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Ernesto is somewhat inept, naïve and slow on the uptake, and you are going to love him. A musician in a Cuban nightclub, he flees his homeland and abandons the woman he loves after witnessing a blood drenched murder. He fetches up in a village somewhere in rural southern Spain.   ‘Andalucia 1957 Bar receipts, bus tickets, nameless fluff, Ernesto rummaged through his pocket, pulled out the envelope and squinted at the date. Was it ’47 or ’49. Hard to tell. He studied the address, stained with grease from an oil-soaked sardine he’d devoured to stave off his hunger, and marked with drips of tawny rum that looked like blood.’   Personal hygiene is not one of Ernesto’s talents. Nor is being aware of what is going on around him. He’s left Cuba for a land where he speaks the language but has no intuition for the political landscape.   ‘Two years of lacklustre conversations. Back home talk was fertile and strident, with simultaneous chatter about everything from the going rate of the dollar to national politics, and, of course, the Mafia. Here though, discussions were dull and subdued as if no-one had a serious opinion about anything.’   Ernesto leaves Cuba a few years before a revolution and lands in a Spain where a different sort of revolution has installed an authoritarian regime that has permeated every level of society down to the cracks between the paving stones of the Andalucian pueblo where he rents a modest room. Ernesto reads newspapers avidly and seems to understand nothing.   Then the owner of the newspaper shop beneath Ernesto’s rented room asks him to look after a packet of letters for him. And, of course, Ernesto can’t help but look at the letters – and carry them around in his pocket, and get them covered in sardine grease.   Patricia Román lets her readers believe they are one step ahead of Ernesto, smarter and more sophisticated and blessed with hindsight, and all the while she pulls in more and more characters to make that smug certainty less and less tenable. As Ernesto gets to know and befriend more people, the reader gets more and more uncertain about what is actually going on.   A provincial revolution, an assassination, an act of resistance, something like that is in the air – something either romantically tragic or comically inept. Whatever it is, Franco is going to live and other, simple people are going to die, we know that. But what about Ernesto? And what about those letters?   ‘ “Where did you get them, Juan? At least tell me that.” “Well Dolores gev me the first un and the rest well it’s too risky to tell.” “And why bring them to me? And why ask me to read them now?” '   Not that he hasn’t already been reading them, taking them out of his trombone case one at a time and hurriedly stuffing them back in as he uncovers yet one more dangerous local secret.   Of course it all goes horribly, and comically, wrong.   ‘Ernesto felt as small as the insects that scuttled across his floor at night. What was he going to say? How could he explain?’   Patricia Román leaves you to ponder which is the greatest tragedy of all – a people suppressed and divided against themselves, a child betrayed by his friend, a mesh of confused intentions, some good some bad, a father’s love distorted?   But a child is a child, and a child has a future. Life goes on in the pueblo - for most people. And we, the sophisticated readers, know there are decades yet to go of Franco’s hold on Spain.   If you love stories about ordinary people struggling to be whole in difficult times, if you’ve had enough of simplistic heroism and triumphalist history, then Letters from the Mountains is for you.

