I read six books in November.
Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith
‘Two young Vietnamese women go missing decades apart.’ A debut novel (the author has previously published short stories), longlisted for The Women’s Prize for Fiction. Fantastic, in both senses of the word.
It has been extensively praised – one review that particularly chimed with me was from Booklist – ‘a strange and wondrous story … magically manages to create a story both epic and intensely intimate.’
A House Full of Daughters by Juliet Nicolson
Juliet Nicolson is the granddaughter of Vita Sackville West and was brought up partly at Sissinghurst Castle. That much I knew before but Vita’s lineage was new to me – she was the granddaughter of a Spanish dancer. A privileged upbringing? Yes, of course in some ways; we don’t all have a castle in the family. But in other ways, definitely not: each of the seven generations was pretty bad at parenting. A fascinating memoir.
The
Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller
Much hyped and going to be a Reese Witherspoon film, I think. It lived up to the hype for me. I loved the atmospheric writing and the American east coast setting and the structure was very clever – an event and its aftermath took place over one day, and in between we learn of the narrator’s life and what led up to this point. I was a little disappointed (not the only one looking at the reviews) by <spoiler alert> the ambiguous ending. And be aware there are some unpleasant scenarios.
A Book of Railway Journeys by Ludovic Kennedy
I love train journeys, including vicarious ones. This is a very enjoyable set of book extracts (fiction and non-fiction) and poems by eg Charles Dickens, Stephen Crane and Paul Theroux. Here are grand old trains and historic journeys, horrific wartime adventures, spectacular crashes, the romance of rail travel and more.
Something Sensational to Read on the Train by Gyles Brandreth
Staying with trains … this huge volume is, we are told, a mere fragment of the diary entries he has kept since he was a lad. Amazing he has time to do anything else – but do something else he has, in fact a huge number of something elses including: writing hundred of books, presenting on TV-am, starting a teddy bear museum, acting in panto, owning a chain of knitting wool shops, starting the National Scrabble Championships – oh, and being an MP (all to varying degrees of success). Doesn’t sleep obviously.
I’ve been to a show of his at the Edinburgh Festival which was very entertaining, and I admire his relentless energy and enthusiasm. But the tone of the diaries irresistibly reminded me of a fictional diarist, Simon Crisp (in Christopher Matthews’ Diary of a Somebody, published in 1981). It’s not a flattering comparison.
Joe Country by Mick Herron
Love this series … failed spies – known as ‘slow horses’ – are sent to Slough House, a grimy office presided over by the equally grimy Jackson Lang where they continue to work and often meet sticky ends. I’m not reading the books in order but the writing is so clever that doesn’t matter. An edge of very black humour alleviates the grimness and the tense situations the characters (and thus the readers) find themselves in.