Category: New Books

Radical Love – Neil Blackmore (Hutchinson Heinemann 2023)

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Neil Blackmore’s latest novel is set in Georgian London.  Radicalism is in the air- spread by seeds sown in the French Revolution.  Established ideas are being questioned, slavery has been abolished, it seems like the start of a new age.

Only it’s not, the rot is still there and hatred and prejudice still prevalent.  William Wilberforce, celebrated for his achievements in ending slavery still placed black dinner guests behind a screen to keep them separate from the white diners.  Main character and narrator John Church has set up his own place of worship, the Obelisk, to preach tolerance in well-attended services which attracts free thinkers as well as those unimpressed by his motives.  For many the limits come with any suggestion of acceptance for homosexuality and yet molly-houses thrive.  John Church accepts an invitation to attend rooms above a pub where he will attempt to alleviate some of the gay shame and self-hatred by marrying any men who wish to be coupled with one another.  Is he beginning a path of greater acceptance in London or is this just a step too far?

What I like very much is this reclaiming of history, of developing the true stories behind the established facts, as certainly here the novel is based upon actual events.  Over the last few years this has been done very successfully by Black British writers. Paterson Joseph and his “Secret Diaries Of Charles Ignatius Sancho” (2022) and Sarah Collins’ “The Confessions Of Frannie Langton” (2019) immediately spring to mind. Neil Blackmore does this to an extent with black experience but particularly here with gay men’s stories.  Tom Crewe has done similar so successfully earlier this year with “The New Life” (2023) and Blackmore attains a high standard with this.

If you don’t already know about John Church (and I didn’t) greater pleasure will be had from this book by not finding out too much beforehand, especially as in his main character the author has created a gloriously untrustworthy narrator.  We can tell from the start that this is a man of contradictions and it is with great relish that these contradictions are brought to life.

This probably comes as close as a novel is going to get this year to being five stars without me actually awarding my top rating.  (I don’t believe that was because the review copy I was sent was so badly formatted that it did affect my reading flow and thus some of my enjoyment, luckily the book rattles on at such a pace the effects of this were diminished) but I think with John Church so central we only see the other characters from his (sometimes) off-skew perspective which doesn’t give them as much chance to shine as I would have liked.  The radical aspects come across strongly, are well balanced and the ideas very accessible (more so than Tom Crewe’s novel, actually, which is set in a repressed Victorian London of the late nineteenth century).  I also feel that, Neil Blackmore is here just like a cat that toys with a mouse for just a little bit too long before going for the kill in his development of his plot.  It is full of appalling hypocrisy, there’s hope and despair but above all a vivid bringing to life of a forgotten man whose attempts to find and bring love to Georgian London produce this extraordinary tale.

Radical Love will be published on 1st June 2023 by Hutchinson Heinemann.  Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy.

The Sleeping Car Porter – Suzette Mayr (Dialogue Books 2023)

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This is award-winning Canadian author Suzette Mayr’s fifth novel and was the 2022 recipient of the Giller Prize for Canadian writing.  Set in 1929 largely on a long train journey from Montreal to Vancouver where the focus is on main character Baxter, a black gay man who has taken a position as a sleeping car porter to help fund his dream to study dentistry.  We see the passengers through Baxter’s eyes as he strives to get tips and avoid complaints which would lead to demerits and being fired.  He is close to his fund-raising goals so this trip is very important for him.

It’s written in the present tense which is never my favourite narrative structure.  I can find it confusing and a little one-note and there is a danger we fall into stream of consciousness territory.  Baxter has to function very much in the moment, responding to demands and crises so it might seem fitting but then this is not actually his narrative, it’s third person.  I can see why it works to a point but I might have liked the author to mix it up a little but admittedly as time goes on and the exhaustion of both staff and passengers brings in surreal elements the layering of event after event does work well.

Baxter is the shining gem of this novel, unable to afford to eat properly and with little rest he is susceptible to hallucinations and his choice of sensational sci-fi reading material in his rare downtimes gives the potential of a nightmarish edge to the proceedings. Attitudes towards race are explored skilfully as the passengers need this man to be both largely invisible and yet answerable to their beck and call- his individuality dismissed by the generic name “George”, which is not his name.  (I didn’t know about this but this was obviously a thing at the time as the author’s bibliography references works such as “Hey Boy! Hey George!: The Pullman Porter”, “They Call Me George” and “10,000 Black Men Named George”).

