2010s

The Desert and the Drum by Mbarek Ould Beyrouk

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I can now claim to have read all the novels from Mauritania that have been translated into English – because it is one: The Desert and the Drum by Mbarek Ould Beyrouk, originally published in French in 2015 and translated by Rachael McGill in 2018.

The novel is narrated by Rayhana, a young woman who is only recently an adult – she is on the run from her Bedouin tribe, though we don’t yet know why. Not only has she run from her community, she has stolen the ceremonial drum that is the most prized object belonging to her tribe – and she is heading across the desert to safety and a new life.

It was time to detach myself from the old ways: I was no longer from here. I was from nowhere, and I was going faraway. Straight ahead.

The Desert and the Drum takes place in several timelines – one shows her escape to a city, which is quite insignificant as cities go, but feels enormous and crowded to her. Alongside, we see her life in the tribe and the events that lead to her wanting to escape. I shan’t spoil any of them, but Beyrouk is very clever in the way he tells us things in increments that are just satisfying enough to keep the mystery going.

Rayhana only knows her tribe. Her father left years ago, but she is from one of the more important families of the community. Only desperation can take her from the safety of this communal lifestyle, and the confusion she faces in a city is done very well. That confusion leads quickly to distaste for the ways of life that are acceptable, and the way that city-dwellers have forgotten their past:

I began to feel disdain for the town and everyone in it. People seemed to have forgotten what they’d been only yesterday, what their fathers and their fathers’ fathers had been. They were content to no longer be nomadic, to no longer feel the sun on their heads. They were happy to eat new dishes made not with their own wheat or barley, or with the meat or milk of their own animals. They were proud of all that; they thought it meant they could look down on those of us who had stayed as we were, who hadn’t succumbed to the temptations of the new.

Meanwhile, change also came to the Bedouin tribe’s encampment a while earlier – what turned out to be workers on a government contract, drilling for resources.

Monsters of iron and steel appeared one day from nowhere. no one had warned us thy were coming. First we heard an enormous roar. Some people thought it was thunder, but the sky remained an unblemished blue. Others turned their eyes towards the mountains; the faraway summits stood steadfast and serene. The earth began to tremble beneath our feet. We listened, worried, and strained our eyes towards the horizon. In the distance, a cloud of ochre dust rose towards the sky. We remained immobile, gaping at this sight for which we had no name. When we realised the rumbling and the storm were coming towards us, panic spread like wildfire: people ran to hide behind dunes or collect livestock, men went to get their guns, women grabbed their children and ran inside tents. The tribal drum sounded to summon those who were away from the camp. We watched, stunned and powerless, as the terrible unknown thing approached.

I said at the beginning that this novel was ‘from Mauritania’ – it’s by a Mauritanian, about Mauritania, but I note in a comment from the translator on A Year of Reading the World that it was initially published in Tunisia. And the book certainly expects the reader to be unfamiliar with the mores of Bedouin people. It’s a difficult balance to strike: maintaining a first-person narrative of someone who has group up in her tribe and to whom customs obviously aren’t a surprise, while also making them accessible to the reader who knows nothing. Beyrouk finds this balance brilliantly, explaining from the inside – writing for the outsider, but without ever dropping the intimacy of Rayhana’s lived experience. This is particularly notable when he is writing about traditions surrounding weddings – Rayhana says what they are, but in sentences about how the individual acts are affecting her. They are gently introduced and explained, but in a way that would also make sense in the context of a conversation with somebody who knew them all already. It must have taken some doing, and it works very well. He finds the emotions of the moment, not an anthropological thesis.

That is true throughout. While the author is a man with far more education that Rayhana has at this time, there is a feeling of authenticity and immediacy throughout the novel. I certainly felt that I understood a great deal more about one way of life than I had before – and about clashing ways of life in a Mauritania where traditions and modernisation can collide, without either being ‘better’ than the other, just jarringly different to someone like Rayhana trying to make the leap between them.

