Cornflower Books

TBR 6: This Is Where I Am

    "Glasgow. A city of colour and contrast. A place where two worlds collide - and are changed forever. When the Scottish Refugee Council assigns Deborah Maxwell to act as Somali refugee Abdi's new mentor, the two are drawn into an awkward friendship. They must spend a year together, meeting once a month in a different part of Glasgow. As recently-widowed Deborah opens Abdi's eyes to her beloved city and its people, he teaches her about the importance of family - and of laying ghosts to rest. All Abdi has brought with him is his four-year-old daughter, Rebecca, who lives in a silence no one can reach, until one day Rebecca starts talking, and they realise why she stopped.

    Heartbreaking, uplifting and unforgettable, this is a novel of loss and guilt, friendship and hope, and of what can grow from the ashes of the past."

    This Is Where I Am is by Karen Campbell and is to be a BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime.

                                               ~~~~~                

    That concludes today's selection from the TBR piles - I hope some of these books have caught your eye as they have mine.

TBR 5: Secrecy

    "A novel rich as the past it conjures up, weaving a story as playful and disturbing as the strange wax sculptures that its hero gives life to."

    That is Sarah Dunant's summing-up of Secrecy by Rupert Thomson, "a love story, a murder mystery, a portrait of a famous city in an age of austerity, an exercise in concealment and revelation; but above all, a trapdoor narrative, one story dropping unexpectedly into another, the ground always slippery and uncertain."

    Florence, 1691. "The Renaissance is long gone, and the city is a dark, repressive place where everything is forbidden and anything is possible. The Enlightenment may be just around the corner but knowledge is still the property of the few, and they guard it fiercely. Art, sex and power - these, as always, are the obsessions.

    Facing serious criminal charges, Gaetano Zummo is forced to flee his native Siracusa at the age of twenty, first to Palermo, then Naples, but always has the feeling that he is being pursued by his past, and that he will never be free of it. Zummo works as an artist in wax. Fascinated by the plague, he makes small wooden cabinets in which he places graphic, tortured models of the dead and dying. But Cosimo III, Tuscany's penultimate Medici ruler, gives Zummo his most challenging commission yet, and as he tackles it his path entwines with that of the apothecary's daughter Faustina, whose secret is even more explosive than his."

TBR 4: A Parachute in the Lime Tree

    "April 1941. German bombers are in the air, about to attack Belfast. Oskar is a Luftwaffe conscript whose sweetheart, Elsa, was forced to flee Berlin for Ireland two years before. War-weary, he longs for escape.

    In remote Dunkerin, Kitty awakes to find a parachute trapped in one of the lime trees. When she discovers Oskar, injured and foraging for food in her kitchen, he becomes a rare and exciting secret. But Ireland during the 'Emergency' is an uneasy place, and word of the parachute soon spreads.

    Meanwhile, Elsa is haunted by the plight of the parents she left behind. With the threat of Nazi invasion, she feels far from secure.

    A chance encounter with Elsa, and Charlie, a young medical student, finds himself falling in love.

    Oskar, Kitty, Elsa, Charlie. Their lives intertwine in a climate of war, exile, and ever-uncertain neutrality."

    That's A Parachute in the Lime Tree by Annemarie Neary.

TBR 3: Zaremba, or Love and the Rule of Law

   

    Zaremba: or Love and the Rule of Law by Michelle Granas is "an enchanting book":

 "In Warsaw, Cordelia, a shy and high-minded polio victim lives a life of seclusion caring for her odd family until events thrust her into a struggle against political corruption and covert activities. Zaremba, a wealthy businessman, is about to be arrested on trumped-up charges and only Cordelia can save him.... Both a love story and a topical description of the temptations faced by new democracies, this is an upbeat book for people who enjoy language, conversation, and human relationships".

TBR 2: Heat Lightning

    Persephone Books' 101st. title is Heat Lightning by Helen Hull. First published in 1932, this has been described as "an American treat for fans of Dorothy Whipple", and is set over a week in a Michigan town.

    "Amy Norton has come back to stay with her parents and take a rest from her busy life in New York, but little does her family know that their glamorous and successful daughter is really running from a marriage that is falling apart and a life that does not make her happy. Hoping for a chance to get some peace and clarity, Amy has returned to the fold of the Westover clan, the most prominent family in this once prosperous farming community. But times have changed since she has been gone and her sprawling family is splitting at the seams ..."

