Cornflower Books

Looking forward to reading ...

   

    ... Adventures in Modern Marriage.

    Out next month, William Nicholson's latest novel is set over the week leading up to the 2015 General Election, and revisits the characters from The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life*.

    "Focusing on Henry and Laura Broad and their daughter Carrie, this is a minute - but in true Nicholson style, extraordinarily empathetic - dissection of relationships and what keeps them going. It is an acute and compassionate look at male mid-life crises, female sexual desire, death and the fear of it, children and the trouble with them - all the things we battle with every day."

    "Marriage is a useful arrangement for having children, it has all sorts of economic advantages, but once the children have grown up and left home, and the mortgage has been paid off, what's left? I take the view that our time of life is a time of reinvention. The hard slog is over. We can be young again."

   

*See this post and this one.

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Rule 2: draw a map

    If you have watched the second episode of Andrew Marr's Paperback Heroes you'll know that rule 2 of his guide to fantasy is 'Draw a Map': he cites Game of Thrones as an example of a book in which a map drives the whole story.

    I don't know how central to the plot of Caraval is the map shown above, but this Venice-like plan at the front of the book is certainly a point of interest.

    Caraval is a debut young adult novel by Stephanie Garber to be published in both the UK and US in January with film rights having been sold to Twentieth Century Fox; here's the blurb:

    "Scarlett Dragna has never left the tiny isle of Trisda, pining afar for the wonder of Caraval, a once-a-year week-long performance where the audience participates in the show.

    For Scarlett and her beloved and wild younger sister Tella it represents freedom, an escape from her ruthless, abusive father and from her own dark past.

    When the sisters' long-awaited invitations to Caraval finally arrive, it seems their dreams have come true. But Scarlett is too scared of her father to leave Trisda and so she is kidnapped by Tella and a dangerous yet oh-so-seductive sailor named Julian and taken to the mystical Isla de los Suenos, the site of Caraval.

    Legend has it that everything that happens during Caraval is only an elaborate performance. Nonetheless, on arrival Scarlett quickly becomes enmeshed in a dangerous game of love, magic and heartbreak. And real or not, she must find Tella before the game is over, and her sister disappears forever ... with the evil Master of Caraval, Legend."

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Looking forward to reading ...

   

    ... The Horseman by Tim Pears.

    "1911. In a forgotten valley on the Devon-Somerset border, the seasons unfold, marked only by the rituals of the farming calendar. Twelve-year-old Leopold Sercombe skips school to help his father, a carter. Skinny and pale, with eyes as dark as sloes, Leo dreams of a job on the Master's stud farm.

    As ploughs furrow the hard January fields, the Master's daughter, young Miss Charlotte, shocks the estate's tenants by wielding a gun at the annual shoot. Spring comes, Leo watches swallows build their nests, hedgerows thrum with life and days lengthen into summer. Leo is breaking a colt for his father when a boy dressed in a Homburg, breeches and riding boots appears. Peering under the stranger's hat, he discovers Charlotte. And so a friendship begins, bound by a deep love of horses, but divided by rigid social boundaries - boundaries that become increasingly difficult to navigate as they approach adolescence.

    Hallucinatory, beautiful and suffused with the magic of nature, this tale of an unlikely friendship and the loss of innocence builds with a hypnotic power. Evoking the realities of agricultural life with precise, poetic brushstrokes, Tim Pears has created a masterful pastoral novel, the first in a dazzling new trilogy."

    I've read and enjoyed Tim Pears' Disputed Land (I refer to it here), and have high hopes for this book which will be out in early January.

Can't wait to read ...

   

    ... Elizabeth Jane Howard: A Dangerous Innocence by Artemis Cooper, which has just come out.

    The author acknowledges her subject thus:

    "In giving me the opportunity to write her life, Elizabeth Jane Howard bestowed a great gift; so my first and most heartfelt thanks must go to her. I had five long interviews with Jane at her house in Bungay, Suffolk, over the course of 2013. She enjoyed the process of being interviewed and talked simply and easily about her life, more diffidently about her books. She was justly proud of what she had achieved, yet I felt it had come at a great cost. Her hands were always busy as we talked, with knitting or embroidery; and occasionally she lifted her eyes from her work to give me a glance of such startling intensity that I felt she was looking straight through me."

    For more from both ladies I can recommend Slipstream: A Memoir by Elizabeth Jane Howard, and Writing at the Kitchen Table, Artemis Cooper's biography of Elizabeth David.

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Looking forward to reading ...

