humanity

by

The Light Between Oceans by M.L.Stedman

I begin reading with envy as M.L.Stedman’s playful yet adept metaphors slip off sentences, like droplets off the oars of a dinghy, each one plunging back into the ocean to collect another stream from which to compose those few extra words that create more than just mere description, revealing an image and inviting us deeper into the world she paints with words, an island hundreds of miles from civilisation, where only the two oceans, a grand light, the twinkling stars and the tall, elegant, imposing bearer of that light keep a young, newly married couple company.

There are times when the ocean is not the ocean – not blue, not even water, but some violent explosion of energy and danger: ferocity on a scale only the gods can summon. It hurls itself at the island, sending spray right over the top of the lighthouse, biting pieces off the cliff. And the sound is a roaring of a beast whose anger knows no limits. Those are the nights the light is needed most.

Post World War I

It is the early years after the first world war and many families have been affected by the loss of their sons, Tom survived the war but carries the guilt of a survivor who has seen too much and wishes they could have done more.  Isabel’s family is no stranger to the grief of losing not one but two sons, within days of each other, never quite giving up the illusion of hope that maybe it was all an error and one of them will return.

The Isolation of Lighthouse Living

Tom accepts a job on Janus Rock, a lighthouse many miles out to sea, with visits to the mainland years apart, the island, the sea and that reassuring steadfast light his sole companions. Until Isobel joins him in wedlock and on the island will encounter her own form of grief, yearning for the child that never quite makes it into life.

After the last stillborn child, a dingy washes ashore with the body of a young man and a baby wrapped in a bundle, miraculously still alive. Convincing her husband to delay the inevitable moment, the two fall into a conspiracy of their own making, one that lifts Isabel’s spirit while crushing Tom’s peace of mind.

When he wakes sometimes from dark dreams of broken candles, and compasses without bearings, he pushes the unease down, lets the daylight contradict it. And isolation lulls him with the music of the lie.

Photo by Augusta Margaret River Tourist Association

Inspired by Cape Leeuwin Photo by Augusta Margaret River Tourist Association

At times uncomfortable reading, Stedman keeps you guessing and wanting to turn the pages, as the behaviours of the female characters are as unpredictable as the currents of the ocean herself. Tom, like the lighthouse itself is resolute, yet vulnerable to the consequences of his steadfast loyalty.

The choice of a third person narrative perspective has the effect of keeping the reader at a certain emotional distance and prevented me from being drawn into empathising with the characters, never being truly brought deep into their minds to see things from their perspective, thus we remain at a safe distance ourselves, just like those ships out at sea.

I did wonder why the author hadn’t taken that leap and told the story from the perspective of one of the central characters, but at the same time, sense the hesitation to go there. In all, a magnificent debut and thought-provoking novel, with many fabulous evocations of the turmoil of the sea and humanity.

by

Episode 6: Late Night Surgery, the Most Difficult Wait a New Mother will Endure

Exiting the lift, we entered the Anaethetist’s medical room and I watched as they prepared what they needed, looking confident and as if they had done this many times before, which of course they had, it was only Allia and I for whom all this was alarming and new. As they attached three new lines to Allia I noticed that each one had a small square sticky label with a different animal on it. Everything in there was so miniature, the sight of those tiny little animal figures like a kind of bait, luring one into a false sense of security momentarily. But then I saw the tiny mask and the realisation of what that mask signified gave me serious heart palpitations. My little girl had made it into this world, through all these months of waiting and had survived birth and was breathing effortlessly and now this gas mask was going to knock her out.

“Okay, I think I shoud go now” I said stumbling out of the door and into the lift and back up to the relative serenity of the nurturing Woodland Ward. I had stayed as long as I could, but I wouldn’t witness her lose consciousness, that I just couldn’t bear. We then waited in what seemed like and probably was the longest day of my life. Allia had been born on that very same day at 5.16am and we would wait there until after 11pm for the doctor to report back to us.

He returned alone. It was then I understood that Allia would not be coming back to this serene ward.

“She’s okay” the doctor said. He spoke softly and quietly. “She has been taken up to the intensive care ward and you will be able to see her tomorrow. We will try and organise a room for you here then” he said looking at me, “but for now she is being taken care of and the best thing would be for you to go home and get some rest.”

It was both a relief to know she was okay and an anti-climax because we couldn’t see her. I tried not to allow the nagging fear or was it paranoia that he was hiding something or protecting us from something engulf me. A mother in a state of distress has such fine-tuned nerves she picks up on everything. The wild animal instinct in me was sensitive to every word and gesture, trying to read behind every intention in this strange unfamiliar territory.

