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Madame Fourcade’s Secret War by Lynne Olson

The Daring Young Woman Who Led France’s Largest Spy Network Against Hitler

I became aware of this book thanks to a friend who is also interested in historical stories about women in France. I knew at once I had to read it.

While my friend was still reading it some months ago, I happened to go on a walk, following a route I have taken many times and noticed for the first time that Madame Fourcade’s name featured on one of the street signs. You can imagine my surprise and delight! She became even more of a talking point and I looked forward to getting a copy of the book (not that easy) to read.

I will say if you are interested in reading it, that the font size of the paperback version (which I read) is quite small compared to the hardback version (a copy of which I bought for a friend).

Famous French Women, A Rare Vision

Most of the street signs in France are the names of people that have featured in their recent history. However, it is very rare to come across the name of a woman. In our town Marie Curie has a street sign, but even then, she shares it with her husband. Marie Madeleine Fourcade not only has a sign all to herself, strategically placed at the top of a hill overlooking the town, but she was also the very first woman in France’s history to be given a funeral at Les Invalides, an important complex of buildings in Paris that celebrates France’s military glory.

Marie Madeleine’s father worked for a French shipping company in Shanghai. Her mother refused to stay behind in Paris, though agreed to return to Marseille for the birth of her daughter in 1909. Marie-Madeleine and her siblings grew up in Shanghai, with freedoms unheard of for the social and family circles they hailed from. Those freedoms, an early bilingual education and their return to Paris when she was 10 years old, set her up in many ways for the future role she would play, organising and ultimately leading an important French intelligence network.

As a young woman, she again lived abroad, in Morocco. She drove a car, learned to fly a plane and had a job. She rejected French society’s (and her husband’s) restrictive ideas about how women should behave. She had trained to become a concert pianist, worked at a commercial radio station and would forge her own future.

Access to Important Connections, Two Rivals

Street named after Marie Madeleine Fourcade, co founder and chef de resistance of the Alliance network 'Noah's Ark' codename hérrison, hedgehog during World War 2

Though never in the military herself, she was married briefly to a French military officer, as was her sister. She thus had opportunity to meet and observe some of the younger officers through her social connections, men who would later become important during the war years.

Two of the most prominent members of that younger group – Lieutenant Colonel Charles de Gaulle and Major Georges Loustaunau Lacau – took centre stage in the discussion on rue Vaneau, engaging in a debate that quickly escalated into a full-blown argument. It soon became obvious to Marie-Madeleine that the two officers viewed each other as rivals…

Both products of Saint-Cyr, France’s elite military academy Ecole Supérieure de Guerre, both fought and received multiple citations for bravery in WWI; they were brilliant, ambitious and egocentric. A rebellious streak put them at odds with Marshal Philippe Pétain (a French general who commanded the French Army in WW1 and would become head of what became known as the Régime de Vichy Vichy France). The rivalry between the pair would also keep them from being unified during the war years and likely impacted perceptions afterwards.

A Partnership, A Turning Point

After a discussion at one of the social events around March 1936, Loustaunau-Lacau contacted Marie-Madeleine and asked for her help in creating a journal that would argue the case for reform of the military and open the eyes of leaders to the imminent threat of Germany. The work would begin immediately.

“One of my Belgian friends has procured secret dossiers that expose the intentions of the German high command,” he said. “I need to get them quickly. Such documents must not travel by mail. You have a car. You must go to Brussels and collect them. I will pay all expenses.”

An Intelligence Network is Formed, Working Inside France

Caught up in this real life spy drama, Marie-Madeleine agreed – a decision that would radically change her life. From that moment, she wrote later, she and Loustaunau-Lacau began building an intelligence network against Nazi Germany.

Over the next two years, they would recruit informants in France, Switzerland, Belgium and Germany who passed on reports about the build up of the German armed forces. Loustaunau-Lacau adopted the codename Navarre, after Henri de Navarre, later King Henri IV of France. Given the risks they faced, that one of them might be captured or killed, Navarre insisted they share leadership of the network and when he was compromised, as promised Fourcade took the lead role.

At the same time, backbencher in the British House of Commons, Winston Churchill had created a similar private network and Charles de Gaulle decamped to London, setting up his Free French operation. Fourcade suggested they join with him.

Her mentor rejected the idea outright. In England, he said, they would be refugees, just like de Gaulle, dependent on the British for everything. At that point, almost no one in the British government, with the promising exception of Winston Churchill, took de Gaulle and his minuscule band of followers seriously.

They would resist from within.

Another Perspective of History

Founded in Vichy in Septemeber 1940 by Georges Loustaunau-Lacau and Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, the Crusade Intelligence Network (later called Alliance) moves it headquarters from Vichy to Pau in early 1941 and to Marseille later that year.

Madame Fourcade’s Secret War is a work of history, told in a compelling narrative voice, that not only focuses on the leadership role of this one extraordinary woman, but will likely expand most reader’s knowledge of what living in France under German occupation was like for the many, who vehemently opposed the way their government had capitulated to a hostile outside force, without much initial resistance.

Personally, the history I learned in school was quite different, as it was told from a very anglo-centric perspective, so the narratives stemmed from how this threat impacted the United Kingdom and their allies.

I never really understood what exactly happened within France in the lead up to the occupation, how it impacted their government and rendered the military ineffective. So many of the protections a country might normally expect when facing a hostile enemy were lacking; to go against the orders of a government (even if under occupation) was a betrayal.

Cinema Can Create Its Own Self Serving Narrative

Though there have been books and films about the war and the French resistance, little has been shown of the importance of the Alliance network and of Marie-Madeleine Fourcade’s achievements. Most of the attention has gone to stories of sabotage and escape lines, of battles and blitzes.

Saboteurs and other resistance fighters in France were certainly important after D-Day, but they did little to obstruct the Germans before then. Escape networks did heroic work in smuggling shot-down Allied airmen and others out of occupied Europe and back to freedom, but their actual contribution to victory was small.

I would certainly be interested in a cinematic development of Fourcade’s story, one that traverses France and shows a very different side to those who travelling around the country, making radio transmissions and secret flights across the channel, where they are hosted by memorable characters in this real life adventure.

Noah’s Ark and the Hedgehog

Les Invalides Paris, where Marie Madeleine Fourcade's funeral was held, the first woman in France to be commemorated there.
Les Invalides Paris

In the late 1960’s Fourcade would get her story down in a gripping memoir entitled Noah’s Ark, the name the German’s referred to their network as, after they would use codenames of animals, Fourcade’s was hérrison (hedgehog), a small animal that intelligently eluded predators.

