2019: a year in 10 books

Well, 2019 was a bit bumpy, wasn’t it? As always, I took refuge from the vicissitudes of the UK’s fortunes with a lot of good books. Looking over my list this year, it’s quite heavy on dystopia, with some unflinching real life reportage and a top-note of hope.

In no particular order, I enjoyed:

1. John Lanchester, The Wall. An all-too-believable future Britain, grimly keeping out the Others. Beautifully written, with the best exploration of cold and boredom I have ever read. Sure, it was bleak, but the humour and humanity kept me gripped to the bitter end.

2. Margaret Attwood, The Testaments (and The Handmaid’s Tale). I began by re-reading The Handmaid’s Tale, which I first read more than 25 years ago, before diving into The Testaments. In both books I was most interested in the way Attwood showed how oppressive regimes maintain their position by exploiting our fear and self-interest. Everyone thinks they would resist – but would we really?

3. Various authors, Refugee Tales III. The latest edition of stories from around the world, washing up on our shores. You can’t think of someone as other when you’ve listened – really listened – to their story.

4. Alan Moore, From Hell. Graphic novels are well outside my usual comfort zone. I read this for research for my next novel, and found it unsettling, gripping and immersive. From Hell was a tough one, with far more horror (graphically depicted) than I usually read. But a forcible introduction to the genre.

5. Anna Burns, Milkman. God, I loved this book. The unmistakeable voice of the narrator, the absurdity of the humour, the all-enveloping claustrophobia within which horrors that would be tolerated nowhere else seem normal.

6. Toni Morrison, Jazz. I’d not read this novel until Morrison’s death was announced this year. The obituaries sent me back to her output, and I had my eyes opened to the formal inventiveness of her work, especially in this spiky, riffing, cut-up novel of life on the edges of New York’s Harlem.

7. Ali Smith, Spring. Third in the quartet of seasonal novels from Smith, and the one that takes her closest to the Refugee Tales project, of which she is patron. Her experience of visiting the detention centre at Gatwick comes through clearly in this novel of hope, redemption and the power of stories.

8. Kerry Hudson, Lowborn. I was lucky enough to catch Kerry Hudson talking about her visceral memoir at the Bookseller Crow independent bookshop in Crystal Palace this year. It will break your heart and re-make it, with a bit more space inside.

9. Diana Evans, Ordinary People. More Crystal Palace memories, just as I leave the place where I’ve lived for the past 17 years. An ordinary love story set among ordinary people in an ordinary London suburb. In extraordinarily clear prose, it explains why love is not always enough.

10. Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls. This was the book that started my year – an astonishing conjuring-up of the stink and guts of war, and the misery that it inflicts on the non-combatants – the women, the children, the girls.

Eight books I loved this year

Two missing! (one on loan, one on Kindle)

I started 2018 with grand plans to keep good records and review every book I read this year. As usual, that lasted till about half way through February, so my year-end round-up of books I loved reflects those that really made an impact.

In no particular order, they are:

Icebreaker: a voyage far north
Horatio Clare’s account of life aboard a Finnish ice-breaking ship, busily keeping the Bay of Bothnia navigable to shipping during the long winter months, made me pine for the fjords. Something about Clare’s descriptions of the stoic and gloomy crew, the splendour of the ice and the implacable nature of the ship’s life appealed to me. Anyway, it may help to explain why I’m heading to Helsinki on Saturday to spend Christmas in the snow.

Golden Hill
It took me a while to get around to Francis Spufford’s rollicking novel of 18th century New York. I’d read about how beautifully it was written, how precisely it conjured the pioneering spirit of early Manhattan, how well it was researched… but I don’t remember anyone pointing out how side-clutchingly funny it was. Perhaps if they had, I’d have jumped in earlier. I adored it from start to finish, for its audacity, wit and precision.

Circe
Madeleine Miller’s retelling of the myth of the sorceress Circe was my stand-out novel of the year. It represents an enormous feat of imagination, conjuring a whole pantheon of gods and goddesses from the ancient world and bringing them to urgent, vivid life. Miller does not just make us believe in magic, in immortals. She makes us feel the pain of immortality, the toll that magic takes. I was so immersed in the world she created, I didn’t want to leave. For the first time in years, I read the last page then turned again immediately to the beginning.

Milkman
Anna Burns’ Booker Prize winner plunges you straight into the heart of 1970s Belfast, with its unwritten (but unbreakable) rules. The voice of the unnamed 18-year-old girl who tells the story is wholly original, striking and funny and alive with cadence and lilt. The density of the prose reflects the stifling conformity of the time and place, where the impossible is normal and what the outside world thinks is normal doesn’t apply. As someone who remembers the troubles only as a depressing and frightening backdrop on television news, this was a sometimes shocking glimpse into how it must have felt to grow up in the heart of it.

