book review

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Mother to Mother by Sindiwe Magona

Mother to Mother is the second novel in my reading about the complexity of motherhood from three different perspectives, from within London’s Caribbean diaspora in The Mother by Yvvette Edwards, apartheid-era South Africa in Mother to Mother, and contemporary Black America in Brit Bennett’s The Mothers.

Making Sense of a Tragedy

 Sindiwe Magona decided to write this novel when she discovered that Fulbright Scholar Amy Biehl, who was set upon and killed by a mob of black youth in August 1993, died just a few yards away from her own permanent residence in Guguletu, Capetown.

She then learned that one of the boys held responsible for the killing was in fact her neighbor’s son. Magona began to imagine how easily it might have been her own son caught up in the wave of violence that day.

The outpouring of grief, outrage, and support for the Biehl family was unprecedented in the history of the country. Amy, a white American, had gone to South Africa to help black people prepare for the country’s first truly democratic elections. Ironically, therefore, those who killed her were precisely the people for whom, by all subsequent accounts, she held a huge compassion, understanding the deprivations they had suffered.

Mother to Mother, A Novel

When there are tragedies such as what happened here, usually and rightly, a lot is heard about the world of the victim, their family, friends, achievements and aspirations. The Biehl case was no exception.

Amy Biehl’s Last Home: A Bright Life, a Tragic Death, and a Journey of Reconciliation in South Africa by Steven D. Gish

Sindiwe Magona reflects and asks; are there no lessons to be had from knowing something of that other world, the opposite environments to those that grow and nurture the likes of Amy Biehl; to grow up under the legacy of apartheid, a society where you were born a second-class citizen, a system that relegated black people to the periphery and treated them as sub-human.

What was the world of this young woman’s killers, the world of those, young as she was young, whose environment failed to nurture them to the higher ideals of humanity and who, instead, became lost creatures of malice and destruction?

In reality, there were four young men, in the novel there is just one. Through the mother’s narrative of her life raising her children in this oppressive environment, through her memories, we come to understand a number of factors that contributed to the continuing dehumanisation of a population that became more and agitated as the little they had was taken from them, destroyed, bulldozed over and opportunities few and far between and one race of privileged people responsible.

Mandisa’s Lament

Mandisa, bewildered and grief-stricken, on learning the news of her son’s involvement in this terrible tragedy, mines her memory and reflects on the life her son has lived, that brought them to this moment. In looking for answers she paints a vision of her son and his world, the world she has inhabited and done her best to navigate and lead her children through, as if in conversation with that other mother, the one who has lost a daughter, forever.

Forced Removals

What began as a rumour, that the government was going to forcibly remove all Africans from numerous settlements to a common area set aside for them all was initially laughed off, not believed. Everyone talked about it, but not with concern, it was impossible.

There were so many of us in Blouvlei, a tin-shack location where I grew up, Millions and millions. Where would the government start? Who could believe such a thing?

The sea of tin shacks lying lazily in the flats, surrounded by gentle white hills, sandy hills dotted with scrub, gave us (all of us, parents and children alike) such a fantastic feeling of security we could not conceive of its ever ceasing to exist. This, convinced of the inviolability offered by our tremendous numbers, the size of our settlement, the belief that our dwelling places, our homes, and our burial places were sacred, we laughed at the absurdity of the rumour.

Mother to Mother by Sindiwe Magona "a tour de force" Andre Brink

But the government was not laughing. When the rumour paled and was all but forgotten, one day if returned with a deafening roar, as an aeroplane dropped flyers warning them all of the impending deadline, that they would be forcibly removed. To Guguletu.

A grey, unending mass of squatting structures. Ugly. Impersonal. Cold to the eye. Most with their doors closed. Afraid.

Oppressed by all that surrounds them…by all that is stuffed into them…by the very manner of their conception. And, in turn, pressing down hard on those whom, shameless pretence stated, they were to protect and shelter.

Segregation was enforced and black people were removed from their settlements, from suburbs where only white people would now live, pushed into a place and among people they did not know, in challenging conditions and the need to find work.

On A Dark Day, Resentments Build

The narrative is written in two timelines, the day of the protest, when Mandisa is sent home early from her job as a cleaner in a white woman’s home, due to the unrest – interspersed with memories of how their lives came to arrive at this point. She waits and waits for her son to come home and becomes increasingly concerned at his lack of appearance.

10.05 PM – Wednesday 25 August 1993

…where was Mxolisi? Not for the first time, I asked myself what it was that made him so different from the other two children… What had made Mxolisi stop confiding in me? And when had that wall of silence sprung between us? I couldn’t remember. He used to tell me everything…and then, one day I woke up to find I knew almost nothing about his activities or his friends.

As the family circumstances are shared and the life of this mother is revealed, I am reminded of the two autobiographies I have read, of the similarly challenging life and raising of her own children the author in similar circumstances. Although this is fiction, there is resemblance to her own circumstances, no doubt the reason why she understands this could so easily have been any one of those mothers in their neighbourhood.

The story leads up to the actual event, to what occurred on that day, the clash, the terrible crossing of paths, of being in the wrong pace at the wrong time, the burning hatred of an oppressor, the innocent face of one who looked like them, the dark desire of a race seeking revenge, the deep resentment of decades expressing itself in rage.

My son, the blind but sharpened arrow of the wrath of his race.

Your daughter, the sacrifice of hers. Blindly chosen. Flung towards her sad fate by fortune’s cruellest slings.

It is a courageous attempt to present a community in the grip of violent rage, to allow the voice of a mother to speak and share the growth of a family, the intense pain of all touched by a tragedy, to consider a path of redemption, to learn something from it. There may not be any conclusions, but perhaps we are all, all the better for being open to listen to the mothers, to find empathy for people doing the best they can in challenging circumstances. A thought provoking, powerful read.

Restorative Justice

In a final end piece to the story of Amy Biehl, after four men were convicted and given 18 -year prison sentences, there was in July 1987, an appearance before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s amnesty committee to argue for their release from prison, due to the politically motivated nature of the crime.

The parents, the Biehl’s attended the trial and shook hands with the parents of all four men. They understood the context of the South African struggle better than many South Africans.

Restorative justice communities of care and reconciliation, victim reparation, offender responsibility and accountability

The men spoke and asked for forgiveness. After consideration, all four were pardoned and the Biehl family supported their release.

Linda and Peter Biehl created a humanitarian organisation, the Amy Biehl Foundation Trust to develop and empower youth in the townships, in order to discourage further violence.

Two of the men who had been convicted of her murder went on to work for the foundation as part of its programs.

Further Reading

Amy Biehl’s Last Home: A Bright Life, a Tragic Death, and a Journey of Reconciliation in South Africa by Steven D. Gish

South African Press Association: Excerpts from SAPA Coverage of Biehl Amnesty Trials

Author, Sindiwe Magona

Sindiwe Magona (born.1943) a graduate of Columbia University, is an author, poet, playwright, storyteller, actor, and inspirational speaker. Magona retired from the United Nations, where she worked in the Anti-Apartheid Radio Programmes until June 1994 and UN Film Archives till her retirement. After twenty-five years in New York, she relocated to her home country, South Africa.