   

    ... Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz (out early next month):

    "A book within a book, a mystery within a mystery [...] When editor Susan Ryeland is given the tattered manuscript of Alan Conway's latest novel, she has little idea it will change her life.  She's worked with the revered crime writer for years and his detective, Atticus Pünd, is renowned for solving crimes in the sleepy English villages of the 1950s. As Susan knows only too well, vintage crime sells handsomely.  It's just a shame that it means dealing with an author like Alan Conway.

 But Conway's latest tale of murder at Pye Hall is not quite what it seems.  Yes, there are dead bodies and a host of intriguing suspects, but hidden in the pages of the manuscript there lies another story: a tale written between the very words on the page, telling of real-life jealousy, greed, ruthless ambition and murder."

    I can't wait!

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Interesting arrivals: 4

   

    "What did it feel like to be a woman living in Paris from 1939 to 1949? These were years of fear, power, aggression, courage, deprivation and secrets until - finally - with France's liberation came renewal and retribution. Yet, even at the darkest moments of Occupation, with the Swastika flying from the Eiffel Tower and pet dogs abandoned howling on the streets, glamour was ever present.

    It was women, more than men, who came face to face with the German conquerors on a daily basis - perhaps selling them their clothes or travelling alongside them on the Métro, where a German soldier had priority over seats. How did these women react to their subjugators? What made them collaborate or resist? And did they have any choice? By looking at a wide range of individuals from collaborators to resisters, actresses and prostitutes to teachers and writers, Anne Sebba shows that women, whether they were Nazi wives, spies, mothers, mistresses, or fashion and jewellery designers, had to make life-and-death decisions every day, and often did whatever they needed to survive.

    Some women, like the heiress Béatrice de Camondo or novelist Irène Némirovsky, converted to Catholicism; others like racing driver Violette Morris embraced the Nazi philosophy; Coco Chanel even retreated to the Ritz with a German lover. A young medical student, Anne Spoerry, gave lethal injections to camp inmates but was also known to have saved the lives of Jews.

    But this is not just a book about wartime. Sebba also explores the aftershock of the Second World War and the choices demanded. How did the women who survived to see the liberation of Paris come to terms with their actions and those of others? Although politics lies at its heart, Les Parisiennes is above all an account of the lives of the people of the city and, most of all, its women and young girls."

    Les Parisiennes by Anne Sebba will be published on 14th. July.

Interesting arrivals: 2

 

    "Mrs. Laetitia Rodd is the impoverished widow of an archdeacon, living modestly in Hampstead with her landlady Mrs. Bentley. She is also a private detective of the utmost discretion. In winter 1850, her brother Frederick, a criminal barrister, introduces her to Sir James Calderstone, a wealthy and powerful industrialist who asks Mrs. Rodd to investigate the background of an 'unsuitable' woman his son intends to marry - a match he is determined to prevent.

    In the guise of governess, she travels to the family seat, Wishtide, deep in the frozen Lincolnshire countryside, where she soon discovers that the Calderstones have more to hide than most. As their secrets unfold, the case takes an unpleasant turn when a man is found dead outside a tavern. Mrs. Rodd's keen eyes and astute wits are taxed as never before in her search for the truth - which carries her from elite drawing rooms to London's notorious inns and its steaming laundry houses.

    Dickensian in its scope and characters, The Secrets of Wishtide brings nineteenth century society vividly to life and illuminates the effect of Victorian morality on women's lives. Introducing an irresistible new detective, the first book in the Laetitia Rodd Mystery series will enthral and delight."

    The Secrets of Wishtide (which will be out soon) is by Kate Saunders whose work includes the award-winning Five Children on the Western Front, a follow-on to E. Nesbit's Five Children and It stories.

Interesting arrivals: 1

   

    Many of us are fans of Sarah Moss's work and will be glad to know that she has a new novel - The Tidal Zone - out on 7^th July. Here's the gist:

    "Adam is a stay-at-home dad who is also working on a history of the bombing and rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral. He is a good man, and he is happy. But one day, he receives a call from his daughter's school to inform him that, for no apparent reason, fifteen-year-old Miriam has collapsed and stopped breathing. In that moment, he is plunged into a world of waiting, agonising, not knowing. The story of his life and the lives of his family are rewritten and re-told around this shocking central event, around a body that has inexplicably failed.

