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I’m tempted to call The Vanishing Half a mystery, a what happened and why sort of mystery, but I think it’s more like a discovery, a gradual unfolding in which character and the surrounding society matter more than plot. The main thread is the tale of twin girls born into a small town in Louisiana; a town so small it isn’t on any maps. The opening line is one that belongs in one of those lists of memorable opening lines. ‘The morning one of the lost twins returned to Mallard, Lou leBon ran to the diner to break the news, and even now, many years later, everyone remembers the shock of sweaty Lou pushing through the glass doors, chest heaving, neckline darkened with his own effort.’ What sort of place is called ‘Mallard’? A place like this: ‘In Mallard, nobody married dark. Nobody left either, but Desiree has already done that. Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far’. Wow! You know now that you are in for a deep dive into intolerance, gossip and all the horrors of small-town life. Why continue reading? Well, if you’ve got this far (2% in according to my Kindle) you will already be captivated by the vibrant language and the smart sideways glances of the narrator. You will want to know who Desiree and Stella Vignes are and why they suddenly left town. And what happened to them after they left? And why did Desiree come back? And, hang on, what’s all this obsession with light skin? You will want to know how, what and why, even while the whole concept of Mallard starts to turn your stomach queasy. The story begins in the 1950s. The twins, Desiree and Stella, identical in appearance, differ significantly in personality. In some ways they are two halves of a whole, and in many ways they are not. ‘As they grew, they no longer seemed like one body split in two, but two bodies poured into one, each pulling it her own way.’ The twins are so pale skinned they can ‘pass’ for white. After they flee Mallard for New Orleans, Stella gets a job as a secretary by ‘passing’ then suddenly leaves to go to Boston, as the wife of her white boss. She has chosen a life where she can never risk anyone recognising her. She has chosen to leave her mother, grandmother and twin sister for ever. So here is the obvious vanishing half of the title. But there is yet more vanishing in this book. It begins in the 1950s but carries on until the 1990s. It is Stella and Desiree’s story but also the story of their daughters: Kennedy, rich, Californian, blonde and desperate for the love of a mother she finds distant and Jude, raised in absurd and abusive Mallard and convinced she is not beautiful because she is too black. Two girls who should share a grandmother but don’t. Vanishing (either of people who should be there but aren’t, of aspects of personality that demand leading a double life, or changing one aspect of life for another) is also the foundation of many of the minor characters in The Vanishing Half. Vanished, or fractured or denied elements of families, and of self, are everywhere. Reese is Trans. He ran away from home, bought street steroids and bound his breasts tight. Early was given to an aunt and uncle ‘because they had no children and his parents had too many’. Barry is a high school chemistry teacher, except when he’s onstage as Bianca twice a month: ‘Barry went to faculty meetings and family reunions and church, Bianca always lingering on the edge of his mind.’ I found one of the most satisfying elements of this book the way in which the characters are convincing in their struggle to live the life they’ve been given; complex, neither wholly good nor wholly bad. True there is a whole chorus line of nasty white bigots living in a gated community and another of nasty black bigots living in a town that is an experiment in ‘building a better negro’ but that is what they are, the chorus line, the representation of American society and its deeply embedded obsession with race. In the Vanishing Half this questioning of a racist society is right there alongside the exploration of individual identity. The consequences of the foundation of Mallard as a community that breeds lighter and lighter skinned negroes spill into the twin’s different decisions, and over again into the lives of their daughters. American society inherits the consequences of its own past decisions.

Let’s start with the title,The cuckoo and the Cuckquean, since that probably has you wondering. A European cuckoo lays its eggs in other birds’ nests and leaves the young to be raised by the duped bird. The infant cuckoo forces its hosts young out of the nest. All this while the duped bird feeds and protects the intruder. These cuckoos have a distinctive call, ( cu…kooo) first heard in the Spring when the birds return from wintering further south. A cuckquean, is the female counterpart to a cuckold. So, as a cuckold is a man whose wife is unfaithful, a cuckqueen is a woman whose husband is unfaithful. Historically a cuckold has been regarded as an object of scorn. Cuckolds and cuckolding feature in a number of Shakespeare’s plays. The story begins in a small town near to Valencia in southern Spain in 1914, and in the middle of an argument. Maria won’t let ‘that bitch’ into her house. Catalina yells that it’s her house. Pedro, offstage, has made up his mind. The ‘bitch’ acquires a name: Rosa. Then narrative switches abruptly away from anger and desperation to lyrical prose, and Rosa: ‘They had met in the limbo of the estuary, where a river meandered through the marshlands, dispersing across the mud-laden landscape until it reached the sea. Rosa had been watching the long-legged wader birds paddling across the wetland, and gulls in carefree flight gliding over the salt flats towards an endless horizon that promised her the world. Wading through the waterlilies, looking for eggs from the white-headed ducks that nested in the bulrushes, she’d looked up and seen him riding towards her on his pack-horse, weighed down by saddle-bags of salt.’ What happens next is entirely predictable. The man with the power, and the horse, captures the heart of the young girl and sets her up in a shack, near the river and well away from his family home. Rosa falls pregnant. And then the truly surprising twist from Pedro: “Rosa, I’ve decided. You will give birth in my family house.” And because he is the man, and even though he doesn’t own the house, three women suffer through the bizarre situation of Pedro’s mistress giving birth with his wife and mother in attendance. Pedro is in the bar but his mother, Catalina, arranged a university trained midwife to assist at the birth. Maybe Catalina arranged the entire bizarre event. She is woman who wields whatever power she can. The contrast between the presence of the trained professional midwife and the bed of straw and a moth-eaten blanket that Rosa lies on epitomises the society around them. Spain in 1914 saw the same scientific strides as the rest of Europe but vast swathes of its population lived in shacks where they survived by washing clothes in water from the nearby river and eating vegetables grown on the plots by their shacks. They survived slightly better if they had a man they accommodated. This tension informs the rest of the book and the life of Lili, the child born that day. There is one more character to introduce: Pepa Garcia. Pepa is from a wealthy family. She is educated. She travels around Spain organising women to fight for the vote. She knows Clara Campoamor, Spain’s most famous woman suffragist. Catalina invites Pepa to her house, much to Maria’s annoyance. Patricia Román’s sympathy for her characters allows the reader to get close to people who might otherwise seem merely strange. All four women have serious quirks. Catalina is excoriatingly scornful, Pepa is aristocratically naive, Rosa is romantically pathetic and Maria? Well this sums up Maria: ‘Maria picked up her embroidery and stabbed the needle through the cloth.’ The cuckoo in the nest grows up to be Lili. After Rosa’s death she lives in Catalina and Maria’s house. Another surprising twist. Lily is also growing up in the era in which these women are realising, some faster than others, that if they want autonomy they are going to have to work for it. And eventually fight for it. This is a deeply shocking story on many levels. The plot itself is decidedly unnerving. The psychological strain on Rosa, Maria and Lily leaps off the page. The power invested in men reminds the reader of The Handmaid’s Tale. But this is not dystopian fantasy. This is Spain a hundred years ago. The depths of poverty, the hard scrabble life of even those with land and housing, like Catalina’s family, is hard to imagine. But you will imagine it because Patricia Román is so good at leading you there in clear, simple language. This is Lili, now twelve years old: ‘I went outside to sweep the doorstep. The newspaper man was leaning against a lamppost eating his sandwich and drinking a beer. I sighed, knowing I would have to clear up his mess, and when he looked up, I turned away because Catalina had told me not to talk to the press.’ There’s so much in those three lines. Lili lives like a maid in the household. This newspaper man is going to be significant. Yet he is like all the other entitled men; he will leave his mess for a woman to clear up. Lili is friendly by nature but respects Catalina’s wishes. There’s more to come that’s shocking but I won’t give it all away. If you missed the entry on Letters from the Mountains you can find it here https://www.rosemaryhayward.com/post/letters-from-the-mountains-by-patricia-rom%C3%A1n

There are similarities between Bulgakov and Towles. Both came to writing after other careers, Bulgakov in medicine, Towles in finance; both are steeped in Russian literature; both are interested in the role of art in society. Both books satirise the Soviet regime of the Russia of the 1920s. But let’s not push the comparison too far. Mikhail Bulgakov was a Russian writer living in Moscow in the 1920s. Amor Towles is a contemporary American author who does not speak Russian. Heart of a Dog is a chaotic blend of science fiction, farce and satire. A Gentleman in Moscow is a long, immersive rumination interrupted by bursts of action. Heart of the Dog, with its many cultural hints and references compressed into sparse prose and choppy dialogue, is a challenge for a non-Russian reader. A Gentleman in Moscow lingers over detail, backstory and context. Heart of the Dog is very short, a novella. A Gentleman in Moscow is a by any standards a long book. So why have I paired them? Largely because one scene in Heart of a Dog struck a vein of humour for me. I believe it was the inspiration for a similar scene in A Gentleman in Moscow. Not plagiarism. Nothing like. Rather the best form of literary influence. Heart of a Dog is the story of a professor who transplants a man’s pituitary gland and testicles into a dog resulting in turning the dog into a human, but one with decidedly dog-like characteristics. Sharikov cannot resist chasing cats and when a neighbour’s Tom cat sneaks into the professor’s apartment… ‘… something jumped against the walls of the locked bathroom, basins came clattering down, and Sharikov’s wild voice roared hoarsely behind the door: “I’ll kill you on the spot….” Water rushed down the pipes and began to run. Philip Phillipovich pushed the door, trying to force it open. Darya Petrovna, flushed from the stove, appeared on the kitchen threshold, her face distorted. Then the transom window, high up on the wall between the bathroom and the kitchen, cracked jaggedly. Two pieces of glass crashed down, followed by an enormous tom, with tiger stripes and a pale-blue bow on his neck, looking for all the world like an old-style policemen. He dropped right into a long platter on the table, splitting it in half, bounced off to the floor, turned around on three paws, waved the right paw as in a dance, and immediately seeped out through a narrow crack to the back stairs.’ There’s something so delightfully catlike about ‘seeping out’. A Gentleman in Moscow is the story of a man placed under house arrest by the regime, in an upscale Moscow hotel. One day, ‘When the Count reached the lobby, before he could continue to the barbershop his eyes were drawn to a willowy figure coming through the hotel’s doors…what guaranteed her position as the natural center of attention were the two borzois she had on a leash… ‘… the one-eyed cat slipped behind the trunk of the tree. Then having satisfied himself that the dogs were securely tethered, the cat alit from the palm to the floor and without even bothering to arch his back opened his little jaws and hissed. With a terrific volley of barking, the dogs leapt to the extent of their leashes, tugging their mistress from the front desk as the ledger pen clattered to the floor. “Whoa,” she shouted. “Whoa!” Apparently unfamiliar with equine commands, the wolfhounds leapt again and, freeing themselves from the willow’s grip, scrambled towards their prey. Kutuzov was off like a shot. Slipping under the western embankment of lobby chairs, the one-eyed cat dashed toward the front door, as if intending to escape into the street. Without a moment’s hesitation the dogs gave chase. Opting for a pincer movement, they split at the potted palms and pursued the cat on opposite sides of the chairs in the hope of cutting him off at the door. A lamp that blocked the path of the first hound was knocked to the floor in a shower of sparks, while a standing ash tray that blocked the second was sent head over heels, discharging a cloud of dust.’ As in Bulgakov’s version the cat is victorious… ‘… For just as the wolfhounds registered the cat’s reversal and attempted to turn, the lobby’s expansive oriental carpet came to an end, and the dogs’ momentum sent them skidding across the marble floor into the luggage of an arriving guest.’ Both authors have had great fun creating a truly farcical scene involving dogs wrecking their surroundings in pursuit of a saucy cat. Bulgakov’s is the more complex version. He is conveying many things at once: satirising medical science that believes people can be rejuvenated by injecting them with animal parts (that really was a thing in the 1920s); satirising professor Philip Phillipovich who can’t control the man/dog he has created; satirising the communist revolution that believes it can turn ordinary people into model citizens by imposing social changes; and demonstrating the chaos and destruction brought about by ill-advised social experiments. The Heart of a Dog novella was not published until 1968 in the West and 1987 in Russia. The book did circulate in manuscript form before that in an underground network of dissidents. Bulgakov remained in Russia and had a sinecure post at the Moscow theatre but his plays were not performed. He had that much freedom possibly because Stalin was said to have found one of his plays extremely funny. Not that Stalin wanted anyone else to see it. Towles is having fun while introducing an important character, the willowy woman. He is showing off his knowledge of Russian literature and history. (Kutuzov was the one-eyed general who lead the Russian army against Napoleon.) At the end of the scene the Count is in control, because he knows how to whistle commands to hunting dogs. At the end of Bulgakov’s scene the distinguished professor is far from in control. Sharikov is locked in a room, hammering on the door, and the professor is the subject of pity. Heart of a Dog is compressed, absurd and uneven. It is an important book of its time. A Gentleman in Moscow is a beautifully written meditation on what it might be like to live out much of your life in a hotel. Both tell you a lot about life under early communism. Both have an undertone of fear. Both are replete with references you may need either to look up or skip over. Both are worth the effort.

When I re-read Hamnet I could see what the book could do that the movie couldn’t and also what the movie could do that is hard to achieve in a book. Physicality is something the medium of film imparts directly – in pictures, no less. Countryside, buildings, streets, clothes ­– all these have to be described by an author and realised in the mind of a reader. Good cinema hands them to you to enjoy in glorious colour. Hamnet the movie does this movie thing very well and then doubles the impact by making a movie of a play. The final scene of both book and movie is Agnes watching a production of Hamlet and seeing her husband on the stage as Hamlet the ghost, the old king. In the book this scene is Agnes’ internal thoughts:   ‘As the ghost talks, she sees that her husband, in writing this, in taking the role of the ghost, has changed places with his son. He has taken his son’s death and made it his own; he has put himself in death’s clutches, resurrecting the boy his place.’   It verges on the expository.   In the movie, scenes from Hamlet, and Agnes’ reactions to them, show you so much more than words can describe. Her husband is Hamlet the ghost. Young Prince Hamlet is her son, grown older; the man he might have been. She reaches towards him. This is the power of theatre.   But movies of books are limited in the amount of material they can convey within their time constraints. They are always in danger of abandoning complexity and of concentrating too much on particular scenes, which unbalances the atmosphere achieved by the book. In Hamnet the movie there is way too much fraught childbirth and mooning around in a forest and far too little of Hamnet the boy and his view of the world.   The book, on the other hand begins with young Hamnet:   ‘ A boy is coming down a flight of stairs.             The passage is narrow and twists back on itself. He takes each step slowly, sliding himself along the wall, his boots meeting each tread with a thud.’   The reader is invested in this boy. Who is he? Where is he? Why is he taking such a hesitant, unboylike approach to stairs? From the very beginning this is Hamnet’s story and the story of the impact his life, and death, has on the people around him.   