Backlist Books of the Year

At the end of 2019, I challenged myself to read 100 books from my own shelves. What I meant by from my own shelves were the books that had been sitting there some time, often for years. I was fed up of not getting to books that I knew I wanted to read because there was always something shiny and new in front of me. The pandemic helped, of course; losing most of your work and being forced to stay at home will do that. I finished the 100 in early December. Here are the ones I really really loved.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake – Aimee Bender (Windmill)

I thought this would be twee, I was so wrong. The story of a girl who realises she can taste people’s emotions; the story of her brother who begins to disappear. It’s about trauma and depression and it’s perfect.

The Western Wind – Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape)

A Brexit allegory disguised as a Medieval whodunnit. Utterly compelling.

Fleishman Is in Trouble – Taffy Brodesser-Akner (Wildfire)

A soon-to-be-ex-wife and mother disappears. A terrible soon-to-be-ex-husband who thinks he’s great has his story narrated by his ‘crazy’ friend. A piercing look at heterosexual marriage and a send-up of the Great American Novel. Longer review here.

Things we lost in the fire – Mariana Enriquez (translated by Megan McDowell) (Granta)

Dark, dark, dark stories. So haunting, so brilliant.

Exquisite Cadavers – Meena Kandasamy (Atlantic)

A Oulipo style novella showing how fiction can be created from life, but it isn’t the same thing. Longer review here.

Ongoingness: The End of a Diary – Sarah Manguso (Graywolf Press)

Manguso wrote a daily diary until she had her first child. This is full of ideas of letting go which are so brilliant I copied many of them on to Post-Its and stuck them above my desk. It’s published by Picador in the UK.

we are never meeting in real life – Samantha Irby (Faber)

Irby is my discovery of the year. Her essays are laugh-out-loud funny and entertaining but they are also about her life as a working class, disabled Black woman with a traumatic childhood. Revolutionary.

Heartburn – Nora Ephron (Virago)

Funny; good on cooking and marriage. Devastating final chapter.

Fingersmith – Sarah Waters (Virago)

Clever crime novel about class, the art of theft and pornography. Superb structure. A masterpiece.

The Chronology of Water – Lidia Yuknavitch (Canongate)

Yuknavitch’s non-chronological memoir about the fifteen lives she has lived. It’s about dying (metaphorically), swimming (literally and metaphorically) and living (literally). It fizzes.

Bear – Marian Engel (Pandora)

The headline is this is a book about a woman who has sex with a bear. It’s really about female autonomy. It’s being republished in the UK in 2021 by Daunt Books.

Magic for Beginners – Kelly Link (Harper Perennial)

Kelly Link is a genius. These stories are so rich in detail; she takes you from a situation that seems perfectly normal to a wild, subverted world that also seems perfectly normal. Incredible.

Parable of the Talents – Octavia E. Butler (Headline)

The novel that predicted a president who would aim to ‘Make America Great Again’. It’s as much the story of a mother / daughter relationship formed under significant trauma as it is the story of a country at war with itself. Longer review here.

Copies of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Fleishman is in Trouble, Exquisite Cadavers, we are never meeting in real life, The Chronology of Water and Parable of the Talents were courtesy of the publishers as listed. All others are my own copies.

Books of the Year 2020

I’ve read more books this year than I’ve ever read in a year before. It’s been a very strange time, but these are the books published this year that have resonated with me.

This Mournable Body – Tsitsi Dangarembga (Faber)

Tambudzai’s life is not going how she expected. In her 30s, living in a hostel, unemployed, in a country that’s hostile, there are multiple structural barriers preventing her progress. An examination of a woman and a country. A masterpiece. Longer review here.

Love After Love – Ingrid Persaud (Faber)

A woman widowed from her abusive husband; her young son, and a gay man hiding his sexuality. Their bond asks the question what really makes a family? Betty, Solo and Mr Chetan have lived in my head since I read this in the first half of the year. Gorgeous. Longer review here.

