Book Review
Neve, a novelist in her 30s, is married to Edwyn, an older man and classic emotional abuser. This short novel, almost a novella, explores the nature of their relationship, as well as her relationships with the other significant people in her life: her mother, her father, and her occasional lover, Michael.
In 1980s Nigeria, a young married woman, Yejide, tries and fails to become pregnant. It’s a time of political upheaval: over the course of the novel, several coups take place. It’s also a time during which modern (Western) medical practice enjoys an ongoing conflict with traditional remedies, as well as pseudo- or quasi-Christian practices in Southern Nigeria, where the novel takes place. The protagonist’s mother-in-law sends her to a “prophet” in an attempt to remedy her apparent infertility; when she eventually conceives and gives birth, only to have the child die in infancy, the mother-in-law openly suspects it of being abiku, an evil spirit.
Not long after World War Two, a pair of teenage Jewish Londoners, brother and sister, are diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to a treatment centre in the Kent countryside. Once the exclusive domain of the wealthier classes, the advent of the NHS has opened up the world of sanatoriums to the poor, and not all of the patients are happy about it.
What happens when an oppressed people suddenly gain a huge amount of power over their oppressors? What would a truly matriarchal global society look like? Are men and women born with certain inherent characteristics, or are they the result of social conditioning (surely we can agree that one’s stupid, right)? What if women were the physically stronger sex?
Returning to live with her mother and siblings after a mysterious absence, Eleanor’s first day at her new school begins inauspiciously, when no one will let her sit next to them on the bus. Eventually, Park takes pity on her, and over a series of bus trips they gradually develop a friendship that turns into a romance. But Eleanor’s home life is less than idyllic, and forces beyond their control are building that will threaten to topple their fragile happiness.
In roughly our time, after failing to save the life of an actor who collapses on stage, a trainee paramedic in Toronto receives a phone call from his doctor buddy at the hospital, telling him to lock himself in with some bottled water: a passenger from Russia has landed and is spreading a flu-like virus with a super-fast incubation period and nearly 100% transmission rate.
Twenty years later, civilization has collapsed. There is no electricity, no internal combustion engine, no modern medicine. In the Great Lakes region of North America, a group of actors and musicians walks along the abandoned road, bringing art and culture to the sparse settlements of survivors. Their motto is taken from Star Trek: Voyager: Survival is Insufficient.
Natalie Waite, seventeen years old, from a reasonably well-off family, is preparing to leave for college at the start of this novel. Over the course of several months, we follow her as she moves into a new phase of her life, gradually makes new friends, and starts to become an adult. Except of course it’s a Shirley Jackson novel, and none of that is what actually happens.
A chest full of gold pieces and a treasure map; a voyage to tropical waters on a ship packed with secret enemies; a mutiny complete with cannon fire; X marks the spot. It is the very model of a modern major pirate tale*. If you’ve had any pop cultural contact with pirates at all, you know the outline of this story, and all that remains is to fill in the details.
Georges Simenon was inter-war France’s most famous writer of detective fiction, and Inspector Maigret is his most famous creation: built like a rugby player, sucking on his pipe, with the collar of his coat turned up against the Paris drizzle. A few years back, Penguin announced it would be reissuing one Simenon per month – a larger undertaking than it sounds, given the sheer volume of his output, not to mention the need for translation. This week, after years of good intentions, I finally read one of them.
Strange News Out of Essex: it is 1892*, and residents of a coastal village have reported glimpses of a mysterious animal in the marshes of Blackwater Estuary. Thither goes our heroine, one Cora Seaborne, a young woman recently (and mercifully) widowed, hoping to add to the collection of ammonites and other fossils in which she has an amateur interest. She meets the local vicar, Will Ransome, a friend of a friend, and they develop an intimate relationship that defies attempts at definition.