The Roles We Play by Sabba Khan

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought of It:

WINNER of the 2022 Jhalak Prize.

If you ever thought graphic novels were just for light entertainment, cast those thoughts aside now. The Roles We Play is a profound exploration of the experience of diaspora, at once universal and deeply personal.

Khan begins with the story of the Mangla dam, which flooded fertile land in the Mirpur region on the borders of Pakistan and Kashmir, displacing vast numbers of the Mirpuri people from their homes and bringing so many of them – including Khan’s family – to the UK.

Thereafter, her story, her family’s story and the wider story of the Mirpuri people interweave. Stripped of their language and culture, looked down on on two continents, by British and Pakistanis alike, they close in on themselves – at once generous in looking out for extended family, and rigid in holding to traditions and re-enforcing hierarchies.

Khan explores her own journey – beginning to question the certainties of her religion, giving up wearing pardah (her hijab) – but all the time find herself ‘not enough’ – not white enough, not brown enough, not Muslim enough, not secular enough.

“With centuries of othering, how can we speak out for ourselves when we don’t know what being treated with humanity looks like?” she asks.

Sabba Khan is an architectural designer, and her line drawings frequently revolve around houses broken open and exposed to the eye, impossible staircases, doorways that let you through or shut you out… Her human figures are simple but expressive. She often draws herself naked, underlying her vulnerability. The images of her face are often fractured into different parts, as others see her or as she sees herself.

To add another layer to this multi-media experience, Khan has curated a playlist to accompany the book – an eclectic selection of tracks, one for every chapter, from western artists such as Queen, Radiohead, Prodigy… to South Asian artists such as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Jagjit Singh and Mohammad Rafi. (You can listen to the playlist here on Spotify.)

Khan examines both herself and her community with ruthless clarity and honestly. But the book is also full of wit and humour, both visual and verbal. There are drawings of her as a strawberry runner – an offshoot from the mother plant, kicking her way out of a box or buried under stones made of expectations.

Brilliant on so many levels, and a more than worthy winner of the 2022 Jhalak Prize.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: Antiemetic for Homesickness by Romalyn Ante, Dear Infidel by Tamim Sadikali, How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa, The Things We Do Not Tell the People We Love by Huma Qureshi

Avoid If You Dislike: Philosophy, psychology, introspection and geopolitics

Perfect Accompaniment: Chai, and Khan’s own playlist, naturally.

Genre: Graphic novel, autobiography

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Are We Home Yet? by Katy Massey

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought of It:

The memoir opens with Massey’s realisation, at the age of eleven, that her mother is using their comfortable home in Leeds as a place from which to sell sex. She marks that as the point at which she split herself in two.

“In the pause, I am falling apart, literally becoming two people. I remain the plump playmate that Sarah takes me for, but I have also become someone else who floats just above us, watchful. Alert. This version of me knows that something has changed forever […] though I can pretend, that simple young girl has gone forever.”

By the time Massey was in her late teens, her mother had graduated from prostituting herself out of their back room to running a spa-cum-brothel in an industrial area of Leeds. Massey finds herself acting as receptionist, spending long hours chatting to the ‘girls’, recognising the sheer banality of the sex industry, “where good looking, decent women who could hold a conversation offered various sexual services in exchange for money. “

But Massey’s story is far more complex than that one eye-catching headline. There’s the sense of loss associated with her all-but non-existent relationship with her absent father; her complicated relationship with food that goes back to a stepfather who fed her sweets to comfort her for the pain caused by his own tormenting; the issues she has faced as a mixed-race child in an otherwise all white family, and the rarely-spoken-of death of her middle-brother.

The memoir braids together three timelines – Massey’s own childhood, her mother’s younger life, and the present day as she tries to piece it all together and come to terms with her own struggles.

Massey’s writing explores her own ongoing depression and her troubled relationship with her mother with razor-sharp clarity. On bad days:

“Even the street beneath my feet feels somehow insubstantial, as if it may melt and I go through the sinking tarmac until the black sludge closes over my waist, my handbag, my necklace and finally my head and there is no trace of me left.”

