Category Archives: Sarah Hall

The BBC National Short Story Award Shortlist: Sarah Hall

Posted on by
3

The BBC National Short Story Award always highlights some absolute gems. This year there are three womxn on the shortlist: Jan Carson, Sarah Hall and Eley Williams. I had the pleasure of speaking to all three of them about their short stories. You can watch my interview with Jan Carson here. My interview with Eley Williams will be posted on Friday.

Sarah Hall is the author of five novels and three short story collections. Her novels The Electric Michelangelo and How to Paint a Dead Man were both nominated for the Booker Prize and in 2013 she won the BBC National Short Story Award with ‘Mrs Fox’. This year she became the only writer to have been shortlisted four times for the BBC National Short Story Award

I spoke to Sarah Hall via phone. We discussed family units, coercive control and political and societal structures.

There’s so much within ‘The Grotesques’. For you, did it start with the characters or the ideas? Is there an image that sparks things?

Like any short story, it’s a combination. I tend to store these things away in my brain and they accumulate and begin to work with each other. I have a background in art history and the images are obviously there. The story starts with this terrible image of a vagrant man who has been subject to this awful class joke by wealthy students, but the idea of grotesques was always very interesting to me. The idea that there’s a kind of horror and disgust and comedy combined. Wherever there’s cognitive dissonance, I’m very interested. Each of my short stories seems to have something of that in it, so there’s a repellent thing, an empathetic thing and a sympathetic thing as well with these characters. What’s behind the face? And it is a mask; it’s a presentation to the world. If you start with that idea and think about human beings, that’s quite interesting. What’s presented to the world? How are messages conveyed? 

There was a lot in the press at the time about the growing gap between rich and poor and a return to the disparity between those with power and entitlement and those without it. That’s the background of the story; the political and social layer. Then it’s always very interesting to examine the psychology of a family unit, or any unit, where there are power structures that mirror what might be going on in the bigger scheme of things. So, you have this inner story of a family unit where there’s covert control; there’s a presentation to the world in one way; there’s something going on behind masks, and the main character is very lost in this world. She’s stunted. There’s a paralysis to her development and you realise later she’s much older than you think she is. Short stories are great for layering in these meanings. 

I’m interested in the psychology of it as well. In all the stories I write there is generally a kind of psychology being examined or being questioned. A very good friend of mine is a psychologist, so I always send my stories to him and we talk about how it all works and the character dynamics.

My main family unit is quite small, but I come from quite a big family with loads of cousins, so I’m interested in the idea of controlling a unit. I’ve written about this in novels as well. It’s not just the family, it could be a female army. How do you get individuals to be loyal to a unit? In some ways there’s a bit of mind control going on. When do you give up your individuality for the good of the group? Whether that’s an army or a family or whatever it is that makes you feel like you belong and function best inside it. That theme has always been there in my work; the idea of the individual in the society somehow.

There’s a lot in the story about the narratives we create, whether that’s within a group of people or the individual narrative we present to the group. How does this fit with the class dynamic in ‘The Grotesques’?

I think it’s true that your existence in life is about the story that you tell yourself about your life, or your perception of it. We can see that written quite starkly in politics now. The idea that you can just say, ‘I don’t agree with your version of events’, ‘That’s a false truth’ or ‘That didn’t really happen’, even if it’s a fact. This undermining of the very essence of what has happened is very interesting to me. There’s a lot of that goes on in families, that I’ve noticed. The shifting sands. It is about power. It’s about maintaining a position of authority within a family or getting people to do what you want them to do. Or it’s the sense of keeping a unit together by scapegoating. The scapegoat is a very important image in the story. To cohere any unit – a country, a family, a couple – often there is this notion of the other, the scapegoat. All the dysfunction of that unit is put onto something outside to make the unit cohere. The thing that keeps people together is this story about this is us and how we do it and the goodness of us and our righteous superiority and this is the bad that’s outside that we have to attack and that makes us join together even stronger. When you notice that going on, in politics, in families, it’s fascinating. Even capitalism. A very good friend of mine is a philosopher and he’s just written a book about scapegoating capitalism by saying capitalism is this terrible thing. It is, but it has been created by us and it facilitates our darker commercial motives and operating systems of having and having not, so we can scapegoat these things and say ‘oh, that’s a terrible thing’, but it’s created by us. I quite like these honest examinations in stories of holding onto power. A kind of selfishness. Those observations are always fascinating and they’re everywhere. It’s how we operate now.

There’s a sense that the family are middle class do-gooders. The narrator thinks about what her mother would’ve done if she’d seen Charlie-bo, the vagrant man. The nuance in the characters, which considers the idea of the version of their lives they tell themselves, is interesting.

I suppose I’ve become interested in liberalism and what that means now. Whether it’s authentic. Because liberalism can dismiss a lot of stuff and forgive a lot of stuff in some ways. True liberalism is not what we think it is, so I think this questioning of what that means politically, and in our lives, is very interesting. I would consider myself, hopefully, a true liberal. But that means holding people to account, not excusing them. I’m horrified of the loss of a liberal party in Britain – not because I’d necessarily vote for them, or I think they should be voted into office – but just the idea that we’re no longer really questioning – or maybe we are again – what liberalism really is and what it should do. So, you’ve got this family who are, outwardly facing, very left-wing, in some ways, but actually are as power hungry or controlling as the very right-wing structures that seem to control things; because of money, because of having, because of entitlement, because of the wheels behind the wheels. It’s interesting to me that you can be outwardly facing one thing but operationally very different. I do see that in politics as well; the sense of the loss of authenticity in politics. It’s back to this shifting sands of what things mean and what they don’t mean and what you say you are and what you’re actually doing. That dissonance and discrepancy. That notion of things seeming to work together, and we allow it to work together in our brains, but the meaning is lost. Things cancel each other out in some ways. That’s what I was hoping for with this particular family unit. There’s obviously a very strong matriarch and an absent father figure. He’s left the family, or he’s been kicked out of the family. You only really hear about the dad at the end; is he going to come and say happy birthday? He’s passed that message on through someone else. What has happened to this girl so her father’s passing on happy birthday messages through somebody else? It’s horrific. 

Once you become a parent, it’s not unlimited power, but you have to be very careful in thinking this child is my child but actually this child isn’t. This child is a borrowed person, who I’m looking after for a while, and they are their own person. How do you helpfully create individuation rather than enmeshment for your own purposes? You need to really question yourself as a parent. We maybe do it too much now and certainly my mum’s generation didn’t do it; they spent less time with their kids, and they worried less about it. Now we spend more time with our kids, and we worry more about it. What’s going on there? Once you get into the bracket of having children rather than not, you have to take these things on, I think. You really have to work through the minefield of being a benefactor or an influence on that small, vulnerable person. 

The woman in the story appears to be a girl, but she’s thirty. You meet her and you think she might be a teenager; she’s out doing chores for her mum. And in the end, the sad thing is, her choice is almost to stay in the safe unit where she’s defined as somebody else. This is the damage of a certain kind of family unit and perhaps it’s being the youngest one in that family unit as well and being vulnerable. Again, I’ve seen it in large families and extended families; you can see the pecking order. You can see where somebody’s influence has become dangerous. And the results of that are tragic. 