So We Can Glow – Leesa Cross-Smith (Grand Central)

Cross-Smith’s latest short story collection celebrates women and girls. Their triumphs, their tribulations, their crushes, their loves, the way they support each other to rebuild themselves and their lives. The language and the characters fizz. Longer review here.

The Meaning of Mariah Carey – Mariah Carey with Michaela Angela Davis (Macmillan)

It shouldn’t really be a surprise that Carey’s memoir isn’t your average celebrity memoir. Open, honest and reflective, Carey looks at her traumatic childhood, her marriage to Tommy Mottola and her career. A fascinating insight into who she is and how she became one of the most successful singers in the world.

The Bass Rock – Evie Wyld (Jonathan Cape)

The story of three women, in three different time periods, lived in the shadow of the Bass Rock. They’re linked by what one of Wyld’s minor characters – the brilliant Maggie – describes as a serial killer: toxic masculinity. Maggie’s idea of a map showing places where women have been killed by men has haunted me all year, as has the final page of the novel. Longer review here.

Hamnet – Maggie O’Farrell (Tinder Press)

Named for Shakespeare’s son who died – probably of plague – and the play that was probably written about Shakespeare’s grief: Hamlet. Really though, this is the story of Agnes (Anne), Shakespeare’s wife. Beautiful and vividly told. O’Farrell’s well-deserved acclaim was long overdue. Longer review here.

Breasts and Eggs – Mieko Kawakami (translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd) (Picador)

A novel in two-parts exploring Natsuko’s sister’s desire for breast implants and then Natsuko’s questions around whether or not she wants a child. An examination of the expectations placed on women from a working class Japanese perspective with a bonus send-up of the literary industry. Longer review here.

In the Dream House – Carmen Maria Machado (Serpent’s Tail)

A ground-breaking memoir of an emotionally abusive, same-gender relationship. It questions notions of the canon through a range of devices and genres while delivering a devastating portrait of domestic abuse. Longer review here.

Postcolonial Love Poem – Natalie Diaz (Faber)

An investigation of the body as a site of trauma and of desire. Diaz connects the body to the land, the water (particularly rivers) and the air, showing how violation of the elements by white Americans has led to irreparable damage. This is also a celebration of queer love and language that elevates and transcends. Longer review here.

Bad Love – Maame Blue (Jacaranda Books)

19yo Ekuah has an on / off affair with up-and-coming musician Dee. Later she meets English teacher and spoken word night organiser Jay Stanley. The two men exert different pulls on her life, but Ekuah has to work out how she wants to live. I was rooting for her all the way. Longer review here.

Writers & Lovers – Lily King (Picador)

Casey’s in her 30s. Single, a waitress trying to write a novel, living in her brother’s friend’s shed, she meets two men: Silas is a teacher and a writer, but unreliable; Oscar is slightly older, an established writer, widowed with two young boys. Casey has to decide whether to accept or reject a conventional life. I wrote about her choices for the Pan Macmillan blog.

Nudibranch – Irenosen Okojie (Dialogue Books)

Okojie is the queen of stories that take you to unexpected places. Her latest collection is a wild ride of time-travelling silent monks; some unexpected zombies; a heart-eating goddess; mechanical boys, and an albino man who brings fountains to a small town in Mozambique. The incredible ‘Grace Jones’, about an impersonator and her past, deservedly won the 2020 AKO Cane Prize. Slightly longer review here.

Thanks to the publishers (as listed) for This Mournable Body, The Bass Rock, Hamnet, Breasts and Eggs, and Writers & Lovers. All other books are my own purchases.

#DiverseDecember #17 – #21

Things have been slightly derailed by my despair at the situation in the UK and being exhausted at the end of term. I also wanted everything I recommended to be fairly recent publications and I over-estimated how much reading I could do. But I’m back on track so I’m going to do two round-ups, one today and one on Thursday (Christmas Eve). 