At other times, “I walk the street towards Mam’s flat with my loneliness attached to my heels, dragging behind like a recently shed skin.”

There is a breath-taking self-awareness in the way she confesses that “I had made my relationships into broken clocks and gleefully reduced them to their parts. Spreading them out on the kitchen table, fascinated with the possibility in those shiny nuts and wheels, I always realised to late that there was no home of reassembling the, turning them back into something of purpose.”

A powerful study of family dynamics and the toxic legacy of secrets. Shortlisted for the 2021 Jhalak Prize

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: Lowborn by Kerry Hudson, My Name is Why by Lemn Sissay

Avoid If you Dislike: Memoirs of genteel dysfunctionality.

Perfect Accompaniment: Milky tea and cheese straws

Genre: Memoir, Non-Fiction

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This Small Cloud: a Personal Memoir by Harry Daley

Reviewer: David Dawson

What We Thought:

It’s unusual to review a book that’s out of print, but I highly recommend this fascinating dive into England’s social history, and a time when being gay was punishable by imprisonment. This Small Cloud was published posthumously in 1987. There are second hand editions available, and I’m willing to lend my copy. It’s an important book.

Harry Daley was born in Norfolk in 1901. He knew from an early age that he was gay. During his life he was a merchant seaman, a London policeman, a member of the Bloomsbury Set, and E. M. Forster’s lover.

He encountered many famous people, including Prime Minister Bonar Law, the women’s rights campaigner Marie Stopes, and media magnate Lord Beaverbrook.

Daley’s writing is candid and direct. In life he was honest and open, and never hid the fact that he was gay. He writes about the prejudice he faced, both in youth and later in the Metropolitan Police in London. He never denied his sexuality, but importantly, he never allowed senior officers in the police force to get the better of him, or hold back opportunities from him.

He was bullied by some of his colleagues, and describes in the book how the bullies “were ex-Guardsmen who looked on homosexuals as a source of extra income. They couldn’t resist telling of their adventures with rich old queers but anxious not to give themselves away completely always ended with ‘Of course – directly he touched me – biff bang wallop.’ Of course!”

In the mid-twenties he became a part of the Bloomsbury Set and began a relationship with E. M. Forster. The writer was not the only person to fall for Daley, and Daley is clear that his preferences were for what he called “normal men” who were older, rougher and stronger than himself.

This was a surprising book in many ways. Daley gives fascinating descriptions of a side of early twentieth century Britain I had not read about before. His writing style is accessible, and he tells a good story. This is first-hand social history, and it’s first-rate.

You’ll enjoy this if you loved: Fighting Proud by Stephen Bourne

Avoid if you dislike: Some limited descriptions of gay sex

Ideal accompaniments: A spam sandwich and a pint of stout

Genre: Autobiography LGBTQ

https://www.amazon.co.uk/This-Small-Cloud-Harry-Daley/dp/0297793586

Once Upon A Time in the East by Xiaolu Guo

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought:

Shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize 2018, this is a memoir of growing up in China, of peasant existence in the 1970s, and the immense changes that have swept over China since the end of the Cultural Revolution. It is also the story of a struggle to develop an identity and a creative voice, first in a collective society, and then later, marooned and isolated as an immigrant in a foreign country.

The memoir overlaps, chronologically, with Madeleine Thien’s sweeping epic, Do Not Say We Have Nothing. But Xiaolu Guo’s family was not one with a long cultural and artistic heritage. Although her father was a state-sanctioned artist, for the most part, her family were illiterate peasants and fishermen, living in the rural and industrial fringes of China, far away from the cultural centres of Shanghai and Beijing.

Despite the declared feminism of Communist doctrine, this was a society where women were treated brutally. Domestic and sexual abuse was rife. Her grandmother, who brought her up for the first few years of her life, was regularly and savagely beaten by her grandfather, and nobody thought it was anything unusual. And when Xiaolu speaks up about her own sexual abuse at the hands of a colleague of her father’s, she finds every one of her university dorm-mates has a parallel story to tell.