Her writings include To My Children’s Children and Forced to Grow (autobiography); Living, Loving, and Lying Awake at Night and Push-Push and Other Stories (short stories).

Her novels are When the Village Sleeps, Mother to Mother, Beauty’s Gift, Life is a Hard but Beautiful Thing (YA) and Chasing the Tails of My Father’s Cattle! Please, take photographs! a book of poetry, Modjaji Books and Awam Ngqo,(short stories) and Twelve Books of Folktales – written in both English and Xhosa.

Magona has written over a 120 children’s books, including: The Best Meal Ever and Skin We Are In and Her awards include include Honorary Doctorates from Hartwick College, USA; Rhodes University; and Nelson Mandela University; and the Order of iKhamanga.

My writing, on the whole, is my response to current social ills, injustice, misrepresentation, deception – the whole catastrophe that is the human existence. Sindiwe Magona

Next Up, the third novel : The Mothers by Brit Bennett

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The Mother by Yvvette Edwards

Mothers in Literature

I had long wished to read Yvvette Edwards second novel, The Mother (2016) after very much enjoying her Booker longlisted A Cupboard Full of Coats (2011). I decided to read it alongside two novels on my shelf with similar themes of the bonds, burdens and breakthroughs of motherhood.

The three novels I chose are set in different countries and contexts: The Mother by Yvvette Edwards (UK) is set in London’s Caribbean community, Mother to Mother by Sindiwe Magona is set in apartheid-era South Africa, and The Mothers by Brit Bennett is set in contemporary Black America.

Sindiwe Magona has written numerous novels; however I have read and reviewed her autobiographies To My Children’s Children (1990) and Forced to Grow (1992), while Brit Bennett is well known for her novel that addresses the theme of passing, The Vanishing Half (2020).

The Complexity of Motherhood

All three novels expose motherhood as fraught with social pressure, moral judgment, and emotional complexity. Despite the different settings, they collectively form a global conversation about motherhood, resilience, and the human cost of structural and racial inequality.

3 novels of mothers and motherhooh The Mother Yvvette Edwards Mother to Mother Sindiwe Magona The Mothers Brit Bennett

In The Mother, Marcia grapples with grief and guilt after the murder of her son.

In Mother to Mother, Mandisa reflects on her life while writing to the mother of the girl her son has murdered.

And The Mothers, focuses on young women (and a collective “we” voice of church “mothers”) navigating the expectations of womanhood, including unwanted pregnancy.

The Mother by Yvvette Edwards

The Mother is the story of a mother’s struggle to come to terms with understanding her teenage son’s violent death, it is both a courtroom drama following the murder of Marcia and Lloydie’s 16-year-old son Ryan and a story of transformation and healing through grief.

I used to be good at making decisions, took it for granted completely, imagined it was one of those things that because I’d always been good at it, I would continue to be good at it, and then something like what happened to Ryan comes along and you realise some things are just temporary gifts granted for part of your life only, like the headful of hair you imagined would be yours forever that you went to sleep with one night and as usual but woke the following morning to find gone, clean gone.

Suffering Together, Drifting Apart – the Complexity of Grief

The Mother by Yvvette Edwards courtroom drama in London youth stabbing gang culture

Marcia wants to be present every day at court, her husband Lloydie does not. Increasingly emotionally estranged, she does not understand what he does all day, where he goes. Their habits are changing and they seem to be leaving each other behind, dealing with the loss in completely different ways, on their own.

Lloydie is putting my cup of tea on the side when I return to the bedroom. He looks slightly sheepish, is probably annoyed with himself for the mistiming that has meant he has found himself alone with me when we are both awake and alert. He looks at me without speaking.

‘Aren’t you going to ask how it went?’ I say.

It’s not the question I intended; too in-your-face, accusatory. I didn’t want to start the discussion here but it’s out now, I can’t take it back.

His tone is dutiful. ‘How did it go?’

‘It was hard. Listening. Seeing that boy, his mother. Very hard.’

The Need to Understand

Marci is determined to be present every day, to understand why this happened and comes to realise that there may be things about her son that she did not know.

Understanding has been my problem from the start. How is it possible that my son was doing all the right things, that as parents, Lloydie and I, we were doing all the right things, and yet still Ryan is dead?

The novel follows the case and outside the court other events begin to shed light on the situation, Marcia’s beliefs and assumptions are challenged. In her need to know, she becomes reckless.

She observes the boy who is being charged, his fixed stare and has already decided his fate.

…he stares ahead as if it is all beneath him, and as usual I find it unnerving. I have to say that single quality in him is enough to convince me that he did it, that he’s guilty because he has something in his aura of the type of person who could kill someone at six thirty, then stroll home, have dinner and a hot bath, followed by an early night of unbroken sleep.

Edwards is adept at tapping into the realms of Ryan’s peers and the insidious, threatening world of youth gang culture, which comes into full view through he character of Sweetie, the girl caught between the earnest world of Ryan and the manipulative obedience she has to Tyson Manley and his type.

It is a thought provoking story of complicated parenting and motherhood highlighting effects of judgment, truth seeking, and the social forces that shape personal and family outcomes, while reflecting on the particular role of mother. Motherhood becomes a lifelong, consuming identity, the loss of a child, in this case, destabilising her sense of self.

Author, Yvvette Edwards

Yvvette Edwards is a British East Londoner of Montserratian origin and author of two novels, A Cupboard Full of Coats (2011) nominated for The Hurston-Wright Legacy Award and longlisted for the Booker Prize, and The Mother (2016). Her short stories have been published in anthologies and broadcast on radio.

She is interested in writing that challenges the single narrative, giving voice to characters who are absent or under-represented in contemporary fiction.

An Upcoming Novel in March 2026

Good Good Loving, Yvvette Edwards first book in almost a decade, will be published in March 2026 by Virago. The synopsis reads:

Good Good Loving Yvvette Edwards a multi-generational British-Caribbean family across five decades

“Ellen’s big, beautiful family are gathered around her hospital bed as she prepares to slip away… her children have chosen now of all times to have a never-ending discussion about all her failings. Every single tiny thing they think she’s done wrong over the years – and the one big thing too. Even after everything, after all the sacrifices Ellen has made for every last ungrateful one of them, they still all take their father’s side. If only they knew the whole story.

“Moving backwards in time through all the decisive moments that have shaped Ellen’s life – the disasters, celebrations and surprises, the revelations, confrontations and betrayals – Good Good Loving is the vibrant story of a multi-generational British-Caribbean family across five decades.”

Next up is Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother :

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The Trees by Percival Everett (2021)

Having already read and enjoyed three novels by Percival Everett, So Much Blue (2017), Erasure (2001), and James (2024), when I saw The Trees at the local bookstore when I’d been in a reading rut, I picked it up, knowing it would be a guaranteed entertaining read.

The Trees Percival Everett shortlisted Booker Prize 2021

Percival Everett had already written 21 novels by the time he was shortlisted for The Booker Prize in 2022, won that year by an equally satirical novelist Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka for his The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (my review).

Everett was more of a cult writer, well-known among regular readers, but not a mainstream name. His experimental style, genre-bending and intellectual satire made him more popular in literary and academic circles than in popular fiction. The author describes himself as “pathologically ironic“.