I suppose the marker of an excellent translator is that you don’t notice their work, and I certainly never found the translation an obstacle to the excitement and insight of the novel. I really liked it, and I’m hoping that his other two novels might also get translated…

All Among the Barley by Melissa Harrison: EUPL Giveaway!

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The European Prize for Literature (EUPL) is an annual prize that awards emerging authors from across 41 countries in Europe – and, because of lockdown making promotion of the prize more difficult, I’m one of the bloggers who has been asked to help raise awareness of the prize and of the UK winner – Melissa Harrison, with All Among the Barley. I’ll get onto that, but first here’s a quick video explaining what the prize is… (I’ll also be doing a giveaway – check out the bottom of the post for that.)

I’m all for prizes that raise awareness of authors we wouldn’t otherwise hear of, and my reading of non-British European writers is pretty lamentable. It’s even more lamentable when it comes to those writing now. And I’m afraid that hasn’t changed with the 2019 winner I’m writing about, because she’s British, but at least I can go and look at the others among the 13 winners awarded in 2019.

I had heard of All Among the Barley before I was sent it to review, but I think only because I’d been so drawn to that beautiful cover. The ploughed fields, the swallows (maybe; look, I don’t know anything about birds). I am in danger of being like the townies who wander through the setting of 1930s Suffolk, seeing only the idyllic and not noticing the hard work, the striving for modernity, and the real lives behind the thatched cottages – particularly during a year apparently famous for drought. Except I grew up in the countryside, so I know it can be beautiful and difficult simultaneously.

My name is Edith June Mather and I was born not long after the end of the Great War. My father, George Mather, had sixty acres of arable land known as Wych Farm; it is somewhere not far from here, I believe. Before him my grandfather Albert farmed the same fields, and his father before him, who ploughed with a team of oxen and sowed by hand. I would like to think that my brother Frank, or perhaps one of his sons, has the living of it now; but a lifetime has passed since I was last on its acres, and because of everything that happened I have been prevented from finding out.

This is the opening page – well, the opening after a quick preface – and it quickly immerses us in the world she lived in. That ‘I would like to think’ sentence gives the reader a sense of mystery, but we forget it (I forgot it) as we are swept into her world. Edie is a young 13-year-old, a little more innocent than the other children in the community, a little less prepared for the outside world. At the same time, she fully knows difficulties. Her father drinks too much. Her mother has to make up for his shortcomings. She sees poverty, vice, brokenness. But she also sees the beauty of the world around her – and Harrison is wonderful at natural descriptions, giving not just the aesthetics of the stunning countryside but also its practicalities.

In October, Wych Farm’s trees turned quickly and all at once, blazing into oranges and reds and burnished golds; with little wind to strip them the woods and spinneys lay on our land like treasure, the massy hedgerows filigreed with old-man’s-beard and enamelled with rosehips and black sloes. Along the winding course of the River Stound the alder carrs were studded with earthstars and chanterelles and dense with the rich, autumnal stink of rot; but crossing Long Piece towards The Lottens the sky opened into austere, equinoctial blue, where flocks of peewits wheeled and turned, flashing their broad wings black and white. At dawn, dew silvered the spiders’ silk strung between the grass blades in our pastures so that the horses left trails where they walked, like the wakes of slow vessels in still water. 

Into this world comes Constance FitzAllen. She shocks the locals by wearing trousers, and is there to document the old rural ways of life, and is keen to preserve it. I was initially reminded of Valentine Ackland, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s partner, who made similar investigations in similar trousers – but her resulting book, Country Conditions, was about the importance of good plumbing and hygiene in rural communities. Connie is much more concerned with setting rural life in amber – writing for a journal, but also lamenting any developments. Edie’s family don’t take kindly to this at first – they want machines that do the work faster; why would they roast food on an open fire if a modern oven is superior? – but they are won over by her charm and enthusiasm.

