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Horse is wonderful story telling And it’s more, and in some ways less. I feel there’s something paradoxical about Horse.   First the story. It’s a more-than-dual timeline, but mostly two time periods moving forward in parallel, historical and present day. Each chapter has a title, a place named and a date. If you’re the sort of person who doesn’t read chapter headings you’re going to need to break that habit for this book, or you’ll be hopelessly lost. Even with the signposts I found myself flipping back to check on who was when, something I find much easier in a physical book than in an e-book. It’s something to do with spatial memory.   The historical part runs from 1850 to 1875, so from before the American Civil War until after. Jarret is enslaved, but his father is a free man and a horse trainer in Lexington, Kentucky. Jarret adores horses and one in particular, which he cares for from the moment it is born. This horse will eventually be known as Lexington, a racehorse famous in his day and later famous as a stud stallion. Lexington is temperamental and Jarret, who becomes his groom, is the only person who can calm him.   The present day part tells of Jess, an Australian transplant to Washington DC with a special talent for bones, the sort that are displayed in museums, and of Theo, a post-graduate student who is also a transplant. His heritage is more complicated, his father being American and his mother Nigerian. He, because his parents were diplomats, spent much of his childhood in an English public school.   So, no more about the plot because one of the joys of this book is working out what is going on and how the timelines fit together.   But there is more to say.   In her afterword to the book Geraldine Brooks writes, ‘As I began to research Lexington’s life, it became clear to me that this novel could not merely be about a racehorse; it would also need to be about race.’ This novel has that oft maligned element, a theme, and, like a skeleton being stripped of its flesh for display, the theme emerges as something essential yet disturbing.   Brooks’ characters think about their situation, be they enslaved, emancipated, mixed race or immigrant. She shows how their inner lives are circumscribed, and threatened, by the construct of race. And she shows how threats are realized in a society that has racism woven throughout its social fabric. The construct of race is constantly on everyone’s mind. The characters can’t seem to move a few yards without having to consider it. And the result is deeply shocking.   Courageously writing about race is how Horse is more than a great story about a horse, it’s also why it’s less. Sometimes the bones stick out.   For example, the character of Catherine, an English veterinarian, seems shallow despite carrying a significant element of the plot. Her dialogue often feels like dumps of information and her language unconvincing. She’s there but she’s not there. Yet she’s important, not only for the plot but because she is outside the racist the web that has ensnared both Jess and Theo.   When Theo says, “The slave-holding classes considered enslaved people subhuman. They referred to them as ‘the necessary mudsill’ on which one constructed the edifice of a higher kind of society.” Catherine’s response is, “What a distressing concept… although I’m not sure it’s an order of magnitude worse than the upper-class attitude to the lower classes. I mean, not everything has to be about race does it?” Theo retorts “Perhaps not, when you are White.” Catherine mutters and leaves off the conversation.   This is not how an Oxford-educated woman reacts to an argument. Such a woman can recognize a certain type of shock-tactic when she hears it. She would hear the assertion in that first sentence and agree with it before expanding the conversation. Or maybe she would react angrily to the personal attack. She does not live in America. She has not spent the last few years rethinking her status while being subjected to the steam roller effect of the notion of white privilege. She won’t see where this ‘You are White’ is coming from.   But, is this out of character reaction there so Catherine can say, “Not everything has to be about race”? Is it the author who is saying, ‘Think about all those scenes where it’s been about race? Were those always about race? Here I’ve given you three people and the conversation comes round to racism in America, but none of these three people were born and raised in America. This is not their culture or their heritage.’ So here’s the paradox. The jarring nature of Catherine’s out of character reaction sends the reader out of the novel and into their own thoughts. Just what are those thoughts? That’s down to you.   I won’t go in for any more textual analysis. The story of the horse, Lexington, and the people who connect with him is masterfully told and the way the construct of race pollutes every character is subtle and thought provoking. It was a hard task the author set herself. 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The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye begins, as do all fairy stories, by announcing that it’s a fairy story. ‘Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jeweled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan hillsides, when folk in Norway and Tasmania in dead of winter could dream of fresh strawberries, dates, guavas and passion fruits and find them spread next morning on their tables, there was a woman who was largely irrelevant, and therefore happy.’ It's a fairy story but it is today. And for the next hundred pages it’s today - or 1994, when the book was published. Dr Gillian Perholt, the largely irrelevant, happy woman, is a narratologist. Narratology is the study of narrative and narrative structure and the ways that these affect human perception. (And, yes, I did have to look that up). Narratologists, as far as this story is concerned, spend most of their time flying to conferences to give talks to other narratologists. Gillian Perholt flies to Turkey, which we all know is a place where the air is full of spirits, some of whom get captured in objects such as lamps and bottles and are obliged to grant us three wishes if we release them. But one hundred pages in and, although the tone is still that of a fairy tale, the content is the story of Turkey; the rationalist Turkey of the 1990s, not the reactionary, reverted, Turkey of today. Although that Turkey is presaged. While looking for a supposedly magic pillar in the Haghia Sophia, Gillian and her Turkish  colleague, Orhan, meet a Pakistani family. ‘ “And she, does she speak English?” It was clear that Gillian had been taken for a quiet Muslim wife. She had been standing two paces behind Orhan as he cast about for the magic pillar. Orhan replied gravely. “She is English. She is a visiting professor. An eminent visiting professor.” Orhan, a child of Atatürk’s new world, was enjoying himself…the Pakistani gentleman was not happy.’ In the story called Dragon’s Breath a village is destroyed by a dragon. Then there should be a hero who slays the beast, shouldn’t there, not something sad and unnecessary about a fried pig? How is hopelessness converted into legend? The Story of the Eldest Princess… hang on, shouldn’t that be The Story of the Youngest Princess? It’s always the youngest one that gets it right, isn’t it?  And princesses are not supposed to befriend scorpions, toads and cockroaches (at least only sanitized, Disneyfied ones). Princesses are supposed to find their true love, ‘naked to the waist, with black curly hair, leaning on a long axe and singing: Come live with me and be my love And share my house and share my bed And you may sing from dawn to dark And churn the cream and bake the bread And lie at night in my strong arms Beneath a soft goosefeather spread.’ The Princess is about to fulfil the destiny the story demands, but a scratchy cockroach voice rasps out from her basket: ‘And you may scour and sweep and scrub With bleeding hands and arms like lead And I will beat your back and drive My knotty fists against your head And sing again to other girls To take your place, when you are dead.’ The cockroach knows. He has crept around the dark crevices of people’s houses. A S Byatt has such a mastery of the open tone and straightforward language of the fairy tale and so cleverly controls the way a fairy tale evokes the dark fears of the human psyche that it is hard to keep in mind that she has made all this up. Those verses are her own and this book is no re-telling of The Arabian Nights. She follows all the tropes, then she does something that hits you in the stomach. Intertwined, like roses and their thorns on a trellis, her fairy tales are both fables and commentaries on the preoccupations of modern times. And is there a djinn in a bottle? And where does a nightingale’s eye feature? I’m not going to tell you. You will have to read the book.

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.

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 .