Lynne Olson provides a thoroughly researched, immensely readable account of the creation of the Alliance, one of the original and most important resistance networks in France. From its foundation by Navarre and Fourcade to the establishment of thousands of recruits, the many dangerous activities they undertook, throughout the war, all that was able to be continued by Fourcade due to her continued leadership deserves to be more widely recognised and appreciated.

They Will Not Be Forgotten, The People

L'Arche de Noé Réseau Alliance 1940-1945 by Marie Madeleine Fourcade autobiogrpahy of her role as the leader of a French resistance during world war 2

The book is full of stories about the different people she recruited, the relationships and loyalties and daring escapades each of them went on, in order to bring their intelligence to the Alliance.

It is also, sadly, a homage to those who would be punished and killed for their roles, some, so close to the end of the war, it is excruciating to read. That Fourcade survived and was able to share her story and thus the courage and bravery and loyalty of others is a true gift to all humanity.

It’s the first time I have read an account that centres what was happening in France at this local level, with a more global scope, that renders the dangerous and delicate situation of those in the military, who were against the capitulation of their government. While in great danger to themselves, they were able to band together like-minded civilians and provide those on the outside with the information they needed to mount a significant and ultimately successful defence.

Highly Recommended!

Author, Lynne Olson

Lynne Olson is a New York Times bestselling author of nine books of history, most of which focus on World War II. Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has called her “our era’s foremost chronicler of World War II politics and diplomacy.”

Born in Hawaii, Lynne graduated magna cum laude from the University of Arizona. Before becoming a full-time author, she worked as a journalist, with the Associated Press as a national feature writer in New York, a foreign correspondent in AP’s Moscow bureau, and a political reporter in Washington. She left the AP to join the Washington bureau of the Baltimore Sun, where she covered national politics and eventually the White House.

Lynne’s latest book is Empress of the Nile: The Daredevil Woman Archaeologist Who Saved Egypt’s Ancient Temples From Extinction (2023).

Three of her earlier books were immediate New York Times bestsellers; Madame Fourcade’s Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France’s Largest Spy Network Against the Nazis (2019), Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II (2013), and Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour (2010). 

Lynne lives in Washington, DC with her husband, Stanley Cloud, with whom she co-authored two books.

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Overland (2024) by Yasmin Cordery Khan

The Overland, the Hippie Trail, the Big OE

I was interested to read this to observe some of this particular overland route that many young people took in the late 1960’s early 1970’s.

While for some it signified the hippie trail, for others, for example, those coming from New Zealand, it was a kind of right of passage, referred to as ‘the Big OE’, the ‘overseas experience’, which that culture accepts is something that every young person might do in their twenties, while still single, and eligible to get a working holiday visa in the UK to help fund their travels.

By the 1990’s when I did my OE, the overland route had changed, it was no longer advisable to take the route that those from the 1970’s had taken. My mini version of the overland, was to spend three months travelling through India, Nepal, Vietman and Thailand.

Employers expected many young in their twenties to leave to take up the two year visa opportunity and gain valuable experience from living in another country and travelling in other cultures. I remember my boss when I told him I was leaving telling me that he learnt more in first couple of weeks travelling in Asia than he had in the previous couple of years in his employment. It did make me wonder what happened in those couple of weeks!

Both of my birth parents travelled a similar route, from different starting points, and reading Overland made me want to know more about their experiences, because they were very different from what I read here.

Both had to find work in foreign countries to fund their travels, and set off on their own, without a vehicle or travelling mate, although as anyone travelling alone soon discovers, it doesn’t take long to connect with other like minded travellers.

Recently my father found some old photos from that journey he set out on at the age of 18, one of which is depicted above, others show him working on a construction site in Kuwait, interacting with local workers. Not the same route followed as this overland novel depicts, much more of an intrepid journey.

Young Brits Abroad in a Land Rover

Three youth did an overland trip and on the first page of the novel, Joyce, who describes herself as a nobody, is looking back fifty years later after an otherwise uneventful life, recollecting the trip. There had been scandal and controversy at the time of their voyage and she had slipped under the radar. A recent visit to a car boot sale in the grounds of an old country house has awakened memories and now she is reliving the trip.

I saw Persia in the time of the Shah, and the sun set over Kabul and the sun rise at Taj Mahal. I was there too and this is my story.

Overland thus begins with an advertisement in a London newspaper in 1970.

Kathmandu by van, leave August

Share petrol and costs.

Joyce is just out of secretarial college and comes across the ad because she likes reading the miscellaneous section of the newspaper. She goes to Clapham to meet the two boys who are taking the Land Rover on the trip. Friends from boarding school Fred, whose aristocratic family own the vehicle, and Anton, son of an Egyptian Doctor and English mother, who has been supported by Fred’s family since a family tragedy.

From London to South Asia via Istanbul, Turkey, to Tehran, Iran to Kabul, Afghanistan to Pakistan, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh to Thailand

The Aristocrat, The Son of an Immigrant, A Working Class Girl

It becomes clear that the three travellers are from different socio-economic backgrounds and being confined to a vehicle for a trip through foreign lands is going to bring out aspects of what each of them is either escaping or moving towards. When Anton asks Joyce why she wants to go, she can tell he’s looking for an intellectual response and sceptical of her motives. Reasons she keeps to herself (and from the reader) for a long while.

First impression: arrogant little twit. My face was burning with embarrassment at having been corrected, but he didn’t seem to notice. I might not have all your certificates, but I know about real life, I thought.

There’s No Place Like Home

The three of them go on the journey and have to overcome various challenges they confront in each country, whether cultural, mechanical or human. Over time their characters and back stories are revealed and in Fred’s case his father’s dark history, in one of the countries they will travel to. All of this plays into how they cope with the situations they encounter. And they come to consider their own destiny.

In a nutshell, if I could have articulated it, I’d have said that England was my destiny. Because by that point – although I liked those landscapes and those wild places that we drove through, don’t get me wrong – a realisation was growing in me, more and more, about the sheer beauty of the English countryside.

They will discover the consequences of acting or not acting on their instincts, who they can trust, who they should avoid and what to do when one of them starts experimenting in ways that threaten to derail them from their objective.

“We were all on pretty much the same route, there were only so many digs to stay in. So even though we were crossing the world, there was a small world on the overland, its own little bubble, the same faces and names and rumours recirculated and resurfaced.”

The Memory Trip

I enjoyed the novel for the way it depicted the journey and the places they stopped, mostly unfamiliar until they get to India, then it awakened my own overland journey, particularly the memory of taking the local night buses, with 3 people per seat (no headrest) and trucks/buses driving in the middle of the road in the dark of night. (We soon understood what “HORN PLEASE” on the back of the vehicle in front referred to). Yes, the all night loud music playing to keep the driver awake (ear plugs essential), stopping for sweet roadside chai, meeting young Indian astronomers on their way to view the total solar eclipse in Fatepar Sikri.

