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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hard Rain is dystopian science fiction. This isn’t usually my thing. I generally either find it horribly depressing, or unrealistically redemptive. Hard Rain is an exception. Andy builds his world by starting with a scene that is immediately familiar–boys playing a video game and killing each other. But things are slipped in that make it clear that this is the future and this virtual world is a few steps ahead of where we are now. Not many, mind you. Read this book in ten years’ time and we might be there. There is one central sinister premise–the boys have chips in their necks, inserted at age ten. Chips that control their emotions. Without the chips they won’t get into the best school. ‘Suddenly it was easy to be “good”, to be the mature young man everyone wanted him to be. No longer would he slam the door and scream “no fair!” about things that did not matter. He never cried again. The grownups were right; there was nothing to cry about.’ The chips don’t just dampen emotion, they remove pain. No pain lasts for more than a minute. It’s not even called pain. It’s called a ‘pang’. Franc, the boy at the heart of the story, decides to remove his chip. He knows about the emotion and the pain. He knows how to get around the things his chip does for him, like open locked doors, what he doesn’t know is that the world around him is not as he was seeing it. ‘When they passed the end of Golden Gate Park, Franc saw what looked like bundles of old clothes all over the slope and in the bushes. One of the bundles sat up, and he could see that these were people sleeping on bits of cardboard and covered with old coats and tattered blankets.’ That’s right we are in San Francisco–a San Francisco remarkably similar to the present, just spread beyond the Tenderloin. ‘As they drew up beside, Franc saw the officer in the van give a signal. Suddenly a group of guards in brown uniforms like Franc had never seen before surrounded the car. A man jumped out, knife in hand and three of the guards began beating him with their clubs, while two more reached into the car and pulled a baby from the arms of a screaming mother. One was prying her fingers off the child while the other smashed the woman in the head.’ The best dystopian writing takes the undercurrents  lurking in contemporary attitudes and develops them into concrete actions. Hard Rain was published in April 2024. Andy has a sensitivity towards young people–the way they think, what worries them, what fascinates them and how incredibly brave and resilient they can be. In many ways this is a coming of age story, for not just Franc but for several characters. But there is nothing saccharine about it, rather a genuine feeling for young people and the way they struggle through those teenage years. The struggle is more than adolescent angst. It’s a fight for the right to be a whole human being while living on the fringes of a society that determines everyone's potential. It is also a story of resistance. About a third of the way through the book Franc’s experiment with knowing the world as it really is turns into something much more adult. ‘And that was when he began to be afraid’. In a moment reminiscent of the hobbits sensing the black riders on the road Franc’s world is turned upside down and a whole new section of the story begins. Which I’m not going to tell you about because that would spoil it. Just this: ‘The bridge rises before me, the red light flashing at the top of the tower. To my right the backside of the Pres, the lights of the evening, and further on, the glow and twinkle of the Sunset. Each light a person, and all of them trapped in their own heads. Everyone thinks they’re the center of the universe, but out here, on the edge of the immense Pacific, you know you’re a speck, that you could just disappear and life would go on just fine without you.’ To me there’s something very powerful about an imaginary world that is your own world gone wrong. Something frightening–a wake-up call perhaps. Something more than an escape into video games.

The Book Thief is special. It’s narrated by Death.   ‘ HERE IS A SMALL FACT. You are going to die. I am in all truthfulness attempting to be cheerful about this whole topic, though most people find themselves hindered in believing me, no matter my protestations. Please, trust me. I most definitely can be cheerful. Agreeable. Affable. And that’s only the A’s. Just don’t ask me to be nice. Nice has nothing to do with me.’   So true. This story is not nice. It does not end happily ever after; Death will tell you that right at the beginning. It’s a story about the rise of Nazism in Germany and the progress of war in the small village of Molching, close to the Dachau camp outside Munich. It’s a story about ordinary families and extraordinary people. And it’s about what happened to them: their courage, their cowardice, their attitudes, their love and their fates.   Time is fluid for Death. Death’s world is composed of colors not time.   ‘ People observe the colors of a day only at its beginning and ends, but to me it’s quite clear that a day merges through a multitude of shades and intonations, with each passing moment. A single hour can consist of thousands of different colors. Waxy yellows, cloud-spat blues. Murky darknesses. In my line of work, I make it a point to notice them. ’   There is beautiful writing on every page of this book. It’s a book to linger over like you would linger over a good meal or a good wine. Zusak also uses typography, layout and even pictures to tell his story. I have this book on Kindle. I recommend getting a physical copy. The book is constructed as a work of art, just as the book thief sees books as works of art to be handled and kept.   The huge gap between the rich and the poor in the village is front and central. The story centers around the people of Himmel Street, which is certainly not heaven, but neither is it hell. The poor people living there are always hungry, living on bread and pea soup. The rich in their part of town have personal libraries. The children of the poor learn to fight and steal and play football in the street. They are tough little beings.   The adults love their children. They only want to keep them safe. But sometimes their choices are the wrong ones.   One thing that will stick with you, I guarantee, is the directly insulting nature of German swearing. Liesel Meminger, the book thief of the title, is taken to a foster family, with a foster mother of extraordinary verbal repetitiveness.   ‘In the beginning it was the profanity that made an immediate impact. It was so vehement and prolific. Every second word was either Saumensch or Saukerl or Arschloch . … “ Saumensch, du dreckiges! ” Liesel’s foster mother shouted that first evening when she refused to have a bath. “You filthy pig! Why won’t you get undressed” She was good at being furious. In fact, you could say that Rosa Huberman had a face decorated with constant fury. That was how the creases were made in the cardboard texture of her complexion.’ Rosa, you will probably not be surprised to discover, has strengths that could well be beyond us all. They are strengths she is going to need.   ‘ The beginning of September. It was a cool day in Molching when the war began and my workload increased.’   Another novel about World War Two? Aren’t there enough out there? There are many. This one is different. This one will survive.

