Reading matters

'The Fifth Child' by Doris Lessing

  Fiction - paperback; Flamingo; 160 pages; 2001.

Doris Lessing is one of those authors you know you ought to read but never do. A case in point: I've had both The Golden Notebook and The Good Terrorist in my possession for more than three years and never once cracked them open. The sheer size of the books and the weight of the subjects contained within, combined with Lessing's awesome literary reputation, have made me doubt my ability to understand and enjoy her work. Easier, then, to leave well alone.

That was until I read John Self's review of The Fifth Child followed in due course by another review of the same book by Isabel from Books and Other Stuff. Maybe it was time to take the plunge? A slim book -- just 160 pages -- seemed the perfect introduction to her work.

And so this is how I came to read my first Doris Lessing last week.

The Fifth Child is billed as a horror story but it's not from the Stephen King school of horror -- it's slightly more subtle but oodles more menacing because of it.

'The Road Home' by Rose Tremain

  Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 365 pages; 2008.

Rose Tremain is one of those British authors who has been on the periphery of my reading existence for about 10 years. She's been hard at work crafting novels -- 11 at last count -- and the odd short story collection, but I have only ever read Music and Silence, which won best novel in the 1999 Whitbread Awards. In fact, I adored that book so much, it may partially explain why I've shied away from reading anything else by Tremain: I've been scared that nothing else could live up to the beauty of my first experience reading her work.

I have had her 1992 novel Sacred Country in my reading queue for a year or so, but then she won this year's Orange Prize with The Road Home and I wondered whether it was time to give her another shot. A half-price promotion at Waterstone's was the final push I needed, and so, that was how I found myself last weekend opening this book and falling in love with it.

The story is essentially about an immigrant from an unspecified Eastern European country (I imagine it is Poland and wondered why Tremain had refused to just come out and say this), who arrives in London determined to make enough money to support his elderly mother and young daughter back home.

Lev is in his early 40s and still grieving over the death of his wife, 36-year-old Marina, from leukemia, so there's a sense of melancholia about him. But he is also prepared to work hard and knows to get anywhere in life he must put aside his personal troubles and just get on with it.

Naively believing that it is possible to survive in London for £20 a week, he initially struggles to get settled, sleeping rough and making a measly fiver here and there by delivering leaflets for a kebab shop. But his luck turns when he scores a job washing dishes at a restaurant run by a famous chef (the fictional GK Ashe who has a  touch of the Gordon Ramsay's about him).

With a little help from Lydia, a fellow compatriot whom he befriended on the long bus journey to London, he finds himself a room to rent in a house owned by the genial Christy Slane, a recently separated Irish plumber. Together Lev and Christy strike up a wonderful friendship, based partly on shared grief and the fact they both have young daughters of around the same age.

When Lev finds himself falling in love with Sophie, a colleague, it seems as if his new English life is finally complete, but it's really just the beginning of a complex, often bumpy, occasionally funny and constantly challenging journey...

'Digging Up the Dead: Uncovering the Life and Times of an Extraordinary Surgeon' by Druin Burch

Non-fiction - paperback; Vintage; 276 pages; 2008. Review copy.

I have read some interesting and unusual books in my time, but Druin Burch's Digging Up the Dead must be the most interesting and unusual book I have ever read. Indeed, when I was offered it for review, I had initially been drawn to the dark, Gothic nature of the subject, but hadn't quite clocked the fact it was a non-fiction title. So when it popped through my door I was slightly taken aback to discover that it was actually a biography. But what a biography it turned out to be!

Digging Up the Dead looks at the life and times of arguably the world's first famous surgeon, Astley Cooper (1768-1841), whom Burch -- himself a medical doctor -- describes as vain, egotistical, nepotistic and "rather wonderful".

Astley was born into a highly educated family -- his father was an Oxford-educated vicar, his uncle was senior surgeon at Guy's Hospital in London -- but he showed little interest in books or study but specialised in pranks and adventures. When the family moved to Yarmouth he began training under a local apothecary, who also doubled as a surgeon, in the hope that he might learn enough to follow his older brothers into university and perhaps a physicianship, or his uncle to a hospital and career as a surgeon. He did well and moved on to become an apprentice to a surgeon at the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital.

When he was fourteen-and-a-half he witnessed a problematic, but successful, operation to remove a stone from a man's bladder. This was to have a profound influence on him, because it was not long after that he decided to embark on surgical training in London, much to the delight of his family.

'Losing You' by Nicci French

Fiction - paperback; Penguin Books; 293 pages; 2007.

I'm a long-time Nicci French fan, but it's been more than two years since I picked up anything written by this husband-and-wife team. Once-upon-a-time I would anxiously await each new release, sometimes even buying them in hardcover when expenses would allow, because I enjoyed reading these psychological thrillers so much.