So We Can Glow – Leesa Cross-Smith (Grand Central Publishing) 

The ‘We’ in the title of Lessa Cross-Smith’s latest short story collection is women and girls. Through a collective narration in the opening story ‘We, Moons’ the hopes, dreams and fears of women and girls are laid out:

We’re not depressed all the time, some of us aren’t even depressed sometimes. We’re okay, our hearts, dusted with pink. When we cry in our bathrooms together it’s about men or our mothers or our fathers or our bodies. […] We love men. We are ashamed of this attraction. We, the ones who aren’t lesbians or asexual; we fantasise about lesbian communes or asexual communes. 

What follows are 41 stories in which women and girls have crushes, fall in love, have affairs, have relationships with good men and terrible men, form friendships which last a lifetime, live, laugh, cry. 

One of the reasons I love Cross-Smith’s work is that we share a lot of cultural references. This exchange from ‘Teenage Dream Time Machine’ is a perfect example:

Dave and I were listening to
DEF LEPPARD.

POUR SOME SUGAR ON
ME?!

Of course! LOL.

I love it. Did you ever dye
your hair?

Bright pink once and my mom
almost killed me. I used to 
spray Sun In in my hair when I
laid out but it didn’t do much. It
smelled good though. I wanted 
to be Drew Barrymore. I wanted
to be Courtney Love for a 
minute too. 

Same. This is so funny…all
the women our age…we 
were practically living the
same life! We’re all
connected…like magic.

I also love that she takes crushes, especially on pop stars / actors / sportsmen seriously and the lives and thoughts of teenage girls. That she writes like a dream, ending so many of these stories on the most perfect lines, only elevates the stories of women and girls further. As it should be. 

My Darling from the Lions – Rachel Long (Picador) 

Rachel Long’s excellent debut collection considers love in all its forms: romantic, familial, friendship, discovering how to love yourself. A series of poems called ‘Open’ punctuate the first section:

This morning he told me
I sleep with my mouth open
and my hands in my hair.
I say, What, like screaming?
He says, No, like abandon.

But it’s the love for her mother that really shines through:

Orb

Mum combs her auburn ’fro up high.
So high it’s an orb.
Everyone wants to – but cannot – touch it.

Themes of race, class and misogyny underpin the collection and it’s often these undertones that deliver the vivid images and sucker punch final lines that resonate long after reading.  

Endless Fortune – Ify Adenuga (Own It! / Boy Better Know)

Ify Adenuga is the mother of four children: Joseph Junior aka Skepta; Jamie aka Jme; Julie, who was the voice of Apple’s music station Beats 1 when it launched, and Jason, music producer and graphic designer. They’re the reason I picked up Endless Fortune, but Ify Adenuga’s own story turns out to be more interesting than her children’s.

The book begins when Adenuga is 10, living in Lagos with her family. The Bifran War begins and Adenuga’s family, who are Igbo, flee the city to their father’s village. Adenuga misses much about Lagos, not least attending school. When she is able to go to the nearest school the teacher suggests she skips a year (having missed three years of schooling) This creates tension with her father who thinks she should do things chronologically and come top of the class. Adenuga finds a way around this and passes the year with a high mark. This sets up two threads that weave throughout Adenuga’s story: the first is her passion for learning which takes her to a ‘good’ school, through a degree as a mature student, to setting up her own education centres and the second, her determination that no one will stand in her way. 

Adenuga’s memoir is one of a woman who took risks, stayed resilient through multiple setbacks, and created a life that allowed herself and her family to flourish. It’s a fascinating story. 

Future Home of the Living God – Louise Erdrich (Corsair)

When I tell you that my white name is Cedar Hawk Songmaker and that I am the adopted child of Minneapolis liberals, and that when I went looking for my Ojibwe parents and found that I was born Mary Potts I hid the knowledge, maybe you’ll understand. Or not. I’ll write this anyway, because ever since last week things have changed.