There’s ambiguity to the story as well. Dilly’s collecting things from town and she’s sitting by the river and she zones out. Towards the end you hear this news of the body that’s been dragged out of the river and, in one scenario, has she killed herself to escape because she knows that the face underneath all the faces is hers? And that’s awful, but at the same time, she’s given herself up to this way of being. She has access to a psychiatrist down the road but doesn’t actually say anything. She gets no help; not that any help was really intended. There are choices we make about our identity, in realising that we’re a product of certain upbringings or certain expectations, and what do we do about it once we’re aware of it? Becoming aware of it is the key, isn’t it? You can be a product, or you can become aware of the things that have made you and start to question them. Or decide that questioning them is too difficult. So that’s the real interplay for her. And that’s where we are, I suppose, now, isn’t it? We have access to psychiatry and psychology, but to what extent are people aware of who they are and who they want to be and what mistakes they’re making and what repetitions they’re making? That’s really interesting. That’s always fascinating. Progress. How do you progress in your life? 

I really felt that sense of Dilly being trapped at the end. That she felt as though she had to give herself up to it. There was a sense that everyone knew everything about her. The psychiatrist knows her mum and Dilly’s family are setting up a job for her with an acquaintance. There’s a sense of it being nepotistic. She can get the help because she’s part of the structure, but also being part of that structure traps her in it. 

That’s is. It’s about those mechanisms. I did it in The Carhullan Army as well. If you’re training someone to resist interrogation and torture, you do certain techniques on them to make sure they can withstand it. Some of these things are to do with food restriction and again, it’s like Dilly who’s really restricted from eating. You see this a lot, don’t you? In ‘Case Story 2’, the story that I wrote for Madame Zero, there’s a kid who’s being raised in a commune and he’s anorexic. He’s only eating three snails a day. It’s a system of control. In the story it broke my heart to write the part where Dilly gets an extra scone and the relief she feels. That level of control is through very simple, but fundamental means. Her position is terrible. 

It’s really supposed to be a psychological minefield and that’s the great thing about short stories; you can present these scenarios that are psychologically mined and people walk through and they’re setting stuff off in themselves. That’s the ideal for a short story. I think it’s supposed to take you into a zone that’s full of conflict, and you bring to it your own morality or disquiet or scenario or understanding of things or questioning of things. Hopefully the two things meet. It’s dark territory really. 

I wanted to talk about the setting because it’s set in Cambridge – 

Well, it’s not, it’s an amalgamation. The Corpus Clock is in there, so people think it’s Cambridge and that’s obviously lifted from Cambridge. But as many people have read it and said it’s Oxford, it’s Norwich, and it’s an amalgamation of those places. The setting is a very rich and entitled university town, so that limits it to a few places, but the bridges are renamed and mixed up and there are places in Norwich, where I live, that are in there. St. Giles, places like that. Some people though it was Oxford too because there’s a patisserie and the landscape, but those two towns have similarities, obviously. 

Were you thinking about how the setting ties to political ideas, for example the Bullingdon Club, that class of political leaders?

Definitely there are those. Like in The Wolf Border there are the political class that I don’t know much about really. I’ve seen it a bit. That is of interest to me, the wheels that operate and the immense wealth and the immense power; the snowball wealth in this country. We cannot think this is a true liberal democracy because it isn’t. We might be doing a good impression of it at certain times, we might hope that’s what we are, and we want to become more that way, but that isn’t how this country functions really. It’s quite hard to get at that in literature. Again, a short story can touch on it in one layer and ask questions about it. 

The family in the story have got no association with the colleges really. The mother might have come from a working class town somewhere in the country, so there’s a sense of pulling up to the middle class. I suppose that has interested me, because my mum’s generation came out of that Thatcher zone of thinking. It split people; there was a kind of violence to thinking ‘I have to pull away from my working class roots; I don’t want to be that, I must be middle class. I have to disavow everything that’s gone before and recreate myself into this’. Or the digging in of pride; ‘there’s nothing wrong with being working class’. There’s a violent split that was performed in that period and since then. I have been thinking about what’s going on now. How do we define ourselves in terms of class and self-perceive what that means? The story is in some ways asking questions about that too. About what you leave behind. What you recreate yourself as and why? And the violence that performs on you and on others, in some ways. None of these questions are in any way really answered in the story, but then a short story doesn’t have to answer questions, I don’t think. It just has to ask them. It’s a hard thing to write about and there are no rights and wrongs. Why wouldn’t you aspire? That’s a good thing, but if some self-loathing is brought in then that’s an extremely damaging thing. But at the same time, again with liberalism, what’s it trying to excuse? At what point is there agency – individual agency or community agency. I’m just interested in these stories that swirl around. I’m from Cumbria, which is a region which probably should be independent. Lots of counties or regions should devolve, I think, because they’ve got very little to do with London or other parts of the country.

This is your fourth shortlisting for the BBC National Short Story Award. What’s your secret? Did you celebrate and, if you did, how?

It’s a surprise. It was a surprise the three other times as well!

I’ve been really bad at celebrating. It’s been a really rough ride over the last few months. These things happen and I should take the time, but with who? And how? Also, I’m a bit of a workhorse. I think you’ve got to get on with it and ignore the good and the bad. I am actually delighted, I really am. Short stories feel harder. It’s not my métier. There’s something about the structure, there’s something about the content of short stories that seems to suit my preoccupations and make me a better writer in some ways. I really like the form. I hope they’re working and it’s really nice to think they are working. 

I’ve judged that prize. It’s very hard. You don’t get hundreds of brilliant short stories written. On the other hand, people that have somehow caught hold of something about the form are able to accomplish things that are in some ways more exciting and satisfying than novels. When you’re judging a short story prize and you get those ones in and think ‘oh my god, this is like a gymnast’, other short story writers are able to perform these amazing literary feats that you can’t really do in a poem or in a novel, and it’s really exciting. I don’t know what the key is really; I’m still trying to work it out. I do love doing it; I love short stories. I wanted to be a poet when I first started; I’ve written novels, but something about me and short stories come together, hopefully. 

Who are your favourite short story writers? Who do you read and take inspiration from?

It’s always difficult to mention other writers. In Britain, Jon McGregor and Tessa Hadley are doing brilliant things. Helen Oyeyemi is a brilliant short story writer. And they’re all doing different things. They’re able to innovate or seem like a classicist but actually be really subversive underneath, which is great. The form allows for that. 

There are writers that I like and think are really brilliant, but in some ways it’s the individual stories. Again, having judged something, you might only ever write ten brilliant short stories in your lifetime and the rest are pretty good, but ten were brilliant. There are brilliant novelists who’ve written a couple of brilliant short stories and you think okay, something arrives at some point that has to be a short story and it’s brilliant. You’re waiting for that oddity to come along.  

The winner of the BBC National Short Story Award with Cambridge University will be announced on 6th October on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row. The shortlist anthology is out now from Comma Press and the stories are available to listen to on BBC Sounds.

Gender: what is it good for? – Reading Round-Up

Posted on by
7

The Electric Michelangelo– Sarah Hall

I started the year re-reading my favourite book. For those of you at the back, that’s The Electric Michelangelo by Sarah Hall. It tells the story of Cy Parks: his childhood in Morecambe, raised in his mother’s B&B; his apprenticeship to Eliot Riley, the local tattoo artist, and his journey to New York, where he sets up a booth in Coney Island and meets Grace, a woman from war-torn Eastern Europe, who asks him to decorate her body. Throughout the book there’s discussion about women’s bodies and what they’re allowed to do with them but it’s Grace who seems to have the answer:

It will always be about body! Always for us! I don’t see a time when it won’t. I can’t say you can’t have my body, that’s already decided, it’s already obtained. If I had fired the first shot it would have been on a different field – in the mind. All I can do is interfere with what they think is theirs, how it is supposed to look, the rules. I can interrupt like a rude person in a conversation.

I’m not going to give anything away about whether or not she succeeds, I’ll just mention again that it’s my favourite novel of all time and leave you to do the right thing.

