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A Prayer for Owen Meany is one of those books that turns up on those 100 great books of the twentieth century lists. It’s a book you’ve seen mentioned so often you wonder if you’ve actually read it and completely forgotten what it’s about. Except I don’t think you’d easily forget some of the images in this book. John Irving reportedly said that the opening sentence of A Prayer for Owen Meany was the best opening sentence he had ever written. It certainly packs a lot in one sentence. “I am doomed to remember a boy with a wreaked voice, not because he is the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.” This is not a book for speeding through and enjoying the plot. This is a book where you sometimes have to slow right down and unpack a sentence. And if that final clause puts you off – I am a Christian because of Owen Meany – I respectfully suggest you do a bit more unpacking. Johnny Wheelwright is the character beginning the story. This is Johnny Wheelwright as a fusty old man teaching in an obscure all-girls school in Canada. The young Johnny Wheelwright grew up in an obscure lumber town in New Hampshire. After a few of these paragraphs of fustiness tinged with wry humor (“When I die, I shall attempt to be buried in New Hampshire–alongside my mother–but the Anglican Church will perform the necessary service before my body suffers the indignity of trying to be sneaked through U.S. Customs”) the narrative switches to the past: “What faith I have I owe to Owen Meany, a boy I grew up with. It is Owen Meany who made me a believer.” White space, then… “In Sunday school, we developed a form of entertainment based on abusing Owen Meany…” What follows is a hilarious description of Owen Meany, Sunday school in small town America and the behavior of children left to their own devices. It’s hilarity mixed with pathos and barbarism. “We tortured him, I think, in order to hear his voice; I used to think his voice came from another planet.” His voice, and his attitude that he is a chosen one, is truly annoying and to emphasize just how annoying it is Irving has Owen speak in block capitals throughout the book. “PUT ME DOWN...CUT IT OUT! I DON’T WANT TO DO THIS ANYMORE. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. PUT ME DOWN! YOU ASSHOLES!” It is not until the end of this Sunday school scene that you learn that the narrator is a Wheelwright, not until a few family history diversions later that you learn he is John and it is not until after a lot of family history, and town history, diversions that he comes out as ‘little Johnny Wheelwright, father unknown,…”. This meandering style is maintained throughout. When the narrator is the older Johnny it’s just that, meandering, contemplative and philosophical. When it’s the younger Johnny you are immersed in the meandering life of the small town by the Squamscott river. “Owen and I were throwing rocks in the Squamscott, the saltwater river, the tidal river­­­­­­­­­–or rather, I was throwing rocks in the river; Owen’s rocks were landing in the mud flats because the tide was out and the water was too far away for Owen Meany’s little, weak arm.” This 1950s small industrial town in New Hampshire is as alien to me as any book written about India by Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy or Rohinton Mistry. Irving makes it real. And "little, weak arm"? The word order is wrong. In English adjectives have an order: weak, little arm. The weirdness of Owen Meany percolates through the language used to describe him. Henry James described nineteenth century novels as “large loose baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary”. A Prayer for Owen Meany is one such large, loose baggy monster, but it’s a baggy monster that hits hard. Johnny and Owen are the Vietnam generation. The tentacles of the great war machine reach into their lives, and the consequences are huge and disturbing. Irving is not Dickens, even when his book is north of 1000 pages in a print edition. His moral stance is far less polemical and far more satirical. It has overtones of the great satirical works coming out of Germany in the first half of the twentieth century, which is not surprising given that Irving studied under Günter Grass. That being said, give me Dickens over Henry James any day.