That began to change when The Trees was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021 and his novel Erasure was adapted into the film American Fiction (2023). And then his 2024 novel James (a reimagining of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s perspective) won the US National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

The Trees

So knowing the kind of writer Everett is, I read this without looking at the blurb. It was ironic to read about what is a murder investigation into the soul of America’s violent past, immediately after I finished Killers of the Flower Moon, the story of the targeting of the Osage people after they came into significant wealth.

The Trees is about the mysterious murders of white men in Money, Mississippi, an allegorical reckoning with centuries of racial terror inflicted upon Black communities. It is written in lean, precise and economical prose, like a script, unfolding like a crime story with mild, intriguing suspense driving the plot forward.

Copycat Crimes & Condemnation

Photo by cottonbro studio Pexels.com

Every time a man is found murdered, another body appears alongside them, a man who resembles Emmett Till, a young black boy lynched in the same town 65 years before. Locals find him the perfect scapegoat, creating fear and paranoia among the community, until the dead man reappears at the site of a second murder.

Confusion reigns, except for the team from the MBI (Mississippi Bureau of Investigation), who have been sent in to assist, though met with resistance by the local sheriff and townsfolk.

Satirical elements appear in his depiction of law enforcement and the media: their incompetence and self-interest are exaggerated to reveal systemic failings. As a spate of copycat killings spreads across the country, the investigation begins to have wider implications.

Remember Their Names

There is a great grandmother Mama Z who has been compiling files on every lynching that has happened in America since her father Julius Lynch was a victim in 1913, she is remembering their names, lest anyone forget.

When I write the names, they become real, not just statistics. When I write the names they become real again. It’s almost like they get a few more seconds here.

The book I read has an interesting cover, it looks like a dartboard, or a target and the circles are yellow, green, black and red, the colours of the Black Panthers, an influential militant black power organization from the 60’s whose members confronted politicians, challenged the police, and protected black citizens from brutality.

Witness and Memory

The Trees refers to the place where many were hung and I’m guessing that the fruit of those trees, represented on the book cover by twin peaches is a reference to all those who died who could not continue to reproduce. Trees represent historical memory, they are witness to the persistence of racial violence.

One thing I notice is how much easier it is to read about a violent past than it is to watch a twenty first century depiction of it. There’s no over dramatisation of the violence or needless exaggeration of the characters. While here on the page, there are an abundance of literary devices in use to deliver themes of racial violence and historical memory.

I certainly hope they don’t make this one into a film, I would not wish to see it, but I admire the ability of the author to demonstrate the effect of turning the tables and making a white population consider the trauma of having such atrocities committed against them.

Further Reading

Read an Extract from The Trees by Percival Everett

Percival Everett interview: ‘How long did it take to write The Trees? Sixty-three years’

Author, Percival Everett

Percival Everett lives in Los Angeles, where he is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.

He has been nominated for the Booker Prize twice – he was shortlisted for The Trees in and shortlisted for James in 2024 – and is the author of over 30 books since his debut, Suder, was released in 1983. His works include I Am Not Sidney Poitier, So Much Blue, Erasure and Glyph.

A Guggenheim Fellow and Pulitzer Prize Finalist for his novel Telephone, Everett has won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, the Academy Award in Literature, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, and the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Fiction. In 2021, he received the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award at the National Book Critics Circle Awards and in 2024 won 4 major literary awards including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with James.

You’ve said in the past that reading is one of the most subversive acts we can perform. Can you elaborate? 

There’s a reason that oppressive regimes often resort to burning books. No one can control what minds do when reading; it is entirely private. We make of literature what we need to make. This is true of art. There is nothing more challenging to an oppressive government than a populace that can read, and therefore think.

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A Truce That is Not Peace by Miriam Toews

Life and Death So Far, A Search for Meaning

“…we might remember the dead without being haunted by them, give to our lives a coherence that is not ‘closure,’ and learn to live with our memories, our families, and ourselves amid a truce that is not peace.” – Christian Wiman

A truce that is not peace Life and Death So Far memoir by Miriam Toews

I’ve been tempted but never read any of Miriam Toews novels, so this might not be the best place to start, this being the first time she has written about her own life in non-fiction (Swing Low: A Life she wrote about her father in 2000). Hoever, I was intrigued and it was available to read on Netgalley so I jumped in to learn more about the source(s) of her inspiration.

While her novels are not autobiographies, they address the emotional, spiritual, and political terrain of her life – her Mennonite upbringing and their lack of voice, her family’s struggles with mental illness and the burden of communal silence. 

A Truce That Is Not Peace makes those long-standing concerns fully explicit, acknowledging the reality behind those themes in her novels, exploring the writing life, family tragedies and day to day obsessions with grace, humour and bite.

Fragments of Memory, Flashes of Reality

The memoir is written in a fragmented journal entry style, one that continued to visit and revisit a number of current obsessions and memories she kept going back to, things from the past that haunted her, her father and sister’s suicides, their long periods of silence, their incessant need to write, her conversations and the questions asked by a Jungian therapist, who she reassures each visit that she is not suicidal (having read that is the greatest fear therapists have of their clients), though it is all she talks about.

It then switches into current desires, a wind museum idea, how to negotiate getting her royalties back from her ex-husband, and repeated attempts to answer the question Why Do I Write?, as the Conversación Comité who invited her to respond to that question, in anticipation of participating in a conversation in Mexico City, keeps rejecting her submissions as being not altogether what they were looking for, while attempts to rewrite it have her dreaming about her Wind Museum.

Creativity, the Messiness and Musings of Lives

Various quotes, letters, emails, dreams, nightmares; musings and memories litter the text as the author grapples with what presents itself in her life, and then the words of others arrive as if to provide validation or a way to get to that truce she seeks.

“Punishment, perhaps, or some contagion of fate, finds her here, her hair shorn, both wrists wrapped, her eyes open, pondering the parable of perfect silence.” – Christian Wiman

Photo by Mat Brown on Pexels.com

The text is interrupted by grandchildren activities, worries about biting habits, by questions she asks her mother, by the antics of family gatherings, of things falling apart in the house, the river that runs beneath it, a skunk with distemper that keeps trying to return to the now renovated back deck and falling into the window well. A close encounter with a plane in a blizzard on a highway, all while trying to find a way to navigate this life, this ‘truce that is not peace’.

It reminded me of reading Terry Tempest Williams When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice, another memoir that circles a writer’s many obsessions as she struggles to find a connection. Her list of things she wrote of were: Great Salt Lake, Mother, Bear River Bird Refuge, Family, Flood, Cancer, Division of Wildlife Resources, Mormon Church, subjects that resided within her, evolving and changing shape like a murmuration.

When Miriam Toews makes her list she writes: Wind Museum, Deranged Skunk, North-west quadrant with ex, Conversacion in Mexico City, Neighbours.

I found the style confusing at first, but then because she returns to the same subjects, I started seeing the pattern. She mixes heavy subjects with the mundane of everyday life, and shares pockets of humour and tenderness amid the pain. The presence of children and noise and problems that need to be dealt with keep them all grounded and present and observant, there is inspiration everywhere, even in the most mundane.

While it may have helped had I read her other work, it is not necessary.