My Sister the Serial Killer– Oyinkan Braithwaite

Ayoola summons me with these words – Korede, I killed him.
I had hoped I would never hear those words again.

Ayoola, as you can see, has a thing for murdering men, men she’s dated who’ve become angry with her. Korede’s good with the bleach so helps with the clean-up. Two things are about to become a problem though: Femi, the man Ayoola kills at the beginning of the book, has family who want to know what’s happened to him, and Ayoola starts dating Tade, a doctor at the hospital where Korede’s a nurse. A doctor Korede also has a crush on.

Braithwaite examines the role of the patriarchy in the way women behave, both towards men and towards each other. She asks whether we can ever escape our childhoods and if blood really is thicker than water. A smart page turner.

Thanks to Atlantic for the review copy.

Louis & Louise– Julie Cohen

Louis and Louise, Cohen’s protagonists, are the same child, born to the same parents, in the same place, at the same time. But they are born as two different sexes. Cohen then jumps forward 32 years to show us how their lives have turned out. Lou(ise) is a teacher and single mother to her daughter, Dana, living and working in Brooklyn. Lou(is) is a writer who’s in the process of splitting up with his wife. In both timelines, Lou is summoned home to Casablanca, Maine, because their mother is dying of cancer. This means a confrontation with Allie, Lou’s former best friend, and the uncovering of secrets kept for over a decade.

What I was expecting from Louis & Louise was a critique of gender from the protagonist’s perspective, a ‘look what you could’ve won’ style narrative. But Cohen’s version is more sophisticated than that; she uses the twins, Allie and Benny, Lou’s childhood best friends to explore the restrictions binary gender places on both women and men. There are points where this isn’t a comfortable read [cn for domestic violence, rape and suicide] but Cohen shows that there might be another way. There are a number of points in the book where Louis and Louise’s stories meet. These sections are written as though the character is non-binary, using singular they for their pronoun, and show that some of this person’s experience was identical, regardless of gender. Both versions also end with hope. Louis & Louise is a sophisticated look at gender and love and is well worth your time.

Thanks to Orion for the review copy.

Baise-Moi – Virginie Despentes (translated by Bruce Benderson)

On Sundays, I’ve started giving myself free rein to read whatever I want from my poor, neglected shelves. You know, those books I bought because I wanted to read them that sit there while I go through proofs and reading for work. Woe is me and the books that never get read. I was so enamoured with Despentes’ Vernon Subutex 1 that I’ve bought everything that’s been translated and decided to start from the beginning.

Baise-Moi translates as Rape Me so let me insert all of the trigger warnings here. Nadine is a sex worker who watches pornography incessantly. Manu has a huge appetite for sex and alcohol. After Manu is raped and Nadine kills her flatmate, the two women’s paths cross and they embark on a killing spree. It seems superfluous to mention it really, but this isn’t for the faint hearted. It’s violent, full of sex and swearing, but also – dare it say it – gripping. There’s an element of excitement in watching two women do something men have dominated for years. Morality aside, of course. Thelma & Louise meets Natural Born Killers.

The Mental Load – Emma (translated by Una Dimitrijevic)

Emma went viral with the comic ‘You Should’ve Asked’ a couple of years ago. The Mental Loadis a collection of her pieces dealing with gender and political issues, ranging from working in a hostile environment to forced caesarean sections to the male gaze to raids on immigrants made under the guise of terrorism laws. The strips are informative, clear and interesting. However, it felt a little feminism/capitalism 101 to me, in which case, I’m not the intended audience. I do heartily recommend that every heterosexual man reads a copy asap though, but not at the expense of doing his share of the housework or childcare.

You Know You Want This – Kristen Roupenian

Roupenian went viral last year with her story ‘Cat Person’ which was published in The New Yorker. Much has been made of the subsequent high figure deals she then netted for this, her debut collection. I mention it more because it’s become a talking point that as an indicator for how to read the stories – the collection seems to have taken a battering in some quarters because it isn’t what the reader expected it to be on the basis of one story and some publishing money.

If you’re looking for more stories in the same vein as ‘Cat Person’ you get one; ‘The Good Guy’ is the longest story in the collection and tells the story of Ted, who thinks he’s good but is clearly bad. Ted’s one of those men who thinks that because he had female friends, because he was the nice guy who hung around listening to their problems while working out how he might shag them, he’s good. Roupenian (and the rest of us) have news for Ted.

The rest of the stories take a somewhat darker turn. If you were expecting Sally Rooney, prepare for Ottessa Moshfegh without the redeeming qualities. In ‘Bad Boy’ a couple who have a friend staying in their flat know he can hear them having sex, so persuade him to join them; in ‘Sardines’ Tilly makes a birthday wish that will please her mum but cause problems for her dad and his new, younger girlfriend; in ‘Scarred’ the narrator conjures up her heart’s desire to discover that maybe it’s not what she wanted after all. When Roupenian’s at her best, she makes your skin crawl: ‘The Matchbox Sign’, in which Laura discovers bite marks on her skin which her doctor thinks are psychosomatic, made me itch, while ‘Biter’, in which Ellie does what it says, made me wince (and maybe punch the air, a little bit). You Know You Want This isn’t a perfect collection but it’s an interesting one.

Thanks to Jonathan Cape for the review copy.

Blood Orange – Harriet Tyce

Madeleine Smith is found next to her husband’s body; he’s been stabbed to death in their bed. Madeleine says she’s guilty but there’s something about her story that doesn’t quite seem right.

Alison is going to take Madeleine’s case – her first murder case, but Alison’s got problems of her own: she’s drinking too much, having an affair with a colleague and someone knows. Her husband, Carl, is a therapist who’s had enough of Alison’s drinking and late nights at work and isn’t afraid to use their daughter, Matilda, to make Alison feel guilty.

Tyce tells the story from Alison’s perspective and – as we follow her thoughts and actions – it starts to become clear that something isn’t quite right.

Because this is a psychological thriller and therefore some of the enjoyment hinges on the twists, I don’t want to say too much more about the plot. However, Tyce takes a very topical look at the behaviour of men and finds them wanting. Blood Orange is fierce, smart, gripping and sticks a very big middle finger up at the patriarchy. Obviously, I loved it.

Thanks to Wildfire for the review copy.

BBC National Short Story Award 2018: Sudden Traveller – Sarah Hall

Posted on by
Reply

Day two of my BBC National Short Story Award coverage and it’s the turn of my all-time favourite writer, Sarah Hall and an extract from her story ‘Sudden Traveller’.

Sudden Traveller (extract)
Sarah Hall

You breastfeed the baby in the car, while your father and brother work in the cemetery. They are clearing the drains of leaves and silt, so your mother can be buried. November storms have brought more rain than the valley has ever seen. The iron gates of the graveyard are half gone, the residents of the lower lying graves are being made moist again. Water trickles under the car’s wheels. The river has become a lake; it has breached the banks, spanned the valley’s sides. And still the uplands weep. On the radio they have been talking about rescue squads, helicopters, emergency centres in sports parks and village halls. The army is bringing sand. They have been comparing measurements from the last one hundred years. The surface of the floodwater is decorated with thousands of rings as the rain comes down.

Inside the car is absolute stillness. When he is finished, the baby sleeps against your side. There are only two small feeds a day now. His mouth has become a perfect tool and you no longer have any marked sensation, no tingling, no pressure across the chest wall as the milk lets down. His mouth remains slightly open, his cheeks flushed. There are bright veins in his eyelids, like light filaments in leaves. He rests heavily against you, hot, breathing softly, like a small machine, an extra organ worn outside the body. You could try to place him carefully on the front seat, under a blanket, get out and help clear the leaves. You would like to feel the cold air against your face and hands as it streams over the mountains. You would like to work with the men. But you dare not move. If the baby senses a temperature change, he will wake, he will want more of you. You could wear him in the sling to work, but the rain keeps coming, slanted, determined to find everything.