Ultimately, the overland is an opportunity to immerse in a culture, live for a period in a different way, encounter different ways of thinking and being, different perspectives, that much of this was missed in their journey taints the possibility of this experience having any meaning.

I enjoyed less the depiction of the dysfunctional character of Fred and the obsessive, slightly unreliable narrator Joyce. Anton was the more interesting character for me, due to his interest in the culture and languages and people, so without giving anything away, the ending was disappointing, but maybe that’s the message, about who in this life gets protected and who falls into the cracks.

So, there is the significance of the roles each of them played, their own histories, that of their families, the different social class they issued from and how that figured in the way they behaved and how they end up.

Alwynne, one of my Goodread’s friends articulates the themes succinctly here, in and extract from her review:

“Khan’s novel’s convincing, beautifully-observed and meticulously researched, making it hard sometimes to remember Joyce is a purely fictional creation. This isn’t a nostalgic glimpse at lost innocence, instead Khan’s narrative gradually constructs a damming portrait of a newly post-colonial world, casually racist, steeped in orientalist attitudes. A place where, for people like Joyce and Fred, nation, the myth of empire, class and identity are still tightly intertwined. Khan’s exploration of these connects to an oblique, underlying series of reflections on history, memory and the legacy of imperialist atrocities – and above all the failure to take responsibility or atone for the evils of the past. But despite the complexity of Khan’s themes, it’s highly readable. An absorbing, fluid piece.”

Highly Recommended.

Yasmin Cordery Khan, Author

Yasmin Cordery Khan is a novelist and historian. Her first book, The Great Partition: the Making of India and Pakistan (2007), won the Gladstone Prize for History from the Royal Historical Society. Her second book was The Raj At War: A People’s History of India’s Second World War (2015) followed by the novel Edgeware Road (2022).

She has written for the New Statesman and Guardian and appeared on BBC radio and television, and is an editor of History Workshop Journal and a trustee of the Charles Wallace India Trust. She lives in Oxfordshire.

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Unearthing (2023) by Kyo Maclear

A Story of Tangled Love and Family Secrets

“But what is the point of writing if not to unearth things… Annie Ernaux

I chose to read Unearthing because it was the overall favourite read of 2023 of Shagafta who I follow on Substack and because it ties in to a theme I have been researching, exploring separation, kinship and the discovery of one’s identity.

Of Changing Seasons and Evolving Stories

Unearthing is a memoir of twenty four sekki (節気) or “small seasons” that offers a different way of thinking about the ever changing ground of our personal stories.

Three months after Kyo Maclear’s father dies, looking to know him at a deeper level and curious about his mother’s side of the family, she takes a DNA test.

When my father died and I was his grieving and wondering daughter, I thought of a word. The word, yugen, or what the Japanese call a state of “dim” or “deep” mystery, evokes the unsettled feeling I had at various points growing up as an only child. Our family was a tiny unit with strange ways. My parents acted like criminals on the lam – loading up moving vans, changing house every few years. I was four years old when we left England, shedding backstory and friends overnight. What made a family behave this way, like people drawn to erasure? Why were we always leaving like this, unceremoniously? I did not know. Growing up, I assumed that everyone was shaped and suffused by what they could not perceive clearly, the invisible and voiceless things imparted atmospherically within families.

Ask Your Father

Shocked, when she receives the results she learns that she is not biologically related to her father and that her mother refuses to speak on the subject.

She repeated it three times. Talk to your Dad. As if his death had been a hoax; her voice no longer blurry but brisk with fear.

Though her mother does not wish to talk about it, her daughter perseveres. She will weather this storm, waiting for it to calm, listening between the lines of conversation, picking up on the cues.

When one person leaves, the old order collapses. That’s why we were speaking to each other carefully. We were a shapeshifting family, in the midst of recomposing ourselves. What is grief, if not the act of persisting and reconstituting oneself? What is its difficulty, if not the pressure to appear, once more, fully formed?

Solving the Mystery of Your Life

Photo K. Kaboompics Pexels.com

Becoming a detective in her own life, Kyo assembles the story of her lineage, tied to the seasons and the making of a garden.

Digging was my way out. An impulse born of stubbornness and bred in me by a culture that loves stories of people discovering the truth of their paternity; that champions the idea that concealment is destructive and truth is freeing.

The way the Kyo Maclear takes her time unveiling the truth of her story, the various paths she follows, the thoroughness of her pursuit to know, makes this a thrilling read.

There is something about the long, slow seasons and the process of tending the soil, not trying to rush the end result that resonates in her writing, yet never slows the narrative.

Her observations of her mother, the nuanced noticing, are so well depicted, you can feel the resolution of the mystery getting warmer and warmer, as she regains her mother’s trust and nurtures her into revealing more.

Something

It was all being pulled from some shadowy room. The details she remembered. The broken chain of events. What she spoke arrived in fragments. But there was something else, a hitch and hesitance, that made me alert.

I did not yet understand the need to hold on to an invented story, even a falsified past, at all costs. I did not recognize her dissembling. Usually impervious, I thought she seemed out of sorts. Maybe a little distraught.

She does not want to tell me something, I thought.

Along the way larger questions arise: What exactly is kinship? What does it mean to be family? What gets planted and nurtured? What gets buried and forgotten? Can tending a garden heal anything?

I thought this memoir was brilliant, I highlighted so many thoughtful and thought provoking passages. I admired the way the revelations came slowly and the characters of her family were explored, her search for herself made her realise how little she knew of her own parents. They too, were a mystery to unravel and motivations to explore, before even embarking on the second exploration, the unknown aspect that her DNA revealed.

It also celebrates those that helped, guided and accepted her along the way, new relationships and a deeper understanding of aspects of the self, while never losing her essence.

Highly Recommended.

Kyo Maclear, Author

Kyo Maclear was born in London, England, and moved to Toronto at the age of four. She holds a doctorate from York University in Environmental Humanities.

Her most recent book, the hybrid memoir, Birds Art Life, was published in seven territories and became a Canadian #1 bestseller. It was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and winner of the Trillium Book Award.

Unearthing was an instant bestseller in Canada and winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction. Her short fiction, essays, and art criticism have been published in Orion Magazine, Asia Art Pacific, LitHub, Brick, The Millions, The Guardian, Lion’s Roar, The Globe and Mail (Toronto) and elsewhere. She has been a national arts reviewer for Canadian Art and a monthly arts columnist for Toronto Life. She is also a children’s author, editor, and teacher.

She lives in Tkaronto/Toronto, on the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the New Credit, the Haudenosaunee, Métis, and the Huron-Wendat.

