November 5, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry

I’ve long wished to read a novel by Sebastian Barry and somehow not got to one until now.

Old God’s Time was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2023 and shortlisted for the 2023 Irish Book Awards, Novel of the Year (winner announced 22 Nov).

literary fiction Irish — Book Toothbrush for Livia

This is a slow burn, introspective, literary read, of a man in decline, in the 9th month of his retirement from the Irish police force, now in his late 60’s. He has relocated to the annex of an old castle-like building overlooking the Irish sea and rarely has contact with anyone, though he is aware of his elderly landlord weeding the garden, a young woman with a child in the turret of the same building and a lone, trigger happy cellist.

His thoughts are of his wicker chair, his view, his peaceful existence and the joy of the privilege he has had to love his wife June, who he believed loved him in equal measure.

Over the course of the next week or so he relives memories of being with his wife and we develop a sense that this good fortune was not something either of them expected from life, given their rough beginnings, both abandoned as babies or small children.

His nostalgic meanderings are disturbed by a visit by two young policemen working a case against a priest, and looking into the cold case of another murdered 20 years ago. They want to know what he remembers from that time, as it was a case he worked on. Their arrival also coincides with the beginning of tentative relationships with his neighbours.

What a thing to bring to your old friend’s door. A new peril of cold cases that he had never foreseen. Enough time goes by and it is as if old things never happened. Things once fresh, immediate, terrible, receding away into old God’s time, like the walkers walking so far along Killiney Strand that, as you watch them, there is a moment when they are only a black speck, and then they’re gone. Maybe old God’s time longs for the time when it was only time, the stuff of the clockface and the wristwatch.

old god's time cormorant — Photo by Sindre Fs on Pexels.com

The visits disturb and awaken old memories and feelings, going all the way back to his early days in the army, a year in Palestine and then in Malaya, where he was a sniper and other dark shadows of memories long buried.

The slow revelation of his past, of his job and family, his son and daughter, his wife and their experiences as children create intrigue as he alludes to disturbing events that take time to unveil.

His often-time confused mind sometimes makes those memories feel like events happening in real-time around him; people appear to him who are no longer here. Figments of imagination or angelic attendants preparing him?

Sometimes he awakens and realises it was a dream, other times he realises it was a form of hallucination.

But he was obliged to believe it. Because in the first instance a witness should be believed. A lot of mischief and mischance had arisen from not believing witnesses. Rejecting out of hand. Poor soul standing in front of you, spilling the dreadful beans, and it not sounding likely. But oftentimes the unlikely was the truth, as you might find out, in the end, when it was too late. He felt he should believe – believe himself.

We read and we are in his mind trying to decipher what is real and what is imagined or desired. At a certain point it doesn’t really matter, except that the two young policemen may suspect he is implicated in something.

Far from being depressing or exhausting, given the burden of what he has lived through, there is a sense of gratitude for the gift of a shared love he had with June and pride he has in his children.

Behind the plot is a seething rage at the years long refusal to follow up with child abuses nor charge priests suspected of child abuse, men covering the despicable deeds of other men, of one type of power enabling another, predators against the weak and helpless and the long term psychological distress this trauma has inflicted on hundreds of thousands of children, not talked about but passed on through their own DNA, becoming a form of collective trauma of a generation(s).

The lack of redemption for victims, the theft of their freedom, of their peace of mind, the deep wounds that remain, that continue to fester, to destroy souls.

It was up to him now to know less about times and details and more about the moiling mysteries of the human heart. Things happened to people, and some people were required to life great weights that crushed you if you faltered just for a moment. It was his job not to falter. But every day he faltered. Every day he was crushed, and rose again the following morn like a cartoon figure.

Setting the novel in this man’s twilight years takes a dramatic subject and allows it to be reflected on in slow paced, methodical way that combines the experiences people go through and witness, the effects and consequences that they continue to live with and attempt to overcome or heal from, or take revenge for and the aftermath, what survives.

Brilliantly written and rendered, thought provoking, holding its threads of hope and faith in the power of genuine love. It is a book that is worth immersing in due to its dream-like reality, an ideal weekend read.

Highly Recommended. Have you read any Sebastian Barry novels? Do you have a favourite?

Sebastian Barry, Author

Sebastian Barry is an Irish novelist, playwright and poet, one of a small group of authors to have been nominated for the Booker Prize five times.

The 2018-21 Laureate for Irish Fiction, Barry had two consecutive novels shortlisted for the Booker Prize, A Long Long Way (2005) and the top ten bestseller The Secret Scripture (2008), before Old God’s Time was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2023.

He has also won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize, the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His novels have twice won the Costa Book of the Year award, the Independent Booksellers Award and the Walter Scott Prize.

Barry was born in Dublin in 1955, and now lives in County Wicklow. 

November 2, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg tr. Frances Frenaye

I’m planning on reading a few books by the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg, as mentioned on reviewing her excellent memoir Family Lexicon which I chose to start with, before diving into her fiction.

I start her fiction at the beginning with this brilliant, page turning feminist classic, originally penned in 1947, The Dry Heart.

Captivating right from the opening lines,

“Tell me the truth,” I said.
“What truth?” he echoed…
I shot him between the eyes.

Natalia Ginzburg’s debut novella starts with a shot and then goes into the domestic detail that preceded that moment.

Those first lines begin halfway down the page, just a couple of paragraphs before you turn the page, where not only is the husband shot, but in the last sentence before we turn the page, she tells us,

But for a long time already I had known that sooner or later I should do something of the sort.

She then leaves the house and over the course of the day, she recalls in minute detail how she met Alberto, her husband of four years, their long drawn out courtship, her wavering feelings for him that seesaw between love and hate but never indifference, before deciding what she ought to do now.

I put on my raincoat and gloves and went out. I drank a cup of coffee at the counter of a café and walked haphazardly around the city. It was a chilly day and a damp wind was blowing. I sat down on a bench in the park, took off my gloves and looked at my hands. Then I slipped off my wedding ring and put it in my pocket.

A school teacher living in a boarding house, surrounded by different characters on the periphery of her life, she had a vivid imagination and had fantasized about marriage. Alberto hadn’t fit that image but over time that had changed.

When a girl is very much alone and leads a tiresome and monotonous existence, with worn gloves and very little spending money, she may let her imagination run wild and find herself defenceless before all the errors and pitfalls which imagination has devised to deceive her.

The novel vivdly portrays the roller coaster of her young imagination, the frustration and desire she feels, the willingness to compromise and accept a less than perfect situation, the significant step forward their marriage takes when a child comes into it, until the day she snaps.

There is no mystery, all is laid bare in captivating, enticing prose, that is direct and insistent while exploring the dark aspect of a relationship that can’t be controlled, of characters who are ill-suited yet drawn towards one another, until that spontaneous combustion of their marriage.

It’s a novella, just over 100 pages, one to dive right in, highly recommended. A feminist classic.

Brilliant.

Also reviewed earlier this year by Jacqui at JacquiWine’s Journal and Kim at Reading Matters Blog.

Natalia Ginzburg Italian literature Family Lexicon

Natalia Ginzburg, Author

Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991) was born in Palermo, Sicily. She wrote dozens of essays, plays, short stories and novels, including Voices in the Evening, All Our Yesterdays and Family Lexicon, for which she was awarded the prestigious Strega Prize in 1963.

She was the first to translate Marcel Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann into Italian.

Her work explored family relationships, politics and philosophy during and after the Fascist years, World War II. Modest and intensely reserved, Ginzburg never shied away from the traumas of history, whether writing about the Turin of her childhood, the Abruzzi countryside or contemporary Rome—approaching those traumas indirectly, through the mundane details and catastrophes of personal life.