You sit in the car, watching reefs of cloud blow across the valley, watching the trees bow and lean and let go of their last leaves, hearing the occasional lost call between your father and brother, and feeling the infant heat against your side. So often it is like this – suspension from the world. Waiting to rejoin. Nobody warned you about this part. The baby is some kind of axis. He is a fixed point in time, though he grows every day, fingers lengthening, face passing through echoes of all your relatives, and the other relatives, heart chambers expanding, blood reproducing. It is like holding a star in your arms. A radiant new thing, whose existence was unimagined before it was discovered, illuminating so many zones, and already passing. All stories begin and end with him. All the moments of your life, all its meanings and dimensions, seem to lead to him and from him.

Sarah Hall is the prize-winning author of five novels – Haweswater, The Electric Michelangelo, The Carhullan Army, How to Paint a Dead Man and The Wolf Border. Her first short story collection, The Beautiful Indifference, won the Portico Prize and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. The first story in the collection, Butcher’s Perfume, was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award. Her second collection, Madame Zero, was published in 2017 and is currently shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize. The lead story, ‘Mrs Fox’, won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2013 and the last story, ‘Evie’, was shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. ‘Sudden Traveller’is an original commission by Audible for the Bard series of short stories. Sarah was born in Cumbria and now lives in Norwich.

The winners of the BBC National Short Story Award with Cambridge University will be announced on 2ndOctober on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row. The shortlisted stories are available in an anthology published by Comma Press, out now: https://commapress.co.uk/books/the-bbc-national-short-story-award-2018

 

‘I think all fiction is speculative.’ Sarah Hall at Manchester Literature Festival

Posted on by
6

Sarah Hall is my favourite writer but I’ve never seen her talk about her work until I arrive at her event at this year’s Manchester Literature Festival. It’s partly the old never meet your heroes adage and partly that I know I’ll make an idiot of myself if I do get to meet her. Now, on the verge of turning 40, my mantra is ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’. Provided I don’t do anything that would necessitate a restraining order, the worst I can come up with is embarrassing myself and, well, it wouldn’t be the first time.

The brilliant Katie Popperwell is on interviewing duties. Her first question to Hall is about how she approached the writing of her BBC National Short Story Award Winning ‘Mrs Fox’, considering the literary tradition of metamorphous/fox stories? Hall says that the story’s based on David Garnett’s novella Lady into Fox but that she hadn’t read the book before she began writing the story. She was fascinated with the idea that a husband would continue to live with a wife who’d turned into a fox. It was liberating to have the bare bones of the story but try not to think too mythically and do something different with it. ‘How can I absolutely convince the reader that this woman’s turned into a fox?’ was Hall’s driving question. She read Garnett’s story after she finished writing but didn’t change any aspect of her own story.

Popperwell asks if there’s a link between the story and Hall’s last novel The Wolf Border? Hall says it was a literal challenge to describe the wolves as you very rarely see them. She says the short story allows you to get a flashpoint of someone’s psychology and ‘Mrs Fox’ was a response to the question, how do you cope with radical change? That’s what underpins the metaphorical change into the fox.

The discussion moves more broadly onto Hall’s latest short story collection Madame Zero, of which ‘Mrs Fox’ is the opening story. Popperwell comments on the theme of desire which runs throughout the collection. ‘Desire that’s possibly not even known to the wives themselves’, says Hall. She describes Sofia in ‘Mrs Fox’ as ‘other’; she’s only seen from her husband’s point of view so is essentially unknowable. Evie, the character who the final story in the collection is named after, includes an explanation for her altered behaviour. What’s happened to her plays into the main sexual fantasy of her husband. Hall describes relationships as a complicated give and take with power struggles.

Popperwell asks about the influence of Cumbria on Hall’s work. Hall says she writes about living with the landscape and losing it. Sofia in ‘Mrs Fox’ sells property on new developments. She wants to get closer to the land she’s helping to destroy. ‘Is there a complicity you have with your downfalls?’ Hall asks. She says we distance ourselves from the things we really need.

How has literature served mothers? asks Popperwell. In her shortest response of the evening, Hall says, ‘It’s an open field for anyone who wants to write about it in more interesting and complex ways than it has been’.

Hall talks about how she often partners a story with a novel. She wrote The Carhullan Army alongside the story ‘Butcher’s Perfume’. She says the stories draw something off/away from the novel. In this case, it led her to think about the capabilities of women: how can they be radicalised? Can they fight on the front line? She describes the short story in this instance as ‘a starter’.

‘On a technical level, they make me better as a writer’, she says of the short story form. Everything – character, plot, description – needs to balance, ‘A slick, small machine.’ Content wise, she says she likes the episodic nature and the disquiet. The reader has to bring their own experience of life to them. ‘Your expectations are often confounded.’ She describes the qualities of short stories as ‘dizzily exciting’; they allow you to look at the psychology and the pathology of a person.

Popperwell mentions the idea that women’s writing is always autobiographical. Hall says, ‘You do look to yourself when you’re writing, that dark calibration of yourself that seems normal.’ She also says, however, that fiction allows you to get outside of yourself. Stories are transportive, you’re experiencing someone else’s experience.

The conversation returns to Cumbria and landscape and literature. ‘There have been some writers, I believe, from the Lake District, who’ve considered these things,’ says Hall. She says the sensuality she tries to create is somehow linked to the Lake District. She also has an awareness of particular words that are different in Cumbria because her parents were from the south. Don Patterson is very good on the relationship between words and content and meaning, she tells us.

What about the tenses that Hall writes stories in? It’s about finding the right voice for the thing you want to write. It’s intuitive, something in you knows already what you are doing. Popperwell asks about ‘Theatre 6’ which is written in second person. There’s a presentational distance required in using second person which allows you to do interesting things, says Hall. It draws the reader in and is discomforting. ‘I love writing in the second person.’

Do you have to know your characters well? ‘God, no.’ You have to create them well on the page, she says. If you profile the characters you’ll do it in the plot of the book. It’s fine for the writer not to know the characters well. She refers to Jackie from The Carhullan Army, calling her ‘magnetic and convincing, heroic but dreadful. Why would I want to know her when she’s going to be an unguided missile?’ We don’t know people, we get to know people’s habits. ‘You might know someone for forty years and never know them. They might fuck off.’

Does she categorise her writing as speculative fiction? ‘I think all fiction is speculative. All fiction is science fiction. You have to convince the reader of a different version of something. It’s marvellous reality.’ Returning to The Carhullan Army, she says it was written with a forty-year plan. Carlisle was down for three days in floods. There was no power, people were airlifted. You couldn’t drive out, the roads were blocked. We live mostly comfortable lives, this was an extraordinary thing. ‘It’s all coming,’ says Hall. ‘Those stories feel other but I don’t go in thinking they’re going to be science fiction, I just think I have to pull it off.’

Popperwell’s final question is about writing sex scenes. You seem to be very good at them, she says to Hall. ‘Are you asking if I’m a pervert?’ When ‘Evie’ was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Short Story Award, it was read by an actor, ‘It’s like someone’s gone in my underwear drawer’. She says, ‘The physical description is a challenge’. It’s territory that brings in society, upbringing and the state of a relationship. It’s not poetry, it’s not pornography, it’s something in between. Because she’s ‘erred towards a more stylised form of writing’ she enjoys searching for the right language. ‘It’s very hard but very rewarding.’ She ends by saying that writing about sex ‘is not a thing to shy away from as a writer’.

