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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.’

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).