The Other Hand

From the back of the book: We don't want to tell you what happens in this book. It is a truly special story and we don't want to spoil it. Nevertheless, you need to know enough to buy it so we will just say this:

This is the story of two women. Their lives collide one fateful day, and one of them has to make a terrible choice.

Two years later, they meet again - the story starts there...

Once you have read it, you'll want to tell your friends about it. When you do, please don't tell them what happens either. The magic is in how it unfolds.

How can you not pick up a book with a blurb like that? This blurb won Sceptre, the 'Best Blurb' award at the Book Marketing Society Awards in 2010 and it's not hard to work out why... but how the hell do I review a book where I'm not allowed to tell you anything about it??

The Other Hand by Chris Cleave is a beautiful piece of writing; it is dramatic, yes, but also funny, touching and relatable (is that a word?). What makes it all the more remarkable is the authenticity of the female voices that bring this book to life when the writer is a man. That's not to say that men can't understand women - not about to get into that argument! - but I still feel it's quite an achievement for any writer, male or female, to adopt the other's voice so successfully.

I wouldn't say I 'liked' any of the characters. For me, that's always a 'must'. They all have flaws and controversial ones at that, flaws that you can't ever imagine forgiving but it's these flaws that make the characters feel all the more real. They're the kind of flaws that you hope people would forgive in you but you never have the faith that they ever would so you try and keep them under wraps...

This novel is international in its scope. The dilemma is one that no one ever thinks they would have to face but the novel makes you realise how it could happen to anyone. It is about relationships between friends, boyfriends, husbands, children, colleagues and whole nations. It is about truth and how it's not always healthy. Most importantly, it's a complete breeze to read. 

There's a film in the pipeline starring Nicole Kidman, so get reading before it comes out and everyone knows what happens!

7.5/10

Oxford Literary Festival

Tuesday was one of those days where I feel smug that I picked the right career path. It's 23 degrees outside and not a cloud in the sky and I get to go to Oxford for the day for the Oxford Literary Festival and hear authors talk about books in the impressively beautiful Corpus Christi and Christ College. Also making it into my day: 4 bottles of water, 3 coffees, 2 apples, 1 Jamie Oliver rhubarb muffin, 1 BLT bagel, 1 quick catch-up with a school friend and some sneaky sunshine snatching.

A 6.20 start got me into Oxford at 9.15 and allowed me to have a leisurely walk from the station to the Festival. First stop: Joanne Harris of Chocolat fame joined a panel that discussed 'The End'. Is the end of a novel ever really the end? Should endings be precise or open-ended? Are sequels ever really successful, whether they are written by the original author or not? The panel referred to various classic novels from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson and the sequels (and prequels in the case of Wide Sargasso Sea) that followed in more recent years. Harris felt that Death Comes to Pemberley, a sequel to Pride and Prejudice, failed Mr and Mrs Darcy - how did an inherently argumentative and opinionated couple become so calm and mundane in marriage? Hilariously, Harris revealed that she had always thought that, approaching middle-age, Elizabeth would inevitably become more and more like her mother and slowly aggravate Mr. Darcy.

Later on I saw an interesting talk on the wife on Constance Wilde, wife of Oscar. Embarrassingly I had no idea that Oscar Wilde married! Once I did, my immediate reaction was to feel sorry for a woman whose husband would later be imprisoned for homosexuality. She did, however, stand by her husband during these times, despite his imprisonment cutting off her career and social life as much as his, forcing her to take their two sons to Italy to get away from it all. She was not a softly-spoken wimp, however. She had quite the personality - an active figure (as was Oscar) in the dress reform movement, was a children's writer and very active in the politics of the time.

I won't bore you by going into much more depth but the day was full of interesting talks and people and I would definitely recommend going along for a day or even a morning if you can!

Book Club: The God Of Small Things

From the back cover: “'The God of Small Things' explores the tragic fate of a family which ‘tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved, and how.” They are an eclectic mix: grandmother Mammachi; her spoilt Anglophile son, Chacko; her daughter Ammu; Ammu’s inseparable twins Estha and Rahel; and Baby Kochamma, grand aunt, determined to spread the bitter seeds of her early disappointment in love. From its mesmerising opening sequence, it is clear that we are in the grip of a delicious new voice … a voice of breathtaking beauty. 'The God of Small Things 'achieves genuine, tragic resonance. It is, indeed, a masterpiece.” CHRISTINA PATTERSON, Observer


I mentioned a while ago, when I first found out this was our next Book Club read, that I was already dreading reading it because the cover was so disappointing! You may think I was being childish, and perhaps I was, but it turns out I wasn't the only one with that exact same thought...

In short, I wasn't looking forward to this book as much as some of the others I've read - I was anticipating something quite difficult to read because I knew it was a Booker winner and promised to deal with a lot of characters and a lot of issues. It certainly does deal with a lot... but I'm pleased to say that the book pleasantly surprised me. I even found myself welling up by the end (be it happiness or sadness) because I found that I had, without realising, been sucked in.

The setting is unfamiliar to me and, at first, I found it interesting but a bit alienating. Once the Western character arrived, though, I finally could see my access point within this story. That's not to say that I understood or felt more for the Western characters because it was actually the opposite.

I liked the characters, the settings and found the politics and social history interesting but there were some disturbing scenes. It wasn't a cheerful read but there was humour in it and I liked the way Arundhati Roy wrote her younger characters and the odd way that children think. The one thing I didn't like in the book was that the writing tended to lean towards being flowery and over-done. The writing itself is, I think, a reflection of the writer's culture but there was also something very self-conscious about the book and its style - as if Roy were really trying to make it a literary novel, and not just another commercial read.

In the Book Club it received mixed reviews, 7s, 8s and... a 2. I went for 7/10 because, pleasant surprise or not, I did enjoy the book and appreciate that Roy is a talented writer.

A Handful of Dust

From the back of the book: After seven years of marriage, the beautiful Lady Brenda Last is bored with life at Hetton Abbey, the Gothic mansion that is the pride and joy of her husband, Tony. She drifts into an affair with the shallow socialite John Beaver and forsakes Tony for the Belgravia set. Brilliantly combining tragedy, comedy and savage irony, A Handful of Dust captures the irresponsible mood of the 'crazy and sterile generation' between the wars. The breakdown of the Last marriage is a painful, comic re-working of Waugh's own divorce, and a symbol of the disintegration of society.


Over the weekend I had one of those awful moments where you start a book you're just not in the mood for. Therefore, I've stopped reading The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh but the thing is, I love Waugh! Instead of putting you off Waugh forever (because I know I'm just that influential...), I thought I'd review one my favourites of his.

The blurb is entirely accurate and is designed to attract Waugh-ophiles but it doesn't get across the sinister turn that the book takes about half-way through. Nicholas Lezard of the Guardian puts it well: "One of the twentieth century's most chilling and bitter novels and one of its best." Waugh revealed that the ending to the book originally existed as a separate short story and this ending, without ruining it, left my heart thumping and feeling distinctly uncomfortable. It's just so good! This short story having already been published in the American press, however, meant that Waugh had to provide a different ending to the original US edition, which was much less sinister.

Waugh is a brilliantly intelligent and darkly comic writer who often takes a critical and satirical look at society, and no more so does he do this than in A Handful of Dust. Satire, comedy, society, darkness, it's got it all and a great plot on top of it.

For interest, the title itself comes from another fantastic and famous inter-war piece of writing: T.S.Eliot's The Wasteland:

I will show you something different from either 

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

This gets 8.5/10
(so much more than an '8')

Food in Literature...

Hello hello. A busy weekend - hence the lack of posts! While I got up to lots of things over the weekend, one of the biggest features was... as ever... food. Spring is really trying to fight through and all I can think of now is picnics and baking and pub lunches in the sunshine. Admittedly Spring was decidedly absent from my Saturday and in true rainy-day fashion, I got baking. I made some delicious brownies and a lush ginger cake - I realise that you shouldn't complement your own baking but considering I ate so much of what I made, I choose to ignore this rule!

Anyway, the guilt of eating all this delicious food and the guilt of not writing any blog posts for a few days got me thinking. Food has always been very present in books and I don't mean simply cookbooks. Here are some of my favourite foodie moments in novels:

I sell dreams, small comforts, sweet harmless temptations to bring down a multitude of saints crashing among the hazels and nougatines

One book jumped to mind immediately and probably did the same in a lot of your minds as well. Regardless of whether you came to it by page or through the impossibly gorgeous Johnny Depp, Chocolat by Joanne Harris, has been making us want to gorge on chocolate for years. For anyone who regularly reads this blog, you'll know that I read Five Quarters of the Orange by Harris recently and, like Chocolat, food is a massive part.

Harry's mouth fell open. The dishes in front of him were now piled with food. He had never seen so many things he liked to eat on one table: roast beef, roast chicken, pork chops and lamb chops, sausages, bacon and steak, boiled potatoes, roast potatoes, fries, Yorkshire pudding, peas, carrots, gravy, ketchup, and, for some strange reason, peppermint humbugs.

Potter is never short of foody moments, what with Honeydukes sweet shop, Molly Weasley's multiplying sandwiches and Slug Club feasts. My favourite, however, has to be in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone when they have their first banquet in the great hall. It makes my stomach rumble just thinking about it!

I love my pizza so much, in fact, that I have come to believe in my delirium that my pizza might actually love me, in return. I am having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair.

Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert has 'Eat' in the title and then explores food in Italy - what could possibly go wrong??

I remember the dinner well—soup of oseille, a sole quite simply cooked in white wine sauce, a caneton à la presse, a lemon soufflé. At the last minute, fearing the whole thing was too simple for Rex, I added caviare aux blinis. And for wine I let him give me a bottle of 1906 Montrachet, then at its prime, and, with the duck, a Clos de Bère of 1904

Ahh Evelyn Waugh - one of my real favourites and what could be more iconic than Brideshead Revisited. But you can't have a big country house with lots of sexual tension without throwing in some food!

If this post wasn't quite enough to satisfy your rumbling stomachs, visit this fantastic blog. It hasn't been updated recently but there are plenty of foodie moments in its archive for you to enjoy: http://literaryfoodporn.blogspot.co.uk/

 
Happy eating!

Claire Tomalin on Dickens

Embarrassingly, I haven't read Claire Tomalin's widely credited Charles Dickens: A Life. However, you needn't have to read the book to get a wonderful feel for the author whose name has been for centuries a house-hold name, just hear Tomalin talk. To be honest, Claire Tomalin has done so many talks on Dickens this year in celebration of his bicentenary that I'm surprised she still has a voice...

Think Dickens, think the Victorian working classes, novels, debtor's prisons, ridiculous hair, obsessions etc but Tomalin brought colour and life last night to a man we thought we knew so much about already. When asked by a member of the audience why she decided to take on a person of whom there are already so many biographies, Tomalin eloquently said that biographies are like portraits - there are never too many as each author, each angle, each style is different even if the subject is, essentially, the same.

In this case, Tomalin decided to dedicate many pages to Dickens best friend, John Forster. If you think about how much of your life is taken up with and informed by your friends, it seems staggering that there is not more information about Dickens' friendship with Forster when so much of his material was inevitably influenced in some way, however small, by the people around him. According to Tomalin, for instance, it was Forster who insisted that David Copperfield were written in the first person - a device rarely used at the time, except Jane Eyre, which Dickens did not read but Forster almost certainly did. Forster was a critic and biographer and would have read an awful lot - in fact he wrote a biography of Dickens himself.

Dickens was completely convinced that 'the little people' in life should be explored, written about and given a voice and his books certainly do that. Outside his writing, however, he did a hell of a lot. He regularly visited the inmates at prisons all over the country, he wrote to friends in high places to donate money to London's ragged schools for the poor, he published his novels in cheap, serialised form so that everyone could afford them and he travelled endlessly to perform to people all over the world until his death.

Not to say he wasn't flawed... but a really interesting guy. I'm gonna go buy the book now. Don't you just hate it when you become aware of how easily sold to you are? *sighs*

Algonquin Hotel

One of my favourite cities, unoriginal perhaps, is New York. The last time I went was October 2011 and, once again, fell in love with, this time, a very snowy Manhattan. Like breakfasts of 5-stack pancakes, golden syrup and fresh strawberries, shopping, strolls in Central Park... I couldn't visit NYC without popping into Fifth Avenue Barnes & Noble. I love Waterstones, I do, but B&N is just something else…

What I've never done before, however, is visit the famous Algonquin Hotel on W. 44th Street. A friend of my Dad's came to treat us to lunch at the Algonquin's Round Table and my inner-book-geek came streaming out... We sat at the round table itself, I'm told, and ate the most delicious burger and garlic fries...

Six years ago now, the hotel officially became a literary landmark. Tucked in-between the Theatre District and the publishing world, the Round Table entertained many literary greats. William Faulkner is thought to have written his Nobel Prize acceptance speech there, Harold Ross came up with The New Yorker and, with Vanity Fair offices just 4 doors down, plenty of the magazine's elite journalists used to dine at the Round Table for a truly literary lunch. To this day all guests receive free copies of The New Yorker. Many women, in particular, enjoyed The Algonquin: Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker and Simone de Beauvoir were all seen regularly.
The Round Table posse at The Algonquin were made up largely of critics and they would sit and discuss the day-to-day goings on with each other. These characters and discussions inspired Franklin Adams’ column in the Tribune at the time. This column would go on to inspire the writings of the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway - quite the legacy, I think you'd agree.
As you can see from my photo, the hotel itself was amazing as it felt I was walking around in the 1930s or a scene in Woody Allen’s, Midnight in Paris, and about to bump into the Fitzgeralds or Edith Wharton!

Literary Prague

Last weekend I was lucky enough to jet off to Prague in the Czech Republic. With buildings that are centuries old and the Vltava River flowing straight through the middle, Prague is a truly beautiful and charming city. It has often been the centre of political turmoil and yet its buildings stand largely unbruised besides the constant stream of graffiti.

Prague is a cultural hub with the Rudolfilim, which is home to the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Estates Theatre, where Mozart's Don Giovani debuted. Kanye West and Rihanna have both filmed music videos in the city and Prague has also played host to many film sets, including Mission Impossible and the Chronicles of Narnia.

I, of course, however, will be looking at the literature side of things and the most famous literary figure to have come out of Prague is probably Franz Kafka. Kafka was born in 1883 into a middle-class Jewish family in Prague, Bohemia, when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. he house he was born in was situated on Prague's Old Town Square and is now home to a permanent Kafka exhibition. At this time, it is thought that around 26,000 Jews lived in the city. Following World War 2, however, the community has declined to 1,500.

Kafka himself died young, at only 40 years old, but during World War 2, his sisters were deported by the Nazis, along with their families, to the Łódź Ghetto. They subsequently died either in the Ghetto or in concentration camps, including Theresienstadt and Auschwitz.

Kafka was educated at the Altstädter Deutsches Gymnasium and the building still stands today. He later went on to study Chemistry at Prague's Charles-Ferdinand University before changing course to Law. Kafka never actually wrote specifically about Prague in any of his short stories or novels but it is felt that the city, although unnamed, is very much present in his writing. Most of his works were published postumously, despite his last request: "Everything I leave behind me ... in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters, sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread."

Another author to have lived in Prague is American writer, Marcia Davenport, whose house and plaque I saw on my walk around the city.

The Orange Prize: Longlist

The Orange Prize for Fiction is an award given to women writers who have displayed great originality and excellence in a new novel. The winner wins a cheque for a not insignificant £30,000 and a bronze figurine known as a 'Bessie', which is unique each year, designed and donated by Grizel Niven.

The chair of this year's judging panel is the famous writer, Joanna Trollope, who is accompanied by a group of well-known and successful writers and broadcasters: Lisa Appignanesi, Victoria Derbyshire, Natalie Haynes and Natasha Kaplinsky.

The longlist was announced yesterday, on International Women's Day, and includes a handful of debut novelists, which is always exciting to see. Last year's winner, Téa Obreht, was a debut novelist and the youngest to ever win the prize. Her novel was The Tiger's Wife.

Accompanying the debut novelists on the list are some more familiar names, including Ann Patchett, Ali Smith and 2011 nominee, Emma Donoghue, but who will win??

Island of Wings by Karin Altenberg (Quercus) - Swedish; 1st Novel

On the Floor by Aifric Campbell (Serpent's Tail) - Irish; 3rd Novel

The Grief of Others by Leah Hager Cohen (The Clerkenwell Press) - American; 4th Novel

The Sealed Letter by Emma Donoghue (Picador) - Irish; 7th Novel

Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan (Serpent's Tail) - Canadian; 2nd Novel

The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape) - Irish; 5th Novel

The Flying Man by Roopa Farooki (Headline Review) - British; 5th Novel

Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon (Quercus) - American; 4th Novel

Painter of Silence by Georgina Harding (Bloomsbury) - British; 3rd Novel

Gillespie and I by Jane Harris (Faber & Faber) - British; 2nd Novel

The Translation of the Bones by Francesca Kay (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) - British; 2nd Novel

The Blue Book by A.L. Kennedy (Jonathan Cape) - British; 6th Novel

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (Harvill Secker) - American; 1st Novel

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (Bloomsbury) - American; 1st Novel

Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick (Atlantic Books) - American; 7th Novel

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett (Bloomsbury) - American; 6th Novel

There but for the by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton) - British; 5th Novel

The Pink Hotel by Anna Stothard (Alma Books) - British; 2nd Novel

Tides of War by Stella Tillyard (Chatto & Windus) - British; 1st Novel

The Submission by Amy Waldman (William Heinemann) - American; 1st Novel


The shortlist will be announced on 17th April and the winner on 30th May.