, would have you hoping.

Siblings Sophia, Harry and Francis Garden aren’t much upset when their father dies. He has been angry, unpredictable, alcoholic, and unkind. Only six months earlier, their much-loved and much-suffering mother had died, and Sophia had chosen not to see her father in that time. But there is a wide cast of aunts and uncles who want to see the right thing done. The Garden trio aren’t fond of many of these relatives, and openly loathe some of them, but get bustled through decorum and keeping up appearances – while secreting away anecdotes and quotes to share and laugh at together later. They have the casual unkindness of people in their late teens and early 20s when considering nuisance relatives, though it isn’t really cruel because the relatives are completely unmoved by it.

While there isn’t much money left, the inheritance that the three get is enough to rent a tiny cottage on ‘Enbury Heath’ – a stand in for Hampstead Heath. The descriptions seem to vary a little – at one point it seems to be a two-up-two-down squeezed in between larger buildings, but it also has a dining table big enough for a dozen or so, and seating for large parties, so perhaps Gibbons’ definition of tiny isn’t the same as mine (I have to limit dinner parties to three guests, especially since I put in another bookcase that means I can no longer use the leaf to extend my dining room table.)

Gibbons’ pacing is often a little erratic, and nearly a third of the book is over before the three move into the cottage. This was my favourite part of Enbury Heath – as they set up home together, and deal with arranging domestic help, embryonic careers, visiting dogs etc. Gibbons is particularly funny about dogs, actually, and I only wish she’d turned her attention to cats at similar length. It’s almost ninety years old, but some things about running a home haven’t changed. We might not get coal and laundry deliveries, but these sorts of messages are not uncommon…

The coal, for example. The firm which sold the coal simply could not be brought to believe that there existed a cottage in the Vale where no one was at home from a quarter to nine in the morning to half past six at night. It was nonsense; it was a try-on; whoever it was doing it on purpose, and the coal firm knew better than to give way to such caprices.

So they sent coal (it was only two hundredweight, to add insult to injury, for this was all that the cottage’s cellar would hold), for three days running at eleven in the morning, disregarding Sophia’s frantic telephone messages, and the would send it no more.

The same difficulty occurred with the laundry, which, like some puckish sprite, some coy elf of the dells, could never say exactly at what time it would call, but preferred to pop in winsomely whenever ‘the boy was down that way,’ which might be at any time during the day.

In the final third of the novel, Gibbons throws in a host of other characters – a girl called Mae who catches Francis’s eye, and an old school rival called Juan who gets involved with the family. It breaks all sorts of novelistic rules to have the cast disrupted at this late stage, and I don’t think they were particularly needed – but somehow it works. I was nervous when Mae arrived on the scene, because I recall Bassett and how brilliantly funny the first half of that novel was, and how tedious once it became about a love triangle. It’s certainly not that bad in Enbury Heath, though I confess I would have loved the novel more if Gibbons had stuck to the siblings in their cottage.

Apparently Enbury Heath is semi-autobiographical. For the sake of Gibbons’ actual aunts and uncles, I hope that it is very semi, but knowing that there is some basis in fact explains why the novel never feels like a fairy tale, even with a fairy tale opening. There is a grounding of reality throughout that tethers the narrative. It’s a wonderful novel, and another perfect Christmassy read.

What I Read At Christmas

Happy Christmas! I hope you had a lovely time – hopefully better than last year. I went to my parents’ house, as did my brother, so it felt like a lovely family Christmas. Very relaxed, if you don’t count the fiendish board games and quizzes. And plenty of reading, of course. In fact, the two books I finished have rather beautifully pairing covers.

A Snowfall of Silver by Laura Wood

A Snowfall of Silver by Laura Wood | WaterstonesLast year, on the recommendation of Sarra Manning on Instagram, I bought Laura Wood’s A Snowfall of Silver – and I was saving it for a special occasion, because it felt like it would be the perfect book to read at Christmas. And, goodness me, it was.

Wood’s novel was published last year, but is set in 1931. The briefest synopsis sold me: 18-year-old Freya runs away from Cornwall to London, because she is desperate to become an actor. Her sister Lou lives there – probably with her boyfriend Robert, Freya suspects, though outwardly he lives elsewhere. And so Freya turns up on her doorstep, having taken the train and feeling very dramatic about the whole thing. As Lou points out, she could equally have arranged to stay with their parents’ permission, but to Freya’s mind that wouldn’t have set the tone.