Jeanne Althouse is a master of the short story and is particularly good at flash fiction, where every word has to carry its weight. This collection is longer stories, but you can see how she makes the words work for their space. Her sentences carry a lot of information. This is not writing to be rushed through: ‘Uncle lived at Grandma’s house, which smelled of peanut butter cookies, Grandpa’s cigar smoke and her old poodle who suffered from incontinence.’ Three characters and a house have been introduced in one sentence, and an unconventional placing of a pronoun has established Grandma as the significant element in this story, which is not, on the surface, about Grandma. Jeanne does this sort of thing again and again. It’s not a mistake. It’s compression of language.   The stories are grouped according to the ages of man, or woman: Secret Children; Sins and Regrets; Secret Desires and Ultimate Mystery – secrets, sins, regrets and mysteries - things people don’t talk about.  You meet a woman who contemplates just how she might be related to the person who shares a cousin’s-worth percentage her DNA; a man who wonders why he wasn’t the person who paid for the groceries of the old man who couldn’t; a blind woman who never truly knows why a dance ended with ‘the air before her filling with emptiness’ and, when ‘Goran holds his breath’ you are left to finish the story for yourself, his choice unresolved.   Jeanne is a versatile writer and her stories vary in tone from the sinister to the compassionate and from the historical to the modern. There are World War Two stories and Covid lockdown stories. There are stories from the point of view of the older person looking back at a naïve childhood to the younger person learning to be astonished by a grandmother. There is variety here, not continuity. For that reason, and because they are so densely written, these stories deserve to be savored. Maybe read one at bedtime before picking up the novel you are going to be engrossed in until two in the morning (or the worthy piece of non-fiction you are going to peruse for twenty minutes before it drops on your nose and wakes you up). But having said there is not continuity of character, place or time, there is a unifying impetus. In every story a character examines their own moral purpose and acknowledges their own choices. They might not be the choices you, the reader, think they should have made, but they are their choices and they are having to make them in the situation in which they find themselves. And that brings you face to face with your own moral failings – the actions, feelings or desires, be they big or small, that you might not admit to, even to the person closest to you, even to yourself – the things you did or felt because of the situation in which you found yourself.   So, if you appreciate what can be done to make words work for their living and you are interested in moral dilemmas BIG Secrets Everywhere is a book for you. It might appear small on the outside but there’s a lot in it.

Don’t Look Now is a collection of five short stories published in 1966:               Don’t Look Now             The Breakthrough             Not After Midnight             A Border-Line Case             The Way of the Cross   Those are clever titles. Every one has a double meaning. Every story is more than it seems on the surface.   These stories are contemporary, to 1966. They weren’t written as historical fiction, although they feel historical reading them now. The characters are almost all a certain type of upper-middle class English person – I can only think of one who did not attend a fee paying school. Their children are safely enclosed in boarding school while they take a holiday in Venice. They never carry their own luggage. The men are army or navy veterans. The women over thirty don’t drive cars. Retired female teachers are described as ‘a couple of pathetic old retired school mistresses on holiday’, and a girl with learning difficulties as ‘a backward child, a sad little object of no interest’. These are hardly descriptions you would expect to find in a modern novel.   But I’m not sure du Maurier thought those descriptions were entirely ok either. They are attitudes in the thoughts of the characters. And the characters are not entirely trustworthy.   Each story is told from the point of view of a character, except the last, The Way of the Cross, where the point of view moves from one person to another as a group of tourists walks along the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem. None of these characters is a hero -  the person you  admire and are rooting for. They are people with dubious moral failings, or their thoughts and conclusions are distorted by strong emotion, such as grief.  There is no authorial voice telling you how to react either. Just your own little voice in your head saying “Wait a minute. That doesn’t seem right. Don’t do that.”   In this sense these are classic horror stories – there is something awful lurking in the wings, something that shouldn’t be disturbed. In fact you’d be better off turning round and running fast in the other direction. Quite often the something that prevails.   They are horror stories then. But they don’t reel in blood and guts and torture. They  quiver with unease and don’t end happily.   The tourists in The Way of the Cross experience their own personal suffering on the Via Dolorosa, in the form of intense embarrassment and loss of self-respect. Unease pervades the entire telling of The Breakthrough leaving the reader wondering if anybody involved in the experiment truly recognized the immorality of their actions. In a Border Line Case terrorism is seen through the eyes of an emotionally immature nineteen year old who steps over so many of the boundaries that a woman should acknowledge if she is to keep herself safe that you want to shake her. Not After Midnight is the classic slippery slope of one ill-advised action sliding into another. And Don’t Look Now is a masterful portrayal of how the mind ceases to work logically when overwhelmed by grief.   Du Maurier’s writing is lucid and straightforward. Her plots move steadily forward. Her characters think the limited thoughts of limited people. Yet, somehow, she manages to let you know there is another layer to all this and that layer is you, the reader. What are your mistakes, your moral failings? How much danger are you in? Would you put one foot in front of another until you finally slipped down the slope? Or is there another voice somewhere, keeping you safe?   If you don’t like reading books that are disturbing, then don’t read this one. Du Maurier did, after all, write The Birds, the story in the classic Hitchcock film. She knows what will make you squirm. However, there are no cheap scares here. It’s masterful story telling and highly perceptive observation of human failings. It might make you think.

