Tag: Literature

Women’s Prize shortlist book review – “Good Girl” by Aria Aber

It was good to see the Women’s Prize garnering lots of attention again this year – it really is coming into its own as a literary event. The non-fiction winner, Rachel Clarke’s The Story of a Heart was covered in a piece on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme the morning after, while the fiction winner, The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden, was not even mentioned. There was a bit of press interest however in the author’s acceptance speech comments about being intersex and the challenges she has faced throughout her life as a result of that, mostly the prejudice she has encountered. She also advocated for transgender people in the speech. It is worth watching and you can see it here. I do always feel the Women’s Prize ceremony is a little bit scrappy – surely they can get a bigger venue, or more organised stage appearances!

I am not sure I will read The Story of a Heart – whilst it has been described as uplifting and life-affirming, I think I might find it too emotionally challenging. It tells the true story of a heart transplant from a nine year-old girl, Kiera, who had died in a car accident, to a young boy Max, facing imminent heart failure due to a viral infection, and who needed a new heart to survive. The book is about the journey of both families.

I reviewed The Safekeep when it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year. I enjoyed the book very much, but I did not feel it was the finest book on the list. The Women’s Prize on the shortlist was somewhat different in character. I have so far read three of the other five books and whilst it has not been my favourite so far, I can see why it was chosen.

Good Girl by Aria Aber

I am going to start my reviews of the shortlist with Good Girl by Aria Aber. I think I am right in saying that Aria Aber is the youngest of the shortlisted authors and this is her debut novel. Aber is based in the US but was born and raised in Germany to Afghan immigrant parents and therein lies the rub for me – the novel reflects many of the details of her own upbringing. The central character Nila is a young woman, an art student, a talented photographer, but who has gone off the rails somewhat. Her parents were refugees from Afghanistan and have struggled to integrate in Berlin. The family lives in a run-down suburb of the city in a poorly maintained apartment block with hundreds of other immigrants who are not welcomed by the locals. The spectre of Nazism is never far away from their lived experience. Nila’s mother is dead, passing away suddenly as a middle aged woman who never fulfilled her potential; she was medically trained but her status was never accepted by the German authorities. Nila’s father simply does not know how to “be” in this society that is so alien to him, where his status as the male head of the household is neither recognised or valued, and where he is unable to get work fitting his standing. His outlet is to bully his wife and daughter.

Amidst all this ‘othering’, the unhappy home life and prejudice at school, Nila finds relief in Berlin’s underground music scene. In the clubs she is able to forget her Afghan heritage (her parents told her she should be proud, but she just feels shame and wants to hide it) and her problems at school. Instead she can lose herself in techno music, dancing, drugs and sex. On one of these nights she meets Marlowe Woods, an American writer, somewhat older than her, still dining out on past success but whose star is very much descending. His disillusion finds common cause with Nila’s hopelessness and the two strike up an intense but complicated relationship. 

I struggled to find very much to like about any of the characters in the novel. Nila is a vulnerable and troubled young woman and it is clear to see why she behaves the way she does. It is also a difficult read in the sense that the immigrant experience does not seem to have improved and the challenges of integration affect young people the most. I found it difficult to work out with Nila, what was a kind of ‘nihilism of youth’ and what could be attributed to the specifics of her situation. Parts of the novel felt like they were an angry young person who was simply rebelling and for me that was not particularly interesting. I did not like Marlowe at all, I thought he was just a creep, and I also felt the ending was a little weak. 

So, hmm, not my favourite.

I have also read The Persians, which has acquired an additional resonance for me in the light of recent events in Iran, and I felt, as far as the immigrant experience goes, this was far more cleverly and subtly done. I’ll review that next time. 

May chronicles

I’ve had another long break from blog posting, but I’m happy to report that I have had a busy month of travelling, some near and some far. It was my middle child’s 21st birthday so we made a short trip to the beautiful city of Cambridge for a family celebration. Hotel accommodation in Cambridge can be pricey and I have found that the cheaper accommodation can be hit and miss and seldom has free parking. So we stayed a little outside town at the wonderful Madingley Hall. It belongs to the University and there seemed to be some conference groups there, although it is a substantial property and was by no means full. It was beautiful, with fabulous grounds and is close to one of the park and ride facilities so I recommend it highly if you are thinking of going there.