“When I started writing, the work was an act of rebellion. An act of subversiveness. But also a philosophical one. The humor, the writing, the taking note of absurdity. A rebelliousness against life. That’s how Camus felt too. That it is absurd. That there is no meaning. That there’s no reason to this crazy place of pain and ridiculousness. And yet, it’s what we have. So let’s be in it.” Miriam Toews

Further Reading

The Yale Review: Shakespeare & Company interview Miriam Toews on how writing resembles loss, Adam Biles

The Guardian: ‘My sister, my God. It’s a visceral pain that never goes away’: Miriam Toews on a memoir of suicide and silence by Hannah Kingsley-Ma

Author, Miriam Toews

Miriam Toews is a Canadian novelist and writer born in 1964 in Steinbach, Manitoba, a small, conservative Mennonite town that profoundly shaped her life and work.

Toews is best known for her darkly comic, deeply compassionate novels that explore themes of Mennonite culture, female autonomy, family bonds, mental illness, and the struggle for personal freedom. Her internationally acclaimed books include A Complicated Kindness (2004), All My Puny Sorrows (2014), and Women Talking (2018), the last of which was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film.

Much of Toews’s writing is informed by her own experiences, including the suicides of her father and sister, and her complicated relationship with the Mennonite community in which she was raised. Her memoir, A Truce That Is Not Peace, addresses these influences directly. She lives in Toronto.

“The book is about my attempt to find connection, to really meet my sister, in the spaces between words, in the silence. And my inability to do that, my reluctance to go there. There’s just such a huge abyss between the pain of the feelings and the articulation of that pain, whether it’s manifested in silence or whether it’s manifested in writing a story. It’s that time in between. I think that’s where I can maybe meet her in my mind.” interview with Adam Biles, Shakespeare & Company, Paris

N.B. This book was an ARC kindly provided by the publisher, 4th estate, via NetGalley.

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Flashlight by Susan Choi

As I mentioned in the Booker Prize shortlist post, this is one of the two shortlisted novels I’m reading before the winner announcement on Nov 10.

Cross Cultural Relationships, Identity and Belonging

Flashlight interested me because it is a portrayal of a cross-cultural marriage and family that highlights the tensions between adults with different backgrounds and expectations, coping within one culture and the way a child of that union navigates both her life and her parents, when she comes from them both.

Flashlight by Susan Choi set in Japan USA and North Korea

The novel begins with a scene plucked from the middle of the story, when ten year old Louisa and her father Serk are out for a walk in the early evening, in a coastal town in Japan.

Serk was born in Japan to Korean parents and while furthering his education in America, met Louise’s mother Anne. The family are in Japan on a one year secondment from his American university.

Hours later, Louisa is found washed up on the beach and her father is missing, presumed drowned.

Finding One’s Place Nowhere

The story then returns to the beginning, where we learn of the childhoods and upbringing of Serk in Japan and Anne in America, of his attachment to Japan and his success in school, while his family long to return to Korea (having not told him earlier where they were from) and wish their children to attend another school where they can learn about their culture and identity.

To learn it was not Japanese but Korean was so profoundly disorienting that the greater discovery, that he himself was Korean, was for the moment secondary.

As Serk matures, he comes to understand the ambiguous nature of nationality and belonging, of being caught between two nations, perceived and treated as an outsider by both of them; American thus becomes both an escape and an even greater frustration.

…disillusioned as he was, when his parents decided to abandon Japan he was dumbfounded.

Photo by Chen Te on Pexels.com

The first half of the novel, prior to his disappearance has the feel of domestic fiction as the family navigate the intimate dramas of their lives and find their way.

Both Serk and Anne have withheld parts of their lives from each other and this adds tension to their marriage, as these things are sensed but unknown, or threaten to become visible, ultimately undermining their relationship.

That fall, Serk’s college announced it would send a member of its history department as a visiting professor to Japan, starting the following April. Before the history professor was chosen, Serk was asked if he would like to be considered and said he would not.

Louisa becomes partially aware of their secrets, adding to her own confusion and struggle to find a sense of belonging.

When Louisa hated her mother, it was because the thought of her caused her so much pain.

When she hated her father, it was because she was conscious of emulating his remoteness.

Shattered Lives Separate

In the second half of the novel, the family is no longer a cohesive unit, their lives diverge and chapters are then told from each character’s separate location and perspective. The pace changes, an element of mystery appears in the timeline and there was such a feeling of a true-crime element, that I paused reading and checked the back of the book for a bibliography. Sure enough, there are 15 works of fiction and non-fiction referenced, very revealing.

What Really Happened to the Disappeared

Photo by Lara Jameson on Pexels.com

As the mystery of what happpened to Serk is revealed, other characters appear who are searching for their own disappeared and thus stories of a similar nature are discovered, told with such detail that they seemed as though true.

So while the novel continues, it also provides an insight into historical tensions between Japan and North Korea and the untold stories of a number of families whose tales of missing members of their family were ignored and disbelieved until subsequently proven to be true.

I don’t want to reveal too much more than what you can read in the blurb, because encountering the story is all the better for not knowing. Not everything that occurs is written, as each character chapter ends, we often know what is to be revealed and we fill that in ourselves, creating connections as the narrative leaps forward from one character to the next.

Perhaps no one but Anne, who had lived with him and tried for so long, could understand how impossible Serk made it to know the least thing about him. A constant wretched privacy had radiated from him, more powerful and more wretched the nearer you got.

An Illuminating Text

Flashlight was so many things, a complex story of a multi cultural family, the relinquishment of a child, four people whose lives came together then split apart, who we continue to observe, often decades later. It explores the effect on each person in the family of their culturally diverse pasts, their birth circumstance and the geographic moves they make that shift perceptions of who they are.

It exposes the cruelties of nations, abuses of humankind, the determination of those who seek the truth, the perseverance of those who want to bring justice and the importance of closure, of being present even when someone seems beyond comprehension.

What an effort to bring all that together and create a novel that traversed so many elements of the cross cultural family, the immigrant life, the (false) allure of the return, lost family members and the dangers of trying to find them. I was reminded a little of Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow, but this is much less introspective and Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, but with a different focus on aspects of history & family predicaments.

This was such an eye opening, thought provoking read that felt like reading two novels, the first half interesting but mundane and predictable, the second half mysterious, disconcerting and dangerous. For me it started a little slowly and almost methodically and then suddenly you become aware of a much greater story within which this narrative sits, and then it became completely absorbing and I didn’t want to put it down.

Highly Recommended.

Further Reading

Read an extract from Flashlight by Susan Choi

‘Flashlight is a sprawling novel that weaves stories of national upheavals with those of Louisa, her Korean Japanese father, Serk, and Anne, her American mother. Evolving from the uncertainties surrounding Serk’s disappearance, it is a riveting exploration of identity, hidden truths, race, and national belonging. In this ambitious book that deftly criss-crosses continents and decades, Susan Choi balances historical tensions and intimate dramas with remarkable elegance. We admired the shifts and layers of Flashlight’s narrative, which ultimately reveal a story that is intricate, surprising, and profound.’ Booker Judges

Author, Susan Choi

Born in South Bend, Indiana, Susan Choi is the author of six novels.