The subtitle tells you this book is a serious work of history. The title helped to shoot it into popular prominence as soon as it was published in 2012.   Christopher Clark is Regius Professor of History at Cambridge (UK). He was born and raised in Australia, studied history at Sydney University and later at the Freie Universität in Berlin. He received his doctorate while at Pembroke College, Cambridge, before moving to St. Catherine’s College as a professor of modern history. He is fluent in German and his earlier work is on nineteenth century German history.   So he has all the expert credentials that you might desire for a new look at the First World War.   He is also a great storyteller.   After the introduction to The Sleepwalkers (more of that later) Clark plunges you straight into a murder.   ‘Shortly after two o’clock on the morning of 11 June 1903, twenty-eight officers of the Serbian army approached the main entrance of the royal palace in Belgrade.…the king, flabby, bespectacled and incongruously dressed in his red silk shirt, emerged with his arms around the queen. The couple were cut down in a hail of shots at point blank range….By the time the assassins had gathered in the gardens to have a smoke and inspect the results of their handiwork, it had begun to rain.’   I’ve left out the really gory bits.   Two pages at the start of the book. If Clark had continued like this he would have written a fascinating historical novel with horror elements. But this is serious scholarly work and the next section is analysis. This is where you will need to gird your loins and take on the names and events of the mysterious Balkans.   ‘The root of the problem lay partly in the coexistence of rival dynastic families. Two great clans, the Obrenović and the Karadjordjević, had distinguished themselves in the struggle to liberate Serbia from Ottoman control.’   Are you reeling? How on earth do you pronounce those names? Where exactly is Serbia, anyway? What and why are Ottomans?   Give yourself a break. No-one is going to test you. Clark has given you what matters: two rival families. He succinctly explains the rest in the following paragraph. It’s like he’s talking to you. And if all the names and dates wash over you? Like I said, it doesn’t matter. There is no history teacher devising convoluted multiple choice questions to catch you out. There are no condescending reading-group discussion questions at the end either.   In his introduction Clark asks why this book, when the First World War has ‘ …spawned an historical literature of unparalleled size, sophistication and moral intensity’?   His answer: ‘But if the debate is old, the subject is still fresh…a kind of period charm accumulated in popular awareness around the events of 1914. It was easy to imagine the disaster of Europe’s ‘last summer' as an Edwardian costume drama…The presumption steadily asserted itself that if the actors’ hats had gaudy green ostrich feathers on them, then their thoughts and motivations probably did too….This book strives to understand the July Crisis of 1914 as a modern event….It is concerned less with why the war happened than with how it came about.’   Delving deeply into ‘how’ Clark gives you memorable characters and stories. But he doesn’t avoid ‘why’. What he does is steadily build the how from the perspectives of the participants (Serbia, Austria, Russia, France, Germany, Britain, Italy, the Ottoman Empire) and allow you to ask why. Your conclusion may be different from mine. This is a complex book on a complex subject. What I brought away from it was that no one power started that war. And no consensus in any country wanted a war (a real one where millions of people were killed) but, as they went down the slippery slope, almost any one of the players could have stopped war being the outcome – if they had only had the courage to back down and find another way.   In other words this book completely changed my understanding of that period of history, and the myth on which my British cultural identity is founded. That’s a big thing for a book to achieve.   I can’t go without commenting on Clark’s humour. I think he is at heart a lecturer and a good lecture needs humour. Some have objected to any lightheartedness on this terrible topic but, as the green ostrich feather comment shows, his humour has point. And the fact that he’s Australian lets him stand aside a little. Here’s a line on the German attempt to become a naval power in the first decade of the 1900s.   "Ships, they built ships, that upset the British, you should never build ships. Because it upsets the British".   If you are open to changing your view of European history, or expanding it, this is the most important book on the catastrophic opening to the twentieth century you are ever going to find. At 562 pages, before notes, it is no quick read, but, remember, no-one is testing you.