Madingley Hall, Cambridge

A few days after the birthday I set off for Egypt! I always enjoyed travelling when I was younger, but since having my children this has been on the back burner. Our holidays have been family affairs and we have tended to stick to UK and European destinations with the kids. This has also been the first year in about two decades (!) when I have not been bound by school holidays. My husband has a busy work schedule and is less interested in exotic locations than me so I took myself off alone! Well, not exactly alone…I went on a group tour, feeling that perhaps I needed to build my confidence a bit with solo travel before going it completely alone. I could not have made a better decision! I travelled with a company called Intrepid and the tour was fantastic. It was a very international group- Australians, New Zealanders, US, Canadian and Italian citizens and even a couple of other Brits! Such a wonderful and interesting group of people, we bonded really well and I am missing them all so much. Our tour guide was brilliant, so knowledgeable about ancient Egyptian history and culture.

I had the most marvellous time and as soon as I came back I was on Intrepid’s website thinking about my next trip! Some of my fellow travellers went on to Jordan and looking at their Instagram posts I think that might be next on my list. I’ve posted some photos below. Egypt is an incredible country, with beautiful friendly people and I will definitely go back there.

I had a few days to find my feet again and catch up on laundry before I was off again, this time on what has become an annual visit for me – to the Hay Festival. For the past couple of years I have camped at the Tangerine Fields site just outside Hay on Wye, but I decided I am over camping! I stayed in a B&B in Talgarth, about 10 minutes drive from the Festival site.

I was there for three days and, as usual, had a fantastic time. There were two particular highlights for me: my final event on Saturday evening was a talk from Radiohead bass player Colin Greenwood, who has recently published a book of photographs he has taken over the years performing and recording with his band. He was very warm and candid and clearly exhausted having just returned from touring the US with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Despite this he spent almost two hours afterwards signing copies of his book How to Disappear, chatting to fans and having selfies with them – such a pro. My other highlight was seeing Kate Mosse and Jacqueline Wilson, two giants of the literary scene. Apparently, between them, they have sold 50 million books worldwide – staggering. The pair are great friends and talked about their writing habits, their current projects and many other topics. They were both so down to earth and modest.

My other events were Jeremy Bowen, BBC International Editor and often to be found reporting from the Middle East or Ukraine – I have seen him at Hay before. Listening to him is sobering indeed. I saw Hallie Rubenhold, author of best-selling non-fiction book The Five about the women victims of Jack the Ripper. she has just published a book about the case of Dr Crippen and his lover, who murdered Crippen’s first wife. She was very interesting. Less interesting was Jeremy Hunt MP. Politicians are usually good value at Hay, but I’m afraid Mt Hunt had disappointingly little gossip! He has just published a book talking about how Britain can be great again, but it struck me as somewhat blinkered about how we became un-great in the first place. His interviewer Robert Peston was a little more entertaining.


A few photos of my Hay Festival experience below.

I am looking forward to a bit of staying put in June! The winner of the Women’s Prize will be announced next week (12th June). I have a couple of reviews to post of books on the shortlist that I have read, so will aim to get those out in the next few days.

Book review – “Alias Grace” by Margaret Atwood

I have had a copy of Alias Grace on my bookshelf for years; my copy might even date back to when the paperback version came out in 1996. But, like so many of the books I own, it was some time before I got around to reading it! I watched the mini-series available on Netflix (it was made in 2017) during the Covid lockdown, I think, and thoroughly enjoyed it so I suppose I felt I didn’t need to read the book after that, but I came back to it recently and am so glad I have finally properly honoured this incredible piece of writing. 

Full disclosure, I am a huge admirer of Margaret Atwood and will probably never dislike anything she has written. She is surely one of the greatest authors alive, with countless awards and prizes to her name, including two Bookers and a PEN lifetime achievement award. I’m not sure why the Pulitzer or Nobel prizes have eluded her – surely The Handmaid’s Tale must be a candidate for both of these. The first book of hers that I read was The Blind Assassin, which won her her first Booker Prize in 2000. It was also the very first audiobook I ever listened to, on tape in my first ever little car! The job I had at the time involved a 90 mile round trip drive three days a week and my husband bought it for me to help pass the time. I felt that book was one of the most brilliant things I had read in years; my first child was a toddler so I did not have a lot of time for reading in my life at that stage – at least not adult reading! 