Hamnet the book is told is a dreamlike way, as if the reader is spying the action through a telescope, and this feeling persists even when the story is being told from inside a character’s thoughts. An aspect of a person comes into focus and drifts away again. Judith usually has a kitten in her apron pocket. Hamnet’s grandfather is vicious when drunk. ‘Come back, his older sister, Susanna, will hiss, flicking his ear.’ As readers we get to see characters through the eyes of other characters, slipping and sliding in and out of focus. We are no more granted perfect knowledge of who they are than we are granted perfect knowledge of people we know in life, even the ones closest to us.   And this inability to truly know another person and the dangers of believing knowing is the most important element of a relationship is one of the major themes of the book. (Others are grief, love, sorrow, casual abuse, jealousy, mankind’s relationship with nature and the perversity of fate. I did say it was a complex book, didn’t I?)   Agnes is Hamnet’s mother, Anne Hathaway as the world generally knows her. Names were not as fixed in sixteenth century England as they are now, or rather they were fluid in different ways than the ways they are now. They were fluid in records as well as in everyday communication. As O’Farrell explains in her forward and afterword, Hamlet and Hamnet were interchangeable versions of the same name and Anne Hathaway was referred to as Agnes in her father’s will. O’Farrell probably chose that version of the name to help the reader discard previous conceptions of Anne Hathaway, because history, and academic comment in particular has not been kind to Anne. Which is putting it mildly, academic comment has actually been outright misogynistic where Anne Hathaway is concerned, referring to William Shakespeare being trapped in a destructive marriage on the basis of precious little evidence.   The Agnes in Hamnet has qualities verging on the supernatural. She is a water diviner, an expert in medicinal herbs, she hangs out in the forest with a tame kestrel and she can see into people’s souls when she pinches their hand in a certain way. (Her teenage daughter, Susannah, takes to approaching her mother with her hands behind her back.) But when she tries to see into her husband’s soul she can only see open plains of things unrealised. She cannot know him.   And we cannot know him either. In the movie he is solid man, romantic and present on the screen as Will Shakespeare. In the book he is never named. He is the Latin tutor, the lad, the husband, the father, the ghost. He is important in the story but he is not going to dominate it. This is Agnes’ story, and Hamnet’s.   O’Farrell takes her time telling her story. The day that Judith falls ill, the day that begins the book, is told in interludes between swathes of Agnes’ childhood, how Agnes’s met the Latin tutor, scenes with Susannah and her grandmother, scene’s between Will Shakespeare and his sister ( scenes in which he is ‘Eliza’s brother) – many, many scenes before the moment Hamnet lets Agnes know that Judith is sick:   ‘He does not speak. He shakes his head. He points towards the stairs. Agnes takes them, two at a time.’   And even then the chapter ends and the narration swerves back to Agnes’ wedding in the next one.   This is O’Farrell’s way of dealing with the fact that many readers of the book will know that Shakespeare’s son Hamnet, Judith’s twin, died when he was eleven years old, while still creating a story for those readers who don’t know. (The story is, I think, more powerful if you do know).   Whichever camp you fall (or fell) into, if you like all things Shakespeare, or you like to see a demonised woman being given a different character, or if you just like being immersed in the past, Hamnet is for you.

Disbelieved: Skin and Bone CSIs is YA (young adult) fiction, young adult being a euphemism for older children. But children’s books make great reading for adults who want some light relief, or a thumping good adventure without a whole slew of sex and violence. Think Harry Potter or Terry Pratchett’s Disc World books. Although I’m not sure bookstores have it right when they shelve Terry Pratchett in the children’s section and come to think of it, there’s plenty of violence and even some kissing in Harry Potter. Back to Disbelieved: Anelise’s father is an eccentric entomologist, away on an extended field trip; Joe’s mother is an eccentric forensic scientist, currently giving evidence in a murder case in a city a train journey away. The cousins live together, because, we gather, the adult brother and sister live together, in a house where the basement has been turned into an insect laboratory and the front room has been turned into a crime laboratory. So far, so good. We have the setup for the ‘kids run free without the adults’ plot of every YA novel from The Railway Children onwards (The Swiss Family Robinson was published in 1812, but my memory tells me adults were substantially involved). Disbelieved has a significant twist on the formula: Anelise sees things before they happen. The author plunges us straight into this and never seeks to explain, although it causes Anelise a lot of anxiety. Anelise dyes her hair a different colour every weekend, and dyes it back on Sunday evening. Joe has a ponytail, a cloak, and carries around a full forensic kit in his backpack. Not your everyday kids, then. The story is thoroughly modern. This is definitely not Harry Potter. For Anelise (15/16) and Joe (17/18), the world is one of mobile phones, social media, exam pressure and an ever-present side-show of drugs. Yet they race around on bicycles in a gently evoked landscape of quarries, byways and small towns, as kids have for generations. And in the landscape that they know so well they meet dangerous adults, of course, and they solve a crime, of course, and the police are obtuse, of course. What I particularly like is the way the two of them always do the exact opposite of what adults have advised them to do, and even do the opposite of what they have advised themselves to do while laying clever plans to trap bad guys. This author knows teenagers.