Her first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for Fiction. Her second, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. Her third, A Person of Interest, was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 2010 she was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award. Her fourth novel, My Education, received a 2014 Lambda Literary Award. Her fifth novel, Trust Exercise, won the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction – and was a US bestseller.  

Her sixth novel, Flashlight, began as a short story in the New Yorker in 2020, and won the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award in 2021. She serves as a trustee of PEN America and teaches in Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. 

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Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann (2017)

Around the time the Martin Scorsese film of this book came out, the author David Grann had a new nonfiction book coming out The Wager, A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder.

The film about the Native American Osage murders was three and a half hours long and I knew that was not for me, not because the story isn’t important, but the way stories like this are portrayed cinematically in the 21st century is not for me.

I did read The Wager and thought it was excellent, and I knew if I ever came across Killers of the The Flower Moon, I would read that too.

Last week I visited our local English bookstore and there was a second hand copy sitting on the shelf, so I snapped it up and read it in a day.

Killers of the Flower Moon

So what is that title all about?

“In April, millions of tiny flowers spread over the blackjack hills and vast prairies in the Osage Territory of Oklahoma. There are Johnny-jump-ups and spring beauties and little bluets… In May, when coyotes howl beneath an unnervingly large moon, taller plants such as spiderworts and black-eyed Susans, begin to creep over the tinier blooms, stealing their light and water. The necks of the smaller flowers break and their petals flutter away, and before long they are buried underground. This is why the Osage Indians refer to May as the time of the flower-killing moon.”

Land and Oil – From Greed to Domination to Dehumanisation

Grann twists the metaphor to describe what happened to the Osage people when white settler individuals, driven by greed, racism and a total lack of empathy conspired to kill multiple members of families for their wealth and rights to oil profits.

In nature, one species nourishes the next, governed by the cycles of the Moon whereas the story he presents here, uses that phrase to describe a murderous cycle of greed and violence to annihilate and supplant the native Osage.

An Obsession with Wealth and Control

In the early 1870’s , the Osage had been driven from their lands in Kansas onto a rocky, presumably worthless reservation in northeastern Oklahoma, only to discover, decades later, that this land was sitting above some of the largest oil deposits in the United States. To obtain that oil, prospectors had to pay the Osage for leases and royalties.

I raced through this book, enjoying how thorough it had been researched. It is divided into three parts, Chronicle One: The Marked Woman (or The Marked Family or The Marked Tribe) focuses on four sisters Mollie, Anna , Minnie and Rita (pictured below) and their mother Lizzie, all of whom find themselves in danger of being killed in an elaborate conspiracy, without knowing who or why.

Four Sisters Targeted

The story opens with the gruesome murder of Anna and then goes back to describe the events that lead the Osage people to be where they were living, how their lives were changed, the treaty that forced them to give up their lands or be declared enemies of the United States, the banned aspects of their languages and lifestyles, the imposed education and names.

In the early 1870’s the Osage were forced to cede nearly a hundred million acres of their ancestral land (between the Arkansas River and the Missouri River), ultimately finding refuge in a 50 – by – 125 mile area in southeastern Kansas. And it was in this place that Mollie’s mother and father had come of age.

One native Osage family of four sisters targeted in the Reign of Terror in the US from 1913 - 1931 by whites seeking to obtain headrights
Osage sisters Me-se-moie (Rita), Wah-hrah-lum-pah (Anna), Wah-kon-tah–he-um-pah (Mollie) and Wa-sha-she (Minnie)

Decades later it was discovered that this infertile land sat above some of the largest oil deposits in the country. To obtain that oil, prospectors had to pay the Osage for leases and loyalties. As a result, as oil revenues grew and their wealth accumulated, the Osage became the wealthiest people per capita in the world. However, severe controls were placed on their ability to access their own money.

Who Was Behind the Murders? A Texas Lawman Investigates

While the family got no help from the local sheriff they paid various private investigators to look into the murder of Anna, when Rita and her husband were killed. The community lived in fear and needed answers.

Chronicle Two: The Evidence Man turns the focus to Texas Ranger, Tom White, who becomes the government appointed (by Edgar Hoover) lead in an investigation, when a number of others who attempt to report back to authorities are mysteriously killed, hinting at a wider conspiracy. Tom White focuses on Mollie’s family when her mother mysteriously dies and Mollie becomes the sole survivor of her family.

Under Hoover, agents were now seen as interchangeable cogs, like employees in a large corporation. This was a major departure from traditional policing, where lawmen were typically products of their own communities. The change helped insulate agents from local corruption and created a truly national force, yet it also ignored regional difference and had the dehumanising effect of constantly uprooting employees.

A Wider Conspiracy Revealed

Chronicle Three: The Reporter circles back and relooks at these events and sees that they were part of a wider pattern of targeted murders, but this is in the 21st century, where there are few people left who can recall events. However, the archives and family testimony reveal the depth of this terrible vengeance against a marginalised population, just because in the process of being banished from their original lands to other infertile lands, they happened to land on undiscovered deposits of oil and became wealthy.

Brilliantly pieced together and a horror to read, how this family of women were targeted and those around them easily influenced to participate in it and the wounding legacy of future generations who lost so much of their family over the greed and jealously of remorseless white men.

Further Reading

Guardian: Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann review – family murder, oil & the FBI by RO Kwon

NYTimes: The Osage Indians Struck It Rich Then Paid the Price

FBI History : Osage Murders Case – A deadly conspiracy against the Osage Nation and the agents who searched for answers

“The most common comment I have received is: ‘I can’t believe I never learned about this. I think that is a reflection to some degree of the underlying force that led to these crimes, which was prejudice.” David Grann

Author, David Grann

David Grann is an American journalist, a staff writer for The New Yorker, author of The Wager, The Lost City of Z, A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize.

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of an Edgar Allan Poe Award for best true crime book. It was adapted into a film directed by Martin Scorsese, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone, Robert De Niro, and Jesse Plemons. 

His stories have also been published in the New York Times Magazine, Atlantic, Washington Post, Boston Globe, and Wall Street Journal.

In addition to writing, Grann is a speaker who has given talks about topics from Killers of the Flower Moon and the importance of historical memory to the dangers of complicity in unjust systems, and from the art of writing and detection to the leadership methods of explorers, such as Ernest Shackleton.

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Love Forms by Claire Adam (Trinidad & Tobago)

I first heard this recommended on the Irish Times Women’s podcast summer reads of 2025 and shortly after that it was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2025. It didn’t make the shortlist, but it was the novel I was most drawn to, given the adoption theme, but coming from a different culture than that we usually hear from.

Love

forms in the human body

– Louise Glück ‘The Fortress’

Forced Relinquishment Across Seas

Love FOrms by Claire Adams longlisted Booker Prize 2025 Trindad & Tobago

A 16 year old living in relative privilege in Trinidad, has one crazy night out at carnival and months later is clandestinely bundled into various transportations, made to wait at different locations, never told where she is going, crossing the water to a hideaway in neighbouring Venezuela, where she will stay a while, give birth to her baby and return alone.

It was my father who made the arrangements. My uncle helped, since he lived down south, where all this kind of business is carried out. I’m talking south-south : down past the airport, past the swamp, past the oilfields, everything. Way down at the bottom of the island, down where Columbus landed, long ago.

