Seven in January

Seven in January

I read seven books in January. (I know it’s almost March but this month I’ve published a new story collection and had other news to report … )

Uncommon Type: Some Stories by Tom Hanks.

Yes, the Tom Hanks. And it’s a signed copy, courtesy of the wonderful Topping bookshop in St Andrews and my (also wonderful) husband.

Each of the stories involves a manual typewriter in either a minor or a major way (TH has collected about a hundred of them). Some of the stories have the same characters. Some are very thoughtful, others very funny. I think my favourite, and falling into the funny category, was the very first one, about three best friends, two men and a girl, Anna. One of the men, the narrator, makes the mistake of having an affair with Anna for ‘three exhausting weeks’, after which they revert, with mutual relief, to their previous relationship.

Between Friends by Jenny Harper

‘Love, secrets and loyalty’ in contemporary Edinburgh. When Marta bumps into an old acquaintance, Tom, during the Edinburgh Festival and asks him to dinner, a whole domino effect of disasters occurs, as Marta is unaware of the effect that Tom’s appearance will have on her two best friends Jane and Carrie. Of course the Edinburgh setting was bound to appeal to me but I also enjoyed this gripping story of female friendships.

The Savage Garden by Mark Mills

I read this author’s The Whaleboat House last year and loved it. Enjoyed this one too which is set in Tuscany in 1958. A young English scholar tries to decode the clues in a mysterious garden and in doing so uncovers secrets of love, revenge and murder from 400 years ago and much more recently …

Howard’s End is on the Landing by Susan Hill

The house Susan Hill shared with her Shakespearian scholar husband had bookshelves everywhere. One night she went in search of Howard’s End. She couldn’t locate it but she did realise that there were books on their shelves that she’d forgotten they had, some she would love to re-read and perhaps two hundred that she hadn’t read at all. So she decided to give up buying new books for a whole year, instead going through the house shelf by shelf. At the end, with great difficulty, she compiled a list of the forty books she would keep if she had to give the others up.

I liked reading about her experience – and although I could do the same (check my to-be-read pile, print and Kindle!) I’m afraid I would not have the self-discipline.

Year of the Tiger by Lisa Brackman

A thriller set in China, with flashbacks to the war in Iraq where the narrator, Ellie, was a medic. Ellie’s friendship with a missing local artist leads her into big trouble when both Chinese and American government agents hound her about him.

I’m mad keen on books – fiction and non-fiction – set in China since a visit there a few years ago. 

The Secret of Nightingale Wood by Lucy Strange 
'1919. Henry [Henrietta] moves to the countryside with her family, scarred by her brother's untimely death. Her only friends are characters from her favourite books - until, one day, she wanders into the woods and meets Moth, a striking witch-like woman. Together they form a bond that could help Henry save her family and overcome her grief.'

Henrietta is twelve, but this could be read by anybody of any age. Adults will read it on an extra level, knowing about the horrors of the First World War and of the way mental illness (not just of war veterans) was treated at this time. 

I adored this book and cannot recommend it highly enough.

A Cold Case in Amsterdam Central by Anja de Jager

Excellent contemporary police procedural. A workman falls from the top of a half-finished building – accident or murder? The answer – spoiler alert – has its roots in the Nazi occupation of Holland and a present-day extortion racket. Great sense of place and an interesting protagonist in Lotte Meerman, a police detective who has just returned to work four months after being shot; not all her colleagues are pleased to see her … 

This is the second Lotte book; I'd like to read the other two (which is why, see above, I could never do a Susan Hill).

Seven in July

I read seven books in July, one I wish I hadn’t.

Missing, Presumed by Susie Steiner

Christian Aid sale purchase. Loved this police procedural. The main character, Manon Bradshaw, is a detective sergeant and what she has to deal with is this – ‘Edith Hind is gone, leaving just her coat, a smear of blood and a half-open door’. How could you not want to find out what happened next? The New York Times, no less, called it: ‘Smart and stylish. Manon is portrayed with an irresistible blend of sympathy and snark.’

I Found You by Lisa Jewell

Read on Kindle. Lily has only been married for three weeks. When her new husband fails to come home from work one night, she is left stranded in a new country where she knows no one.

Alice finds a man on the beach outside her house. He has no name, no jacket, no idea what he is doing there. Against her better judgement, she invites him into her home.

I stayed up very late to finish this. My goodness, it has some extremely dark and harrowing moments. You have been warned.

Alone Through China and Tibet by Helena Drysdale

Christian Aid sale purchase. I am rather obsessed by China (see why here) and wish that, like Helena Drysdale, I saw it before its modernisation began.

She went in 1985 and I travelled vicariously with her. I would not have the courage to do what she did – or the temperament. I like knowing where I'm going to sleep, and even the thought of arriving other than ridiculously early at a station or airport gives me the screaming heebie jeebies.

But I like to think that in some respects that I am more prepared for a journey than Ms Drysdale. I wouldn’t take the hour-and-a-half bus trip to Glasgow without an emergency granola bar. She got on a bus to go through Tibet, a journey of several days in one of the most unpopulated parts of the planet, and she did not take a single thing to eat with her, nor any water. Her fellow travellers were laden with snacks, including tins of mandarin oranges – they fished the segments out with chopsticks. She does not say whether they offered to share with her but after a day or two someone by the roadside ‘made us omelettes’. I’d have eaten my own hand by that stage.