Against the Grain: a deep history of the earliest states
Big ideas and a big book from James C Scott. Deep history, the far-away origins of our species and how we may have lived, fascinates me. And this book gets down to the nitty-gritty, the ways we lived before states, before taxation, before parliaments and leaders, before we settled by the rivers to grow grain. Scott persuasively explains how the standard view of a steady progress from hunter-gatherer nomadism to settled agriculture and grain production was anything but steady. People, he asserts, were remarkably reluctant to settle down and till the fields. Indeed, city walls tended to be designed to keep people in, rather than repel invaders. The links between grain and taxation, war and surpluses, livestock and disease, are all explored in intriguing detail. A book to make you think differently.

Strange Labyrinth: outlaws, poets, mystics, murderers and a coward in London’s great forest.
Will Ashton was a delightful guide to this personal and whimsical memoir/history/travel book about Epping Forest. I spent a lot of time in Epping Forest this summer in preparation for leading a Refugee Tales walk of 120 people into and out of the woods. Happily we made it through without having to bunk up in the trees for the night. Knowing a little about some of the folk who had lived in the forest before, including poet John Clare and sculptor Jacob Epstein, brought fresh interest to every walk.

Life After Life
Kate Atkinson is fast becoming my favourite novelist of English life. This novel reminds us, time after time and life after life, of the delicacy of the thread on which every life hangs, the tiny decisions that turn fate one way or another. Mordantly funny at times, it’s also achingly sad as Atkinson repeatedly takes the world she has carefully constructed for us in its minute, precise detail and shakes it like a snow-globe. Despite the cleverness of the central conceit, and the way it insists on its own fictitiousness, it doesn’t pull its emotional punches. The opening chapter is a masterclass in how to start a story.

The Dark is Rising
About this time last year, I noticed a thread starting on Twitter, launched by nature writer Robert Macfarlane. People were reading or re-reading Susan Cooper’s creepy children’s book, The Dark is Rising, starting on December 22, the midwinter darkest day and finishing (as the novel does) on January 6. I hadn’t read the book before. It was something else – part-pagan, part-parable, a descent into the darkness and a struggle back into the light. The natural world is depicted with delicate menace. The uncanny is everywhere, in the way that early dusk can bring on the shivers in familiar lanes, or a blanket of snow makes everything unknowable. As the darkness wheels round again, I’m thinking of re-reading it this year, a companion into the Finnish night.

 

 

The Heat is Grate and growing Grater…

My 1986 edition, with Julie Christie (from the film) on the cover

Outside, the sky has changed from a relentless Madonna-blue to uneasy, mauve-bruised clouds. It’s stupid hot, impossible hot, the sort of hot that robs you of the will to move, even to think. It’s too hot to stay inside; too hot to go out. I walk from room to room, hoping to find somewhere a shade cooler.

I open the front door, look hopefully at the clouds. Rain, I beg them. Please, go on. Rain. Rain rain rain.

There’s a great tradition of heatwave literature. One of the best, LP Hartley’s The Go Between, uses the growing heat of a long Edwardian summer to chart the intensity of a forbidden love affair. Innocent schoolboy Leo unknowingly acts as messenger between his aristocratic school-friend’s older sister and the sexy farmer she’s carrying on with behind her war hero fiancé’s back.

Every day, Leo goes to check the thermometer, as excited as today’s newspapers about the possibility of broken records, the mercury rising higher than ever before: “The thermometer stood at ninety.  It might still go up. Passionately I willed it to…” Marian, the friend’s sister, realises how uncomfortable he is in his Norfolk jacket and buys him a new, lightweight suit. Delighted, he felt “I had been given the freedom of the heat,” although when it all gets too much, he writes to his mother that: “the Heat is Grate and growing Grater;” his spelling deteriorating with the weather.

But even the longest, hottest summers come to an end. When the explosive ending comes, with Marian’s affair and Leo’s part in it painfully revealed, it is of course during a thunderstorm, “the indescribable smell of rain filling the air,” lightning “darting ice-blue from black clouds.”

How I’ve longed for that indescribable smell in the last week! And now, finally, the air is rich with petrichor, thunder rumbles overhead, lightning flashes and the rain comes down. Yes, I did run outside like a mad thing, letting the rain soak into my hair, my thin cotton clothes.

If I was to write a novel set in the heatwave of 2018, today would have to be the day it reached its climax, the day all the narrative threads collided and the suspended reality of enervating heat broke with a sudden shower of blessed rain.

London Book Fair: the view from Author HQ

I’ve had one thing drummed into me by publishing friends: book fairs are not for authors. They’re for publishers and agents, the ones with the cheque-books, to do the grown-up bit about contracts and deals, rights and publicity. Authors, with their dreams and stories, just get in the way.

Well, I have news for them. I spent two days at London Book Fair, met loads of fellow-authors and had an absolute blast. The book fair had an “Author HQ” where they tucked us away with a brilliant programme of seminars, talks and networking events. Organisations for authors, from the august Society of Authors to the engaging Alliance of Independent Authors, had stands, alongside those keen to offer us “author services.”