On the train, she meets a tall young man called Kit – he is reading a book, has broad shoulders and freckles, and it is instantly obvious to the reader that they are destined to be together. He also works with a theatrical company, though not as an actor, and is able to get Freya introduced to the director – who is a bit past his heyday, but is still deeply famous in Freya’s corner of Cornwall.

One thing leads to another and Freya goes off on a six-week tour, as an assistant to the woman in charge of costumes. The attractive, volatile cast, the grande dame, the wide-eyed ingenue – all the puzzle pieces are in place for a rollicking, delightful journey.

It’s published as young adult fiction, but I think any adult would find it great fun too. We might not fall for the central love story with quite as much naïve joy, not least because Kit is never fully fleshed-out and is more a place for a younger reader to superimpose their own fantasy, but it’s still a really lovely book. My main quibble was that Lou and Robert seemed too fun to get so few pages – so I was pleased to discover that Wood has written an earlier book where they are the main characters. I suppose it spoils that they end up together, but in this sort of book that is never in doubt.

Infused by Henrietta Lovell

Infused: Adventures in Tea: Amazon.co.uk: Lovell, Henrietta: 9780571324392:  BooksThe other book I started and finished was Infused by Henrietta Lovell, published in 2019 – a non-fiction book with the subtitle ‘Adventures in Tea’, given to me for my birthday by my friend Lorna.

Lovell is the owner of Rare Teas, a tea brand that sells leaf tea and which I have now ordered a little pile from. In Infused, Lovell takes us all over the world with her as she goes in search of the finest teas – and her ways of describing the adventures, the tastes, and the quiet but passionate joy of sampling nuances between different infusions is all very, very infectious. The humble teabag is dismissed throughout Infused, including some industry secrets on why even the fancy brands aren’t giving you great stuff – and while I doubt I’ll become a leaf tea drinker exclusively, I do want to try some Rare Tea and see how differently I can experience my favourite drink.

But even if you hate tea, there is a lot to enjoy in the way Lovell writes, and the way she approaches the adventures she’s experienced – from crafting a tea for the RAF to exploring Malawi to climbing mountainsides in search of the rarest teas. While she is clearly an expert, she writes with a fervour that is accessible – and admits her own incapability when it comes to certain aspects, like hand-rolling tea leaves.

Choose good tea, tea sourced directly from a farmer rather than faceless brokers. The knock-on effect of that choice will be manifold. You’ll be supporting communities around the world, people trying to work their way out of poverty into a sustainable future. You’ll help maintain great skills and keep craftmanship from disappearing under mechanisation. You might even force the giant conglomerates to change the way they do things.

This is a call to arms, comrades.

And there is no hardship in this calling. In choosing to drink good tea, we might change the world and give ourselves the greatest pleasure.

Others on the go…

I got about halfway through Stella Gibbons’ Enbury Heath, a delightful novel about three siblings inheriting a legacy and buying a small cottage together. I also started Ian Hamilton’s The Keepers of the Flame, about the history of literary estates and biography through major figures of literature, from Donne to Plath. All my Christmas reads have turned out to be good in one way or another, and were carefully chosen. And, of course, there were a pile among my Christmas presents…

The Beatles: Get Back

I was offered a review copy of The Beatles: Get Back to accompany the TV documentary about them. I absolutely don’t like The Beatles, but my brother Colin is a big fan… so I got it sent to him instead. And here are his thoughts – over to you, Col!

The Beatles: Get Back: Amazon.co.uk: The Beatles, Harris, John, Jackson,  Peter, Kureishi, Hanif, Russell, Ethan A., McCartney, Linda: 9780935112962:  Books
“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” – The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

For over 50 years, it has not been enough for Beatles fans to know the songs: we have to know about the songs, and what was happening when the songs were written, and where, and why, and how they changed along the way. Hey Jude? Originally conceived as Hey Jules, written by Paul about John’s son Julian while his parents were going through a divorce, but John thought it was about him, and Paul said it was actually about himself, too. Yesterday? The melody came to Paul in a dream, he asked everyone if they recognised it, and when no one did he started writing it as ‘Scrambled eggs / Oh my baby how I love your legs’. Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite? Transcribed almost word for word by John from a circus poster. You get the picture.

