Reading – Page 13 – Julia's books

The Platinum Jubilee #4 1980s

And then came the 1980s. It all started quite well for the Royal Family with the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer in July 1981. I remember the event well and at the time it seemed like the biggest event that had ever happened in my life. The nation was enthralled by Diana Spencer, a fact that would become a problem for the Queen in the years to come.

It was the decade of my teens and much of the music of my youth was pretty dire – I was a fan of Adam and the Ants and Duran Duran! I was also a big fan of Japan and OMD, which was somewhat better. The Smiths and Joy Division came to the fore, but I was not into indie bands until much later. The prevailing culture was of materialism, prizing wealth and selfishness. Margaret Thatcher told us there was no such thing as society. In 1987 I went to university, truly a dream come true. With so many young people going on to higher education today (a very good thing in my view, though I do wish it was cheaper for them), it is easy to forget that in the 1980s this was a privilege gifted to only about 15% of 18 year olds, and the majority of those came from either a privately educated or grammar school background.

Most of my reading in the 1980s was of the classics, either in my preparations for studying an English degree, or during my studies. I did also study American and Irish literature, which was more modern, but I read little from post-war authors. I missed out on a lot!

There were some landmark books published in the 1980s. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, came out in 1985. It has always been an iconic novel, but has enjoyed a resurgence in the recent years with the extraordinary television series and the author’s follow-up The Testaments. It is truly frightening to me that some of the horrors envisaged in that novel are materialising before our eyes today.

In the US, Alice Walker was blazing a trail for non-heterosexual women of colour with her novel The Color Purple, published in 1982. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1983 and was adapted into a film in 1985, by Steven Spielberg and starring Oprah Winfrey. It holds the dubious record for the film receiving the most nominations at the Academy Awards without winning a single Oscar. Hmm. It is hard to overstate the importance and significance of this book.

Magical realism as a literary style was being explored with exceptional applomb. Isabel Allende published her extraordinary debut novel The House of the Spirits in 1982 and Milan Kundera published The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a novel about the Prague Spring in 1968. His books were banned at the time by the communist regime in his native Czechoslovakia.

Of British books published in the 1980s I could choose a number as my book of the decade. An author I admire hugely, Kazuo Ishiguro, born in Japan but brought to the UK by his parents at the age of five years (and now a knight of the realm), published his Booker and Nobel Prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day in 1989. A beautiful book encapsulating perfectly British character and manners with tenderness and empathy.

In 1985, Jeanette Winterson published her groundbreaking semi-autobiographical novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit about a teenage girl growing up in northern England in the 1960s in a fanatical religious family and discovering her sexuality.

While I love both of these books very much, I don’t think I read either of them in the 1980s. So, my book of the decade is by Salman Rushdie (another knight of the realm, while Winterson is merely a CBE), who is described as an Indian born British-American, so I think it counts in the parameters I have set myself. Midnight’s Children won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was voted the ‘Booker of Bookers’ a few years ago. An awesome novel which was one of the first contemporary novels I read after I graduated in 1990 (the end of the 1980s, strictly speaking!), I remember being blown away by it. It is set at the time of Indian independence in 1947, specifically following the life of Saleem Sinai at the stroke of midnight in the new republic. Children born at that time were said to have been imbued with special powers. It is a spectacular novel, perhaps the finest of the second half of the twentieth century.

The Platinum Jubilee

I’ve never been a royalist. If anything, growing up in a working-class environment, my family was rather dismissive of everything the British royal family represents – aristocracy, privilege, unearned wealth, inequality, unelected power. My views have not shifted much, especially in the light of the various royal scandals of recent years. However, it is hard not to be impressed by Queen Elizabeth II; she represents a totally different era and mindset, and her forthcoming platinum jubilee really is an extraordinary moment in history. When you stand her alongside many of today’s politicians and world leaders, she is even more impressive. We will not see her like again.

