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The Book Thief is special. It’s narrated by Death.   ‘ HERE IS A SMALL FACT. You are going to die. I am in all truthfulness attempting to be cheerful about this whole topic, though most people find themselves hindered in believing me, no matter my protestations. Please, trust me. I most definitely can be cheerful. Agreeable. Affable. And that’s only the A’s. Just don’t ask me to be nice. Nice has nothing to do with me.’   So true. This story is not nice. It does not end happily ever after; Death will tell you that right at the beginning. It’s a story about the rise of Nazism in Germany and the progress of war in the small village of Molching, close to the Dachau camp outside Munich. It’s a story about ordinary families and extraordinary people. And it’s about what happened to them: their courage, their cowardice, their attitudes, their love and their fates.   Time is fluid for Death. Death’s world is composed of colors not time.   ‘ People observe the colors of a day only at its beginning and ends, but to me it’s quite clear that a day merges through a multitude of shades and intonations, with each passing moment. A single hour can consist of thousands of different colors. Waxy yellows, cloud-spat blues. Murky darknesses. In my line of work, I make it a point to notice them. ’   There is beautiful writing on every page of this book. It’s a book to linger over like you would linger over a good meal or a good wine. Zusak also uses typography, layout and even pictures to tell his story. I have this book on Kindle. I recommend getting a physical copy. The book is constructed as a work of art, just as the book thief sees books as works of art to be handled and kept.   The huge gap between the rich and the poor in the village is front and central. The story centers around the people of Himmel Street, which is certainly not heaven, but neither is it hell. The poor people living there are always hungry, living on bread and pea soup. The rich in their part of town have personal libraries. The children of the poor learn to fight and steal and play football in the street. They are tough little beings.   The adults love their children. They only want to keep them safe. But sometimes their choices are the wrong ones.   One thing that will stick with you, I guarantee, is the directly insulting nature of German swearing. Liesel Meminger, the book thief of the title, is taken to a foster family, with a foster mother of extraordinary verbal repetitiveness.   ‘In the beginning it was the profanity that made an immediate impact. It was so vehement and prolific. Every second word was either Saumensch or Saukerl or Arschloch . … “ Saumensch, du dreckiges! ” Liesel’s foster mother shouted that first evening when she refused to have a bath. “You filthy pig! Why won’t you get undressed” She was good at being furious. In fact, you could say that Rosa Huberman had a face decorated with constant fury. That was how the creases were made in the cardboard texture of her complexion.’ Rosa, you will probably not be surprised to discover, has strengths that could well be beyond us all. They are strengths she is going to need.   ‘ The beginning of September. It was a cool day in Molching when the war began and my workload increased.’   Another novel about World War Two? Aren’t there enough out there? There are many. This one is different. This one will survive.

​​   “Lord what fools these mortals be!” Puck, Midsummer Night’s Dream Bernard Cornwell is best known for his Napoleonic War books about Richard Sharpe and the rifle brigades and for his Last Kingdom series about Uhtred the Saxon. Both have been made into popular television shows. Fools and Mortals is a standalone novel about the first staging of Midsummer Night’s Dream. There is a theory among some academics that Midsummer Night’s Dream was written for the marriage of Elizabeth Carey to Thomas Berkeley on February 19th, 1596. Elizabeth Carey was the granddaughter of Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, the patron of The Lord Chamberlain’s men, the company in which Shakespeare had a share. As such Hunsdon was a powerful and important figure in Shakespeare’s life. Cornwell runs with this theory for his story and Fools and Mortals is replete with descriptions of London in the snow and the problems of staging a play in a hall by candlelight.   ‘It was cold. Freezing. The night was still, baked with frost. The snow sparkled where lantern light touched it…I needed shelter, but by this time of night the taverns in Whitehall were tight shut, not even a lamp glimmering.’ ‘The music began and I snatched up a pair of shears. Tom and Percy had lit the candles, but they had to stay in the gallery, so two of us mechanicals took the right-hand side of the stage and two the left, where we trimmed the wicks, cutting off the excess to make a clearer, brighter flame.’ The story of Fools and Mortals is told in the first person by Richard Shakespeare, a brother of William’s and ten years younger. Cornwell imagines Richard as getting into trouble in Stratford on Avon and running away to London to beg William to help him become an actor. He finds his older brother rather dour and distant, but undeniably brilliant, both as a playwright and as a theatre troupe manager. After an apprenticeship in one of the boys’ companies Richard graduates to playing women and girls with The Lord Chamberlain’s Men.   ‘George Bryan, all nervousness gone, had been clawing at me, much to the audience’s joy. They were urging him to drag up my skirts and show them my legs, but I managed to get a knee between his thigh’s and jerk it up hard. He went very still, and the audience probably thought he was having a moment of even greater joy…’ When the story begins Richard is getting too old to play girls and wants proper parts. He has ‘a beard coming’ he says. His brother seizes upon that declaration and shamelessly gives to Flute the Bellows Mender in the mechanicals’ performance in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Richard is mortified. There is tension between Will and Richard. There is tension between the players and the Pursuivants, employees of the Crown who seek out seditious, Catholic, literature. There is deadly rivalry between theatre companies. And someone steals Will’s latest plays. Is the disaffected Richard to blame? That is the personal story, but what I enjoyed most about Fools and Mortals was the bigger background and the way Cornwell brings the actors of the day to back-stage life. They are rough, hard-working and are handy with their oaths: ‘ ‘’What’s your first line?” Rust growled. “Um…” “Christ on his silver-painted cross! If I ever hear the word ‘um’ on this stage I will kill! I will kill! What’s your goddamned line?” And I love the asides such as: ‘We are players, and we love an audience. Sometimes, if a play is going badly, it is easy to think of the audience as an enemy, but truly they are a part of the play, because an audience changes the way we perform.’ As true now as it ever was. If you love theatre, love Shakespeare’s plays and you love a rollicking, fast moving tale grounded in historical accuracy, then Fools and Mortals is for you.

Pied Piper was published in 1942. The story is purely imaginary and something of a fairy tale (a nice one, not a Brothers Grimm horror story) but the setting is as realistic as imagination applied to the news of the day could possibly make a setting. The narrative is framed by the conversation of two men sitting out a bombing raid in their London club. One of them, a frail elderly gentleman, called John Sidney Howard, has a story to tell. The story never refers to John Sidney Howard again after the opening line. He is always Howard, or Mr. Howard or ‘the old man’. This is Shute’s style. He distances the reader from the adults on the Pied-Piper-like journey that Howard takes right across France from the Jura near the Swiss border to the coast in Brittany. The children that Howard acquires on his journey are always called by their given names. Combined with the simple English Shute uses this creates a contrast between how an adult sees the war and how the children do and points up the immediacy of the scenes. When the Germans invade Norway, then Holland and Belgium, Howard is in the Jura, fishing in mountain streams. He is not paying attention to the news. He is desperately trying to cope with the death of his son, an RAF pilot. But the news catches up with him and he decides he must return to England while he still can. At that point he acquires two children. Their parents are English, the father working for the League of Nations in Switzerland. The adults feel they should stay. Will Howard take the children back to England with him? Now you might question the believability of this plot. What mother would send her children away with a holiday acquaintance rather than go with them herself? There are several ways that feeling is countered. Within the narrative: Howard thinks it odd himself. In terms of the historical setting: war brings out strange responses in people. Given the whole fairy tale ethos of the story: it’s what has to happen. Howard is the modern Pied Piper driven by forces beyond rationality and self-preservation and offering something magical to those who come into contact with him. That magic is never defined but by the end of the book it is clear that it has drained Howard, as if all his strength passed to the children who continue on their fairy-tale way to a promised land far from their parents. Scenes from Pied Piper stuck with me through all the years since I first read it. I knew exactly what was happening as I read it this time. Only a few events and characters had disappeared from my memory. Here is some of the scene on a French road that led to my conversation about how well Shute creates feeling while also drawing the picture for the reader. The bus they are traveling on has broken down and Howard has taken the children a little way away from it to eat their lunch on the grass. Three planes appear. ‘There was no time to do anything, to go anywhere, nor was there anywhere to go. Howard caught Shelia and Ronnie and pulled them close to him, flat upon the ground. He shouted to Rose to lie down, quickly.    