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Tidal Waters by Velia Vidal (Colombia) tr. Annie McDermott

Women in Translation

Tidal Waters is my first August read for #WIT month. Reading Women in Translation.

What an original, good-hearted, open, vulnerable read. I’m not sure whether what I read was fictional or not, because much of what is described in the ‘letters to a close friend’ coincides with elements in the author bio inside the front cover of the book and the main character is Vel.

The Epistolary Novel

epistolary novel of letters, reading, literacy, poverty, Afro Colombian

An epistolary narrative, it is about the return to a place and finding new purpose, along with the motivation to pursue it and taking others with you – told through a correspondence that bears witness and though we don’t see the replies, we can tell that they encourage and support both the idea(s) and the woman pursuing it.

I don’t know if I mentioned this specifically, perhaps not in a letter, though maybe when we met up before I left to come and live here here for good, but part of what pushed me to make this radical life change was the need to feel that my existence had meaning, that I was spending each day doing something I cared about and could feel proud of at the end of my life. And that’s just what I found in being Seño Velia, the woman who has meetings with people about books, who tries to motivate children to love reading and books as much as she does, and who supports the teachers.

Finding Purpose and Motivation, In Community

The letters span 3 years from May 2015 and they track a significant change in Vel’s life as she decides to return to Choco (to the Afro-Colombian community she was raised in) to start a new venture to bring reading, literacy and a love of books to it. The correspondence exhibits the growth and expansion of her writing, the letter becomes a safe harbour and she tests it by taking her writing to another level, stretching into a more personal yet contained arena.

Tomorrow I start a diploma in reading promotion, and with it my project, Motete. We’ve chosen three areas of Quibdo where I’ll start running the workshops.

She is taking a risk starting a new venture, but believes in it and is surrounded by extended family and connections, which facilitate her ability to reach out even further into the community and invite everyone in, to be part of or benefit from her shared love of reading.

And so this project is coming together. This basket, this Motete, is filling up. The slogan for my project is ‘Contenidos que tejen’ – contents that weave – and every day I like it more. Every day I realise that these contents are weaving fulfillment and happiness within me…

The thing is, motetes have been used to carry food for the body: plaintains, bushmeat, fish. Our is to fill them with food for the soul: art, culture, books. And just as motetes are woven by hand, I thought these new contents would also form a fabric: the fabric of society, of community, the fabric of souls.

Letter Writing

Her unnamed friend that she writes to is someone she hasn’t known long, he occupies a space between the familiar and the unfamiliar that she claims as a freedom to express herself, to be vulnerable and open, someone who has mentored and shown her how to get funding. The range of things she will write to him of, span a wide spectrum.

We never see the replies but the continuation of her own correspondence displays her life, her dealing with health problems, the double bind of her wounding and love, of being raised by doting grandparents, while having complicated relationships with a teenage mother unable to mother her and an emotionally absent father. Her later sadness and depression, helped through therapy, tears and conversations, to ways of coping and healing. Her optimism for her venture, and the community connections she creates keep her going.

I grew a lot. I learned. But most of all I tried to weave a new way of relating to my father that hurt as little as possible.

The Sea, The Sea

One of the themes is the sea, the absence of sea, the way the river meets the sea and her relationship to it. She yearns for it when it has been absent for some time, just as she yearns for the letter writer and the relief that comes in the act of writing to him.

She describes herself in her current role as being like the sea at that place where it meets the river.

I’m like the Pacific Ocean, pressing at the river with its tides to make it flow the other way, or lapping at the land when its waters rise, when it feels like gaining inches of new ground. You need strong motivation to stick to this way of life, which isn’t exactly a fight against the world, but rather the certainty of forging your own path.

An Homage to Correspondence

I loved this slender book, it’s project and generosity, its intimate sharing and platform for expanding and learning and having the courage to venture into new areas. It made me think of an exquisite title I’d forgotten about, Leslie Marmon Silko’s slim book of correspondence The Delicacy and Strength of Lace: Letters Between Leslie Marmon Silko and James Wright.

That correspondence was written when Silko was 31 years old and Wright 51. They had planned to meet in the Spring of 1980, mentioned in letters of Oct/Nov of the previous year, not knowing he would be gone before then.

They discuss her novel, his poetry, language, his travels, her adventures with animals, their speaking engagements, their mutual challenges and experiences as university professors, and soon began to share more personal feelings, as she acknowledged the tough time she was having and he shared his own experience, expressing empathy.

Velia Vidal dedicates her book:

To my recipient,
simply for being there.

and when I read about her own projects in society, her love of the sea and shared readings and efforts to help move children and young adults out of poverty, it is all the more inspirational to read these letters, understanding the difference a letter can make, to see someone take a risk and pursue something that will help others from her community, while fulfilling her own dreams and aspirations.

Highly Recommended.

Velia Vidal, Author

Velia Vidal (Bahía Solano, Colombia, 1982) is a writer who loves the sea and shared readings. In 2021 she was a fellow at Villa Josepha Ahrenshoop, in Germany.

For her book Tidal Waters she won the Afro-Colombian Authors Publication Grant awarded by Colombia’s Ministry of Culture. She is the co-author of Oír somos río (2019) and its bilingual German-Spanish edition.

She is the founder and director of the Motete Educational and Cultural Corporation and the Reading and Writing Festival (FLECHO) in Chocó, one of the most isolated, complex and neglected regions in Colombia with the highest afro-descendant population density in the country.

Vidal graduated in Afro-Latin American Studies and has a Masters in Reading Education and Children’s Literature. She is also a journalist and specialist in social management and communication. In 2022 she was included in the list of 100 most influential and inspiring women in the world by the BBC.

She writes children’s literature, fiction and non-fiction, and poetry. Her work has been translated into German, English and Portuguese.

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Booker Prize for Fiction Longlist 2024

Today the longlist for the Booker Prize for Fiction 2024 was announced, 13 books, featuring three debut novels and six previously nominated writers.

It features blackly comic page-turners, multi-generational epics, meditations on the pain of exile – plus a crime caper, a spy thriller, an unflinching account of girls’ boxing and a reimagining of a 19th-century classic.

The long listed selection was chosen from 156 books published between 1 October 2023 and 30 September 2024. The Prize is open to works of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland.

The list includes the following titles, of which I have read three (reviews linked to title):

Wild Houses by Colin Barrett (Ireland)  – A story of two outsiders striving to find themselves as their worlds collapse in chaos and violence, set in County Mayo.

Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel (US) – Funny, propulsive, obsessive and ecstatic, Headshot is equal parts subtle and intense, as it brings us to the sidelines of the boxing ring and above and beyond it.

