The Salt Path - Raynor Winn

Amazon link

Write Club

So enjoying listening to the Write Club podcasts.

This group of writers discuss everything from why we write to how we find excuses not to write (the noble art of procrastination!), and as well as reading short extracts from their own writing, they discuss research, approaches to writing, writing exercises, and the importance of reading, ending the podcasts with discussions of the books on their bedside tables.

It's easy-going and invariably humerous, and yet thought-provoking and gives the creative urge a kick up the proverbial. As well as giving writers a chance to engage with what and how other writers are writing and reading, you can join in their discussion on their Facebook page as well as on their podcast page. It's like being in a friendly and supportive writer's group without having to take the trouble to go out and find one! 

Jakob's Colours by Lindsay Hawdon

Amazon link

I'm finding some absolutely beautiful and also absolutely heartbreaking books in the library at the moment - this one, Jakob's Colours, was recommended by a friend, and is right up there with the best of them.

I am conscious that I've been using the word "beautiful" quite a lot in recent reviews, but just switching the word does not alter the fact that sometimes it is the best description. Jakob's Colours is beautifully written, and I adore the characters who inhabit its pages and the tiny cupboards within its walls. The Roma Holocaust - the Porajmos - is little-visited in literature, and rarely does any book telling the untellable do it with such devastating beauty.

And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini

Amazon link

And the Mountains Echoed is a beautifully written, intense, and accomplished novel, as you'd expect from the author of The Kite Runner and the even more splendid A Thousand Splendid Suns.

I did feel that I'd have liked to have spent more time with some of the characters at the heart of the novel, followed them in more detail over all the years they travelled in search of what was lost, but that's a testament to Hosseini's engagingly human characters and powerful storytelling in what is both a heartbreaking and an uplifting journey.

The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton

Amazon link

The Miniaturist is a wonderfully inventive and sensuous novel with fantastic characters - both human sized and miniature! - and a deeply engrossing plot. The sights and sounds and smells and claustrophobic politics of 17th century Amsterdam infuse this intelligent novel, and the plot has enough twists and turns to keep you guessing - even if you might have seen some of them coming! 

The key to the sheer delight of this novel is the core thread of the relationship between the central character, Nella, and the mysterious miniaturist, which is nicely poised between the beneficent and the sinister and keeps you reading avidly to the end of this excellent book.

Gingerbread by Robert Dinsdale

Amazon link

This is another beautifully written book: Gingerbread by Robert Dinsdale, is a wonderfully eloquent and genuinely disturbing contemporary fairy tale which is also as old and as wide as the forest into which we venture, fearing the wolves in men's clothing; the wolves in all of us, even those we love and trust the most.

This is an often heart-rending story about trauma and love, about memory and forgetting, about the past and the present, about trying to keep impossible promises, and is above all a wonderfully-written, frequently nightmarish story, as well as a thoroughly gripping read.

At Hawthorn Time by Melissa Harrison

Amazon link

This book caught my eye while I was browsing the library shelves because I'd previously read - and absolutely loved - Melissa Harrison's previous novel, Clay.

At Hawthorn Time did not disappoint: whilst, in some respects, Jack and Jamie reminded me of the central two characters in Clay, it was the style of her writing as much as the theme of the misunderstood which echoes through both novels here, and the intense and believable truth she evokes in her characters.
Harrison steeps her stories in nature in both novels, and it is in At Hawthorn Time that this is more explicit and intimately, outstandingly successful.  Another beautiful, beautiful novel, evocative, intense, and deeply moving.

All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Amazon link

Anything I try to write about this novel will fail to do it justice.

It's a story about a blind French girl, her father, her uncle and his housekeeper; it's also a story about a German boy, his sister, and his friend; it's about miniature hand-carved houses which hold secrets, it's about snails, and it's about a blue diamond with a swirl of fire at its heart.

All The Light We Cannot See is a novel about light, and radio waves, and trying to be true to yourself and others, and keeping promises. It's also one of the most beautiful and devastating books I have ever read. I have swept all other books off my shelves and replaced them with this one.

The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers - an unforgettable journey

Amazon link

The Yellow Birds, Kevin Powers. This book. This book. I have never taken so long to read such a short book. Not because it was one of those books not worth the time, but because this book is worth the time.

Not a page went by I didn’t take in a breath and go back and read it again, even more slowly, sometimes many times before I could move on. It is a beautifully written, mesmerising book. It is also utterly devastating. It should be essential reading for anyone responsible for starting a war, and for anyone thinking of starting one, and for everyone in between. It is about the intimate experience of war, about the failure of memory to make sense of it, and about the necessity of trying to do just that. It is a psychological journey and is also a philosophical one – about choice, about memory, about trying to live and live on, but most of all it is about the disintegration war reaps at every level.

While there may be some faces missing from the last pages which I felt should have also been present in the shadows beneath the trees or traced along the lines of a map, this book leads you on an unforgettable journey, along a path of fires burning in the dust.

The Confabulist - Steven Galloway

I've been reading a lot of fabulous books just lately, so I thought I'd pass it on... 

Amazon link

The Confabulist – Steven Galloway

I’m not sure what I expected from this book having read and loved Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo a few years ago. What I got with The Confabulist is a haunting tale of memory and loss, of the impossibility of living outside of the past we tell ourselves and the future we try but fail to mould. The Confabulist is a re-telling of Houdini and the man who killed him, Martin Strauss, but it's much more than that: the tale entraps you, weaving its bonds, and even if you can see it coming this compelling novel is particularly haunting because, in the end, in the gut-punch end, you know it’s your story that Martin Strauss is telling, and your time is up. 

Which Book has Saved Your Life?