These, and many more, have passed into Beatles lore, and while some are contested – was Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds about LSD, or just about a picture Julian Lennon painted of his classmate? Was Blackbird really a subtle reference to the civil rights movement? – there is no doubting that the Beatles are the most talked-about band in history. And it’s not just the songs: almost every moment of their turbulent domination of the 1960s has produced its own legend, from Ringo learning how to play chess during the recording of Sgt. Pepper, to his rotating of his cymbals ninety degrees in case he was shot at in America, to his tendency when attempting to write tunes to inadvertently play whatever was in the charts at the time, to his suitcase full of baked beans, to his tonsillitis, to… well, again, you get the picture. And that’s just Ringo.

A huge part of the Beatles legend is, of course, their break-up. Every Beatles fan knows that Ringo left the band briefly during the recording of The Beatles (aka the White Album), returning to find his drum kit covered in flowers with a message saying he was the best drummer in the world (the line from John about him not even being the best drummer in the Beatles was – of course – never said by John; it was a Jasper Carrott joke). We know that George briefly departed during the Let It Be sessions; that John later broke up the band, calling it a ‘divorce’; and that Paul set the seal in the press release accompanying his album McCartney. And we all know that the recording of Let It Be was an acrimonious affair, filled with bitterness and backbiting (and Yoko), leading inevitably to the end of the Fab Four. That, at least, is the legend.

The Beatles, against the advice of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, have not printed the legend. Instead, with Peter Jackson’s 468 minute docuseries The Beatles: Get Back and this accompanying book – almost entirely a transcript of the series and credited as being ‘by the Beatles’ – the legend has been challenged. It is not the first time – the 2003 re-edit Let It Be… Naked included 22 bonus minutes of audio clips from the sessions, painting them in a more harmonious light – but it is by far the most comprehensive. Acrimony – what acrimony?

The docuseries comprises footage filmed by director Michael Lindsay-Hogg for what was originally intended to be part of a TV special, but became the feature film Let It Be. That film was released in 1970 and is not currently officially available (about 15 years ago I watched a version that I thought I’d obtained legitimately); it was responsible for many of the legends that built up about the Beatles’ breakdown, perhaps the most famous of which being George telling Paul: “I’ll play whatever you want me to play, or I won’t play at all if you don’t want me to play.” That scene remains in place, and is there on p46 of the book, but even there a bit more context is given to show that, though clearly frustrated, both Paul and George were trying to do what they thought was best for each other and for the group.

In some quarters, the documentary has been criticised as concealing the true extent of the Beatle’s animosity, and it’s true that some elements either weren’t caught on camera or were deliberately omitted (John’s heroin addiction at the time is not properly covered, for example), but some of the criticism seems to stem from jealousy that the baton of the Beatles legend has been passed on. Philip Norman, biographer of the Beatles and previous keeper of the flame, complains that George and John’s fist fight is not included; this, though, is because it didn’t happen: the docuseries shows them laughing over fallacious reports of it at the time, and even talking about suing the reporter.

If the intention here was to show that everything was happiness and smiles, though, it has failed. The cavernous Twickenham studio where the Beatles were initially huddled seems to have been just as unhappy a setting as always imagined, with minimal productivity – lots of time is spent playing through old tunes and discussing the many and various plans for a concert that may be on a boat, or in Tripoli, or in the Houses of Parliament, but in fact will never actually materialise – and plenty of rancour. The Beatles: Get Back shows (which Let It Be didn’t) George quitting the Beatles, with the beautifully casual “I think I’ll be leaving the band now” (his famous “See you round the clubs” parting line was not caught by the microphones); it also makes clear why he was driven to that point, facing lectures from Paul and seeing his compositions disregarded while vast amounts of time were spent on other, lesser, songs. One particular scene shows him playing a rough version of I Me Mine, one of the standouts of the album, to almost no interest from John – who was offering the likes of Dig a Pony: a fun song, but not in the same league. Paul, of course, was producing all-time classics like Get Back, Let It Be and The Long and Winding Road, as well as trying to keep the band together.