Alias Grace preceded The Blind Assassin. In my opinion, the later book is better, but you do get the sense of an author rising to the peak of her literary powers and experimenting with moving between time periods (which she also does in The Handmaid’s Tale, of course). Alias Grace is the story of a double murder and a young woman convicted for the crime. Grace Marks was a young Irish immigrant to Canada and after the death of her mother (on board the ship) she leaves her drunken abusive father and, much to her guilt and shame, her younger siblings, to get a job as a servant girl. She finds a position with Thomas Kinnear, an unmarried gentleman who is having an illicit affair with his housekeeper, and Grace’s immediate supervisor, Nancy Montgomery. 

After the couple are murdered in brutal circumstances, Grace is convicted of the crime along with James McDermott, who also worked for Kinnear. McDermott escapes with Grace, but the pair are soon captured, convicted and sentenced to hang. Grace’s sentence is later commuted to life in prison following appeals by a group of well-meaning supporters who believe she was merely an accessory to McDermott’s wicked plan. She is eventually allowed to work as a servant in the home of the prison governor, because she is a docile and obedient inmate. Her supporters eventually arrange for a psychiatrist, Dr Simon Jordan from America, to interview her over a period of time and to produce a report which they hope will help to secure her release. 

Atwood uses these interviews to tell us the story; Grace gives a full account of her life to Dr Jordan, from the beginning, her early childhood in northern Ireland, to her mother’s death, and finally her experiences working for Mr Kinnear and Nancy Montgomery and the murders themselves. For the reader, the question becomes, is Grace a reliable witness? This is a dilemma Dr Jordan finds himself in too. Over the months he spends time with her, he also gets drawn into her world and the patient/doctor boundary becomes blurred. 

The book is based on real events – these murders actually took place and Grace Marks was a real woman convicted of the crime in mid-19th century Canada. At the end of the novel, the author gives an account of the facts she has gleaned from contemporaneous and historical sources. No-one really knows exactly what happened; the reader, like others who have investigated this grisly crime, must make up their own mind. But Atwood does not leave her readers dissatisfied (at least not this one!) – she leaves you with a question. And in her subtle portrayal of Grace, she leaves you with enough space to draw whatever conclusion you want. Or to leave you as perplexed as, it seems, everyone else has been.

I recommend this book highly – it’s a really significant literary achievement. 

The Womens’ Prizes 2025

I’ve had a little blogging hiatus these last few weeks, and, unfortunately, a bit of a reading hiatus, never desirable. The day job and kids coming home from university for the Easter break have cut short my time. We also had a a short holiday in our beloved Zeeland, which was relaxing but full.

Views I never tire of: (clockwise from top left) Village Scaldia, Hoofdplaat, Zeeland; Middelburg; the Scheldt estuary; the Begijnhof, Bruges

While I was away, this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist was announced, and a very interesting selection it is. It was a big surprise to me that Dream Count, the long-awaited new novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche (I flagged this as one of the highlights among new books out this spring, just a couple of weeks ago) did not make the shortlist. A further surprise was that Yael van der Wouden’s Safe Keep, shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year, did make it. I enjoyed Safe Keep but it didn’t feel like a prize-winning novel when I read it last autumn.

Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel Tell Me Everything has also made the shortlist. She is an author I admire hugely, having shot to literary stardom quite late in life and has been fairly prolific these last few years. She has definitely found her groove. The other four novels on the shortlist are by authors I have not come across before: Sanam Mahloudji’s The Persians about a family split by the revolution in Iran and trying to make a life in America looks fascinating. Miranda July’s All Fours about a woman approaching middle age who decides to leave her family and try and forge a new identity for herself, has received a lot of attention.

Nussaibah Younis’s Fundamentally is also about a woman escaping her life, this time to become a UN worker in Iraq and developing an unlikely friendship with a young ISIS bride. Finally, Aria Aber’s Good Girl is about Afghan teenager Nila, living in Berlin with her migrant family, also trying to make a new life for herself away from the impoverished suburbs where she grew up, and finding that the grass may not be greener on the other side.