The Velázquez painting known as the Rokeby Venus hangs in the National Gallery in London. It was badly slashed by a suffragette in 1914. Not that suffragettes have anything to do with this novel, which is a tale of art, forgery and crime. The main character, the American Chaz Wilmot, is a brilliant, disillusioned and somewhat unlikeable artist who stubbornly refuses to create original work, preferring to design magazine covers. As a result he is divorced from the wife he still loves and lives in an industrial attic in New York. His only friends are an art dealer he has known since college, and possibly his ex-wife. The story is slow to start, with much background being laid down. These beginning pages are intermingled with commentary on the nature of art. Is art something sacred or is it a way to earn a living? In Velázquez’ day artists were craftsmen, not gentlemen. Velázquez, also brilliant, and possibly unlikeable, devoted his talents to earning a living at the Spanish Royal Court and his energies to getting a knighthood. Except there is that one nude Venus, and there were possibly more. A lot of Velázquez’ work was lost in a fire that destroyed the royal palace in Madrid, on Christmas Eve, 1734. Chaz Wilmot claims he painted a newly discovered Velázquez. Not only that, he claims he is Velázquez, and that he painted the nude Venus in Rome in 1650, and the model’s name was Leonora Fortunati. You will, he states, find seventeenth century Roman grime in the craqueleur… “You think I’m crazy,” “Frankly, yes. You even look crazy. But maybe you’re just drunk.” “I’m not that drunk. You think I’m crazy because I said I painted that thing in 1650, and that’s impossible. Tell me, what is the time?” I looked at my watch and said, ‘It’s five to ten,’ and he laughed in a peculiar way and said, ‘Yes, later than you think. But, you know, what if it’s the case that our existence – sorry our consciousness of our existence at any particular now – is quite arbitrary?’ ” The Forgery of Venus is a book of questions, doubts and shifting realities. Why should a suddenly rediscovered painting by an old master be worth millions when a perfect modern version of the same thing is worth a few thousand? What is real, or true, about the art market? And what is true, or real, about a novel? An author can make you believe anything they want, or at least oblige you to choose what to believe.

Leo the African, or Leo Africanus, is not a new book. It was first published in French in the nineteen-eighties and my British edition was published in 1994. I pulled it from my shelf as one of five books whose covers I like and was surprised at how old it was, the cover still beautiful but the inside pages yellowed with age. When I re-read it I remembered everything of its world: the places, the characters and above all the voice of Hasan, who is the Leo of the title and the teller of his own story. There was a real-life Leo the African, a sixteenth century exile from the Spanish conquest of Muslim Granada, who wrote a geography of North Africa that was a go-to text for centuries. Hasan/Leo included details of his travels in his ‘Description of Africa’. Amin Maalouf’s fictional memoir is based on those travels. And what extraordinary travels they were. From Granada to Fez, to Timbuktu, to Cairo, to Constantinople, Mecca and Rome, Hasan doesn’t so much navigate the world within camel and boat reach as fall over it. He stumbles from place to place and from friendship to friendship. Hasan’s friends seem to be constantly saying, “Don’t do that. It’s not a good idea.” But, accident-prone and given to falling helplessly in love, he somehow survives persecution, fire, snow storms, imprisonment and capture by slave-traders, always emerging to find somewhere to live and be valued as a diplomat by the terrifying people who hold power in this age of religious arrogance and the aggressive expansion of empires. In this book you will meet the last sultan of Granada, the first ruler of the Ottoman empire and the Medici popes, and you will be glad it is Hasan who actually meets them and not you. Despite his trials and tribulations, his losses and compromises, Hasan survives to tell his tale. You might not have been so lucky. The book is still in print, as ‘Leo the African’ in the UK and ‘Leo Africanus’ in the US. The cover of my UK edition invokes the art of Moorish Granada: perfectly balanced in design and color, rich in shape and texture.

This is the first time I’ve written about a non-fiction book in this newsletter, although there are plenty on my shelf. Non-fiction dates faster than fiction, but this book hasn’t dated too much yet. It was first published in 2012/2013 depending on which part of the world you’re considering. Some of the later chapters that refer to current events that are no longer current sit a little oddly, but that’s all. The History of the World in 12 Maps is a book for people who find maps and mapmaking intensely interesting, as the author does. He is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University, London, an expert in the history of maps and a television and radio presenter. His style is easy going and anecdotal but he doesn’t dumb down the material. If you read this book you are going to find yourself thinking about what exactly a projection is and what does it mean to fix a point on the earth’s surface. This book isn’t just the story of maps and the people who made them, fascinating as that is. The author has selected particular maps to show the way people imagined the world and what they thought was important about mapping it. For example, the great map of France (Carte de France) was initially financed by Louis 14th, because his finance minister, Colbert, wanted to assess the resources of the kingdom. However, the man he hired to manage the project, the astronomer Giovanni Cassini, was more interested in determining the exact circumference of the earth, and its shape, so any point on a map could be a pinpoint on the globe with the distance from any other point correct. The resulting new map of France reduced the size of the nation by 120,000 square kilometres. Louis 14th reportedly said that he had lost more territory to his astronomers than to his enemies. Although this quote is not in Jerry Brotton’s book. So maybe it is, like so many others, a later witticism. Surveying in the 17th century was a matter of carrying four-metre long wooden rods around and laying them out in a straight line for two hundred metres. (So where do you get a straight line unimpeded by rocks, water and trees?) Then the surveyor climbed a vantage point, like a church tower, and used the latest astronomical instruments to measure the angles between the ends of the line and where he was standing. Next he needed trigonometrical tables to calculate the distance of the sides of this imaginary triangle. This information was mapped into notebooks. France was turned into a network of triangles. The surveyors did this over and over again, carrying all that bulky equipment around by horse transport. And they terrified the local inhabitants with their strange instruments and secretive encampments. One surveyor was even hacked to death by villagers who suspected he was bewitching their crops. By the end of the 18th century the maps had made France into a nation that could be visualized, with coastlines and borders that were fixed in relation to each other. Citizens could form an emotional attachment and political loyalty to a nation, just in time for the French Revolution and Napoleon’s wars to demand repeated acts of nationalistically inspired self-sacrifice. The Cassini maps are one example. The other maps considered range from Ptolemy’s Geography in 150 CE to Google Earth in 2012. Some will probably be familiar, such as the Peter’s Projection of 1973, others may be a surprise, such as the Korean Kangnido map of 1402. Everyone is a step along the road of history. The edition I have is the hardback and I think it is essential to read this book in hardback to get the full value of the illustrations and the colour plates. E-Books have many advantages but they are not good for illustrations. The book is still in print, Viking Press, and there are many used copies available online. So, if you love maps and want to know more about them this is a book for you.