But I found the last French book, Catch Me When I Fall, slightly disappointing. It felt like the girl-on-the-run-from-a-stranger franchise had become tired and too formulaic, or perhaps I'd simply cottoned on to the fact that Nicci French is a one-trick pony and I wanted a little more from the reading experience. Needless to say, I didn't rush out and buy the next one: I bided my time and acquired it via BookMooch a month or so ago.

Losing You, I am happy to report, is a welcome breaking of the mould. This time it's not a young woman being stalked that forms the backbone of the narrative, but a mother searching for her missing child. It's a refreshing change.

The novel -- the 10th one in the French catalogue -- is set on Sandling Island, 60 miles from London, "but, rimmed as it was by the tidal estuary and facing out to open sea, it had the feel of a different world, gripped by weather and seasons; full of wild spaces, loneliness, the strange call of sea-birds and sighing winds". It's the ideal claustrophobic and slightly creepy setting for the story that enfolds over the course of the next 290 pages.

Nina Landry, recently separated from her husband, is about to embark on a Christmas break to Florida with her new beau and her two children, 15-year-old Charlie (Charlotte) and 11-year-old Jackson. The day ahead looms large, with a million tasks to do before the family heads to Heathrow for their 6pm flight, but things go off kilter before it even gets started. First, Nina's car breaks down, then her house is swamped by people throwing a surprise 40th birthday party for her -- and all this before 11am. 

It's only when Nina notices Charlie's absence that the suspense gets ratcheted up a notch or two. When she calls the police, they assume it's simply a case of a teenager running away because she's unhappy at home. But Nina knows this isn't true.

Embarking on her own investigation, she slowly pieces together Charlie's last movements and, in doing so, learns that the relationship she has with her daughter is not as open or as trusting as she first thought. Nina slowly begins to uncover secrets within secrets, all of which lead her to believe that Charlie will turn up dead if she doesn't find her quickly...

This is typical French fare in the sense that the suspense doesn't really let up from the word go, helped in part by absolutely no chapter breaks. The prose style hurries along at an ever-quickening pace without losing the rich detail and vivid descriptions that bring the narrative to life -- you get a real sense of the people, the places and the events that occur in ways that a less-busy, tell-don't-show style would fail to deliver.

There are plenty of twists and turns in the plot, and many characters are not what they first appear to be, and all the while the story never really escalates into all-out melodrama. Indeed, it reads as quite an authentic account of a panicked mother trying to find her missing child when the rest of the world doesn't seem to take her concerns seriously enough.

Losing You is a thoroughly entertaining read, one to quicken the pulse and test your powers of deduction all the way through. I can honestly say I did not guess the ending, nor the perpetrator, which is quite rare in much of my recent reading experience.

Now, that French seems to have worked her way into my good books once again, I wonder where I can get my hands on a copy of her latest novel Until It's Over...

'How the Light Gets In' by M.J. Hyland

Fiction - paperback; Canongate; 320 pages; 2004.

A couple of years ago I read MJ Hyland's Booker Prize shortlisted novel, Carry Me Down, which I greatly admired. Her ability to get inside the head of a disturbed 11-year-old boy was nothing short of extraordinary.

Her debut novel, How the Light Gets In -- written two years before Carry Me Down -- covers similar terrority, but this time the protagonist is a 16-year-old troubled girl. But that's where the similarities end.

This time the narrator is not from Ireland, but Australia, and the setting is the suburbs of Chicago.

Louise Connor is an exchange student from an underpriviledged background who has high hopes of reinventing herself as a new person, free from her emotionally distant family -- her unemployed parents, two bullying older sisters and their no-hoper boyfriends -- where evenings are spent 

all in the boxy lounge-room, all smoking; so much smoke you can hardly see, the burning ends of their cigarettes glowing, moving from lap to mouth, somebody waving at the smoke to see the TV screen.

When she moves in with her clean-living morally upstanding host-family, Margaret and Henry Harding, and their two children, 14-year-old Bridget and 15-year-old James, she believes it won't take long to "unlearn the tricks of my own family". But despite the love and affection shown to her -- Margaret is especially touchy-feely and goes out of her way to make Louise feel at home -- it doesn't take long before Louise starts to crack under the pressure.

'The Old Jest' by Jennifer Johnston

Fiction - paperback; Flamingo; 158 pages; 1984.

This classic text by Irish writer Jennifer Johnston won the Whitbread Award for the best novel of 1979, the year in which it was first published.

It's set immediately after the Great War in an unspecified village by the sea, a short train journey from Dublin. Here 18-year-old Nancy, an orphan, lives with her Aunt Mary and her invalid grandfather, a veteran of the Boer War. It's summer and Nancy is on the brink of adulthood, excited about starting her new life, but reluctant to bade goodbye to childhood.

Secretly in love with her neighbour, Harry, a city worker who treats her like a younger sister, she knows deep down inside that he will never reciprocate her feelings: he's too busy wooing another villager, the haughty Maeve Casey.