It’s a fantastic event. At the end, I join the signing queue, clutching my copy of The Electric Michelangelo, my favourite book. I tell Hall that I’ve brought it with me because it inspired my PhD topic but when she asks which other books I’m using I can’t remember any besides Rosie Garland’s The Palace of Curiosities. As embarrassing encounters go, I’ve had worse.

Books of the Year, Part Two: 2015 Publications

Posted on by
23

Here we are then, the books from this year I’ve read and rated most highly. I’m basing my choices on the very unscientific, I thought it was brilliant at the time and I’m still thinking about it. I was concerned this would skew the list towards the end of the year but it hasn’t at all – two thirds of the books are from the first half of 2015. Publication dates are UK (where applicable) and if you click on the cover it will take you to my review.

Citizen – Claudia Rankine 

A superb book. An examination of race and the treatment of black people in present day America. Rankine uses flash fiction, essays and poetry to explore the way people of colour ‘…feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background’ and, by implication, how often, as a white person, you are complicit in creating and maintaining that background. Short, sharp and powerful, I’d like to see a copy of Citizen distributed to every household, taught in schools and university, and added to the canon. If you believe art can change the world, this is a book that should be able to do so.


A Little Life – Hanya Yanagihara

It’s divided readers and critics but I make no apologies for including this book for several reasons: it’s utterly absorbing, I felt as though I’d been entombed in Yanagihara’s world; it focuses on male friendship which I think is unusual; the friendship group consists of four men of different ethnicities and different sexualities, one of whom is disabled and Yanagihara has written about their lives as though they are, well, people. They are not defined by their ethnicity or sexuality and this feels like a break through. It’s huge and harrowing and clearly not for everyone but I’m still thinking about it six months on.

 

The House in Smyrna – Tatiana Salem Levy (translated by Alison Entrekin)

A short, sharp tale told in fragments. At the centre of the book is the story of the key given to the unnamed narrator by her grandfather: the key to his old house in Turkey, in Smyrna. There are four threads to the book: the narrator’s journey to her grandfather’s house; the grandfather’s journey from the house to the woman who became the narrator’s grandmother; the narrator’s relationship with her dead mother, and the narrator’s passionate affair with an unnamed man. A shocking and beautiful novella about exile in many different forms.

The Private Life of Mrs Sharma – Ratika
Kapur 

Mrs Sharma’s thirty-seven-years-old and married with a fifteen-year-old son, Bobby. They live in a flat in Dehli with her parents-in-law. Her husband, Dheeraj, a physiotherapist, has been working in Dubai for over a year in a bid to raise enough money to cover his parents’ medical bills and send his son to college to do an MBA in business. She works as a receptionist in a gynaecological clinic and dreams of starting her own business. Mrs Sharma’s veneer begins to crack when she meets Vineet Seghal on a station platform. Tightly plotted with precise, often repetitive, language, this is a brilliant book about an unfulfilled woman.

Vigilante – Shelley Harris

Jenny Pepper, 42, manager of a charity bookshop, married to Elliot, graphic designer, with a 14-year-old daughter, Martha, is fed-up of her life. She’s particularly annoyed and frustrated by the way men objectify women and the consequences of this behaviour. Donning a superhero costume for a fancy dress party, she stops a mugging and gets a taste for the vigilante lifestyle. Before long, she’s on the tale of someone who’s attacking teenage girls. A gripping and believable look at the concerns of a middle-aged woman and her life.

 

The Last Act of Love – Cathy Rentzenbrink

When Cathy Rentzenbrink was seventeen, her sixteen-year-old brother, Matty, was hit by a car and left in a persistent vegetative state for eight years. The book is Rentzenbrink’s story of the effect of Matty’s accident on her and her family. Told in an unflinching first person account with a huge amount of love and dollops of humour, Rentzenbrink brings the Matty she loved back to life and pays tribute to her parents without descending into mawkishness. Heartbreaking and heartwarming. Buy tissues before reading, I’m welling up just thinking about it.

 

A God in Ruins – Kate Atkinson

A companion piece to Life After Life, A God in Ruins focuses on Ursula’s younger brother, Teddy and those who’ve shared his life – his wife, Nancy; daughter, Viola; grandchildren, Bertie and Sunny, and the men he served alongside in the RAF. The structure’s non-chronological, creating a jigsaw puzzle of Teddy’s life and the lives of his family members for the reader to reconstruct; every chapter capable of standing alone as a story in its own right. The chapters set in the war are some of Atkinson’s best writing but this is more than a character study, it’s a book that explores what fiction is. Superb.

 

The Vegetarian – Han Kang (Translated by Deborah Smith)

Mr Cheong chose his wife, Yeong-Ho, because she’s passive. But then, due to a set of reoccurring dreams, she turns vegetarian; a highly unorthodox act in South Korea. The reactions of Mr Cheong and Yeong-Ho’s family turn dark and sometimes violent quite quickly. But Yeong-Ho’s brother-in-law is fascinated with her and her mongolian mark which leads to him creating a physical work of art with her. A disconcerting story that explores society’s treatment of a woman who defies expectations and how her internalisation of those expectations affects her psyche.

 

The Ship – Antonia Honeywell 

In the not so distant future where banks have collapsed, the homeless population is out of control, food is scarce and the military rule, Lalage is protected by her father, Michael Paul, and his creation, the ship. The ship is a version of paradise, stocked with everything you might need and more. As it sets sail with Michael Paul’s chosen people on it, Lalage begins to question her father’s motives and what she really wants from life. The Ship raises questions of wealth and poverty; of governments who fail to protect all their citizens; of the value of art and artefacts. It’s futuristic setting is misleading, this is really a novel about what’s happening to society now.

The First Bad Man – Miranda July 

Cheryl Glickman, early forties, lives alone and works for a company who make self-defence, fitness DVDs. She has two fascinations: Phillip Bettelheim and babies who might be Kubelko Bondy, the son of her parents’ friends. Cheryl’s bosses ask if their daughter, Clee, can move in with her until she finds a job. First Clee trashes Cheryl’s system for keeping the house clean and tidy, then she’s physically fighting Cheryl for extended periods before Cheryl begins imagining herself as Phillip having sex with Clee. It sounds absurd but it’s a sharp exploration of loneliness which transforms into something emotionally fulfilling.

The Wolf Border – Sarah Hall

Rachel has spent almost a decade in Idaho, monitoring wolves on a reservation but an unplanned pregnancy, the death of her mother and the offer of a job supporting the reintroduction of the Grey Wolf to Great Britain sees her returning to the Lake District. The Wolf Border considers a variety of different intersections that humans come up against – birth, death, addiction, love, political change and, of course, nature. The precision of the language, particularly in the descriptions of the Lake District and the wolves, is superb as is the characterisation of Rachel. One of our best novelists, probably her best book.

Grow a Pair: 9 1/2 Fairytales About Sex 
 – Joanna Walsh

From the very opening sentences of the first story to the end of the afterword of Grow a Pair transformations occur: characters adopt and change their genitalia; a man becomes a woman; a queen becomes a witch; a woman fragments into multiple vaginas. Walsh mixes retellings of traditional fairytales like ‘The Princess and the Penis’ with new pieces. Filled with as many moments of humour as it is ones of magical realism, the collection allows its women to take control of their own sexuality and fulfilment. Entertaining, smart and thoughtful.

