Cornflower Books

Book of the day - Love and Treasure

   

     "Complex and thoughtful, moving and carefully researched, this is a novel to love and treasure," says Philippa Gregory of Ayelet Waldman's Love and Treasure, out here early next month.

    "Salzburg, 1946. A fugitive train loaded with Jewish treasure. A dazzling jewelled pendant in the form of a stylised peacock. And three men - an American infantry captain in World War II, an Israeli-born dealer in art stolen by the Nazis, and a pioneering psychiatrist in fin-de-siècle Budapest - who find their lives turned upside-down by three women, each locked in a struggle against her own history and the history of our times. And at the centre of Love and Treasure, nested like a photograph  hidden in a locket, a mystery: where does the worth of a people and its treasures truly lie?

    Waldman traces the unlikely journey, from 1914 Budapest to post-war Salzburg to present-day New York, of the peacock pendant whose significance changes with the changes of fortune undergone by her characters as they find themselves caught up in the ebb and flow of modern European history. Spanning continents and a hundred years of turbulent history, encompassing war and revolution, the history of art, feminism and psychoanalysis, depicting the range of human feeling from the darkness of a shattered Europe to the ordinary heartbreaks of a contemporary New York woman, this novel marks the full maturity of a remarkable writer."

    Michael Ondaatje comments, "One is quickly caught up in Love and Treasure with its shifting tones and voices - at times a document, a thriller, a love story, a search - telescoping time backwards and forwards to vividly depict a story found in the preludes and then the after-effects of the Holocaust. Waldman gives us remarkable characters in a time of complex and surprising politics."

    There is a video trailer for the book here, but you may wish to turn off the audio as I found the music detracted from the images.

My house looks not unlike this:

... and I am having a bit of a sort-out, so please bear with!

    The picture is of the old Public Library in Cincinatti, now sadly demolished, but you can see more views of the building here.

Breakfast at Plumstead Episcopi

    "... The tea consumed was the very best, the coffee the very blackest, the cream the very thickest; there was dry toast and buttered toast, muffins and crumpets; hot bread and cold bread, white bread and brown bread, home-made bread and bakers' bread, wheaten bread and oaten bread; and if there be other breads than these, they were there; there were eggs in napkins, and crispy bits of bacon under silver covers; and there were little fishes in a little box, and devilled kidneys frizzling on a hot-water dish; which, by-the-by, were placed closely contiguous to the plate of the worthy archdeacon himself. Over and above this, on a snow-white napkin, spread upon the sideboard, was a huge ham and a huge sirloin; the latter having laden the dinner table on the previous evening. Such was the ordinary fare at Plumstead Episcopi."

    Feeling peckish now? That passage comes from Trollope's The Warden which our very informal Cornflower Book Group is reading this month. There's still plenty of time to pick up the book if you'd like to read it, or if you already know it well, do join in the chat about it from Saturday the 29th. (I've just finished it and found it completely charming.)

Book of the day - The Collected Works of A.J. Fikry

  

    Here's what Eowyn Ivey, author of The Snow Child - and herself a bookseller - has to say about Gabrielle Zevin's novel The Collected Works of A.J. Fikry:

    "Delightful! I read it in one sitting. It's a big-hearted gift to anyone who has worked at a bookstore, or loitered in a bookstore, or dreamed of living above a bookstore. The story has humour, romance, a touch of suspense, but most of all love - love of books and bookish people and, really, all of humanity in its imperfect glory."

    Here's the blurb:

    "A.J. Fikry owns a failing bookshop. His wife has just died, in tragic circumstances. His rare and valuable first edition has been stolen. His life is in ruins.

    Maya is the baby who is left on the floor of the children's section in A.J.'s bookshop, with nothing but a note.

    What happens in the small bookshop changes the lives of these extraordinary characters.

    As surprising as it is moving, this is an unforgettable tale of transformation and second chances, an irresistible affirmation of why we read, and why we love."

    I love the sound of this one!

Two Turtle Doves: A Memoir of Making Things

 

    In Two Turtle Doves: A Memoir of Making Things, jewellery designer Alex Monroe has written a fascinating and truly lovely account of his creative life. This is a book which shows a real zest for living, a warm heart, a keen eye, and genuine pleasure in fashioning beautiful objects which will become meaningful pieces for those who wear them.