Chosen as a tribute to Salman Rushdie after the unconscionable attack on his life on August 12th, 2022, I found my copy of Midnight’s Children exactly where it should be, shelved under R, on the top right-hand shelf of the section of the floor-to-ceiling bookcase that extends into the closet; up there, along with Satanic Verses, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Joseph Anton. I needed steps. The pages are yellow, almost brown, and the glue crackles in the ominous way that tells me the leaves are detaching themselves from the spine. And the words? The words are nowhere near as heavy going as I remember. Perhaps I have become more sophisticated since 1982. Midnight’s Children is a book for enjoying the words and what words will do. It’s a book you return to daily, not a book you can’t put down. There’s no reading it fast to see what happens, although plenty does happen. Saleem Sinai, born at the stroke of midnight on the day India became an independent nation, believes that his life is India’s history. Because of this, he is disintegrating, cracking from the navel outwards, and he has to tell his story while he still can. But does he begin at his birth? No, much to the frustration of his sole living listener, Padma, he begins with his grandfather, because his grandfather had blue eyes, and, most importantly, a big nose. Only they aren’t his grandfather’s eyes, and it isn’t his grandfather’s cucumber of a nose, because Saleem was swapped at birth with another child born at midnight. Saleem’s nose gets him into a lot of trouble. Hiding in a chest of dirty washing in the bathroom, where he takes his nearly-nine-year-old self for comfort, and where he can’t smell his surroundings due to his perpetually congested nose, he catches sight of his mother’s backside, as round as a black mango, inhales the end of a pyjama cord and his head explodes. The result? His mind is now a receiver of messages from all the other children born in India between midnight and one in the morning on the day ‘a nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom, catapulting us into a world which, although it had five thousand years of history, although it had invented the game of chess and traded with Middle Kingdom Egypt, was nevertheless quite imaginary.’ Midnight’s Children is a collage of liberated India in all its brilliance and messiness, the smells of its fabulous pickles and the spectacular nagging of its women, its divisions, its crowds, its hustling and its poverty, its superstitions and its magic, its violence and its hope. There is a lot of humour in this book; a lot of wit. There are a lot of characters too. Keeping track of them is a challenge, especially if their names are difficult for you because they are not how you learned names ought to be when you were a not-quite-nine-year-old. I say them out loud, in my head if there’s someone else in the room. This is a long book: 463 pages in my old paperback; 536 in the 40th anniversary edition now available. If you like a long read, a rich portrayal of a tangled world, and a touch of the improbable creeping over the line into the impossible, Midnight’s Children is for you.

The year is 1964 and Roland Tuttle is the last of his family to work the farm in Wethersfield, Vermont. Wethersfield is by the Connecticut River, on the border between Vermont and New Hampshire. It is a small town in New England. The population in 2000 was about 2,700. You can find all this out on Wikipedia, where you can also find the story that this book is based on, the story of Romaine Tenney who becomes Roland Tuttle in Exit 8. But don’t do that before you read John Bragg’s book, because his story-telling takes you inside the mind of an extraordinary person. Roland Tuttle, born in 1900, is aware, in 1964, that Interstate 91 is being built along the Connecticut Valley. Or is he? For a year the reader lives with Roland as he tends his farm, using the tools left by his family; still ploughing with horses, still cutting hay with a scythe. Roland’s tools are falling apart and the stores that supply parts are closing down. “Everything around him is old: the wagon purchased from Paine Wagon Makers by his grandfather, the single plow that belonged to his great-grandfather, the shovels, the rakes, the barn itself. He spends a good part of his days keeping these tools and implements working.” Meanwhile the town is buzzing with the coming of the interstate and the route it will take. Roland, “stops at the door to the meeting hall–the voices are louder now–then turns around, goes out the front door, and walks back up the hill to the farm. Never did have much use for meetings.” Is he in denial? Is he not very smart? Is he just plain stubborn? That will be for you, the reader, to decide, because it won’t be spelled out for you by this author. Everything here is seen through Roland’s eyes and Roland lives a life bounded by the farm. Throughout the year, Roland’s contemplation of the advancing road, which he largely doesn’t contemplate, is overwhelmed by his thinking about the past. The history of the Tuttle family from the first immigrant settlers in the valley onwards is told through his memories. Gradually you get to know why this single man lives in the back kitchen of a large house and you find out what happened to his family. Roland is taciturn. He spends more time talking to his dog more than to people. But when he speaks he is in control and he has wit. “–Couple-a good nags, you got there, Eddie says. They got names? ­–‘Course they do. That there’s Sam, the other’s Joe. –Isn’t the dog, Sam? Eddie says. –Yep. Not likely to get ‘em confused.” And this way he keeps people at a distance; people who try to help him, try to get him to make a decision, his remaining family, his neighbors, the town sheriff and the man doing local liaison for the government road building project. Running a small hill farm is sheer hard slog. The summers are short and demanding. The winters are long and life-threatening. And, despite Roland’s life-time of hard work, the farm is falling down around him. When the woodshed roof falls in under the weight of the snow in the middle of the night, “The whole house shakes and Roland lies there, knowing what it is but not wanting to know. When he comes down the steep stairs from the loft in the morning, the door from the woodshed to the kitchen is wide open and snow has drifted across the kitchen floor… He pulls his boots on over his wet socks and opens the front door.” But this land has infiltrated Roland’s soul and he can’t be separated from it. He was the one to hear his father’s dying words “ Take care of your mother…the farm.” The farm owns him. How can this ever come to an end? It’s a year in the telling.