    "... exquisite, evocative writing, every line beautifully crafted..."

(The endpaper - and bookmark - is Memories of the Alamo, 1929, a plain weave roller-printed silk by HR Mallinson & Co.)

TBR 1: The Hired Man

   

    Today's clutch of books from the TBR piles begins with The Hired Man by Aminatta Forna, author of the Orange Prize shortlisted The Memory of Love.

    "Gost is surrounded by mountains and fields of wild flowers. The summer sun burns. The winter brings freezing winds. Beyond the boundaries of the town an old house which has lain empty for years is showing signs of life. One of the windows, glass darkened with dirt, today stands open, and the lively chatter of English voices carries across the fallow fields. Laura and her teenage children have arrived.

    A short distance away lies the hut of Duro Kolak who lives alone with his two hunting dogs. As he helps Laura with repairs to the old house, they uncover a mosaic beneath the ruined plaster and, in the rising heat of summer, painstakingly restore it. But Gost is not all it seems; conflicts long past still suppurate beneath the scars."

    "A beautiful, moving story about the aftermath of civil war in the Balkans, its descriptions of the Croatian landscape are breath-taking and the novel's gentle pace reflects the trepidation with which the characters face the horrors of the past."

    Before I leave this book for now I must comment on its jacket - another strikingly beautiful design by Holly Macdonald, whose cover for Kate Worsley's She Rises (among others) was remarked upon last week.           

Sanctuary Line

    A few days ago I quoted a passage from Jane Urquhart's novel Sanctuary Line. I chose it for its imagery, but also because I suspected (I had read no further at that point) that it would somehow be emblematic of the whole book, and having finished it now I think that is so. That picture of reflections, refraction, views mirrored in other views, and so on, is much like the story itself, or rather the way in which it is told.

    Liz Crane is an entomologist who is researching the migration of monarch butterflies and has come back to live at her family's farm on the Canadian shore of Lake Erie. The farm was founded generations earlier, and the family's history has echoed down the years, myth and memory, anecdote and cautionary tale, told and retold. Most recently, the farm was home to Liz's uncle, aunt and cousin Amanda, and Liz and her mother spent every summer there, but the events of one hot night changed everything for those present, and now it is that more recent past that has left its impression on the old house and the long-neglected land.

    The family, once large, thriving and forward-looking, is now depleted. Liz's cousin Amanda, to whom she was very close, was a brilliant military strategist who has been killed in Afghanistan; her uncle, a man who had to "own the lion's share of experience", disappeared and has never been seen again, even at his daughter's repatriation ceremony and funeral. Liz's aunt is dead, her mother in a retirement home, so it is Liz alone who lives with memories and tries to make sense of the past - to make the pieces fit. "Absence confronts me daily, but my uncle's disappearance - his departure to nowhere - was the most dramatic, and the most deliberate, the most final abdication of them all." The narrative advances towards that fatal night and then retreats, alludes to the events and their consequences, seeks to find cause and measure effect - and all the while multiple histories are being plied together to make a single strand.

    This is a very even, measured book, introspective in nature - although it becomes clear Liz is telling her story to someone other than the reader - sensitive, beautifully crafted and rich in its simple economy. The theme of migration which connects the butterflies, the ancestors who came from Ireland to settle by the Lake, the Mexican farm workers flown in for seasonal work, even Liz and her mother and their summer visits to the farm, is woven through past and present day, and with it ideas of belonging or fitting in, acting according to type and heritage, conforming or not. I had not read Jane Urquhart before, but on the strength of this book I'm looking forward to discovering more of her work (Linda, in her comment here, recommends The Stone Carvers very highly).

Books in brief: The President's Hat

    

    Mr. Cornflower writes:

    Thirty years ago I was living in Paris, on the Left Bank, in a little side street near the Seine. Our side of the street was rather scruffy and down at heel; the other side was already being transformed by wealthy landlords and residents. I stood at my window and looked from shabby carpet tiles and cheap furniture across to a world of polished floorboards and tasteful bibelots. Part of the magnetic attraction to investors was the location, in the next street, of the pied-à-terre belonging to the most powerful man in the country: François Mitterrand, President of the Republic. In France, as elsewhere, money follows power.