What if I told you that this is a book about quasicrystals that reads like a thriller? You’d think I was nuts. Well, this is a book about the search for a quasicrystal, something thought to be impossible, that reads like a thriller. The subtitle of The Second Kind of Impossible is The Extraordinary Quest for a New Kind of Matter. Now, we’re getting to it. Matter is matter, isn’t it? New sorts of matter might be the subject of science fiction but not of real science. Except real science is doing all sorts of things those of us with no more than a high school education in it might think impossible. Forget common sense when you approach modern science. It isn’t going to help you. What will help you is masterful storytelling and that is what you have with The Second Kind of Impossible. The book veers around a bit at the beginning, swerving from a preface that flashes forward to the end of the story, to a lecture the author gave to an audience that included the celebrated, and somewhat fearsome, Richard Feynman, to 1781 and a French scientist’s work on crystals. It is during this dive into the history of science that the narration settles down and the reader gets a thorough explanation, with pictures, of what exactly crystals are and why the mathematical concept of symmetry matters. Don’t be daunted. It’s not hard. It’s full of familiar things like cubes and tetrahedrons. Admittedly the next chapter gets harder, because it goes into three dimensional regular bodies that are impossible in crystals, like icosahedrons. But here again, it’s all explained. You can’t tile a floor in regular pentagons. Just try it if you don’t believe me. Equally you can’t build matter out of icosahedrons. “Yet somehow, icosahedral symmetry had received the highest score for alignment of atomic bonds in our computer experiment.” Of course, the story is far more complicated than that. This is only page 34 of the book.  So far Steinhardt is dealing with a mathematical simulation. The man is a theoretical physicist, after all. But, over the course of many years, he and his colleagues move from mathematics, to investigating artificially generated crystals to finding natural crystals on the surface of the earth: weird, impossible matter. The material Steinhardt is working with is unimaginably small.  “Princeton, November 21, 2008: I kept a firm grip on the small box as I trudged up the hill from my office to the Princeton Imaging Center. Inside were the two brass cylinders I had received from Luca (through the mail from Italy). Each cylinder held a thin glass fiber about an inch long with a precious speck of material glued onto the end… Removing the specks from the glass fibers would be a risky endeavor…Preparing our sample for a test…required removing a speck from the glass fiber, separating it into its many microscopic individual grains, and then sorting among all of those grains to find one that would be thin enough for the electron beam to pass through.” Suppose they dropped the ‘speck’? Suppose they breathed too hard and it blew away? What really happened was just as tense as you can imagine. It’s on page 139. Apart from the thrill of the chase and the unravelling of a mystery, The Second Kind of Impossible is a window into the workings of science as it really happens. The crystal structure Steinhardt was investigating was physically impossible. You can only tile a floor with a limited and known set of regular shapes, right? Well, not quite. In the 1970s Roger Penrose solved a famous mathematical puzzle concerning tiles: can you find a set of tiles of a shape that can cover a floor without leaving gaps and do so only non-periodically? Which means they don’t repeat in a regular mathematically symmetric pattern (which is why you had to know about symmetry back in chapter 1). Penrose found some, which he called kites and darts. Not only can you cover a floor with them, there is no regular pattern option for these shapes. (I’m familiar with these non-periodic tilings of the plane because my husband is fascinated with them and has made tops for tables and jewellery boxes using patterns that are non-periodic.) Penrose’s work demonstrated a symmetry that was “strictly forbidden according to the mathematics of tilings and the established laws of crystallography.” New and outrageous ideas in science arouse passionate feelings and opposition and not just from the scientifically illiterate but from the scientific community itself. And this is not a bad thing. It is a fundamental part of the way science works. “The first and most vociferous critic was Linus Pauling. ‘There is no such thing as quasicrystals,’ Pauling liked to joke, ‘Only quasi scientists’….during the course of his scientific career, Pauling had consistently challenged and prevailed over conventional wisdom. He was not someone you wanted as an intellectual opponent.” Undaunted, encouraged in fact, Steinhardt sets up a B team of renowned sceptical scientists, not including Pauling, to read, review and comment on his team’s work. It is part of the process of good science. The whole quasicrystal hunting endeavour is a master class in international, interdisciplinary co-operation and creative opposition. The icing on the cake for this voyage of discovery is an actual voyage of discovery to one of the most remote and inaccessible parts on the world: the Kamchatka peninsular. The story of how Steinhardt, no longer a young man, and team of geologists eventually find the elusive ‘naturally’ occurring quasi crystal is a whole new eyeopener into the world of science. “Middle of Nowhere, Kamchatka Peninsula, July 22, 2011: Somehow the unimaginable had happened. No one was less suited to take part in, much less lead, an expedition to the remote regions of Far Eastern Russia. Yet here I was.” Kamchatka is the most easterly part of Russia, just over the Bearing Straits from Alaska. It’s a restricted area requiring layers of permissions to visit. It has a very short season it calls summer, which rejoices in wildflowers and mosquitoes. It is home to a large population of very large Kamchatka Brown Bears. And there aren’t any roads outside the few settlements and certainly not where this expedition intends going: the landing site of meteor they believed was where a Russian geologist had found quasicrystals on a surveying trip decades earlier. Fortunately that geologist is still alive and eager to join the expedition. And how Steinhardt makes contact with that geologist is another whole story in this book packed with fascinating stories, one which tells a tale of black market deals and the unexpectedly criminal world of amateur geology. Do you like yarns almost impossible to believe? You should try The Second Kind of Impossible. This story is both true and great science.