She was involved in political activism throughout her life and served in the Italian parliament between 1983 to 1987. Animated by a profound sense of justice, she engaged with passion in various humanitarian issues, such as the lowering of the price of bread, support for Palestinian children, legal assistance for rape victims and reform of adoption laws.

She died in Rome in 1991 at the age of seventy-five.

October 27, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

This Plague of Souls by Mike McCormack

Well, that wasn’t what I was expecting. Perhaps the first half, which felt like a different novel, one that felt familiar in an Irish rural novel kind of way, featuring a lonesome protagonist, Nealon, who has returned to the abandoned home and found it empty of his wife Olwyn and child Cuan, who hadn’t waited to hear the outcome of the charges that have kept him in prison the last 10 months.

An Old Irish Cottage of Memories

As he wanders about the house, certain objects awaken memories, of his parents, now long dead and more recently his wife Olwyn, who removed everything in the house that had belonged to them and did him a favour by cleaning and renovating it single-handedly. In protest he drags their old couch into the back lawn and just sits there.

We don’t know why he was imprisoned, what he was charged with, who his wife was, where she is.

Solar Bones Tramp Press Irish experimental fiction

The only evidence of a life or connection outside this empty cottage, is a persistent caller, who calls every day and seems to know everything about his life.

He conveniently repeats to Nealon everything he knows about him, though we don’t know if any of it is true, because the protagonist rejects everything he says, neither accepts or denies and even in the thoughts shared on the page, chooses not to think about (or the writer chooses not to share) any thoughts relating to the activities he describes.

I do not highlight one single passage until page 64 and then it is this I note, words exchanged in one of their cryptic telephone conversations:

‘I’ll tell you this: there is a great shortage of imagination out there, you couldn’t underestimate it.’
‘I wouldn’t know about that. I have noticed that there is no shortage of foolishness.’

An Alternate Reality or A Spark of Imagination?

Finally they will meet and the story becomes more surreal, at this point I thought, this is actually going to be revealed as science fiction, there is probably an alternative reality going on here – isn’t there? Because it’s starting to get kind of frustrating almost boring; but clever yes, the writing is polished, it’s relatively easy to read, but for this reader, there is nothing meaningful or all that intriguing about it, I feel the edge of disappointment ahead of me, as there are so few pages left to read. I start theorising and make up my own story about what is going on (I won’t bore you with that).

As the man says himself articulating both his conundrum and my own :

‘So I understand the architecture of the whole thing, the grandeur and ambition of the entire construct. But not the motive behind it. What is it all about? What does it hope to achieve? Is it some noble enterprise – as I hope it is – or something else entirely? Something squalid and rotten to the core.’

Scattered throughout the text are occasional sentences that hint at Nealon’s understanding, words that come from his ‘now’ wherever that is.

It took him a long time to recognise it as chaos and he wonders now how he could have mistaken it as anything else.

We have learned that in prison there was a complete lack of mind-sharpening engagement that threatened to turn in on itself and close him down, however nothing about the character thus far indicates his capability. He is a loner, just as his name indicates, Nealon – a.l.o.n.e with a capital N.

Curiosity Can Kill the Cat

Ultimately, despite his better judgement, out of curiosity or nothing better to do, or perhaps he really is interested in finding out where his wife and child are, he is lured into meeting the man, and while focusing on not really saying anything, he may have talked himself into a trap.

As he travels from the West of Ireland towards the city, he becomes aware of some kind of threat looming over the country.

On the edge of insight, when it comes it may be too late. This constant feeling that he is about to realise something drives the novel forward and creates a sort of tension.

In a way, it reminded of the book I just read Margarita Garcia Robayo’s The Delivery, she uses a similar introspective technique to keep the reader from knowing exactly what is going on, however throughout the course of novel, there are many more morsels of humanity, she too is a loner, but life and love push their way in on her – you can’t escape the community.

The author who describes the novel as ‘part metaphysical thriller, part roman noir’ did ask himself the question and was aware he may alienate some readers, as he says in an interview with the Irish Times.

Would it be possible to write a book of which it would be impossible to speak, where I don’t know what happens, and how to make that artistically credible and skilful without it coming across as clueless, as an authorial failure?

Why Did I Read This?

I chose to read this book because of all the good reviews of Solar Bones, which I will still read, and also because Mike McCormack was picked up by Tramp Press, one of my favourite Irish publishers, who also publish my top two Irish authors, Sara Baume and Doireann Ni Ghriofa.

Author, Lisa McInerney’s blurb on the back cover was closest to my reading experience, when she says:

‘A darkly marvellous novel: at once intimate, domestic, and poignant, then speculative and hard-boiled and wild’

Mike McCormack, Author

Mike McCormack’s previous work includes Getting it in the Head (1995), Crowe’s Requiem (1998), Notes from a Coma (2005), which was shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Year Award, and Forensic Songs (2012).

In 1996 he was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and in 2007 he was awarded a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship. Solar Bones (Tramp Press, 2016) won the Goldsmiths Prize, the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Award for Best Novel and Best Book, and the Dublin International Literary Award (previously known as the IMPAC), and was nominated for the Booker Prize.

Mike McCormack lives in Galway with his family.

October 25, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

The Delivery by Margarita Garcia Robayo tr. Megan McDowell

The Delivery was next up to read from my 2023 Charco Press bundle and was published on 24 October. This year’s books have been so great, I couldn’t wait to get to this one. I haven’t read her previous translated book Fish Soup, but I had heard good things about it too.

Charco Press and Latin American Fiction On a Roll

One of the earlier Charco novellas I read this year, The Remains (see my review) by Mexican author Margo Glantz (translated by Ellen Jones) just made the longlist of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2023. In the same week Two Sherpas (see my review) by Sebastian Martinez Daniell translated by Jennifer Croft was longlisted for the 2024 ALA Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Ana Paula Maia’s Of Cattle And Men, translated from the Portuguese by Zoë Perry made the 2023 Cercador Prize Finalists ( a bookseller-led prize for literature in translation).

Warning: Don’t Ignore Your Packages – The Review

A young, unapologetically self-absorbed woman lives alone, away from her family. Though loathe to form attachments, she is hyper observant of all that goes on around her; the neighbour into whose apartment she sees, the doorman sweeping below, the mother with her young son, the unreliable babysitter.

A large package arrives from her sister who told her via one of their infrequent video-calls, that she was leaving with her family on a cruise. The sisters have a complicated relationship, one she ponders.

When she notices my silence she goes quiet and sighs. I guess she, too, gets fed up with the weight of incomprehension. I guess that on top of seeming like a sister who is detached, dejected and discourteous, I also come off as an arrogant person. Kinship isn’t enough for her, either, of course it isn’t. In cases like ours, getting along isn’t a question of magic or chemistry or affinity, but of tenacity, toughness and torturous toiling.

The package, the size of a large crate stays in the hallway for two days until neighbours complain, knock on the door and push it into her seventh floor apartment. She continues to ignore it.

It’s noon; my sister must be aboard her cruise ship by now. I can just see her gazing excitedly at the array of interactive screens showing maps of the ship marked with little flags: ‘…over twenty stations of international food.’
I wonder: When my sister isn’t there, who takes care of my mother?

Farming Cows Personality Animals The Delivery On Writing — Photo by Flickr on Pexels.com

Working from home as a freelance copy writer, she meets her boss once a week. Currently working on a piece about a cow, while procrastinating over completing a grant for a writer’s residency in Holland. Here she questions whether her choice to be a writer is another act of avoidance.

And although writing is something I have done every day for years now, I again get the feeling that this thing I call ‘my job’ is nothing but another avoidance strategy. Compared to all other professions, writing is like the effort a tick makes to feed and survive among predators. I climb onto a branch, wait a long time until the herd passes, calculate the least risky distance to drop onto a fluffy mass and drink a minuscule ration of blood, which will allow me to maintain this limited but sufficient life.