    Writers are often asked where they get their inspiration, and it's a question to which there is usually no easy answer, but in this case an artist/craftsman shows exactly how the creative process works for him. While Alex Monroe admits that "the origins of a piece of jewellery can be obscured even to the maker," where the genesis is clear he lets the reader follow his train of thought, from "the purest moment of creation right at the very start: that tiny inkling, the appearance of the spark of an idea," through "the sense of revelation" as it develops in the sketchbook and then in precious metal, to a finished piece and en entire collection.

    Monroe grew up making things - from go-carts and bicycles to ammunition (!) - and his account of his childhood in a rambling Suffolk house with acres of semi-wild gardens is funny, affectionate, and frequently hair-raising. With minimal parental supervision, his exploits included some from which he is lucky to have lived to tell the tale, but happily he did, and perhaps it was that very unstructured upbringing coupled with his inquiring mind and a pragamatic way of responding to his surroundings and any materials to hand which have shaped his approach to his work.

    For the book's epigraph, he quotes Arthur Ransome: "When a thing's done, it's done, and if it's not done right, do it differently next time," and that persistence, that modus operandi of constant refinement, seems to be very much at the centre of the Monroe method. While he will often talk in abstract terms, e.g. of "the compulsion to turn a feeling into an object," what he shows us - as the reader virtually looks over his shoulder at the jeweller's bench - is the whole process. So, for example, a bee observed in a Swiss forest eventually becomes the centrepiece of a collection called 'Original Sin' which takes its inspiration from Lucas Cranach's paintings Adam and Eve and Cupid Complaining to Venus, and is the subject of many painstaking hours at the workstation with piercing saws and files, a setter's tool and solder. An obsession with gardening, "seeded" in the orchards of the family home, becomes a story, a picture book, an exhibition, and a jewellery collection which includes a watering can pendant, pea pod earrings, plant label charms and a 'secret garden' key, while the Two Turtle Doves of the book's title have their beginnings as birds glimpsed at dawn on a 'Swallows & Amazons' childhood river trip, a netsuke in the collection of the V&A, and as a necklace become a gift of great significance.

    Memories flow through the book linking times past to time present, and showing that for the artist, no moment is without creative potential. In telling his story - and in designing his jewellery - Alex Monroe shows us just how rich that power is and how it permeates life in a truly organic way. His book is a delight.

Slightly Famous People's Foxes

    To celebrate their tenth birthday, the excellent Slightly Foxed have published Slightly Famous People's Foxes, a charming little collection of vulpine characters drawn by (very) famous friends of theirs, with all profits from the sale of the book going to the Hospital School at Great Ormond Street.

    Oliver Pritchett has written a witty introduction on 'the literary fox', and has furnished each drawing with a commentary, but the sketches themselves show a great deal of humour and often not inconsiderable talent for the medium!

    Just as an example of their work, below are foxes drawn by Alexander McCall Smith and Diana Athill,

while other contributors include Tracy Chevalier, Alan Garner, Andrew Motion, Isabel Colegate,  and Michael Palin (there are 26 in all).

    The book costs £5 and is available from the Slightly Foxed website and all good bookshops.

Books in brief: The Other Typist

 
   The Other Typist by Suzanne Rindell: a very slick, assured psychological thriller set in New York City's Lower East Side in 1924.

    Rose Baker is a secretary at the police precinct, transcribing the statements of gangsters, bootleggers - for Prohibition is in full swing - and murderers. All goes on as usual until the arrival of 'the other typist', the magnetic, daring Odalie Lazare, a world apart from the dowdy, dull Rose. But despite their differences, Odalie takes her colleague under her wing, and soon it's a new side to the city that Rose is seeing, and a new way of living to which she quickly adapts.

    An unreliable narrator, a jazz age setting, a very deftly told story - this is a great debut, and Suzanne Rindell is an author to watch.

Publishing Lives

 
   A new series of Publishing Lives begins tomorrow (Monday) on BBC Radio 4 at 1.45pm, and in the first episode Robert McCrum looks at the life of Kaye Webb of Puffin Books.

    "For three generations of children," says Valerie Grove in the preface to her biography So Much To Tell, "the words 'Editor: Kaye Webb' on the title page [of a book] guaranteed quality within".

    As one of those children, I shall be listening with great interest.

Friday reads

    I've spent the week writing reviews (including one whopper) - which will appear elsewhere - so I'm just about out of words, and in the mood now for reading at a gentler pace. I'm going to pick up The Warden (our Book Group March book), and I'm also tucking in to the visual feast that is Liberty: British Colour Pattern: 'A voyage of discovery through the archives and memorabilia of the last great emporium for innovative British design', and they will do me nicely for the weekend.