I’ve not been recommending enough American authors, so here’s one to redress the balance a little. Karen Fowler isn’t only a resident of the United States, she lives in my home town of Santa Cruz ( although that’s as close as our acquaintance gets.) That and her writing. I read We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves after hearing it discussed on Radio 4’s A Good Read. I don’t recommend reading, or listening to, any reviews of this book before reading it (except this one of course), because for this book spoilers really matter. I do recommend A Good Read in general. It’s a delightful conversation in which the host and two guests discuss three books, one recommended by each of them. The storyteller in We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is Rosemary Cooke. She’s telling the story of her life and she starts in the middle, when she was a student at the University of California, Davis. Rosemary’s life before this point was nothing like anything you might expect. Your agile reading mind will invent all sorts of scenarios until the reveal comes, which it does at just the right moment, before you get too frustrated with Rosemary for not being straightforward. Most books are framed by the beginning and the end. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is framed by the middle. Rosemary is telling you her memories and she is also coming to terms with her life, and herself. She is aware of the deceitful nature of memory. “Why are there so many scenes I remember from impossible vantage points, so many things I picture from above, as if I’d climbed the curtains and was looking down on my family?” Come back to that sentence after you’ve read the book and you’ll see just how cleverly constructed it is. The first, big, reveal comes early in the book but there is a lot more for Rosemary, and the reader, to discover. This is where the story goes back to the beginning. Rosemary was a talkative child, to the extent that her mother told her to pick one out of any three things she wanted to say. Other people were less sophisticated in their reactions. One baby sitter bought relief from her five-year-old incessant talking by promising to teach her a new word every day, in return for an hour’s silence, “A word so lonely, so dusty with neglect…She would set the oven timer to make sure, which generally resulted in me asking her every few minutes when the hour would be up.” When her father got home Rosemary would tell him her day had been ebullient or limpid or dodecahedron. Then one day the word was ithyphallic, which she was asked not to repeat to her parents. “And just ask Lowell (her brother) if I’m the sort of person who keeps her promises. The minute I saw our father, I told him that my day had been ithyphallic, instead of the official day’s word, which was psychomanteum.” (If you’re reading on a Kindle, that highlight and look-up facility is going to come in useful.) The traumatic event in her life made Rosemary train herself not to talk at all, particularly not about her family. But in this novel/ fictional memoir she does, a lot, and directly to you.

Alice Munro is a writer’s writer. Her prose is clear yet solid, like ice with no flaws. Her stories march firmly from beginning to end. And you march with them, reading in perfect time to the rhythms of her writing.   Dear Life is a collection of fourteen short stories published in 2012. By then Munro had received numerous awards for her work, including the Man Booker Prize for International fiction. In 2013 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature as ‘master of the contemporary short story.’ Dear Life was to be her last book. She was 81 years old. She died in 2024.   Munro is Canadian and the stories in Dear Life are nearly all set in rural Canada. And they are nearly all set in the past. They bring that past Canada to life: the vast spaces, the smallness of the towns, the remoteness of the farms, the brutality of the seasons, the rawness of the people intruding on the land. Yet there are very few passages of description, just the odd little bit here and there, where the story lets it in.   ‘The trees , maples and oaks and others, were second growth, though of an impressive size, indicating there had been cleared land.’   ‘Then there was silence, the air like ice.’   ‘The dream was in fact a lot like the Vancouver weather – a dismal sort of longing, a rainy dreamy sadness, a weight that shifted round her heart.’   ‘They walked on planks laid over an uneven dirt floor, in a darkness provided by the boarded-up window.”   The stories are nearly all narration: either a first person narrator recounting events in a past life or a third person that is at the same time both distant and immediate.   ‘Over the hill came a box on wheels, being pulled by two quite small horses. Smaller than the one in the field but no end livelier. And in the box sat a half dozen or so little men. All dressed in black, with proper black hats on their heads. The sound was coming from them. It was singing. Discreet high-pitched little voices as sweet as could be. They never looked at him as they went by. That chilled him. The buggy in the barn and the horse in the field were nothing in comparison. He was still standing there looking one way and another when he heard her call, “All finished.” She was standing by the house.’   Here the reader is in a scene, experiencing something strange along with the character, but there is a dreamlike quality as if a story is being told by someone else, which indeed it is. Munro does it with her use of verbs. ‘Over the  hill came a box’ not ‘A box came over the hill’ and ‘being pulled’ by the horses, not 'the horses pulling the box'. And there are few commas in that piece. No pauses or explanations or asides. The strange scene ploughs strangely and steadily on.   The character here is Jackson. He is in a story called Train. Travelling home at the close of the Second World War, he  jumps off the train before his hometown and walks back along the track. No explanation is offered for this action, except that he is avoiding something. Jackson is offered breakfast by a woman running a small farm by the train tracks. He stays for thirteen years. The woman becomes ill. He drives her to hospital. After surgery she tells him of a disturbing instance in her past, and also that she will leave the farm to him. He never returns to the hospital.   