Everything comes as a surprise when we are so focused only on what is happening right now. With the benefit of hindsight, I see that all these small shocks and surprises are the things that create anxiety in the lead up to knowledge about out what is going to happen next. But the maternal instinct is a wonderful shock absorber and close to the survival instinct I am sure.

Which is just as well, because no one can warn you that will only hold your baby for a short while after birth, that she will be taken away and put in a different ward from you, that she will go to another hospital without you, that they will ask for your consent to perform surgery over the telephone and then tell you it’s better for you to stay where you are and rest, that you will escape the hospital to follow your child, not even knowing the address of where she is, that you will wait four hours for an operation to be performed and you won’t see your baby afterwards and that you will find yourself walking out into the dark streets of London just before midnight on the same day that you first gave birth, looking for a taxi that won’t appear in the freezing cold of a late November winter, that the taxi you eventually find will throw you around its back seat violently as it turns corners, accelerating into each street, that you will be too tired and stunned to even protest as the physical pain of what you have endured finally overpowers the drug-like effect of whatever bodily hormones have up until now been providing you with some measure of pain relief.

As we left the hospital to search for that taxi, the nurse insisted that I sit in a wheelchair.

“It’s been a long day and your body also needs to recover” she said.

Next Up: in A Silent Education: Our Quiet Challenge in Provence

Episode 7: The Verdict, The Recovery and Home Just in Time for Christmas

Previous Episodes

Introduction

Episode 1: The Benefits of Insomnia

Episode 2: We are not Living in France!

Episode 3: The Benefits of Contra-Indicated Essential Oils

Episode 4: Where’s My Baby and Why Isn’t She With Me?

Episode 5: GOSH: Where Peter Pan’s legacy resides, a kind of Neverland

by

Episode 5: GOSH Where Peter Pan’s legacy resides, a kind of Neverland

At Great Ormond St Hospital we were shown to the Woodland Ward, the family and children friendly ward names, a first step in reducing my overburdened anxiety levels. Allia was in a beautiful communal room decorated for children, with soft lighting, colour, patterned bed sheets with giraffes and monkeys. The quiet whispers of the nurses a stark contrast to the beige walls, formica cabinets and metal machines with cables and hoses draped everywhere of the hospital we had just left.

Arriving at GOSH Great Ormond St Hospital

It was like we had left the factory and entered Neverland. In a way we had. GOSH has the benefit of many private donors and receives royalties from the estate of J.M. Barrie, who claimed Peter Pan had been a patient in Great Ormond Street Hospital and that:

It was he who put me up to the little thing I did for the hospital.

Allia was asleep in an open incubator so we could actually touch her. She was so peaceful sleeping there. There was no naso-gastric tube in her nose, only lines in her hands and feet, things that in this environment were as ordinary and common as sheets and blankets. She was okay and she was going to be okay. She looked more comfortable now than she had before and I was just happy to be there with her.

It was a shock for my husband. Having missed the birth itself, he was now confronted with something even more difficult, seeing his daughter for the first time in a hospital wired up to machines and about to undergo surgery. If he thought he had arrived in time to avoid the drama, he was mistaken, he had arrived in the middle of it and now he and I would have to endure four hours of awaiting the outcome of a major event that neither of us had any role in.

My Aunt left and Susan’s husband stayed with us. Susan (whose name I have changed for this story) and I used to joke about our funny connections and serendipitous events, one of them being that she shared the name of my mother and I shared the name of her daughter. We laughed the day we met when we discovered this connection, never for a minute anticipating the future role she would play in our lives, at the birth of our daughter.

We had about half an hour before Allia was taken downstairs to the operating theatre. The doctor spoke with us and drew a diagram of the digestive system, from the mouth, down the oesophagus, to the stomach and the small intestine to the ileum, the point just before the small intestine connects to the large intestine.

“It is here just before the ileum that there is a blockage” he explained. “We don’t know exactly what it is, whether there is an end to the intestine so that the two pieces must be re-joined or whether there are striations or a blockage, in which case, we may need to cut a section out. Do you want to come down to the Anaesthetists’ ward?” he asked.

“Yes” I replied.

“No” said my husband simultaneously.

The lift opened, Allia was wheeled inside, I followed with the doctor and we all descended.