A very interesting selection that perhaps speaks to the times we are living through right now. I’m not sure where to start!

The Women’s Prize non-fiction shortlist is also out. A few of the books included had already caught my eye: Neneh Cherry’s autobiography A Thousand Threads, Chloe Dalton’s account of raising a baby hare Raising Hare, and Rachel Clarke’s The Story of a Heart, a true account of an organ donation from one child to another – this might be a really tough read. The other shortlisted books are:

  • What the Wild Sea Can Be: the future of the world’s oceans by Helen Scales – promising to be an awe-inspiring account of the wildlife on our watery planet and what we can do to protect it.
  • Private Revolutions – coming of age in a new China by Yuan Yang, the first Chinese-born British MP.
  • And finally Clare Mulley’s Agent Zo: the untold story of courageous WW2 resistance fighter Elzbieta Zawacka, the only female member of the Polish elite special forces.

The winners of both prizes will be announced on 12th June – about 8 weeks to read 12 books!

Books out this spring

It really does feel that at long last there is a bit of a change in the air. I am spring cleaning my bookshelves at the moment – always a very challenging task. Books that I have forgotten I owned, books I might want to re-read (someday!) and books that I am ready to let go of, either because they deserve to find a new home or because I am accepting I will almost certainly never get around to them! And I need to make some space for the new titles coming out this season. A few have caught my eye and I thought I would share them with you.

I have been enjoying a lot of non-fiction in recent months and I find that I feel more excited by this genre’s new books than the fiction, to be honest.

Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green

A few years ago I read a book about tuberculosis by science writer Kathryn Lougheed and found it absolutely fascinating. My paternal grandfather died of the disease in London in 1940 just days before his second child (my dad) was born, and I was drawn to this book as I was trying to find out more about my family history. This book comes at a flexion point I think, as I was reading in the newspaper just this week of fears that cases of this terrible condition are likely to rise in the coming months and years following the withdrawal of US aid to developing countries. In our globalised world, we should not expect to be able to contain the disease within national boundaries (as we found with the Covid 19 pandemic) so it will be no surprise to see cases increase in the global north.

Story of a Murder by Hallie Rubenhold

Hallie Rubenhold caught the attention of the literary world with her bestselling book The Five about the women who were the victims of the infamous Victoria London serial killer Jack the Ripper. Her new book, released at the end of March, gives the same treatment to another famous murder case. In 1910, a London doctor, Hawley Crippen, murdered his wife Belle Elmore, a music hall performer. In this book, Rubenhold applies her research and detective skills to uncovering the story of how a group of Belle’s friends helped bring the killer to justice, and shady associates who may also have had a role. The book has been highly praised and its publication is much anticipated.

Maternity Service by Emma Barnett

I am an avid listener to the BBC Radio 4 morning news programme Today, and Emma Barnett is one of its main presenters. She is a broadcasting tour de force and made her name with some spectacular interviews on Radio 5 Live, and changed the face of another Radio 4 stalwart show Woman’s Hour. She is a campaigner for many feminist causes and is a high profile mother of young children who speaks passionately about the challenges of juggling motherhood and a career. As I work with new mothers I am very interested in what she has to say on the topic.

So, that’s the non-fiction, what of the fiction?

Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Published just a week or so ago and immediately longlisted for the Women’s Prize, this is the much anticipated new novel from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, her first in a decade. I love her work – her book Half of a Yellow Sun about the Biafran war is one of my favourite books of all time – and have reviewed her recent non-fiction books on here. This will be top of my TBR list for spring.

Flesh by David Szalay

Szalay’s 2016 novel All That Man Is was one of the first books I reviewed on this blog, after it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize that year. It wasn’t my favourite on the shortlist but I did enjoy it and found it interesting to read men’s perspectives on life’s dilemmas. Flesh follows the life of a young Hungarian boy as he moves from his small town to the ranks of the super-rich in London. With so much toxic masculinity in the world just now I feel this might be an important read.