And Connie does come across as a delightful character. I was fully charmed by her. Which… well, I shan’t say more on that front.

Edie is certainly charmed by her, and sees her as a gateway into a new way of thinking – London, confidence, and adulthood. I find coming-of-age novels tricky sometimes, but I thought Harrison did a great job of showing the development of a teenage, torn between the dual wishes to enter adulthood and to remain in the safety of childhood.

And now the elephant in the room for anyone who knows my taste well: historical fiction. We know I’m not a fan. I have read so very many novels written in the 1930s that I did wonder why I’d need someone writing in the 2010s to tell me about that world. Sometimes it didn’t quite work – Harrison was very obviously writing from 80+ years’ distance, and the mores and morals of the 21st century seeped between the cracks of the world she was depicting. There was the implicit value system of a later day – but this was ok because Edie was also looking back, if not from 2019 then from many decades after the fact.

And there are twists and developments, which I shan’t spoil, that nobody writing in 1933 would have included.

All in all, I was impressed by Harrison’s writing style and descriptive abilities, fond of Edie, and startled by my own earlier reactions when more details of this world emerge…

* * Giveaway time! * *

EUPL are offering up a free copy – if you’d like one, please tell me your favourite rural novel (or novel with a rural setting) in the comments. I’ll pick a winner on Sunday 17 May 2020. It’s open anywhere in the world (though lockdown may mean it’s an ebook, depending who wins. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it!)

And head over to the European Prize for Literature site to learn more about them.

Notes on Suicide by Simon Critchley

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For my second book for Lizzy and Karen’s Fitzcarraldo Fortnight, I read Notes on Suicide by Simon Critchley – a very, very short 2015 book. It’s 92 pages in total, but the last fifteen or so of those reprint a David Hume essay on suicide. So Critchley is covering an astonishingly complex subject in very few pages. So this will be an equally brief review!

Not only that, he says he wants to do it from personal, philosophical, literary, religious, and moral angles.

It’s a tall order and, of course, he only scratches the surface. And I think it was best when he nudged towards the personal – not necessarily his own life (though the book opens ‘this is not a suicide note’) but other individuals, famous or not. He looks through the common themes of suicide notes, and considers them almost as art. They appear in the narrative to illustrate Critchley’s point, or to divert the paragraph into a different direction, even though we seldom know from where or how they’ve been selected. For instance, Critchley described this as one of the most poignant suicide notes he’s read:

Dear Betty,

I hate you.

Love, George.

I found the sections on moral philosophy a little less interesting, because they are rather cursory and abstract – and have obviously been considered in rather more detail elsewhere. He can hardly hope to plumb the depths of the topic in a handful of pages. But even a moment like his question ‘Why do we find suicide sad?’ can lead to all sorts of other questions in the reader’s mind, to contemplate in their own time.

And somehow the mix of the intimate and the global, the detailed and the distant, make Notes on Suicide a brief but captivating book. It barely touches the surface of what could be said about it, but it still made me think more deeply about this difficult and curious topic. And that’s probably one of the best things you can ask of an essay.

Love Notes From Freddie by Eva Rice

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I got Love Notes From Freddie (2015) as a review copy, based on how much I’d enjoyed her novels The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets and The Misinterpretation of Tara Jupp, so I don’t know why it took me quite so long to get to it. In fact, I did give it a go a couple of years ago and wasn’t in the right mood – but Project Names made me get it off the shelf again.

I suppose I should start by saying that I was under Miss Crewe’s spell from the moment she walked into the room, picked up a piece of chalk and scratched an isosceles triangle on the blackboard. She had that effect on people – made all the more remarkable by her absolute blindness to her own power.

