2023/157: Nettle and Bone — T Kingfisher

It was hard to be frightened of the unknown when the unknown kept chickens. [p. 66]

Marra is the youngest of three princesses. Their mother has made politically advantageous matches for the elder two: first Damia, who married Prince Vorling, and then Kania, who marries Vorling after Damia's early death. Marra -- who's been packed off to a convent, nicely out of the way of politics, where she has learnt to midwife and to embroider -- learns that Damia's death was suspicious, and that Vorling is immensely cruel to Kania ... and will be until she produces an heir. Marra realises that nobody else will save her sister, or herself: and sets out to find a dust-wife (a graveyard witch), and perform three impossible tasks, and then quite a few more tasks that seem even less feasible.

Nettle and Bone opens midway through the second of those tasks. Marra is making a dog out of bones, and her fingers are sore from weaving her cloak of nettles. Worse, she's in the blistered land, where the folk are mostly cannibal zombies. This turns out to be irrelevant to the wider plot (well, Bonedog is extremely relevant) which sees Marra and the nameless dust-wife venture to the goblin market, to the run-down home of a fairy godmother, and into the necropolis beneath Prince Vorling's palace.

The story is told from Marra's point of view. She's thirty, somewhat naive, often afraid and yet determined to save her sister and her kingdom. Hers is a particular kind of courage, but it's as fervent as that of Fenris, a former paladin retrieved from the goblin market. They travel with the dust-wife (who is utterly fascinating because Marra knows little, and understands less, about her) and, later, Agnes, Marra's own fairy godmother who is ... perhaps not the most powerful of her kind. Oh, and a hen possessed by a demon: when it casts a shadow, the shadow has little horns. The hen is mostly harmless, at least to the protagonists, but there are vengeful ghosts, a Boschian horror called the Tooth-Dancer, a woman ridden by a wooden corpse-child, a woman doomed to immortality. These are treated as matter-of-factly as more mundane horrors: poverty, violence, fear of outsiders, prejudice.

While this story is firmly rooted in fairytale, it also interrogates the tropes of that form. As the dust-wife says, “Fairy tales ... are very hard on bystanders. Particularly old women." The handsome prince is the villain; fairy godmothers lay curses, not blessings (though, per Agnes, "There’s only one story about godmothers that’s always true. Bad things happen if you don’t invite us to the christening"), those who are abused will often cling to their abusers, and princesses live circumscribed lives without privacy or power. Marra's down-to-earth personality and determination to be a decent person is the perfect foil to the darker aspects of the story, and her particular gifts are essential to the happy ending.

I have to say I didn't enjoy this as much as some of Kingfisher's other work: I think that was a case of 'right book, wrong time', because I've skimmed it again while writing this review and am now tempted to reread!

2023/156: Frontier Wolf — Rosemary Sutcliff

Better to remember the high moors beyond Credigone; better to remember the hunting fire and the shared laughter, and leave the rest to the wolves. [loc. 3067]

Alexios Flavius Aquila, nephew of the Roman Governor of Northern Britain, is promoted beyond his abilities. He makes a catastrophic error of judgement and is responsible for many deaths in an ill-advised retreat from Abusina, a fort on the Danube. Because of his uncle's influence, he is given another command rather than being discharged from the army: but his new command is an auxiliary cohort, the Frontier Scouts, 'the scum and scrapings of the Empire ... hard cases', mostly tribesmen, more loyal to one another than they are to Rome. His uncle says disdainfully that they might make a man of Alexios, if they don't kill him first.

Alexios' new command is based in the (fictional) fort at Castellum, far north of Hadrian's Wall in country that was once conquered (though never successfully occupied for long) by Rome. The local tribes, while apparently friendly and happy to trade with the Romans, have their own allegiances. Alexios settles into his new command, manages to calm some tribal disputes, and begins to earn the respect of the men he commands. He also becomes friends with the Votadini chieftain's son, Cunorix, and learns to appreciate Celtic culture and the fragile peace between Celts and Romans, with the highland Picts and the threat of Hibernian raiders as mutual enemies. But perhaps the worst danger will come from the south, with the visit of the new Praepositus, Glaucus Montanus.

This novel -- a reread, but I hadn't read it for many years and had forgotten all but a few fragments -- is as much about poor management as about military prowess. Alexios makes a bad decision against the advice of his staff: later, he tries to defuse a dangerous situation, but is overruled by his superiors. He deals competently with the troublemakers in his new command, and he strives for justice rather than punishment. By the climax of the novel, when he's having to make difficult decisions for the good of his men, he's learnt a great deal about personal honour, about friendship, and about loyalty.