    How about you?

A question for you

        I wonder if anyone can help with a question which has come in from a reader:-

is it possible to find out the font size of a book to ensure that it will be a comfortable read for someone whose eyes are beginning to give them trouble?

    Large print books are, of course, an option*, but not all books are available in that format, and that size per se is not needed, as any reasonably sized print with decent spacing is all that's required here. While in a physical bookshop a quick browse would yield a range of suitable titles, shopping online or requesting a book from a library's catalogue is a different story.

    Publishers' catalogues often give the size of the actual book, but I haven't come across any information on the print, so if you happen to know of a source for this, please leave a comment and I'll pass it on.

 

*as is an e-reader.

Arrivals - 6

   

     "This is an astonishing and luminous novel," said Hilary Mantel of Grace McCleen's The Professor of Poetry, which is out in paperback shortly.

    "Whilst recovering from cancer, Elizabeth Stone, a respected academic, returns to the city where she was a student over thirty years ago to investigate some little-known papers by T.S. Eliot, which she believes contain the seeds of her masterpiece; a masterpiece that centres on a poem given to her when she was eighteen by Professor Hunt ...

    But as the days pass in the city that both enchants and disquiets her, Elizabeth's memories return her to a time shadowed by loneliness, longing and quiet despair, and to an undeclared but overwhelming love for the elusive Professor Hunt. Haunted by a sense of waste, stunned by the intensity of her emotion and faced with new challenges, Elizabeth Stone comes to realise she is facing the biggest test of her life.

    With shades of Jane Eyre and A.S. Byatt, this is a timeless novel that takes time as its subject, a novel filled with silence and stillness that nevertheless rejoices in the musical, dynamic qualities of prose."

Arrivals - 5

   

    "On the night of May 3rd., 1942, fifteen-year-old Alma Braithwaite and her fellow boarders at Goldwyn's school huddle in an air-raid shelter as bombs rain down on Exeter in one of the Baedeker raids. By the time the girls emerge, half the school is in ruins and the city centre has been destroyed.

    Twenty-one years on, Alma lives alone in the family house and teaches music at her old school. She's moderately content, until the death of the long-serving headmistress brings a new broom in the form of the steely, modernizing Miss Yates. A new student starts too - the daughter of a man Alma hasn't seen since 1942, when he played a pivotal role in her life. Suddenly, Alma is taken back to the summer that followed the raids, a summer of numbing loss yet also of youthful exuberance, friendship and dancing.

    In the enthralling After the Bombing, Clare Morrall captures the impact of the Second World War on those at home, particularly the ones too young to take part, and poignantly conveys the long shadow it cast for a generation of women."

Arrivals - 4

   

    "A novel about marriage, poetry and art, and what it is to live under the shadow of a great man, The Poets' Wives by David Park is literary writing at its finest.

    Three women, each destined to play the role of a poet's wife: Catherine Blake, wife of William Blake, the nineteenth century poet, painter and engraver; Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, whose poetry cost him his life under Stalin's terror; and the wife of a fictional contemporary Irish poet, who looks back on her marriage during the days after his death.

    Set across continents and centuries and in very different circumstances, these women confront the contradictions between art and life, contemplate their sacrifices for another's creativity, and struggle with infidelities in many forms. They find themselves custodians of their husbands' work, work that has been woven with intimacies and which has shaped their own lives in the most unexpected of ways."

    While we're on the subject of poets' wives, may I recommend The Poet's Wife by Judith Allnatt - there's a post on it here.

Arrivals - 3

   

     "Born just before the First World War, Elizabeth Pringle has been a familiar yet solitary figure on the Scottish island of Arran. A dutiful daughter, an inspirational teacher, a gardener. But did anyone really know her? When Elizabeth dies, her will contains a surprise. She has left her home and her belongings to someone who is all but a stranger, a young mother she watched pushing a pram down the road more than thirty years ago.

    Now it falls to Martha, the baby in that pram, to find out how her mother inherited the house in such strange circumstances, and in doing so, perhaps leave her own past behind. But first she has to find the answer to the question: who was Elizabeth Pringle?"

    The Legacy of Elizabeth Pringle by Kirsty Wark (yes, the very one) is "a multi-generational story of love and belonging; a captivating and haunting story of the richness beneath so-called ordinary lives, and the secrets and threads that hold women together ..."