Nancy, naive but headstrong, spends much of her time alone at the beach, where she discovers a secluded hut -- "built by some railway workers many years before, cleverly hidden in among the granite blocks, which protected it from the sea wind" -- that she makes her own.

During one visit she discovers, much to her annoyance, that someone else has been using the hut, and before long she meets the intruder, an older man, in hiding, whom she befriends. And then, one day, he shows her his gun...

'Eros Unbound' by Anais Nin

Fiction - paperback; Penguin Classics; 112 pages; 2007.

Anais Nin (1903-1977) is mainly known as a diarist, publishing a series of personal journals spanning 60 years of her life. But she is also one of the world's most famous and finest writers of female erotica.

No surprise then that this book, part of the Penguin Great Loves series, depicts a ripe orange that resembles a woman's breast on the cover. It almost looks too naughty to read...

'The Unknown Terrorist' by Richard Flanagan

Fiction - hardcover; Grove Press; 336 pages; 2007.

Australian author Richard Flanagan's latest novel, The Unknown Terrorist, is dedicated to David Hicks, the Australian-born Taleban fighter captured by US forces in Afghanistan in November 2001. Hicks was detained by the US Government in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp for more than five years, before he was tried and convicted of supporting terrorism in 2007. His ongoing detention without trial made him a cause célèbre in Australia.

If nothing else, this particular case highlights that those accused of terrorism are not subject to the normal "rules" under the justice system as it operates in most democratic countries: if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time you could be locked away without trial and, what's more, you could be mistreated and tortured on the simple basis that you are presumed guilty with no legal right to defend yourself.

Since the advent of 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror, we live in dangerous times, but who is in danger? Innocent civilians who may be blown up at any moment? Or innocent people accused of plotting to blow things up on the flimsiest of "evidence"? It's a blurry line and it is exactly this line that Flanagan exploits for the purposes of this thrilling, thoroughly modern novel.

Set in Sydney across five hot, summer days, the story follows Gina Davies, a lap dancer known as the Doll, on the run from the law having been accused of helping to plot a terrorist attack. But Gina is entirely innocent. Her "crime" has been no more than having a one-night stand with an attractive stranger, Tariq, who is blamed for three unexploded bombs found at Homebush Olympic Stadium the previous day.

'Lullabies for Little Criminals' by Heather O'Neill

Fiction - paperback; Quercus; 384 pages; 2008.

Quercus may be my new favourite publisher. In recent months I have read several books -- Nefertiti, The Tenderness of Wolves and Bad Debts -- published by this burgeoning publishing house based in London, and so when Lullabies for Little Criminals landed in my mailbox this week -- the result of a mid-week "trolley dash" around Amazon.co.uk -- I decided to bump it right to the top of my incredibly long reading queue.

Despite being longlisted for this year's Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction and longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, Lullabies for Little Criminals has received little press attention here in the UK. But in its native Canada it has been critically acclaimed, winning the 2007 Canada Reads, an annual battle of the books competition, as well as the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Best Novel 2007. It  was also shortlisted for the 2007 Governor General's Awards, the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award 2007, the Amazon.ca/ Books in Canada First Novel Award 2007 and  the Grand Prix du Livre de Montreal 2007. With such ringing endorsements, I was anxious to see if it lived up to all the hype.

'Nefertiti' by Michelle Moran

Fiction - paperback; Quercus; 528 pages; 2007. REVIEW COPY.

Nefertiti is one of ancient Egypt's most legendary rulers. She was the Second Wife of the heretic king Akhenaten and, as Queen, had just as much influence and status as her husband. Renowned for her extraordinary beauty, she was more than a pretty face -- as this compelling novel by Michelle Moran demonstrates.

In fact, the Nefertiti presented in this book is not exactly the most likeable of characters. She's manipulative, calculating and shrewd. Despite the fact she was chosen to marry Akhenaten because everyone believed she was level-headed enough to tame his erratic, egotistical tendencies, she does the exact opposite. When her husband marks his rule by elevating a minor god, Aten, to a position of power, obliterating Amun and destroying all of Amun's temples, she doesn't bat an eyelid but actually encourages him to make further irregular and unpopular decisions.

And if that wasn't enough, she's riddled by jealousy over the Pharoah's First Wife, Kiya, who has already given birth to a son and heir, and does whatever she can to bed her husband in an attempt to produce the next prince -- with mixed results.

All the while Nefertiti's younger sister, Mutnodjmet (Mutny), is treated like a slave who must obey the Queen's every whim. As she watches Egypt become besieged by religious and cultural changes that she is powerless to stop, Mutny dreams of the day she can escape the clutches of the Royal Family so that she can live a quiet life, growing herbs and other plants in her own little oasis. When she falls in love with the General Nakhtmin, she thinks she may have found her "get out clause", but alas, Nefertiti doesn't exactly see it that way...