Then the machines were on them, low-winged, single engine monoplanes with curious bent wings, dark green in colour. A burst of fire was poured into the bus from the machines to right and left; a stream of tracer-bullets shot forward up the road from the centre aircraft. A few bullets lickered straight over Howard and his children on the grass and spattered the ground a few yards behind them.    For a moment Howard saw the gunner in the rear cockpit as he fired at them. He was a young man, not more than twenty, with a keen, tanned face. He wore a yellow students’ corps cap, and he was laughing as he fired.    Then the two flanking aircraft had passed, and the centre one was very near. Looking up, the old man could see the bombs in their racks beneath the wing; he watched in agony for them to fall. They did not fall. The machine passed them by, not a hundred feet away. He watched it as it went, sick with relief. He saw the bombs leave the machine three hundred yards up the road, and watched dumbly as the debris flew upwards. He saw the wheel of a cart go sailing through the air, to land in the field.    Then that graceful, weaving dance began again, the machine in rear changing places with the one on the left. They vanished in the distance; presently Howard heard the thunder of another load of bombs on the road.    He released the children, and sat up upon the grass. Ronnie was flushed and excited. “Weren’t they close!” he said. “I did see them well. Did you see them well, Shelia? Did you hear them firing the guns?”    He was ecstatically pleased. Shelia was quite unaffected. She said, “May I have some orange?”’ If you want a book you will pick up and read in a day because you have to know what happens next, or you want to revisit a story you know from years past, Pied Piper is for you.

Martha’s prose is like crystal; a fluid that has become a solid. It leaps amongst the poses of ballet and lingers in the memory-haunting nature of song. It is like the facets of a transparent gemstone, cut around the three muses of discipline, song and memory and reflecting the story’s three characters: a musically gifted psychiatrist, a ballerina and a choreographer. There are glimpses in this book. There is dominance and abuse; or is it obsession and art? There is cruelty; or is it protection? There is honorable renunciation; or is it a failure to embrace life? At its core the story is a romance, an eternal triangle, but one with all the interlocking mysteries of the human mind. Self-awareness and memory and circumstance makes a man, makes a woman. For two of the three main characters, the traumas of the past are written into the story: the story of a child who survives a Nazi deathcamp because he can sing to the officers and the story of a child who survives the death of her alcoholic mother through dancing. The third, the choreographer, is an eminence grise, with his own, hinted-at, past of escape. The choreographer: the person who makes the ballet and lurks in the wings of the stage; the person invisible to the audience, who emerges at curtain-call. The reader sees through the minds of the two main protagonists, catching at the scintillations of their virtues and their failings. The reader never sees the mind of the choreographer, and the author never puts him in a box. He is always reflected, back and forth, never transparent but undoubtedly brilliant. The ballets performed in The Three Muses are mostly imaginary, invented by Martha, choreographed and set to music by Martha, allowing her to put the reader inside the creative process. The songs sung to German officers are real, and relentlessly upbeat. You can listen to them on YouTube, sung by bright treble voices. The deathcamp horror Martha evokes is claustrophobic and sweaty. The ballet world is claustrophobic and sweaty too. Beauty and the strivings and failings of humanity exist side by side. Even, dare I say it, beauty and evil. For where does human failure end and evil begin? On the surface this is a simple book, a love triangle, and the clarity of the prose might deceive you into thinking it has a simple message. But it doesn’t. Eternal questions are asked. There are no pat answers and no sweeping historical perspectives. There is the nitty gritty of panic reactions, dirty clothes and friends who know you better than you do. If you like a book that is going to challenge you and linger with you, and maybe leave you unsated, unsatisfied, then The Three Muses is for you.