James by Percival Everett (US) – A profound meditation on identity, belonging and the sacrifices we make to protect the ones we love, which reimagines The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey (UK) – Six astronauts rotate in the International Space Station. They are there to do vital work, but slowly they begin to wonder: what is life without Earth? What is Earth without humanity?

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner (US) – A woman is caught in the crossfire between the past and the future in this part-spy novel, part-profound treatise on human history.

My Friends by Hisham Matar (US/UK/Libya) – An intensely moving novel about three friends living in political exile and the emotional homeland that friendship can provide.

Held by Anne Michaels (Canada) – In a narrative that spans four generations from 1917, moments of connection and consequence ignite and re-ignite as the century unfolds.

This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud (US) – charts the Franco-Algerian, Cassars’ unfolding story, in a work of breathtaking historical sweep and vivid psychological intimacy, from June 1940, as they move between Salonica and Algeria, the US, Cuba, Canada, Argentina, Australia, and France.

Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange (US) – A tender, shattering story of generations of a Native American family, struggling to find ways through displacement, addiction and pain, towards home and hope. 

Enlightenment by Sarah Perry (UK) – A story of love and astronomy told over the course of 20 years through the lives of two improbable best friends.

Playground by Richard Powers (US) – Playground explores that last wild place we have yet to colonise and interweaves profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity.

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden (Netherlands) – An exhilarating tale of twisted desire, histories and homes – and the legacy of one of the 20th century’s greatest tragedies.

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood (Australia) – The past comes knocking in this fearless exploration of forgiveness, grief and female friendship.

* * * * * * *

Both My Friends by Hisham Matar and James by Percival Everett were 5 star reads for me, that I highly recommend. Orbital was a unique and different read, but one that at times I felt a little disengaged from.

Plenty more to explore here, have you read any from this list that you highly recommend or are looking forward to reading?

The shortlist of six books will be announced on Monday, 16 September.

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The Years by Annie Ernaux tr. Alison L. Strayer

I have had Annie Ernaux’s English translation of The Years on my bookshelf for some time now, since it was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2019. It was originally published in French in 2008 (Les Années) and is considered to be her chef-d’œuvre. It is a non-fiction work that spans the years 1941 to 2006 in France.

Neither memoir or autobiography, it is a unique compilation of memory, experiences, judgments, of political, cultural, personal and collective statements and images that represent a woman living through those years.

It is bookended by descriptions of things seen that are likely never to be seen again.

All the images will disappear:

the woman who squatted to urinate in broad daylight, behind the shack that served coffee at the edge of the ruins in Yvetot, after the war, who stood, skirts lifted, to pull up her underwear and then returned to the café

the tearful face of Alida Valli as she danced with Georges Wilson in the film The Long Absence

There is no call for literary devices or beautification of language or hiding the crude, raw human elements that some may grimace at.

When Ernaux won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022, she gave a speech entitled I Will Write to Avenge My People in which she described deciding on and finding her writing voice, that it would not be like that used by the esteemed writers she taught her students.

What came to me spontaneously was the clamour of a language which conveyed anger and derision, even crudeness; a language of excess, insurgent, often used by the humiliated and offended as their only response to the memory of others’ contempt, of shame and shame at feeling shame.

Raised by shopkeepers/cafe owners, she considered herself a class-defector through her education alongside the sons and daughters of bourgeoise families. She would find a way through the language she used to address that betrayal, to elude the gaze of the culturally privileged reader.

I adopted a neutral, objective kind of writing, ‘flat’ in the sense that it contained neither metaphors nor signs of emotion. The violence was no longer displayed; it came from the facts themselves and not the writing. Finding the words that contain both reality and the sensation provided by reality would become, and remain to this day, my ongoing concern in writing, no matter what the subject.

For Ernaux, class mobility is a violent, brutal process and she sees it as her duty to at least attempt, via her authorship, to make amends to those she remembers, has left behind and to not hide from her own perspective, actions, behaviours.

Shame Simple Passion The Years Annie Ernaux Nobel Prize Winner 2022

Knowing that The Years was considered her masterpiece, I decided to read some of her earlier short works, to engage with her style and thus appreciate this work all the more and that has certainly been the case. I began with the book she wrote of her father La Place (A Man’s Place), then of childhood Shame, and an affair Simple Passion. I do think it is a good idea to read some of these shorter works before taking on The Years.

In effect The Years is an attempt to collate and offer a faithful account of an entire generation, as it was viewed by one woman and the collective that she was part of. The narrative therefore is written from the perspective of ‘she‘ and ‘we‘, there is no ‘I‘. It is an observation of the times passing and the inclinations of people, for better or worse.

She would like to assemble these multiple images of herself, separate and discordant, thread them together with the story of her existence, starting with her birth during World War II up until the present day. Therefore, an existence that is singular but also merged with the movements of a generation.

We read and witness the impact of school, religion, the media, politics on a generation, alongside the cultural influences, the strikes, the films, the advertising, the village gossip and children’s cruelty.

Public or private, school was a place where immutable knowledge was imparted in silence and order, with respect for hierarchy and absolute submission, that is, to wear a smock, line up at the sound of the bell, stand when the headmistress or Mother Superior (but not a teaching assistant) entered the room, to equip oneself with regulation notebooks, pens and pencils, refrain from talking back when observations were made and from wearing trousers in the winter without a skirt over the top. Only teachers were allowed to ask questions. If we did not understand a word or explanation, the fault was ours. We were proud, as of a privilege, to be bound by strict rules and confinement. The uniform required of private institutions was visible proof of their perfection.

While some aspects will be universal, it is by its nature a collective and singular memory of a life in France. That will interest some and not others, but as someone who lives in France today, it is interesting to read of the familiar and also the references to the particular, the cultural, the influences.

Between what happens in the world and what happens to her, there is no point of convergence. They are two parallel series: one abstract, all information no sooner received than forgotten, the other all static shots.

Because it is clearly written over the many, many years, it comes across as being always in the now, as if she is time travelling into the various versions of the self over the years, looking and noting down the visual memories, remembering and accessing the perspective of the time they were in.

So her book’s form can only emerge from her complete immersion in the images from her memory in order to identify, with relative certainty, the specific signs of the times, the years to which the images belong, gradually linking them to others; to try to hear the words people spoke, what they said about events and things, skim it off the mass of floating speech, that hub bub that tirelessly ferries the wordings and rewordings of what we are and what we must be, think, believe, fear, and hope. All that the world had pressed upon her and her contemporaries she will reuse to reconstitute a common time, the one that made its way through the years of the distant past and glided all the way to the present. By retrieving the memory of collective memory in an individual memory, she will capture the lived dimension of History.

L'occupation Une femme Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit

I found it an absolutely compelling read, filling in a lot of gaps and knowledge regarding French history that I happily encounter in this kind of format.