To mark this momentous occasion, I intend to do what many others in the blogging world, the media and social media are doing, and picking my favourite books of the last 70 years, one from each decade of the Queen’s reign. I am going to stick to British books, which I know means it risks being a very white male list, but then perhaps that reflects the predominant literary forces in play throughout this time.

Let’s start with the 1950s then.

As a period in modern history I am fascinated by the 1950s. I’m not hugely knowledgeable about popular music, but this was the era of early rock and roll. The second world war was over and in Britain rationing was coming to an end and whilst there was still a great deal of hardship, there was I think a new energy in popular culture that would be fully unleashed in the subsequent decade.

On the flip-side, Britain was still a very buttoned-up country, very deferential, and popular culture reflected, not the truth of how society was, but a version that social and political leaders wanted it to be. Books that have looked back on this era have also shown that British society was deeply flawed, such as Andrea Levy’s Small Island.

Some of the best books I read in my teenage years (probably the books that made me determined to read English literature at university) were written in this decade: John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (I was obsessed with Steinbeck!), Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s and JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and, one of my all-time favourites, Charlotte’s Web by EB White. They are all American novels, however, so I cannot pick them.

Instead, my pick is not just one book, but a collection – The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis, although if pressed I would have to choose The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Lewis is one of my literary heroes, not just because his books are powerful wonderful stories, but also because of his great scholarship, output and influence. I remember at primary school, we were able to choose and buy Puffin books – we’d get a newsletter once a month or so and I would save up my pocket money for these little treasures. I got The Horse and His Boy because I liked horses, having no idea it was part of one of the all-time great literary series! I went on the read the whole series in order (in true child book geek style!) and loved them. At university I learned more of what they were really about and was in even greater awe. I love watching television and film adaptations and I love books that draw on Narnia (like Philip Pulman’s His Dark Materials trilogy and, of course, Harry Potter). The Chronicles of Narnia represent a true literary milestone.

Look out for my 1960s pick tomorrow!

Audiobook review: Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka

This was suggested by one of my fellow book club members for our April read. I had not heard of this author before – this is only her second novel – but I feel sure hers is a name that we will all hear about in the future. Danya is an American and is a literary agent in her day job. She published her first novel Girl in Snow in 2017, and Notes on an Execution was published earlier this year, to great acclaim it seems, judging by everything I have been able to glean about the book since finishing it.

The novel is set in the US and covers a period of thirty or more years and moves effortlessly back and forth in time. The present day strand is narrated by Ansel Packer, a convicted murderer who is on Death Row in a Texas prison, twelve hours from his execution. He reflects on the nature of life and death and philosophises about right and wrong. He has been writing down his thoughts in what he considers to be a work of philosophy (harking back to his time in college where he majored in the subject but failed to complete his degree) and plans to leave it as his legacy. He has been having a Death Row visitor, Shawna, to whom he grants custody of his manuscript.

Interspersed with Ansel’s narrative is an account of his past. He spent his early years on a remote farm, where his violent father Johnny abused his young wife, Lavender, then only seventeen years old, virtually keeping her prisoner and well away from normal society. Ansel receives no formal schooling and is isolated from other children. When Johnny takes Lavender on a trip, leaving four year old Ansel in charge of his baby brother, Lavender escapes her husband’s clutches at a gas station and manages to call the police to tell them about the children. Ansel is taken into foster care. He is told that his baby brother died.

An account of Ansel’s time in foster care in upstate New York is given by Saffy, another of the orphaned children living in the home. Saffy has had troubles of her own – her Indian father is unknown to her, she is the result of a short relationship her mother had, and her mother was killed. Saffy eventually finds her purpose as a police officer, working her way up to detective. She is put on a case involving three murdered girls whose bodies have been found buried in the woods. Saffy knows one of the victims – it was one of the girls she grew up with in the foster home. A suspect is found, but Saffy knows the homeless man being fingered for the crime is not the real killer. She harbours a private agenda to catch the murderer, which grows into an obsession.