    I had pushed this brush with greatness far back into the attic of my memory until Cornflower kindly put into my hands the charming and evocative novel by Antoine Laurain, The President's Hat. He imagines an ordinary man who by accident finds himself in possession of Mitterrand's hat, and from this spins a series of delightful tales about how the hat transforms the lives of the various people through whose hands it passes. The wit and elegance of Laurain's book should win him a much wider audience - you don't have to know anything about French politics in the 1980s to enjoy it.

At the writing desk with Deborah Lawrenson

    Last week Adèle Geras let us join her at the writing desk, today my special guest is novelist Deborah Lawrenson who has kindly allowed us into her home in Kent to have a peep at her study and the desk at which she writes.

    If you don't already know Deborah's books then you have a treat in store! Her most recent novel The Lantern was featured on Channel 4's TV Book Club (click there to watch the programme - Deborah's segment starts at the 10.26 mark); the book was shortlisted for the RNA's Epic Romantic Novel Award last year, and was also a Cornflower Blue, one of my 'books of the year', not to mention having been published to great success in many countries. I described it as "a Jo Malone fragrance in book form" as it is so richly evocative of the French landscape in which it is set - a place Deborah knows well as she and her family have a home in the Luberon which she often writes about on her lovely blog.

 

    Deborah, your books transport us to other times and other places - please tell us about the spot in which they are written. Is your desk a special piece of furniture or just a convenient surface? And do you have a dedicated study, or have you claimed a corner of another room in the house?

    My writing desk fits almost exactly in front of an upstairs window in my study. This is definitely my best working space so far – it’s my daughter’s old bedroom (she moved a floor up for more space) – but I’ve written books in various places in the house: I wrote two early novels in a tiny box room on the top floor, freezing in winter, the archetypal garret; one in the downstairs study which has now been commandeered by my husband; and one on a console table in front of a window in the main sitting room which looked out onto the village high street and made me feel like Jane Austen, though sadly only in the sitting-writing-by-a-window sense.

    What typically sits on your desk while you are working? Reference books, photographs or special bits and pieces? 

    As I have two laptops – one for the book, one for the internet – there’s not much space for more than a few reference books and my notebook. If the thesaurus isn’t on the desk it will be close by on the floor. 

    I can see from the picture that you have a view from your desk, so looking up and out is clearly a help rather than a distraction while you're working.

    There’s a view of evergreen trees and a high yew hedge. I like to see out, especially on a day of heavy rain or snow. It makes me feel cosy and purposeful, and I don’t beat myself up about being too engrossed in writing to go out for a walk. 

    We've been talking about notebooks recently, and I wondered whether a notebook is an important adjunct to the computer for you, at any stage of working. Do you find you need to see a book's structure or 'plot' its plot with notes and diagrams set out on a pinboard, or do you display images of settings, say, to help inspire the words?

    Each book begins with a new bound notebook and I make notes and plans in that. I do try to make all my notes in this notebook but inevitably there will be bits of paper to stick in. No pinboards; the visualization is almost all in my head though I often take photographs of locations to remind me of the location details.

    Is all your writing done at your desk, or do you ever take yourself to cafés or libraries for a change of scene?

    The only time I write away from my desk is when I’m in France. Very occasionally, I will scribble in the notebook while on a train. I found some notes I made while travelling from Avignon to Paris a few years ago. They ended up as the foundation for an episode in The Lantern I always rather liked (see below). 

Bénédicte drifts though the rooms of the lower floors, into the dust of venerable scents: flecks of the lavender held in the corners of drawers; flakes of pine wood armoire; the soot of long-dead fires; and from the present: the deep mossy aroma from cloud formations of damp above the rose-tiled floor; the sharp white smells of late spring flowers outside.

These visitors are new. She is sure she has never seen them before though she closes her eyes and tries to think calmly, to count her breaths, slowing her intake of air, scouring her memory to make sure. When she opens her eyes, they are still there. The strangeness is that they stare straight into her face, just as they look around her so intently, into the corners of the rooms, up to the cracked ceilings, the fissures in the walls, yet they don’t acknowledge her presence. All is silent, but for the tapping of the catalpa tree in the courtyard and the creak of a newly-opened shutter that lets in a shifting band of brightness.