Reading it this time, I can see why it was a tougher sell than the others. It starts off in a school in the late 1960s, and you get the feeling that it might all be about detentions and stern headmistresses and that sort of thing. Marnie Fitzpatrick is the focus – a goodie two-shoes who is excellent at maths and impresses her teacher Miss Crewe. But perhaps she doesn’t want to stay well-behaved and predictable all the time – one of the reasons that she gets drunk with her friend Rachel. But during school hours and in school uniform – and so she and Rachel are expelled. Marnie is off to a different school that doesn’t have the inspirational Miss Crewe.

The chapters are alternatively from the perspectives of Marnie and Miss Crewe – we learn that the latter was an excellent dancer in her youth, but an injury (and her natural brilliance at mathematics) led to a teaching career.

They’re both interesting characters, but I didn’t find the initial set-up particularly interesting. Thankfully, though, it is just a background to what follows. And what follows is (finally!) Freddie. The novel certainly gets a new lease of life when he arrives, and we breathe a sigh of relief that the novel won’t be about a maths prodigy’s education. (Unless you wanted to read that sort of novel, I suppose, then you’ll be disappointed – but it didn’t seem quite to fit.) Marnie comes across Freddie at the local factory, where he works as an electrician. But he also uses the space to dance. Marnie sees him at it, and decides to volunteer her old maths teacher as a possible dance teacher. Diffidently, Freddie agrees.

Describing dancing is a difficult task, but Rice manages to convey the freedom Freddie feels when he can dance – along with the uncertainty, the self-criticism, and the insecurity – all from the perspective of somebody watching the dance, because we never hear from Freddie himself. And the perspectives of Marnie and Miss Crewe, watching him dance in different chapters, are cleverly different. Marnie sees him with the adoring eyes of a girl falling in love for the first time. Miss Crewe sees him with more world-weariness – superimposing her own failed dancing career, and the short-lived romance from the same period.

From here, Rice’s excellent storytelling ability takes us through to the end of the novel. It was a slower start than the other two I’ve read, but perhaps a deeper emotional centre once we’ve got going. There is a joy to the novel, but it is offset with greater uncertainty. Marnie’s naivety clashes with Miss Crewe’s hard-lost hope, and Freddie is somewhere between the two. Rice is very good at young love and the exuberant anxiety of it – and she’s equally good at reining the novel in to something more nuanced and cautious than a straightforward romance.

So, if you give this one a go, power through the maths at the beginning and get to something with Rice’s special touch. Or loiter in the maths and the school scenes, if that’s your jam.

To The Bright Edge of the World by Eowyn Ivey

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My book group doesn’t really have any rules, but there are a couple that people have voiced support for. I would love if we implemented a 350-page-maximum rule, and there are others who think we should only recommend books we’ve already read. I am vehemently anti this rule, because my choices for book group are broadly made for one reason: because I own them and want to read them, but not quite enough to do so off my own bat.

Step forward To The Bright Edge of the World (2016) by Eowyn Ivey, which I got as a review copy a few years ago. I’d read and loved The Snow Child – I say ‘loved’, but in fact I found it so emotionally vivid and painful that I had to stop for about six months in the middle. But Ivey was a brilliant storyteller and I wanted to try her again.

And then the book arrived. And it was enormous. And historical. And about icy exploration. That is not a list of ingredients that warms my heart, even despite Claire’s very enthusiastic review. So – book group it was!

There are two main characters who narrate To The Bright Edge of the World, and they don’t spend a lot of time together on the page despite being married. Colonel Allen Forrester has been sent off to the uncharted territories of Alaska with a band of men in 1885, tasked with reporting back. For a while it looks like his wife Sophie might join him, and I was quite excited about seeing a woman doing something adventurous. As it turns out, though, she’s pregnant and she stays behind – so the novel is told through their diaries and occasional letters.