Today's The Guardian Childrens' Books is asking authors and teenagers to share the books that saved their lives for Blue Monday #Gdnbluemonday. I tweeted a quick reply - my choice being instantaneous - but it got me thinking about how a book can do that. Save your life.

We talk about the vital importance of reading, of libraries, and we know reading is absolutely vital for literacy (of course), but also for economics, for emotional and physical well-being, and so on, yet sometimes it hits home, you feel it, and you remember that reading really can save your life.

Here's why my choice is Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce. 

Amazon link

As a child, Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce was the first book I'd ever read which gave me a very real escape into another world: the loneliness of both Tom and Hatty, the sense that neither home nor adults were a safe or trustworthy place for either of them; the deep need for a place they were free to be themselves in, and where they could find true friendship – to the extent that time and reality itself could somehow be changed by desire, by love - were not things I could articulate at the time I first read it. But that book offered me a deep and meaningful escape into what felt on a subliminal level to be a very real and accessible place where I felt safe, where new possibilities existed, where time and space and reality could change. This book saved my life.

I continued to read it right through my teens too, and its impact on my early life not only directly influenced my lifelong avid reading but led into my urge to write too.

Which book saved your life?

~

rather thrilled

Indeed I am rather thrilled to have been asked to run a Shared Reading "Get into Reading" style group in a Lancashire Library I'm rather familiar with. Can't wait, and am ordering myself a copy of A Little, Aloud to share stories and poems with the group.

Love reading, me, and shared reading is a subtle but surprisingly profound way for people to find inspiration, support, and a little bit of themselves along the way, just through listening to someone telling them a story and then talking about it as a group. Amazing.

Malkin Child - a truly haunting tale by Livi Michael

Malkin Child by Livi Michael is a haunting and original book. And it goes on haunting you long after you’ve finished reading it.
   
Whilst I initially found the opening “argument” between the storyteller and Jennet Device about who was going to tell her story less compelling than the rest of the book, as I read on, I realised I liked this opening because it tells you what this book is doing: taking a well-worn story that you know – or think you know – out of that practically mythological place the story of the Pendle Witches inhabits in social discourse (‘A long time ago, in the Forest of Pendle, there lived a family …’) and into the real world.

Because what Livi Michael does with Malkin Child is show that the story of the Pendle Witches is not just a window into past beliefs and darker times, and a re-telling of one of the most infamous trials in British history, but is a personal and family and community tragedy.

I got my copy from the eye-catching display for the book in Accrington Library, and as soon as you see it, the front cover of Malkin Child is arresting, foregrounding a young girl who seems to look out of the past right at you, but also beyond you. Clever stuff.

The story is beautifully written in a wonderfully atmospheric style, and although it is of course a fictional re-telling, Malkin Child gives an authentic voice to a young girl who inhabits the lowest strata of the social spectrum: the youngest child of a family living in poverty. As we read her story, we are drawn into her world and her character, and there is an authentic sense of historical time and place in the homely details of her life. But it is brought into the present in the compelling immediacy of Jennet’s voice, and the reader inhabits that world with her.

I particularly love the way Livi Michael weaves nature seeping with the darker elements of fairytale into the story, and with a child’s-eye view which keeps a firm hold on realism, such as Jennet’s dislike of ‘gathering sticks’ for the fire in the wood ‘when the light was fading’ because ‘everyone knew there were goblins in Trawden wood. And wolves …’

The wolves in Jennet’s story are the kind that are hairy on the inside, however, and more frighteningly real as they prey on her youth and naivety to serve their own purposes. What Livi Michael does in Malkin Child is show how Jennet’s own powerless situation operates, not only within her own family circle, but crucially, within the wider social spectrum, and her psychological and emotional experiences within this.
Malkin Child has uncomfortable echoes of the present where you can’t help feeling little has changed. Children are still living in poverty, are still being abused and manipulated, and their own voices are still ignored.

The question of power haunts Malkin Child, and it is this adult-child and social inequality that leads to fatal consequences when Jennet is in the hands of those with power and the determination to use it. And you know it and feel it all the way through the book, as it pulls you inexorably towards the tragedy you know is coming.
Jennet is a child. She is vulnerable, she is naïve, and she is manipulated by those with an agenda of their own into betraying her family. As a child, Jennet is unable to understand the consequences of her testimony, yet Livi Michael gives her a compelling voice and all you can do is read on.

Because we know the story, reading Malkin Child is a doubly-haunting experience. It is beautifully, hauntingly written, and we know what happens in the end. We can see how Jennet is being manipulated, and what haunts the most is that the Malkin child cannot see what is coming, but we can.
The question I'm left with is what will change?

~

Malkin Child by Livi Michael has been commissioned by Litfest to mark the 400th centenary of the Lancashire Witch Trials, and has been chosen by Lancashire Libraries as its Lancashire Reads book for 2012. Some of the proceeds from the book are going to support Stepping Stones, a charity working to protect children in Nigeria being accused of witchcraft today.
~
postscript: this review has also been published on the Lancashire Libraries Lancashire Reads page.

Yes, yes, yes!!! Reading for Pleasure Campaign

The Society of Authors are campaigning to encourage reading for pleasure in schools and have written to Schools Minister, Nick Gibb, making recommendations regarding school libraries, teacher training and author visits, and to request a meeting to discuss practical strategies to further the Government response to the Henley Review and Ofsted’s Moving English Forward.

In their letter to Nick Gibb, they make the following three recommendations:

1. Primary and secondary schools should be required by law to have a school library and a trained librarian.
2. Teachers, in all stages of their careers, should be supported through a range of initiatives (detailed in the letter) to inspire a love of reading for pleasure in their pupils.
3. Schools’ use of author visits and longer residencies should be accredited by Ofsted.

Click here to read the letter in full.

They've got my support, yes yes yes!

See the Reading for Pleasure Campaign - Society of Authors for more information.