Years later, 58 years old, living alone in London, unable to pick up her career in medicine, two grown sons, divorced, her family still in Trinidad, she begins to search for her lost daughter, with very little knowledge, except that memory of the trip in the dark. The rest must be imagined.

I’ve spent many hours trawling through images online, trying to find this place again.But Venezuela is a big country…Even now, over forty years later, I still don’t know exactly where I was.

Gone But Never Forgotten

Photo by W. Fortunato Pexels.com

The novel explores a certain way of living in Trinidad, a daughter made to feel shame, an event unspoken of for more than a decade, a self-exile imposed. A child never forgotten, forever part of her, out of reach.

Over the years, I’ve come across a few photos in magazines and newspapers that I’ve cut out and kept, because they look the way I imagine her to look. I have them in different ages.

Though she maintains contact with her family, there is more than just physical distance between them. There’s a loss of intimacy, of trust, a love that overnight became conditional, an imposed silence that is easier to bear from afar.

I do love my mother dearly, despite everything, but this particular issue is fraught for us. If she and I were to start talking, and I were to finally tell her the honest truth about everything I’ve felt over these past forty years? Well, I couldn’t do something like that – not now, at her stage of life.

There’s A Community Out There

Not until she begins her search and becomes familiar with the experiences of others like her, of children like the one she abandoned, does she begin to be able to understand what it is she has been feeling, a life long loss, momentarily offered the promise of being filled, as each potential contact (a woman her daughter’s age searching for their mother) raises that hope. She confides in a work colleague, a safe stranger.

‘I wasn’t going to tell you,’ I said. ‘But I guess, why not. Another person has been in touch. A girl. I mean, a woman. From the websites. As a possible, you know. Match.

He was watching me closely, and I tried to take on the right manner. Steady and controlled, hopeful but in a measured way. With a hint of detachment, as if I were talking about something at a much greater remove, of academic interest. I said she was in Italy, a town in the north, and that she was a professional person, a biochemist with a pharmaceutical company.

This was a compelling read that would create interesting discussions, with its deeply flawed characters, many terribly inhumane behaviours and the life long wounding adults commit, who care more for status and reputation than the damage heaped on women and children for being in the too common situation of being pregnant, or birthed, unwanted. It’s a conversation and narrative that has for too long been dominated by one side, so it is good to see it being explored through fiction.

This kind of story comes in so many varieties and though this one is unique, again it is driven by the shame and blame of young women, without consideration for those whose consent is never given, those future adults severed from the natural maternal bond and their lineage, conditioned into false belonging.

On the return journey, in the jeep and then in the dented, rattling airplane, I felt as if something had changed, although I couldn’t, at that stage, have fully articulated what it was. Pieces were beginning to settle in new patterns. Maybe my story wasn’t: Dawn, who made a mistake and brought shame to her family. Maybe its: Dawn, mortal woman, who took a wrong turn in life and got lost.

One of the most hopeful parts of this novel for me, was the knowledge that this character and this author, read the forums and the stories of the many humans born into this paradigm who write of their shared, common experience of how that separation affects a child, their life, their future relationships, which helps dispel the myth, that it’s a good or right thing to do, to sever any baby from its mother.

The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood

Last year, I read the book Relinquished by Gretchen Sisson, a non fiction work that was the result of ten years of interviews, research and analysis of young women who had given up their babies, looking back at the impact of those decisions.

If you have any interest in the subject of family preservation, and creating conditions where families are supported not separated, read this. If you want to know the truth behind the experience of relinquishing a child (a lifelong trauma), not to mention the impact that has on the child (loving family or not), become more well informed by reading this excellent work.

Further Reading

Read an Extract from the novel ‘Love Forms’ by Claire Adam

Guardian Review: Love Forms by Claire Adam, reviewed by Julie Myerson, June 2025

Recommended Resources : Adoptee Documentaries, Adoptee Podcasts, Adoptee Books

Recent Research: Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood by Gretchen Sisson (2024)

Claire Adam, Author

Novelist Claire Adam was born and raised in Trinidad. She was educated in the United States, where she studied Physics at Brown University, and now lives in London with her husband and two children.

Her first novel, Golden Child, published in 2019, won the Desmond Elliott Prize, the McKitterick Prize, the Authors Club Best First Novel Award and was named one of the BBC’s ‘100 Novels that Changed the World’. Adam’s second novel, Love Forms, was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2025. 

I wanted to explore the bond between mothers and their children. On one hand, it’s the most ordinary, mundane, taken-for-granted thing in the world… on the other hand, it’s deeply mysterious. In the case of a mother and child who’ve been separated since birth, for example, often there is a pull towards each other that lasts a whole lifetime. These are people who don’t know each other, who’ve basically never ‘met’ – and yet they yearn to be together. Why is that? Claire Adam

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Brandy Sour by Constantia Soteriou (Cyprus) tr. by Lina Protopapa

Brandy Sour is a novella length book by the Cypriot author Constantia Soteriou, translated from Greek by Lina Protopapa. It won the 2023 National Book Prize in Cyprus and the author won the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story prize.

Foundry Editions, A Love of Mediterranean Literature

It was the first book published in the Foundry Editions collection of Mediterranean fiction back in 2024. This independent press was created out of a desire to discover and share new voices from the Mediterranean and the people and lands around it.

I heard about them after reading an excellent article in the Guardian entitled ‘Huge scars’: novelist finds a fractured Spain in its half-built houses about the book Far by Rosa Ribas (my review) translated by Charlotte Coombe. I sent a copy of it to a good friend in New Zealand and read it myself and loved it. I started seeing reviews for other Foundry Editions works and now I’m following their list closely.

A Turbulent History Told Through Hotel Beverages

Brandy Sour is set in the emblematic Ledra Palace Hotel, established in 1949 on Nicosia’s UN-controlled buffer zone, the Green Line that, since 1964, has divided the island into Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot sectors.

It has been witness to some of the country’s significant historical events and can be considered an integral part of Cyprus’ cultural heritage and difficult past.

“The Palace was the epicentre of the island’s recent history. It was built as the promise of a new era; a haven for all nationalities, all communities. It drew people from all backgrounds: the wealthy bourgeoisie who lounged by its cerulean pool; the poorer working classes who made its beds – and its Brandy Sours…

But in 1974, it became the site of the worst battle of the war; a symbol of all that could not be allowed to fall. After the division, it was the endpoint of student demonstrations, the gathering place for those who mourned their missing.

And when the barriers finally opened, the Palace once more became a symbol of hope. Of promises that were given, but never kept. Of wounds that ran very, very deep.” Constantia Soteriou, Cyprus Mail

The book is made up of twenty two vignettes or short character studies that form an interlinked slice of life of the hotel and the many characters who have had connections to it.

From Brandy Sour to Rosebud Tea to Grape Molasses

Each character is represented by a beverage starting with the Brandy Sour : The King. Much is revealed in the opening line.

They say a barman invented the cocktail for King Farouk of Egypt in the 40’s – a dark time for the king, who is already grown and in trouble, no longer the handsome, athletic boy charming Europe with his Western manners but a heavy middle aged man facing all kinds of political headaches in Egypt – and elsewhere too – who has to conceal his fondness for alcohol.

