Books In Brief

Today I'm reviving a series that I haven't visited since last autumn (gulp)! I feel that this little space doesn't adequately reflect how much time I devote to reading, and wanted to share three books that I've particularly loved recently. If you're looking for a read that will grab you and force you to feverishly relinquish your loved ones and duties until you resurface days later, glassy-eyed and unwilling to let go of the book, look no further. These three are well-written, blessed with fantastic plots and characters, and you'll find yourself reluctant to leave their worlds behind: the hallmark of a truly good book for me. 

Station Eleven (2014) - Emily St. John Mandel 

"What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty. Twilight in the altered world, a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a parking lot."

Station Eleven begins one wintry night in a theatre in Toronto. A rapt audience watches a performance of King Lear, unaware that the world's population is on the brink of being crushed by a deadly strain of swine flu. Mandel doesn't dwell on the horrors of this disease but rather places her focus on the human reactions and relationships before, during and especially in the aftermath of the apocalypse, weaving a host of seemingly disparate storylines around this central event, the last night of the world as we know it. What I love about this novel is that although you might expect life to be rendered unrecognisable by the plague, the remainder of society continues to cling to the threads of our collapsed former civilisation. Shakespeare, classical music and literature are adapted to the needs of the new world - even Sartre's famous 'Hell is other people' gets a rewrite: 'Hell is the absence of the people you long for' -  and chillingly, a museum memorialises laptops and mobile phones, technology forced into obsolescence by the plague. This is a perfectly crafted, touching piece of apocalyptic fiction, well worth the cloud of hype that's surrounded it over the past year. 

The Little Friend (2002) - Donna Tartt

'It was the last picture that they had of him. Out of focus. Flat expanse of green cut at a slight diagonal, with a white rail and the heaving gloss of a gardenia bush sharp in the foreground at the edge of the porch. Murky, storm-damp sky, shifting liquescence of indigo and slate, boiling clouds rayed with spokes of light. In the corner of the frame a blurred shadow of Robin, his back to the viewer, ran out across the hazy lawn to meet his death, which stood waiting for him - almost visible - in the dark place beneath the tupelo tree.'  

This is the Donna Tartt novel that most people haven't heard of - her second after The Secret History, preceding The Goldfinch. The novel opens with the murder of a little boy (named Robin - hence the title) but isn't centred around the event. Instead, the focus here is about the people it affects, years later. The story revolves around the escapades of his sibling, the twelve-year-old Harriet, in a sleepy backwater town in Tartt's home state of Mississippi. Harriet, a baby at the time of Robin's death, is fiercely determined to avenge her brother, and impervious to the fact that her vendetta may be misdirected. Hijinks ensue, including one very memorable moment with a king cobra. As usual, I can't help but approach Tartt's writing as if spinning out a particularly delicious ice cream - her plots and characters are beautifully crafted, her prose so eminently readable (yet not self-indulgent), and I never want her books to end. Luckily, they're quite long, so there's lots to enjoy! Next up, The Goldfinch - I can only hope it's as good as Tartt's first two novels.

The Circle (2013) - Dave Eggers

“We are not meant to know everything, Mae. Did you ever think that perhaps our minds are delicately calibrated between the known and the unknown? That our souls need the mysteries of night and the clarity of day?” 

When one of the most exciting tech behemoths in the world offers small-town Mae a job,  it feels like a miracle. Her new company, The Circle, is an unholy mash-up of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat, and its 'campus' comes with all the perks you might expect at the coolest social media company in the world: an in-house GP, rooms of free products to test and borrow, theatres and nightclubs, and a space for the hottest musicians, comedians and writers to perform their material for The Circle's employees. Hell, if they advertised a grad scheme I'd probably sign up in a heartbeat. But of course, in fiction, if you're presented with a utopia, it's always too good to be true. As a social media company, the Circle encourages sharing everything online - doing so increases one's online rank and thus celebrity. As her sharing levels spiral out of control, Mae finds herself propelled closer and closer to the dark truth at the heart of the Circle. As a blogger and someone who shares fairly extensively on social media channels, I found Eggers' writing a fascinating comment on our computer age - and how our obsession with online transparency might easily morph into a 21st century Big Brother state.

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Witching Hour Reads for Halloween

“The witching hour, somebody had once whispered to her, was a special moment in the middle of the night when every child and every grown-up was in a deep deep sleep, and all the dark things came out from hiding and had the world all to themselves.” ― Roald Dahl, The BFG

Tomorrow is Halloween, bringing with it little painted beggars brandishing buckets at my front door, flickering jack o'lanterns in windows and the greatest witching hour of them all. In preparation for All Hallows' Eve this month, I made it my goal to read five books belonging to the darker genres. I also decided to source all five from my excellent local library in Queen's Park, whose myriad choice meant I ended up with a huge range of subject matter. From teenage witches to a time-travelling serial killer, a patient brought back from the dead at the turn of the century, a medieval bride lost during a game of hide-and-seek, and a man targeted by a malicious, invisible assailant...I had great fun! Here's what I ended up reading.