A further narrator is Hazel, the twin sister of Ansel’s wife Jenny. Hazel recalls her first meeting with Ansel; shortly after he and Jenny get together at college, he joins the family for the Christmas holidays. Hazel is strangely attracted to him and jealous of her sister, but there is something about Ansel she does not trust. In the middle of the night she looks out of her bedroom window and sees him burying something in the family’s back garden, an action she cannot explain, but she says nothing.

This is a book about a serial killer; we know the ending, we know that Saffy must therefore eventually get him. This book is not a whodunnit. It is part cat and mouse – the chase, how Saffy will eventually catch up with him. It is also about the women Ansel killed, it tells their stories. It is also about the mind of a killer, how this is cultivated, what part his upbringing and his being left by his mother played in that evolution. Lest we blame his mother for “abandoning” him, the author explores Lavender’s story too – she was a child herself when she was impregnated by Ansel’s abusive father and it was his violence that forced her to take the only course of action possible to save herself and her children. She will carry the burden of that action for the rest of her life.

I was reading this at about the same time as Crime and Punishment and there are some interesting parallels – the brutal murders of women, the lack of remorse shown by the killer, the philosophising on right and wrong by the person committing the crime. The two books, separated by more than 150 years, share some similar characteristics, but Kukafka, makes the victims front and centre even though Ansel is trying to make the story about himself.

This is a brilliant book. It is powerful and interesting in a way that I did not expect and even though we know how it ends, the author still manages to throw in some heart-stopping surprises. I listened to the audiobook and was riveted. The performances were excellent.

Highly recommended.

Spring is here! Time for nature books

At last, spring seems to have arrived here in the north of England and it has felt like a long time coming. I love my garden but I could certainly not describe myself as a ‘keen’ gardener, nor have I a great knowledge about the subject. I like it to look nice though, and I like being in it. So, for the last few weeks, as the weather has got noticeably warmer and less damp, I have spent a lot of time in my garden, mainly cutting things back as it was already well-planted when we moved in and the shrubs just seem to grow and grow every year. I have barely touched the garden all winter, but as soon as buds start to appear on things, or spring blooms emerge, I am filled with a renewed gardening energy!

Nature more generally is rather different for me; I love being outside all year round and I find great beauty in bare trees in the winter months, when you can see the wonderful shapes and the intricate patterns of their branches more clearly. It can appear to some that everything is ‘dead’, but while much of it is indeed dormant, there is still a great deal going on if you care to look. Nevertheless, in the spring, so much of the work of nature is visible that it’s a good time of the year to think about nature books. I’ve picked out a few below, fiction and non-fiction, both classic and contemporary, that you might like to indulge in.

Classics on nature

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

I read this while at university for a module on American literature, and I’m afraid my 20 year-old self found it very boring! It is, however, a classic of the genre. Written in the 1840s, when the author was in his late 20s, it is his account of living in the wilderness (for two years), beside Walden pond in Massachussetts, observing the changes in the natural world around him and contemplating the virtues of the simple life versus a more materialistic one. I would like to come back to this book sometime soon, to see if I feel any differently about it!

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

This is a book I’d never heard of until fairly recently. It is now regarded as one of the early warnings on climate change. Carson was a research biologist and became increasingly concerned about the use of pesticides in particular, and how they then infiltrated the food chain, and more generally about the way man was exploiting nature in a way that would have disastrous long-term (although short and medium term, as it turns out) consequences.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

The classic man versus nature novel. The whale represents existential threat to man’s self-perceived mastery and throws its protagonist into psychological turmoil. Spoiler: the whale wins.

Nature in contemporary fiction

The Overstory by Richard Powers

Moby Dick is one of my all-time favourite classics, and The Overstory is one of the best books I have read in the last ten or more years. It will become a classic. The secret life of trees is explored in awesome detail, woven into a plot about climate activism and the lengths that some people will go to to save nature. It draws on the classics of nature writing as well as new research. Powerful and brilliantly written.

The New Wilderness by Diane Cook

Like Carson’s Silent Spring, this 2020 Booker Prize shortlisted novel envisions a future where humans have prevailed and pushed nature to a point where life as we know it cannot be sustained. Dystopian fiction at its finest and most frightening, because much of it feels very close and entirely possible. If this does not spur you to action then nothing will.