If you’ve read the Iliad, and I know some of you have, you are going to enjoy this book. I can say that unreservedly. This is not Cliff Notes for the Iliad. If you haven’t read the Iliad you are also going to enjoy this book, because Madeline Miller has achieved a thoroughly contemporary story of the Trojan War and the years leading up to it, while placing you firmly amongst ancient Greeks. The Song of Achilles is written from the point of view of Patroclus, Achilles’ beloved companion who was slain by Hector on the battlefield. There’s no issue with spoilers here. Achilles’ doom is foretold and although the characters don’t know exactly how fate will play out the reader probably does. Patroclus, a minor character in the Iliad, almost a plot device, is such a significant character in Madeline Miller’s version that the book could have been called The Song of Patroclus. This is a modern novel, not a re-telling of the Iliad; character development and relationships are at its core. Patroclus and Achilles are lovers. Achilles is half god, half human. Thetis, Achilles’ sea-nymph mother, is a scary hyper-controlling parent. Chiron, the boys’ tutor, is a centaur. And that’s perfectly fine. He’s a character. In the Iliad the gods intervene in human lives with breathtakingly casual arrogance. In The Song of Achilles they are part of the fabric of the world. The interweaving of the known story with the reader’s expectations about the story is masterful, and all done in Patroclus’ voice. ‘ “I thought you said it would be an easy campaign, home by next fall,” I managed. I had to do something to stop the relentless roll of their words. “I lied.” Odysseus shrugged.’ And this: ‘He put on his best singer’s falsetto, “A thousand ships have sailed for her.” A thousand was the number Agamemnon’s bards had started using, one thousand, one hundred and eighty-six didn’t fit well in a line of verse.’ Most of the book is not the Trojan War, it is the boy’s lives before the war, but some of it is, so if you are wondering how the violence is handled the answer is with immediacy and speed, but without the seemingly endless, anatomically detailed, descriptions of the many ways a bronze age weapon could penetrate a human body that you find in the Iliad. Madeline Miller has only a few lines like that, but they are enough to put you on the battlefield. In the author’s own words: ‘I will say that at some point a friend of mine – let’s be honest an ex-boyfriend – referred to the story as “Homeric fan fiction.” That was fairly dampening. But I decided: so be it. If it’s fan fiction, it’s fan fiction. I’m still going to write it.’ If it’s fan fiction, so be it. It’s amazingly good fan fiction.

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.

The idea for this newsletter grew out of something I read called 5 best book covers of…, you know the sort of thing. They all start with a number. It seems we can’t resist the combination of a number and the word ‘best’. The book covers were, in my not so humble opinion, awful. So I pulled books from my shelves until I found five I liked and photographed them. From there grew the idea. These were not just great covers; they were books I had read and enjoyed. Why not share them? Susanna Clarke wrote Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell. You are going to know that if it’s the last thing the publisher does, because it’s the only thing that mars an otherwise classically elegant cover. Don’t dismiss Piranesi out of hand if you didn’t like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell. It’s recognizably a book from the same author with the same skills but it’s a different book, a lot shorter apart from anything else. In Piranesi you plunge into an alternative world through the journals of a character of such innocence you just want to hug him. You soon know his world intimately because that’s how he knows it. At the same time you know it isn’t the only world he has ever known, because he might be innocent but his cultural references are our cultural references and his scientific rationalism is our scientific rationalism and your ever-active mind tells you that he probably belongs in our world, and that our world is more real than his. Then, you feel sad because his world is so beautiful and mysterious and he negotiates it so perfectly. It’s a mystery plot, of the “What’s really going on here?” type. You might not find out, at least not from the author. You have to bring your own thoughts to bear on this book. The book reads itself to you, then you read the book to yourself, and when you close the cover you think, “What was all that about, really? But it was wonderful. Or at least it contained wonder. Wherein does that wonder lie?” If you like world-building and intensely close-up first-person narration, Piranesi is a good read for 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.