Look, I’m not that interested in icy exploration. I keep calling it that because I don’t know what we call non-polar exploration in the ice… frontier exploration? And Ivey writes very vividly about this trip, taking us inch by frustrating inch along their journey. I did find Forrester a very warm, lovable character, unafraid to express how deeply he loves and admires his new wife – as well as his affections and frustrations with the various other men on his trip. But I suppose I’d have found him a more enjoyable character in a drawing room than in a makeshift camp. I will confess that I ended up reading some of these sections very quickly, not necessarily picking up every single detail…

And when I say ‘exploration’, I should add that they weren’t the first people there. Along the way they encounter several native Alaskans, and it’s interesting to read the meeting of cultures – particularly when Alaskan myth and miracle is woven into the novel. And one of the men strikes up a very close relationship with a native Alaskan. Like many historical novels, twenty-first-century morality guides which characters are admirable. I suspect we wouldn’t find many explorers of the time who were quite so considerate to native Alaskans, nor who had such feminist sensibilities.

Speaking of, mine were rather more invested in Sophia back home. She is a brilliant mixture of intelligent determination and uncertainty – keen to face life bravely, but also young and naive. She has a lot to contend with in the pregnancy (and there are some heartbreaking sections where he writes joyfully about her pregnancy while she is finding it terrifying and difficult), and she has plenty to content with in the patriarchal society. And then her interest in photography blooms. That’s much more up my street than exploration! I loved reading about her processes, and her intent attempts to capture stunning wildlife photography.

Ultimately, and unsurprisingly for me, I found the novel wildly too long. It would have been a better novel with at least a hundred pages shaved off it. Unless sections of it were meant to reflect the wearying, slow process of getting through inhospitable Alaska?

But I enjoyed it nevertheless. The strength of it is the characters. And for those who like exploration, that will be an addition rather than an obstacle. In fact, just go over and read Claire’s review? I didn’t have quite her experience with it, but I got plenty vicarious enjoyment from her enjoyment of it. And if I were a rating man, I’d give it a solid 7/10 myself.

Notes Made While Falling by Jenn Ashworth

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Image result for notes made while fallingSometimes you read a book so unusual, so defying of genre, that it’s hard to know what to write about it. Something that is experimental with language and format without ever losing its tethering to the ground. All I can say is that Notes Made While Falling (2019) is special, and reading was an extraordinary experience.

Well, that’s not all I can say, because I’m going to keep writing this. Notes Made While Falling is non-fiction, and that’s about as comfortable as I feel putting it into a box – and even that might be too confining. It is memoir and essay and literary criticism and everything in between.

At its starting point, and the point to which it always returns, is a traumatic childbirth. Ashworth started haemorrhaging during a caesarean and was conscious but immobile for part of the operation. She heard her own blood falling onto the floor. This is an image that recurs throughout the book and with which she was clearly obsessed – it haunted her sleepless, alcohol-filled nights; it became all sorts of other images of falling. The first section of this book is a vivid, vicious, vital exploration of her own illness – a dizzying mix of clear-eyed retrospective and blurred lack of self-awareness, somehow coming together into a brilliantly written whole. She uses ‘/’ mid sentence to give two alternative sections of sentences – places where both versions are true at the same time, and a single sentence can’t hold the multiplicity of reality. I think the whole book, but especially this part, is about the fragility of narrative and the inevitability of narrative.

From here, Notes Made While Falling is a wide-ranging journey. Ashworth writes a lot about her upbringing in a strict Mormon church. (My own upbringing in a faith-filled household was nothing but a blessing, and I thought I might be irritated by another memoir that refuses to see any good in people of faith, but her church was certainly not my church, and her life had many more restrictions.) She writes about her confusing, violent father, and the time she spent in care. A lot of this comes in the form of a short story that she once wrote and which she is now elucidating and critiquing. Again, the outlines are blurred. Certainty is always something Ashworth resists, or cannot pin-point.

It’s all so original. A chapter ostensibly on why she doesn’t like King Lear is really about fathers and memories. Elsewhere she takes us from Agatha Christie to Freud to the Bulger trial to Astrid Lingren and every step makes sense, so we only know how strange the journey has been when we get to the end.