The Gravity of Birds is about a painting, a triptych: the people painted in it and the people trying to find the missing two outer panels. Thomas Bayber is a famous artist who hasn’t painted for years. Suddenly he calls upon his friend, Professor Dennis Finch, to track down the two missing side panels of a painting Thomas still has in his possession. Finch, whose lifework has been the catalogue resumé of Bayber’s work has every incentive to do as he is bid, even though he knows he is being manipulated. He even carries on when Bayber saddles him with the insufferable but talented Stephen Jameson as an expert in authenticating art. It becomes apparent that finding the paintings means finding the sisters portrayed in them, Alice and Natalie Kessler. But they have done a wonderful job of disappearing. Disappearing from Thomas, Finch and Stephen that is, not from the reader. Alice’s story is told alongside the hunt for the triptych. Natalie’s is a mystery that gradually unfolds. With five principal characters to juggle the author has the audacity to add another half way through the book. It’s no wonder her editors quailed. But Guzeman can handle her characters, gradually refining their motivations, revealing their misconceptions and disclosing secrets that have been kept over a lifetime. And Guzeman’s writing is exquisite: ‘The paint on the door was a tired brown fading to gray, cracked  and buckled as an alligator hide, chunky flakes of it falling to the ground as she brushed against it.’ ‘A wave of grief washed over Finch, and he was overcome with her absence. Eleven months was not long – he still found the occasional sympathy card in his mailbox – but time had expanded and slowed. His days swelled with the monotony of hours, piling up in colossal heaps before and after him, the used the same as the new.’ ‘The used the same as the new.’ What an amazing description of the absence after death. This is writing to make you pause and savor what has been said. Guzeman puts the frailty of the human condition front and center. Her characters are bereaved, they have migraines, they suffer from car sickness and are afraid of flying. One has crippling arthritis. One has a stroke. Another bears a war wound.  I cannot think of any other book where illness and disability is something that every main character experiences, not just the token individual. Yet this book is not morbid. It’s not preachy, either. In some parts it’s extremely funny. Misconception, misunderstanding and misuse are the foundation of the mystery that drives the plot. What is the resolution? Well, it takes a while to realize there is a mystery beyond the missing parts of a painting – longer to get to a resolution. But it’s worth every beautifully crafted word.

The eight short stories and one novella in this collection are linked by the author’s interest in science. Characters from the past include great names such as Linnaeus, Darwin, Wallace and Mendel. Some of the stories are modern, some historical. The author approaches her topics at an angle: a day in Linnaeus’ old age in which he imagines he’s back with his favorite pupils; a young doctor who works at a quarantine station in nineteenth-century Canada; an American naturalist who meets Arthur Wallace on his expeditions. When I revisited these stories I found some of them still lodged in my brain from when I first read the book, some twenty years ago. In my grey matter there lingers an eighteenth-century woman who decides to test the contemporary belief that swallows live underwater until spring, a boat that passes over a river swarming with bedding, planks and straw thrown overboard from newly arrived ships and a man who brings back the first birds of paradise his country has ever seen, only to find it uninterested and in the throes of a civil war. The stories: The Behavior of the Hawkweeds , Mendel’s other plant, one that didn’t cooperate. The English Pupil , Linnaeus as an old man losing his grip on reality. The Littoral Zone , a tale of scientist lovers who spoiled their lives. Rare Bird, those underwater swallows. Soroche , a woman meets a man whose great-great-grandfather was Darwin’s guide in the Andes. Birds with no Feet , those birds of paradise. The Marburg Sisters , brilliant modern scientists. Was their mother a witch? Ship Fever , a devastating depiction of what became of Irish emigrants fleeing the potato famine. These are plainly told stories, with solid narration and well-built scenes. The author has a talent for locating big subjects and tough situations in vividly described places. The characters are complex, intelligent and often unfulfilled and unhappy, but, don’t despair, not always. If you like old-fashioned story-telling and are fascinated by what people used to believe, this book is for you.