The Last Bear by Hannah Gold

I recommended this in a post a few weeks ago, when I was looking at books out for young people. This book was the overall winner of the Waterstones Children’s Book prize this year and is at the top of my TBR list. Unlike many of the other books mentioned in this post where the subject is man versus nature, Hannah Gold’s book explores the special empathy that children have with animals and nature. A force for good which should surely be harnessed.

Nature in contemporary non-fiction

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

A brilliant book that has spawned a number of imitators. Published in 2014, it is a memoir of grief, but also a powerful evocation of the relationship between man and nature, again, this time in the form of a goshawk. The author’s father was a keen falconer and photographer who died suddenly. In an effort to reconnect with her memories of her father she acquires a young goshawk which she seeks to train. The landscapes she describes provide a perfect metaphor for grief.

The Snow Geese by William Fiennes

A beautiful and brilliant book by an English author who observes and recounts the epic migratory journey of these magnificent birds from the southern United States to the Arctic. Not a book about man versus nature, rather one about what we can learn about ourselves and human nature by observing animals.

Wilding: the return of nature to a British farm by Isabella Tree

Published in 2019 to critical acclaim and hugely popular to boot, Wilding is an account filled with hope of one couple’s decision to surrender their uneconomic 3,500 acre farm in West Sussex to nature, by introducing free-roaming breeds of animals and ceasing to manage the environment. In a few short years an extraordinary natural balance was restored. I have this book but have not yet read it, but I did listed to an adaptation on the radio which was inspiring.

I hope you approve of my selection. I would love to hear your reading suggestions for this verdant time of the year.

Book review – “Briefly Yours” by Cat English

A few months ago I read Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying and reviewed it on here. It was part of my 2021 reading challenge and for that month I’d set myself the challenge of reading some classic erotic fiction. The post must have got me noticed in certain quarters because shortly afterwards I was approached to participate in a book review tour. Now, this was my ‘first time’ so I agreed, rather excitedly! I may have been blogging for some time, but clearly there is a whole sector of book bloggers out there that I have never discovered before! They mostly inhabit Instagram and post short punchy reviews with lots of hashtags. (Note to self: must log into Insta again one day.)

Briefly Yours by Cat English is a non-fiction erotic memoir. ‘Cat’, her nom-de-plume and working pseudonym, is a call-girl, but she is no ordinary sex worker. It is very much a career choice which she has made in order to help fund her sister’s law degree and to support her passion, which is rescuing feral cats, feeding them, helping them to get well and arranging veterinary treatment, including neutering. Cat has worked in other sectors and in the book she takes time out from the sex work to try her hand at something more conventional, working in a department store. However, the lifestyle of the commuter and the bullying she is subjected to by her supervisor, are not worth the pitiful salary.

Cat’s life story is interwoven into her accounts of work at the parlour and many episodes of encounters with clients. She creates three separate worlds – the parlour, with the other women who work there, the clients and staff, a fun and credible cast of characters; her cat world, with all the feral creatures she names and cares for, with the help of her sister; and her family life, her mum, sister and brothers. She seems close to her family and they are aware of her lifestyle, even though she tries to keep it a secret generally from friends and neighbours. I would have liked to have had a little more sense of her sister’s gratitude – wow, what a sacrifice! Cat grew up on a council estate in the north west, so she is a down to earth girl who comes across as both deeply caring and pretty shrewd.

She deals with the issues around her sex work head-on. She invites the reader to set aside their prior assumptions and asks whether what she is doing is really any more exploitative than working for minimum wage in a dead-end job she hates. Whilst I was deeply uncomfortable with some of the issues she raised, it did open my eyes. It helps that she actually enjoys the work, both the sex and the customer service aspect (she meets people’s needs, and knows that she does it well). Some of the clients are ghastly, some are cruel and borderline violent (the set-up of the parlour brings with it a degree of protection), but Cat certainly feels like she has a degree of control. She has mixed feelings about the clients; some she really likes, others she has no respect for particularly if they have partners and children at home, but insisting their wives don’t understand them. There is a nice camaraderie in the parlour, but this is high-end, and therefore expensive. Even if you can accept prostitution at this level, one does wonder about the women who are doing it for much less, or to support a drug habit, or putting themselves at great risk on the streets. I found that quite difficult to get out of my head.