The House of Barbary by Isabelle Schuler

This is said to be a feminist re-telling of the legend of Bluebeard which interests me as this myth has crossed my path a couple of times in recent years, also as a feminist re-telling. First in the non-fiction book Women Who Run With Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, and second in Angela Carter’s collection of short stories The Bloody Chamber. The book is a re-imagining of a number of brutal myths and the opening story (which gives the book its title) concerns the Bluebeard tale. I have not heard of Isabelle Schuler so I am interested to read her treatment of this story.

So, that lot should keep me occupied for a little while!

What books are you looking forward to reading this spring?

Book review – “Thunderclap” by Laura Cumming

The longlist for this year’s Women’s Prize for Non-fiction was announced last week. Only a couple of the books on the longlist have crossed my radar – Neneh Cherry’s autobiography (I have heard her talking about it on the radio quite a lot recently) and Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, which feels like it might be required reading at the moment, sadly. Anne Applebaum is someone I admire hugely and she is speaking at the Hay Festival this year, the opposite weekend to Colin Greenwood so I am trying to choose between her and Radiohead! Depression and joy perhaps!

So, I thought it might be a good week to post a review of Thunderclap by Laura Cumming, which was shortlisted for last year’s Women’s Prize for Non-fiction and has been widely praised since its publication in 2023. Laura Cumming is a journalist, art critic for the Observer, and Thunderclap is her third book. The subject is Carel Fabritius, the Dutch Golden Age painter, pupil of Rembrandt, who was killed in 1654 at the age of 32 in Delft when a building in the town where gunpowder was being stored exploded, killing more than a hundred people and injuring thousands of others. Fabritius was killed and his studio destroyed along with an unknown number of his paintings. Only about a dozen of his paintings remain in art galleries around the world. 

Laura Cumming follows in the footsteps of many other scholars and art experts in trying to find out more about the artist who showed so much promise (he has been described as the only one of Rembrandt’s many pupils who began to develop his own style after learning from the great Master, and at such a young age) but has left tantalisingly little. Experts have long felt that there simply must be more of his work, but that it just has not been found yet. He is a somewhat enigmatic figure and very little is known about his life; it is known that his first wife died young as did their infant daughter, and that he married again, but there are significant gaps and despite his rare talent he seems to have died quite indebted so he obviously did not live well from his work. For one so gifted he has left remarkably little behind, either in terms of paintings or a paper trail. 

Cumming writes of her deep love of Dutch art and how this was fostered from an early age. Her father was also an artist and nurtured her interest, and married with the deep dive into the life and work of Carel Fabritius (and his contemporaries) is biographical detail about her father and his creative life. She draws many parallels between her modest, gentle and talented father (who died prematurely) and the kind of person she imagines Fabritius might have been. Examining the facts of his life, his humble background, his marriage to a local girl, then widowhood and the loss of a child, she concludes that he carried a heavy burden and that this helps to explain his absence from the main Delft and Amsterdam artistic scenes. Cumming looks deep into a number of his paintings and finds in ‘Young Man in a Fur Cap’ (thought to be a self-portrait) traces of tragedy and grief. 

This book is both expansive (as well as Fabritius, Cumming writes at length about other Dutch painters of the time and the genre generally, her father and her own journey embracing art) as well as focussed on the tiny details of her subject, his life, his appearance, his paintings. I learned so much but I did not feel at any point that I was being given a history lesson – Cumming takes you on the journey with her.

One of my favourite books of recent years is Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, which, of course, concerns one of Fabritius’s most famous paintings of the same name. It now hangs in the Mauritshuis gallery in The Hague. I was drawn to find out more about the painting and its artist creator after reading that book, and Thunderclap came out shortly after I read it, so I have been keen to read this book. I was not disappointed, it really is excellent. Since completing it I have also been to the National Gallery in London to see the Van Gogh exhibition there. The National Gallery has two of the paintings Cumming explores in detail – ‘Young Man in a Fur Cap’ and ‘View of Delft, with a Musical Instrument Seller’s Stall’ – and it was a joy to see them and have a greater understanding of the work.

I recommend this book highly. 

By coincidence, I am currently reading Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, which won the Women’s Prize for Non-fiction last year. I am enjoying it enormously and it shows what high quality this particular Prize promotes. The 2025 shortlist is out on 26 March.