Old Baggage tells you what happened to suffragettes once it was all over.   Those of you versed in suffragette lore will relish the significance of Mattie’s purple, green and white sash and her Holloway medals that she wears to give magic lantern lectures on the history and methods of the militant suffragette movement. You will delight in recognising references to singing The Marseillaise and the WSPU slogan Deeds Not Words. Mattie Simpkin was a militant suffragette, a member of the Women’s Social and Political Union. The problem for Mattie is it’s now 1928 and she is still a militant suffragette. Apart from the humiliation of being referred to as the old baggage by some of the local youth, she is also carrying around a lot of old baggage of her own. Mattie is fifty-eight years old, but she feels no different than she did when she was thirty. And perhaps that’s part of her problem.   The story begins with Mattie taking a short cut across Hampstead Heath. It’s a fine, sunny winter’s day. She can hear the sounds of the New Year’s fair ahead. The fairground tunes set her thinking of her younger brother, severely wounded in the war. As she daydreams her handbag is snatched from her grasp. She grabs the miniature bottle of whisky that slips out of the bag before it is whisked away: ‘The slope was in her favour; the missile maintained its height, kept its trajectory, and she was able to feel a split second of wondering pride in an unlost skill before a red-headed girl ran, laughing, from behind the booth, dodged round the thief and received the bottle full in the mouth.’   The rise and fall of that sentence is the rise and fall of the tiny bottle as it hurtles through the air. Then, bam! It descends into comedy. Evans’ writing is full of such delights.   Mattie owns a house adjoining the Heath, that she bought on impulse with the money from a legacy. The house used to be a Mousehole ­– a refuge for women released from prison on licence under the terms of the legislation the suffragettes called the Cat and Mouse Act. The women hid there to avoid returning to prison after recovering from hunger striking. Mattie’s experiences have had a profound effect on her. They have made her who she is.   The house was too big for Mattie alone and she offered it up as a commune for retired suffragettes. Only one friend took her up on the offer. Florrie Lee, known to the suffragette women as The Flea, comes to live in the Mousehole. Old Baggage is as much Florrie’s story as it is Mattie’s.   Florrie is a Health Visitor, a highly trained professional who visits people in need of medical care in their homes. She is in the advance guard of independent women in the nineteen-twenties who lived their own lives and earned their own money. Only it’s not enough money to be able to afford more than a bedsit ‘with a line of mould creeping across the ceiling and a shared kitchen lambent with silverfish’. Florrie is grateful to live with Mattie and offer cooking and gardening in lieu of rent.   There’s a third person whose story is woven into this book – Ida Pearse, the young woman who received a thick lip as a result of Mattie’s throwing abilities. Mattie and Florrie have just lost their house cleaner. They seek out Ida to offer compensation for the damage done and Florrie is inspired to offer her the cleaning job, since Ida has just lost hers ‘for cheek’. “She corrected one of the ladies.” “Corrected her on what?” “Geography” “What aspect of geography?” “I don’t know. But we’re not supposed to contradict the ladies. I don’t ever.”   Mattie is inspired to start a girls’ club in opposition to a fascist-style singing and uniform-wearing society for young people that march on the Heath. Mattie’s group, called The Amazons, meets on Sundays to throw javelins, learn morse code, play active treasure hunt games and debate current affairs. Ida, of course, is a member. Mattie and Florrie are determined to improve Ida because Mattie feels that with the upcoming legislation that will grant votes to women on a par with men it is high time that young women knew something about politics.   Trouble follows. Trouble that devastates Mattie, Florrie and Ida. There are reparations to be made. A way forward has to be found. The humour in the characterisation slips into pathos as the reality of life for women who determine to live without the support of men comes into focus. Courage and humility is required at every turn.   Lissa Evans writes from different points of view, slipping from one to another without waiting for a break. This is not a technique used much in modern novels and is sometimes disparagingly referred to as ‘head-hopping’. Evans carries it off with aplomb. If I hadn’t told you, you probably would never notice it happening. It’s a refreshing change from the intense, one person focus that is so common today.   If you like to read an author who has an amusing turn of phrase, or if you want an insight into what happened to the women who fought for the vote after the First World War was over, then Old Baggage is for you.

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).

I’ve recommended a number of different books in this newsletter so far and they’ve had one thing in common, they were fiction. Safe, Wanted and Loved is not. It is a memoir written by a man whose wife suffered a sudden and severe episode of psychosis. Names and locations have been changed, Patrick Dylan is not the author’s real name, his wife’s name is not Mia, the family didn’t live where the book says they did and I guess many of the other characters are going under invented names too. But the scenes are real, devastatingly real, and the emotion and tension is stretched tight throughout. If you’ve seen the person-stealing effect of mental illness close up you will recognize it here. If you haven’t, this book will be an eyeopener. Patrick tells his story in a voice that is immediate and sincere. Raw fear, confusion, compassion and determination jostle with each other. They are feelings you can share in. Mia, under stress at work, became unable to sleep and convinced she was being videoed and would go to prison for a trivial mistake she might have made. She told Pat this after waking him at three in the morning. The next day she terrified her sister, telling her they had to contact the author of the children’s books because he had the ‘answer’. And so it began. ‘“Pat, we need to kill the dog,” Mia said in a calm voice. She was standing by the foot of our bed, our old miniature dachshund cradled in her arms…It’s the devil… He got inside her.” I started to look down, but she cut me off. “Don’t look into her eyes!” she shouted.’ There are wonderful doctors in this story, supportive school counsellors and threatening ones, brutally realistic police officers and intransigent health insurance companies. I’ve met them all during my years living in California. Patrick’s story has the supreme merit of being accurate. He soon knows his way around the entire pharmacopeia of mind-blasting drugs the medical profession has at its disposal and soon realizes how primitive the whole science is. He sees the effect on his children and how they need help to cope. He learns that the only way to deal with the industrial medical complex is to be as heartless as it is, ‘‘’ And now I owe you $30,000. But I can’t possibly pay that…I know how this works. If my insurance were paying this they’d have negotiated reduced rates…I am going to write you a check for ten grand.”’ And Patrick finds out just who will stand by him, an outrageously otherworldly brother-in-law, and who will make his life even more difficult, a school counsellor who has to be talked out of calling child protective services. Patrick’s declared motive in publishing his story is to bring mental illness out into the open and help people get over the shame and the feeling that they need to hide their sickness. Yet the book has enough instances of the kind of treatment families in this predicament can receive for it to be perfectly understandable why they would not invite it. Patrick interweaves the story of Mia’s illness with a mini-biography of their lives together. Personally, I found these sections less compelling and I didn’t take up the invitation to listen to the songs referenced at the start of each chapter. Other reviewers, however, found the love story heartwarming and the music-listening rewarding. They do both add structure and relief to a roller-coaster-ride of a tale; a tale which has the added advantage of being written like a detective story. Will Patrick and Mia ever find out who the culprit is, the name of the disease, and will they ever overcome it? This is not a depressing read. It’s emotionally challenging but also uplifting, and not in a soppy way. In the end the medication that helps Mia is alarmingly simple. No spoiler apologies here. You might not give this book a go if you thought it was going to be a tragedy. Although for many people with a mental illness the outcome is tragedy, or long, drawn-out misery and persecution, and that is something we should remember.