The documentary does succeed, though, in showing that things weren’t as bad as the legend says. There is almost no fighting between John and Paul – one of the more surprising segments is a lengthy defence of Yoko’s permanent presence by the latter (“Let the young lovers stay together […] they just want to be near each other”) – and there is plenty of laughing and joking, even after Georg’s departure, and (following several crisis talks that were not recorded) after his return. It’s a cliché, but they really were like a family: they may have fought, and fought badly, but underneath it all they did love each other. Once they relocated to Abbey Road alongside keyboardist Billy Preston (there are some surprisingly serious conversations about inviting him to become the fifth Beatle), the atmosphere is palpably warmer. As, indeed, the legend has always said it was.

That, though, demonstrates one of the problems of the book, as opposed to the docuseries. It’s wonderful – for a Beatles fanatic – to see with your own eyes the intimate camaraderie of the Beatles, in beautifully remastered footage that looks like it was recorded yesterday; it is rather less wonderful to read it. Even the most dedicated Beatlemaniac will gain little joy from reading the likes of: ‘George: What sort of vegetables do you like?’ or ‘Yoko: I’m trying [the toast] without marmalade today, you know.’ Or, for example, when Peter Sellers comes to visit the set (he’s about to film The Magic Christian with Ringo), it’s incredibly awkward and he’s clearly embarrassed to be there, but none of that comes through in the text itself. And then, of course, there’s the music…

It is perhaps a little obvious to say that one of the main selling points of the docuseries is watching and hearing the Beatles make music together. While very little is created from scratch in the studio – each member of the band would start writing something at home, then bring it in to be developed – the most thrilling part of the series, musically speaking, is watching Paul putting together Get Back. He plays a few chords; it becomes recognisable; out of almost nothing comes a familiar favourite, which they will later return to over and over, perfecting it in time for their famous rooftop concert. It’s a beautiful moment that is not really fully captured by ‘Paul leads a very early version of ‘Get Back’’ (p53 of the book). This is a shortcoming that comes through time and time again in reading the book: The Beatles without the music are just four young men (all of them in their 20s) fighting a bit, laughing a bit, and climbing onto a roof.

The fascinating revelations are mostly still there – the eagerness with which the Beatles read their own press; George saying the group should ‘divorce’; Paul suggesting using strings for The Long and Winding Road long before Phil Spector was castigated for adding them – but we’ve already got them on the screen, and if I wanted them written down I could have done it myself. It’s difficult to understand what purpose the book is intended to serve: there’s no index, so it doesn’t even make it easier to track down particular conversations. It has beautiful pictures, but we’ve just had nearly eight hours of beautiful pictures, and those ones moved. We get a call sheet showing that the documentarians thought Mal Evans (the Beatles’ long-term roadie) was called Mel Evans; we get a slightly mystifying introduction from Hanif Kureishi, a playwright with no apparent connection to the project or to the Beatles, other than the fact that – like half the world – he’s a fan; we also get a foreword from Peter Jackson himself, who says: “When Apple Corps told me about this book, based on the transcribed audio conversations, I must admit was dubious […] the first time I read the book you hold in your hands, I realised how wrong I was.”

I’m afraid, Peter, that you were right the first time. The docuseries is fascinating (if overlong) and essential viewing for all Beatles fanatics; this book is, unfortunately, beautiful and unnecessary.

A couple of recent audiobooks

I go back and forth with my Audible subscription. I’m currently back in – and have discovered the Audible Plus catalogue, where you can download free audiobooks that have been added to that collection. There are thousands of the things, with no clear criteria why they’re in – some classics, some look to be self-published with audiobook covers designed in Paint. It takes some scrolling through, but I have managed to find some books of interest. (Any recommendations?)

And here are a couple of books I’d already added to my Audible wishlist – and I was pleased to see, when I re-joined, that they were labelled as freely available to me.