This novel is set around AD349, when Rome's strength and influence in Britain are past their peak. Sutcliff, as usual, vividly illustrates that feeling of decay: 'the honeysuckle was still in flower in the small walled wilderness behind the officers’ quarters that had once been a garden'; the ruins of a signal tower on the Old (Antonine) Wall, where Alexios kills his wolf; the owl's nest in the fort's armoury. I found the sense of abandonment, and the contrasting warmth of Alexios' friendships, more engaging than the military action. (There's actually not a great deal of the latter, though the last third of the novel is devoted to a desperate retreat.) This isn't one of my top three Sutcliff novels -- currently The Mark of the Horse Lord, The Eagle of the Ninth and Blood Feud: ask me again next year -- but it did spark my enthusiasm for novels set in Roman Britain: reviews of Hunter and Bradshaw coming soon.

2023/155: Otherlands — Thomas Halliday

You can never visit the environments through which titanic dinosaurs strode, never walk on their soil nor swim in their water. The only way to experience them is rockwise, to read the imprints in the frozen sand and to imagine a disappeared Earth. [loc. 440]

Halliday's evocative, poetic journey into the past of our planet is an immensely readable survey of what's preserved in the fossil record. The journey starts in the Pleistocene (the geological period that began about two and a half million years ago, and ended around 12,000 years before the present), and moving backwards through Pliocene, Miocene, Oligocene et cetera, he describes the flora, fauna, climate, geology and even astronomy of each period. The survey ends with the Ediacaran period, half a billion years ago, when life was just starting to become complex and multicellular. As well as ranging through time, Halliday examines different areas of the planet, though of course continental drift has shuffled everything around. For the Paleocene, 66 million years ago and featuring the Chixculub impact, it's Hell Creek in what is now Montana, while for the (deeply weird) Devonian it's Rhynie in now-Scotland.

Halliday rejoices in vivid images -- the varied colours of warm pools colonised by cyanobacteria, the sizzle of a melting glacier, the vast extent of the mammoth steppe which stretched from Ireland to Canada, the mile-high waterfall that filled the eastern Mediterranean -- and fascinating factoids. I have learnt that baby pterosaurs are termed 'flaplings', that horseflies evolved millions of years before horses, that the moon was much brighter (because closer) in the Ediacaran period, that some trilobites had bifocal vision, that ammonites could only hear sound for a brief period after hatching, that deers' antlers grow through a mechanism similar to cancer (and thus deer have only 20% the rate of cancer observed in other wild mammals). And -- in the final chapter, where Halliday discusses the current state of the planet and the threat of climate change -- I discovered that 'Between 1970 and 2019, the Great Plains ecosystem of North America moved north by an average distance of 365 miles – that is, on average, a metre every forty-five minutes' [loc. 4941].

Even that final chapter, titled 'A Town called Hope', isn't entirely gloomy. Halliday's sheer joy in the immense diversity of life, past and present -- and in the different geological and climatic environments which have preserved traces of that life -- illuminates every page of this book. I enjoyed this book so much that I found myself reading excerpts to friends at a birthday lunch: for instance, the quotation below. Which led me down another rabbithole...

... another of the earliest Paleocene mammals has been called Earendil undomiel. In J. R. R. Tolkien’s Arda mythology, Eärendil is the voyager, the morning star that heralds oncoming joy, a reference to an Anglo-Saxon poem which uses this image to describe John the Baptist, in Christianity the herald of Christ. By the vagaries of taxonomy, the specimen named Earendil undomiel is now considered to be a species of Mimatuta... Mimatuta itself has a Sindarin elvish etymology, meaning ‘jewel of the dawn’. [loc. 2193]

2023/154: The Cure for Sleep — Tanya Shadrick

I went without rest, searching always for ways to escape my self and the pain of living. To slip my skin and merge, forever, with something beyond me. I tried mothering, unpaid acts of service, immersion in cold water, the making of art, and then – lastly, disastrously – I hoped to get lost in love. [loc. 3257]

When Tanya Shadrick was 33 years old, just after the birth of her first child, she suffered an arterial tear and almost died. The experience made her feel that she had to break free from marriage and motherhood: simultaneously, she knew that she had to stay. The Cure for Sleep is her account of making public art, coming to terms with her difficult relationships with her parents (meek mother, absent father, ogrish stepfather) and her loving but perhaps claustrophobic marriage. She sat by the lido in Lewes for two summers, writing a mile of text; she spent a year repainting the railings around a vandalised tree; she embarked upon an ill-omened affair. And she opened herself to the world, and to its opportunities.

Given the subtitle -- 'On Waking Up, Breaking Free and Making a More Creative Life' -- I'd put off reading this book, I think because I expected it to be prescriptive: to tell me, too, how to stop sleepwalking through my life and reawaken my creativity. It's actually more of a memoir, and Shadrick is a very different person, in a very different place, to myself. (I have the free time she craves; I don't think I have the desperate drive to create, or the desire to create as performatively.) Her writing is beautiful though sometimes over-poetic: I felt she'd bashed away at some sentences until they were beautiful, regardless of whether the raw meaning was retained. Her account of her solitary childhood and her longing to escape her childhood home rang horribly true, and I think perhaps the most powerful aspect of the book for me was her gradual acceptance of her mother, despite the continuing friction between them.