I will sit a while longer, Bénédicte thinks. Watch to see what they do next.

Breathe. Breathe deeply.

    Your husband Rob is a composer, so yours is a musical household, but do you like to listen to music while you work or is silence preferable? And do you do what you can to minimise external interruptions or does that not matter when you're in your stride?

    It varies. I’ve always enjoyed writing to music but haven’t been so keen lately. Throughout most of the first draft I’m working on now, it’s been an unwelcome distraction but I’ve recently started putting some carefully selected CDs on. My current favourite is the swing band soundtrack to Dancing on the Edge, the Stephen Poliakoff series on the BBC – fantastic original music by Adrian Johnston and Paul Englishby, superb! The phone goes on answering machine but I still have to contend with all the usual interruptions with as good a grace as possible.

    Are you very disciplined about work or prone to being easily distracted?

    I am pretty dogged when I’m working and don’t let much distract me, but what has done for the past few months (and this could have something to do with not wanting music on) is the latest production of husband’s panto. The original music and words have been hard to escape…  

    Your fans will be keen to know how the next book is progressing as we're eagerly awaiting it - can you tell us anything about what is currently 'on the desk'?

    A first draft of a new novel. It’s not quite right yet and I’m at the jittery stage, close to the end, worried that it’s not good enough and that I just won’t be able to make it as good a read as it is in my head.

    As an experienced novelist what would you say were the best, most rewarding aspects of the writer's life, and what, if any, are the downsides?

    The most rewarding aspect is playing around with words all day and still being able to say I’m working. The downsides are not getting out enough while work is in progress, with the result that I become a) very dull and b) fatter than I want to be!

    Finally, you've spent many hours 'at the writing desk' and as a result you have built a successful career and an ever-growing readership; what advice would you give to aspiring writers, or to those already in print and hoping to build on that beginning?

     Never give up. Don’t eat that cake.

    Many thanks to Deborah for letting us stand at her elbow and giving us this privileged glimpse of her writing desk.

Re:Pears

    A little more on Iain Pears, and chiefly on his forthcoming work which I first had word of a few months ago and which sounded exciting then but seems to be even more ripe with possibility now that I've read An Instance of the Fingerpost.

    Arcadia is "a great multi-layered story of history and time. It is conceived and written for digital publication and will be first released in a purpose-built app for mobile devices built by Faber and Iain Pears in partnership.

    The novel, whose characters' lives intersect in vivid time-slip stories, is the first of its kind. It mixes genres, periods and styles and can be read in different ways. Readers may approach each narrative as a traditional linear story; or they may follow the episodes of each tale on a cross-linear path. They can read, or leave out, sections as they choose. Different ways of reading create different relationships between the characters, and a different understanding of how stories can be told."

    The app is due to be released in September this year with the hardback and ebook editions following in March 2014.

    For those who prefer more conventional books, may I recommend Iain Pears' Stone's Fall - there's a post on it here - and still on the subject of his oeuvres, has anyone read The Portrait? It looks appealing.

Cornflower Book Group - An Instance of the Fingerpost

   

    Well, then - hands up all those who made it through to the end! If you have read Iain Pears' An Instance Of The Fingerpost, all four parts, all 692 closely worded pages, then I applaud you, and if you haven't finished yet, or you've abandoned it, then I'd say it is worth persevering.

    It's a brilliant piece of writing, a sequence of events recounted through four dictinct voices, four sets of perceptions and preoccupations, four unique presentations of 'the facts'. It encompasses a vast amount of knowledge of life and culture in Restoration England, a time of political upheaval and manoeuvring and intellectual ferment - it's worth reading for its insight into the medical and scientific thinking of the period alone. It is complex and intricately plotted, but is it unnecessarily long?

    At roughly 200 pages in, here's the note I made: "Any impatience with the relative circumlocution should be countered with a reminder that it's there for a reason; sit back and enjoy the ride and don't agitate about reaching the destination quickly or soon." You may disagree! Granted, by mid-way through the third part I was finding it hard going, but the pace picked up in part four, and the ending was surprising and ingenious - worth the wait, I think.