Half Bad by Sally Green

I'd heard stirrings about Half Bad all over Twitter, and initially thought that its plot might be quite similar to Harry Potter, with narrative elements such as the formative years of a young male witch, romances with pretty witch girls and the development of latent magic power. But Hogwarts this is not. This great YA focuses on a persecuted half-Black half-White witch, in a world where White is acceptable and Black is very definitely not. Do I detect some racial undertones here? If you're a fan of fantasy with love and violence thrown in, this will definitely be your cup of tea/cauldron of potion. I'm already anticipating the next instalment in the series.

The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

The Shining Girls has to be one of my favourite reads of the autumn so far. Sharing a similar premise to Stephen King's Doctor Sleep (supernatural serial killer(s) target victims with the 'shining'), it comes into its own with the extremely original element of a piece of architecture with the ability to manipulate the killer as well as allow him to travel through time. I won't say more because I reckon you should read this, if you're a thriller fan - or not very good with horror for the most part.

Printer's Devil Court by Susan Hill

This beautifully designed pocket-sized ghost story was written by the author of The Woman in Black - which had me sold the second I saw it in the library! I found The Woman In Black utterly chilling, both in book and movie form, and so I had high hopes for Printer's Devil Court. Named after the dingy halls of residence off Fleet Street occupied by student doctors, the book centres around three medics who make an unwise pact to emulate Jesus' raising of Lazarus, and attempt to bring a girl back from the dead...For our protagonist, the effects of this decision will resonate throughout his life, with some predictably unhappy consequences. Fun, light reading - until I got to the last page, and found that I was too terrified to turn off my bedroom light...

The Fear Index by Robert Harris

Now, this one didn't involve monsters or the supernatural (unless you count the ghost in the machine...) but it had the definite creep factor - a man who has built his fortune on calculating the 'fear index' in the stock markets, allowing him to buy stock at plunging prices, finds that someone is out to provoke the very same reaction in him. What follows is a ticking timebomb that will lead to the collapse both of the man and the financial markets - and there's very little time in which to pinpoint the perpetrator. I'd call this a Dan Brown style read - not amazingly written or wonderfully memorable, but a fun thriller to immerse yourself in while on a train.

The Mistletoe Bride & Other Haunting Tales by Kate Mosse

My first foray into reading Kate Mosse's fiction! I enjoyed this collection of short stories immensely, especially those focused around the eponymous mistletoe bride, lost on the night of her wedding... The stories are tied together by their settings: all find their roots in northern France, the Languedoc and Mosse's home territory of Sussex, and most are taken from ancient myth and legend, which I loved. I'm really looking forward to reading Mosse's other works now, as I know many of her other books are based in Sussex and France, such as the Languedoc Trilogy.

As a bonus, I'm now reading a book called Snowblind, by Christopher Golden: a terrible snowstorm ravages a town, but of course the horror doesn't stop there. Years down the line, the survivors get 'exactly what they've been wishing for...And the realisation their nightmare is only beginning' - or so the blurb tells me. I'm expecting a revenant plot twist is on the cards, in the style of The Returned. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to curl up with Snowblind in front of the wood stove, with a mug of tea and a couple of these Mr. Kipling bad boys to keep me company! (See below for my guilty pleasure...especially in their mince pie 'Winter Whirl' incarnation. Not even sponsored or anything, I just have horrifically bad taste where it comes to sweet treats :D)

Have a terrifyingly happy Halloween! 

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Books In Brief: Chapter One

So many books, so little time. To be honest, I'm a pretty rubbish book blogger. When I read something that really grips me - for better or worse - my intention is always to write about it on my literary blog, Lignin and Petrichor. In the last few months, though, I've been doing work experience at several different publishing houses, and my mind and room have been so saturated with great books that I've found it difficult to pin one down to do a full review on. I'm remedying this by starting a series where I can quickly comment on my latest reads! I mentioned that I read lots of books in my post on my August faves: here's what I thought of some of them.

Life After Life / Kate Atkinson (Black Swan, 2013)

By far the best ebook I've downloaded for my Kindle thus far. Ursula Todd cannot stop being reborn. Darkness falls repeatedly, only for her to be reincarnated into the same life, born on an unusually snowy day. In each life Ursula attempts to avoid the traumas that have led to death in the last, from accidents to disease to bombs during the Blitz. What I loved here is that we must infer that tiny decisions taken in childhood impact one's life greatly; hundreds of different fates play out for Ursula in this book. Seriously gripping, and by very dint of its nature, a book where the reader is allowed to decide which ending they prefer. 

The Garden of Evening Mists / Tan Twan Eng (Canongate, 2012)

This book revolves around the aftermath of the Japanese occupation of South-East Asia during WWII. Its protagonist, a bright Cambridge graduate, filled with hatred and vengeance after her internment in a Japanese camp in the depths of the Malaysian jungle, unexpectedly finds herself apprenticed to the gardener of the Japanese emperor. Here she attempts to pursue atonement and happiness after the death of her sister, but in the climate of the Emergency, a guerrilla war fought between Communist insurgents and the Commonwealth army, peace will not be found so easily. Marked by Tan's beautifully poetic prose, this was an especially intriguing read for me since most of my family hail from Malaysia, with three of my grandparents having personally experienced the occupation during WWII. 