In 2012 a friend persuaded me to apply for the Tin House writers’ conference, because Paul Harding was leading a class on novel writing. She had read Tinkers and she wanted to find out how he did it. I don’t know if I did find that out but I discovered a lot about writing, drank some great beer, and made lasting memories. Tinkers confounds all the advice my editor is currently giving me: ‘too much description, digression and diversion’. Tinkers is all description, digression and diversion. It hardly seems reasonable to call it a novel at all. It’s a collection of vignettes; the pieces of a stained-glass window that assemble themselves into a view on a story. George Crosby lies dying and thinks about his father; possibly that’s what’s happening. This book doesn’t bother itself with mundane attempts at rationalizing its existence. You have to take this book on its own terms. George’s father’s story is told. Howard Crosby, was a tinker, moving through parts of New England with a mule-drawn wagon. He was also an epileptic, in the days when the illness could have you confined in an asylum. George, for his part, tinkers with clocks. Or did, before he was dying. Perhaps ‘evocation’ rather than ‘novel’ would be a better description for this book. Harding places you closer than you could have dreamed possible to human thoughts, the natural world, and the insides of clocks. There is immense variety in his writing style. There might not be the pace you get from a fast-progressing plot or rapid dialogue but there’s plenty in the gallop from a dying man hallucinating his house collapsing, to the stubbornness of country women, to an eighteenth-century clock-repair manual. This is not a book you can read while letting your mind wander elsewhere. Every word has been carefully chosen; every scene is a story in its own right. Some images are surreal and disturbing, such as the description of what happens in George’s body as he dies. Some are poignant: ‘God hear me weep because I let myself think all is well if I am fully stocked with both colors of shoe shine, and beeswax for the wooden tables, sea sponge and steel wool for dirty dishes.’ Some are mystical: ‘When new buds light up wet black branches, they seem to burst forth from another side of time, which belonged to men like my father.’ Some are brutally matter of fact: ‘He was dying from renal failure. His actual death was going to be from poisoning by uric acid. Whatever food or water he managed to consume never came back out of his body.’ Perhaps it’s as well such an intense book is only 190 pages long, in a format smaller than your average paperback. If you like writing that shines out like the crown jewels, Tinkers is for you.