Her attempts to avoid human contact threaten to overwhelm her, as increasingly she is drawn in to life around her and made to be present.

I felt I had the right to not be a trustworthy person. It was good to make that clear, even if it worked against my professional future; from now on you should be aware that assigning me a job includes the possibility that I’ll quit halfway through. That was more or less how I put it. It was the closest I would come in this business to an outburst of dignity.

The novel follows a week or so in her life and the people (and a cat) with whom she interacts, both willingly and unwillingly. Encounters that awaken memories, that cause her to explore her own responses and thoughts on them all, she avoids closeness but each situation contributes to the growing relationships between them all.

Her efforts to keep a distance stall, fail and slowly make her see her own role in running from herself, the inclination to self-sabotage.

Sometimes I feel like two people live inside me, and one of those people (the good one) keeps the other in check, but sometimes she gets tired and lowers her guard and then the other (evil) one stealthily emerges, with a mad desire to wound just for the sake of it.

It’s both introspective and funny, as her avoidance and inattention to things leads to consequences that surprise her and because we see everything from her perspective, we too have a somewhat clouded view of reality.

Her philosophical considerations and snippets of conversation give pause for thought. It’s entertaining in a surreal yet banal way, knowing that life’s reality is likely to burst the bubble she lives in eventually, yet it doesn’t stop her from continuing to ponder and escape from it.

How quickly the shell of a routine is shattered.
Any routine, however solid it may be, is obliterated by the unexpected.

Margarita García Robayo, Author

Margarita García Robayo was born in 1980 in Cartagena, Colombia, and now lives in Buenos Aires where she teaches creative writing and works as a journalist and scriptwriter.

She is the author of several novels, including Hasta que pase un huracán (Waiting for a Hurricane) and Educación Sexual (Sexual Education, both included in Fish Soup), Holiday Heart, and Lo que no aprendí (The Things I have Not Learnt). She is also the author of a book of autobiographical essays Primera Persona (First Person, forthcoming with Charco Press) and several collections of short stories, including Worse Things, which obtained the prestigious Casa de las Américas Prize in 2014 (also included in Fish Soup).

Her books have been published widely and praised in Latin America and Spain and have been translated into several languages, including Chinese, Hebrew, French, Danish and Turkish. The Delivery is her third book to appear in English after the very successful Fish Soup (selected by the TLS as one of the best fiction titles of 2018) and Holiday Heart (Winner of the English PEN Award).

October 24, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Warwick Prize for Women in Translation longlist 2023

16 titles have been longlisted for the seventh annual award of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.

The prize was established by the University of Warwick in 2017 to address the gender imbalance in translated literature and to increase the number of international women’s voices accessible to a British and Irish readership.

This year, there were 153 nominations representing 32 languages. The longlist spans 11 languages and for the first time includes a title translated from Vietnamese. Arabic, Chinese, Hungarian and Italian language books are represented more than once.

A Long Line of Classics by Women Coming into Translation

Knowing how few women authors have been translated into English until now, only confirms how many great books sitting waiting to be discovered and rediscovered, as the demand to read literature from elsewhere increases exponentially. Yes, we have been and are, starved for other voices, for universal connections, stories imagined and conceived in other languages.

I have read two from the list, both excellent novels that I recommend, click on the titles to read my earlier reviews. Forbidden Notebook by Italian-Cuban author Alba de Cespédes translated by Ann Goldstein is a rediscovered classic from 1952, a highly compelling read about a woman’s self discovery through the transgressive act (find out why) of writing in a notebook.

The Remains by Mexican author Margo Glantz translated from Spanish by Ellen Jones is an extraordinary novella of a woman who returns for the funeral of her ex-husband and relives aspects of their relationship while navigating the audience of mourners, uncertain to whom they should pass on their condolences.

The judges said of the 2023 longlist:

“From an exceptionally rich field of submissions we have chosen 16 remarkable books in first-rate translations. All of them deserve to find delighted readers everywhere.

Our contemporary picks span a dazzling rainbow of genres, cultures and voices – from an Egyptian graphic novel to a Vietnamese vision of migrant life in France; a Chinese fable of an alternative Hong Kong to a comic-epic Swedish novel of ideas; a Mexican musical elegy to a Yemeni documentary testament to the human costs of war.

But this year’s long list also honours a formidable cache of rediscovered gems from major 20th-century women writers: classic works given new life by the translator’s time-defying art.”

The full list of longlisted titles, in alphabetical order, with a summaries, is as follows:

Dorthe Nors, A Line in the World – A Year on the North Sea Coast (nonfiction) translated from Danish by Caroline Waight (Pushkin Press) – a year travelling along the North Sea coast—from the northern tip of Denmark to the Frisian Islands.

In 14 essays, it traces the history, geography, and culture of the places she visits while reflecting on her childhood and her family and ancestors’ ties to the region. She writes of the ritual burning of witch effigies on Midsummer’s Eve; the environmental activist who opposed a chemical factory in the 1950s; the quiet fishing villages surfers transformed into an area known as Cold Hawaii in the 1970s. She connects wind turbines to Viking ships, 13th century church frescoes to her mother’s unrealised dreams. She describes strong waves, sand drifts, storm surges, shipwrecks; nature asserting its power over human attempts to ignore or control it.

Lalla Romano, A Silence Shared (historical fiction, WWII) translated from Italian by Brian Robert Moore (Pushkin Press) – Italian classic about the mysterious relationships between two partisan couples in German-occupied Italy in the wintry mountains of Piemonte.

Sheltering from the war in a provincial town outside of Turin, Giulia and her husband Stefano feel an instant affinity with Ada and Paolo: she a spontaneous, vibrant young woman, he a sickly intellectual, a teacher and partisan in hiding. As the Germans occupy Italy, a subtle dance of attractions between the couples begins, intensified by their shared isolation and the hum of threat over a long, hard winter.

Amanda Svensson, A System So Magnificent It Is Blinding (literary fiction) translated from Swedish by Nichola Smalley (Scribe UK) – A joyful family saga about free will, forgiveness, and connectedness that asks if we are free to create our own destinies or are just part of a system beyond our control?

As a set of triplets is born, their father chooses to reveal his affair. Pandemonium ensues. Two decades later, Sebastian has joined a mysterious organisation, the London Institute of Cognitive Science, where he meets Laura, a patient whose inability to see the world in three dimensions intrigues him. Meanwhile, Clara has travelled to Easter Island to join a cult, and the third triplet, Matilda, is in Sweden, trying to escape the colour blue.

An event forces the triplets to reunite. Their mother calls with news: their father has gone missing and she has something to tell them, a twenty-five-year secret that will change all their lives.

Krisztina Tóth, Barcode (short stories/literary fiction) translated from Hungarian by Peter Sherwood (Jantar) – a first substantial work in prose after 4 volumes of verse, consists of 15 short stories tied together by a poetic sensibility.

Whether about childhood acquaintances, school camps, of love or deceit, all take place against the backdrop of Hungary’s socialist era in its declining years. The stories are strung together, like jewels in a necklace, along metaphorical ‘lines‘, which nearly all include the word for ‘line, bar‘. The losses, disappointments, and tragedies great and small offer nuanced ‘mirrorings’ of the female soul and linger long in the memory.