    The author has some fun at his own expense with this passage from early in Prestcott's narrative: "It is my desire to set out clearly my account of events, and not bother with the silliness indulged in by so-called authors trying to earn spurious fame....All those elaborate conceits and hidden meanings. Say what you mean to say, then be silent, is my motto, and books would be better - and a lot shorter - if more people listened to my advice."

    A crime novel and a piece of literary sleight-of-hand, a combination of artifice and scholarship, a work which puts flesh on the bones of real characters of the time, and which takes a single act in the essentially closed world of an Oxford college and uses it as fine focal point and as cause or effect of so much else in the wider world.

    Over to you.

                                                    ~~~~~

    The 'cake' to go with this book is here.

Where's your reading taking you?

    For the last few days I've been on a farm on the Canadian shore of Lake Erie in the present day thanks to Jane Urquhart's fine novel Sanctuary Line (from which there's a short extract here). Now I'm across the lake in Ohio and I've gone back in time to the 1850s. I'm with Honor Bright, a young Quaker woman from Dorset who has travelled to America in the company of her sister who is to be married to Adam Cox, a draper who emigrated a few years earlier.

    Honor is the heroine of Tracy Chevalier's new novel The Last Runaway. She's an expert seamstress and quilter, and en route to her new home fate has brought her to the household of Belle Mills, a milliner, so in return for board and lodging for a few days, Honor is plying her needle making and decorating hats and bonnets for the ladies of the town of Wellington - headgear far more elaborate than she herself would ever wear. Honor has already encountered Belle's brother, the slave hunter Donovan, and it looks as though that acquaintanceship may prove difficult for her.

    I'm only 50 or so pages in but loving the book so far, and the needlework aspect of the story - which is clearly going to be of some significance - is an added pleasure.

    What are you reading just now, and where's your book taking you in terms of country and period?

TBR 6: The Scent of Death

    I read Andrew Taylor's The Anatomy of Ghosts a couple of years ago and loved it (as you'll see here), so I'm delighted to have his latest book to look forward to:

     The Scent of Death is set in Manhattan in 1778, and as the last part of America under British rule, "New York is home to a swelling tide of refugees seeking justice from the British crown. Edward Savill is sent from London to investigate the claims of dispossessed loyalists, but he soon becomes embroiled in the case of a gentleman murdered in the city's notorious Canvas Town. An escaped slave hangs for the crime, but Savill is convinced they have executed the wrong man.

    Lodging with the respected Wintour family, Savill senses the mystery deepening. Judge Wintour's beautiful daughter-in-law, Arabella, hides a tragedy in her past, while his son plans a dangerous mission into enemy territory. And what of Mr. Noak, the enigmatic clerk seemingly bent on a dubious course of his own?

    One thing is clear - the killing in Canvas Town was just the start of a trail of murder, and it's leading directly to Savill ..."

TBR 5: The Rosie Project

    "Meet Don. He looks a little like Gregory Peck* and is getting married. He just doesn't know who to yet. But he has designed The Wife Project, using a sixteen-page questionnaire to help him find the perfect partner. She will most definitely not be a barmaid, a smoker, a drinker or a late-arriver. And it's definitely not Rosie Jarman. Absolutely, completely, definitely not."

    Graeme Simsion's debut novel The Rosie Project is to be published in more than 30 countries and is already getting rave reviews from readers who know a thing or two - Marian Keyes, for example, says it's "adorable, really funny and heart-warming, a gem of a book."

    It's a comedy, an ingenious novel, and it introduces us to "one of the most endearing protagonists in contemporary fiction - Don Tillman, a genetics professor who has foibles, unique insights on love and everything else, and a penchant for lobster on Tuesdays".

 

*I read that and - of course - I was hooked.

TBR 4: Traps

 

    "Sweet are the uses of adversity, writes Shakespeare, and Mackenzie Bezos explores that proposition through four damaged lives as they intersect over four suspenseful days. Her characters are beautifully delineated and arrestingly original."

    That's Geraldine Brooks' verdict on Traps by Mackenzie Bezos, "a powerful, warm and wise story of four very different women whose lives come into startling alignment in ways that will transform them forever,"  - a book which has drawn comparisons with the work of Anne Tyler and Jennifer Egan.