Fulfils the ‘Author who shares your name’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge.

How would it be to give to myself, for even a short while, such kindness? To spend time learning or recovering what I loved, what I yearned for? To ask for exactly what I needed, as my children were able to do? [loc. 1831]

2023/153: Prophet — Helen McDonald and Sin Blaché

...just like fluoride in water protects a nation’s teeth, Prophet in water protects a nation’s idea of itself... [loc. 6139]

An American diner has appeared in a Suffolk field. It's a pitch-perfect rendition, with the neon and the jukebox: but it's not connected to any electricity supply. It's something like a memory, but not quite. To investigate this, the US military brings in an odd couple: Sunil Rao, British-Asian, ex-MI6, ex-Sothebys, who has an inexplicable sense of truth so strong and so infallible that he can zero in on a fact by asking himself questions about it; and Lt-Col Adam Rubenstein, impassive and unscrutable, the only person whose lies Rao can't detect. The two have worked together before, but there are elements to their collaboration that Rao, at least, isn't aware of. And between them they begin to discover the nature of the substance called Prophet, manufactured by an American pharma company, which -- at least initially -- allows those who are dosed with it to reify their fondest memories: for instance, that diner, created by a local fellow who's into Americana.

Nostalgia, which was regarded as a psychological disorder when it was first identified and named, is now generally thought of as a twee but harmless affection for the past: here, though, it's weaponised, and Prophet, the means by which memories become objects, is poorly understood by its creators. It's up to Rao and Rubenstein to make sense of the drug and the implications of its existence, even as its nature changes and changes again. Add to this an apparently one-sided attraction between them (Rao is a promiscuous, manic bisexual, and he hypothesises that 'whatever sexuality Adam possesses has been entirely sublimated into government-sponsored violence') and the two men's personalities and histories weave into an ever more complex web of meaning, emotion and deception.

I liked this a great deal, though I think I had been expecting something ... other, given Macdonald's solitary, rural, grief-laden H is for Hawk. I was aware, going in, that the two authors had co-written Prophet during the pandemic, and that some reviewers were comparing it to fanfiction. As someone who has co-written before, and misses it, I was especially intrigued by the collaborative aspect of the novel: as with all good collaboration, the joins are imperceptible. If there are issues, it's the uneven pacing and perhaps the skewed imbalance between backstories: we get a lot about Adam's past, but rather less about Sunil's. On the other hand, most of the narrative focusses on Sunil Rao: he is the agent of change.

The romance works; the techno-thriller more or less works; I like the protagonists (and their banter, and their very distinct voices) a great deal; I found some of the Prophet-objects, such as the dog, truly horrific; and I hope that Blaché and Macdonald collaborate again.

'Our subject, in Prophet, is the literal weaponisation of nostalgia.' -- great article by the authors on how and why this is 'Barbie meets Oppenheimer'.

2023/152: The Lighthouse Witches — C L Cooke

We are not just made of blood and bone – we are made of stories. Some of us have our stories told for us, others write their own – you wrote yours. [loc. 4542]

The story begins in 1998, when artist Olivia Stay arrives on the Scottish island of Lòn Haven, where she's been commissioned to paint a mural in a disused lighthouse. With Olivia are her three daughters: Sapphire, aged fifteen; Luna, aged nine; and Clover, aged seven. Sapphire -- Saffy -- is not best pleased to have been uprooted from her life and her friends: searching for distraction, she finds an old book and begins to read about witches and changelings and missing children. All the locals seem to be highly superstitious, and Saffy is scornful of their fears -- though it's true that a lot of children go missing from Lòn Haven. And then Clover disappears...

The second main narrative of the novel begins in 2021 (sans Covid), with Luna expecting her first child. Since she was abandoned in the forest by her mother as a child, she's grown up in a series of foster homes, which have left her with some deep-seated psychological issues and a reluctance to commit to Ethan, the father of her unborn child. Luna is very much alone in the world, and is constantly searching for clues about what happened to her mother and sisters. Then she receives a call from a police station in Scotland. Clover has been found: and, inexplicably, she's still seven years old.

The premise of this novel is intriguing, but I was unable to suspend my disbelief at certain points. Why would the police just hand over a seven-year-old child -- who's apparently the subject of a missing person report from over twenty years ago -- to a woman claiming to be her sister? Why would that seven-year-old child start behaving in deeply spooky ways, which constitute an excellent red herring but have no other explanation? Why would the 'diary' excerpts from a book supposedly written in the seventeenth century have such a modern style? And what's the mechanism by which numbers appear, cut into the skin of returned children?

The atmosphere was great, but I didn't feel the story really hung together: too much of it relied on characters being purposely opaque or deliberately dishonest. There's a subplot about cancer which I could have done without, especially as it had little relation to the main story about witches' curses and missing children. And I didn't warm to any of the characters.