I Am Pilgrim / Terry Hayes (Corgi, 2013)

This one's a definite holiday read (hence its well-loved, dog-eared appearance!) It was a happy coincidence that it was set partly in Bodrum, where I was on holiday last month. It revolves around the titular figure of Pilgrim, a frighteningly capable ex-secret agent, sent back into the field to halt the progress of a jihadist with a horrifying plan. Especially exciting in this 600-page novel was the fact that we are allowed to see the life events that shaped the jihadist's fate, making him a three-dimensional, human character rather than the stereotypical baddie driven purely by evil. Hayes also weaves a whodunnit sub-plot through the novel, resolving the case but leaving the criminal unapprehended, and therefore the door wide open for a sequel. A bit of a brick to take in your suitcase (perhaps better suited in Kindle form) but a fantastic read.

Smiler's Fair / Rebecca Levene (Hodder, 2014)

Published this summer, this is one for the high fantasy lovers. Levene lays the foundations for her trilogy in this first novel, building a magical yet recognisably human universe; a forbidding land of mountain ranges, icy wasteland and desert, with insidious 'worm men' inhabiting its caves and underground passages. A sprawling travelling fair winds its way through this landscape, home to an unsavoury crowd of moneygrabbers, prostitutes and murderers. The moon, killed off by the goddess of the sun, has been reborn in the form of the king's son, and in a typically Oedipal fashion, has been sentenced to death by his father. The sacrifice of his mother leads to the son being spirited away to one of the mountain tribes, but he cannot escape, nor understand, his fate. There are elements here that I recognise from other well-established fantasy universes such as A Song of Ice and Fire, yet Levene's world is also highly original, with deities and rune-based sorcery at work. I'm already excited for the next book, which Levene has promised me (via Twitter!) is on its way.

The Secret Place / Tana French (Hodder, 2014)

Here's a murder mystery with an edge: the suspects are all sixteen year old girls, from a private school. But girls can be very cruel. Especially at a private school like St. Kilda's - I would know! And so the premise immediately had me hooked. A boy from the neighbouring school has been brutally murdered, his skull smashed in on St. Kilda's property, the case never closed. One year later, an enigmatic message is pinned up on Kilda's honesty board - a picture of the dead boy, and the words I know who killed him. Detective Stephen Moran immediately seizes on this as his chance to finally win a place on the vaunted Murder Squad, and alongside reluctant partner Detective Antoinette Conway, the case is re-opened. We are presented with two temporal threads here: one, the two detectives solving the case in the present day, and two, the events leading up to the murder and after, meaning that we unravel the case at roughly the same time as the police. I have to admit that I worked out the murderer before their name is revealed, but nevertheless, I was enthralled by this novel. French has the tangled pysche of the public schoolgirl down pat, and I would love to read more of her novels. I've only just found out that this is the fifth book in French's Dublin Murder Squad series, from which you can surmise that The Secret Place functions perfectly well as a standalone. 

Red Rising / Pierce Brown (Hodder, 2014)

Like Smiler's Fair and The Secret Place, this book was kindly given to me as a gift after I did work experience for Hodder in July. I felt it ticked all the boxes in terms of dystopian fantasy: this book is honestly like The Hunger Games meets Wool meets Ender's Game. Darrow, a 'Red' at the bottom of the social pecking order, learns that his world is a lie. Resolving to bring down the 'Golds' - the god-like rulers of the terraformed Mars - he must first himself become a Gold, and infilitrate their military school, while trying to avoid getting killed along the way. This was a vey enjoyable read, and while I'll definitely read the next installment in the series, I feel that I'm beginning to get a bit bored of the teen dystopian genre in a market saturated with Katniss Everdeen, Divergent, Matched, The Maze Runner and so on. And yet I continue to buy and read them...

The Girl With All The Gifts / M.R. Carey (Orbit, 2014)

I got a bit obsessed with zombies last year, reading the entirety of the Walking Dead graphic novels and compulsively flipping through Max Brooks' World War Z as well as Isaac Marion's Warm Bodies. Suffice to say that I had some horrific nightmares around that time. The Girl With All The Gifts was naturally on my radar, though I decided to wait until after finals to allow myself to read it to avoid potential zombie dreams during revision. Carey takes a typical post-apocalyptic zombie narrative and swivels it around so we're seeing things from the point of view of a high-functioning undead child with a love for Classical mythology. Not your average horror novel. The zombie infection is also fascinatingly brought on by a fungus similar to Cordyceps, which, as you might know from watching nature programmes, is a parasite which takes over insect bodies and minds, forcing them to climb as high as possible, where they eventually die. After some time the fungus explodes out of the creature's head, spores fluttering to the forest floor to infect more unsuspecting insects. The concept here is the same, but with humans: utterly engrossing. You can read my full review of the book here.

Have you read any of these, and if so, what did you think? Any recommendations for what I should read this autumn? I'm thinking of joining a book club, but worry that my attention span might be too short to concentrate on one book at a time!

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