I suspect I am not the target audience for this book! I have to say though that I did enjoy it. It’s a light fun read. There is a lot of really bad erotic fiction out there, that is written for a certain kind of stimulation. I think this definitely better than most of the ‘written to a formula’ trash in that category. The sex scenes are very graphic (though not much more so than, say Luster or Queenie, even though those books would fall into a more literary category), but mostly they ring true. Cat writes well, actually, and with charm; she captures the array of clients really well and it feels authentic. I suspect she might not find the life of an author quite as lucrative as that of a call-girl, but I wish her well!

I was sent a complimentary advance copy of this book by Literally PR.

March in pictures

I missed out on this post last month – like much of the UK population I had Covid for the first time in February and so did not do very much or take many pictures!

What I was reading in March:

Plus more research for my book:

Sufficiently recovered from Covid to do the Heaton Park run with my son, but kept it to a 5k, while he completed his first half marathon!

And very happy to have a signed copy of Margaret Atwood’s latest!

Enjoying a bonus early spring warm spell at Dunham Massey, Cheshire.

Looking forward to April!

Book review – “The Secret Scripture” by Sebastian Barry

This is the third book I listened to in Sebastian Barry’s McNulty family trilogy. The first was The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, published in 1998, then I listened to The Temporary Gentleman, published in 2014, and then finally this book, which was published in 2008 and shortlisted for the then Man Booker Prize. I read them in the wrong order, but in doing so, arguably, I saved the best till last! The Secret Scripture is an astonishing and powerful piece of work, and provides answers to some of the unresolved questions raised in the other two books.

At the centre of the trilogy is the McNulty family and in particular the three brothers, Eneas, Tom and Jack. Eneas, as I have already posted about in my review of the first book in the trilogy, is something of a black sheep in that he is largely exiled from the family, in America, Africa and finally England, because of his job as a policeman which gets him into trouble with the republican Sligo underworld. The Temporary Gentleman concerns Jack, the golden child of the family, with a degree in engineering and a respectable marriage to the daughter of a doctor. However, this book reveals the lie about his life, hinted at in The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, his alcoholism and gambling and the problems in his marriage. The third son, Tom, who becomes a local councillor, is married to Roseanne, who is the subject of The Secret Scripture and who appears in both the other novels. Having come to The Secret Scripture last I feel now that this trilogy is as much about Roseanne as it is about the McNulty family, because their relationships with her tell us almost more about them than their own lives.

When the book opens we meet Roseanne, a woman in her 90s, perhaps even 100, a long-term resident of a mental hospital that is about to be demolished. Her psychiatrist, Dr William Grene, must assess her and determine whether she is able to be discharged into the community. There is a recognition that many of the residents of such institutions were committed for social as much as mental health reasons. Dr Grene sets about trying to establish why Roseanne, who has been a patient at the hospital for around half a century, was admitted. The story is told from the parallel perspectives of Roseanne, who writes her own story in secret, and Dr Grene who records his notes and observations in a day book. These become a kind of confessional for both of them.

What we know about Roseanne is that she was very beautiful and therefore treated with suspicion, considered almost a temptation to sin, and therefore a sinner herself. To make matters worse, she is a Protestant. As a child she idolises her father and spends a great deal of time with him at his place of work – his job is as caretaker of a cemetery, a role he takes very seriously. However, after a tangle with local gangsters, active in the political strife that beset Ireland in the 1920s and 1930s, he is served the humiliation of losing his position and being redeployed as a rat-catcher. He maintains his dignity, however, and is conscientious, but the family’s fortunes decline thereafter. Roseanne’s mother is committed to an institution and her father dies. The local priest arranges a marriage to Tom McNulty, and he truly loves her, but she is never accepted by his parents, the elder Mrs McNulty in particular.