Fascinating as Guo’s account of her life in China is, it is her struggle to find a creative voice in a strange country and in an unknown tongue that I found most absorbing. It always seems extraordinary to us stubbornly monoglot Anglophones when someone expresses themselves creatively in a language they did not grow up with. But the gulf that Guo had to cross was far more than merely linguistic. It required an entirely new mode of thinking.

“How could someone who had grown up in a collective society get used to using the first person singular all the time? The habitual use of ‘I’ requires thinking of yourself as a separate entity in a society of separate entities.”

I haven’t read any of Guo’s novels, but I am excited to try one now.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien, Wild Swans by Jung Chang

Avoid if You Dislike: Frank discussion of sexual and domestic abuse

Perfect Accompaniment: Noodles and tofu

Genre: Autobiography, Memoir, Non-Fiction

Available on Amazon

My Good Life in France: In Pursuit of the Rural Dream by Janine Marsh

Reviewer: Liza Perrat, author of The Bone Angel trilogy (Spirit of Lost Angels, Wolfsangel, Blood Rose Angel) and new release, The Silent Kookaburra.

What we thought: I might not be brave enough to renovate a run-down barn in rural France, but as an ex-pat living in a French village, I can totally relate to Janine Marsh’s book, My Good Life in France.

The author’s new life in France started out quite differently to most ex-pats though: whilst on one of her regular day trips to pick up cheap wine in northern France, she purchased an old barn in the rural Seven Valleys area of Pas de Calais. It seems no one was more surprised at this purchase than the author herself.

Her French adventure began as weekend trips to renovate her new home which lacked mains drainage, heating, proper rooms, and had not the slightest of comforts. It turned into a life-time project requiring far more time, money and energy than she could ever have imagined.

Several years ago, Janine eventually gave up her top corporate banking job in London to move with her husband to their still quite run-down French barn. In My Good Life in France, she narrates the true story of negotiating the local inhabitants, French bureaucracy, tradesmen, culture and etiquette. No easy feat for a born and bred British girl from the city!

I loved reading about all of her adventures: the good, the bad, the ugly. And the incredible, one of which resulted in the neighbours nicknaming her “Madame Merde”. I’ll let you read the story for yourself to find out why!

The author’s joy, frustration, enthusiasm and curiosity for her new homeland shines through as she recounts her experiences with humour, from administrative struggles to homesickness and personal tragedy, to her love for chickens and stray animals. And, finally, love for her life in France.

Towards the end of the book, Janine includes a lot of useful information for adapting to the French lifestyle and negotiating French rules –– both written and unwritten!

Highly recommended for Francophiles and anyone thinking of impulse-buying a run-down property in a region where it rains all the time.

You’ll like this if you enjoy: Humorous ex-pat stories, such as Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence and the sequels: Toujours Provence and Encore Provence.

Avoid if you don’t like: tales of travel and home renovation.

Ideal accompaniments: Gratin de Maroilles aux lardons washed down with a cool glass of Chardonnay.

Genre: memoir, travel book.

Available on Amazon

A Discarded Life by Alexander Masters

Reviewer: Barbara Scott Emmett (http://barbarascottemmett.blogspot.co.uk/) author of Delirium: The Rimbaud Delusion, The Man with the Horn, The Land Beyond Goodbye, and Don’t Look Down.

What We Thought: I have read several excellent books since I've been reviewing for Netgalley and to be honest when I chose this one I thought it was a novel. It isn't. It's quite unlike anything else and must occupy a category of its own.

Some years ago several boxes of diaries were found in a skip in Cambridge by friends of the writer Alexander Masters. After a another few years he ended up as custodian of the unknown diarist's work. He ignored them for a while but on eventually dipping into them, became intrigued. Who is this unnamed person? Why were the diaries thrown out? Who is the oft-mentioned E?

In a manner befitting a detective novel Masters begins his investigation. Picking up the odd clue in the writing, he discovers where the writer lived, details of work done and schools attended and passions felt. He does not at first read the diaries in date order but gathers information sometimes from the early years - the fifties - and sometimes from the later ones.