Next Up: Late Night Surgery, the most difficult wait a new mother will ever endure

Read Previous Episodes this mother/daughter collaboration: A Silent Education: Our Quiet Challenge in Provence

Introduction

Episode 1: The Benefits of Insomnia

Episode 2: We are not Living in France!

Episode 3: The Benefits of Contra-Indicated Essential Oils

Episode 4: Where’s My Baby and Why Isn’t She With Me?

by

Death off The Lifeboat

Post my visit to Belfast in Northern Ireland and the Titanic Museum, followed by reading Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember and Christopher Ward’s , The Band Played On I have continued with this reading theme with Charlotte Rogan’s novel The Lifeboat, which felt like reading the next chapter of a Titanic story, the one that hasn’t been written to my knowledge, the story of what might have occurred had the lifeboats and their inhabitants been left overfull to roam the high seas.

 Set in the summer of 1914, the story centres around Grace Winter, a 22 year widow; right from the beginning we understand she is one of three women being held in prison while on trial for a crime that is alleged to have occurred while they were afloat on a lifeboat after the sinking of a grand ocean liner they were travelling to New York on.

Thirty-nine people started out in the boat, but a lot less than that survived under somewhat suspicious circumstances. As the trial progresses, to aid her defence her lawyer asks her to record the days as she remembers them in a kind of journal, and so simultaneously we too read her re-enactment of what she perceives happened as if it were happening now.

At the same time it occurred to me – and it must have occurred to Mr Hardie as well – to wonder if Rebecca was the victim of some sort of natural selection and to think that if she had fallen overboard, maybe it was for the best.

Having suffered one family tragedy already and seeing their prospects dwindle after the death of their financially troubled father, Grace’s aspirations had been in the ascendant after marriage to the young, successful Henry, although all is not clear around this, it is a subject she neglects to delve into in great detail and neither subsequently do we hear much of either her own family or her in-laws. Only her ruthless determination to marry the already engaged Henry, rather than follow her sister’s example and seek a governess role or other employ. Marriage was to be her saviour and Grace exhibits ambition had used her resources stealthily to achieve it.

It is an interesting premise, the concept of floating at sea for days on end, death never far from seducing some, and destroying others in dramatic fashion. This story pits men against women, the strong against the weak and the cunning against the calculating. I did wonder about its authenticity when they decide very early on, in the first hours to abandon a child clinging to some debris, it is clear the child will perish and even if the boat is hopelessly overfull, it is hard to accept that women in particular could be so in shock as to allow such a young soul to be left.

Later, Hannah stamped her foot against the floor of the prison van and cried, “What is this, a witch trial? Is the only way to prove our innocence by drowning?”

 

Note: This was an Advance Reader Copy (ARC) provided by the publisher via NetGalley.

by

In the Shadow of the Banyan

Early morning in Hanoi, Vietnam

The countries, culture and people of Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma and the surrounding area interest me. Vietnam was the first country I travelled solo in and while I was there, in addition to the cultural immersion, I also enjoyed reading the works of two local authors, which I purchased from a street vendor, Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War and Duong Thu Huong’s Paradise of the Blind, both of which are excellent.

We learn a little how they live, what they eat and how a soldier deals with the aftermath of war. These occasional books translated into English provide an important insight into real experiences and a way of thinking that cannot be portrayed by any other than those who were raised there. Their experiences often cause us to question our own perspective, our knowledge, and beseech us to see things from another point of view. It is a joy therefore to come across a publisher of who said:

When I came to S&S, I told everyone here I wanted to publish books that deepen the cultural conversation and take readers to places they couldn’t otherwise go. – Jonathan Karp, Simon & Schuster

This is certainly the case with Vaddey Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan, narrated from the perspective of 7-year-old Raami, a girl whose experiences reflect the author’s own, though she has chosen to fictionalise her story.

 It isn’t so much the story of the Khmer Rouge experience, of genocide, or even of loss and tragedy. What I wanted to articulate is something more universal, more indicative, I believe, of the human experience our struggle to hang onto life, our desire to live, even in the most awful circumstances. – Vaddey Ratner

Lest we forget, Hanoi, Vietnam

The daughter of royalty, although a failed, corrupt democracy ruled, she and her family were evicted by the revolutionary Khmer Rouge, a marginal guerrilla group – whose leaders were from the same intellectual class as Ratner’s well-educated father, however who held radical ideals to transform the social fabric by destroying traditional family, social and wealth connections and creating an experimental collective.