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

In the introduction to the 2023 edition of Americanah, Adichie writes ‘I became Black in America…while British colonialism in Nigeria left many cursed legacies in its wake, racial identity was not one of them.’   Ifemelu, Igbo, Roman Catholic and well-educated in the Nigerian school system, is stifled by the lack of opportunity in Nigeria. All her contemporaries want to seek fulfillment. They talk about it all the time. Where to get it other than America, or maybe Britain? Ifemelu chooses America, leaving behind her family and the love of her life, Obinze.   America brings graduate school, new lovers and a respected job teaching at Princeton, not to mention a highly successful blog. So why is she, at the beginning of the book, planning to abandon all and return to Nigeria?   The planning to return involves the bewildering, at least to me, process of getting her hair braided. Adichie deliberately uses the trope of Black hair to wake up her readers to how little they know about Black women’s lives and concerns. Ifemelu’s hair choices feature large in the book and the point is made that Black hair styles are not featured in fashion magazines, or weren’t in 2013 when Americanah was originally published.   The story ranges back and forth in time, and you gradually piece together Ifemelu and Obinze’s journeys. They are not the easiest of people to like. They make mistakes. They wallow in self-pity. They suffer humiliation and don’t rise above it. They become involved in less-than-moral practices. Yet you will feel for them. You will know their frustration, almost desperation, their dislocation and their failure as they lead you through experiences you never had. Can you trust Adichie’s descriptions? Is she telling you the truth about this sense of alienation; about what it means to find yourself different in a country?  Are her observations valid?   Well, Obinze doesn’t go to America on a student visa like Ifemelu did. He enters the UK illegally. Here is one of his experiences:   ‘It amused Obinze, how keenly the men flipped through their newspapers every morning, stopping at the photo of the big-breasted woman, examining it as though it were an article of great interest, and were any different from the photo on that same page the previous day, the previous week. Their conversations, as they waited for their trucks to be loaded up, were always about cars and football and, most of all, women…’   Now that is all too familiar. Yes, I trust this writer to be telling it as it is.   Adichie writes long, beautifully constructed sentences. The one above carries on for another seven lines. These sentences pull you deep into Ifemelu and Obinze’s thoughts; they draw you into living their experiences. And then suddenly they will be interrupted by action. Just as Obinze’s mind has wandered onto the kind of shorts he wore at school a new paragraph wrenches him back to his present: ‘Roy Snell’s morning greeting to him was a jab on his belly. “Vinny Boy! You all right? You all right?”’   For Obinze the whole experience of working illegally is constant torture, and not just because of the ever nagging fear of being found out but because of the experience of being a sensitive and educated person thrown into a pool of toxic masculinity.   Ifemelu’s experience is quite different. It starts by being refused respectable work and doing, just once, something that is not respectable, something that throws her into a depression. But in many ways she flourishes in America. She even acquires a new boyfriend, a loving man who cannot fathom why she would up and leave.   Ifemelu’s deep feeling of being unsatisfied is only emphasized by her precise observation of the world she is living in. Her blog on her observations about being Black and African in America is her voice crying in the wilderness:   ‘Obama Can Only win If He Remains The Magic Negro – His pastor is scary because it means maybe Obama is not the Magic Negro after all. By the way the pastor is pretty melodramatic, but have you ever been to an old school American Black church? Pure theater. But this guy’s basic point is true: that American Blacks (certainly those his age) know an America different from American Whites; they know a harsher, uglier America. But you’re not supposed to say that, because in America everything is fine and everyone is the same.’   She is saying things, using words, in a way that that is pretty outrageous. ‘Negro’ – a word most Americans avoid. White, with a capital letter – grammatically correct, if you give Black a capital letter you should give White a capital letter – but again, not done. She’s pushing the limits, using her privilege as an outsider – and she has a large following. Many others want to hear what she has to say, but being that prophet, all alone, is not sustainable. She gets her hair braided and returns to Nigeria, where yet more alienation awaits.   You can never go back, only start again.