Roseanne is ill-treated by them all, except Eneas. After being spotted in a mis-judged but innocent meeting with another townsman on a mountain walk, she is exiled as an adulteress. This is largely an excuse for the family to be rid of her. Her marriage is annulled and she is forced to live in a hut outside the town. Tom marries again and it is as if Roseanne never existed. She is maintained at subsistence level, but no more. Her fate is sealed when she becomes pregnant and gives birth to a child alone on the strand with the tide coming in. She collapses unconscious after the delivery and awakes to find herself being taken away by ambulance, and no sign of her baby.

Events unfold rapidly in the final third of the book. Connections are made with Eneas and with Jack, and the family’s stories become knitted together. It is a slow build, however, up to this point. What the author is doing very skilfully, is building the picture of this woman, of her relationship with Dr Grene, who provides us with a perspective on her and the treatment she received at the hands of the McNulty family and the Sligo community more generally. Roseanne is a marginal figure in the other two books, but a figure, a mystery, nonetheless. The Secret Scripture gives us answers to questions the reader might have had whilst also exposing the dysfunctional relationship between religion and society that bedevils Ireland’s modern history.

*A film adaptation of* The Secret Scripture was released in 2016, starring Vanessa Redgrave and Rooney Mara, though the story differs in some important respects.

This novel has been Barry’s most successful to date, winning the Costa Book of the Year in 2008 (his novel Days Without End won in 2017, making him the first double-winner) and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize the same year. Apparently, however, some have found the ending of the book flawed and unpalatable. I disagree wholeheartedly! I do not wish to reveal any spoilers, so I will only say that I found it extraordinary. I can see how some might find it a plot twist too far, but from a reader’s perspective it is heart-stopping and I loved it.

I am on a real roll with Sebastian Barry at the moment; having only discovered his work in 2017 when I read Days Without End, I cannot now get enough of him – there is the Dunne Family trilogy to savour next.

The Secret Scripture is a brilliant and powerful book and I recommend it highly.

St Patrick’s Day

Happy St Patrick’s Day to all my Irish family, friends, acquaintances and fellow bloggers. Ireland is a country very close to my heart since my husband is from Dublin and my children are proudly half-Irish. I have spent very many happy times in Ireland in the last twenty-something years, and sadly not nearly enough time there in the last two.

I know that not every Irish person is a huge fan of ‘Paddy’s Day’ even though the diaspora celebrates it with great vigour. It’s true that the imagery associated with it can harden a false impression about the country and what it means to be Irish, that it’s all about the ‘craic’. Indeed it is not. Ireland and the Irish are thoughtful, deeply emotional, and phenomenally creative people. It’s not for nothing that the nation punches well above its weight internationally.

So, for my post today, in a celebration of all things Irish, I’m picking out a few of my favourite Irish books and authors.

Highlights from my recent reading:

Days Without End by Sebastian Barry

This vivid and powerful account of an Irish emigrant participating in the Amercian Civil War and finding forbidden love is one of my all-time favourite books and began my love affair with the writing of Sebastian Barry.

Holding by Graham Norton

One of my favourite television and radio personalities, Graham Norton proved himself an accomplished author too with this his first novel, which has also now been adapted for television.

Grown Ups by Marian Keyes

Marian Keyes might well have attained the status of “national treasure” in Ireland at this stage. This was the first book of hers that I read and I intend to read more. Loved it.

The Wonder by Emma Donoghue

Donoghue hit the big time with her book Room, which was made into an Oscar-winning film starring Brie Larson, but for me The Wonder, published in 2016, is better. It explores the place of myth and its confused relationship with religion in Ireland. Powerful and beautiful.

The Glorious Heresies by Lisa McInerney

Gangs, drugs, violence, love, this book has it all. Winner of the Baileys Prize (now the Women’s Prize) in 2016, it explores the dark underbelly of the city of Cork in a post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. Not an easy read, but beautifully and confidently written, with dark humour and love at its heart.