Many novels have been written with a desire to educate. Not many are very good. Didactic purpose can overwhelm the heart of fiction, which is storytelling. Still Alice is different. Written by an author with a doctorate in neuroscience and published in 2007, Still Alice is the story of a university professor who has early onset Alzheimer’s disease. Genova tells Alice’s story from the inside. In the preface to the 2009 edition of Still Alice, Genova writes: ‘ My query letter seeking representation for Still Alice was rejected or ignored by 100 literary agents. The few who asked to read the manuscript felt that Alzheimer’s was too heavy, scary and dark, and that readers would shy away from the subject. It was too big of a risk, and they passed on it. I pressed on and self-published Still Alice, selling copies from the trunk of my car for almost a year.’ When Still Alice was eventually picked up by Simon and Schuster it spent 59 weeks on the New York Times best seller list. It has been translated into 37 languages. It has been made into an award winning movie and there’s been a stage production. I always have felt the world of agents and publishers has a low opinion of the fortitude of the reading public. We, the readers, are willing to feel and willing to learn. Just give us a good story at the same time. The impetus for Genova’s book came from realizing how little is written from the point of view of the person with the disease. There are medical discussions galore. There are support groups and advice for carers. But there is so little for the Alzheimer sufferer herself. Genova brings this fact directly into Alice’s story, having her set up a support group for other Alzheimer sufferers in her area: a place where they can talk, and not be talked around, above or about. Near the beginning of the novel Dr. Alice Howland is introduced to an audience as, “the eminent William James Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.” The abundance of capital letters points up her status as an important person. A few pages earlier she was seen as a dynamic wife of another Harvard professor, and mother of three grown children. She is busy, in control and a little domineering, especially in her relationship with her youngest daughter. Alice knows best. About forty minutes into the lecture she is giving she gets stuck. “She simply couldn’t find the word. She had a loose sense for what she wanted to say, but the word eluded her.” It’s the first indication that something is wrong. But so what? We’ve all been there, haven’t we? I know I have, and in front of a class. That technical language can disappear into the back of one’s brain so easily. But a few days later she gets lost during her routine run near her home. “She wanted to continue walking but stood frozen instead. She didn’t know where she was …She knew she was in Harvard Square, but she didn’t know which way was home... ‘ Please stop this,’ she whispered. She opened her eyes. Just as suddenly as it had left her, the landscape snapped suddenly back into place.” There is a page of words in the spaces where I’ve put the ellipses in that quote. Genova’s writing is detailed and evocative. You feel Alice’s mounting panic along with her. Genova has chosen a highly intelligent woman as her protagonist and a particularly aggressive form of Alzheimer’s as her villain. She needs Alice’s smart analytical brain to tell her own story. She needs the fast progressing disease to keep up the pace. But the empathy that flows from the author is not only for the loss of a good brain, it is for everyone who suffers from this disease that robs people of their very essence. One of the most memorable passages of the book is a family gathering when Alice and her husband tell their children about Alice’s illness. It’s too long to quote here but suffice it to say that everyone immediately starts talking about themselves, as if Alice isn’t there. They don’t ignore her completely, that’s what’s so clever about this writing, but it’s enough to give the feeling that that’s what’s coming. Dark, heavy and scary? Scary, yes. I’m sure everyone reading this knows of someone suffering from Alzheimer’s or some other form of dementia. Everyone fears it for themselves and the people they love and care for. Dark? Well what is dark? It’s serious. It doesn’t paint everything rosy. Dark is good. Heavy, no. this book is as light as air. It’s light with love and truth.

Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (Froken Smillas Fornemmelse for Sne) is published in the US as Smilla’s Sense of Snow. Smilla is a young woman from Greenland living in Copenhagen. She’s an expert on snow and ice, not only because her mother was a hunter in north Greenland, an area that is harsh and sparsely inhabited even by Greenlandic standards, but because she has studied snow and ice, written a dozen published scientific papers on them and been on expeditions to the arctic, where any group would take her along as navigator ‘even if they had to carry her on their backs’. Smilla owes much of her forceful and resilient character to her mother. In traditional Greenlandic society there were women who hunted like men: ‘because of the numerousness of women, by dint of death and need, and because of the natural acceptance in Greenland that each of the sexes contains the potential to become its opposite. As a rule, however, women have then had to dress like men, and they would have had to renounce any sort of family life. The collective could tolerate a change in sex, but not a constant transition to and fro. It was different with my mother. She laughed and gave birth to her children and gossiped about her friends and cleaned skins like a woman. But she shot and paddled a kayak and dragged meat home like a man.’ That is Smilla speaking: academic, wordy, cynical, funny and possessed of enormous insight. Smilla’s father is Danish, a wealthy retired anaesthetist who ‘resembles a docker and discretely cultivates this look by letting his beard grow out now and then.’ He left Smilla’s mother, and Greenland, when she was three years old. He took Smilla into his care when her mother died in a hunting accident. Smilla went to boarding schools through the period of cultural assimilation, when Greenlanders were called North Danes and speaking Danish was the sign of being civilized. She ran away from school repeatedly but she somehow got the education. So when is this book set? In the 1990s. Which is a little disconcerting, because although it’s a modern story there’s so much that has changed. Nobody then carried a miniature computer in their pocket. There was no Google. Research was going to a library. The Danish colonial repentance that led to infrastructure, healthcare and education for the Inuit of Greenland was encased in contempt for their cultural autonomy and their rights as human beings. Their story mimics the painful stories of the native peoples of Canada, Australia and the USA. Smilla is a product of that time. The alcoholic mother who lives in a nearby apartment is another. One day Smilla finds this mother’s child sitting on the stairs. ‘Then I see that it’s a child, … “Beat it, you little shit.” I say. Isaiah looks up. “Peerit,” he says. Beat it yourself. …the boy on the stairs looks right at me with a gaze that cuts straight through to what he and I have in common.’ One day Isaiah falls to his death from the roof of a building next door. Smilla doesn’t believe it was entirely accidental, his footprints in the snow look like he was running from something, and Smilla is tenacious. What follows is a crime story, an action-movie of a book. But it avoids the things that make action movies so tedious; the outrunning of explosions, the dodging of hails of bullets and the drawn out fights where people spring back up after getting the hell beaten out of them. Smilla knows about violence alright, she is expert at it, but it’s violence informed by that cutting intelligence of hers. ‘The misconception that violence always favours the physically strong has spread to a large segment of the population. It’s not correct. The results of a fight are a matter of speed in the first few metres.’ There are moments in this book when you’ll wonder just why something has been included, elements of two sex scenes come to mind, and moments that verge on the farcical, complete with people popping in and out of doors, but the overall mixture of lurking evil, social commentary and philosophical musing lifts it above and beyond the average murder mystery. And you will learn a lot about snow and ice.

In Life After Life Ursula dies, over and over, and in many ways. If that sounds gruesome, well in some instances it is, and in some it isn’t, but it is always an end of life.   The story (stories) begins in 1910, with Ursula’s birth in the middle of a February snow storm. Sylvie, her mother, already has two children, Maurice and Pamela. Sylvie married Hugh while young and the first part of the book is as much Sylvie’s story as Ursula’s. She is smart and she was brought up in one of those unconventional artistic households that flourished at the end of the nineteenth century. You get the impression her own household is unconventional too, with the children running wild in the English countryside and Bridget, the Irish maid, and Mrs Glover, the indomitable cook, forming a family within a family. Ursula, grows older. The tone shifts. Ursula is dimly aware that she has been here before and she starts trying to alter the future. Sylvie takes her to a psychiatrist, who becomes a good friend to Ursula, but from now on Ursula is center stage and Sylvie feels like a much less likeable character.   Ursula’s many lives span the first half of twentieth century Europe, those blood soaked years that took so many lives in first one horrific conflict and then another. The First World War, the Great War, takes place off stage but its returning, and not returning, soldiers loom large in Ursula’s life. The Second World War is her war, and is the heart of the book.   Atkinson tells the story of the Blitz from the point of view of the ARP (Air Raid Precaution service). Those are the people remembered for patrolling the streets yelling, “Turn that bloody light off!”.  They did more than that. They pulled people out of bombed buildings, dead or alive. Atkinson takes you right with them.   ‘They had to know the occupants of every building in their sector, whether they had a shelter of their own or whether they went to a public one or whether they too were fatalists and didn’t bother at all. They had to know if anyone had gone away or moved, married, had a baby, died. They had to know where the hydrants were, cul-de-sacs, narrow alleyways, cellars, rest centres.’   