2023/151: Venomous Lumpsucker — Ned Beauman

The diversity of life on earth was (as far as anyone knew) the most majestic thing in the universe, and human beings were (as far as anyone knew) the only living things with the capacity to appreciate that majesty, and yet human beings were also the ones who were stamping that majesty out, not deliberately but carelessly, incidentally, leaving nothing behind but a few scans and samples that nobody would ever look at. [p. 119]

Hilarious, mournful and eminently quotable, Venomous Lumpsucker is a technothriller with strong ecological and climate-crisis themes, focussing initially on the plight of the (fictional) eponymous fish -- possibly the most intelligent fish on earth, assuming its last remaining breeding ground in the Baltic hasn't been destroyed by a misdirected mining operation.

Our protagonists are Mark Halyard, an Australian environmental impact coordinator working for the Brahmasamudram Mining Company (and surreptitiously engaging in a little short-selling of 'extinction credits') and Karin Resaint, a Swiss-German biologist contracted by Brahmasamudram to assess the intelligence of the venomous lumpsuckers. If the fish aren't intelligent, it will cost fewer extinction credits if they're wiped off the face of the earth. Halyard argues that it won't matter: their DNA is backed up in biobanks. But then the biobanks are destroyed ...

I don't propose to recount the twists and turns of this engaging, headlong novel (though I will say how pleased I was that Beauman eschewed any cheap romantic element). Instead, I'll observe that the tone -- and the frequent asides providing context on some especially improbable invention, such as the Hermit Kingdom -- reminds me strongly of Neal Stephenson. (The Hermit Kingdom features chalk cliffs that are 'just a doomy frontage for sunlit uplands'; 'that government, like an empty restaurant who won’t give you a table, was still very much wedded to the idea that their borders were under siege, even though it was probably a decade since anybody had felt any desire at all to sneak into the country'; one of the novel's more delightful characters is the maverick Secretary of State for DEFRA, first encountered in a powered wetsuit; and the South-West Peninsula is a macabre wildlife preserve, run by tech billionaire Ferenc Barca. But I digress.)

Venomous Lumpsucker is, on one level, a profoundly depressing vision of an imminent future where failing agriculture means awful food, extinction is subject to market forces, uncontrolled spindrifters (reminiscent of Theo Jansen's creations) roam the seas whipping up random storms, insects -- 'yayflies' -- are genetically engineered to maximise the amount of joy in the universe, and everyone is embarrassed at mention of the United States. It's easy (as I've done here) to applaud the inventive details: but there is also a solid, and often poignant, plot, though it does sometimes get obscured by the sheer exuberance of Beauman's writing. Immense fun, and a worthy (and accessible) winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award.

After reading Beauman's first novel, Boxer, Beetle, I wrote "I'd like to read his other work to see if the promise of this book is fulfilled." My conclusion is a resounding 'yes, yes it is'.

'...We’re losing the spiny shore beetle and at least another ten thousand like it every year. You say you’d rather die than lose dogs, but to lose those ten thousand a year doesn’t trouble you at all.’
‘Christ, you people never stop talking about your ten thousand a year, it’s like being in fucking Jane Austen.'[p. 184]

2023/150: For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain — Victoria MacKenzie

I wanted my mind to be driven deep into God like a nail. [loc. 787]

This short novel examines the lives of the two great medieval female mystics from Norfolk, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. The two met at least once, around 1413, when Margery visited Julian in her anchoress' cell at St Julian's Church in Norwich. Victoria MacKenzie posits that, on this occasion, Julian handed the manuscript of her Revelations of Divine Love to Margery for safekeeping.

Most of this short novel is composed of alternating scenes from the two women's viewpoints: Julian looking back on the life she left behind to become an anchoress, and the ritual 'death' by which she withdrew from the world to be immured in her tiny cell; Margery complaining of being misunderstood, harassed and hounded by the townsfolk of what was then just plain Lynn. They are very different people. Julian's intensity, her almost obsessive pacing and prayer, contrasts strongly with Margery's performative faith, her public conversations with Jesus, and her frequent clashes with the religious establishment. Julian sees the world, and God, in the song of the blackbird in the hazel tree outside her cell; in a snowflake melting in the palm of her hand; in the company of her cat. Margery weeps for Christ in church, and is unable to get enough of being shriven for her sins. She's called a heretic, but she has experienced visions of Christ, and she's sure that some day she will be in heaven with Mary and Jesus and the apostles. And when they meet, there is an instant connection, a shared understanding that each has experienced revelation.

This would make an excellent play: the voices are so strong and distinctive. (The quotation at the top of this review is from Julian's narrative: Margery says, quite early on, 'as I began to tell of this sin, my confessor was sharp with me, telling me not to take all day, and then I could not get the sin out' [loc. 185].) And it's refreshing to read historical fiction which focuses tightly on the characters, rather than exploring the world around them. There are just enough hints of life in medieval Norfolk (the wandering musicians who Margery hears at the inn, the whispers of plague that reach Julian in her cell) to remind us that this is not our time.