Highly recommended if you are interested in French cultural and personal history from a unique literary perspective.

Have you read any works by Annie Ernaux?

I have a few more shown here that I intend to read in the original French version.

Further Reading

The Guardian, Interview: ‘If it’s not a risk… it’s nothing’: Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux on her unapologetic career by Alice Blackhurst

The Guardian: Annie Ernaux: the 2022 Nobel literature laureate’s greatest works

Author, Annie Ernaux

Annie Ernaux was born in Seine-Maritime, France, in September 1940 and currently lives in Paris, France. In October 2022 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Annie Ernaux grew up in Normandy and studied at Rouen University, before becoming a secondary school teacher. From 1977 to 2000, she was a professor at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance. Her books, in particular A Man’s Place and A Woman’s Story, have become contemporary classics in France. The Years, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2019, won the Prix Renaudot in France in 2008 and the Premio Strega in Italy in 2016. In 2017 she was awarded the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her life’s work.

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All My Mothers (2021) by Joanna Glen

I picked this book up because of its premise of a child having questions about her early life and origins, sensing she is being lied to by her parents.

A 30 Year Story from 80’s London to Córdoba

Adoption Motherhood Mothers

The book is 480 pages and most of the first half is narrated by Eva as a child or teenager. It begins as she is starting school and beginning to develop friendships. She befriends Bridget Blume and is besotted. Not just by her, but by her entire family, especially her mother who is so unlike Eva’s mother whom she calls Cherie (like her father does).

At school Eva is deeply affected by a book the teacher reads ‘The Rainbow Rained Us’, in which a rabbit throws a stone at the rainbow of Noah’s Ark breaking it apart into hundreds of multicoloured mothers who repopulate the earth with children.

The Many Colours of Mother Love

There Blue Mother stood in a mesmerising cornucopia of blues, at the edge of a turquoise sea, laughing, the wind in her hair, surrounded by her blue family.
‘Blue Mother is free and open and speaks from her heart.’
She sounded exactly like Bridget’s mother – utterly perfect.

From then on she refers to her mother as Pink Mother and Bridget’s mother as Blue Mother.

Pink Mother was sitting upright in a kind of fairy-tale bed, a bit like my mother and father’s, a four-poster, with a roof and curtainy droops around it.
No,no,no.
‘Pink Mother is delicate and feminine,’ said Miss Feast, explaining that delicate meant not strong.

When they are asked to share a baby photo, Eva becomes even more convinced than she already was, that her mother is not her mother, there is no photo of her as a baby, nothing before the age of three and a half.

The novel’s first half follows her through primary school, her developing friendship and first great loss, first the loss of a favourite teacher, then a death that will result in her friend’s family moving to another country and then abandonment by her father, who returns to Spain and rarely if ever makes contact.

Eva’s personality develops and is compromised by these losses and causes her to develop or accept superficial relationships, taking some time to realise what she lost by neglecting what has been meaningful to her.

Hispanic Studies, La Mezquita, A Headless Nun

In the second half of the novel she has started a university degree, changing locations due to the demands of her boyfriend Michael.

The pace really picks up in this half, perhaps because we have left the child narrator behind, so Eva becomes less introspective and more in charge of acting on the questions and thoughts she has and voicing some of the strong opinions she has.

When told they will spend a summer semester in Córdoba, Spain, the separation from all that is familiar and expected of her, marks the beginning of a transformation and a quest into looking for the answer to questions she has about her origins.

la mezquita the grand mosque in Cordoba, Spain
Photo Juan L. Secu on Pexels.com

The second half is something of an adventure as she develops a new friend Carrie who is interested in helping her and the two begin to consider not returning to their previous lives, to stay in Córdoba.

As Eva enters her 20’s her relationships and perspective begin to evolve, although she remains somewhat detached, circumspect and emotionally distant. With the presence of those around her, she begins to understand the complexity of being a mother, of being mothered and that judgments can change, as can people, especially when they find those relationships that are mutually nurturing.

The final third of the jumps into a second person narrative perspective ‘you’ and becomes somewhat nostalgic and didn’t work quite so well as the preceding chapters. It’s like the beginnings of a letter to a little girl who is still a baby, perhaps the thing that she had missed from her own life, being provided for another.

Writing From Experience versus Imagination or Observation

It is an interesting and captivating read, however I couldn’t help but feel as I was reading that this was imagined, rather than felt, because I am interested in books, fiction or nonfiction that come from the experience of separation.

In an interview with Carolyn Ray of JourneyWoman Bookclub, Joanna Glen shared that one of her aims was to explore the question, What is Our Deepest Longing?

I suppose the motherhood theme came next thinking what is our deepest longing that we have right from the beginning and of course a baby’s deepest longing is to gaze into the mother’s eyes and receive the gaze of love back. So I was thinking, what would be the most powerful or perhaps the saddest lack, would be not to feel that connection. That would be a very visceral fundamental lack.

She shares more about her own experience in the interview, which was the opposite of what she explores in the novel regarding the mother child connection, but brings alive the adventure of living abroad, in the town of Córdoba as a young person.

Overall, an enjoyable summer read that is likely to spark an interest in Córdoba, if like me you have never been there and one that celebrates female friendship and connection across different age groups and cultural backgrounds.

Further Reading

TripFiction Review: All My Mothers by Joanna Glen, coming of age novel mainly set in Córdoba. Aug 2021

Author, Joanna Glen

Joanna Glen’s novels include All My Mothers and The Other Half of Augusta Hope, which was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award.

She and her husband live in Brighton.

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The Hand That First Held Mine (2010) by Maggie O’Farrell

And we forget because we must. Matthew Arnold

The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O’Farrell was the winner of the former Costa Novel Award in 2010.

I read and really enjoyed O’Farrell’s memoir I Am, I Am, I Am – Seventeen Brushes With Death, the first of her books I encountered and Hamnet, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction (2020).

I have The Marriage Portrait still to read, however I was curious to discover more of her earlier work and decided to read this one next.

Dual Narrative, Dual Timeline

This novel is narrated as two stories of two couples, one set in 1950’s/60’s that centres around Lexie, a rebellious university graduate who has been asked to apologise for using a door for men, before receiving her degree.

At home in Devon with her parents, she is about to abandon them all, the academic institution and her family for London, after Innes, a 34 yr old sports car driving art dealer, journalist, critic and self-confessed hedonist, breaks down not far from the field where she is sulking.

Innes has been in St Ives, visiting the studio of an artist whose work he’d been hoping to buy. He had found the artist rather drunk and the work far from completion. The whole excursion had been a raging disaster. And now this.