    Dana is a security guard trained in special ops but she is terrified of emotional commitment. Jessica is an Oscar-winning actress whose father sells her out to the paparazzi. Vivian is a teenage prostitute who will do anything to protect her twin babies, and Lynn is a recovering alcoholic living in isolation on a ranch in Nevada. Their fates bring them together and offer each of them a chance at redemption and renewal.

TBR 3: She Rises

    "Immensely enjoyable ... full of energy, intelligence and delicious turns of phrase," says Sarah Waters of Kate Worsley's first novel She Rises.

    Set in the mid eighteenth century, this is a tale of drunken sailors, press gangs and smugglers, but at its heart a love story:

    "Louise Fletcher, a dairymaid on an Essex farm, has long been warned of the lure of the sea, for it stole away her father and brother, but when she is offered work in the naval port of Harwich, as maid to a wealthy captain's daughter, she leaps at the chance to see more of the world.

    Young Luke is drinking in a Harwich tavern when he is pressganged and sent to sea aboard a warship. He must learn fast if he is to survive the brutal hardships of a sailor's life, above and below decks.

    Louise navigates her new life amid the streets and alleys of the town where fine houses concealing smugglers' tunnels are flooded by spring tides, and love burns brightly in the shadows. And Luke, aching for the girl he left behind and determined to find his way back to her, embarks on a long and perilous journey across the ocean.

    When Luke's and Louise's worlds collide the consequences are astonishing and irrevocable."

TBR 2: The Promise

    "1900. Young pianist Catherine Wainwright flees fashionable Dayton, Ohio, in the wake of a terrible scandal. Heartbroken and facing destitution, she strikes up a correspndence with a childhood admirer, the recently widowed Oscar Williams, and in desperation agrees to marry him.

    Catherine travels to Oscar's farm on Galveston Island, Texas, and finds she is little prepared for the life that awaits her. The island is remote, the weather sweltering, and Oscar's little boy Andre is grieving for his lost mother.

    Meanwhile for Nan Ogden, Oscar's housekeeper, Catherine's sudden arrival has come as a shock. Not only did she promise Oscar's first wife that she would be the one to take care of little Andre, she has feelings for Oscar which she is struggling to suppress. And when the worst storm in a generation descends, the women will find themselves tested as never before ..."

    The Promise is the new novel from Ann Weisgarber, author of the Orange Prize long-listed The Personal History of Rachel DuPree.

TBR 1: The World Was All Before Them

    "Philip and Sue ... one year, two lives, and what it means to live in them. A story about love and courage, risk and betrayal; about the choices we make and the consequences that shape us. A story that will make you look at the world with new eyes."

    Matthew Reynolds' The World Was All Before Them is "original, exhilarating and tender, at once an epic and a miniature, and a mesmerizing exploration of the way we live now."

    Matthew's first novel was the highly original, satirical, sharply clever Designs for a Happy Home which I wrote about here; having greatly enjoyed that book I'm eager to pick up this one.

TBR

       
    In order to keep up with (even just some) of the recent arrivals I plan to do a series of brief posts today, a book at a time, as short and to the point as I can make them.

    As only a fraction of what comes in will get eventual review posts as such, this seems the best way of flagging up titles you may not have heard about. I'll be back with the first one shortly.

A rich resource

 
   
        One last writing-focused post for now, and this is to point you in the direction of the Royal Society of Literature and specifically their series of masterclasses. What's more, they helpfully post on their website 'top tips' from previous masterclasses and associated reading lists, so here, for example, is the kernel of Candia McWilliam's advice from her class on memoir and imagination:

    "Read. Look. Listen. Remember. Read more. Re-read. SPY. COLLECT. Observe. TUNE IN. [Do not drop out]. Find the right word for the precise feeling, the word that sounds right and lies happily with the words on either side of it.You are weaving tight and close something that must feel light and transparent. To pay attention is everything. Nothing need ever be wasted."

Her reading list on the subject is here.

    Colin Thubron on the evocation of place suggests:

    "In travel, leave behind - as far as you can - all prejudice. Shed your own culture.

    Take full notes as you go*. The vitality of description lies in its detail.

    Don’t be too dutiful. Follow your obsessions."

    And before you leave the RSL site, take a look at the society's marvellous archive of articles and audio recordings - what a rich resource it is.

 

*He must have a wonderful collection of notebooks!