Cedar’s diary is written for the unborn baby she is carrying in a world where being pregnant is dangerous. As society breaks down, pregnant women are being captured and kept in hospitals. 

When Cedar discovers she is pregnant, she goes to meet her birth mother, withdraws all her savings and stockpiles things that might be useful – cigarettes, guns, ammunition. Protected by the baby’s father, she attempts to stay hidden, communicating with her birth family via her mother’s husband. 

It’s a tense tale with some particularly evocative scenes; a period of time in hospital with an elective mute roommate is a really interesting section of the story, and there’s a graphic description of labour and birth that had me wincing. 

If you’ve read Erdrich before you’ll know that in her novels the backstory is the story. In some ways, Future Home of the Living God, feels like a departure – things happen in the now as society changes and Cedar’s pregnancy progresses – in others, it feels like a typical Erdrich novel, specifically in the ending that makes the whole book feel as though it’s backstory. It left me wanting more of what happens next. 

Cannibal – Safiya Sinclair (Picador) 

Safiya Sinclair’s debut collection takes her childhood home of Jamaica, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and her present home of America to explore and confront exile, otherness, race and womanhood. The poems here are deep and rich with language and ideas. Some feel very intense, ‘Pocomania’, for example, which begins:

Father unbending father unbroken father
with the low-hanging belly, father I was cleaved from, 
pressed into, cast and remolded, father I was forged 
in the fire of your self.

Others more spacious and provocative, such as ‘Elocution Lessons with Ms. Silverstone’, which opens with:

In high school boys were easy – 
they saw none of you 
or all of you

in one ravenous gaze, 
slurped hankering glances
or walked right through

you in sterile absolution, 
high-fived and hissed about
your dick-sucking lips.

Brewing names
for your body
in the mastabatorium. 

It’s an incredible collection and I’m excited to see where Sinclair’s career takes her. 

All copies of these books are my own purchases.

Nudibranch – Irenosen Okojie & Earthseed – Octavia E. Butler #DiverseDecember #4 #5

Life intervened yesterday, so it’s a double bill of #DiverseDecember recommendations today.

Nudibranch – Irenosen Okojie

Irenosen Okojie’s short stories are unpredictable, wild, inventive, magical and often heart-wrenching rides. In Nudibranch we meet – amongst others – a woman losing herself; time-travelling silent monks; some unexpected zombies; a heart-eating goddess; mechanical boys, and an albino man who brings fountains to a small town in Mozambique. 

Perhaps the standout story in the collection is the winner of the 2020 AKO Cane Prize for African Writing ‘Grace Jones’. The tale of a Grace Jones’ impersonator, Okojie is interested in who this woman really is; what is she hiding behind her lookalike costume? It’s a breath-taking, hard hitting story and you can read it here.

Earthseed: Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents – Octavia E. Butler

In a dystopian North America, Lauren Oya Olamina lives in a gated community with her family – her academic / preacher father, her stepmum and her siblings. Lauren is hyperempathetic which means she feels the pain of other living creatures. This creates a vulnerability that can be dangerous for her. When the compound is attacked, she begins a journey north, collecting other people along the way. Lauren decides to start preaching her ideas for a new religion which believes that ‘God is Change’. 

Parable of the Talents is narrated by Lauren’s daughter Asha Vere along with diary entries from Lauren. These help Asha to understand her mother and how she has ended up in her current situation. While the first book is focused on community, there is a shift in the second to family. Events are played out against a backdrop of a rising political figure called Andrew Steele Jarret. Jarret is a Christian fundamentalist / White supremacist whose slogan is ‘Make America Great Again’. Yes, really. These books are gripping and fascinating. 

Nudibranch is published by Dialogue Books; Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents are published by Headline. All copies are my own.

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

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.

Attrib. and other stories – Eley Williams

I should start with a confession: I love Eley Williams’ work. I’ve loved it since ‘Smote (or When I Find I Cannot Kiss You In Front Of A Print By Bridget Riley)’ was shortlisted for The White Review Prize in 2015. It’s a story I read repeatedly when I was trying to work out whether my own writing was experimental or not and it’s heart-stoppingly beautiful. It’s not even the best piece in Williams’ debut collection.

