Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“Why did Busoni transcribe Bach? How does a copy become more than a copy? Is art the creation of something new and original, or simply the continuous enlargement, or the distillation, of an observation that came before?”

So ponders the narrator, Marie, near the end of this long, but never slow, novel. As a child living in Canada, her beloved father, Chinese by birth, committed suicide in Hong Kong in 1989. Not long after, her mother received a letter from the wife of her father’s best friend in China, begging Marie’s mother’s help to smuggle her teenage daughter to Canada. Although the child Marie does not understand the reasons for these events, it is implied that the daughter, Ai-Ming, has been involved somehow in the Tiananmen Square protests. After her arrival Ai-Ming discovers a notebook in Marie’s home filled with elegant Chinese calligraphy, and begins to tell the story of the Book of Records.

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The Tidal Zone

There’s a kind of suspension of time that happens when you crack open a new book by a favourite author. Will she live up to the promise of those previous books you loved? Has she lost her touch? Are you about to suffer a crashing disappointment?

Moss’s main interests, judging by her previous works, are the role of women in society and the ways in which families function (and fail to function). In this novel, the main character is, for a change, a man – a stay-at-home dad with a GP wife and two school-age daughters. As the book opens, his seemingly stable world is about to be nudged off its axis by a phone call informing him that his elder daughter, Miriam, has stopped breathing at school.

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The Pursuit of Love & Love in a Cold Climate

It occurs to me that some people might not know who the Mitford sisters were. Do you know who the Mitford sisters were? They were the daughters of a minor peer, raised partly in London and partly in Oxfordshire, and were notable for their eccentricities, which is what you call it when rich white people do things that would be unacceptable if they were poor or black. Nancy, the eldest, had a string of husbands and lovers before settling down in Paris with a man she refused to marry but lived very happily with (scandalous at the time). Jessica eloped with an aristocratic communist, and then, much worse, with an American communist. Unity and Diana both got into fascism in a big way; Unity shot herself in the head when Britain declared war on Germany (she survived, but later died essentially due to complications arising from the bullet that was STILL IN HER HEAD). Diana’s second wedding took place in Joseph Goebbels’s drawing room. Deborah towed the line a bit more by marrying well, and ended up managing Chatsworth house in her capacity as Duchess of Devonshire. Pamela was mostly into animals, bless her, though that goes for all of them: during Unity’s debutante season, she frequently showed up at balls and parties draped in her pet grass-snake, Enid.

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Mothering Sunday

The year is 1924, and Jane Fairchild, a housemaid in a country house, is engaged in a long-running affair with the son of a nearby estate. Paul Sheringham, too young to have been killed in the war along with all of the other local young men, is due to marry another woman in a few short weeks, and this novel charts their last day – really only a few hours – together.

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Grey Mask ff

As a person who has had a love of Agatha Christie inculcated in me from the years of my earliest literacy by older female relatives on both sides of my family, I am the first to admit that I am less than conversant in other great mystery novelists of the same period. It took me until my 30s to discover John Dickson Carr, for example – arguably the greatest of the so-called “locked room mystery” writers. My family bookshelves just didn’t deign to notice the existence of any detectives that weren’t Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, or (grudgingly) Tommy and Tuppence Beresford*. No surprises, then, that Patricia Wentworth has only just appeared on the horizon of my literary radar**.

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Margaret the First

The reason I know anything at all about Mad Madge, aka Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, is entirely coincidental: she features heavily in (and supplies the title of) Siri Hustvedt’s excellent novel The Blazing World, which I happen to have read. In the 17th century, she was that rare and stunted unicorn, a female writer demanding to be taken seriously. Why is she so little-known when her contemporaries and near-contemporaries – Samuel Pepys, Thomas Hobbes, and Rene Descartes, to name a few – are bywords? (In fairness, I believe Pepys’s diaries do refer to her, though not with approval.) This fictionalised biography attempts to go some way towards remedying that gap.

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Our Spoons Came From Woolworths

The first page of this novel tells us two things: that it’s a sad story, and that it gets better. From there, we launch directly in to the first person narrator’s history: marriage between two young artists (Charles and Julia) during the Depression, collecting furniture on a poverty-line budget, fending off intrusive and condescending in-laws. Not until things start to sour between them do we see what the introductory paragraphs didn’t foreshadow: this is a great feminist text.

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The Tsar of Love and Techno

The combination of title and cover art led me to expect that this book would be some kind of whimsical satire, possibly surrealist. I could probably have dispelled that preconception if I’d thought for half a second about Marra’s debut from a couple of years ago, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, which examined the aftermath of the Chechen insurgency and was not what the kids call an upper. Don’t be similarly misled. Tsar is a serious work about serious things.

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A Spool of Blue Thread

Anne Tyler’s back doing what Anne Tylers do best: being a nicer, better, more experienced, less pointlessly antagonistic version of Jonathan Franzen. In A Spool of Blue Thread, she brings us another example of what I call the “family epic”: a novel tracing the history of a family – in this case, the Whitshank family, from the Depression up to the present day. Because it’s Tyler, these events take place in Baltimore.

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