The Gracekeepers – Kirsty Logan

A dual narrative following two young women – North, who lives with Circus Excalibur, travelling the sea but performing most nights on land with her bear, and Callanish, the gracekeeper, living on a tiny island by the graveyard and performing Restings for the dead. North has a number of issues to deal with – she’s engaged to Ainsel and his father wants them to live on land, but she doesn’t want either of these things; Ainsel’s mother is jealous, and North is pregnant to someone else. She’s also tied to Callanish in ways that only begin to reveal themselves when the two meet. A beautifully rendered world.

 

An Untamed State – Roxane Gay 

Mirelle is kidnapped in front of her husband, Michael, and their baby, Christophe, directly outside the heavy steel gates at the bottom of the drive to her parents’ house in Haiti. She’s been taken because her father’s rich and the kidnappers believe he will pay a lot of money for her, his youngest and favourite daughter in U.S. dollars. He refuses, assuming they will return her unharmed. She’s repeatedly raped and tortured. The majority of the book deals with the aftermath, looking at whether it’s possible to rebuild a life, a marriage, a familial relationship after such horror. An interesting examination of power and privilege.

Talk of the Toun – Helen MacKinven

Angela’s short-term ambition is for her and her best friend, Lorraine, to lose their virginity over the summer holidays. Long-term, she wants to move away from the council scheme she’s grown up on and attend Glasgow School of Art. Her parents are determined she’s getting a job. Over one summer in the 1980s, Angela and Lorraine’s friendship will deteriorate thanks to Pamela aka Little Miss Brown Nose and Stevie Duffy, just out of borstal and ‘a total ride’. Class, religion, family and friendships are all explored but it’s the perceptive look at women’s sexuality and the use of Scots dialect that really make this a stand out read.

 

Honourable mentions also go to The Hourglass Factory by Lucy Ribchester; The Table of Less Valued Knights by Marie Phillips; Dear Thief by Samantha Harvey; Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum, The Chimes by Anna Smaill and Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller.

In the Media: 12th April 2015

Posted on by
4

In the media is a weekly round-up of features written by, about or containing female writers that have appeared during the previous week and I think are insightful, interesting and/or thought provoking. Linking to them is not necessarily a sign that I agree with everything that’s said but it’s definitely an indication that they’ve made me think. Also, just a note to make it clear that I’m using the term ‘media’ to include social media, so links to blog posts as well as traditional media are likely.

The results of the VIDA count was announced on Monday. VIDA: Women in Literary Arts have counted the number of female and male reviewers in the major literary publications. There are some improvements this year, but overall the picture remains grim. For the first time this year, VIDA published a separate count for Women of Colour, it’s as depressing as you might expect. Reaction came from Hannah Ellis Peterson in The Guardian, ‘Male writers continue to dominate literary criticism, Vida study finds‘; Radhika Sanghani in The Telegraph, ‘Men aren’t better writers than women. Literary mags need to close the book on gender bias‘ and on Bustle, Caroline Goldstein declared, ‘The Results of the 2014 Women of Color VIDA Count Are Problematic‘.

VIDA also produced a handout: Things You Can Do Right Now to Advance Women’s Writing. Immediately after the results of the announcement, good things began to happen in Twitterland; Marisa Wikramamanayake created a ‘Women Who Review‘ database. If you’re a reviewer, you can add yourself to it; if you’re an editor at a literary magazine with a gender balance problem, you can have a look at all the women you could approach with review commissions. Judi Sutherland is getting a group of women reviewers together to send reviews to the TLS, contact her on Twitter if you want to get involved, and Amy Mason created Sister Act Theatre (@SisterTheatre): Support + recommendations of/for women working in UK theatre/performance. Worked with a great woman? Need work? Promoting your show? Tell us.

While all that’s been going on, Katy Derbyshire has been collating ‘Some more statistics on translated fiction‘ on Love German Books.

The other big news this week came from an American report that found the number of women choosing to be child-free has increased. The report coincided with the publication of the Meghan Daum edited essay collection Selfish, Shallow and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids and the launch of the film While We’re Young. It’s triggered a number of articles: Emma Gray at the Huffington Post says, ‘A Record Percentage Of Women Don’t Have Kids. Here’s Why That Makes Sense‘; Jane Marie wrote, ‘Why I Stopped Trying to Be a Supermom and Started Being Myself Again‘ on Jezebel’; Hayley Webster wrote, ‘I had an abortion and didn’t talk about it…and I no longer want to live in shame‘ on her website; Hadley Freeman wrote, ‘Why do we still have to justify the choice to be child-free?‘ in The Guardian; Jessica Valenti asked, ‘Why do we never worry about men’s childlessness and infertility?‘ also in The Guardian

The best of the rest:

On or about books/writers/language:

Personal essays/memoir:

Feminism:

Society and Politics:

Music and Television:

 

The interviews:

If you want some fiction to read:

If you want some poetry to read:

If you want some non-fiction to read:

The lists:

In the Media: 29th March 2015

Posted on by
1

In the media is a weekly round-up of features written by, about or containing female writers that have appeared during the previous week and I think are insightful, interesting and/or thought provoking. Linking to them is not necessarily a sign that I agree with everything that’s said but it’s definitely an indication that they’ve made me think. Also, just a note to make it clear that I’m using the term ‘media’ to include social media, so links to blog posts as well as traditional media are likely.

News this week from ABC that a Tasmanian writer, Marjorie Davey, has published her first novel at the age of 95. She might be the oldest but she’s not the only woman to be published later in life; Abby Ellin’s article, ‘Finding Success, Well Past the Age of Wunderkind‘ in the New York Times includes Lucille Gang Shulklapper, first published at 60, and Cathy writes about Leland Bardwell: The forgotten woman of Irish literature, first published at 48, on 746Books.

At the opposite end of the age spectrum (give or take) the big news this week was that Zayn Malik left pop band One Direction. Before the news broke, Leesa Cross-Smith wrote ‘One Direction & Other Boy Bands‘ on Real Pants (which had me watching more 1D videos than I’d ever seen before (which was none)) while advertisements for Granta popped up). Anna Leszkiewicz wrote ‘I’m an adult woman with a real boyfriend – and I’m absolutely heartbroken about Zayn Malik quitting One Direction‘ in The Independent, Mackenzie Kruvant wrote, ‘How One Direction Helped Me Find My Girls‘ on Buzzfeed, and Huma Munshi wrote, ‘The Courage of Zayn Malik and Why Strong Men Cry‘ on Media Diversified.

Media Diversified also published an open letter ‘To the organisers of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction‘ regarding Cathy Newman and Grace Dent being members of the judging panel.

Granta, in celebration of their new website, opened up some of their archive, including these letters from Iris Murdoch to Raymond Queneau; ‘Night‘ by Alice Munroe; Sayaka Murata’s ‘A Clean Marriage‘ (tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori), and ‘Hardy Animal‘ by M.J. Hyland

It was the anniversary of Virginia Woolf’s death this week. Daniel Swift wrote ‘Virginia Woolf in the Bomb-scarred City‘ in Five Dials and Louise Brearley read Virginia Woolf’s final letter to her husband in The Telegraph.

And in commemoration of the third anniversary of Adrienne Rich’s death, The Critical Flame have devoted a whole issue to her and her work. The table of contents is here.

Angelina Jolie Pitt turned to writing this week with her ‘Diary of a Surgery‘ in The New York Times. Fay Schopen responded with ‘Angelina Jolie says the decision to deal with her cancer was simple. Mine is not‘ in The Guardian, while Caroline Corcoran wrote about her own experience, ‘I never felt like I’m less of a woman because I don’t have breasts or ovaries‘ in The Independent.

