2026/035: Cuckoo Song — Frances Hardinge

Trying to cling to the past, to the way things were, pretending nothing has changed. Everything changes and breaks and stops fitting – and we know that, even with our stopped clock. The world is breaking, and changing, and dancing. Always on the move. That’s how it is. That’s how it has to be. [p. 409]

Reread for book club: first read in 2014. I remembered very little except Triss' true nature and the scissors. That said, I find that my Kindle highlights match quotes from that earlier review... And I'm not sure I have much more to say about it, other than that this time around I really sympathised with Violet, who carries the winter with her, and who is definitely kicking against society's decrees about what nice girls do.

The parents' behaviour towards their remaining children -- who they only want to keep safe -- is borderline abusive. Pen is the scapegoat, Triss is the delicate flower, and nobody must ever mention Sebastian or talk about any of the problems within the family. (Sebastian's fate is cruel: I wish we'd had more of his letters. )

Hardinge's prose is deliciously visual, vivid and arresting: a cry 'sounded the way a scar looks'; 'so dark that she seemed to hear the hiss as it sucked light out of the air'; and, when they're pursued, the pursuers are 'cold on their heels'. 

We spent quite a while wondering where Ellchester was. I thought it had a northern feel but the consensus, eventually, was that it might be Bristol-adjacent.

2026/034: The Invention of Essex — Tim Burrows

I started to recognise an intrinsic feeling of accentuation when it came to Essex, between sparseness and density, bucolic abandonment and oncoming modernity, realism and poetry, country and city, rich and poor – buzzing dichotomies that meant that, as hard as I tried to pin Essex’s story down, it always somehow slipped away. [loc. 1151]

Burrows was born in Essex^*, and moved back there from London when he and his wife started a family. He has real affection for the county, but a solid grasp of its socioeconomics, and of the TOWIE-fuelled perception of Essex as 'a land of crass consumerism, populated by perma-tanned chancers and loose women with more front than Clacton-on-Sea'. 

Essex has long been viewed as a classless, uncultured wilderness -- apart, of course, from 'Constable Country', which Burrows describes as 'a shambling pastoral scene assiduously cultivated since the days of [the painter] Constable', and which attracts the kind of tourists who would flinch at the raucous glories of Southend seafront. Dismissed as 'the rubbish dump of London', Essex is the site of multiple, often toxic landfill sites where the majority of London's actual rubbish ended up. It's also where working-class Londoners moved in the hope of a better quality of life. And Essex has long been a hotbed of dissent, individualism (utopians, occultists, political and religious extremists), experiments in new ways of living (from communes to worker-oriented 'new towns) and, of course, crime.

Burrows often writes for the Guardian, and his piece on the Broomway and the stranded Amazon van prompted me to buy this long-wishlisted book. I learnt about plotlands, which I'd somehow been unaware of despite growing up with people who lived in them! And about the ecological impact of the London Gateway megaport, dredging for which has destroyed much of the local fishing industry. Burrows is also good at putting stereotypes such as 'Essex Man' and 'Essex Girl' into context, and he's quietly scathing about the superficial glamour, and the underlying classism and misogyny that informs those stereotypes.

Some weird hyphenation throughout -- Basil-don, South-end, Med-way -- but otherwise immensely readable, informative and well-researched.

^*I was also born in Essex, but nearer the edge of the map: Burrows barely mentions the area where I grew up, though it's less than ten miles from his current home in Southchurch.