2023/149: Daughters of the Labyrinth — Ruth Padel

One of Cézanne’s friends said the master always began a painting with shadow. He laid down a patch of shadow, overlapped it with another, then another, till all the shadows hinged to each other like screens. That’s what Mama has been doing for me. Connecting the dark bits to make a picture of her life. [loc 2898]

Daughters of the Labyrinth is the story of Ri Gold, a British artist in her sixties. Ri (short for Arianna) was born in Crete and has recently been widowed: her husband was Jewish. She's finding London, in the run-up to Brexit, increasingly unwelcoming, and when her friend Nashita visits from Mumbai for Ri's gallery opening, she points out that there's something 'withheld' in Ri's work. But then Ri's mother is admitted to hospital in Crete, and Ri flies home to see her -- and is shocked when her Catholic mother, half-conscious, begs her 'say kaddish for me'. But there are no Jews in Crete ...

Ri's mother Sophia (nee Sara) was Jewish, and during the Second World War, when the Germans invaded and the Jews were driven out of Chania -- one of the oldest Jewish settlements in the world -- she fled to the mountains, helped by Andonis, a Cretan boy who was falling in love with her. Andonis was also active, as a teenager, in the Cretan resistance, and worked with an English archaeologist who later sponsored Ri's education, as well as her brothers' livelihoods.

Ri's growing understanding of her family's history is beautifully told: her painterly eye, and especially her observations about light and shadow ('every ripple has a grin of dark') add an intriguing layer to the story. Her anger at her parents for their silence transmutes into acceptance and even pleasure at her newfound heritage, and even in the final pages, when the spectre of Covid ('koronia') looms, there's a sense of hope and inspiration. The stories of Andonis and Sara, full of long-held secrets, are grimmer and more poignant: but they survived the war, and became the loving parents of Ri and her brothers.

I read this novel about Crete whilst holidaying there: I hadn't expected to be so moved by it, and it offers a perspective on Cretan life not readily accessible to the tourist. It did make me look afresh at everything around me: at the shadows, and at the light.

The author's afterword reveals the historical inspiration for the novel: it's based on real events during the war, and Padel draws on the work of modern Jews rededicating the ancient synagogue in Chania. I do wonder if her 1940s character Tinu, formerly a Turkish slave -- the Turks only left Crete in 1900 and he's in his sixties when Sara meets him -- is also based on a real person...

2023/148: The Last of the Wine — Mary Renault

It was not that we were in love with the past. We were of an age to feel the present our own, and to suppose it would never outstrip us. [loc. 4289]

Read for book club: technically a reread, but it's at least twenty years (and probably more than thirty) since I first read this novel. Curiously, the one image that I remembered from that earlier reread is the narrator's father, Myron, turning a wine bowl in his hands: 'inscribed on the one side MYRON and on the other ALKIBIADES'. For The Last of the Wine is about (among other things) the Peloponnesian War, and Alkibiades' chequered career, and the Tyranny of the Thirty. The focus, though, is on the narrator Alexias: his adolescence, his many admirers, his education at the feet of Socrates, his love affair with Lysis, his difficult relationship with his father, and his experience of war.

This novel caused quite a storm in 1956: it's not sexually explicit, but it does deal with a homosexual relationship between a youth and an older man, and the way that relationship evolves when Lysis -- not only Alexias' lover but his mentor and role model -- marries a woman named Thalia. (After Lysis' death, Alexias, who has already saved Thalia from dishonour for Lysis' sake, marries her himself.) Renault's depiction of their relationship is understated but powerful, not least because in a hundred little details she shows us that this is wholly normal and expected in that place and time. Though a man must marry and father children, his first love affair as a youth will be with a man a few years older than himself: and, as with Myron and his long-past relationship with Alkibiades, that first love can influence and shape a man's whole life. Alexias doesn't always understand what he's seeing (for instance his father buying at auction one of Alkibiades' old mantles: 'I daresay my father thought it a bad bargain, for he never wore it') but the shadow of Alkibiades looms large in Myron's household.

Where this novel really hit home for me was the depiction of Athens' defeat by Sparta: widespread starvation and infanticide, surrender, and then the almost Orwellian Tyranny of the Thirty, which lasted mere months but saw 'the killing of 5% of the Athenian population, the confiscation of citizens' property and the exile of other democratic supporters... Many wealthy citizens were executed simply so the oligarchs could confiscate their assets, which were then distributed among the Thirty and their supporters.' (source. Renault doesn't pull her punches: Alexias suffers loss after loss, and it is he who kills the leader of the tyrants, avenging his father.

Ancient Greece is so vividly evoked: I felt as though every stele Alexias saw, every temple he prayed at, was real -- and likely many of them were, for Renault had an excellent and comprehensive knowledge of the archaeology and history of classical Greece. There are references, too, to the Athenians' own sense of history: one man has pierced ears and Alexias deduces that 'he came from one of the very old noble families, some of whom at that time still wore the ancient adornments handed down since the Wars of Troy'. (Lysis, at his wedding, wears 'a great brooch of antique goldwork from Mycenae, a gift to some ancestor from Agamemnon'.) That's a primarily oral history stretching back nearly a thousand years... There are some less pleasant, but wholly accurate, elements: the treatment of women, the custom of exposing female newborns, the enslavement of defeated soldiers, the slaughter of domestic animals in times of famine. It is a very different world: but the people in it are not that different from ourselves.