That marching along with the pace of the story you do as a reader? It becomes disturbing. There is no introspection. Jackson never analyses his actions. He left a woman who was dying and who had just revealed the biggest and hardest event of her life to him. He apparently has no moral compass. And you, the reader, are likely to be swept along regardless, if you don’t reach out for something floating in your own mind and stop yourself drowning.   There is the same nexus of careless exploitation, this lack of concern for the effect of their actions, on the part of the characters in many of the stories. The couple who plan a joint suicide in a car in the forest: do they have no thought of pain of the people who will find them? The man who promises to marry a girl and runs off at the last moment, despite having lived with her as his mistress. The man who doesn’t run to save a child from drowning. The woman who goes to another town for a sexual assignation, taking her five-year-old with her.   Endings are often left wide open. They are often one short paragraph or even just a short sentence, apparently final but ambiguous as far as the character is concerned.   ‘She just stood waiting for whatever had to come next.’   ‘So that’s the way they were going to leave it. Too late to do another thing. When there could have been worse, much worse.’   ‘In the morning he got off in Kapukasing. He could smell the mills, and was encouraged by the cooler air. Work there, sure to be work in a lumbering town.’   I confess I don’t know what to make of the lack of introspection and resolution in these stories. Unfortunate circumstances? Past trauma? Bad decisions? Huge character failings? A disregard for others? No sense of any obligation beyond the self? There is no answer. These stories are written in simple, clear prose with straightforward plots, but they are far from simple and clear.

The Safekeep won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. It’s also a book with an intriguing title, a title that will become increasingly significant as the story progresses. After telling you that you are in The Netherlands in 1961 (don’t overlook that title to Part 1), Van der Wouden plunges you into Isabel’s story. But there is no description of Isabel. Instead there is a vividly described garden. ‘Spring had brought a shock of frost, a week of wet snow, and now­–at the lip of summer–the vegetable garden was shrinking into itself.’ It soon becomes clear that Isabel is ‘nearly thirty’, lives alone in a house that she considers it her duty to look after and has a tenuous hold on reality. She hasn't come to terms with the death of her mother and is obsessed with the idea that the maid is stealing from her. Her memories of  first moving into the house during the German occupation of the Netherlands do not agree with her younger brother’s but the two do agree that they moved into the house when they were children and it was fully furnished. And that is your first clue about this house. The house Isabel is keeping safe. A bit of background. Twenty thousand Dutch people starved to death in the winter and spring of 1944/1945. The famine hit hardest in the cities in the west of the country. Isabel’s uncle found a house in the rural east for Isabel, her mother and her two brothers. It was a house with a vegetable garden. Isabel still keeps the vegetable garden, but she considers housework and cooking activities she employs someone else to do. Then Isabel's elder brother sends his latest girlfriend to stay with her, while he works abroad. This is Eva, and she is the other main character in the book. Eva apparently doesn’t know what to do with her enforced idleness. Tensions are high in the house. Isabel hates and despises Eva and Isabel is very good at hate. She has a lot of emotional suppression and self-delusion to work through. Her awakening is sudden and at the same time both painful and glorious. The reader is perched on a seesaw swinging up, thinking she has worked out what is really going on, then plummeting down as she realises she has no idea. As the story digs deeper it becomes clear that it’s not just Isabel’s self-delusion that is at stake here. It’s the self-delusion of the entire Dutch nation, still reeling from the trauma of the war; still dealing with its unexpected consequences. There is no taking of sides here. Evil emerges in the spaces between what people did or didn’t do, the opportunities for charity and honesty they missed, the promises they failed to keep and the lies they told themselves. There is the tragedy of people trying to survive and go forward and the tragedy of people who didn’t and can’t. Evil is not large and brutal and German; it is small and Dutch. It's an evil that can be dissipated by small actions but if, and only if, there is emotional honesty. The trouble is that Isabel is very bad at emotional honesty. Then there is love, with all its pains, joy and delusions. There is the love between siblings and there is sexual love. There is a lot of sex in this book. I’m often surprised at how many times people comment on a book and never mention the sex. There are pages and pages of it in The Safekeep. Its well written, believable and in-character sex, but if you want to skip it just go ahead. Who is Eva really? That will become the question on your mind as you read. There are lots of clues and I’m sure you will work out most of it before the long section of Eva’s diary entries that tell all her backstory. This is not a device I like, especially if the entries are realistic, as they are here. Diary entries drop the reader into an environment they don’t know, with characters they don’t know and emotions that have no context. And they are aways formatted in pages and pages of italics. I hate them. I skip them. It doesn’t matter. The story works just fine without them. I’ve seen it said that the ending of The SafeKeep is unexpected. I thought it the only possible redemptive ending for a book about people who were longing for reconciliation and integration with the past, even when they didn’t know that’s what they were doing. If you like a book with twists and turns, if you like an untrustworthy narrator, if you feel, like me, that the shadow of World War Two still looms over Europe and it is not one we should ignore, then the Safekeep is for you.