Writing about illness naturally makes the Woolf fan think about On Being Ill, and Woolf is certainly in the mix. This section is about her, and shows the sort of fluid, thought-provoking style that Ashworth brings to the book.

It is significant that Woolf foregrounds the difficulties experienced by the woman writer. The wounded woman writer, which of course she was. It is significant because wounded is a tricky thing for any woman to admit to being. Not least because any time a woman utters a sentence about her own experience, she becomes a kind of terrorist and there’s an army out there waiting to strike her down. Some days it feels like writing truthfully about her own life is the most subversive thing a woman can do. But more specifically there is also the sense that in uttering the truth of painful experience she is letting the side down and embracing the straightjacket [sic] and the hysteric’s sickbed a little too easily. That she is first with her body then again with her writing (that is, with her hands) providing hysterical ladies (the story railroads us all towards it conclusion: all they need is a good fucking, even when they’ve already been fucked). More nicely: women writing about illness risk equating womanhood itself with illness.

It’s such a rich passage, and practically every page is as rich. Incidentally, I’ve put ‘[sic]’ in there but I’m very ready to believe that the misspelling ‘straightjacket’ was intentional.

I’ve read a couple of Ashworth’s novels, and was particularly impressed by her most recent, Fell. This feels in some ways like a logical step from that, since Fell was also about illness and uncertainty and all sorts of other things. But this is a different creature, and – excellent novelist though she is – it feels like Ashworth has found her metier with Notes Made While Falling. It was a privilege to read it.

Less by Andrew Sean Greer

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Quite a while ago I was asking Twitter what recommendations I could get for funny, well-written, modern fiction. All the modern fiction I read – which is admittedly not much – seems to be quite serious. So I wanted the twenty-first-century equivalent of all those twentieth-century writers who knew how to be funny AND turn their hand to prose.

One of the suggestions that came up more than once was Less (2017) by Andrew Sean Greer, which has the added distinction of having won the Pulitzer Prize. My friend Tom even lent me his copy – and, even better, it turned out to be a surprise entry for Project Names, where I’m reading lots of books with people’s names in the title. Because our main character is one Arthur Less. I never worked out if this was intended to sound like half-or-less, or if it would require a very particular English accent to get that from it.

As it satirised at one point in the novel, Less is a middle-class, middle-aged white man with sorrows. Though undoubtedly living a privileged existence, he is definitely on the unhappy side of things. His writing career is rather lacklustre (“too old to be fresh and too young to be rediscovered, one who never sits next to anyone on a plane who has heard of his books”), he is single, and as the novel opens he is (a) not recognised by the person organising a sci-fi event he is supposed to chair, and (b) receives a wedding invitation from an ex-boyfriend. In order to avoid the wedding and the unacknowledged feelings it would bring, Less decides to accept all the author engagements that he usually ignores. Wherever they are in the world.

As luck would have it, they all neatly line up and take him across the globe. But he is usually not wanted for his own work, but because – in his youth – he was the lover of a revered, older poet. That seems to have secured whatever reputation he does have.

Usually I find this sort of structure to a novel quite annoying – where it’s just a series of events, without a central momentum or the same set of characters to engage with. I don’t know how Greer makes it so compelling, but he certainly does. I thought Less was very good indeed – and, yes, very funny. Part of that humour came from more orchestrated humour, like Less’s belief that he speaks good German (cleverly rendered in an English translation); a lot is a gentle ongoing satire of the life of a very self-conscious, not very happy writer. Even where he is revered, he realises it is because his translator is an excellent writer. He is simply a mediocre man not quite able to accept that mediocrity – for who, after all, accepts their mediocrity.