I've read another very good historical novel dealing with the rise and fall of Alkibiades: The Flowers of Adonis, by Rosemary Sutcliff. (And I note from that review that I had just completed an online course in Ancient Greek history, of which I now remember nothing. But perhaps the basics are still with me, even though I'd forgotten about the course.)

2023/147: Ink Blood Sister Scribe — Emma Torzs

At first each bookstore felt magical. Not the kind of magic Esther had grown up with but the kind she’d read about in novels, the kind that was all possibility, the chance that with one right turn in the forest or one fateful conversation with an old woman a person’s life might change forever. [loc. 3614]

The Kalotay sisters haven't seen one another for years. Esther is working in the Antarctic as a electrician, while her half-sister Joanna lives in a hidden house in Vermont, alone since the death of their father, who was killed by a book.

This is a world where magic is a closely-guarded secret, and spells are inscribed in books using ink made of blood and herbs. The talent for magic runs in families -- Joanna can sense it in the books she guards, though Esther is curiously immune -- and can be detected by other magic users. Esther was told never to stay in the same place for more than a year: 'you must leave on November 2 and keep moving for twenty-four hours, or the people who killed your mother will come for you'. But she's in love with a girl named Pearl, and doesn't want to go. Joanna, meanwhile, lives a solitary life, reading historical romances: there's a stray cat that comes looking for food, and she visits her mother in town, but she's achingly lonely.

As is Nicholas, the third of the viewpoint narrators, despite the near-constant presence of his bodyguard Collins, and the company of his uncle Richard, and of Maram, Richard's partner and Nicholas' former tutor. Nicholas is heir to the Library, a secret thaumocracy of magic-users: he's also a powerful Scribe, writing spells to order with his own blood. He lives a life of immense privilege but very little freedom. It's for his own protection, says Uncle Richard: wasn't Nicholas kidnapped as an adolescent, and didn't he lose an eye?

The three protagonists' stories converge, but the paths are twisty and the intersections unpredictable: the denouement, despite a slowing of the plot as all the convolutions are exposed, is highly satisfying, and open enough to admit a sequel. Ink Blood Sister Scribe is a pleasure to read, full of inventive turns of phrase ('He’d never felt so passionately all-caps about another person') and vivid descriptions -- of a dark garden in Vermont, of a drive through London at night, of Antarctic skies. It reminded me, in atmosphere, of The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake, but the tone is less cynical and the characters less antagonistic, less competitive. An intriguing debut.

2023/146: The Brutal Telling — Louise Penny

This case didn’t begin with the blow to the head. It started years ago, with another sort of blow. Something happened to our murderer, something we might consider insignificant, trivial even, but was devastating to him. An event, a snub, an argument that most people would shrug off. Murderers don’t. [loc. 1497]

This is a tricky novel to review: it's sixth fifth in the series that began with Still Life, which I liked very much, but I haven't read the intervening volumes, so there is quite a bit of missing context. I also understand, from reviews I sought out after being perplexed by the conclusion of The Brutal Telling, that said conclusion is not actually a conclusion: some aspects, at least, of the case continue in the next book.

Gamache is urbane and compassionate as ever; some of the people of Three Pines have become his friends, while others -- including Marc and Dominique, new owners of the old Hadley house which they hope to turn into a luxury hotel and spa -- are newcomers, slowly being assessed and assimilated by the village. Clara the artist is moving up in the world: when she's offered a career-changing exhibition by an unpleasant individual, she's forced to decide whether her conscience trumps her ambition. There is (of course) a dead body, which has unaccountably appeared in the bistro. There is a convoluted plot involving references to various Charlottes (which I am not altogether convinced held together) and a man -- well, several men -- haunted by secrets that can't be revealed.

And a gut-punch of a revelation as to the murderer's identity.

Delightfully atmospheric, with intriguing and likeable characters and complex social networks. I think I will attempt to read this series in order, and return to this novel in its proper place in the sequence.

2023/145: Some Desperate Glory — Emily Tesh

“They’re people,” she said. “The majo. You know they’re people.”
“So what?”
“This isn’t justice. This is just the same thing over and over.”[loc. 3729]

Kyr (short for Valkyr) is a warbreed, genetically engineered to be a warrior. She, and a couple of thousand other humans, inhabit Gaea Station, continuing the fight against the alien Majoda confederation who destroyed Earth and murdered fourteen billion people. Gaea Station is no place for rest or recreation, or love, or friendship. Kyr is desperate for approval from Admiral Jole, who she calls 'uncle', and she adores her brother Magnus, whose scores are the best in Gaea's history. (They don't talk about their traitor sister Ursa, who fled to the colony planet Chyrosothemis.) She isn't interested in 'sex things' or kissing. She tries to look after the Sparrow mess -- the only female group in their age cohort: eight teenaged girls -- pushing them to be the best they can be. She doesn't need them to like her.