Thuận, Chinatown (literary fiction) translated from Vietnamese by Nguyễn An Lý (Tilted Axis) – An exquisite and intense journey through the labyrinths of Hanoi, Leningrad, and Paris via dreams, memory, and loss

An abandoned package is discovered in the Paris Metro: local workers suspect it’s a terrorist bomb. A Vietnamese woman sitting nearby, her son asleep on her shoulder, waits and begins to reflect on her life, from her childhood in communist Hanoi, to studying in Leningrad during the Gorbachev period, to the Parisian suburbs where she now teaches English. Through it all runs her passion for Thuy, the father of her son, a writer from Saigon’s Chinatown, who, with the shadow of the China-Vietnam border war falling between them, she has not seen for 11 years.

Through her breathless, vertiginous, and moving monologue alongside the train tracks, the narrator attempts to face the past and exorcize the passion that haunts her.

Zhang Yueran, Cocoon (Historical Fiction) translated from Chinese by Jeremy Tiang (World Editions) – a unique voice from a generation of important young writers from China, shedding a different light on the country’s recent past – on the unshakable power of friendship and the existence of hope

Cheng Gong and Li Jiaqi go way back. Both hailing from dysfunctional families, they grew up together in a Chinese provincial capital in the 1980s. Now, many years later, the childhood friends reunite and discover how much they still have in common. Both have always been determined to follow the tracks of their grandparents’ generation to the heart of a mystery that perhaps should have stayed buried. What exactly happened during that rainy night in 1967, in the abandoned water tower?

Alba de Céspedes, Forbidden Notebook (literary fiction) translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein (Pushkin Press) – a classic domestic novel that centres the inner life of a dissatisfied housewife living in postwar Rome. Exquisitely crafted, Forbidden Notebook recognises the universality of human aspirations.

Italian feminist writing classic 1940s 1950s

Valeria Cossati never suspected how unhappy she had become with the shabby gentility of her bourgeois life – until she begins to jot down her thoughts and feelings in a little black book she keeps hidden in a closet. This new secret activity leads her to scrutinize herself and her life more closely, and she soon realizes that her individuality is being stifled by her devotion and sense of duty toward her husband, daughter, and son.

As the conflicts between parents and children, husband and wife, and friends and lovers intensify, what goes on behind the Cossatis’ facade of middle-class respectability gradually comes to light, tearing the family’s fragile fabric apart.

Dorothy Tse, Owlish (Science Fiction/Fantasy) translated from Chinese by Natascha Bruce (Fitzcarraldo) – Thrumming with secrets and shape-shifting geographies, this extraordinary debut novel is a boldly inventive exploration of life under repressive conditions.

In the mountainous city of Nevers, there lives a professor of literature called Q. He has a dull marriage and a lacklustre career, but also a scrumptious collection of antique dolls locked away in his cupboard. And soon Q lands his crowning a music box ballerina named Aliss who tantalizingly springs to life. Guided by his mysterious friend Owlish and inspired by an inexplicably familiar painting, Q embarks on an all-consuming love affair with Aliss, oblivious to the sinister forces encroaching on his city and the protests spreading across the university that have left his classrooms all but empty.

Marguerite Duras, The Easy Life (literary fiction) translated from French by Olivia Baes & Emma Ramadan (Bloomsbury) – For the first time in English, a literary icon’s foundational masterpiece about a young woman’s existential breakdown in the deceptively peaceful French countryside.

Francine Veyrenattes, a 25-year-old woman feels like life is passing her by. After witnessing a series of tragedies on her family farm, she alternates between intense grief and staggering boredom as she discovers a curious detachment in herself, an inability to navigate the world as others do. Hoping to be cleansed of whatever ails her, she travels to the coast. But there she finds herself unraveling, uncertain of what is inside her. Lying in the sun with her toes in the sand by day, dissolving in her hotel room by night, she soon reaches the peak of her inner crisis and must grapple with whether and how she can take hold of her own existence.

An extraordinary examination of a young woman’s estrangement from the world, a work of unsettling beauty and insight, a bold, spellbinding journey into the depths of the human heart.

Magda Szabó, The Fawn (literary fiction) translated from Hungarian by Len Rix (Maclehose) – Eszter Encsy, an accomplished actress, ponders her impoverished childhood and path to accomplishment on hearing news of a childhood acquaintance.

A series of internal monologues delve into the depths of the humiliation, isolation, poverty, social and emotional exclusion and despair she experienced, attempting to comprehend her experiences. At first she recalls them with a disturbing calmness and an indifferent detachment, outwardly remaining unperturbed and icy, but soon finds her manner of speaking and her demeanor slowly changing as it becomes more and more difficult for Eszter to choke down the intense feeling of hatred and resentment she has been allowing to ferment for years.

Bianca Bellová, The Lake (Science Fiction/Dystopia) translated from Czech by Alex Zucker (Parthian Books) – a dystopian page-turner, the coming of age of a young hero.

A fishing village at the end of the world. A lake that is drying up and, ominously, pushing out its banks. The men have vodka, the women troubles, the children eczema to scratch. Born into this unforgiving environment, Nami, embarks on a journey with nothing but a bundle of nerves, a coat that was once his grandfather’s and the vague idea to search for his mother, who disappeared from his life at a young age. To uncover this mystery, he must sail across and walk around the lake and finally dive to its bottom. A raw account of life in a devastated land and the harsh, primitive circumstances under which people fight to survive.

Grazia Deledda, The Queen of Darkness (short stories) translated from Italian by Graham Anderson (Dedalus) – The ancient traditions of Sardinia feature heavily in this early collection. The stories collected in The Queen of Darkness, originally published in 1902 shortly after Deledda’s marriage and move to Rome, reflect her transformation from little-known regional writer to an increasingly fêted and successful mainstream author. The two miniature psycho-dramas that open the collection are followed by stories of Sardinian life in the remote hills around her home town of Nuoro. The stark but beautiful countryside is a backdrop to the passions, misadventures and injustices which shape the lives of its rugged but all too human inhabitants.

Margo Glantz, The Remains (literary fiction) translated from Spanish by Ellen Jones (Charco Press) – The way you hold a cello, the way light lands in a Caravaggio, the way the castrati hit notes like no one else could–a lifetime of conversations about art and music and history unfolds for Nora Garcia as she and a crowd of friends and fans send off her recently deceased ex-husband, Juan.

Like any good symphony, there are themes and repetitions and contrapuntal notes. We ping-pong back and forth between Nora’s life with Juan (a renowned pianist and composer, an accomplished raconteur) and the present day, where she sits among familiar things, next to his coffin, breathing in the mix of mildew and lilies that overwhelm this day and her thoughts.

In Glantz’s hands, music and art access our most intimate selves, illustrating and creating our identities, offering us ways to express love, loss and bewilderment when words cannot suffice. As Nora says, “Life is an absurd wound: I think I deserve to be given condolences.”

Hanne Ørstavik, ti amo (literary fiction based on true life) translated from Norwegian by Martin Aitken (And Other Stories) – a harrowing novel, filled with tenderness, grief, love and loneliness.

A woman is in a deep and real, but relatively new relationship with a man from Milan. She has moved there, they have married, and they are close in every way. Then he is diagnosed with cancer. It’s serious, but they try to go about their lives as best they can. But when the doctor tells the woman that her husband has less than a year to live – without telling the husband – death comes between them. She knows it’s coming, but he doesn’t – and he doesn’t seem to want to know. Delving into the complex emotions of bereavement, it asks how and for whom we can live, when the one we love best is about to die.

Bushra al-Maqtari, What Have You Left Behind? (nonfiction) translated from Arabic by Sawad Hussain (Fitzcarraldo) – powerfully drawn together civilian accounts of the Yemeni civil war that serves as a vital reminder of the scale of the human tragedy behind the headlines.

In 2015, a year after it started, Bushra al-Maqtari decided to document the suffering of civilians in the Yemeni civil war, which has killed over 200,000 people according to the UN. Inspired by the work of Svetlana Alexievich, she spent 2 years visiting different parts of the country, putting her life at risk by speaking with her compatriots, and gathered over 400 testimonies, a selection of which appear here.