The talks I attended were excellent and I learned a heap about successful self-publishing, trends in book-selling and buying, audio-book production and marketing. I also discovered how friendly, encouraging and helpful most authors are – just about everyone I approached was happy to chat and to share their ideas and experience. They say authors are introverts, but put us all in one room with a glass of wine in our hands, and it’s hard to stop us talking.

Indie author rock stars Joseph Alexander, Mark Dawson and LJ Ross

In that spirit, here are the top things I learned at London Book Fair:

• It is possible to make a living as a self-published independent author, if you write enough books, market them well and engage with your audience. If your plan is to write one literary masterpiece and retire to your ivory tower, it’s probably not for you.
• Yes, audio books are the fastest-growing sector of the book trade at the moment. But they still represent only 4% of book sales, and they are expensive to do properly. I’ll be focusing on reaching the other 96% for the time being.
• There’s not just one way to market a book. Although pretty much everyone I spoke to said you need a good email list to drive readership, sales and reviews. That’s high on my (ever-expanding) list of things to do.
• Around a quarter of book sales are now e-books, and that figure has stabilised over the last few years. Sales of e-readers may be down, but that’s because people read on tablets or phones rather than dedicated e-readers. Did you know that 22% of e-book downloads in 2017 were of books by self-published authors? Me neither.
• One thing is true – London Book Fair is probably not the place to go if you want to nab an agent or publisher. They’re all meeting each other in the big zones downstairs, fuelling their ridiculous schedules with caffeine and brownies. I’m glad I didn’t go with that aim – it would have been dispiriting and counterproductive.

How else to get the most out of the fair? I enjoyed listening in to some great interviews, notably Kit de Waal being interviewed about her new novel The Trick to Time, which sounds rather wonderful, and to children’s laureate and illustrator Lauren Child begging for children to be allowed to simply draw for fun. I downloaded the app before the show and ear-marked everything I wanted to see, which helped me organise my time better.

I also came back with a nice haul of free tote bags, magazines, pens and bookmarks! As a seasoned journalist who’s attended many vast medical conferences, I knew to take a sandwich lunch rather than rely on the over-priced and average food on offer at the catering outlets, and to ensure my footwear was up to a full day’s walking from one end of the exhibition to another (although I was rather astonished to see I’d clocked up 17,000 steps by the end of Wednesday).

Is London Book Fair a place for authors? I think it is, so long as you approach it in a spirit of  discovery and enthusiasm, rather than as a way for others to discover you. As a one-stop shop to find out all you can about the vast publishing industry, it’s unbeatable.

In the deep midwinter

It doesn’t feel like winter really gets going until the end of January. December is too jolly, and often too warm. It’s the last week in January that I start to feel winter seeping into my soul.

By February, we’ve had three months of getting up before dawn and heading home after dark. At our rickety office, we huddle around the convector heater, drink tea and eat biscuits to keep warm. This morning, as I gazed out of the window hoping for some kind of inspiration from the same old view of a leafless tree and a street lamp, snow started its soft fall, a teasing flurry that drifted away like a dream.

I have three survival strategies for winter: books, food and friends. Christmas brought a windfall of the first of these, books to curl up with, food to lay down hibernation layers. I supplemented Ali Smith’s wonderfully strange novel Winter, with Nigel Slater’s The Christmas Chronicles – a beguiling melting pot of recipes for the coldest days, traditions, folklore and musings. I also devoured Edd Kimber’s Patisserie Made Simple, dreaming of a day when I could whip up the lightest of French fancies at the drop of an egg. True to form, the first thing I made from Patisserie Made Simple was a short story about lemon tart.

Life outdoors doesn’t stop, however. I took a glorious walk along the Chelsea Embankment one coldly sunny day in January, striding out to keep warm in the icy wind. There’s even work to do in the garden, keeping down the weeds, turning the compost and planning for spring planting.

We dug a few knobbly Jerusalem artichokes from the iron-hard earth in the community garden, turning pink with effort, then walked the beds, deciding – tomatoes did well here last year, runner beans didn’t get enough sun there. We made plans, imagined healthy leafy plants, ripening fruit, untouched by slugs and blight. Last year, we planted tomato seeds on windowsills, on a snowy day in February. Almost time to make that leap of faith again. I notice my autumn-planted broad beans have sprouted – and a day later, that something has started to eat them.

Late last year, I started writing what I hoped might be a novel. Prematurely, I realise – the roots were shallow, I’d spent too little time ruminating, feeding the idea, getting to know the characters. It needs composting with research, turning in my mind, to put out feelers in the dark before it emerges, blinking, in the light of the laptop.

Some of that mulling happened over tea, cake, wine and cheese, at the Battleaxe Brigade’s winter writing retreat. This year we headed for a picturesque cottage in Sussex, with white clapboarding and a log fire. We shared work in progress, enjoyed a few writing sprints, talked until we were all talked out and laughed till our bellies hurt.

Good food (and wine), a log fire, writing and reading, and friends. If anyone has a better survival plan for proper winter, I’d like to hear it.