Their revolution took the form of putting the population into work camps in living conditions worse than peasants. Whether driven by fear, paranoia or disillusionment, they ruthlessly continued to seek out and judge people as the enemy, a definition that moved and changed like the current in the Mekong itself until through murder, disease or starvation scholars estimate that as many as a third of the population (1-2 million) died. The regime was finally overthrown by the Vietnamese military in January 1979.

Ratner tells the story of Raami, physically challenged from a polio defect which shortened one of her legs, her experience during the period of exile with her parents and sister, how she survived the extreme living and working conditions and what it taught her along the way. She remembers the stories and poems that her father shared with her and they continue to be a source of strength for her throughout her life.

“Do you know why I told you stories Raami?” he asked. I shook my head. I knew nothing, understood nothing.

“When I thought you couldn’t walk, I wanted to make sure you could fly.” His voice was calm, soothing, as if it were just another evening, another conversation.

“I told you stories to give you wings, Raami, so that you would never be trapped by anything – your name, your title, the limits of your body, this world’s suffering.”

It is a humbling story and frightening to perceive, yet dealt with by Ratner in a way that allows us to acknowledge and attempt to understand something of the seemingly never-ending cycle of oppression, idealism, revolution and the dangers inherent when revolutionary intent is hijacked by power, destroyed by paranoia and becomes tyrannical, while preserving the few special moments that continue to pass between people despite the danger posed by their selfless acts.

Terrible as it is and damaged as they are, it is those who survive and who are still able to maintain some belief in the human spirit and humanity that bring one of the few gifts that such terror evokes. It is a price no person would ever wish to pay.

For all the loss and tragedy I have known, my life has taught me that the human spirit, like the lifted hands of the blind, will rise above chaos and destruction, as wings in flight.

The author has succeeded in taking this sad chapter in her country’s history and showing us some of its beauty and culture, sharing memories and thoughts that can never be erased and putting them into a new form, this literary work, which we are privileged for it to be shared in English.

In a sense it leaves us puzzled and perplexed, just as witnessed in Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love, yet another tyrannical regime that loses its way to the detriment of its people. The stories can be shared and passed on, but they also represent a kind of grief for a way of life now lost to future generations.

Note: This was an Advance Reader Copy (ARC) provided by the publisher via NetGalley.

by

The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna

When I was gifted my kindle by my kind, book-loving Aunt,  Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love was one of the preloaded titles I looked forward to reading.

Aminatta Forna was born in Scotland and raised in Sierra Leone, the country where most of this story takes place. She is the daughter of a former Sierra Leonean cabinet minister and dissident, murdered by the state in 1975. She has written the story of three men, whose lives intersect briefly, and who come into contact with each other at the Freetown Central Hospital.

Dr Adrian Lockhart, recently arrived from London has responded to a request to an overseas posting for a government-sponsored psychologist specialising in PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), his thoughts and actions suggesting he may be in the midst of a midlife crisis, needing some distance from his life to see it for what it really is. Life in Sierra Leone may allow but doesn’t appreciate such self-centred indulgences and Dr Kai Mansaray, a young local surgeon gives him an honest portrayal of just how people like him are perceived, lacking sufficient equanimity to see it for himself. Despite the frankness, the two become friends and seek out each other’s company with increasing frequency.

Both men experience love and its aftermath, its vulnerability, its brief joy, its destruction and the memory of it, as if it were real, even when it no longer exists.

 For death takes everything, leaves behind no possibilities, save one – which is to remember. He cannot believe with what intensity one can continue to love a person who is dead. Only fools, he believes, think that love is for the living alone.

In addition to his post at the hospital, Adrian helps out at the mental hospital and recognises Agnes, one of his former patients (one visit patients – they visit once and never return).

The people his colleagues sent to him were outpatients mostly, the ones with whom the doctors could find nothing wrong. And afterwards each of his new patients made the same request for medicines, to which Adrian explained he was not that sort of doctor. A nod of acceptance, rather than understanding. None of them ever returned.

Agnes is discharged before Adrian sees her and he becomes intent on trying to resolve the cause of her illness, a fugue, or temporary amnesia, and in doing so he will come too close to the sick, ugliness of the country’s past conflict where sometimes amnesia may be the only respite one has from a brutal reality.