And now for some classics…

An education in literature in English would be incomplete without the above. Ulysses changed the world of fiction forever, perhaps even the world. Yeats, for me, evokes all that is Ireland and his life story is so emblematic. O’Casey’s play is a history lesson. Behan and Wilde are authors who embody some of our notions of human suffering.

So, today I will be raising a glass of Guinness to Ireland and in particular to its extraordinary literary heritage.

Sláinte!

#KeepKidsReading – books out for children

In the last week I have shared a couple of book reviews of children’s books I have read recently. To close off this little series of #KeepKidsReading posts I would like to share some of the children’s books that are either out now or just about to come out and which I really like the look of. Capitalise now on all that ‘World Book Day’ enthusiasm!

Middle-grade books (primary school age/early secondary school)

Me, My Dad and the End of the Rainbow and The Secret Sunshine Project by Benjamin Dean

The first of these two books sits on my current TBR pile. It’s Benjamin Dean’s debut novel and is the story of Archie Albright who decides to try and ‘fix’ his family and restore their lives to normal after his parents split up. Archie’s father has come out and Archie must learn to come to terms with the ‘new normal’. Looks like a great one for children of same-sex parents, blended families, or separating families. Look out for a future review.

Benjamin Dean does not shy away from challenging themes in his second novel either, it would seem. In The Secret Sunshine Project he deals with the loss of a parent, resilience, sisterly love and the joy of Pride.

The Last Bear and The Lost Whale by Hannah Gold

Another double recommendation, this time two books which deal with important themes of the connection between humans and nature and climate change. The Last Bear was a huge success and widely acclaimed. April’s father is a scientist and his research takes the family to a remote Arctic island where it is said polar bears are now extinct. April comes across one however, starving and desperate, and she is determined to save him.

In The Lost Whale Rio goes on a quest to find a whale he has met on whale-watching trips with his best friend Marina and her father. He has been sent to live with his grandmother in California while his mother recuperates from illness. The children discover the whale but are then distressed when it goes missing. Rio will learn much about his life and the world in his search for the whale.

All of the above titles have wonderful illustrations which I think remain important for this age group.

The Swallow’s Flight by Hilary McKay

Finally, a sadly very topical suggestion. This is a story about the second world war written from the perspective of four children, two in England and two in Berlin. They are all contemplating their future as their countries pursue a war that none of them want or fully understand. A few adults could do with reading this as a reminder of what the senselessness of war looks like through the eyes of a young person.

Teens and younger adults

This is a broad category and some titles deal with mature themes that even very good readers may find challenging so choose your books with care.

You’re Not the Boss of Me by Catherine Wilkins

This title made me laugh as it is an exclamation that one of my children directed at me once! This book may help young teens navigate the thorny topic of sexism. Amy is all set to the be the star of the school show until Harry is put in charge and seems determined to stand in her way. Amy’s sister tells her Harry is being a sexist and she must take a stand. Written with humour by a popular comedian.

Furthermoor by Darren Simpson

Fantasy for young teens. Twelve year-old Bren finds solace from the challenges of his life, where his sister has died and he is constantly bullied, in the imaginary world of Furthermoor where he feels safe and can control events. When the mysterious Featherly enters this world, Bren is forced to choose between fantasy and reality.

Baby Love by Jacqueline Wilson

Another characteristically bold fictional outing from national treasure Jacqueline Wilson. This time she deals with first love and teenage pregnancy in the 1960s when Laura, finding herself pregnant and alone, is sent away to spare her family’s shame.

Blood to Poison by Mary Watson

This looks like a complex and powerful novel. Set in South Africa, its central character is seventeen year-old Savannah who has been identified as a ‘Hella’s girl’, the inheritor of a tradition in her ancient family bloodline where certain young women will die young. This is a story about magic, witchcraft and the courage to defy one’s destiny.

For more suggestions, see the shortlist for this year’s Waterstones Children’s Book Prize.