The Trick to Time by Kit de Waal

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought:

The Trick to Time is a tender exploration of love and loss and the ways we find to come to terms with the unbearable.

Somewhere in a small English seaside town, an Irishwoman approaching her sixtieth birthday makes and sells beautiful dolls. The bodies of the dolls are wooden, turned and carved for her by a man referred to only as the carpenter. She dresses them in wonderful, individualised clothing and she sells them to customers all around the world.

But as well as these, there are also the special dolls. The ones ordered by women who come into the shop and whisper in her ear. The ones whose wooden bodies are made to a precise weight. The ones that are handed over to the customer, not in the shop but at the Irishwoman’s home.

As the present day story unfolds - Mona’s sixtieth birthday, her tentative relationship with Karl, a neighbour who shares her insomnia, an annual trip in November that holds special significance – so we learn more and more about her past history: her early life in Ireland, her move to Birmingham, meeting her husband. They are poor and life is tough, but they are very much in love. Then, on the night that the IRA blows up a Birmingham pub – their life is split apart by tragedy.

This is a difficult book to review because the things I most want to write about risk spoiling the pleasure of peeling back the layers of the story and uncovering its mysteries step by step. It’s a very different story to de Waal’s debut, My Name is Leon, but her delicate prose shines through in the same way, as does her ability to create sympathetic characters with real depth of humanity.

De Waal is a champion of working class writing. (She is the editor and instigator of the anthology Common People, shortly to be published on Unbound.) Her characters are ordinary people from ordinary working class backgrounds. Her gift is to write about them without cliché and without being patronising – something you only realise is rare (among British writers in particular) when you take a step back.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: Stay With Me by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀̀, My Counterfeit Self by Jane Davis, A Cupboard Full of Coats by Yvvette Edwards

Avoid If You Dislike: Stories that revolve around bereavement and loss.

Perfect Accompaniment: A cup of tea and the smell of freshly turned wood

Genre: Literary Fiction

Available on Amazon