The King asks for something that doesn’t look like a drink, with that good brandy and the lemons he likes, and the barman obliges creating a cocktail worthy of a king that wishes to deceive people, with lemonade to sweeten him and the lemons to remind him of his sorrows in a tall glass that resembles an iced tea.

We learn of the tastes of local ladies and English ladies, of the maid, the cleaner, a guerilla fighter and with every consumer of a beverage, an important anecdote relating to their predilection.

City people think that roses are only good for looking at. Village people know that flowers are also good for eating. Especially roses – those tiny pink roses, the hundred-petal roses called damask roses, the ones that climb and spread their thorns across fences and hedges.

The Doorman likes his infusion of rosebud tea in his tin mag and when he starts work at the Big Hotel he takes his tin mug and the root of a damask rose and secretly plants it in the hedge. They must be picked in August with the morning dew, or risk a bitter infusion; it helps digest the indigestible.

Coffee and How War Changes Everything

Photo by Samer Daboul Pexels.com

He always wakes at dawn and he goes to the kitchen to have his coffee prepared the way he likes it. The only coffee of the day. With lots of kaymak and no sugar. Turkish coffee – Greek coffee, he always corrects himself – with sugar is an absolute waste of coffee. It needs to be bitter. There’s no point otherwise.

After the morning ritual of the maître’d, we learn of his role as the first shots are fired and he brings the foreigners down to the basement for protection. He returns home and anxiously watches the fighting on his TV, he meets his former colleagues in a coffee shop, the maid, the cleaning lady and the doorman.

He’s taken to drinking coffee in the afternoon now, too – no sugar the way it befits funerals and grief and tragedy and death. That kind of coffee. He takes his coffee with thick kaymak and no sugar. Coffee needs to be bitter – there’s no point otherwise.

The Builder and the Grape Molasses

One of the more moving stories near the end is that of the sensitive builder who gets mouth sores when he is stressed. He can’t eat or drink, there is no medicine that can help him.

The only thing that seems to make a difference is the grape molasses an old lady whose house he fixes gives him. Grape juice molasses that you boil for hours and hours, that you boil and boil until the liquid turns thick like honey – you dab it on your lips and on your gums and it’s the only thing that can cure mouth ulcers, those little holes in your mouth.

We learn the reason for his sensitivity, for only a few have the skills he does, who know old architecture like he does, how to repair the ancient materials in the foundations, to feel and understand old houses.

Ritual, Repetition and Reassurance

In each story there is often repetition, of that which is important to the character, like the ritual of the beverage, something that is repeated, that is part of a way of life. In the same way language repeats and reassures, building connection between the ritual and the meaning and importance it brings to the community, something to be cherished. The reader too is reminded of that meaning for that character and is moved by it.

I read the book without referring to the history, but on finishing it, I wanted to know more and went looking for the wider context, as we sense the changes occurring through each character and their habits, how the hotel itself somehow embodies the collective memory of a history. Over time, it is occupied by different kinds of guests, welcome and unwelcome, civilian and military and the local people who try to accommodate them and stay safe and adjust to the new paradigm of a post-colonial, independent country and then the destabilising effect of the coup in 1974 that created a separation and dividing line between Turkish and Greek Cypriots.

It’s a beautiful, evocative tribute to a culture, a heritage and the people that have populated and passed through it, that gives pause for thought, of the essence of ritual, of the importance of even the most simple traditions and need for humans to satiate a thirst, a soulful desire.

Highly Recommended.

Further Reading

Review, Cyprus Mail: A brandy sour at the Ledra Palace by Alix Norman

Article: The Ledra Palace Hotel and the ‘difficult history’ of modern Cyprus, Cambridge University Press, Dec 2022 by Antigone Heraclidou & Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert

Have you read any of the Mediterranean fiction published by Foundry Editions? If so, do tell us about it in the comments below.

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The Song of Youth by Montserrat Roig tr. Tiago Miller

The Song of Youth ‘el cant de la joventut’ is a slim collection of short stories written by Montserrat Roig translated by Tiago Miller, published in English in 2022 by fum de stampa press (originally published in Catalan in 1989).

It was shortlisted for the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize, (now rebranded the Queen Mary Small Press Fiction Prize) that rewards ‘bold and innovative’ literary fiction by small presses publishing 12 or fewer titles a year that are independent of any other commercial financial entity.

The winner of that prize in 2025 was There’s a Monster Behind the Door by Gaëlle Bélem (Ile de Reunion), translated from French by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert and in 2024 Of Cattle and Men (reviewed here) by Brazilian writer Ana Paula Maia, translated by Zoë Perry, published by Charco Press.

Finding and Reading Catalan literature in Catalonia

Backstory Bookstore Barcelona

When I visited the Backstory Bookshop in Barcelona, I was interested in and looking for Catalan literature that embraced something of its history in some way.

Monserrat Roig (1946-1991) was a novelist, short story writer, investigative journalist and feminist activist widely regarded as forming a central part of the Catalan canon, inspiring many other Catalonian writers to seek the intimate, personal testimonies of ordinary people, within a wider version of history guided by a strong sociopolitical engagement.

One of Roig’s many literary strengths was creating and placing subversive characters in deeply philosophical and provocative narratives, and bringing out their flawed, tender and very real aspects. It is helpful to consider this when reading her bold collection of short stories.

I’m going to mention two out of the collection that really stayed with me, The Song of Youth and Mar. Love and Ashes packs a punch, but is so short, it need not be described here.

The Song of Youth

I found it helpful to be reminded of this context, written on the back of the book.

In The Song of Youth, Montserrat Roig boldly presents eight remarkable stories that use language as a weapon against political and social “dismemory.” Her powerful and striking prose allows the important stories of those silenced by the brutal Franco regime to, at last, come to the fore. The Song of Youth is undoubtedly feminist and deeply critical but, as always, Roig’s lyrical writing gives shape, depth, and significance to the human experience.

This is how author Eva Baltasar described the collection:

The Song of Youth represents an array of lagoons in which Montserrat Roig’s most extraordinary flowers lay their roots.”

The short story collection by Montserrat Roig The Song of Youth Catalan literature translated fiction

After the first reading of each story, I felt like I was sitting at the edge of one of those lagoons, firstly appreciating the flowers, though not always seeing those roots in the deep, dark depths. And so I went back and reread them. I wrote on and around the pages, and looked up the poetic literary references and was in awe.

The opening story, The Song of Youth, reread a few times, revealed its many layers with each reading. It is magnificent. I think it is a story that needs to read quietly to concentrate, like contemplating a work of art, it won’t reveal itself at a first glimpse. However, it is perfect as it is. A celebration of dying moments and the power of memory, of a life lived courageously.

I turn my face from the ominous day,
Before it comes, everlasting night,
So lifeless, it’s long since passed away.

But shimmering faith renews my fight,
And I turn, with joy, towards the light,
Along galleries of deepest memory.
JOSEP CARNER, Absence

A woman lying prone in hospital with her eyes closed, near the end of her life, observes the white coat of the Doctor and has flashbacks to her youth, a stranger in a white shirt walked into the bar where she sat with her parents, with a decisive air. A transgression.

The men who came from the war didn’t have that air.

She opens her eyes, she is still alive. Everything as it was when she closed them. She knows the sounds. The sounds that keep them alive and the sounds that warn of encroaching death.