​​   “Lord what fools these mortals be!” Puck, Midsummer Night’s Dream Bernard Cornwell is best known for his Napoleonic War books about Richard Sharpe and the rifle brigades and for his Last Kingdom series about Uhtred the Saxon. Both have been made into popular television shows. Fools and Mortals is a standalone novel about the first staging of Midsummer Night’s Dream. There is a theory among some academics that Midsummer Night’s Dream was written for the marriage of Elizabeth Carey to Thomas Berkeley on February 19th, 1596. Elizabeth Carey was the granddaughter of Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, the patron of The Lord Chamberlain’s men, the company in which Shakespeare had a share. As such Hunsdon was a powerful and important figure in Shakespeare’s life. Cornwell runs with this theory for his story and Fools and Mortals is replete with descriptions of London in the snow and the problems of staging a play in a hall by candlelight.   ‘It was cold. Freezing. The night was still, baked with frost. The snow sparkled where lantern light touched it…I needed shelter, but by this time of night the taverns in Whitehall were tight shut, not even a lamp glimmering.’ ‘The music began and I snatched up a pair of shears. Tom and Percy had lit the candles, but they had to stay in the gallery, so two of us mechanicals took the right-hand side of the stage and two the left, where we trimmed the wicks, cutting off the excess to make a clearer, brighter flame.’ The story of Fools and Mortals is told in the first person by Richard Shakespeare, a brother of William’s and ten years younger. Cornwell imagines Richard as getting into trouble in Stratford on Avon and running away to London to beg William to help him become an actor. He finds his older brother rather dour and distant, but undeniably brilliant, both as a playwright and as a theatre troupe manager. After an apprenticeship in one of the boys’ companies Richard graduates to playing women and girls with The Lord Chamberlain’s Men.   ‘George Bryan, all nervousness gone, had been clawing at me, much to the audience’s joy. They were urging him to drag up my skirts and show them my legs, but I managed to get a knee between his thigh’s and jerk it up hard. He went very still, and the audience probably thought he was having a moment of even greater joy…’ When the story begins Richard is getting too old to play girls and wants proper parts. He has ‘a beard coming’ he says. His brother seizes upon that declaration and shamelessly gives to Flute the Bellows Mender in the mechanicals’ performance in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Richard is mortified. There is tension between Will and Richard. There is tension between the players and the Pursuivants, employees of the Crown who seek out seditious, Catholic, literature. There is deadly rivalry between theatre companies. And someone steals Will’s latest plays. Is the disaffected Richard to blame? That is the personal story, but what I enjoyed most about Fools and Mortals was the bigger background and the way Cornwell brings the actors of the day to back-stage life. They are rough, hard-working and are handy with their oaths: ‘ ‘’What’s your first line?” Rust growled. “Um…” “Christ on his silver-painted cross! If I ever hear the word ‘um’ on this stage I will kill! I will kill! What’s your goddamned line?” And I love the asides such as: ‘We are players, and we love an audience. Sometimes, if a play is going badly, it is easy to think of the audience as an enemy, but truly they are a part of the play, because an audience changes the way we perform.’ As true now as it ever was. If you love theatre, love Shakespeare’s plays and you love a rollicking, fast moving tale grounded in historical accuracy, then Fools and Mortals is for you.