Purposefully alternating between accounts from the victims of the Houthi militia and those of the Saudi-led coalition, al-Maqtari highlights the disillusionment and anguish felt by civilians trapped in a war outside of their own making. As difficult to read as it is to put down, this unvarnished chronicle of the conflict in Yemen serves as a vital reminder of the scale of the human tragedy behind the headlines, and offers a searing condemnation of the international community’s complicity in the war’s continuation.

Deena Mohamed, Your Wish Is My Command (graphic novel) translated from Arabic by Deena Mohamed (Granta) – Shubeik Lubeik – a fairytale rhyme meaning ‘Your Wish is My Command’ is the story of three characters navigating a world where wishes are literally for sale; mired in bureaucracy and the familiar prejudices of our world, the more expensive the wish, the more powerful and more likely to work as intended. The novel tell the story of three first class wishes used by Aziza, Nour, and Shokry, each grappling with the challenge inherent in trying to make your most deeply held desire come true.

Deena’s mix of calligraphy and contemporary styles, brings to life a vibrant Cairo neighborhood, and cast of characters whose struggles and triumphs are deeply resonant. Shubeik Lubeik heralds the arrival of a significant new talent and a brave, literary, political, and feminist voice via the graphic novel.

The shortlist for the prize will be published in early November. The winner will be announced in London on Thursday 23 November.

October 7, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

These Days by Lucy Caldwell

These Days is set over a period of a week in the life of one family with a young son and two daughters, both of whom are at significant turning points in their relationships, just as the Belfast Blitz is about to destroy much of their city.

The precariousness of life pushes both girls out of their everyday lives into confronting the very depths of who they are and what they want from life and whether or not they are prepared to conform or compromise.

The tension of living with blacked out windows, with their father being an on-call doctor, who must rush to the hospital to deal with the casualties and Emma, a First Aid volunteer also called into the throng of destruction, heightens the situations both girls are in, creating a unique sense of urgency, and yet…

Audrey’s boyfriend, an only son, is also a doctor and the thought of possibly losing her hastens his own decisions, which Audrey responds to in that same atmosphere of heightened tension. But when she returns to work at the tax office and begins to realise how that decision is likely to change her life, she begins to question how much she really wants it. IS what she feels enough?

…She thinks of the Yeats poem: this tumult in the clouds…in balance with this life, this death…and she thinks how strange, how strange it is, the sides on which we find ourselves, the things we, really, have no choice or say in, the ways we blindly go through a life in which the grooves are already set.

Emma spends less time thinking about her decisions and future life, she is more impulsive, reckless even. Just as she is coming to the realisation of how she wants to love and live, that vision of a future life disappears right in front of her. In a cruel twist of fate, she will experience something that her own mother has long lived with, intertwined feelings of love and grief, of love at its inception, turned in an instant to memory, rather than be allowed to flourish.

Their mother too conceals thoughts of a life not quite embarked on, one cut short that re-enters her imagination now and then, that has caused her to stop believing.

But the times we live through, she thinks, as they turn onto Sydenham Avenue, have bred in us all a grim, stoical sort of endurance. After the Great War, and the civil war, and the shattering Troubles of the twenties, those hundreds of people dead…After the unemployment and the riots of the thirties, the sectarian pogroms, the chaos, the roads blockaded, the burning, only half, a quarter of a mile away…You’re not surprised by anything anymore: you shake your head and press your lips and get on with whatever else there is to be doing, make the most of things, make of what you have – what you’re fortunate, and yes, grateful to have – the best you can.

Her latent grief, a feeling that arises then recedes, removes some of the shock of what is happening around them.

It hasn’t surprised her, over the years, she sometimes secretly thinks, that the city around her should periodically erupt into barricades and flames, doesn’t surprise her that it should be obliterated now from above, because that, sometimes, is how a cold small part of her feels – just take it, take all of it, I want none of it, none of this, because none of it – how can it? – none of it matters.

As these women go about these terrible, historical days, encountering both a physical and emotional toll, they will all come to realise what is most important to them, it will mark them and change them.

It will never go away, she wants to say then. None of it does – the real or the imagined. Once you have seen those images, whether with your eyes or or in your mind’s eye, they are etched there – seared into the body. They are there forever and you can’t pretend otherwise. When they rise up, you need to try not to fight them, try not to push them away. You must just focus on the smallest, most incidental thing you can. You must make yourself breathe, and feel the current of breath through your body.

Meticulously researched, the days of the Belfast Blitz and the consequences of families, are brought to life in the pages of this novel, the lost and homeless, the children evacuated, the trauma these days will instill in the genes of future generations, yet unborn. Those familiar with the streets and surrounds of Belfast will imagine it all the more evocatively.

“My grandma didn’t like to talk about the Belfast Blitz: ‘Ach, sure, what do you want to know about all that for?’ Towards the end of her life, wracked with vascular dementia, all questions became traps, and then she couldn’t talk at all. I still wonder, even after years of researching it, what her stories might have been.” Lucy Caldwell

The Belfast Blitz

Due to its capacity for shipbuilding and other manufacturing that supported the Allied war effort, Belfast was considered a strategic target by the German Luftwaffe. It was also the most undefended city in Europe.

That threat became a reality in April and May 1941, with four separate attacks, causing a high number of casualties and destruction of the city and residential areas.

On Easter Tuesday, 15 April 1941, 200 Luftwaffe bombers attacked military and manufacturing targets in the city. Some 900 people died as a result of the bombing and 1,500 were injured. 220,000 people fled from the city.

In total over 1,300 houses were demolished, some 5,000 badly damaged, nearly 30,000 slightly damaged while 20,000 required “first aid repairs”.

Lucy Caldwell, Author

Born in Belfast in 1981, Lucy Caldwell is the award-winning author of four novels, several stage plays and radio dramas, and two collections of short stories: Multitudes (2016) and Intimacies (2021).

These Days (2022) won the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

August 2, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

The Booker Prize Longlist 2023

The Booker Prize longlist has been announced, featuring books from four continents, representing seven countries – Scotland, England, Ireland, Canada, America, Nigeria and Malaysia and includes four Irish writers plus four debut novelists.

You can read more about the history of the prize here.

The Judges

Novelist Esi Edugyan, twice-shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is the chair of the 2023 judging panel. She is joined by actor, writer and director Adjoa Andoh; poet, lecturer, editor and critic Mary Jean Chan; Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Shakespeare specialist James Shapiro; and actor and writer Robert Webb.

The judges are looking for their perceived best sustained work of long-form fiction written in English, selected from entries published in the UK and Ireland between October 1, 2022 and September 30, 2023.

The Booker Dozen

The longlist of 13 books was announced on August 1, 2023 ; the shortlist of six books will follow on September 21 and the winner of the £50,000 prize will be announced on November 26, 2023.

The 13 longlisted books explore universal and topical themes: from deeply moving personal dramas to tragi-comic family sagas; from the effects of climate change to the oppression of minorities; from scientific breakthroughs to competitive sport.

The list includes:

10 writers longlisted for the first time, including four debut novelists
Three writers with seven previous nominations between them
Writers from seven countries across four continents
Four Irish writers, making up a third of the longlist for the first time
A novel featuring a neurodiverse protagonist, written from personal experience
‘All 13 novels cast new light on what it means to exist in our time, and they do so in original and thrilling ways,’ according to Esi Edugyan, Chair of the judges

The House of Doors – by Tan Twan Eng

Based on real events, Tan Twan Eng’s masterful novel of public morality and private truth examines love and betrayal under the shadow of Empire

It is 1921 and at Cassowary House in the Straits Settlements of Penang, Robert Hamlyn is a well-to-do lawyer, his steely wife Lesley a society hostess. Their lives are invigorated when Willie, an old friend of Robert’s, comes to stay.  