Assuming the writer must be dead - or why would the books have been in a skip? - he pursues his mysterious quarry from Cambridge to London to the Wirral and back again.

The diarist is an artist - a painter, a pianist, a writer; great symphonies will be composed, novels will be published, the world will one day know this person. There is passion for life - and an inability to do anything other than write about it. The diaries move from teenage fantasies full of sketches, to adult depression; from a head-in-the-clouds inability to concentrate on mundane work, to an obsession with television personalities.

The writer is spiteful, hateful, loving, vulnerable, weak, full of grandiose ideas and ultimately ineffectual. There is hunger for acceptance and the refusal to act in an acceptable manner. An odd attraction to elderly women reveals itself.

This is an amazing book. It has the grip of a detective novel combined with the fascination of a biography. Covering over fifty years, it allows us to see into the mind of another person - to see all the grand schemes and petty annoyances, to gain insight to the private thoughts and private language of another human being in way I have never before encountered. Most published diarists write from the start with an eye on publication. This one did not.

Masters has a warm and human style. He both likes and dislikes the subject of his 'biography' and tells the tale with humour and self-deprecation. All life is here - ordinary life - a life discarded in a skip.

You’ll enjoy this if you like: The Lady in the Van

Avoid if you dislike: Warts and all investigations of another person’s private life.

Ideal accompaniments: A very open mind.

Genre: Biography / Diary

Available on Amazon

Dear Reflection: I Never Meant to be a Rebel by Jessica Bell

Reviewer: Liza Perrat, author of The Bone Angel trilogy (Spirit of Lost Angels, Wolfsangel, Blood Rose Angel) and new release, The Silent Kookaburra.

What we thought: Jessica Bell’s unflinching and unbridled memoir is set in 1980s Melbourne, where she grew up with rocker parents who encouraged her to play her own guitar and write her own songs. This might sound exotic and exciting, but proved to be just the opposite. Her mother’s medical problems led her to abuse pills, alcohol and, during withdrawals, to suffer terrible anxiety and psychotic attacks. Fearful of these reactions, her step-father retreated into silence. Having no one to confide in, and to rely on, Jessica turned inwards, to her own reflection.

But her mirror proved not to be a friend, but her enemy, and she stumbled into alcoholism, depression and self-destruction. She became a rebel. Until, one day, the alcohol literally almost killed Jessica and she was forced to ask herself honestly, why she kept running from reality. And from herself.

This memoir is a raw and brutally honest account of Jessica’s damaged years, and the inspirational self-determination she was able to muster to break free from this destructive wave. It portrays how her highly creative powers, both in music and writing, helped her rebuild the love, shattered by illness and medication, between a daughter and her mother.

This is a moving, frightening, intense and beautifully-narrated page-turner, where the reader can’t help but sympathise with Jessica, and hope she finds her way out of the black hole. Highly recommended.

You’ll like this if you enjoy: honest childhood memoirs, or for anyone who’s dealt with disturbed adolescents.

Avoid if you don’t like: highly emotional stories about deeply troubled children and teenagers.

Ideal accompaniments: non-alcoholic beverage and a playlist of Jessica’s songs.

Genre: Memoir


Available on Amazon

Paralian by Liam Klenk

Reviewer: JJ Marsh

What we thought: The extraordinary tale of an exceptional life. Any one of the barbed wire fences Klenk has overcome might be enough to define an average person, but this journey is as far from average as can be imagined.


Born into the wrong body, adopted by dysfunctional parents, battling spasticity, marrying for convenience, living as an agnostic with Mormons, undergoing gender reassignment, suffering heartbreak and embracing career changes while digging deep for a true identity, this is an epic journey. An odyssey.

Paralian, meaning a water-dweller, is a wonderful way to connect the flowing adventures and experiences. Each chapter takes the name of a body of water, and each has as much variance of temperature and hue.