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

‘ “Where are you from?” Elif Shafak asked herself in a 2020 Vanity Fair article. “I am from multiple places. I come from memories and forgettings, from stories and silences, from various countries and cultures, but also their ruins.” ’ [i] Shafak is usually described as a Turkish/British writer, obscuring her birth in France and large parts of her childhood spent in Spain and the United States. What is not obscure is that for one of the main characters in The Bastard of Istanbul, Asya Kazanci, Istanbul is the place where she grows through the intensity of adolescence and along with that intensity absorbs her home-town into her being. I say one of the main characters because at the heart of this book are two main characters, Asya and Armanoush, one Turkish, the other Armenian. There are also a wealth of other people, Turkish aunts, Turkish intellectuals, Armenian aunts and uncles, Armenian ancestors and American parents, not to mention a cyber-world. One of the ways Shafak keeps you grounded is through food. ‘ “ But honey you are just nibbling like a bird. Don’t tell me you are not even going to taste my manti ?” Auntie Varsenig wailed with a scoop in her hand and such severe dismay in her dark brown eyes that it made Armanoush wonder if something far more life-and-death than a bowl of manti was concerned .’ Shafak also uses food to bind the story together. Each chapter is named for a food. Turkish and Armenian food is the same food, it even has the same names. This when the American-Armenian Armanoush first meets her step-father’s family in Istanbul: ‘ “ These are all my favorite foods. I see you have made hummus, baba ganoush, yalanci sarma… and look at this, you have baked churek !” “Aaaah, do you speak Turkish!” Auntie Banu exclaimed, flabbergasted as she walked back in with a steaming pot in her hands.’ “ No, no, I do not speak the Turkish language, unfortunately, but I guess I speak the Turkish cuisine.” The mystery of Asya’s birth is the spine of the plot. She is the ‘bastard’ of the title. The story of Armanoush’s family is its ribs. The four Turkish aunts react with disbelief and horror to Armanoush’s version of their history, but, interestingly, the reaction is to history, not to her. Only Aunt Banu, the soothsayer who has captured two djinns, one perched on each shoulder, has a direct and terrible insight into the truth. In 2006 Elif Shafak faced prosecution in Turkey for ‘insulting Turkishness’, because The Bastard of Istanbul talked about the Armenian genocide. The charges were dropped, but she moved to London, UK. In 2019 she was once again under investigation in Turkey for the representation of sexual violence and child abuse in later novels. If you like an intense relationship to place, a host of engaging characters, a flirtation with magic, a window into history and culture, or even precocious adolescents, The Bastard of Istanbul is for you. Manti : meat filled dumplings with a yoghurt and garlic sauce Yalanci Sarma : vine leaves stuffed with a vegetable and rice filling Churek : a flat-bread with sesame seeds [i] Elif Shafak, Perpetual Motion , Vanity Fair 2020

The setting is Oxford and the year 1976. A magnet for me. I was living in Oxford during the long, hot summer of 1976. Recently I came across a blurb for a historical novel that described that time as wonderful. It wasn’t. It was disconcerting and oppressive; difficult to believe months without rain were following one on another, in England. This is the atmosphere of Restless . Ruth’s mother, Sally Gilmartin, is handsome, eccentric and emotionally detached, and she lives in the most remote Oxfordshire village imaginable. She cuts her lawn with shears and surveys the woodland at the end of her garden with binoculars. Ruth is not a run-of-the-mill individual herself. Academically brilliant she is resentfully not completing her thesis and spends her days teaching English to foreign students (badly by modern standards) and caring for her five-year-old son, who is the equal in brilliance and eccentricity to both his mother and his grandmother. Then, on a regular Saturday visit, Ruth finds her mother in a wheelchair, although there appears to be nothing wrong with her. ‘ “I know what you’re thinking, Ruth,” she said. “But you’re wrong, quite wrong.’ She stood up out of her chair, tall and rigid. “Wait a second,” she said, and went upstairs. “Have you made Granny cross again?” Jochen said, in a low voice, accusingly. “No.” My mother came down the stairs – effortlessly it seemed to me – carrying a thick buff folder under her arm. She held it out for me. “I’d like you to read this.” ’ And so begins the story of Eva Delectorskaya. It’s a tale of spies and betrayals; of real dangers and presumed ones; of naivety and love coupled with a frightening level of courage and skill. It’s a story about British actions in World War II that you may never have imagined, but you won’t be too surprised when you find out what they were. As Ruth bumbles over a potential love affair, drinks and smokes too much and regrets her entanglement with Jochen’s father she gets drawn further and further into Eva’s story, even to the extent of seeking the aid of her thesis supervisor. If you like strong, intelligent, and haunted, female characters, slowly unfolding mysteries and spy-thriller type dramatics, Restless is for you. There is also a BBC series available on Prime Video.