When Baxter discovers a postcard whilst cleaning we suspect that his route to his dentistry dream will not run smoothly with a creeping inevitability which the author handles very well.  It’s a chilling depiction of the sleeping car porter’s role which was arduous and fraught with a whole range of dangers brought to life in this engaging novel.  Whilst reading this I realised I have read very little Canadian literature and that this particular train journey might just have opened up a whole new reading world for me.

The Sleeping Car Porter will be published in the UK by Dialogue Books on 18th May 2023.  Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy.

Trespasses – Louise Kennedy (2022)

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As I was reading this it was announced that Louise Kennedy has made the shortlist for the 2023 Women’s Fiction Prize alongside Jacqueline Crooks whose “Fire Rush” I have already read and rated five stars.  On the evidence of these two books this particular judging panel seem to know how to spot a gem.  I think this novel is outstanding and a serious contender for my Book Of The Year (yes, I know it’s only May!)

It caught my attention when it won Novel Of The Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards beating Donal Ryan, whose book I’d loved.  It was also a title which popped up when I was “Looking Around” at what other bloggers had loved at the end of 2022 and Cathy at 746 Books and Karen at Booker Talk and my friend Louise’s recommendations were enough to push this up my To Be Read List.

Set in Northern Ireland in 1974 it is ostensibly a tale of a problematic relationship between a Catholic Primary School teacher who works part-time in her family’s pub and a customer, an older Protestant barrister.  But it is so much more as with a lot of attention to domestic detail the author humanises a world which seemed so alien to those of us who were around then watching the horrors of daily news bulletins in the UK at the height of The Troubles.  As a child then it seemed impossible to me that life could go on as normal there through the barricades, searches, explosions and retaliations but Louise Kennedy brings this time to life.  I recall enough to know that this is subject matter that I would not actively seek out but the author has convinced me otherwise in skilfully recreating this time and location. 

Characterisation is great.  Main protagonist Cushla’s mother copes with the effects The Troubles have had on her family through alcohol and some wonderful one-liners.  Her class favourite, seven year old Danny is such a strong illustration of the resilience of children, her colleague Gerry is a valuable support and there’s a very scary parish priest.

Perhaps the hardest thing to come to terms with was what Cushla sees in barrister Michael Agnew and whether it is worth the trouble it will cause but the author does  not romanticise this attachment.  We see it in its warts-and-all reality but accept that Cushla is experiencing something different.

I felt my involvement which started off very strong deepened more and more as I progressed through this excellent book.  There really has been some exceptional writing coming out of Ireland the last decade or so and this, dealing with very difficult issues and a very difficult time in the country’s history is amongst the very best.

Trespasses was published in 2022 by Bloomsbury.

Sparrow – James Hynes (Picador 2023)

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Picador have high hopes for this novel which has been appearing on 2023 anticipated read lists from before the New Year.  I knew nothing about book nor author before reading it.  I wasn’t surprised on completing it to find out this is the work of a very established American writer and his sixth novel, his first being published some 33 years ago (“The Wild Colonial Boy” which has a Northern Ireland terrorism theme).  Nor was I surprised that he has been making a living teaching creative writing courses at American universities and getting qualifications from the highly influential Iowa Writers Workshop as this is a technical masterclass of a novel which shows a gifted writer demonstrating much experience and talent.  I also discovered, on completion, that a few years ago I’d purchased from The Great Courses a DVD course on “Writing Great Fiction: Storytelling Tips and Techniques” and the tutor is James Hynes.  To be honest, I’ve never actually got round to starting that but am far more motivated to do so now I have read what could be the book to bring this writer considerable international success.

“Sparrow” is the story of a slave in Ancient Rome who as a small child finds himself living amongst a group of prostitutes (“wolves”), who live and work in a tavern.  It took me a little while to get into the story but that’s because the author is busy employing his tips and techniques to draw you in.  Very little background is needed as we are reading a first-person narrative from the boy written as an old man looking back.  He doesn’t know his own background but works from one of his first memories which is a violent altercation between an unknown man and the woman who resentfully feeds him.  He is “Pusus”, which just means “boy” and the woman, another slave, referred to as “Focaria” – cook.  He has no other identity and a virtually non-existent outlook on his world.  Through Focaria and one of the prostitutes, known as “Euterpe” his ignorance is slowly diminished and over time his very small part of the world begins to extend a few hundred yards from the tavern. 