We also meet Professor Elias Cole, an old history professor who taught at Freetown university before and after the 1969 coup, his position afterwards, somewhat elevated than it was previously. He has an obsessive fixation on Saffia, the wife of another Professor, whom he befriends and becomes caught up with unknowingly, leading to an interrogation and a spell in prison, which will change both their lives. He encounters Adrian in the hospital, near the end of his life, seeking an audience to share his story before it is too late. Adrian listens and realises there is more to Professor Cole’s story than he is letting on.

This is a multi-layered story that reveals itself with each encounter, that hints at the traumatic events and psychological destruction of a nation, depicting the constant struggle for survival in a post-war era and the love it’s citizens have for their country despite the difficulties and horrors of the past. There is sacrifice in staying and pain in leaving; there is no real escape, both will suffer, albeit in different ways.

The author, Aminatta Forna

I really enjoyed this book, it was a pleasure to read and consider its characters and what they represented, I loved it for the questions it posed in the mind of the reader, leaving us to come to our own conclusions, for every question could have had an equally valid, if opposite answer, such is life and the characters who inhabit our own reality, there are those who will stand up even it means they will be sacrificed and those who will remain quiet and flourish.

It is as if there are no answers, there are just the decisions we make, that both we and the generations that follow then need to live with and understand.

I recommend listening to this powerful discussion between the BBC’s Bola Masuor and Aminatta Forna on the BBC World Service talking about both The Memory of Love and The Devil that Danced on the Water, the book she wrote about her search for the truth of her father’s fate after he was seized by secret police and later killed.

When you do nothing, what do your children inherit?

*

The plain fact of the matter is that any group will remain potentially conscienceless and evil until such a time as each and every individual holds himself or herself directly responsible for the behaviour of the whole group – the organism of which he or she is part. We have not yet begun to arrive at that point. – from the work of M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie

Buy The Memory of Love via Book Depository

 

by

Thomas Jefferson – Lessons from a Secret Buddha

This is a delightful and simple novella that views the life and achievements of one of America’s great role models through the principles of Buddhist thought, a man who wished only to be remembered for three achievements, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom and Father of the University of Virginia. He was President from March 1801 – March 1809.

Suneel Dhand has created a Buddhist guru whom he connects to Jefferson’s mother, and who then begins to correspond with the young man when he is a discontented, overweight child. The letters introduce him to seven ancient principles of Buddhism and the Eastern way of life and we then witness Jefferson’s own lifestyle change as he becomes vegetarian, more interested in books and develops a greater awareness of how thoughts, actions and behaviours position a man.

When we take an in-depth look at all of his lifestyle practices we see that Tom practiced very Eastern ways of living, different from his fellow countrymen. In many ways he was a well-being guru, centuries ahead of his time.

Most of my knowledge of the role Thomas Jefferson played in American society comes from having seen the excellent HBO TV series ‘John Adams’ and the awe with which he was regarded by both John Adams and Benjamin Franklin as they encouraged him to pen the Declaration of American Independence.

Portraits of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson by American painter Mather Brown 1788

The series is based on David McCullough’s Pulitzer prize-winning biography ‘John Adams’, a volume I have on the shelf and will one day set to and read as well.

As Abigail Adams would confide to Jefferson, there had seldom been anyone in her husband’s life with whom he could associate with “such perfect freedom and unreserve” and this meant the world to her.  If you haven’t seen the series, here are some of Jefferson’s greatest moments played by the British actor Stephen Dillane.

A surprising little book, one that is full of good sense and relevant to today while reminding us of the extraordinary man Thomas Jefferson was and the major contributions he made not just to American history but also to humanity.

Today millions continue to be inspired by Thomas Jefferson, the genius who galvanized his people to freedom. A truly enlightened soul indeed – and that, without ever requiring any lessons from a Secret Buddha.

Note: This is an Advance Reader Copy (ARC) provided by the publisher via NetGalley.

by

The Coward’s Tale

Laddy Merridew comes to spend time with his Gran in an old Welsh mining town in Vanessa Gebbie’s ‘A Coward’s Tale’. Not happy with his lot, lost in the in-between, here where he doesn’t feel like he belongs so starts skipping school and there, the home he has come from that is breaking apart and will never be as it was and what’s worse, is requiring him to make decisions he feels incapable of making.

Laddy comes to the town statue outside the public library to listen to the local beggar Ianto Jenkins tell and trade stories for a coffee or a bite to eat and this part of his day passes pleasantly for hearing and learning about the descendants and ancestors of the town, all of whom have in some way been touched by the tragedy at the Kindly Light coalmine one September morning back then.

 ‘We’re meant to be doing coal mines in history.’

‘History, now, is it?’

‘They make it boring though. Not like your stories. You make it like it is still happening, in your head anyway.’

And the beggar shakes that head. ‘It is. And sometimes Maggot, I wish it wasn’t.’

Ianto Passchendaele Jenkins narrates the stories that link present day inhabitants back to their ancestors, two generations previous, showing that one is rarely ever completely free of the past and the sins of the fathers are often witnessed albeit in a new form, in the actions of those living today. From Baker Bowen to the Woodwork Teacher, Halfwit and the Deputy Bank Manager, the Deputy Librarian and the Undertaker and the Piano Tuner, Ianto shares their tales with warmth and compassion until finally one of his characters, the Collier, Peter Edwards share’s the beggar’s story, ‘The Coward’s Tale’.

Like young Laddy who no longer knows whether what his parents say is true or not, so too with the beggar’s tales, which captivate cinemagoers waiting in the queue, keeping him talking by topping up his coffee supply, the author making use of the words may and will to imagine what people may do and if so what that means they will do. Only Laddy searches for clarification, the others are happy to be mesmerised and encourage him with edible gifts.

‘For my breakfast? I will tell a story for breakfast? An egg. How about a nice egg?’

Once I got into the tales and understood the framework, I enjoyed the book, but I admit it took three attempts before the stories managed to carry me away with their rhythmic, poetic prose. However they are splendid tales and told with a unique captivating voice that puts the reader right in that square with all the other listeners, empathizing with each of the characters that the adored Ianto Jenkins brings to life for them.

Finally I am reminded of another set of tales of life in a small French village in Julia Stuart’s The Matchmaker of Perigord, which was a favourite a few years back, which I also recommend as a compelling, humorous summer read.

Note:This book was an Advanced Reader Copy (ARC), provided by the publisher via NetGalley.

by

Frieda’s Unlikely Inheritance

Suzanne Joinson’s A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar, is a novel that intertwines the lives and stories of Frieda, in modern-day London and Eva, part of a missionary group with her sister Lizzie and their companion Millicent in 1920’s Kashgar, in the western part of China.

“Why do you want to bring it?” Lizzie asked, but I don’t think I answered her. I did not tell her that it was my shield and my method of escape; or that since the first time I pedaled and felt the freedom of cycling, I’ve known that it is the closest I can get to flying.

Eva has taken her bicycle and is penning a guide to cycling which seems to interest her more than missionary activities, excerpts of which grace the beginning of each Kashgar chapter and whose meanings could be interpreted to have wider meaning than just cycling.

What the Bicycle Does: Mounted on a wheel, you feel at once the keenest sense of responsibility. You are there to do as you will within reasonable limits; you are continually called upon to judge and to determine points that before have not needed your consideration, and consequently you become alert, active, quick-sighted and keenly alive, as well to the rights of others as to what is due yourself.

Eva and her companions have travelled to the ancient Silk route city of Kashgar in the hope of converting lost souls, but seem to find only trouble, not helped by the questionable motivations of each of the individuals that make up the group. Tolerated but unwelcome, they find themselves ostracized and seen as bringing bad luck during a time of political and religious unrest.

In London Frieda lives a solitary existence, her work demanding her to travel constantly which keeps her from becoming too involved in any social sense when she is at home – that and her choice of relationship which assists in putting a halt on her progression. But two things occur that may offer not just distraction, but a divergence in her life, with which she has a growing frustration and sense of wanting to change. The arrival of a young Yemeni artist on her doorstep with skills in drawing birds like the long-tailed variety he draws on her wall and the arrival of a letter informing her of her responsibilities regarding the death of a person who has named her next of kin.

The letter prompts her to consider making contact with her mother whom she has not seen since she was seven years old and Tayeb, the young artist is able to help her decipher the Arabic script in a notebook she finds that now belongs to her. He also knows how to take care of an owl that seems to have fallen into her care.

The book wasn’t quite what I was expecting, perhaps due to the title and the mention of the Silk Road, these things are mere markers which entice our interest while the story takes us on another journey altogether, the bicycle more of a metaphor for a journey and the things one is likely to encounter and is required to consider. I enjoyed the story and in particular the contemporary story which provides the framework.

Here the birds’ journey ends, our journey, the journey of words, and after us there will be a horizon for new birds. – extract from Mahmoud Darwish’s poem ‘Here the Birds’ Journey Ends’.

 

Note: This book was an Advanced Reader Copy (ARC), provided by the publisher via NetGalley.