Williams’ stories are primarily concerned with three things: language, love (in many forms) and animals. These three things are woven together in almost every story.

The collection begins with ‘The Alphabet (or Love Letters or Writing Love Letters, Before I Forget How To Use Them or These Miserable Loops Look So Much Better On Paper Than In Practice)’. The plot of this is not and will not be obvious begins the narrator. It’s such a bold statement I wonder whether it’s an intention for the collection. With regards to the story, it’s because the narrator has aphasia.

I completely lost it (the plot, not the glasses – they’re only mislaid) about two weeks ago around the same time that I mislaid you. If you were here you would make a filthy joke about my use of that word, about you being miss laid. Scratch that, then. Screw it or unscrew that work out of place. Two weeks ago is when I lost it – the plot – round about the same time that you were not mislaid by me but were misplaced. When you misplaced me. Two weeks ago is when we ceased to converge by the bedside table, beneath the sofa, by the fridge.

There’s a point towards the end of this piece where I’ve noted ‘There’s a real emotional oomf in this’, the loss of not just words but a lover, the two tied together as though they would be the worst two things to happen at the same time, which, for a lover of words, they just might be.

Williams uses a lot of humour in her work. The set up for ‘Alight at the Next’ is funny in itself: the narrator wants to ask their date to come home with them. They’re just working up to the speech they’ve composed to deliver in time with the slowing motion of the train

when the doors are opening and you are standing closer to me than you ever have, and I have been counting, and measuring, and the doors have opened and

 / / a man / / pushes on / / to get inside / / the carriage / / before I’ve had time / / to step down

so without thinking and certainly without hinges I am holding out my hand and placing a finger in the middle of his forehead.

The rest of the story takes place while the narrator holds the man by his forehead, preventing him from embarking.

As for the animals, well, look away if you’re an animal lover…

In many ways my workplace is the loveliest in the whole country. They are still songbirds, after all, even when they are screaming in the pot.

so begins ‘Fears and Confessions of an Ortolan Chef’. In ‘Bulk’ a whale’s body is washed up on the beach; in ‘Mischief’ we encounter a rat trained to detect landmines, and in the final story of the collection, ‘Spins’ (shortlisted for The White Review Prize 2014), a spider weaves its web in the corner of the room an hour after the narrator’s lover has left them. A tip for beginners: spiders are not great conversationalists.

Williams’ work is clever, funny and thoughtful without being pretentious but what makes Attrib. and other stories one of the best books I’ve read so far this year is the huge beating heart at the centre of it all. There were points in some of the stories where I was so willing the narrator on in their quest to connect with someone that I found I couldn’t breathe. It’s a sign of a great writer when they can make you care so deeply about an unnamed fictional creation. Williams is a great writer and I have no doubt there’s even better to come from her.

I interviewed Eley about the collection, the state of the short story and completing creative work as part of a PhD thesis.

Did Eley insert a made up word in her collection?

You can buy Attrib. and other stories from Amazon and Waterstones or support your local independent book shop. If, like me, you don’t have one, I recommend Big Green Bookshop.

Thanks to Eley for the interview and to Influx Press for the review copy.

Homesick for Another World – Ottessa Moshfegh

And anyway, there is no comfort here on Earth. There is pretending, there are words, but there is no peace. Nothing is good here. Nothing. Every place you go on Earth, there is more nonsense.

The characters in Ottessa Moshfegh’s short story collection Homesick for Another World will come as no surprise if you’ve read her Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel Eileen. The people who populate these tales are inappropriate, slack, liars, cheaters, sleezeballs, hypocrites – they are us.