And despite this, Less is not the butt of all the jokes by any means. The reader becomes very fond of him. I wouldn’t say I was desperate for a happy ending, but I certainly sympathised with him – Greer has the impressive gift of writing warmly about a character without writing dishonestly about him. I don’t know how much is a self-portrait, other than Greer is, like Less, also a gay writer nearing 50 who hadn’t previously had enormous success with his novels.

The things that happen in the different countries, and the transitory other characters who pop up, don’t feel as important as this central portrait. Indeed, I only finished the novel recently and I can’t remember much of the plot. But I do remember the commitment to a character and a lightly satirical style that must have been very difficult to pull off – and I can see why the Pulitzer Prize would want to reward this sort of assured writing.

 

 

The Remarkable Life of the Skin by Monty Lyman

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A little while ago I reviewed a book for Shiny New Books that you might not expect to see on my reading pile – The Remarkable Life of the Skin (2019) by Monty Lyman. Well, I’m learning that I should start reading more in areas that I don’t think will appeal. The whole review is over at Shiny New Books – below is the start.

The number of science books I’ve read can be numbered on my fingers, and the number of science books I’ve read that weren’t written by Oliver Sacks is nil. Until now! Full disclosure, Monty Lyman is a friend of mine – and that was why I picked up The Remarkable Life of the Skin. But I’m very glad I did, and would definitely recommend it to anybody who doesn’t have the privilege of being Monty’s friend.

Lyman (let’s keep this review professional) is a doctor in Oxford, and his research has specialised in dermatology. That interest has taken him around the world, and the book reports on interesting cases from most of the planet’s continents – with an especial interest in Tanzania. The real marvel of The Remarkable Life of the Skinis is how much content it packs into a relatively short space.

This Golden Fleece by Esther Rutter

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Do I know anything about knitting? Absolutely not. Actually – caveat, I knew nothing about knitting before I picked up Esther Rutter’s This Golden Fleece. Now I know rather more!

Why did I request this rather off-brand review copy? Well, Esther is a good friend of mine – and if you flick to the acknowledgements, you’ll even find my name there. It seems quite odd to call her Esther, as I know her as Phoebe or Epsie, but I should probably go with what is on the cover.

Esther’s book falls into that genre that has become quite popular since H is for Hawk – of being about a topic, but also about researching that topic. This Golden Fleece is not as deeply confessional or emotional as some in the genre, but we do follow Esther as she travels up and down the country, learning about regional knitting practices, historical details, and other eccentricities in the world of wool devotees. And it’s clear that they do have a world – one that is very welcoming to others, and where strangers will enthuse to each other about their projects and crafty passions.

While this isn’t a deeply emotional book, it is certainly a personal one. Throughout the year, Esther reveals glimpses of her family life, and also discovers that she is pregnant along the way. Her attention turns from knitting a complicated gansey for her dad to creating clothes for her future daughter. Gathering wool for these projects, and covetously looking at expensive varieties, play out alongside visits to craftspeople and collectors who can reveal glimpses into knitting’s past. But there is a feeling that the past is not too far from the present. The world of wool has certainly changed, but not as dramatically as many other worlds. With two pieces of roughly identical wood and part of a sheep, you have something in common with many generations before you. (I use ‘you’ advisedly; I have no idea how to knit, even after reading the knits and purls of This Golden Fleece.)

Some of the most interesting bits include how knitting has been a revolutionary act – e.g. being used to record secrets as part of spying, a la A Tale of Two Cities – and, of course, how knitting came into its own as a method of protest as recently as the ‘pussy hats’ when Trump became President. The stereotype of the passive, harmless knitter-in-the-background looks flimsier and flimsier, doesn’t it?

Most importantly in this book, Esther writes very well. I would expect nothing less, having studied English alongside her – which also helps with the contextualising moments, where unexpected knitters like Virginia Woolf get tangential mentions. The whole thing is very winning and engaging, and Esther’s warm, lovely personality shines through. A wonderful gift for the knitter in your life (or, of course, yourself). And, if nothing else, look how beautiful that cover is!