One of the ways in which this is achieved is by the author’s multi-sensory approach and description of sights, smells, sounds, taste and the feel of the environment which allows the boy to make sense of his world and has the added bonus for us as readers in creating a very strong fictional depiction.  We all know how valuable a technique this can be and here it is employed superbly.  Books set in Ancient Times can be a little off-putting for some as it feels so alien and often too much information is needed to be taken on board but here as we are working through the child’s narrative we only know what we need to and his questioning of his experiences allows us to access his world.  I’m not saying that this is not superbly researched but it is so seamlessly integrated and never over-complicated which also brings the reader right into the text.

Of course, all these technical skills would be pointless if the story did not involve.  Time is taken with plot, strong characters are established and we see things like the boy coping with the social dynamics of getting water from the public fountain at some length before realising that a rich, gripping plot has developed which builds beautifully.

I was very impressed by this work, there are characters I will remember for a long time.  The characterisation of the narrator feels as potent as “Shuggie Bain” or “Young Mungo”, two of the most vital literary depictions of male youth in recent years.  It never shirks from the horrors facing these people (it’s never totally clear how old the boy is, at one point he says he thinks he is ten, which completely floored me, given the ways he has to survive).  You can take these characters out of their Ancient Times setting and place them anytime in history and, shockingly, their ordeals and issues would still be relevant, a sobering realisation.

Despite the darkness of the subject matter the book does have an uplift and there is an overriding sense of hope.  The boy uses a sparrow as a metaphor for escape and can visualise out-of-body experiences when things get too grim, another technique that lifts any sense of gloom and like this metaphorical sparrow this book really flies.

“Sparrow” is published by Picador on May 4th 2023.  Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy.

Small Joys – Elvin James Mensah (Scribner 2023)

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Wooh!, I wasn’t expecting this.  The blog has become awash with five star ratings- we have now had three on the trot and I am thrilled to be knocked for six by this unassuming debut, which I will certainly be promoting as one of the uplifting, feel-good novels of the year.

I know nothing about this author, other than he graduated from Bournemouth University and the indication from his Acknowledgements that there have been struggles with mental health.  Issues on self-worth, self-esteem, gay shame, depression, anxiety and the importance of support networks are central to this novel.  The most uplifting aspect is the notion of friendship, especially a bromance between two unlikely characters.  Harley Sekyere is a young, gay, black man who has found his university course on music journalism too much to cope with.  He is at a very low ebb when we meet him in his first-person narrative and is returning to a house-share in Kent where he has stayed before.   It is set around the time of the London bombings of 2005.  His unlikely friend is Muddy, a rugby-playing, bird-watching gem of a character, full of contradictions and challenges to all manners of stereotypes.  At its most basic this is a glass nearly empty meets a glass almost full scenario.  Muddy’s similar but less well-adjusted mate Finlay and girl friends Chelsea and Noria add to this network which allows Harley with his high-functioning depression to actually function.

It’s heart-warming, it’s funny but it also chilling, especially in aspects of race and sexuality which is handled so well.  At times it reminded me of Paul Mendez’s five-star debut “Rainbow Milk” (2020) and there is obviously a connection as I discovered after finishing this that Paul Mendez is narrating the audiobook.  Here, the scope is smaller, things feel more intense and contained and it works brilliantly because of this.  It is extremely uplifting but throughout it never loses its very brittle edge, as if things can turn suddenly.  These are characters who operate in the modern world and are totally convincing.  Occasionally behaviour is questionable but they have each other to provide balance and support.  As in Jacqueline Crooks’ five star debut “Fire Rush”, music plays an important part and the mid-noughties setting helps this whether it be Muddy’s love for the Gallagher brothers pitched against Harley’s fondness for female rap, to sing-alongs in the car or pub karaoke, music provides an uplift throughout.

Elvin James Mensah is not going to solve this country’s mental health crisis within one novel but Harley’s story provides a pathway which can certainly be seen as inspirational.  There is the odd moment where we momentarily move away for reflection and analysis but the author skilfully allows the characters and their dynamics to illustrate the points being made.  I came away from this novel appreciating a great reading experience and with the awareness that we all could do with a Muddy in our lives.

Small Joys is published by Scribner in the UK on 13th April 2023.  Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy.

Death Under A Little Sky – Stig Abell (Harper Collins 2023)

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Although I have never read either of Stig Abell’s non-fiction works and have seen him only briefly on TV I was actually quite excited to read his debut novel- a literary crime thriller.  Stig is without doubt a high achiever – a double first English degree from Cambridge led to him joining the Press Complaints Commission, which doesn’t seem the most natural route to the role of the managing editor of The Sun newspaper and from there he went on to become the editor of The Times Literary Supplement.  He has since been the Launch Director for Times Radio where he presents the Breakfast Show.  I was intrigued by this mixture of the literary and the mainstream – here is a man who is able to put his ideas across and he is equally at home with the academic as popular culture (he’s also quite easy on the eye) and here he is opting to write a novel within the crime genre because of his deep love of detective fiction.  Could this be where he falls flat on his face?  Not as far as I am concerned as this novel is very good indeed.