Willie Somerset Maugham is one of the greatest writers of his day. But he is beleaguered by an unhappy marriage, ill-health and business interests that have gone badly awry. He is also struggling to write. The more Lesley’s friendship with Willie grows, the more clearly she see him as he is – a man who has no choice but to mask his true self. 

As Willie prepares to face his demons, Lesley confides secrets of her own, including her connection to the case of an Englishwoman charged with murder in the Kuala Lumpur courts – a tragedy drawn from fact, and worthy of fiction. 

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (Ireland)

A patch of ice on the road, a casual favour to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil – can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life?

Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under – but rather than face the music, he’s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker. His exasperated wife Imelda is selling off her jewellery on eBay while half-heartedly dodging the attentions of fast-talking cattle farmer Big Mike.

Meanwhile, teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way to her final exams. And 12-year-old PJ, in debt to local sociopath ‘Ears’ Moran, is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away.

Yes, in Paul Murray’s brilliant tragicomic saga, the Barnes family is definitely in trouble. So where did it all go wrong? And if the story has already been written – is there still time to find a happy ending? 

Western Lane by Chetna Maroo (Kenya/London)

Chetna Maroo’s tender and moving debut novel about grief, sisterhood, a teenage girl’s struggle to transcend herself – and squash

Eleven-year-old Gopi has been playing squash since she was old enough to hold a racket. When her mother dies, her father enlists her in a quietly brutal training regimen, and the game becomes her world.

Slowly, she grows apart from her sisters. Her life is reduced to the sport, guided by its rhythms: the serve, the volley, the drive, the shot and its echo. But on the court, she is not alone. She is with her pa. She is with Ged, a 13-year-old boy with his own formidable talent. She is with the players who have come before her. She is in awe. 

Skilfully deploying the sport of squash as both context and metaphor, Western Lane is a deeply evocative debut about a family grappling with grief, conveyed through crystalline language which reverberates like the sound “of a ball hit clean and hard…with a close echo”

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes (Scotland)

Exploring the natural world with wonder and reverence, this compassionate, deeply inquisitive epic reaches outward to confront the great questions of existence, while looking inward to illuminate the human heart

Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, travelling the globe to study ancient organisms.

When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic Ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of Earth’s first life forms. What she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings, and leaves her facing an impossible choice: to remain with her family, or to embark on a journey across the breadth of the cosmos. 

In this strange and wonderful world, every outward journey – whether to space or the depths of the ocean – is an inward one, as Leigh seeks to move beyond her troubled childhood. In Ascension is a Solaris for the climate-change age.

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch (Ireland)

A mother faces a terrible choice, in Paul Lynch’s exhilarating, propulsive and confrontational portrait of a society on the brink

On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her doorstep. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police want to speak with her husband.

Things are falling apart. Ireland is in the grip of a government that is taking a turn towards tyranny. And as the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a collapsing society – assailed by unpredictable forces beyond her control and forced to do whatever it takes to keep her family together.

Paul Lynch’s harrowing and dystopian Prophet Song vividly renders a mother’s determination to protect her family as Ireland’s liberal democracy slides inexorably and terrifyingly into totalitarianism. Readers will find it timely and unforgettable. It’s a remarkable accomplishment for a novelist to capture the social and political anxieties of our moment so compellingly.

All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow (England)

Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow’s lyrical and poignant debut novel offers a deft exploration of motherhood, vulnerability and the complexity of human relationships

Sunday Forrester does things more carefully than most people. On quiet days, she must eat only white foods. Her etiquette handbook guides her through confusing social situations, and to escape, she turns to her treasury of Sicilian folklore. The one thing very much out of her control is Dolly – her clever, headstrong daughter, now on the cusp of leaving home. 

Into this carefully ordered world step Vita and Rollo, a charming couple who move in next door.

Written from the perspective of an autistic mother, All the Little Bird-Hearts is a poetic debut which masterfully intertwines themes of familial love, friendship, class, prejudice and trauma with psychological acuity and wit.

Pearl by Siân Hughes (England)

Siân Hughes contemplates both the power and the fragility of the human mind in her haunting debut novel, which was inspired by the medieval poem of the same name

Marianne is eight years old when her mother goes missing. Left behind with her baby brother and grieving father in a ramshackle house on the edge of a small village, she clings to the fragmented memories of her mother’s love; the smell of fresh herbs, the games they played, and the songs and stories of her childhood. 

As time passes, Marianne struggles to adjust, fixated on her mother’s disappearance and the secrets she’s sure her father is keeping from her. Discovering a medieval poem called Pearl – and trusting in its promise of consolation – Marianne sets out to make a visual illustration of it, a task that she returns to over and over but somehow never manages to complete. 

Tormented by an unmarked gravestone in an abandoned chapel and the tidal pull of the river, her childhood home begins to crumble as the past leads her down a path of self-destruction. But can art heal Marianne? And will her own future as a mother help her find peace?

Pearl, an exceptional debut novel, is both a mystery story and a meditation on grief, abandonment and consolation, evoking the profundities of the haunting medieval poem. The degree of difficulty in writing a book of this sort – at once quiet and hugely ambitious – is very high. It’s a book that will be passed from hand to hand for a long time to come.

This Other Eden by Paul Harding (USA)

Full of lyricism and power, Paul Harding’s spellbinding novel celebrates the hopes, dreams and resilience of those deemed not to fit in a world brutally intolerant of difference

Inspired by historical events, This Other Eden tells the story of Apple Island: an enclave off the coast of the United States where castaways – in flight from society and its judgment – have landed and built a home. 

In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey arrives on the island with his Irish wife, Patience, to make a life together there. More than a century later, the Honeys’ descendants remain, alongside an eccentric, diverse band of neighbours.

Then comes the intrusion of ‘civilization’: officials determine to ‘cleanse’ the island. A missionary schoolteacher selects one light-skinned boy to save. The rest will succumb to the authorities’ institutions – or cast themselves on the waters in a new Noah’s Ark…

Based on a relatively unknown true story, Paul Harding’s heartbreakingly beautiful novel transports us to a unique island community scrabbling a living. The panel were moved by the delicate symphony of language, land and narrative that Harding brings to bear on the story of the islanders.

How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney (Ireland) (Read my review here)

With tenderness and verve, Elaine Feeney tells the story of how one boy on a unique mission transforms the lives of his teachers, and brings together a community

Jamie O’Neill loves the colour red. He also loves tall trees, patterns, rain that comes with wind, the curvature of many objects, books with dust jackets, cats, rivers and Edgar Allan Poe.

At the age of 13, there are two things he especially wants in life: to build a Perpetual Motion Machine, and to connect with his mother Noelle, who died when he was born. In his mind, these things are intimately linked.

And at his new school, where all else is disorientating and overwhelming, he finds two people who might just be able to help him. 

The interweaving stories of Jamie, a teenage boy trying to make sense of the world, and Tess, a teacher at his school, make up this humorous and insightful novel about family and the need for connection. Feeney has written an absorbing coming-of-age story which also explores the restrictions of class and education in a small community. A complex and genuinely moving novel.

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery (USA)

An exhilarating novel-in-stories that pulses with style, heart and barbed humour, while unravelling what it means to carve out an existence between cultures, homes and pay checks

In 1979, as political violence consumes their native Kingston, Topper and Sanya flee to Miami. But they soon learn that the welcome in America will be far from warm.   

Trelawny, their youngest son, comes of age in a society that regards him with suspicion and confusion. Their eldest son Delano’s longing for a better future for his own children is equalled only by his recklessness in trying to secure it. 