Autobiographies tread a delicate line. Especially those rare few actually written by the subject, as opposed to handed over to ghostwriters. How to balance the personal journey and the unavoidable self-regard? Thankfully, Klenk gets it right. This is essentially a subjective take on a set of jaw-dropping adventures and the character who managed not only to survive, but to triumph.

Readers travel through peaks and troughs without ever losing sympathy with our narrator, even when he exasperates himself. By the end of the book, we feel we have made a fascinating friend and feel uplifted by the encounter.

You’ll enjoy this if you liked: Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig or Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert.

Avoid if you don’t like: Personal intimate stories of body and mind

Ideal accompaniments: A Sea Breeze cocktail, freshly grilled barracuda and a view of the ocean

Genre: Autobiography, non-fiction

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On The Move: A Life by Oliver Sacks

Reviewer: Rebecca Johnson

What we thought: It emerges from Dr Oliver – of hat-mistaking and awakenings fame – Sacks’ autobiography that he was something of a Jekyll and Hyde: the genial doctor had a secret night-time (and weekend) existence, which he reveals in his own account of his life. Not that Sacks was evil, like Mr Hyde, but he was gay (in a time when to be gay was still illegal). This came as a surprise to me – although clearly his close friends and acquaintances (including writers such as Auden and Thom Gunn) knew this – as he was not officially ‘out’ until almost the end of his life. Nor does he make a political issue of his sexuality; while not being secretive, he writes about only a small part of life in San Francisco and New York’s gay community, a life which his few photos hint at tantalisingly. 

A strange life, then, lived in the public eye but in the shadow of what appears to have been a life-long burden of shyness, discretion, and – although he does not dwell on it – loneliness, regarding the truth of his own personal feelings. At one point in an interview for a hospital position he blurts out that he has not had sex for 35 years. If anything is a surprise, in the autobiography of a man who was so widely admired and who made so much of his life and work public, it is this. We all thought we knew Dr Sacks from his many fascinating books: the warm, enthusiastic, humane, indefatigably curious and eloquent neurologist who introduced the world to many of the bizarre fragilities of the human condition, especially the human mind. It turns out we didn’t, and Sacks had a fragility all of his own.

Perhaps – and in parallel – the other unexpected aspect of his life is its physicality, in someone so devoted to concerns of the mind and intellect. As a young man in London he had a passion for motorbikes and was a member of the Ton Up club, doing 100mph circuits of the North Circular, and in the United States, where he emigrated early in his career, he befriended Hell’s Angels. He became a champion weight lifter in his early days on Muscle Beach in California, while studying for his US qualifications. And he retained a passion for swimming and snorkelling throughout his life, swimming whole circuits of City Island where he lived. He would take off to ride for hundreds of miles across states at the weekends from San Francisco, visiting Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon and barely sleeping, or sleeping rough. He makes no secret, either, of his prolonged experimentation with recreational drugs, mainly amphetamines. He also played the piano and his knowledge of and interest in music is dispersed through the autobiography in the same way as are his references to eminent friends and their work and to detailed knowledge of a wide and fascinating range of scientific and literary subjects. Sacks was truly a polymath who lived a full and interesting life.

For a man so ultimately successful, Sacks takes pains to document his many reversals and losses along the way, providing a perspective that illuminates how much of his glittering career was felicity, how much teetered on the brink of failure and despair. At the point when he was about to become successful with the publication of his most famous work, Awakenings, he was sacked, his mother died, and in losing his job he also lost his home and most of his income. He writes, too, of his many rejected and even lost manuscripts, and the painful experiences of failed relationships, his fumbled experimental science career, and his self-confessed personal awkwardnesses. His modesty is endearing, enlightening and encouraging. And yet his charm and underlying strength of character meant that he came through to find his own way.

Dr Sacks takes us through the background to and composition of his well known books, from his first publication Migraine through Awakenings to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and A Leg to Stand On, about his struggle to recover after a serious leg injury. He also narrates his relationships with illustrious friends and acquaintances: Jonathan Miller, W H Auden (who left him all his LPs and 78s), poet Thom Gunn, the eminent Soviet neuropsychologist A R Luria, Robert de Niro (about whom he tells a very funny story), and Robin Williams among them. He also tells the stories of the equally extraordinary members of his family: his eminent gynaecologist mother, his dedicated GP father, his autistic brother, his amazing Auntie Len, all in the same gently humorous, forgiving and warmly appreciative style. He bats off the many criticisms levelled at him of his life’s work decisively, yet with equal charm and grace, although he felt for a long time that he didn’t receive suitable recognition from the medical profession.