    In this exceptionally courageous and unflinching novel of contemporary life Sarah Moss goes where most of us wouldn't dare to look, and the result is riveting - unbearably sad, but also miraculously funny and ultimately hopeful. The Tidal Zone explores parental love, overwhelming fear, illness and recovery. It is about clever teenagers and the challenges of marriage. It is about the NHS, academia, sex and gender in the twenty-first century, the work/life juggle, and the politics of packing lunches and loading dishwashers. It confirms Sarah Moss as a unique voice in modern fiction and a writer of luminous intelligence."

    For anyone not acquainted with Sarah Moss's novels, there's a post on Night Waking here and one on Bodies of Light here. I've yet to read Signs for Lost Children, the third book in that excellent 'series'.

Looking good ...

 

    ... The Countenance Divine by Michael Hughes, out in August:

    "In 1999 a programmer is trying to fix the Millennium Bug, but can't shake the sense he's been chosen for something.

     In 1888, five women are brutally murdered in the East End by a troubled young man in thrall to a mysterious master.

     In 1777 an apprentice engraver called William Blake has a defining spiritual experience; thirteen years later this vision returns.

     In 1666, poet and revolutionary John Milton completes the epic for which he will be remembered centuries later.

     But from where comes the feeling that the world is about to end?"

 

    Toby Litt says this is "one of the most exciting novels I've read in recent years. Michael Hughes writes like a brilliant cross between David Mitchell and Hilary Mantel," while the acquiring editor at publisher John Murray says, "It’s very rare that a debut both has this much ambition and also delivers on that ambition; it’s dizzying, genre-blending, polyphonic and one hell of a ride."

Books inspired by books

   

    "I always feel like my books are inspired by my books. Bel Canto was a novel that took place outside of linear time. I got so frustrated writing a book in which nobody knew what day it was that I decided my next book, Run, would take place in twenty-four hours. In Run I had a character who was an ichthyologist, and I enjoyed writing about science so much that in my next book, State of Wonder, pretty much all the characters are scientists. I was nervous about publishing my essay collection, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage* because it was so personal, but as it turned out no one seemed to care. It made me wonder about writing a novel that was closer to home, something that had more to do with families and less to do with the Amazon, opera, or fish, some of the far-flung subjects I'd been tackling. I wanted to approach the novel more in the way I'd approached the essays: instead of the story coming from research it would be built from the material I had at hand. Which isn't to say the book is true, it's not, but it's made from things I knew and understood. I love doing research but I have to say this was a lot of fun too."

    That's Ann Patchett talking about the genesis of her latest novel Commonwealth which will be out here in September. It's the story of a family, told over fifty years and offers "a window into how we change from the children we were, and how we are always ourselves." I'm greatly looking forward to reading it.

 

*I've no post as such on that one, but as with Bel Canto and State of Wonder (I've yet to read Run), I warmly recommend it.

To be read ...

   

     I'm very interested to read the previously unpublished novel The Theoretical Foot, a "long-lost gem" by the marvellous food writer M.F.K. Fisher, which will be out next month:

    "Susan Harper and Joe Kelly, in love and hitchhiking through Europe, never want this perfect, passionate summer to end. It is the late 1930s and society frowns on the slack morals of couples living in sin. But these tiresome strictures are swept away when they arrive at La Prairie, the elegant haven on Lake Geneva where Joe's enigmatic friend Sara and her lover Tim preside - where judgement is suspended and time ebbs deliciously away.

    Surrounded by orchards heavy with plums and meadows splashed with poppies, lunches are long, youth is languorous and wine flows. As morning gives way to afternoon and sunset brings the evening's festivities, the unseen tensions and desires of the group are revealed, the fleeting yearnings and the long-held resentments.

    [...] the novel illuminates moral attitudes in the 1930s and shows glimpses of a refugee-flooded Europe blighted by the rise of Fascism and the menace of another war. Enchanting, light, yet suffused with the darkness of what is to come, The Theoretical Foot is a witty and bold portrait of a bohemian life under threat."

                                                ~

    If you've never read Mrs. Fisher's food writing, you've missed a delight. The Art of Eating brings together her five most famous books, and is, in Julia Child's words, "the essence of M.F. K. Fisher"; it's to be read hungrily!

    Frank McCourt said of her, "If I were teaching high school English, I'd use Fisher's books to show how to write simply, how to enjoy food and drink but, most of all, how to enjoy life." He's right.

Hot off the press

    My Biannually has yet to arrive, but the postie has brought two of Persephone Books' new releases, Gardeners' Choice by Evelyn Dunbar and Charles Mahoney, a beautifully illustrated plantsman's handbook first published in 1937, and Greengates, a novel by R.C. Sherriff dating from 1936.