Which is a good thing, because Kyr is deeply unlikeable for the first few chapters of the novel. She's been thoroughly indoctrinated, raised as a child soldier, growing up in an environment where sexism and homophobia are rife, violence is valorised and 'population targets' legitimise reproductive rape. Kyr's fine with that. She loathes the aliens, the majo: her life is dedicated to vengeance for the murdered billions of humanity.

Then the Sparrows' assignments arrive, and Kyr finds that she is not, after all, to be a warrior. Worse: her brother has been sent on a suicide mission. Obviously someone somewhere has made a mistake, because Kyr is certain that she's destined for greater things. She's the pinnacle of Gaean humanity, the ultimate weapon against the majo. It's time for Kyr to break the rules, and to enlist the help of genius Systems tech Avi to bring her brother home.

Kyr has a great deal to learn, about herself and about the universe, about the majo and their mysterious Wisdom -- a powerful AI that can, perhaps, alter reality -- and about the people (human and otherwise) who she encounters in the course of her journey. She comes to realise that perhaps the majoda (a blanket term for several species of alien) were right to regard humans as aggressive, territorial and a threat to other intelligent life. She even, to some extent, begins to understand and accept her own emotional responses. She's still a monster in some respects, but she's capable of change.

Some Desperate Glory is told wholly from Kyr's point of view (though the 'Kyr' or 'Val' viewpoint character is not, due to alternate timelines, always exactly the same person), and it's a testament to Tesh's writing that Kyr is a compelling character throughout, capable of compassion as well as courage, willing (eventually) to accept that much of what she was raised to believe is wrong. Sticking to her viewpoint, though, does mean that we only see the other characters through her somewhat blinkered vision: her messmates, in particular Cleo and Lisabel, are depicted wholly through their relationships to Kyr, as is Avi (who's in love with Magnus). Surprisingly, the healthiest relationship in the novel may be that between Kyr and Yiso, a majo. An alien. (I liked Yiso a lot.)

There were points at which I found Kyr's lack of emotional intelligence -- and basic observation skills -- frustrating, and I'd have liked more clarity about the role of the older generation of Gaean's in the conflict before the destruction of Earth. I also felt that making the villain a sexual predator, on top of their other crimes, was excessive. But I loved Some Desperate Glory, and Kyr's self-discovery, and the hope of redemption and deradicalisation. This is a very different work to Tesh's previous fantasy duology, Silver in the Wood and Drowned Country, but told with as much flair, invention and detail. More science fantasy than hard SF: more social SF (Le Guin's term, mentioned by the author in her afterword) than either.

PS: Hurrah for British authors! I laughed aloud at this, purportedly from Federation and Other Problems: An Introduction to Human Political Thought, 3rd ed.: "The fact that some important decisions (such as, for example, the initial declaration of war against the majoda) are left to mass plebiscite should not be taken as evidence of democratic rule. Humans themselves will cynically point out that no popular vote is ever taken unless those in power already know what the answer will be."

2023/144: No One's Home — D M Pulley

This house is bad for men, for boys. They all die here. Almost every single one. And the women go mad. Did you know that?” [loc. 3219]

Myron and Margot Spielman, with their teenaged son Hunter, move from Boston to an historic mansion that's rumoured to be haunted. Rawlingswood has a history of murder, suicide and ruin: its walls and closets are graffiti'd with words and phrases like 'welcome to hell house', 'murder' and 'dead girl'. There are mysterious sounds, lights that switch themselves on, a sense of something watching ... The Spielmans have their own secrets, from a malpractice suit against Myron to the 'hot yoga' videos Margot produces: and all three are haunted by the memory of Allison, Hunter's sister, who died young.

The house's reputation is not undeserved. The narrative switches between the Spielmans and four families who previously lived in the house - the Rawlings family, who built the house, from 1922 to 1931, the Bells between 1936 and 1972, the Klussmans from 1972 to 1990, and the Martins from 1990 to 2016. In each case, there's a tragedy; in each case, we slowly begin to understand that it's not what it seems. But there's an ancient horror here that dates back to before the first brick was laid ...

The blurb, beginning 'for fans of The Haunting of Hill House', lured me in, but to be honest I found this rather disappointing and nothing like as scary as Shirley Jackson's novel. Because I was expecting (and hoping for) supernatural horror, I didn't find the story especially satisfying: indeed, it was sad rather than unnerving. A positive ending, though.

Still thinking about the title. Is it 'no one is at home' or 'this is not anyone's home'? Either interpretation shifts the ambience of the book.