Lexie will move to London, creating an unconventional life and career in 1950’s Soho guided by her pleasure seeking lover, but with the spiteful eye of one who wishes her harm. Inne’s past will come to haunt Lexie’s future, and she will throw herself into her career, doing what she can to maintain her independence.

His father, he tells her, was English, but his mother was a mestizo from colonial Chile. Half Chilean, half Scottish, he explains, hence his Hibernian Christian name and also his black hair.

There’s much more to Lexie’s story, but to share any more of it would spoil the discovery for new readers of this compelling mystery. It is one of those novels where you know the narrative threads are going to connect and so each revelation keeps you guessing, until it eventually becomes clear.

Present Day London, Forgetting

Photo S. Chai Pexels.com

In the present day (2010) Elina, a Finnish woman in London and her boyfriend Ted, have just had a baby boy and she recalls nothing about the birth or the 3 days spent in hospital.

She tests herself, scans her mind. Has she remembered anything? Has it come back to her while she was sleeping? The birth, the birth, the birth, she intones to herself, you must remember, you have to remember. But no. She can recall being pregnant. She can see the baby here, lying in her lap. But how it got there is a mystery.

Not only has their life been turned upside down, but Ted is having memory flashes of childhood, but the images he is seeing are not like what his parents have told him. He knows what happened to Elina, but for now he is not sharing it.

Four days ago, she’d almost died.

The thought has a physical effect on him. One of disorientation and nausea, like seasickness or looking down from a high building. He has to lean his head in his hands and breathe deeply, and he feels the earlier tears crowding into his throat.

Slowly, the two of them begin to piece together the missing elements from their stories. Ted confronts his mother and finds her unhelpful. But since the birth of his son, the flashes of scenes from the past revisit him with increasing frequency.

‘Do you remember…?’ he asks, then has to break off to think. ‘A man came to the house once. And you … you sent him away. I think. I’m sure you did.’

‘When?’

‘Years ago. When I was small. A man in a brown jacket. Sort of untidy hair. I was upstairs. You were arguing with him. You said – I remember this – you said, “No, you can’t come in, you have to leave.” Do you remember that?

When Traumatic Events Awaken the Past

Everyone is being confronted with challenges and O’Farrell deftly carries the reader through them all, and keeps us puzzling over the mysteries underpinning each of their lives.

There is a level of unease and intrigue that is present throughout the narrative, that quickens the pace of readings, as we realise that not all characters are being honest or have good intentions.

Secrets, lies, infidelities, manipulative jealousies, tragedy and the unconditional love of true motherhood. The novel has emotional depth and psychological insight, while keeping up a well thought our plot.

An absolutely riveting read with brilliant storytelling and just enough withholding to allow the slow reveal of mystery and deception.

Highly Recommended.

Further Reading

The Guardian/Observer review: The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O’Farrell – Elizabeth Day enjoys a compelling novel of memory and motherhood, 25 Apr 2010

NPR review: A Moving Look At The Bonds Of Motherhood by Jessa Crispin, 27 Apr 2010

Author, Maggie O’Farrell

Hamnet The Marriage Portrait Shakespeares Wife The Hand That First Held Mine

Maggie O’Farrell is a Northern Irish novelist, now one of Britain’s most acclaimed and popular contemporary fiction authors whose work has been translated into over 30 languages.

Her debut novel After You’d Gone won the Betty Trask Award and The Hand That First Held Mine the Costa Novel Award (2010). She is the author of Hamnet, winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020, and the memoir I AM, I AM, I AM, both Sunday Times no. 1 bestsellers.

Her novels include After You’d Gone, My Lover’s Lover, The Distance Betwees US, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand That First Held Mine, which won the 2010 Costa Novel Award, Instructions for a Heatwave, This Must Be the Place and The Marriage Portrait, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize. She lives in Edinburgh.

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Boy Swallows Universe (2018) by Trent Dalton

Boy Swallows Universe is the debut novel of Australian author and journalist Trent Dalton, who shared with audiences during the promotional tour of his novel (now a 7 episode Netflix series) that the book was semi-autobiographical, 50/50 fact and fiction.

Eli “does a lot of what I would have [done if I could]. It was all wishful thinking.”

While much of what occurs is true, it reads like a crime, suspense and thriller novel, with unforgettable characters. It is set in a suburb of Brisbane in 1985 and follows a boy through dark, dangerous and at times magical teenage years, intent on changing his family’s lives.

Coming of Age Amid Drug Wars, Corruption and Crim’s

Your end is a dead blue wren.

Boy Swallows Universe Trent Dalton debut novel semi autobiographical 7 part Netflix series based on true story of the authors life growing up in Brisbane Australia

Boys Swallows Universe begins with this cryptic opening line, one of many that appear throughout the text, clues that are eventually resolved in this unique family saviour mystery.

Eli Bell is the main character, he is 13 years old; his brother August, a year older does not talk, he spells words in the air with his finger. He has not spoken since something happened in the past that Eli doesn’t remember. To do with their father. Who he also does not remember.

I can see my brother, August, through the crack in the windscreen. He sits on our brown brick fence writing his life story in fluid cursive with his right forefinger, etching words into thin air.

Finding Meaning and Escape in the Details

Their occasional babysitter Slim, a man who spent a quarter century in jail for the alleged murder of a taxi driver, has taught Eli the importance of details. It’s how he survived the hole. Creating double meanings for here (in the jail) and there (the boundless universe in his head and heart).

When he grows up Eli wants to be a crime reporter for the local newspaper. Slim writes lots of letters to his mates still in prison (using a false name) and suggests Eli can practice by writing letters as well. He has a penpal Alexander Bermudez, once sergeant-at-arms of the Rebels outlaw motorcycle gang.

Slim says a good way for me to remember the small details of my life is to associate moments and visions with things on my person or things in my regular waking life that I see and smell and touch often. Body things, bedroom things, kitchen things. This way I will have two reminders of any given detail for the price of one.

A Stupid Plan, A Secret Plan and a Well Meaning Busybody

The boys live with their mother Frankie Bell and her boyfriend Lyle. The boys get on with Lyle, although Eli has not forgiven him for getting his mother addicted to heroin. Lyle wants to save them all and has a fast track, risky idea about how to do it.

When Lyle’s plan backfires, Eli and August are thrust into survival mode and Eli takes this further with his own big secret plan by going into full on rescue mode, investigative detective, naive peacemaker, all with the aim of trying to get his family back together and his future career on track. Ironically for all the calculated risks it requires, it is his schoolteacher getting too interested in their welfare that worries him.

Mrs Birkbeck leans in closer across her desk. There’s something pious in the way she sits.