    I was quick to order as soon as I saw the books were available so I've been sent a selection of endpapers as well - not sure what I'll do with them, but they are very nice to have and they remind me of some great favourites such as Miss Buncle's Book and The Home-Maker.

Book of the day - After Alice

    "What happened to those left behind when Alice went to Wonderland?

    When Alice fell down the rabbit-hole she found Wonderland as rife with inconsistent rules and abrasive egos as the world she left behind. But how did Victorian Oxford react to Alice's disappearance?

    Gregory Maguire turns his imagination to the question of underworlds, undergrounds, underpinnings and understandings old and new, offering an inventive spin on Lewis Carroll's enduring tale, this year celebrating its 150th. birthday. Ada, a friend mentioned briefly in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, sets out to visit Alice, but arriving a moment too late, tumbles down the rabbit-hole herself.

    Ada brings to Wonderland her own imperfect apprehension of cause and effect as she embarks on an odyssey to find Alice and bring her safely home from this surreal world below the world. The White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, and the bloodthirsty Queen of Hearts interrupt their mad tea party to suggest a conundrum: if Eurydice can ever be returned to the arms of Orpheus, or if Lazarus can be raised from the tomb, perhaps Alice can be returned to life.

    Either way, everything that happens next is After Alice."

    After Alice by Gregory Maguire, out later this month; jacket illustration by Perrin.

Book of the day - Nelly Dean

    Here's a book to look out for, to be published later this week.

     Nelly Dean is the debut novel by Alison Case, professor of English and nineteenth century specialist, and it has acquired a powerful advocate in Tracy Chevalier whose support for it extends much further than simply contributing a jacket quote to appearing alongside the author at literary festivals.

    Tracy (who knows a thing or two about the Brontes and their novels) says, "Alison Case has cracked open Wuthering Heights and inserted into the gaps her own richly imagined story. In doing so she manages to pay homage to Emily Bronte without copying her. I never thought I needed more Wuthering Heights. Now I wonder how I could have been satisfied with only the original telling."

    Nelly Dean is "a gripping and heart-breaking novel that reimagines life at Wuthering Heights through the eyes of the Earnshaws' loyal servant, Nelly Dean.

    Nelly has been Hindley's closest companion for as long as she can remember: as long as she has been victim to the lashing out of her father's hand, and as long as she has lived freely at the great house, Wuthering Heights, at her mother's insistence.

    When the benevolent master, Mr. Earnshaw, brings a wild child into the house, Nelly must give up playing with her beloved Hindley and be called servant, following in her mother's footsteps to give herself to the family.

    Soon Nelly is not the only one in the house who must serve. As Hindley takes his place as heir apparent, Heathcliff is rejected and a reign of violence begins that cannot be stopped, even by the will of Nelly herself. And when the new heir of Wuthering Heights is born, Nelly will be tested like never before, as she finds out what it is to truly 'know thy master', and in doing so, know great sacrifice.

    .... Nelly Dean is at once an enthralling literary tale, and a clever, rich testament to Bronte's work."

To be read: Where my heart used to beat

  

    "On a small island off the south coast of France, Robert Hendricks, an English doctor who has seen the best and worst the twentieth century had to offer, is forced to confront the events that made up his life.

    His host, and antagonist, is Alexander Pereira, a man whose time is running out and who has commissioned Robert to write his biography, but he seems to know more about his guest than Hendricks himself does and is more interested in Robert's past than he is in revealing his own. Together they explore whether a life comprises events themselves or the way in which an individual chooses to remember them.

    The search for sanity takes us through the war in Italy in 1944, a passionate love that seems to hold out hope, the great days of idealistic work in the 1960s and finally - unforgettably - back into the trenches of the Western Front.

    The recurring themes of Sebastian Faulks's fiction are here brought together with a new stylistic brilliance as the novel casts a long, baleful light over the century we have left behind but may never fully understand.

    Daring, ambitious and in the end profoundly moving, this is Faulks's most remarkable book yet."

    Where My Heart Used to Beat will be published on 10th. September.

    For more Faulks, click here.

Hands up, all H.E. Bates fans

    Who else is a lover of H.E. Bates' work but hasn't read any for years?

    If you're a fan you'll be pleased to hear that this year and next Bloomsbury are re-issuing the complete short story collections in ebook format with some of them to come out in paperback, too. I have the first of the set, Day's End and Other Stories, and I'm very much looking forward to reading it and becoming reacquainted with a writer I loved when I was in my twenties but haven't picked up since.