Two stories – ‘Bettering Myself’ and ‘Slumming’ – are narrated by teachers, those bastions of standards and rules and betterment. In ‘Bettering Myself’ which opens the collection, a teacher at a Catholic school keeps a sleeping bag in the back of her room to facilitate naps when she’s still drunk from the previous night; considers one of her students to be a friend, and avoids teaching calculus by talking about her sex life. While ‘Slumming’ is set in the holidays when the narrator goes to live in Alna, a poor town where she owns a summerhouse. There, she eats a footlong sandwich divided in two – one half for lunch, the other for dinner; takes ten dollars’ worth of meth or heroin, depending what’s on offer in the bus-depot restroom three times a week, and occasionally hangs out with Clark who looks after the summerhouse the rest of the year. They slept together the first year she was there, ‘me crouching under the sloped ceiling, his genitals swung in my face like a fist’.

It’s not that I lacked respect for the people of Alna. I simply didn’t want to deal with them. I was tired. During the school year, all I did was contend with stupidity and ignorance. That’s what teachers are paid to do.

Many of the stories are concerned with the behaviour of men. Mr Wu is in love with the woman who dispenses the tokens at the arcade he frequents but doesn’t know how to speak to her. While he makes a plan, he visits sex workers in the city, averting his eyes when he has sex with them because ‘He had learned somewhere that closing your eyes meant that you were in love’. In ‘A Dark and Winding Road’, the narrator escapes to his parents’ cabin in the mountains following a fight with his pregnant wife, ‘to have one last weekend to myself before the baby was born and my life as I’d known it was ruined forever’. There he discovers a dildo underneath the blankets on the bed and an unexpected visitor.

Probably the best piece, if you were to judge each story alone, comes in the middle of the collection: ‘An Honest Woman’. A young woman meets her 60-year-old neighbour, Jeb, over the chain-link fence that separates their gardens. Her partner’s recently left her, while Jeb is widowed and has a nephew about the young woman’s age.

‘I’ll meet her,’ said the nephew. ‘But I’m not saying I’ll take her out. I don’t need any drama.’

‘What drama? You should be so lucky,’ Jeb said. ‘A sweet gal. Comes with baggage, of course, as they all do.’

‘Kids?’ the nephew asked. ‘Forget it.’

‘No, no kids. Emotional issues, more like,’ Jeb said. ‘You know women. Stray cats, all of them, either purring in your lap or pissing in your shoes.’

The story takes a creepy turn when the woman visits Jeb, waiting for his nephew but a storm prevents his arrival. Moshfegh highlights the irony of Jeb’s statement about women quoted above when she has him behave as an entitled, misogynistic white man.

It’s at this point in the collection that Moshfegh’s aim starts to become clear: this is a collection of stories about ordinary people at their worst, it’s a mirror held up to today’s society: to the misogyny, to the privilege, to the hypocrisy. Some of the characters know better but can’t be arsed to do better; some of them make an attempt but fall flat at the first hurdle. The collection’s full of characters for whom, essentially, nothing changes. To pull this off and maintain the interest of the reader is quite a feat and Moshfegh does it with style. Her prose is sharp, nailing thoughts, feelings and the messiness of life, love and sex – of which there is plenty.

This an accomplished collection. Every story is worthy of inclusion but there’s something about them taken together which really is spectacular. Ottessa Moshfegh is a remarkable writer.

 

Thanks to Jonathan Cape for the review copy.

Difficult Women – Roxane Gay

There’s an easy way to find out whether or not you’re a difficult woman according to the title story in Roxane Gay’s debut collection: check your pulse.

Dead Girls

Death makes them more interesting. Death makes them more beautiful. It’s something about their bodies on display in final repose – eyes wide open, lips blue, limbs stiff, skin cold. Finally, it might be said, they are at peace.

Although still not safe from the patriarchal gaze.