But the woman with the most publicity this week seems to be JK Rowling. ‘JK Rowling says she received ‘loads’ of rejections before Harry Potter success‘ wrote Alison Flood in The Guardian; Stylist ran ‘JK Rowling’s Brilliant Response to Fan Who ‘Can’t See’ Dumbledore as Gay, Plus 9 Times She Owned Twitter‘; Matilda Battersby wrote, ‘JK Rowling defends Dumbledore on Twitter: Seven Things You Might Not Know About the Hogwarts’ Headmaster‘ in The Independent; Chris Mandle wrote, ‘Why we need more fictional gay role models like Albus Dumbledore‘ in The Telegraph and Stylist ran a piece titled, ‘JK Rowling Describes Hitting ‘Rock Bottom’ In a New Book About The Benefits Of Failure‘

In Harper Lee news, the cover of Go Set a Watchman was revealed this week. The Guardian are inviting people to design their own.

Finally, if you want a good reading list of books by women, the Edge Hill Short Story Prize announced its longlist this week, including Anneliese Mackintosh, Stella Duffy, Kirsty Logan, May-Lan Tan, Hilary Mantel and A.L. Kennedy.

The best of the rest articles/essays:

 

The interviews:

If you want some fiction/poetry to read:

The lists:

The Wolf Border – Sarah Hall

Posted on by
27

She would like to believe Thomas, to think that the country as a whole will one day re-wild, whatever its new manmade divisions created at the ballot box. She would like to believe there will be a place, again, where the streetlights end and wilderness begins. The wolf border.

Rachel has spent almost a decade in Idaho, monitoring wolves on a reservation. As the novel begins she’s about to make her first visit to England in six years:

She is being called upon to entertain a rich man’s whimsy, a man who owns almost a fifth of her home county. And her mother is dying. Neither duty is urgent; both players will wait, with varying degrees of patience.

She attempts to visit the rich man first – Thomas Pennington, Earl of Annerdale – but, after arriving late due to a delayed flight, is forced to return the following day. Then, Pennington takes Rachel on a tour of his estate to show her the enclosure barrier, the one in which he intends to reintroduce the Grey Wolf to Britain.

Above the moorland and trees, the Lakeland mountains castle. Above the crags, sky, occluded clouds. As a child, the territory seemed so wild that anything might be possible. The moors were endless, haunting; they hid everything and gave up secrets only intermittently – an orchid fluting in a bog, a flash of blue wing, some phantom, long-boned creature, caught for a moment against the horizon before disappearing. Only the ubiquitous sheep tamed the landscape. She did not know it then, but in reality, it was a kempt place, cultivated, even the high grasslands covering the fells was manmade. Though it formed her notions of beauty, true wilderness lay elsewhere.

Pennington wants Rachel to manage the enclosure but she sees the wolves living in captivity as a step backwards from her work on the Idaho reservation and declines. She returns to America, telling her colleague, Kyle:

It’s a good scheme. But a mad hope and glory project – he wants to re-wild, eventually…Britain has a history of wealthy eccentrics who love grand schemes, especially if they can be named after themselves. They think they can do whatever they want. Maybe they can – a few handshakes with old-school friends in Parliament and off they go. It’s not like here.

But, following a drunken one-night stand with Kyle at their New Year’s Eve party, she realises she’s pregnant and accepts Pennington’s offer.

The novel then follows her through the reintroduction of a pair of Grey Wolves; her decision over the baby, and her relationship with her brother, all played out during the lead-up to the Scottish referendum.

The Wolf Border considers a variety of different intersections that humans come up against – birth, death, addiction, love, political change and, of course, nature. Hall explores how these borders change people:

She doesn’t want a baby. She has never wanted a baby. A baby would be ridiculous. But how can she describe the feeling? The strange interest in it all, now that the situation pertains to her specifically. The mercurial days: fatal mornings when she is sure she wants rid of it, nights when the certainty evaporates and she imagines. It’s as if some rhythm – circadian, immune, hormonal, she does not know what exactly – waxes and wanes and, with it, her rational mind.

There’s so much about this book that’s impressive; Hall’s writing is obviously the key to it all, her sentences are precise and rhythmic, not a word out of place, not a slip in the voice. Her descriptions of the landscape of the Lake District and the wolves are breathtaking. Her characterisation – particularly of Rachel – is superb. It’s pleasing to see a woman protagonist, in her thirties, career-driven in an area rarely explored in literature, no desire for a relationship, self-sufficient, a risk-taker, portrayed without moral judgement.

It baffles me that The Wolf Border wasn’t shortlisted for the Bailey’s Prize and I’ll be on my soapbox if it isn’t on the Man Booker Prize longlist in the summer. Hall is one of the UK’s best writers and this is her most fully realised work. I hope that the current interest in nature writing and realistic female protagonists mean that this novel gets the recognition it deserves.

My Bailey’s Prize Wishlist 2015

Posted on by
30

You know that spring is almost here when the Bailey’s Prize for Women gets underway. Next Tuesday (10th March) the longlist of 20 novels (if it remains the same as recent years) will be announced. Eligible novels have to be written in English and published by a UK adult imprint between the 1st of April 2014 and the 31st of March 2015. Translations are not eligible.

Here’s what I’d like to see on the list. If you click on the cover, it’ll take you to my review, unless the book is yet to be published, in which case the review will be posted on the week of publication.

As ever, I’ll be shadowing the whole process. Check back on Friday for more details on this.

(Published 26th March)

(Published 26th March)

(Published 5th March)

And three I haven’t read yet but are strong possibilities:

Ones to Read in 2015

Posted on by
34

There are a number of preview lists in the media at the moment. Rather than tell you what’s coming up, I’ve been reading 2015 titles since October so I can recommend books I think you should watch out for in the first half of 2015. Bar the bottom three titles – which are by three of my favourite writers and therefore, highly anticipated by me – I’ve read everything included on here; all of these books are very good and some are superb.

Full reviews will follow on the week of publication. All publication dates are UK and subject to change.

An Untamed State – Roxane Gay

On a visit to her parents in Haiti, Mireille is kidnapped in front of her husband and baby son. When her father holds out on paying the ransom, she’s subjected to brutal attacks. Her family will have to come to terms with the consequences but Gay clearly makes the personal political and An Untamed State is also about the treatment of women by men; the relationship between Haiti and America, and poverty versus wealth. This is an incredible book, if I read many better this year, I’ll be surprised.

Published 8th January by Corsair Books

Hausfrau – Jill Alexander Essbaum

Anna, an American, has lived in Dietlikon, a quiet suburb of Zurich for nine years but she’s never felt as though she belongs despite being married to a Swiss man and having had three children there. When her therapist suggests she attend a German language class, she meets Archie and begins an affair. Essbaum interweaves lessons about language and passivity with Anna’s thoughts and behaviour and adds her work to a line of women going against society’s expectations.

Published 26th March by Mantle

A Spool of Blue Thread – Anne Tyler

The Whitshank family could be any family on the surface – Abby and Red and their four children, son Denny causing problems and disappearing for long periods until someone needs him. The novel begins with Abby’s story and her descent into forgetting things before moving to how her and Red met and then to his parents and their story. A number of family secrets are revealed along the way and Tyler writes families as only she can – with a keen eye and an acute understanding of how the bonds between family members work.

Published 10th February by Chatto & Windus

The Gracekeepers – Kirsty Logan

Callanish is a gracekeeper, someone who performs the burial of the dead. North and her bear are part of the Circus Excalibur, a circus that sails around performing – there is no place on what’s left of the land for them. But North is betrothed to the son of Red Gold, the circus owner, who wants them to have a house on land and restore his family line to the earth. Not everyone likes his plan though and North and Callanish’s paths are going to cross and set them on a different course. Logan builds upon the promise she showed in her short story collection, The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales. The Gracekeepers places her somewhere between Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood.