As both brothers navigate the obstacles littered in their path – an unreliable father, racism, a financial crisis and Hurricane Andrew – they find themselves pitted against one another. Will their rivalry be the thing that finally tears their family apart?

An astonishingly assured debut novel, lauded by the panel for its clarity, variety and fizzing prose. As the stories move back and forth through geography and time, we are confronted by the immigrants’ eternal questions: who am I now and where do I belong?

Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein (Canada/Scotland)

In her accomplished and unsettling second novel, Sarah Bernstein explores themes of prejudice, abuse and guilt through the eyes of a singularly unreliable narrator

A woman moves from the place of her birth to a ‘remote northern country’ to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has just left him. Soon after she arrives, a series of unfortunate events occurs: collective bovine hysteria; the death of a ewe and her nearly-born lamb; a local dog’s phantom pregnancy; a potato blight.

She notices that the community’s suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed particularly in her case. She feels their hostility growing, pressing at the edges of her brother’s property. Inside the house, although she tends to her brother and his home with the utmost care and attention, he too begins to fall ill… 

Study for Obedience is an absurdist, darkly funny novel about the rise of xenophobia, as seen through the eyes of a stranger in an unnamed town – or is it? Bernstein’s urgent, crystalline prose upsets all our expectations, and what transpires is a meditation on survival itself.

Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry (Ireland) (Read my review here)

In his beautiful, haunting novel, in which nothing is quite what it seems, Sebastian Barry explores what we live through, what we live with, and what may survive of us

Recently retired policeman Tom Kettle is settling into the quiet of his new home, a lean-to annexed to a Victorian Castle overlooking the Irish Sea. For months he has barely seen a soul, catching only glimpses of his eccentric landlord and a nervous young mother who has moved in next door.

Occasionally, fond memories of the past return – of his family, his beloved wife June and their two children. But when two former colleagues turn up at his door with questions about a decades-old case, one which Tom never quite came to terms with, he finds himself pulled into the darkest currents of his past. 

A Spell of Good Things by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ (Nigeria/Norwich)

A dazzling story of modern Nigeria and two families caught in the riptides of wealth, power, romantic obsession and political corruption

Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’s breathtaking novel shines a light on the haves and have-nots of Nigeria, and the shared humanity that lives in between. 

Eniola is tall for his age, a boy who looks like a man. His father has lost his job, so Eniola spends his days running errands, collecting newspapers and begging – dreaming of a big future.  Wuraola is a golden girl, the perfect child of a wealthy family, and now an exhausted young doctor in her first year of practice. But when sudden violence shatters a family party, Wuraola and Eniola’s lives become inextricably intertwined…

A Spell of Good Things is an examination of class and desire in modern-day Nigeria. While Eniola’s poverty prevents him from getting the education he desperately wants, Wuraola finds that wealth is no barrier against life’s harsher realities. A powerful, staggering read.

* * * * * * * * * *

Have you read any of these novels, or are you tempted by any? A great many unknown authors here, which is exciting, it will be interesting to see how their stories are received by readers.

I haven’t read any of the books mentioned and I have only read two of the nominated authors, Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’s Stay With Me which I really enjoyed and Tan Twan Eng’s The Gift of Rain and The Garden of Evening Mists.

I’m always interested in new Irish fiction, so I’ll be taking a good look at those titles and plan to read at the very least, Old God’s Time and How To Build A Boat.

July 20, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro tr. Frances Riddle

With A Little Luck now available in English, I’m catching up by reading the word of mouth sensation Elena Knows, which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2022 and won the Premio Pepe Carvalho Prize for crime fiction in 2019. According to the newspaper La Nación, Claudia Piñeiro is the third most translated Argentinean author, after Borges and Cortázar.

Claudia Piñeiro does seem like an interesting author to watch, taking the convention crime fiction genre and giving it a shake up by focusing on social issues and ethical questions, in particular related to the way women’s bodies have been and are used and abused.

Also reading this for #20booksofsummer23 and getting a head start on August’s #WITMonth, reading women in translation, because that’s my favourite corner of the reading world to be looking for literary gems!

What Does Elena Know That No One Else Seems to?

Elena has just learned her daughter Rita is dead. That it occurred on the same afternoon she booked Elena into her boyfriend’s mother’s salon for “the works”.

It was a rainy afternoon and this is the main reason Elena knows there was foul play. Because her daughter was afraid of lightning and because a mother just knows.

No one knows as much about her daughter as she does, because she’s her mother, or was her mother. Motherhood, Elena thinks, comes with certain things, a mother knows her child, a mother knows, a mother loves.That’s what they say, that’s how it is.

A Rigid Point of View

We see everything from her ‘eyes cast downward’ viewpoint, as she heads out one day to get answers from someone she hasn’t seen in 20 years.

Elena’s body is debilitated by Parkinson’s, so in between pills, she can move more easily.

Rita was there when he first explained the disease. Rita, who’s now dead. He told them that Parkinson’s was degradation of the cells of the nervous system. And both she and her daughter disliked that word. Degradation.And Dr Benegas must’ve noticed, because he quickly tried to explain. And he said, an illness of the central nervous system that degrades, or mutates, or changes, or modifies the nerve cells in such a way that they stop producing dopamine. And then Elena learned that when her brain orders her feet to move, for example, the order only reaches her feet if the dopamine takes it there. Like a messenger, she thought that day. So Parkinson’s is Herself and dopamine is the messenger.

The novel is told over the course of one day, in three sections: Morning (second pill), Afternoon (third pill) and Evening (fourth pill). The absence of the first pill in the narrative is a reminder as to how dependent she is on the medication and how controlling it is over her every movement, how it restricts her freedom, her vision, her ability to do anything. She is enslaved to those pills and that body.

As the pill begins to wear off, the risk of her becoming stuck increases, as her body becomes less manageable, there is no room for error or miscalculated judgement, if she is to make the journey she has planned. There are moments when she has to wait for the pill to take effect, these must be carefully timed.

Proprietary Attitudes Over Humans

She is off to get help in her attempt to investigate her daughter’s death, thinking she can use the ‘able body’ of someone she sets out on this day to meet. There is a reason why she believes that this person will help her, where no other can, and she will go to all kinds of lengths, despite the debilitating obstacles of her own body, in order to have an audience with them.

She won’t be able to do it by herself because she doesn’t have a body. Not now that the dethroned king and Herself are in charge. Even if she uses all the tricks in the book, she won’t be able to uncover the truth unless she recruits another body to help her. A different body that can act in her place. That can investigate, ask questions, walk, look directly into people’s eyes. A body that will obey Elena’s orders.

The novel explores this idea of how people impose or claim agency over another’s body and what they sentence them to, in so doing; or how they believe they “know” another just because they gave birth to or mothered them, or that God gave them some kind of right to be so knowing.

Elena’s body is in the end stages, but in her mind, she is still coming-of-age.

Claudia Piñeiro, Author

Claudia Piñeiro is best known for her crime novels, which are bestsellers in Argentina, Latin America and around the world. Four of her novels have been adapted and made into films.

As an author and scriptwriter for television, Piñeiro has already won numerous national and international prizes, among them the renowned German LiBeraturpreis for Elena Knows and the prestigious Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize for Las grietas de Jara (A Crack in the Wall).

Her 8 episode series The Kingdom (2021) currently showing on Netflix, sparked controversy in 2021 for its portrayal of the Evangelical church in Argentina.

More recently, Piñeiro has become a very active figure in the fight for the legalisation of abortion in Argentina and for the legal recognition of writers as workers. Her fiction stems from the detective novel but has recently turned increasingly political, taking a broader, more critical gaze at corruption, injustice, community divisions and other dysfunctions of contemporary society.