‘What I’m trying to say, Eli, is that trauma and the effects of trauma can change the way people think. Sometimes it can make us believe things that are not true. Sometimes it can alter the way we look at the world. Sometimes it can make us do things we normally would not do.’

Sly Mrs Birkbeck. Woman wants to suck me dry. She wants me to throw her a bone about my missing bone.

‘Yeah, trauma is pretty weird, I guess,’ I say.

Eli’s experience of trauma results in him having a highly intuitive subconscious, that combined with a fearless instinct for asking straight up questions push him forward on his quest. The red telephone in the secret dugout room of Lyle’s house is something of an enigma, why does it always ring when he is in there and who is the voice that responds?

A Funny, Thoughtful, Hair-Raising Life Adventure

Boy Swallows Universe is an exceptionally well told tale of a young boy Eli Bell surviving a tumultuous childhood, exposed to the effect of adults involved in drug dealing, of violent school mates, an unusual babysitter and some other hopeful, inspirational characters that make it all worthwhile.

“All of me is in here. Everything I’ve ever seen. Everything I’ve ever done. Every girl I ever kissed on a wagged school day, every punch I ever threw, every tooth I ever lost in a Housing Commission street scrap and every flawed, conflicted, sometimes even dangerous Queenslander I’ve ever come across, as the son of two of the most incredible and beautiful and sometimes troubled parents a kid could ever be born to.” Trent Dalton

This is no story of misery, it is about solidarity between brothers and the tenacity of a boy who won’t accept the way things are, he questions everything and everyone, asking forbidden questions, training himself in observing the details and taking action. Never giving up.

He is trying to save his mother, his mute brother August and himself from the terrible trauma cycles they are all stuck in. He is determined to grow up and become a crime reporter for a local newspaper and to meet the enigmatic Caitlyn Spies.

“The key characters all draw on the people I love most in the world. The most beautiful and complex people I’ve ever known, and I never even had to walk out the door of my house to find them. I just wanted to give the world a story. To turn all these crazy and sad and tragic and beautiful things I’ve seen into a crazy, sad, tragic and beautiful story.”

Brilliantly told, unforgettable characters, a wonderful balance between grounded in the dark reality of a dysfunctional family, a seedy underworld and the ethereal escape of two boys with an ability to dream and imagine their way through the darkest moments of an unsettling childhood.

So many highlighted passages, one of the reading highlights of 2024 for me. Highly Recommended.

I am looking forward to reading his nonfiction book of short stories Love Stories, created when he sat on a busy street corner with a sky-blue Olivetti typewriter and asked the world a simple question: Can you please tell me a love story?

Further Reading

New York Times review: ‘Boy Follows Universe’ follows a Gritty Coming-of-Age in 1980’s Australia by Amelia Lester, May 2019

Trent Dalton on : Why I Wrote ‘Boy Swallows Universe’ Harper Collins

This book is for the never believers and the believers and the dreamers.  This book is for anyone around the world who has been 13 years old. This book is for a generation of Australians who were promised by their parents they would be told all the answers as soon as they were old enough. Well, now you’re old enough.

Here are my answers:

  1. Every lost soul can be found again. Fates can be changed. Bad can become good.
  2. True love conquers all.
  3. There is a fine line between magic and madness and all should be encouraged in moderation.
  4. Australian suburbia is a dark and brutal place.
  5. Australian suburbia is a beautiful and magical place.
  6. Home is always the first and final poem.

Author, Trent Dalton

Trent Dalton Australia author journalist Boy Swallows Universe Lola in the Mirror Love Stories

Trent Dalton is a two-time Walkley Award-winning journalist and the international bestselling author of Boy Swallows Universe, All Our Shimmering Skies, Love Stories and Lola in the Mirror.

His books have sold over 1.3 million copies in Australia alone. He lives in Brisbane, Australia, with his wife and two daughters.

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Cairn (2024) by Kathleen Jamie

A Poet Writing Nature Essays

Kathleen Jamie is a poet and writer of creative nonfiction about nature. She has written three wonderful collections that I have adored. Findings (2005), my favourite, included essays about the Hebridean and Orkney Islands near her home in Fife and Peregrines nesting; Sightlines (2012) covers a fascinating archaeological dig, tales of more birds on lonely, windswept islands and a visit to the Arctic and finally Surfacing (2019) which I review here in Surfacing 1 and Surfacing 2.

Making Ripples at 60

creative non fiction essays poetry by Scottish poet and nature writer Kathleen Jamie

In Cairn, we find a collection of writings, fragments, observations and memories. Sometimes an individual observation and other times a collective witnessing of changes in the local environment. Of migratory patterns disrupted, of things once common on the horizon, now departed.

As she arrives at her 60th year, she begins to ask different questions, about the next generation and the one after that, if there will indeed be one as children question whether to bring another generation into this vastly changing world.

There is less a note of wonder and more a tone of trepidation at the precarious situation of the natural world and those being born into what will continue after we have left.

The Bass Rock and Bird Flu

It’s a while since we could turn to the natural world for reassurance, since we could map our individual lives against the eternal cycles of the seasons, our griefs against the consolation of birds, the hills. Instead there’s the sense that things are breaking, cracking like a parched field. There they are, the seabird people, among their beloved birds at the height of the breeding season, wearing hazmat suits as they pile corpses into bin bags.

Photo by Magda Ehlers on Pexels.com

Like a cairn, these short prose pieces are markers, memories, memorials or perhaps even metaphorical or literary burial mounds, tracking the thoughts and observations of an observer over the years of the natural environment, of change in both the natural surroundings and humanity. Testimonies.

‘Stones propose another sense of time, whereby the past, the deep past of the plant, proffers a meagre yet massive support to acts of human resistance…’ John Berger

A thought-provoking collection.

Further Reading

The Guardian: Cairn by Kathleen Jamie review – a wry SOS for the world

The Caught by the River Book of the Month: July 2024 Cairn by Kathleen Jamie – With its bursts of beautiful brilliance, it is something akin to lightning, writes Annie Worsley

The Guardian: Scotland’s Bass Rock: world’s largest colony of northern gannets – in pictures

Author, Kathleen Jamie

Kathleen Jamie, Photo by Alan Young

Kathleen Jamie is one of Britain’s foremost writers. In 2021 she was appointed Makar, Scotland’s national poet.

Jamie resists being identified solely as a Scottish poet, a woman writer, or a nature poet. Instead, she aims for her poetry to “provide a sort of connective tissue”.  Influenced by Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, John Clare, and Annie Dillard, Jamie writes musical poems that attend to the intersection of landscape, history, gender, and language.

Her groundbreaking works of prose – Findings (2005), Sightlines (2012) and Surfacing (2019) – are considered pioneers and exemplars of new nature writing. She lives in Fife.