The Elephants in My Backyard eBook by Rajiv Surendra | Official Publisher  Page | Simon & Schuster UKThe Elephants in My Backyard by Rajiv Surendra

If you know Rajiv Surendra’s work at all, it’s probably as the rapping mathlete Kevin G from teen classic Mean Girls. I think I read about this 2016 memoir in a Buzzfeed article – but I’m really glad I did. Perhaps against the odds of that opening description, it’s really very good.

Surendra was on the set of Mean Girls when a member of the crew recommended that he read Yann Martel’s Life of Pi – because it’s “a book about you”. Naturally intrigued, Surendra reads – and is instantly captivated. While he doesn’t live the same life as Pi, a Tamil boy in India who is shipwrecked with a tiger, there are other things the same. Surendra’s parents are Tamil and from Sri Lanka; Surendra matches the physical description of Pi. He becomes determined to play the role of Pi in a film.

At this point, there isn’t even a film in the offing. But Surendra starts planning – and even gets in touch with Martel, who proves a remarkably kind and patient correspondent over the coming years (his emails are included in the book). The determination to play the role really becomes an obsession. Over the next few years, Surendra moves for a period to India, he learns some Tamil, he learns to swim, he turns down other acting work on the off-chance that casting for Life of Pi will happen.

In the background to all of this, he naturally shares his own life. And much of that is quite desperate. An alcoholic father, prone to violent outbursts, haunts his home life. His work is mostly playing a character at an interactive historic farm. We get to know him, and he is mostly likeable and interesting – able to laugh at himself, and to convey what it’s like to be so single-minded in pursuit of a goal. (There are some regrettable body shaming moments, and some of the humour doesn’t quite land, but those are only small annoyances in the grand scheme of the book.)

Usually this sort of book is written by someone explaining how they got to where they are. But if you’ve seen Life of Pi, then you’ll know… Rajiv Surendra doesn’t get the part. In the end, despite having a good chat with the casting director, he doesn’t even get an audition. Six years of his life have been dedicated to something that didn’t work out. His lasting acting credit on iMDB is 2005. It’s fascinating to listen to a book like this from the perspective of someone who didn’t make it. There are, of course, any number of actors who commit utterly to their dream and end up not making it. Those stories are probably more valuable to hear. The ones who didn’t luck out.

And it’s a really good, interesting memoir. I’ve never read or seen Life of Pi, but I think all you need to enjoy it is an interest in people and what motivates them.

 

The Wall cover artThe Wall by Marlen Haushofer

I’ve not managed to track down who recommended this Austrian novel from 1963 (translated from German by Shaun Whiteside). I must have seen it somewhere and found the premise interesting enough to pop on my list. And that premise is: an unnamed narrator is visiting a couple friends in a remote farmhouse. They go off to a nearby town for an evening meal, leaving her behind. In the morning, they still haven’t returned.

On her wandering to see what’s happened to them, she finds something impossible. An invisible wall is stopping her going any further. Beyond it, she can see that people and animals are all frozen – clearly having died instantly.

Within the wall are acres and acres of empty land. It’s never clear quite how big it is, but she can travel for hours and find nobody and nothing – except animals. There are enough trout and deer for her to eat, and there is a dog (Lynx), a cat (Cat), and a cow (Bella). From the vantage of a couple of years on, she documents her experiences in surviving, and in developing a deep kinship with those animals.

Haushofer’s story is told quite slowly and gently, never flashing past an experience that she can detail. She is particularly good at the behaviour of animals – well, she’s very good at cats, and I assume she is good at dogs and cows. But over it all is a sense of looming dread – because the narrator has told us that the animals die, and that something bad has caused it.

I did find the end weirdly rushed and odd, after the gentle pacing of the rest of the story. I’m assuming it is a parable for something, or done with deliberate effect, but I am not at all convinced that it worked. Similarly unsuccessful (to my mind) were the occasional attempts to rationalise why she thought the wall was there, and who might be to blame – it worked better as something inexplicable.

These quibbles apart, it is a very impressive work. I do find that fine writing doesn’t work as well for me in audio as on the page. Maybe I’m more into story than prose when I’m listening? And the reader of the audiobook was a bit breathy and soft, which didn’t feel quite right. ANYWAY in summary perhaps I should have read this one as a book, but I still found it really interesting and would recommend. Not least because I want to talk to anyone and everyone about that ending, to try and understand why she did it.