Societal structure and its oppression of women forms the backbone of the collection. Beginning with ‘I Will Follow You’ in which two sisters – Carolina and Savvie – whose relationship is so close that when Carolina’s husband moves to Nevada and Savvie doesn’t want to go, they remain in California together. And ending with ‘Strange Gods’ in which an unnamed narrator tells the man who’s asked him to marry her ‘There are things you do not know about me. These things are not inconsequential’ before relating the various ways in which she self-harms and the reason for her behaviour.

When Gay’s good, she’s very very good. In ‘Open Marriage’, the narrator eats a tub of sour yoghurt to prove a point as her husband declares he wants an open marriage. The payoff is delicious and had me punching the air.

‘Requiem for a Glass Heart’ details a relationship between a glass woman and her stone thrower husband. She wants space from his protection, from her husband ‘who sees too much and loves too carefully’ but discovers he seeks his own space too.

‘I Am a Knife’ and ‘The Sacrifice of Darkness’ both involve women dealing with tragedies. The first has a wife hunting with her husband, attempting to fill a void:

When the buck was finally dead, I used one fingernail, cutting the creature open from his neck to his rear. His flesh fell open slowly, warm innards steaming out into the cold air. The air became sharp and humid with the stench of death surrounded by prayer. I am a knife.

While the latter is a rewriting of the Icarus myth focusing on what happened after Hiram Hightower, a miner who couldn’t face another day underground, flew into the sun, as told by his future daughter-in-law:

In the early days of darkness, we thought it might end. We thought we might once again see the sun, feel its golden shine holding our skin. The bright red crease in the sky pulsed, and like the sun, that crease grew smaller and smaller until it disappeared. Scientists tried to make sense of what happened to the sun. It was nearly impossible for them to believe a man could be so full of darkness he needed to swallow all the light of the sun.

Thematically, the stories are about relationships – with spouses, siblings, parents, lovers, ourselves; male treatment of women; whites’ treatment of blacks.

In ‘North Country’, an engineering lecturer moves from Nebraska to Michigan and has to deal with constant microaggressions.

“Are you from Detroit?”

I have been asked this question twenty-three times since moving to the area. In a month, I will stop counting, having reached a four-digit number. Shortly after that, I will begin telling people I have recently arrived from Africa.

However, ‘La Negra Blanca’ is the sole mishit. William Livingstone III is obsessed with black women and black culture. He visits a strip club where he watches Sierra, a mixed-race woman who passes for white, dance three times a week. The story lacks any subtlety and is less effective for it. It’s a shame in a collection which also highlights how sharp Gay can be elsewhere in her writing.

Overall, Difficult Women is a satisfying and, at times, a superb read. It’s impossible not to read these stories and feel that Gay gets it. She conveys what it’s like to be a living, breathing woman. The title story is divided into different types of difficult women and then into vignettes. ‘What a Crazy Woman Thinks About While Walking Down the Street’ ends like this:

She once told a boyfriend about these considerations and he said, “You are completely out of your mind.” She told a new friend at work and she said, “Honey, you’re not crazy. You’re a woman.”

 

Thanks to Corsair for the review copy.

 

 

The Shadow Panel Winner of The Sunday Times Peters Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award

The Sunday Times Peters Fraser and Dunlop shadow panel – consisting of Charlie Place, Eric Anderson, Simon Savidge, Kim Forrester and myself – met last Saturday to choose our winner. The discussion was lively, interesting and thoughtful and eventually we arrived at our winner: Jessie Greengrass’ short story collection An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It.

As a panel, we felt this collection contained some stunning stories, worthy of winning standalone competitions. Collectively we loved ‘Winter, 2058’ and between us every single story had something of merit which we admired or just really enjoyed. We were also pleased to champion a short story collection; short stories seem to be a neglected form in terms of readership in the UK, which always seems to me to be an odd thing considering they fit perfectly into our busy lifestyles. Maybe this is the collection to tempt more people to engage with the form.

Huge congratulations to Jessie. There will be an interview with her on this very blog tomorrow, so please pop back then to discover more about the collection and this promising young writer.

The official winner of The Sunday Times Peters Fraser and Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award will be announced on Thursday 8th December.