Dr Sacks’ work is always a pleasure to read, and beautifully written, full of humour, insight and revelation. I might have wished that he had been a little less circumspect and discreet about his personal life and the circles he moved in, as he is clearly a wonderful gossip, and the stories he tells about people are almost always to their credit rather than his own. As with most autobiography, there is a sense of judicious omission in many areas. The memoir is in a way a prolonged note of thanks and acknowledgement to everyone who has been formative in his life and work, including, finally, the late-life love of his life. “Let your last thinks all be thanks” as the line he quotes from Auden has it. Oliver Sacks died in August 2015 only a few weeks after the publication of this book.

You will like this if: you like Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, popular psychoanalytic writers such as Adam Phillips, or you are generally curious about the human condition, medical discovery, and how we function.

Avoid this if you don’t like: medical or scientific detail or what makes people tick – or “tic”.

Best accompanied by: two half-gallon jugs of cider, a squid dinner and an L-Dopa cocktail.

Genre: autobiography/memoir, popular science/medicine.

Available on Amazon

Thinking in Pictures by Temple Grandin

Reviewer: JW Hicks, author of Rats

What we thought: If you’ve read Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, and Daniel Tammet’s autobiographical Born on a Blue Day, you’ll find this narrative-essay written by an autistic, utterly fascinating.

In Thinking in Pictures, Dr Temple Grandin, a professor at Colorado State University, allows us to see what it’s like to be an autistic, and gives us a glimpse into a quite other kind of mind.

As a child she confronts the overwhelming sensations of smell and sound and touch that she cannot blot out. She screams and rocks, shutting out chaos and terror by focusing on grains of sand for hours on end. Gradually she gains the beginnings of speech and starts to overcome her fear of contact. With the help of a remarkable science teacher who recognises her unusual potential, she channels her obsessions and becomes a world-renowned expert on cattle psychology and behaviour, a passionate advocate of their humane treatment, and a leading authority in the field of autism. As well as studying cattle, Grandin studies us, as if she were “an anthropologist on Mars.”

Grandin likens herself to Data, the android in Star Trek, who yearns to be human, and compares her mind to a computer. “You look at flowers, I see what great pleasure you get out of it. I’m denied that.”

Grandin never ceases to ponder and explore her own nature and feels “thinking in pictures” gives a special rapport with cattle and is in some way akin to their own mode of thinking.

Words are a second language to her. She translates spoken and written words into full colour movies which run inside her head. As an equipment designer, visual thinking is a tremendous advantage. Her imagination works like CGI, and she has video memories of every item she has ever worked with; from steel gates, to latches, to concrete walls. She has the fantastic ability to create new designs using these remembered templates, and tests them by running three-dimensional visual simulations in her mind. Unlike ‘normal people’ Grandin sees design faults on a drawing before the equipment is even installed and soon realises that normal thinking patterns lack visualisation skills, rendering non-autistics fault-blind.

Learning to read she had problems learning words that could not be thought about in pictures. Nouns were easy to remember because they relate to pictures but spatial words like overand under had no meaning for Grandin until she had a visual image to fix them in her memory. As, if and the, proved difficult words to master.

Thinking in Pictures comes across as a mesmerising mix of scholarly treatise and autobiography. The reader not only learns the scientific aspect of autism, but experiences the actuality of an autistic life. This compelling book tells how it really is. Thinking in Pictures is not only a guide to understanding autism, but a step by step account of Temple Grandin’s integration into our so-called normal society.

You’ll enjoy this if you like: A mix of real life and real science

Avoid if you don’t like: Facts and real-life experiences intermingled.

Genre: Autobiography

Available from Amazon