It is dangerous work, this work on the home front. Ursula works in London, as a civil-service clerk by day and an air raid warden by night. There are many ways to die.   ‘The ground shook and another voice, that of someone working on the mound, yelled, “Watch out!”. She heard something shifting and a noise like  displaced scree rattling and rolling down a mountain, the harbinger of an avalanche. Rubble, not scree. And a mound of it, not a mountain. The rubble that comprised the mound was all that was left of a house, or rather, several houses all ground and mashed into each other now. The rubble had been homes half an hour ago, now those same homes were just a hellish jumble of bricks, broken joists and floorboards, furniture, pictures, rugs, bedding, books, crockery, lino, glass. People. The crushed fragments of lives, never to be whole again.’   So why would you read a book full of such horrors, apart from the fact that, unlike so many of the many books about the Blitz, it does actually convey the horror? Well one reason is that the writing is masterly. Scene after scene unfolds seamlessly. The same scenes, but different. At one point Ursula tells her psychiatrist that her deja-vue sensations are a palimpsest, old parchment that’s been reused and retains traces of what it was before. This whole book is a palimpsest and it challenges you to decipher it.   The Todd family, Ursula’s family, is like the families that inhabited children’s fiction of the first half of the twentieth century. The children live in the world of The Railway Children and Swallows and Amazons; a world where siblings have a special bond and a depth of love not found elsewhere. A world where neighbouring children are both a given part of the environment and mysteriously other. A world of adventure.   But this is a book for adults and we get to know the parents too.   ‘ “Do you hear something?” Sylvie asked. She was propped up on pillow, reading an early Forster. “The baby perhaps?” Hugh cocked his head to one side. For a moment he reminded Sylvie of Bosun. “No,” he said. The baby slept all through the night usually. He was a cherub. But not in heaven. Thankfully. “The best one yet,” Hugh said. “Yes. I think we should keep this one.” “He doesn’t look like me,” Hugh said. “No,” she agreed amiably. “Nothing like you at all.” ’   Is Teddy the son of the handsome ploughman Sylvia lusts after in some versions of her life? We will never know. Atkinson doesn’t take us all the way down every intriguing turning. Sometimes the palimpsest is indecipherable. The infinite ways in which a story can unfold can exist in the reader’s imagination as well as in the writer’s.   Life After Life is the history of England in the first half of the twentieth century. A somewhat patrician history of a clever, educated and well-heeled family with a large house in the home counties, a solid source of funds, two servants and a sense of duty. It is a history where the women achieved the right to be educated, and to work independently, but not to rise to the top, or be free of repression and assault by men. You can rise in your profession or you can have a family, not both. Ursula’s older sister, Pamela, a trained scientist, settles for a family of four boys and a girl. Her eldest brother is a top civil servant. Her two younger ones fight in the war, officers of course.   Ursula? Ursula has many lives. But only one ends the book.

Pelican girls were women sent from France to the La Louisiane colony  to become wives for the settlers. Julia Malye is a French author, but she wrote Pelican Girls in English.   In 1720, the abbess of the La Salpêtrière hospital in Paris is choosing women to dispatch  across the Atlantic. Étiennette is about sixteen, the younger sister of a conspiracy theorist the abbess sent to Mississippi a year ago. Not yet rotten. A good choice for the colony. Charlotte is only twelve, and has been the abbess’ favourite since she was a baby. The abbess wants to keep her safe in the hospital but she insists on going with Étiennette. Pétronille has been confined in the hospital by her family, who claim she is mad. Geneviève, it is written in small print at the end of her file, is an abortionist. The hospital holds the abandoned, the insane and the criminal. The perfect pool for populating a new world.   There is danger ahead: danger from pirates, from disease, from illicit love, from penury, from men, from childbirth, and even from attack by Natchez villagers. It’s a harsh world and the women have no choice but to survive in any way they can. Sometimes it’s through acting in unexpected ways, sometimes through help from unexpected quarters, sometimes through sheer good luck. Malye relates these events in a matter-of-fact way. Heroics are without drama. And after the life-threatening moments the trauma lingers. These are not twenty-first century women in costume. women with super powers. They are not women pretending to be men. Their courage is the everyday female courage of their time. Their nightmares are eighteenth century nightmares. ‘Fourteen months have passed since the Natchez attack, but the events of that winter morning remain as vivid to Pétronille as if they happened yesterday. After Utu’Ecoko’nesel left, she collapsed. She was alone with her children on the shore of the St. Louis River, almost one hundred leagues away from the capital; on the other side of the woods, battles were raging.’   ‘The grandchildren are told about girls barely older than them, who left their city never to return. The women describe the people they learned to love, a husband or a neighbor, and those who departed, making them feel that they would now have to start all over again; they talk about the men and women they betrayed, failed, or hurt; the compassion and the cruelty they were capable of, the destruction they caused; but, no matter what they think once they fall silent, the list is never complete.’   In her author notes Julia Malye writes,’ I have attempted to stay true to what is known about the period and these women’s collective story.’ I have heard it said that you shouldn’t expect to learn about history from historical fiction , and that is true of a lot of historical fiction but not of this book. If you want an insight into the early years of French colonial America Pelican Girls is a great place to start .