Apologies to my Censor: The Highs and Lows of a Foreigner in China by Mitch Moxley

Christian Aid book sale purchase. Another sojourn in China, this one a mere twenty-two years later but in a very changed country. Canadian Mitch Moxley finds himself in Beijing in 2007 as a correspondent for China Daily. He wants to be a journalist, or so he says … he doesn’t actually seem very keen on writing, or working come to that, but he gets up to various shenanigans as twenty-something men are wont to do … But hey, he’s in China so I’m willing to follow him.

Lost for Words by Stephanie Butland

Read on Kindle. I heard about this on the Portobello Book Blog (read Joanne Baird’s review here).

I loved it. Loveday works in a second-hand bookshop in York for the wonderful, mysterious Archie. She lives on her own and doesn’t seem to have any friends or family – her story is slowly revealed. When she picks up a book on the street Nathan enters her life. 

I never intend to get a tattoo but after reading this I’m pondering which first line of a book would I choose if I did. Perhaps it would be the beginning of Lost for Words: A book is a match in the smoking second between strike and flame. Isn't that lovely?

 *****

I’m not going to say what the sixth (e-)book was. If I’d read the first page on Amazon I’d never have bought it – won’t make that mistake again. I kept going thinking surely it will get better but it never did. Banal writing, badly edited (not self-published, shame on the publisher). A young couple’s marriage is in crisis but as we never see them in the good times so what? I could tell you what happened to them but I couldn’t tell you anything about them, they were so one-dimensional. Two hours of my life I’ll never get back.

 *****

The Print Petticoat by Lucilla Andrews

Lucilla Andrews was the doyenne of hospital romance and some of her titles have just been brought out as e-books. This one is set a few years after the Second World War in a maternity unit that was evacuated from London and has not yet gone back. Joanna has several men who are very keen on her and it takes a serious and unexpected event to show which is the right one for her.

The 'print petticoat' by the way is a reference to the full-skirted uniform worn by nurses at St Gregory's Hospital.

 

Lucilla Andrews’ wartime memoir No Time for Romance (highly recommended) became part of a controversy involving Ian McEwan and his novel Atonement.

I was honoured to be asked to contribute an article for the publisher’s website and I chose to write on my favourite books about nurses (fiction and fact), see ‘Florence, Cherry, Lucilla and Me’ here.

Stranger than fiction

I was recently tagged on Facebook to post a photograph every day for five days so I looked out ones taken when I was in China in 2011. When I came back from my trip I wrote some articles but had no success in having them published (clearly I should stick to fiction). But I will tell you here about the strangest evening I have ever spent because I couldn’t have made it up. 

You will be, my daughter kindly informed me, the oldest westerner to visit Ningxian. 

She went there, to the south-east corner of Gansu Province, China, in August 2010 to teach English for a year and the following April my sister and I found ourselves on a country bus driving through China’s driest province to the dusty little town my daughter called home. She and her fellow gap-year teacher lived on the school campus – the object of much friendly curiosity as the only two westerners most of the town had ever seen.

Now there were two more.

Within minutes of our arriving, pupils jumped up and down to look through the window and some came in to see us close up. Fortunately, no words of ye ancient western wisdom seemed to be required from the oldest one or her sister – all we had to do was pose for what turned out to be the first of (very) many photo sessions.

During the next six days we were privileged to be asked out by generous and genuine people to restaurants, and to private homes, to sample the region’s delicious noodle-based and surprisingly spicy food. 

But one invitation appeared to have its own agenda.

We met our hostess (an English teacher who spoke very little English), and her husband who ‘works for the government’, outside the school gate at 5.30 but it wasn’t until 9 o' clock that we sat down to eat in a hot-pot restaurant, the only kind that stays open that late. (Hot-pot is a kind of individual fondue arrangement where tofu and raw meat and vegetables are dropped to cook in a pot of boiling soup.) For three and half hours we had to sing for our supper.

First of all, we were startled to be ushered into a large, newly built, empty hotel belonging, as it turned out, to friends of our hosts, escorted upstairs to a bedroom and photographed  – perhaps, we later speculated, to appear in promotional material as their international clientele …

We – the party now including the hoteliers – were then driven about ten miles away ‘to see a valley where there are beautiful flowers’. On the way we passed dozens of cave dwellings, some definitely still occupied (I saw a line of washing high on the hillside) but our hostess denied this and was keen to show us ‘the new countryside’ and the houses recently built for the farmers. 

When we stopped to look at the ‘beautiful flowers’ carloads of more of their friends arrived to check out the westerners, add them to their photograph albums, and follow them as they drove on.

Our next stop was a primary school where, at seven o’ clock in a smoky staffroom, teachers were marking homework. 

We were invited to have a look round in the company of one of the teachers, a cigarette tucked behind his ear.  The school was built in the 1950s and not much changed. A board on the wall had Chinese writing with an English (?) translation underneath: 

All the teachers trooped outside to be photographed in the playground with us and our entourage plus three children who had appeared from nowhere. As we departed, waving royally, my sister, a primary-school head in rural Scotland, tried and failed to imagine a similar scene back home.

Finally (in the dark) we had to inspect a poly-tunnel which apparently was very eco-friendly.

 We were conducted around it by a smiley man to whom, like all the other followers we acquired that evening, we were never actually introduced. 

He turned up at the hot-pot restaurant (above, left) and as a finale to the night was revealed to be, not the gardener of the poly-tunnel as we’d vaguely assumed, but ‘he runs TV station’. Another line-up. Another camera. Would we appear on Chinese TV? When I looked in the mirror back in the hotel and saw the havoc wrought by leaning over the steamy, spicy hot-pot I could only hope not.