“They all died at daybreak. Just like the night.”

She is defiant. She is determined to remember a word. She succeeds.

It’s not easy to describe, this too is a story that needs to be experienced, to read the clues and the disjointed moments of the present and past that create the whole.

Death, Memory and Friendship

To Montserrat Blanes

Life has taught me to think but thinking has not taught me to live. HERZEN

The story MAR is the hardest hitting and most powerful – about a woman befriended, a relationship, admiration, of two people who are unalike but drawn towards each other, who go their own ways; until an accident changes everything.

…it never once occurred to me to give a name to that period of silence, madness and noise, to those moments when the hours would melt into timelessness and our intellectual friends, while watching us, would frown or raise an eyebrow.
“They’ve got some nerve,” said their suspicious eyes while they stared, unaware of their own fear.

The time they are together changes the one telling the story, she is an intellectual, always analysing everything, living in a world of opinions and judgments. While in this friendship, something shifts, changes her. The presence of this unconventional friend disturbed others, messing up the carefully compiled archives on their minds. From vastly different worlds, they each gain something powerful from being in each other’s lives. Something that unsettles others.

We hardly said a word, we certainly didn’t reinvent anything, but it was only with her that I lost my fear, the fear of revealing who I believe myself to be, that little girl I keep hidden in the deep, damp depths of my inner self.

A friendship of silences, commotion and madness

A tribute to friendship, this story originally published in 1989, was celebrated in December 2021 when a documentary was produced about Montserrat Roig and Montserrat Blanes friendship of silences, commotion and madness.

The audiovisual is made up of two narratives, the one in the short story and that told through the live voice and presence of Montserrat Blanes speaking from experience, memory and remembrance.

If you understand Catalan, you can watch and listen to the recording of “Roig i Blanes. Una amistat de silencis, enrenou i bogeria” on Youtube here.

Overall a powerful and thought provoking collection that makes me keen to read her longer fiction.

Further Reading

Biography: Amb uns altres ulls (With Other Eyes) by Betsabé Garcia (2016)

Article: Montserrat Roig : Up-close and from afar by Mercè Ibarz

“And when cancer attacked her, the hour of relentless truth that is illness brought out the self-portrait that the public persona had been hiding: a lucid, serene, combative writer and an excellent reader, who was cognisant of the fact that Franco’s dictatorship had pulled literary training up at its roots and who was, therefore, all too aware of her limits to that point and the power that, despite her illness, journalistic prose could give her.” Mercè Ibarz

Author, Montserrat Roig

Montserrat Roig (Barcelona, 1946-1991) was an award-winning writer and journalist, and the recipient of numerous prestigious prizes including the Premi Víctor Català and the Premi Sant Jordi.

Her journalistic work focused on forging a creative feminist tradition, and on recovering the country’s political history.

Her novels take similar stances, reflecting on the need to liberate women who were silenced by history.

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Ghost Wall (2018) by Sarah Moss

In 2020 I read the novel Summerwater by Sarah Moss after having listened to the author speak about her work. I didn’t review it because it didn’t work that well for me, but when I saw this slim novella at a book sale I thought I’d try again. It had been longlisted for the Women’s Prize in 2019.

Family Memory or Normalising Terror

Book cover of novella Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss. The cover shows woven wood that might have been used to recreate an Iron Age hut.

Interestingly, Summerwater was an ‘on-holiday’ novel, a rain soaked 24 hours in the Scottish Highlands, of families stuck in their cabins, inspired by the author’s two week stay under similar conditions, while Ghost Wall is also a tale of a less than salubrious summer holiday.

Teenage Silevia is spending time with her family in an Iron Age re-enactment hut in Northumberland, experiencing what it might have been like to live as they did. There is a Professor and his students also present, whereas Silvie and her father are there because her father, a bus-driver is passionate to the point of obsession about the history of this period.

We were sleeping in the roundhouse, my parents and I. The students had built it earlier in the year, as part of a course on ‘experiential archaeology’, but they had been firmly resistant to my father’s view that everyone should sleep in it together.

The point of the experience was to have a flavour of Iron Age life, a period around 800 BC when people learned how to use iron, which subsequently shifted the way they lived. Still very basic, so much of the holiday is spent foraging for food and for Silvie’s mother, preparing it.

Re-enactment not Reality

Silvie befriends one of the students Molly, who isn’t taking the experience as seriously as the others, who brings a reminder that life is not like this today and challenges some of the things that they do. Silvie admires her rebellious spirit, but is too fearful of her coercive father to defy his requests, finding it impossible to say no and seeing how little it takes for her mother to be punished.

I sometimes think I can tell when two pieces from the same site were made by the same prehistoric person, because the way my hands move is the same. I shivered. Of course, that was the whole point of the re-enactment, that we ourselves became the ghosts, learning to walk the land as they walked it two thousand years ago, to tend out fire as they tended theirs and hope that some of their thoughts, their way of understanding the world, would follow the dance of muscle and bone.

Photo by E. Laperriere Pexels.com

Underlying her experience and in the opening three pages, is the experience of the bog girl who was sacrificed, a story that as we read those pages, it is not clear whether this is a foreshadowing of something that is going to occur, or something from the past that she can imagine and feel, but whatever it is, it starts to feel real, even when she says otherwise.

Silvie, she said, you’re really OK with this, the ghost wall? It’s interesting, I said, I didn’t think it would be but it is. You’re not scared she said. I shrugged. Of what, bones? Of people, she said.

Passion or Persuasion

Photo by Petra Nesti on Pexels.com

The novella is atmospheric and becomes increasingly alarming as Silvie gets swept up in the passion of her father and the history professor, who have convinced themselves that there’s nothing wrong with taking the way these people used to live further. Despite her unwillingness, Sylvie also recognises her father isn’t academic like the rest of the team and part of her wants to support him.

It’s slightly terrifying the further things goes and the ending might have been a little abrupt, but then often conclusions are dramatic when an intervention is required, rather than the ideal of thoughtfully addressing real concerns.

Interviewed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2019, Sarah Moss, on her inspiration for the novel shared:

I had a writing residency for the Hexham Book Festival, and became fascinated by Hadrian’s Wall and prehistoric arts and crafts. We think of Hadrian’s Wall as the boundary between England and Scotland but neither of those entities existed then; it was the boundary between the Roman empire and the barbarians. There was and is plenty of reason to be thinking about the borders between civilisation and barbarity, nature and culture, insiders and outsiders.

Further Reading

A Q & A with Sarah Moss: On Iron Age re-enactment camps, barbarity and civilisation and Brexit’s impact on writers

Guardian: Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss review – back to the iron age

Author, Sarah Moss

Sarah Moss has published eight novels, two memoirs, numerous essays, and academic work on Romanticism, travel, food and gender. Her work has been listed for prizes including the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Wellcome Prize.

Her novels are Summerwater, Cold Earth, Night Waking, Bodies of Light, Signs for Lost Children, The Tidal Zone, Ghost Wall and Ripeness (2025). A memoir of her year living in Iceland, Names for the Sea, was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize and another My Good Bright Wolf (2025) is about growing up in the 1970’s and how excess self-control affects her early adulthood.