We meet main character Jake Jackson at the start of the novel getting out of a taxi in the middle of nowhere in an unspecified part of the English countryside.  He walks to a house he has inherited from an uncle where he intends to embrace a solitary, rural life, giving up his career in the police.  As much as it is a crime thriller this is a novel of escaping and of adapting to circumstances, all feeling rather relevant in this post-Covid 19 world.  Jack is going to wing it- he is happy to give up technology, has no transport and no real survival plan.  What he does have is his uncle’s impressive library of detective fiction which Jake believes initially will do.  I really like this man.

However, this is a crime novel and things will not stay quiet, even though for a considerable time the thriller aspect just simmers alongside Jake’s coming to grips with his new life but slowly the author ramps up the pressure and we get a highly satisfactory crime fiction set-up.

As you might expect it is well written and the grounding Jake has in police-work and detective fiction gives the novel a huge respect for the genre which elevates it onto a higher level.  Stig Abell knows exactly what he is doing here- his love and absorption of crime novels and his years of professional analysis of literary works is so evident and has resulted in this first-class example.  Is there anything this man does not excel in?

Death Under A Little Sky is published by Harper Collins on 13th April 2023.  Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy.

The Sun Walks Down – Fiona McFarlane (Sceptre 2023)

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In 1883 in the desert environment of the Flinders Ranges in Southern Australia a six year old boy, Denny Wallace, disappears following a storm.  This is Australian author Fiona McFarlane’s second novel (there’s also been a prize-winning collection of short stories) and it is very much a character-led ensemble piece with a sizeable cast of fascinating characters.

This is the search for Danny and those involved include his family, the authorities and native trackers.  For me, the characters who burn brightest include his fifteen year old sister Cissy, who seems more on the ball than the adults, who borrows a horse from her teacher and is determined to locate her brother; Karl Rapp, a Swedish painter, in search of a perfect sunset; the newly-wed Minna Manning, throbbing with passion whilst her groom Robert, a policeman, is out looking for the boy and the mother, Mary, who waits stolidly at home.

The cast also includes an out of his element vicar; an aborigine whose youth was marked by his excelling in cricket, which no longer seems relevant, and a land-owning woman who yearns for the fur coat of a tracker.  We catch up with these throughout the narrative and there are occasional digressions into back stories which often serve to enrich our understanding of these characters.

It is very well-written with the sense of the desert environment strong where long-established livelihoods are threatened by the lack of rain.  Plot-wise, it is a little light in dramatic tension but atmosphere, characterisation and description made this a memorable, immersive read.

The Sun Walks Down is published in the UK by Sceptre on 9th March 2023.  Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy.

Birnham Wood -Eleanor Catton (Granta 2023)

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It’s been 10 years since Eleanor Catton’s last novel, the doorstep sized “The Luminaries”, scooped the Booker Prize breaking both longest novel and youngest winning author records.  This book marks the long-awaited return for this New Zealand author and has a very different feel from her last highly-celebrated nineteenth century set work.

We are in modern New Zealand.  Birnham Wood is the name of a group of radical horticulturalists, a no profit organisation who carry out guerrilla gardening, planting crops in areas which do not belong to them.  An area called Korawai (fictional) cordoned off due to a landslip offers a great potential opportunity.  The land belongs to the newly knighted pest control expect Owen Darvish, awarded for services to conservation but he is in the middle of secret dealings with an American billionaire.  The Birnham Wood group get caught in the middle in what can loosely be described as an eco-thriller.

One thing I remembered about Eleanor Catton’s work is that she likes long sentences which slowed me down last time round but here it all becomes more and more readable as the plot advances.  I felt with “The Luminaries” that I was missing out on something allegorical I couldn’t  quite pick up on- here things seem more straightforward- it’s a state of the nation environmental novel with leanings towards thriller genre writing where the lines between the goodies and baddies are blurred and moral boundaries are crossed.

Despite the involving plot the main strength for me is (as in her last book) the relationship between characters, particularly Mira and Shelley, the two leading lights of Birnham Wood- Mira, inspirational, starting off enthralled by the prospect of new action for the group, Shelley, more practical, feeling disillusionment creeping in.  There’s great tension between these two friends which is convincing.  I’m not sure how I felt about the ending which wasn’t what I was expecting.  This is another strong title from Eleanor Catton, with less lofty ambitions than “The Luminaries”.  Let’s hope we don’t have to wait another 10 years to read more from her.