Boulder by Eva Baltasar tr. Julia Sanches

Boulder is another portrait of a woman, the second of a triptych.

The narrator of Permafrost never quite cut the strings of family, choosing the path(s) of least resistance, while lamenting not having made more independent choices in her formative years.

Assured Prose Who Art in Metaphor

If the narrator of Permafrost is somewhat unsure, that of Boulder is more certain. The prose is assured, the narrative has pace, the protagonist moves towards what suits her, to freedom – until things change.

The avid descriptions and bold metaphors have me rereading and highlighting passages, like the creation of foam as a wave crashes on itself, they are as natural to the text as the paragraphs within which they roll.

An itinerant cook, she moves from place to place, island to ship, working in the kitchen. Life on the cargo ship suits her, she’s at home in turbulent seas, around those that neither desire nor reject her, a place where there was no need to pretend life had a structure. Rootless, drifting and free.

Freedom In Its Many Forms

I think I’ve discovered what happiness is: whistling the moment you wake up, not getting in anyone’s way, owing no explanations, and falling into bed at daybreak, body addled from exhaustion, and mind free of every last trace of bitterness and dust.

The boat sails up and down the coast of Chile, she rarely disembarks, the only temptation in Chaitén, for a hot shower, fresh linen, and a lurking lust for a lover. That’s where she meets Samsa.

I look at her and she fills every corner of me. My gaze is a rope that catches her and draws her in. She looks up, sees me. She knows.

They begin to see each other, though it is often months between visits. Her lover renames her Boulder.

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She doesn’t like my name and gives me a new one. She says I’m like one of those large, solitary rocks in southern Patagonia, pieces of world left over after creation, isolated and exposed to every element. No one knows where they came from. Not even they understand why they are still standing and why they never break down. I tell her I’ve seen rocks like those in the middle of the ocean.

Compromise, Commitment, Cohabitation

Samsa leaves for Iceland and asks Boulder to join her, she says yes. Samsa makes decisions and Boulder adapts to them. She observes the island, the islanders, the things she doesn’t like, she finds work that gives her an escape. She observes the different way they love each other, the pull of the boats when she walks the dock alone at night.

There’s a restlessness. She starts her own business, a food truck, no boss, no employees, a small but significant and necessary freedom. Something of her own. A coping mechanism.

It’s Not An Elephant in the Room

Then it happens. Samsa wants to have a baby, Boulder knows that refusing her will mean the end, so asks for more time.

The novel charts this turning point in the relationship, where one woman will become pregnant and give birth while the other tries to support and be part of something she does not feel.

It is an alternative navigation of an age old dilemma, seen through the lens of a queer relationship, a couple struggling with avoidance issues.

It’s not difficult to imagine where it is headed, or what might happen, when one person isn’t quite committed to the idea and desires freedom so strongly. Is the love of another enough sufficient when events propel their lives forward faster than the communication of important feelings around them?

Boulder’s observations and experience are like that of an outsider who can’t quite enter the familiar, of trying to overcome an obstacle of the mind, when the heart is resisting, when self destructive tendencies threaten to communicate what the voice has been unwilling or unable to.

Boulder was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023.

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

I admit that I likely wouldn’t have read this if it hadn’t been pressed on to me to read by 3 people. I’ve seen it rise up the reading charts, and in reading it, I recognise that quality that makes some books become the one that goes beyond avid and even occasional readers, to reach those that rarely if ever read at all. And boom, it’s a worldwide bestseller.

Lessons in Chemistry centres around a young woman scientist/chemist Elizabeth Zott. It’s set in America between 1952 and the early 1960’s and Elizabeth has forged a path into science, and in the opinion of some has gone too far down that path. Her academic career is eventually upended by one man who decides to take matters in his own hands to stop her, though with her Masters complete, she is still able to find work in a lab.

Despite continued setbacks, prejudices, sexism, attempts to discredit or steal her work, she perseveres with her research. One day she meets her equally young, revered, male colleague Calvin Evans, helping herself to his stocks of beakers and it signals the beginning of a meeting of minds, a chemistry, between the two, that changes their lives.

Elizabeth is one of those quirky characters, like Eleanor in Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine and Majella in Michelle Gallen’s Big Girl, Small Town, she lacks a filter, is not overly sensitive to bad behaviour, innuendo and discrimination – rather she responds to it neutrally, factually, in a straight up, unemotional manner.

As we read, we realise how unusual that is, because every woman of a certain age, will recognise these workplace dynamics and recall themselves or someone in this situation and will remember how it was – and the pressure to dismiss it, to sweep it under the carpet, to not challenge it – because of the consequences (and lack of).

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Elizabeth too receives the consequences of the relentless, ever-present misogyny, she gets kicked out out university, she’ll get fired, however she continues to bounce back, challenging the status quo.

She perseveres, because she is logical, because she had a different upbringing and wasn’t groomed and conditioned in the way many girls were to accept what she was encountering. It’s not because she has an attitude, it’s because of who she is, at her core. It is humorous because she perseveres, because she takes charge and continues to make her own decisions, never becoming the victim. She is never silenced.

Some describe this as funny. In my opinion, it is not. It is very real – but it is highly unusual to encounter a person, even in fiction, who exposes these aspects of society, and rises – and then finds a way – as she does with her new role, presenting cooking lessons on midday television as science lessons to housewives – starting a mini revolution.

“That’s why I wanted to use ‘Supper st Six’ to teach chemistry. Because when women understand chemistry, they begin to understand how things work.”
Roth looked confused.
“I’m referring to atoms and molecules , Roth, she explained. “The real rules that govern the physical world. When women understand these basic concepts, they can begin to see the false limits you create for them.”
“You mean by men?”
“I mean by artificial cultural and religious policies that put men in the highly unnatural role of single-sex leadership. Even a basic understanding of chemistry reveals the danger of such a lopsided approach.”

I won’t share the quote, because reading it for the first time is too good in the context of the story, but when the rowing coach complains to Elizabeth about how his wife has been influenced by her show, was one of my favourite laugh out loud moments in the book.

Elizabeth slowly gathers around her a supportive, small inner circle of people (and a dog) who get her, the relief of having such people in her life is palpable to the reader. Her friend Walter Pine, articulates in a moment, when he recalls the effect of first meeting her, a day she came to challenge him over his daughter stealing her daughter’s lunches.

She’d stormed past his secretaries in her white lab coat, hair pulled back, voice clear. He remembered feeling stunned by her. Yes, she was attractive, but it was only now that he realised it had little to do with how she looked. No, it was her confidence, the certainty of who she was. She sowed it like a seed until it took root in others.

The writing is pitch perfect, the story hums along at pace and like all greats summer reads, it gives the reader a sense of satisfaction. I would call this ‘magical satire’, because there is a wonderful dog character named Six-Thirty, whom Elizabeth assumes is intelligent, so teaches him a vast vocabulary, although she gives him what might be construed as superpowers, but he is a great character, going through his own coming-of-age, as he leaves an abusive environment to join their quirky family community.

Ultimately, perhaps it is merely about how in all aspects of life,even those deemed more masculine, women bring something different, something complementary and when we can work in partnership, alongside others, the result can be to empower and uplift and improve everyone’s lives, not just those in power, who want to dominate, or those beneath them who continue to support that model.

Perfect relaxing, holiday reading, highly recommended.

Bonnie Garmus, Author

Bonnie Garmus is a copywriter and creative director who has worked widely in the fields of technology, medicine, and education. She is an open-water swimmer, a rower, and mother to two daughters. Born in California and most recently from Seattle, she currently lives in London with her husband and her dog, 99.

Lessons in Chemistry is her debut novel, it was nominated by many bookstores as their Book of The Year and was the Goodreads Best Debut of 2022.

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