2023/143: The Stargazer's Embassy — Eleanor Lerman

Maybe I had a limited imagination; that quality had been necessary for me to cultivate in order to survive. That's what the music and headphones and books and TV were for: to limit what I did not wish to see, what I did not want to know. [p. 248]

The novel begins in 1990, in New York: Julia Glazer works as a cleaner, keeping her head down, going from work to home to work again. One evening, though, she decides to head to the river to watch a meteor shower. There, she meets John, who's a psychiatrist and former lecturer, a Pulitzer Prize winner. They fall in love well before Julia discovers that his area of interest is 'experiencers' -- people who have, or believe they have, experienced alien abductions. Julia is extremely unhappy with this development: she grew up with a mother who was obsessed with aliens. And Julia happens to know that they are real, and that they seem to be stalking Julia herself.

This is a slow, cerebral novel, focussed more on Julia's interior life and her anger towards her mother than on the aliens themselves. She moves passively through her life, refusing the aliens at every turn: refusing to interact with them, refusing to discuss them with others, refusing to think about what happened to her mother and to herself. Refusing to consider that the tattoo on her wrist, of five stars -- which is also the logo of the Stargazer's Embassy, her stepfather's bar in upstate New York -- might mark her as different.

Then everything changes: and the novel picks up ten years later, when reports of alien abductions are few and far between. Did Julia -- who's returned to her work as a cleaner, who has no friends and no close relationships, who's doing her best not to think about what she calls the things --have something to do with that? And have the aliens really, finally, given up on her, or do they have unresolved issues?

The Stargazer's Embassy is a world away from conventional 'alien abduction' novels. These aliens are unsettling, but not especially monstrous; their agenda remains, for the most part, mysterious; they are badly-dressed, having no understanding of fashion or costume, and some of them have a taste for Jack Daniels. They remember Julia's mother, and they are scared of Julia: but she is not scared of them.

Lerman's prose is full of vivid imagery -- 'The sky was streaky, blue on blue on blue, displaying a small moon ... rising as slowly as if it wasn’t sure it was really supposed to appear tonight' [p. 13] -- and she structures this story, with its deliberately isolated and introspective protagonist, with confidence and care. That said, I didn't find it as enjoyable as Still Alive or Satellite Street. At least on first reading: on a reread, I could appreciate the pacing and the few interactions that Julia allows herself.

2023/142: The Unspeakable Acts of Zina Pavlou — Eleni Kyriacou

‘The English don’t like hanging anyone any more. They think it makes them look uncivilised, to the rest of the world. And as for hanging women, well that’s even more unpopular.’
Zina frowns. ‘Not even foreign ones?’ she asks.
Eva doesn’t speak for a few moments... [loc. 1458]

Zina Pavlou speaks very little English. She has come from Cyprus to stay with her son Michalis and his wife Hedy, caring for their children and working as an unpaid housekeeper, but Hedy wasn't happy with the arrangement. Now Hedy is dead, Zina is awaiting trial for her murder, and her family seem to have abandoned her: she has brothers, sisters and nephews, but none visit during her imprisonment. Her son (who was the translator when Zina was first arrested) believes her guilty of the murder and will have nothing to do with her. Eva Georgiou, the translator appointed by the police, is Zina's only hope, and her only friend: but Eva doesn't know if she can, or should, believe Zina's protestations of innocence

This is a powerful novel: it's about the ways in which Zina (old, unattractive, unloved, of low social class and minimal education -- and foreign) is dismissed by most of the men involved in her case, about her lack of agency -- not just in London, but back in Cyprus -- and her disintegrating grasp of the truth about what happened on the night of Hedy's death. 'She’s told the truth throughout, she wants to say, and really doesn’t know how Hedy died, or what happened that evening all those months ago. She is almost certain she had nothing to do with it.' [loc. 3964]. Eva has made a British life for herself: she speaks and writes English, has a career, and is 'respectable': but she still lacks the privilege of even a working-class Englishman. She's paid less than a man doing the same job would be, she's regarded as fair game by unscrupulous journalists, and she's struggling to understand why she's so invested in Zina's case.

This novel is based on the story of Hella Dorothea Christofis (née Bleicher), who was murdered by her mother-in-law, Styllou Pantopiou Christofi, in London in 1954. Eleni Kyriacou's afterword describes the facts that inspired the story, and it's harrowing reading. 'Seven months after Styllou’s execution, there was a huge public outcry when Ruth Ellis was hanged for the murder of her abusive lover, David Blakely. In his autobiography, the executioner to both women, Albert Pierrepoint, noted the lack of press interest in Styllou’s fate. He said, ‘One wonders if it was because she was middle-aged, unattractive and foreign?’ [loc. 5141]. In The Unspeakable Acts of Zina Pavlou (hmm, why plural 'Acts'?) it's clear that Zina is suffering from some form of mental illness. Even today, though, this is not always recognised or treated as a mitigating circumstance. Kyriacou's evocation of the early 1950s post-war British society with all its prejudice and inequality is vivid and bleak. And I grew up closer to that time than to 2023...

Fulfils the ‘Script font on spine’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK publication date is 09 NOV 2023.