Birnham Wood will be published by Granta in the UK on 2nd March.  Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy.

Fire Rush – Jacqueline Crooks (Vintage 2023)

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This big buzz debut was one of the titles I featured as one of my potential highlights of the year.  Jacqueline Crooks has published short stories but this semi-autobiographical work is her first full-length novel.  It is also my first five star read of 2023.

This is a confident, lyrical, powerful work.  The author handles tonal change very well and is able, through an involving narrative, to sustain the pull of heritage, underwater imagery and the rhythms of the often undulating, often sparse dub instrumental versions of reggae music throughout a novel rich in plot and characterisation.

We start in 1978 in Norwood, a London suburb, with three girls, Yamaye, the narrator, Asase, prickly and sassy and Rumer, a white girl from the Irish travelling community who escape underground to dances in a church crypt, “a three-pin plug, charging ourselves to dub riddim, connecting through each other to the underground” whilst tensions with police, the use of stop and search laws and the men who hit on them on the dancefloor weave a potent web. 

A second section features Yamaye removed from her community, falling into a difficult lifestyle with restricted choices within a squat finding her expression in toasting over the rhythm tracks in a Bristol nightclub.  Circumstances force her to Jamaica in a third part to search for her heritage and regain meaning to her life.  Each section feels different and yet there is a flowing overlap which feels like it could stifle the main character at any moment as she struggles to keep her head above water.  This phrase is apt as there is so much water within the images of this book from the calling from the Caribbean over the oceans, the lingering ghosts of slave ships and release from the enchainment of the seas all having a part to play.

There’s a great cast of characters, vividly drawn.  The language is rich and rooted in a Black British Caribbean which feels poetic and powerful and often mystical and elusive, acknowledging a sisterhood of many previous generations, occasionally keeping meaning at arm’s length but then pulling in for a warming hug.

I really enjoyed this- from the fyah of the fierce girls dancing in the damp, smokey club to the fire of the title, the spiritual energy from a much simpler Jamaican life, there is much growth and development which kept me involved throughout.  It is a very strong debut and Jacqueline Crooks deserves to make a significant impact with this.

Fire Rush will be published by Vintage/ Jonathan Cape in the UK on 2nd March 2023.  Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy.

Hungry Ghosts- Kevin Jared Hosein (Bloomsbury 2023)

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One of the titles I was really looking forward to this year by this Caribbean novelist and poet described by the BBC news website as “one of the most talked about forthcoming books in literary circles”.  It is admittedly impressive.

Set in 1940s Trinidad, yet the date feels largely irrelevant as there is a sense of timelessness which permeates the characters’ lives.  There are two main locations, one a large house lived in by Dalton and Marlee Changoor.  His wealth has come from unknown, suspicious means and the locals doubt the background of his younger wife.  The second setting is the barrack, an impoverished courtyard around which a number of families live, including Hans, his wife Shweta and their son, Krishna.  Hans is within both locations as he works in the Changoor grounds.  His aim is to escape the barrack and find land in the nearby Bell village but there are very few ways to escape the barrack.

The author creates a range of vividly drawn characters from their present existence and back stories.  This is a superb storyteller at work.  They are all very much products of their environment, an environment which is richly depicted with much description.  It’s been a long time since I have had to look up so many words, a number related to descriptions of flora and fauna and the surroundings- many used potentially for their sound as much as meaning, really bringing home that this is the work of a poet.

When Dalton Changoor goes missing the lives of the older characters are transformed.  I found the early sections of the book outstanding.  The younger generation’s lives are linked with a casual violence and as the novel continued the ripeness of the words and the environment soured, becoming over-ripe and I found myself getting queasy.  There was still much that impressed yet I found the subject matter led to passages that were difficult to read.  They will stay my mind but not for reasons I’d like.  There’s a slight over-egging of the horrors of life which dominated in the latter sections where I longed for some balance from the nightmarish world-view.  At one point some of the characters consume hallucinogenic mushrooms and it is as if this psychedelic paranoia pervades the novel from this point on.

Characterisation and story-telling great, it just became a little too much.  There is no doubt that Kevin Jared Hosein has written a haunting, impactful tale which has the feel of a modern classic whilst rooted in a historic, oral tradition.

Hungry Ghosts will be published in the UK by Bloomsbury on 16th February 2023.  Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy.