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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Earlier this year, 2022, I came across The Gallows Pole while visiting my brother in Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire, England. The book was the talk of the town. Because it was about their history and their valley; the steep, damp, leafy Calder Valley. I asked, in the pub, about the book and one of my brother’s friends gave me a mysterious, sideways look, added a slight smile, and said, “There aren’t many women in it.” And he was so right. This is what you might call a thoroughly “masculine” book. There is head-on cruelty and violence. There is raw fear, raw hunger and raw hatred. There is exploitation, murder and economic desperation. There are passages I simply decided to skip over. So why would I suggest you read this book? For a start it is beautifully written, and by a poet. Here is the opening passage: “Soot and Ash. Snot and Spume. Quag and sump and clotted moss. Loam The boy left the river and the village behind him and he felt the valley tighten as he turned up the track and the trees curled in around him and over him. Pulled him in. In to dell and dingle. Gulch and gully. Mulch and algae. England” Ah, the locals are thinking, we know exactly where you are. Here is the industrial history, the ever-present water, the shade-loving vegetation, the narrow paths, the romance of nature opening out, the accumulated detritus underfoot; all that we will step into right outside the walls of this pub. Secondly, because it’s a slice of local history, based on the exploits, and ultimate demise, of a family of coiners; people who clipped and forged gold coins. It tells of their hardness, shrewdness and violence. It also tells of their desperate, edge of existence lives as weavers. And it integrates the local perspective into the wider economic picture. Debasing currency is a crime that harms legitimate trade. An excise man’s job is to uphold the law and support the economy. And it is an excise man’s persistence that finally ends the coining and the temporary ascendancy of those involved in the enterprise. This is an economy that will soon be fundamentally changed by the advent of those sooty mills hinted at in the opening words, which still dominate the river Calder and its tributary streams, although the soot has gone. The story is historical fiction, set in the 1760’s, and parts of the book are written in the form of a confession by the main character, David Hartley, in a version of semi-educated, rural seventeenth-century English. This can be hard. I suggest sounding out the words in your head. It’s worth it. It gets you close to this character’s opinion of himself as a latter-day Robin Hood. And thirdly? Precisely because of those “masculine” qualities mentioned above. For that hard look at the human condition and human cruelty. For that hard look at how the lowliest in society are exploited, and how they are cut down if they escape from their subjugation. And at how they sometimes seek to improve their own lot by exploiting others. If you like dense, poetic language, the evocation of nature and tough realities then The Gallows Pole is for you. (Or if you live in Calder Valley, but then you’ve probably already read it).

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.

The main penitentiary gate opened on schedule, without any last minute hitch. Sandra Treming and four other old cons walked out into a rainy Monday morning.   The first scene in Through Thorns packs in a lot. Sandra Treming is notorious, serving a life sentence. She has what the authorities call ‘attitude’; no time off for good behaviour, but none added on for bad. She is terrified of the outside world and so ill-equipped for it that she doesn’t know how to use a seatbelt in a car.   Through Thorns is a fast paced story told in two timelines. One is how Sandra survives in the world outside prison in 2007, the other is how she came to be convicted 25 years earlier. The main thrust of the plot is laid out quickly. The twists and turns are in the details and the attraction is in the author’s compassionate attitude towards some of his characters, his skilful pillorying of others and his ability to create a community of people who are at the same time both absurd and believable.   Sandra in 1982 lives in the Alexander Berkman Collective. According to her own memories she ended up there because she was a runaway with nowhere to go and was befriended by two of the collective members. The collective is the sort of place where they have house meetings about buying groceries that end in members walking out because they are not ‘interested in participating in group struggle that doesn’t advance the revolution’. Whether this reminds you of Monty Python, One Day in the Death of Ivan Denisovich or house-shares you once were part of is all part of the cleverness of this writing. These people are naïve, laughable and dangerous. Or would be dangerous, if they ever reached a decision. When that disaffected member storms out the meeting no longer has a quorum which means, believe it or not, they can’t buy groceries. They so despise capitalist, bourgeois society that they won’t work, take money from parents or accept government payments. Their only sanctioned way of obtaining the necessities of life is through ‘liberating’ property. And that, plus some actual decisions, is where it all goes wrong.   Sandra in 2007 is an ex-prisoner in a hostile world. People who should help her, a steward of a half-way house, a parole officer, are cleverly skewered by the author. There are elements of farce here but also elements of devastating truth. Who hasn’t been humiliated by an official at some time in their life? And the more vulnerable you are the more likely you are to be humiliated.   “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t have you apprehended,” Case officer barked.   “Sorry?” Sandra played contrite to mask the indignation she felt.   “I contacted the halfway house. You weren’t there. In fact, they have no record of you checking in. So, where the hell have you been?”   “I’m staying at a hostel downtown.” She kept her voice neutral. Perhaps, if she didn’t push any buttons, she could weather this storm.   “You’re required to keep this office informed of your place of residence at all times. Why didn’t you tell us about this move?”   “I did, I­—”   “You’re lying. I took careful notes from our meeting. You didn’t say anything about where you were staying.”   Sandra pointed to the receptionist. “I wrote the address on the registration form she gave me.”   And she had. And when it’s proven that she did, do either he or the receptionist apologise for their lack of communication? You guessed it, no, it’s all Sandra’s responsibility; the responsibility of the vulnerable, homeless and jobless person that they are paid, out of the public purse, to help.­   There is a lot of social commentary in this book, and a lot of compassion for the less fortunate and capable. Because her room at the halfway house has gone, Sandra checks into the homeless shelter next door. There the locker she is assigned is broken and all her money is stolen in the night. Angela, refused permission to take her shopping carts full of junk into the shelter, takes Sandra somewhere to sleep that is safer. Safer means behind a bramble thicket under a freeway overpass.   Sandra has a habit of being decisive in the wrong ways. She left the apartment her former comrade found for her. She went to a hostel instead of the halfway house. She stayed in the homeless shelter when she knew her possessions weren’t safe. You could say making decisions that work out badly is a character trait. And that’s nothing compared to some of the decisions she made 25 years before. Yet she has a nature that is open to Angela and to others. Will she survive in this world outside prison with so much stacked against her? That’s a later part of the story, after the thorns, when things get a bit less Monty Python and a bit more modern fairy tale.