Book review – “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro

I am very happy to be at the stage in life where I read books that have been recommended to me by my children (all now adults). This is one which my elder daughter enjoyed reading over the summer last year and which she thought I would too. She was not wrong; it is hard not to be a fan of Kazuo Ishiguro, one of our finest living writers, internationally acclaimed, winner of the Booker Prize in 1989 (for The Remains of the Day) and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017. The Remains of the Day was adapted for screen in 1993 and turned into a highly-acclaimed film starring Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins. Never Let Me Go was also made into a film in 2010 (though I did not know this) with a stellar cast which included Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield. Ishiguro has quite the pedigree and from what I have seen seems a very nice and down to earth chap. (And a British ‘Sir’ to boot.)

[This review contains some spoilers.]

I read and reviewed Klara and the Sun when it came out  in 2021, a novel about some of the potential repercussions of our obsession with technology and AI in particular (I posted about my own sense of alarm about this last month). It looked ahead to some future date when the advance was seemingly beyond our ability to arrest. The world it portrayed was at once familiar and extremely strange. Never Let Me Go bears some similarities in that it explores human cloning. Some readers may recall ‘Dolly the Sheep’ the first successfully cloned mammal who was born in Scotland in 1996 and died in 2003. At the time, there was a lot of fear-mongering about the consequences of this extraordinary achievement and some justified debate about how we as a human race should manage and control the inevitable advance of this particular field of science. In Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro imagines a world where this science is normalised into everyday life and what that means for the people involved.

The narrator of the story is Kathy, a woman still quite young when she is looking back on her life, and in particular at her childhood, from the perspective of one whose living purpose is to care for her peers, the others who share the same destiny as her. Kathy was brought up in an English boarding school (‘Hailsham’) where the staff are known to the young people as “the guardians”. This was in the late 1990s (when Dolly the sheep was all over the news?). Kathy tells us all about her life there, about the daily life of the children, about their relationships and petty differences, about the trivial things that were important to them. At first it is not clear to the reader exactly what is going on at Hailsham, but part way through, when reference is made to their future status as “donors” or “carers” it becomes increasingly and terrifyingly clear what these young people are for – their purpose is organ harvesting. They are all clones of someone on the outside (who they refer to as ‘models’ or ‘possibles’). 

When we think about clones we might think about robots (rather like Klara in Klara and the Sun), but the children at Hailsham have been created and have all the usual aspects of human personality. This presents challenges to how they are raised and ‘Hailsham’ was originally conceived as a place where their lives could be made rich, where they could develop relationships with one another (including sexual relationships) and be given some purpose in life until they would be required as donors. But of course, their lives are completely pointless, as Ishiguro shows us, their future is bleak; at some point they will donate, once, twice, perhaps more, after which they will weaken and die. By showing us the human frailty of the young people (petty squabbles, jealousies and meanness) he shows how they are just like us, how we could be just like them, just a few steps away from being nothing but an organ incubator. It would be easier if they were dehumanised (like Dolly). 

I found this a powerful novel that I have thought about much since I finished it a few months ago. As I have been thinking about it for this review, I have dipped back into sections of the book and seen things I did not see first time around, the pathos in Kathy, Ruth and Tommy’s trip to Norfolk for example, to search for Ruth’s “possible”, like a search for a mother, an origin story, but of course, the search is fruitless and deeply disspiriting to them all. It is a moment of realisation for them all – there is no-one out there for them. 

This book has to be on a list of must-read books of the twenty-first century.

Postcard from Venice

I have started the year as I hope to go on, fulfilling a long-held travel ambition! I have visited Venice a couple of times (once about 12 years ago when my kids were still quite young, and once when I was 18 and went inter-railing in Europe) and on both occasions it was mid-summer, very hot and very, very busy. Ever since, I have wanted to experience Venice in the winter season and last week, with no school term dates holding us back, my husband and I made the trip, spending 6 glorious days in this unique city. One of our favourite films is Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie. It tells the story of a couple, grieving after the death of their young daughter, in a very grey wintry Venice, where Sutherland’s character is restoring a church. The setting is so atmospheric and ever since seeing it I have fantasised about being Julie Christie wandering along empty the alleyways and bridges over deserted canals!