Since the beginning of recorded history, and probably before, people have told tales of catastrophes that sweep through the world and destroy the majority of humankind, leaving only a few to start again. Such stories are so common that they have their own literary genre: post-apocalyptic or dystopian fiction. Dystopia is the opposite of Utopia, a thoroughly nasty society created out of the worst side of human nature. Think The Hand Maid’s Tale or 1984. Post-apocalyptic means after the end of the world. They are also depictions of a grim and hostile place, where humanity’s worst side comes to the fore. Post-apocalyptic is often a misnomer, since, in many books categorized this way the world doesn’t end, only most people in it. Much as I hate to propose a new literary genre (I detest the whole business of literary genres) I think after-the-deluge would be a better name for books that describe a world following a major catastrophe that has wiped out most people. After all, the tale of Noah’s Ark is one of the earliest of such stories. Emily St. John Mandal wrote Station Eleven after SARS but before COVID. In it she imagines what happens if most people suddenly die from a virulent form of flu. She differentiates what she is doing from end-of-the-world stories by incorporating a graphic novel that does tell of the end of the world. Station Eleven the graphic novel is a story within a story. The world is gone. The new home is divided into hostile sections. The hero looks over the waters and mourns his lost planet. The graphic novel throws the actual novel into relief. The graphic novel feeds our love of imagining a dangerous place, from the safety of our couch; our obsession with asserting that the world is heading for disaster. Although Station Eleven the actual novel depicts missing people, searches for scarce resources and conflict with hostile bands, these tropes of the post-apocalyptic genre are not what it is about. It is about what happens to a particular group of people, connected in one way or another to the person who starts the story, Arthur Leander, a movie star performing a stage production of King Lear at the time that the flu hits. The opening scene is in a theatre in Toronto and the story proceeds largely in the area of the Great Lakes. I recommend studying a map of the Great Lakes before you get too far in. It will help enormously with picturing the collapsed world that the characters find themselves journeying through. In the wreck of this world, people are surviving as much on what they can scavenge and re-purpose as on what they can create. This is where the author has to convince you that her vision is plausible, that her world is coherent. How much has changed in twenty years and how much remains? What is adapted when there is no more electricity, or water in the taps? What is used for transport? For heat? She does it vividly, describing old pickup trucks stripped of their engines and pulled by horses in such a way that you can see them trundling along the pot-holed remains of the road, the last of their paint peeling away in the summer’s heat. Because Emily St. John Mandel is showing human nature that doesn’t morph into a world divided between violent good guys and violent bad guys, she has to give the reader back story. She does this with great skill, slipping easily from place to place and from time period to time period. These people, in the twenty years after the flu, are the same people as before the flu, with the same drives. Musicians and artists band together into a traveling symphony. A paramedic becomes the go-to person when people are sick. A young man raised to believe he was saved for a reason becomes the leader of a murderous cult. In this world one has to be tough. The people who do embrace violence are real, but unlike dystopian novels, the daily occupation of most is not either heroic opposition, futile resistance or miserable survival. For most, it is living the best life they can. Just like us.

It may be that you feel you don’t want to read yet another novel about slavery in the United States. After all, you’ve read Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Solomon Northrup’s Twelve Years a Slave, or at least you’ve seen the movie. I sympathize, I truly do, you know the country’s shameful past and the almost unbelievable horrors inflicted on human beings. It is painful to have them recreated in the hands of a skilled author. So why would I recommend this book to you? Because you will learn something. Meticulous research is a fundamental necessity for any historical fiction, and this book is, as far as I can tell, accurate, in both the detail and the larger picture. That was certainly the author’s aim. As she said in an interview with Ophra Winfrey, “I wanted to get it right. I spent a year reading - slave narratives; people writing about slavery, about abolition; 19th-century history.” Sue Monk Kidd immerses you in the world of early nineteenth century Charleston, South Carolina, not just the monied, high society world of her heroine, Sarah Grimké, but the parallel world of her maid, Handful. Handful is the name her mother gave her. Hetty is the name the white world knows her by. This simple choice of name tells you mountains about the way the enslaved people forged a culture of their own, and also quite a bit about Handful’s character. This wealthy Charleston is dangerous to the white population, who, by setting themselves up as masters have set themselves apart and made themselves frightened, defensive and circumscribed. Several times the author has Sarah notice the vast numbers of slaves in the streets: ‘As the carriage neared the market, the noise mounted and the sidewalks began to overflow with Negroes and mulattoes. Sunday was the slaves’ only day off, and they thronged the throughfares…even on regular days, the slaves dominated the streets, doing their owner’s bidding.’ Notice the menace in that word ‘dominated’. These people knew they were sitting on a powder keg. They do everything they can to damp it down. The evocation of the parallel world of the enslaved is masterly. It is all at once saddening, joyful, amusing, defiant and crushed. Handful is the other heroine of this book. She is smart, resourceful and determined. She goes through hell and back. She has to. These things happened and this is a truthful book. But she survives. Not ‘made stronger’, that dreadful cliché, but worked over, scarred and honed. Sarah Grimké, and her younger sister, Angelina, were real people, early abolitionists who deserve to be more widely known than they are. They eventually left Charleston for the North and joined the abolitionist lecture circuit, campaigning for the end of slavery at a time when it was outrageous for a woman to speak in public, and beyond the pale to speak to an audience with men attending. They became pariahs in Charleston, threatened with arrest if they should ever return home. Far from being deterred by the public shock over their behavior they added women’s rights to their speeches and managed to annoy the high-ups in the abolitionist movement as well. Although Sarah Griimké the abolitionist is the inspiration of this book I found her personal development into a major player in the anti-slavery campaign its least convincing aspect. As a defiant and intelligent child she is all you could wish. As an awkward young woman at odds with her society, her mother, the minister, you name it, she is totally believable. But when it came to her religious faith and her association with the Presbyterians and the Quakers I found something lacking. It is as if the author cannot quite accept the integral nature of religion to her life. For the highly motivated white abolitionists religion was their motivation, their rock, their meaning. It fails to come across that way for Sarah. It is as if she is wandering around churches challenging God to tell her what to do, instead of God dragging her by hook or crook into his plan for her, as the devout Quakers and Calvinists of the movement believed. But the sense of her being trapped and stultified where she is, that comes across all too well. The subjugation of women permeates every aspect of her life and her relationships. Subjugation and its hateful consequences for both the subdued and the subduer, is the spine of this book. Handful’s faith, on the other hand, in her mother’s story-quilt and their spirit tree, is beautifully conveyed. This is after her mother disappears: ‘Next day, after I’d slept a little, I sewed the layers of the quilt together with a tacking stitch. Then I wrapped the finish quilt round me like a glory cloak. I wore it out into the yard where Aunt Sister was bundling up copping cane sugar and she said, “Girl, what you got on you? What you do to your head?” I didn’t say nothing. I walked back to the tree with my breath trailing clouds and I wrapped a new thread round the trunk.’ If you want to be transported to the past, if you want to learn, even when you thought you knew enough, The Invention of Wings 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.

translated by Frank Wynne This book is French. Of course it is. Where else would a novel quite overtly written as a vehicle for telling the history of mathematics become an immediate bestseller? Where else except in a country where dinner fills the evening and conversation fills dinner-time. Conversation that turns into excitement over the story of maths. Guedj wraps his lessons in a mystery. What happened to the old mathematician who lived in a Brazilian forest and suddenly sent his entire library to a friend he had not seen in half a century? Guedj people’s his audience with quirky, if not deeply realized, characters. It’s not you and me attending lectures on squaring the circle. It’s deaf eleven-year-old, Max, who has come home from the flea market with a parrot he’s rescued from smugglers. It’s argumentative twin seventeen-year-olds and their hard-working mother. It’s a taxi-driver who only takes people from the airport if they’ve arrived from a city he wants to hear about: “Cities, mind you, not countries. Countries only exist on maps, but cities…cities are real places.” And these people live in Paris. What’s not to like about a novel set in Paris? I would read it just for the street names: ‘The rue Ravignan is short and steep, running from the fountain at the Place Èmile-Goudeau , where the Bateau-Lavoir – Montmartre’s famous studio of painters – still stands, to the junction of the rue des Abbesses and the rue d’Orchampt.’ Mr. Ruche owns a bookshop on the rue d’Orchampt, called A Thousand and One Pages. He’s a philosopher by education. Talking about the library of Alexandria he says, “The first manuscripts were kept in rolls – in Latin, volumen , hence the word volume.” “Where would you be without etymology?” (says one of those highly articulate twins.) “I think I might find words a little less interesting.” It’s Mr. Ruche who takes delivery of a lorry-load of crates filled with books on mathematics. Mr. Ruche sleeps in a converted garage in the courtyard of his house, because he has turned over the living area above his shop to his assistant, Perrette, her twins, Jonathan and Lea and her son Max. They live together as one unusual, but very French, family. Mr. Ruche is making osso bucco for dinner and talking to Lea: ‘Mr. Ruche lifted the lids of the pans in turn: the veal was cooking in the frying pan and the shallots softening in the saucepan. “You can argue successfully only if you are agreed on the basis for the argument. Once that is agreed, you can discuss the rest. I say something, you respond. I make a point, you argue the point, you refine your argument, I shift my ground.” Do they really behave like that in French families? Do teenagers join in conversations like that? In some families they certainly do. I’ve been at dinner tables where they do. And the parrot of the Parrot's Theorem? The parrot is part of the mystery plot. I don’t want to spoil it. Suffice it to say for now that Max loves the parrot.