Published 7th May by Harvill Secker

The Ship – Antonia Honeywell

London is burning. The British Museum is occupied. The Nazareth Act is in force and if you can’t produce your identity card in seconds you’re going to be shot. Lalla’s mother has tried to show her some of the reality but she’s sheltered by her wealthy father, Michael Paul, who’s been building a boat and selecting the people who will travel on it. When her mother’s shot, the boat sets sail but where are they going and what will Lalla discover along the way? A thoughtful, genre crossing, page turner.

Published 19th February by W&N

Vigilante – Shelley Harris

Jenny Pepper’s fed up of tidying up after her graphic designer husband, Elliot and teenage daughter, Martha. When she’s on her way to her friend’s fancy dress party as a superhero and prevents a mugging, she gets a buzz from acting as a vigilante protecting other women. Add to this the graphic novel designed by Elliot, containing a female victim with an unrealistic body; the graffiti picture of a girl in the uniform of the school Martha attends, and a man who’s attacking girls in Martha’s year and Jenny has a purpose in life. Hard to put down.

Published 8th January by W&N

Our Endless Numbered Days – Claire Fuller

Peggy’s father is a member of the North London Retreaters, discussing strategies for surviving the end of the world. While her mother, professional pianist, Ute, is on a tour of Germany, Peggy’s father tells her Ute is dead and takes her to live in die Hütte somewhere in Europe. The structure of the novel moves between Peggy’s present when she has returned to London and her mother and her time in die Hütte and how she and her father survived. Fascinating and terrifying.

Published 26th February by Fig Tree.

 

The Vegetarian – Han Kang (translated by Deborah Smith)

When Yeong-hye begins to have nightmares about meat and murder she decides to turn vegetarian, something highly unusual in South Korean society. It strains her relationship with her husband and her father but makes her highly attractive to her brother-in-law. Told in three linked novellas, each from a different point of view, The Vegetarian becomes odder and more unnerving as Yeong-hye deteriorates mentally and physically.

Published 1st January by Portobello Books.

The Chimes – Anna Smaill

Simon goes to London with his bag of objectmemories, and the name and tune of a woman his mother told him to find. Lives are run by The Order who tell them Onestory every day and erase their memory with Chimes every evening. There is no writing, no shared stories and communities are difficult to forge; music rules everything. But Simon has a purpose, he just needs to remember what it is. An extraordinary story told in a brave and unusual way.

Published 12th February by Sceptre.

 

Before the Fire – Sarah Butler

Stick and Mac are leaving Manchester for Spain. Stick’s had enough of the memories of his sister, dead in a fire; his father who left him and his mother after his sister’s death and now has a posh house with his new wife and kids, and his mum’s OCD which is giving them both sleepless nights. But the night before they’re due to leave, Mac’s attacked and now Stick’s going nowhere and life looks a whole lot worse, especially as the 2011 riots are about to take place. A great addition to working class literature.

Published 12th March by Picador.

 

The Shore – Sara Taylor

Some families just don’t work out. The Shore is a collection of three islands off the coast of Virginia. There live a group of people related to each other. The book begins by introducing Chloe and Renee, daughters of Ellie and Bo. There’s been a murder and people in the local store are gossiping about it. By the end of the first chapter, there will have been three. The book then goes on to tell the stories – past and future – of those related to this central family. The reader travels back to 1876 and Medora and forward to 2143 and Simian. Ambitious with plenty to say about the treatment of women.

Published 26th March by William Heinemann.

The Hourglass Factory – Lucy Ribchester

Frankie George, reporter for the London Evening Gazette, is sent to write a profile of Ebony Diamond, trapeze artist and suffragette, but that evening, Ebony disappears and a woman mistakenly identified as her is murdered. Weaving a murder investigation with the activities of the suffragettes, The Hourglass Factory is a satisfying, multi-strand story with some serious points to make about women and gender roles.

Published 15th January by Simon & Schuster

 

All This Has Nothing to Do With Me – Monica Sabolo (translated by Georgina Collins)

When MS interviews XX she hires him because he’s quirky, tall, young and a mess. MS falls into an obsessive, largely unrequited love which she fuels by keeping notes about XX and taking ‘mementos’ from their after-work drinks. These are documented in diary entries, emails and photographs. The book then moves to tell the story of MS’s childhood and her parents. Sabolo interweaves her own photographs and uses her own initials in this novel which seems to blur the boundaries of fiction and autobiography in a similar way to Sheila Heti and Leanne Shapton.

Published 9th April by Picador.

And the three I haven’t read but am very much looking forward to:

A God in Ruins – Kate Atkinson

In A God in Ruins, Atkinson turns her focus on Ursula’s beloved younger brother Teddy – would-be poet, RAF bomber pilot, husband and father – as he navigates the perils and progress of the 20th century. For all Teddy endures in battle, his greatest challenge will be to face living in a future he never expected to have.

I’ve been reading Kate Atkinson’s novels since Behind the Scenes at the Museum won the Whitbread Award (now the Costa) in 1995 and she’s never disappointed.

Published 5th May by Doubleday.

The Wolf Border – Sarah Hall

For almost a decade Rachel Caine has turned her back on home, kept distant by family disputes and her work monitoring wolves on an Idaho reservation. But now, summoned by the eccentric Earl of Annerdale and his controversial scheme to reintroduce the Grey Wolf to the English countryside, she is back in the peat and wet light of the Lake District.

The earl’s project harks back to an ancient idyll of untamed British wilderness – though Rachel must contend with modern-day concessions to health and safety, public outrage and political gain – and the return of the Grey after hundreds of years coincides with her own regeneration: impending motherhood, and reconciliation with her estranged family.

The Wolf Border investigates the fundamental nature of wilderness and wildness, both animal and human. It seeks to understand the most obsessive aspects of humanity: sex, love, and conflict; the desire to find answers to the question of our existence; those complex systems that govern the most superior creature on earth.

Hall’s been my favourite female novelist since I read The Electric Michelangelo; I think she’s one of the UK’s greatest.

Published 26th March by Faber & Faber

The Story of My Teeth – Valeria Luiselli (translated by Christina MacSweeney)

Gustavo ‘Turnpike’ Sanchez is a man with a mission: he is planning to replace every last one of his unsightly teeth. He has a few skills that might help him on his way: he can imitate Janis Joplin after two rums, he can interpret Chinese fortune cookies, he can stand an egg upright on a table, and he can float on his back. And, of course, he is the world’s best auction caller – although other people might not realise this, because he is, by nature, very discreet.Studying auctioneering under Grandmaster Oklahoma and the famous country singer Leroy Van Dyke, Highway travels the world, amassing his collection of ‘Collectibles’ and perfecting his own specialty: the allegoric auction. In his quest for a perfect set of pearly whites, he finds unusual ways to raise the funds, culminating in the sale of the jewels of his collection: the teeth of the ‘notorious infamous’ – Plato, Petrarch, Chesterton, Virginia Woolf et al.Written with elegance, wit and exhilarating boldness, Valeria Luiselli takes us on an idiosyncratic and hugely enjoyable journey that offers an insightful meditation on value, worth and creation, and the points at which they overlap.

I reviewed Luiselli’s debut novel, Faces in the Crowd, back in 2012 and it was one of my books of the year. I’m looking forward to entering her strange, clever world again.

Published 2nd April by Granta.

 

Thanks to Mantle, Chatto & Windus, Harvill Secker, W&N, Fig Tree, Portobello Books, Sceptre, Picador, William Heinemann and Simon & Schuster for the review copies.