    Often described as the British Chekhov for his mastery of the short form, Bates was also a bestselling novelist with books such as Love for Lydia, Fair Stood the Wind for France, and the Pop Larkin chronicles (beginning with The Darling Buds of May). His work was also adapted for the big screen, the most renowned film being The Purple Plain starring Gregory Peck.

    His stories "often explore country life, the sadness, joy, humour and darkness in what may be seen as a simpler way of life. He writes intimate character studies against vivid rural landscapes and, in so doing, beautifully captures a spectrum of emotions from innocent childhood and early adolescence to wise and experienced old age."

    If you'd like to sample the short stories you can do so at no cost by downloading Castle in the Air, a humorous piece which was lost and unknown to the Bates family until 2013, and for more information on Bates and his work, visit the H.E. Bates Companion, or sign up to the newsletter, link at the bottom of this page.

Book of the day - The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

      Book jacket design trend: the hole in the cover; (here, the watch face is actually on the endpaper, as you'll see from the picture below).

    I like the sound of this book; The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley "blends historical events with dazzling flights of fancy to plunge readers into a strange and magical past, where time, destiny, genius - and a clockwork octopus[!] - collide."

    "In 1883, Thaniel Steepleton returns to his tiny flat to find a gold pocketwatch on his pillow. But he has worse fears than generous burglars; he is a telegraphist at the Home Office, which has just received a threat for what could be the largest-scale Fenian bombing in history.

    When the watch saves Thaniel's life from a blast that destroys Scotland Yard, he goes in search of its maker, Keita Mori - a kind, lonely immigrant who sweeps him into a new world of clockwork and music. Although Mori seems harmless at first, a chain of unexpected slips proves that he must be hiding something.

    Meanwhile, Grace Carrow is sneaking into an Oxford library dressed as a man. A theoretical physicist, she is desperate to prove the existence of the luminiferous ether before her mother can force her to marry.

    As the lives of these three characters become entwined, events spiral out of control until Thaniel is torn between loyalties, futures and opposing geniuses."

Looking good ...

    ... Black Rabbit Hall by Eve Chase, out on 2nd. July.

    "... beautiful, utterly escapist world", "a sheer delight", "a deliciously intriguing novel whose rich sense of time and place bear more than a few echoes of du Maurier's best".

    The author says, "...I'm terribly nosy, especially when it comes to houses. I have always loved the 'At Home' features in newspapers and magazines: opportunities to poke around other people's homes and unearth juicy revelations beneath the chalky layers of Farrow and Ball. In general, the more cash-rich the owner, the less interesting the house - it is easy to spot the dead hand of an interior designer. The houses that have stuck in my mind are the chaotic ones in the country with their boot rooms [...] and secrets, impossible to maintain, sprawling spaces for families to go wrong, but also for magic to happen. Powderham Castle in Devon, Hilles in Gloucestershire, Pencarrow House and Port Eliot in Cornwall were in the back of my mind when I wrote this book."

    Love that cover!

Bookshopping

    Yesterday I had a lengthy browse in Topping & Co., St. Andrews and bought a lovely lot of non-fiction.

    I covet the library ladders which they have throughout the shop.

    I'd have taken more pictures if I'd been bolder, but I'd urge you to go and see for yourself if you're near this branch or their others in Bath and Ely.

Book of the day - Signs for Lost Children

 

       I was thrilled to open a publisher's package this morning and find inside Sarah Moss's new novel Signs for Lost Children, "the triumphant continuation of [her] ongoing examination of women's lives, and a radical inquiry into the workings of the human heart".

    If you've read her excellent Night Waking (there is a post on it here) and her more recent, superb Bodies of Light (post here), then you'll be familiar with the Moberley family, specifically sisters Ally and May; the new book takes up Ally's story.

    Set in 19th. century England and Japan, it begins with a six month period of separation for the newly married Tom Cavendish and Dr. Ally Moberley-Cavendish. Tom goes to Japan to build lighthouses, while Ally stays in England and works at the Truro asylum. "As Ally plunges into the politics of madness, Tom navigates the social nuances of Japan - both to the detriment of their love for each other.

    With emotional insight and an eye for historical detail, Sarah Moss builds a novel in two parts from Falmouth to Tokyo - two maps of absence, two distinct but conjoined portraits of loneliness and determination. What can befall the human spirit when separation disturbs the fragile calm of a relationship, when the ghosts of an unhappy childhood resurface?"

    The book isn't out until early July, but on the basis of Sarah Moss's earlier work this is one to look forward to - and meanwhile, if you haven't read her others, do so now!