I almost hesitate to recommend Birds Without Wings, it’s so long and stuffed full of so much history. But then I could say it’s intoxicating, it’s high comedy, it’s romance, it’s sweeping, ornate, intense, fervent, brutal and, my not-so-favorite fashionable word, empathetic. Birds Without Wings is the last of the five books I pulled off my shelf because the covers are beautiful, the five books that inspired this newsletter. It also follows on neatly from last month’s book, because it is set in the last days of the Ottoman Empire. The imaginary village of Eskibahçe is in western Turkey, near Smyrna on the Aegean Sea. Village in this sentence means both the buildings and the inhabitants. Eskibahçe is remote. It is visited only by traders and tramps. If its people travel, they go in caravan, because the roads are dangerous. It clings to tradition and to a habit of rubbing along. At first this appears to be a fairy-tale Convivencia, where everyone speaks Turkish but writes it in Greek letters, where there are characters called Iskander the Potter, Stamos the Birdman and Mohammed the Leech Gatherer, but any Utopianism is quickly punctured. Only Greek, Christian boys are taught to read and write, a woman’s life is in the hands of a man, poverty is so extreme that one family lives in the hollow trunk of a tree. De Bernieres shirks nothing, but at the same time writes with tenderness and humor. Nobody, not even those guilty of the most intolerant thoughts or of the most heinous acts, is treated as evil. And nobody, not even the village imam, the most convincing representation of a saint I have ever seen in a work of fiction, is a perfect shining hero. You can’t identify with the protagonist in this book, because there isn’t one, and yet there are many. Birds Without Wings could be described as interconnected short stories. It could also be described as an epic of Tolstoyan magnitude. The story of Eskibahçe is interrupted by sections relating the career of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk). As the book goes on, these sections get longer and the Eskibahçe sections shrink. A cloud falls and you long for the characters you’ve grown to love. You might even give up, because history, man’s inhumanity to man, becomes so depressing. Don’t give up. Like reading War and Peace, skip the bits you find to be too much historical detail, or too much commentary. The rest is worth it. From chapter 77, I am Philothei (12) When he was a boy, Ibrahim the goatherd: ‘… could imitate all the different bleats of a goat. I have forgotten the names of some of these bleats, but they were things like the bleat of a goat who is looking for its kid, the bleat of a goat that has accidentally bitten on a stone, and the bleat of a goat that is unable to fart… as time went by he used to do bleats that were more and more absurd. The bleat of a goat that is thinking of becoming a Christian. The bleat of a goat that is too stupid to know how stupid it is. The bleat of a goat that had a good idea the day before and can’t remember what it was. The best bleat of all was the bleat of a goat with nothing to say.’ If you like a long, slow read that will make you laugh out loud, while also making you cry and squirm in horror, Birds Without Wings is for you. Louise de Bernières is the author of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (misleadingly and unaccountably published as Corelli’s Mandolin in the US). The lovely cover is from my American edition. The print in this edition is very small, so you might prefer an e-book. With a Kindle you can also get instant translations of all the foreign words de Bernières sprinkles around and links to Wikipedia explanations of all the Turkish objects, customs and foods.

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

I’ve not been recommending enough American authors, so here’s one to redress the balance a little. Karen Fowler isn’t only a resident of the United States, she lives in my home town of Santa Cruz ( although that’s as close as our acquaintance gets.) That and her writing. I read We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves after hearing it discussed on Radio 4’s A Good Read. I don’t recommend reading, or listening to, any reviews of this book before reading it (except this one of course), because for this book spoilers really matter. I do recommend A Good Read in general. It’s a delightful conversation in which the host and two guests discuss three books, one recommended by each of them. The storyteller in We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is Rosemary Cooke. She’s telling the story of her life and she starts in the middle, when she was a student at the University of California, Davis. Rosemary’s life before this point was nothing like anything you might expect. Your agile reading mind will invent all sorts of scenarios until the reveal comes, which it does at just the right moment, before you get too frustrated with Rosemary for not being straightforward. Most books are framed by the beginning and the end. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is framed by the middle. Rosemary is telling you her memories and she is also coming to terms with her life, and herself. She is aware of the deceitful nature of memory. “Why are there so many scenes I remember from impossible vantage points, so many things I picture from above, as if I’d climbed the curtains and was looking down on my family?” Come back to that sentence after you’ve read the book and you’ll see just how cleverly constructed it is. The first, big, reveal comes early in the book but there is a lot more for Rosemary, and the reader, to discover. This is where the story goes back to the beginning. Rosemary was a talkative child, to the extent that her mother told her to pick one out of any three things she wanted to say. Other people were less sophisticated in their reactions. One baby sitter bought relief from her five-year-old incessant talking by promising to teach her a new word every day, in return for an hour’s silence, “A word so lonely, so dusty with neglect…She would set the oven timer to make sure, which generally resulted in me asking her every few minutes when the hour would be up.” When her father got home Rosemary would tell him her day had been ebullient or limpid or dodecahedron. Then one day the word was ithyphallic, which she was asked not to repeat to her parents. “And just ask Lowell (her brother) if I’m the sort of person who keeps her promises. The minute I saw our father, I told him that my day had been ithyphallic, instead of the official day’s word, which was psychomanteum.” (If you’re reading on a Kindle, that highlight and look-up facility is going to come in useful.) The traumatic event in her life made Rosemary train herself not to talk at all, particularly not about her family. But in this novel/ fictional memoir she does, a lot, and directly to you. So no more. Remember those spoilers. If you like books with surprises, books that make you think about what humans do and why, and books where the main character views the world from a completely different perspective to your own, then We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is for you.

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