An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It – Jessie Greengrass

Jessie Greengrass’ amazingly titled short story collection An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It won The Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2016 and is now shortlisted for The Sunday Times/Peters Fraser & Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award. It’s an ambitious collection ranging from historical fiction to post-apocalyptic futures with a number of themes and ideas uniting the pieces.

All of Greengrass’ protagonists are isolated in some way. This is clear from the opening story (from which the collection as a whole takes its title) in which the narrator relates their time spent in St. Kilda where their behaviour was responsible for the death of the Great Auk.

The first years we climbed out of the launch and we went ashore wading through them, hip deep, to find a flat place which we would clear of birds with a club swung about circular and, when the birds were cleared, in the gap they left we could see their eggs spread across the ground like a scree, like shingle, each the size of a fist and a half a fist. I have never seen so many eggs. These numbers deceived us. It was not possible to realise from that expanse that each egg represented only singularity: that each pair of birds laid only one egg, each spring, down on the bare rock. This truth did not become clear to us until their numbers had reduced to the point that we could, in fact, count them: the birds, the eggs. The number of the birds twice the number of the eggs.

It’s not just the sense of isolation – humans on a depopulated island in the Atlantic Ocean who are dominating and destroying nature – that makes this quotation (and many others I could’ve selected) significant, it’s Greengrass’ sentences which are mostly complex with multiple clauses and, in this instance, use some very effective repetition.

The natural world returns with Knut Knutsson who, on finally becoming captain after the death of his predecessor, has to bury his former boss and invest himself with only a penguin and a pair of albatross as witnesses to events. As well as with the character in 2058, stranded on a site on the North Yorkshire Moors watching for ‘intrusions’ – some sort of alien/hallucinogenic happening.

Greengrass juxtaposes these forays into nature with pieces set in confined spaces where narrators dream of escape: the siblings in an underground bunker in ‘Some Kind of Safety’ who don’t know whether or not the world above ground still exists; the call-centre worker in ‘The Politics of Minor Resistance’ who rebels by talking in an accent not their own, and the person in ‘All the Other Jobs’ who dreams of running away because ‘the territory around me failed to match the map I held’:

When I was a child, adults looked so self-assured, such excellent subjects to be the bearers of my faith and trust, and I thought that by the age of thirty I would have that surety; but as I write this I am one month past my thirty-first birthday and as terrified and uncertain as I was when I was ten, and now it is all other people who seem to know what I have never learned, who while perhaps still fallible are still less fallible than me, more weighty, their mistakes less the result of rank incompetence, their decisions more carefully made.

For me, however, where Greengrass excels is in her stories about relationships: in ‘On Time Travel’ when the narrator’s father dies suddenly, their friends avoid them, and they and their mother become trapped, ‘we hadn’t been a happy family, ever; and it was more this fact even more than the fact that he was gone which trapped us, me and my mother in the moment of his passing’, it’s a time in which the narrator and their friends ‘pretended hard to be ourselves’. In ‘Dolphin’ where the narrator recalls her parents’ marriage crumbling and one of the rare occasions on which her father took her out and left her to watch a dolphin show on her own, and in ‘The Comfort of the Dead’ when the protagonist begins to be visited by the dead, his marriage ends and he grows old.

They seemed to him to understand how so much of the time he felt himself to be failing to live up to a standard he had never explicitly accepted, how he felt himself to be only the shadow of that which he might have done but never would, this failure a constituent part of him, bred in; how faced with a choice between certain mediocrity and risky success he had picked the first, every time, and would again.

An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It is a confident collection exploring some fundamentally human issues through some of the most mundane of situations and some of the most extraordinary. It’s an interesting collection in which the stories are often densely packed with the narrator’s thoughts – this is very much a series of protagonists who tell you their stories. I’m interested to see where Greengrass goes next.

 

Thanks to The Sunday Times/PFD Young Writer of the Year Award for the review copy.