Needless to say it wasn’t quite like that – it was still quite busy, although not nearly as much as spring through to autumn. But the Venetians were warm and friendly, less harassed perhaps than at other times of the year, there were no queues for the big tourist sights (by closing time at Basilica San Marco we had the place practically to ourselves) and good restaurants had plenty of tables. It was well worth compromising on the weather to get the more authentic experience (it was chilly but we did have some bright sunny days) and although Venice is never ‘cheap’ you can definitely get more hotel for your money out of season. Here are a few of my holiday snaps!

Inside the Palazzo Ducale
The breathtaking interior of Basilica San Marco
Palazzo Ducale

As well as beauty, culture, and fascinating history, Venice has a distinguished literary pedigree. Shakespeare set two plays in the city (Othello and The Merchant of Venice). He also set two plays in nearby Verona – Romeo and Juliet and The Two Gentlemen of Verona). We stopped for a night in Verona before heading to Venice – another truly beautiful and fascinating city – and you can visit ‘Juliet’s balcony’ (left). Scholars disagree on whether Shakespeare visited the Veneto but he certainly had a feel for the area and its stories.

A plaque in Verona commemorating Shakespeare’s connection to the city

Lord Byron, of course, famously spent a lot of time in Venice (he loved Italy), occupying a palazzo near San Marco, and referenced it in his poetry. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century American author Henry James wrote about his love of Venice, and John Ruskin wrote a three volume compendium on the art and architecture of Venice. More recently, the Russian American poet and philosopher Joseph Brodsky and American poet Ezra Pound are both buried in the island cemetery of San Michele in Venice. And finally one of my favourite books is set on the Lido – Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, also a brilliant film starring Dirk Bogarde.

So, a definite bucket list trip for me! I highly recommend Venice in the winter.

Booker shortlist review #6 – “The Safekeep” by Yael van der Wouden

Winner of the Booker prize 2024

This is my sixth and final review of this year’s Booker Prize shortlist. The winner was announced a couple of weeks ago so I didn’t quite get all my reviews in before the big day! The prize went to Samantha Harvey’s Orbital which is a worthy winner in my view and it is interesting that the Chair of judges said the decision of the panel was unanimous. It feels like it was a book for this moment, when we seem to be on the cusp of something big globally and could all do with stepping back and looking at the world from a different perspective. If only!

The Safekeep is one of the longer books on the shortlist and that’s partly why I left it until last to read. It is also the debut novel of its Dutch author (the first from the Netherlands to be shortlisted I believe) and is a very impressive piece of work. It is set in the rural east of the country, bordering Germany, in 1961 and the central character is Isabel, a young single woman living alone in the house formerly occupied by her and two brothers (Hendrick and Louis) and their mother. The mother is now dead and Isabel is still clearly deeply in grief. She is obsessive in trying to preserve the house and all its contents, even broken fragments of crockery that remind her of her mother. She creates an inventory of the contents when she believes that the maid Neelke is covertly taking items away. Isabel is an anxious and paranoid woman.

In many ways she has every right to be anxious; she sees herself as the only custodian of their parents’ legacy. Her older brother Hendrick escaped the small town as soon as he could, preferring to live in the city with his boyfriend, and the younger brother Louis is an irresponsible womaniser. He will also inherit the property when its official owner (Uncle Karel, who obtained the house for his sister during the war) dies. Isabel will be homeless without any means of supporting herself, a fact which they all seem to brush over. Isabel is lonely, isolated and grieving.

When Louis invites his siblings to meet his new girlfriend Eva (whom Isabel views with disdain at their very first meeting) and then installs her in the house when he has go to England to work for the summer, Isabel is furious and desperate. To make matters worse, Louis gives Eva their mother’s old room, which Isabel has treated almost as a shrine, and cannot understand why his sister is so affronted. Over the course of the summer, the development of Eva and Isabel’s relationship will transform their lives. 