Arrivals - 2

   

    The arrival here of a new Flavia de Luce book is always a pleasant moment with its anticipation of much reading pleasure. With the latest in Alan Bradley's wonderful series, that joy is tempered by the knowledge that this is billed as the last one!

    I shan't say anything about the plot of the new book for fear of spoiling things for anyone who hasn't yet read the earlier ones, but The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches will be published on 13th. March, and while Flavia fans will be eagerly awaiting it, I'd urge anyone who hasn't yet discovered this clever, nostalgic series to make a start on the books soon as they are too good to miss.

Arrivals - 1

  

    Lots of exciting-looking books have come in over the last few days, so I'm going to do a few short preview posts to show you what's new, beginning with Gone are the Leaves by Anne Donovan:

"Feilamort can remember very little of his childhood before he became a choir boy in the home of the Laird and his French wife. Feilamort has one of the finest voices in the land. It is a gift he believes will protect him . . .

Deirdre has lived in the castle all her short life. Apprentice to her mother, she embroiders the robes for one of Scotland's finest families. She can capture, with just a few delicate stitches, the ripeness of a bramble or the glint of bronze on a fallen leaf. But with her mother pushing her to choose between a man she does not love and a closed world of prayer and solitude, Deirdre must decide for herself what her life will become.

When the time comes for Feilamort to make an awful decision, his choice catapults himself and Deirdre head-first into adulthood. As the two friends learn more about Feilamort's forgotten childhood, it becomes clear that someone close is intent on keeping it hidden. Full of wonder and intrigue, and told with the grace and charm for which Anne Donovan is so beloved, Gone Are the Leaves is the enchanting story of one boy's lost past and his uncertain future."

I laughed, I cried, I couldn't put it down

   

    I went out on a limb the other day and said, on the basis of one chapter, that Niall Williams's History of the Rain looked like being a special book. Well, I've read the whole of it now, and it is just that.

    I'll write a proper post when I've gathered my thoughts, but by way of a place-holder, let me say that it took me from laughter to tears, and I could not put it down.

    Look out for it when it's published on 10th. April -  it is the perfect booklover's book and a lot more besides. Quite wonderful!

Being aboard a readership

   

    "I love the feel of a book. I love the touch and smell and sound of the pages. I love the handling. A book is a sensual thing. You sit curled in a chair with it or like me you take it to bed and it's, well, enveloping. Weird I am. I know. What the Hell? As Bobby Bowe says to everything. You either get it or you don't. When my father first took me to Ennis Library I went down among the shelves and felt company, not only the company of the writers, but the readers too, because they had lifted and opened and read these books. The books were worn in a way they can only get worn by hands and eyes and minds; these were the literal original Facebooks, the books where faces had been, and I just loved it, the whole strange sense of being aboard a readership."

    From History of the Rain by Niall Williams.

(Eighty pages in, I'm completely hooked by this novel - and that's an apt choice of word as you'll see if you read it; so far it's glorious!)

Books for the incurably curious

    The shortlist for the 2014 Wellcome Book Prize has been announced and it includes Elizabeth Gilbert's cracking novel The Signature of All Things (which I wrote about here). The prize "aims to stimulate interest and debate about medical science through books and reading", and that book certainly takes things botanical to a new level - it is wonderfully engaging and entertaining.

    The other shortlisted books are Wounded: From Battlefield to Blighty, 1914-1918 by Emily Mayhew, “ a homage to the courage and determination of the men and women who cared for – and saved the lives of – the hundreds of thousands of British soldiers who were wounded at the Western Front”; Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-Doctors in Victorian England Inconvenient People by Sarah Wise, which “brilliantly exposes the phenomenon of false allegations of lunacy (and the dark motives behind them) in the Victorian period”; Creation: The Origin of Life / The Future of Life by Adam Rutherford, "an account of the synthetic biology revolution"; Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks, "an investigation into the phenomenon"; and Far From The Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity: A Dozen Kinds of Loveby Andrew Solomon, "a book about how parents relate to children".

    The winner will be announced on 29th. April.

Did you know ...?

    "In Ancient Greece, the act of reading was seen as a kind of possession by the text; the loss of autonomy involved in allowing one’s spirit to be inhabited by an unknown writer meant that reading was viewed with suspicion – an activity unsuitable for free citizens and grown men."

    That gem comes from a review of Ewan Clayton's The Golden Thread: The Story of Writing.