Sometimes a book finds its time. I Shall Bear Witness, diaries written in Germany between 1933 and 1945, is one of those books.   Victor Klemperer was a German Protestant convert. He was born of Jewish parents in 1881. He married Eva Schlemer, a Protestant, in 1906, and served as a soldier in World War I. After the war he became a professor of French and Romance languages at a technical university in Dresden.   These facts are all significant because they are the reason Klemperer remained in Dresden right up to the fire-bombing of that city on the night of February 13th, 1945. On the morning of February 13th, 1945 all Jews remaining in Dresden had been ordered to report for deportation on February 16th. There were then 198 people registered as Jews remaining in the city and Victor Klemperer was one of them. On the morning of February 14th, the morning after the fire-bombing, Klemperer pulled the yellow star off his clothing and he and his wife walked out of Dresden and right across southern Germany, until they reached American forces occupying Bavaria.   Klemperer was dismissed from his post as a professor not because he was a Jew. He lost his job prior to that order, during the Nazi clampdown on the universities. French literature was not on the Nazi list of appropriate curriculum for a technical university. Klemperer’s classes diminished in size to the point that he was part of budget cuts in 1935. That, as it turned out, was fortunate, because he got a pension. Dismissed Jews did not get pensions.   Klemperer’s war service had allowed him to continue teaching to ever diminishing class sizes until the crunch came and probably had a bearing on him keeping his pension. He and Eva moved out of Dresden and built themselves a house in a small village. They had a large garden. He bought a car and learned to drive. They visited places, travelling on the fine new roads.   In May 1940, the Klemperers were forced to rent out their home and move to a Jews house. But they were still relatively safe, despite all the indignities and deprivations, because Eva was in that protected category of “Aryan”. They also still had an income.   In his introduction to I Shall Bear Witness Martin Chalmers writes: ‘The point at which some kind of normal life, under the conditions of a racist dictatorship, becomes impossible is the November 1933 pogrom (Chrystal Night) rather than the war, which begins with the German attack on Poland a little under a year later.’   By the autumn of 1941 Jews could not legally leave Germany.   So why didn’t the Klemperers flee while they could? Victor’s elder brother, Georg, was living in the United States. They had the possibility of sponsorship and support.   The answer to that question lies within the pages of the diaries.   ‘New Year’s Eve ’38, Saturday …I do not want to assert prematurely that we have already reached the last circle of hell, for uncertainty is not the worst thing, because in uncertainty there is still hope. Also we still have pension and house…We must not let ourselves be deceived by the relative calm of recent weeks: in a couple of months we are finished here or “they” are.             Recently I have really been doing everything humanly possible to get out of here: the list of my publications and my SOS calls have gone everywhere: to Lima, to Jerusalem, to Sydney, to the Quakers via Miss Livingstone. I gave the affidavit sent by Georg’s youngest to the US Consulate in Berlin, confirmed by telephone that the Mr Geist named by Georg is still there and will be available after the New Year, and wrote a letter requesting a personal audience. But that any of it will do any good at all, is more than doubtful.             Moral was here again on Thursday afternoon: feeling of friendship and isolation and the same irresolution. He thinks and hesitates as we do. Away into absolute nothingness?’   ‘1941, 27th July, Sunday New regulations about immigration into the USA. Our affidavit (which we have received twice!) is thereby invalid – the new procedure means effectively that it will be impossible to get out in any foreseeable future. That suits us entirely. All vacillation is now at an end. Fate will decide. As long as the war lasts we can no longer get out, after the war we shall no longer need to, one way or another, dead or alive.’   All through the mounting fear, harassment and persecution Victor Klemperer keeps his diary, in itself an act of resistance and a dangerous one. He sends pages for safe keeping to a non-Jewish friend.   That sense of community, of people stubbornly holding on to friendship and decency lives alongside the daily struggle, the hopes and uncertainties, and the growing diary.   ‘Since for Eva’s sake I limit the amount of typing (and also because paper is becoming an ever more rare article), I shall go back to the “solid form” using an old diary … I shall get the loose sheets to Annemarie as soon as possible.’   The German title of I Shall Bear Witness is ‘Ich will Zueugnis ablegen bis zum letzen’. The diaries published in Germany under this title were already abridged. For the English language version Martin Chalmers further abridged the work and added notes and an introduction. Chalmers did far more than translate these volumes for the English-speaking market. He produced them. I have long held that translators should be acknowledged on the cover of a book and where the translator brings his skills as a historian he should surely receive a place there.   ‘Ich will Zueugnis ablegen bis zum letzen’ translates as ‘I will bear witness to the last.’   I Shall Bear Witness is two long volumes, but Klemperer, in Chalmers’ abridgment, is an engaging writer. The text has forward momentum. It’s a page-turner. And, if you are witnessing what is going on in the United States right now, you can do little better than learn what went on in daily life in Germany between 1933 and 1945. Why is the title one of my volumes ‘I Shall Bear Witness’ and the other, ‘I Will Bear Witness’? Nothing profound, I believe: my second volume was published in the United States where ‘will’ is common and ‘shall’ is not often used. But I like ‘shall’. It has biblical tones; a sense of endurance. ‘And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.’