It is hard to say more about this book without revealing the significant plot twist. It took me a while to warm to any of the characters: Louis is insufferable and selfish, Hendrick is bitter and Isabel is uptight and unreasonable. Eva, initially, seems dull and insipid. But the book is about Isabel’s transformation and her coming to terms with loss. She has lived in the shadow of her mother, her brothers, the war (which would still have been fresh in everyone’s memory in 1961) and not been allowed to be herself or even acknowledge who she is and what she stands for. It is also a book about memory, and legacy, and the importance and value of “things”, what we hold on to when our life feels outside of our control. There are some significant sex scenes which felt a bit cringey – the portrayal of the intensity was powerful but they went on too long and were overdone for me. I also listened to this on audio and found the reader not great, almost to the point of distracting, so I’d recommend reading the book on paper. The book is undoubtedly a powerful debut, however, and I look forward to what more this author has to offer in the future. 

It’s the Booker Prize winner announcement tonight! (And here’s my review #5 – “Held” by Anne Michaels

Held is the shortest novel on this year’s Booker shortlist and of the five that I have completed so far (I’ve almost finished The Safekeep) the one that I have found the most difficult to read. My brief scan of the reviews suggests that opinion differs quite widely and I suspect it is one of those ‘Marmite’ books. I’m afraid I didn’t love it. I have a copy of the author’s highly acclaimed 1996 novel Fugitive Pieces in my house somewhere, a book I have attempted to read a few times over the years and never quite managed to get into. That novel won the Orange Prize and many other awards when it was published so there is no doubt that Michaels is an author of quality. She is not prolific, Held is only her third novel, but she has published a number of poetry collections and is I believe the current poet laureate of Toronto. In my view she writes prose like a poet and her novels perhaps need to be approached and read in a different way. 

Held is set in a number of different time periods, from early 20th century Paris, to 1950s Suffolk, to London, Estonia and the final brief chapter in Finland, 2025, when who knows what might have happened. The periods are not linear, the novel jumps back and forth. Many of the characters in each chapter are connected by a family thread although mostly they do not know each other well, others seem completely random, but are connected via the greater human story. The other common feature is that each chapter is overshadowed by war, either being in an actual war zone, or affected by an experience of war, or troubled by the threat of war, and its twin, death. Each character has been affected by the premature loss of a loved one, a partner or parent, or the loss of what might have been, and the novel explores how grief is passed down through the generations, of the terrible trauma left by war death and the power of memory which both sustains us but can also be a heavy weight to carry.

I read this on my Kindle and I think that was a mistake; it’s probably a book that benefits from being on paper in your hands, beautifully typeset and with a wonderful cover (like the one in the photo above). I hate the way that with a Kindle you keep looking at your reading speed! I was astonished when I opened to the book that “most readers” had read it in under two hours! (Probably all those literary journalists under pressure of a deadline.) It took me almost twice that and even then I felt I would have enjoyed it more if I’d read it more slowly. You can’t speed read poetry and you can’t speed read this book. 

I enjoyed it more towards the end once the narrative thread had emerged for me out of the literary mist, but for me it was still not strong enough to carry the book. There is some very powerful writing in here and I was moved by many of the characters – their griefs and passions felt very real – but it was just too disparate for me to feel a strong connection with them or with the themes of the book. Many of the novels on this year’s shortlist wear their politics very boldly, but with Held I would suggest it is more subtle, so much so that it is almost lost. This is a more philosophical novel than that.

I would recommend this book, and I may indeed try it again once I relieve myself of the pressure to get through the shortlist before 12 November. But it’s a book that is probably not for everyone. 

So, who is going to win…?

Well, I have completed five of the six books on this year’s shortlist and have almost finished the sixth (The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden), but I’ve read enough of the last one to be fairly confident that it’s not a Booker winner, although I am enjoying it.

My hunch is that Percival Everett will take the prize with James. It would be quite a statement if this book wins, in the light of current political events in the US, although I doubt most people will be listening who need to listen. I did love the book and think it’s a great achievement. But I would be very happy if Samantha Harvey’s Orbital won. I think it is so imaginative and beautifully written as well as being captivating and profound. It also says a great deal about geopolitics, even bigger and more profound than the election of a US president for the next four years, and the world really does need to listen.

The winner is announced at 9.45pm UK time, with a live programme on BBC Radio 4 and live-streaming on the various social media channels.