Eight Pieces of Silva by Patrice Lawrence

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought of It:

What do you do if your mum and stepdad have just jetted off on honeymoon and your big step-sister, who is supposed to be looking after you, disappears?

This is the dilemma facing 16 year old Becks. Of course she could just kick back and enjoy the freedom, but she actually cares about Silva. And her instinct is telling her that something is very, very wrong. So she does the unthinkable and roots around in the forbidden territory of Silva’s room for clues.

What she finds only deepens the mystery. And now she has to wonder if she ever knew Silva at all.

Lawrence has written another wonderful, page-turning thriller. Her teenage protagonist is spikey, passionate, caring – sometimes blind to the obvious, but nonetheless determined to do the right thing.

At the centre of the mystery is an exploitative relationship – one that takes advantage of a vulnerable young woman, playing on her emotions with scant regard for the consequences. It may not be grooming as we read about it in tabloid headlines, but it’s nonetheless insidious and damaging.

Much as Becks feels herself to be alone, she does in fact have those around her who care about her and who will support her when she really needs it.

There is lots of wonderful detail here about teenage life (for which Lawrence credits her own teenage daughter). Becks is passionate about K-pop, Lord of the Rings and Black Panther. She is also into girls, which is never portrayed as an issue; it’s just a part of her identity. (Becks “didn't come out because she was never in.”)

A great book to open up conversations about healthy and unhealthy relationships. And just as importantly, a thoroughly gripping read. 

WINNER of the inaugural Jhalak Children's and Young Adult Prize.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: Orangeboy by Patrice Lawrence, The Million Pieces of Neena Gill by Emma Smith-Barton, The Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson

Avoid If You Dislike: Stories involving the loss of a parent

Perfect Accompaniment: K-pop and your favourite smoothie

Genre: Young Adult, LGBT, Contemporary, Thriller 

Buy This Book Here

Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought of It:

On the morning that I sit down to write this review, there is an article in the Guardian about the depth of abuse Sathnam Sanghera has faced since the publication of Empireland. That such a balanced and measured book could make its author the subject of vitriol is as clear an indication as any of just how blind we, the British public, are to our own history and how necessary this book is.

After a light-hearted opening, where the author imagines a revived Empire Day, repurposed to teach the history and ongoing ramifications of the British Empire, Sanghera goes on to look honestly at his own connections, through his Sikh ancestry, with Empire, both the positive and the negative. He concludes:

“Having faced up to how British [Empire] has shaped and defined my life in deep ways, I had never realised, I can’t help but wonder how imperialism may have shaped Britain itself.”

He then immerses himself in historic research, only to discover how difficult it is to fix precisely where the British Empire began. Arguably it goes back as far as 1497, when John Cabot sailed across the Atlantic to ‘discover’ Newfoundland, or it could be as comparatively recently as 1858, when the Government of India Act abolished the East India Company and established the supremacy of the British Crown. He points out how, over that time, the tone and culture of empire varied wildly. And he shows how, throughout much of its history, there were those who were deeply critical of the imperial ‘project’: to be critical of Empire is not simply a case of applying the values of the present to actions of the past.

Sanghera doesn’t shy away from what is perhaps for many the most discomfiting fact of the British Empire – that between 1660 and 1807, Britain profiteered from the slave trade, shipping around 3 million Africans to the Americas.

Another aspect many in the present day find profoundly uncomfortable is the question of loot. Precious items stolen from colonised lands vastly enriched some and became the foundation of many of our best-known and most beloved museums. Even more disturbingly, sacred items, including human remains, were treated with scant respect and never returned.

Empire is the reason that, long before the famous Empire Windrush docked in Southampton, people of Indian and African heritage were living and working in Britain. There were servants and doctors, café owners and tradespeople, nurses, lawyers and actors. The first MP of Indian heritage was elected in Finsbury in 1892. 

An understanding of all that ought, one might think, lead to a greater understanding and tolerance of our multicultural, multi-ethnic society. But Sanghera also shows how the need to justify slavery and the appalling abuses that accompanied it led, if not to the invention of racism, then at least to its codification. And until we recognise that, it will continue to haunt us.

We are very good at comparing ourselves to other European empires of the 19th and 20th Centuries and persuading ourselves that we were much more benign. But we have conveniently buried the stories of some of the most brutal episodes of our Imperial history. Until we are willing to face up to that – until someone like Sanghera can write a book about Empire and face, not death threats and abuse, but honest reflection - we are never going to be able to move on from Empire and become the tolerant, diverse and non-racist society we like to imagine ourselves to be.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: Brit(ish) by Afua Hirsch; Natives - Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire by Akala

Avoid If You Dislike: Taking off your rose-tinted spectacles and seeing Britain’s role in the world clearly.

Perfect Accompaniment: What could be a more perfect expression of Empireland than a cup of tea?

Genre: Non-Fiction

Buy This Book Here

Diary of a Film by Niven Govinden

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought Of It:

“In making this and other films, no one had ever questioned my right to tell a story and present it in the way that sang to me.”

A film director, referred to only as Maestro, arrives in town for the premiere showing of his latest film at a film festival. The film is a loose adaptation of William Maxwell’s The Folded Leaf, but the director has transported to story from the American Midwest to a European location.

A close relationship has developed between the director and the two stars of the film – one established and one up-and-coming. But all three are aware of shifting dynamics as the process of making the film comes to an end, and the final product is released into the world.

And then there is the woman the director meets on the eve of the premiere – who takes the Maestro to see some intriguing wall art and tells him the story that lies behind it.

Arguably, Diary of a Film is a slight misnomer. More accurately, this is the diary of a film festival, from the point of view of a director who is up for a prestigious Jury Award. It is also the diary of a three-day period in which a creator lets go of an old project as a new potential one takes root in their mind.

Diary of a Film explores the vexed question of creative freedom, particularly in the context of the conflicting rights of two creative minds. How does the right of one creator to re-imagine a story (as when a written work is adapted for screen) balance with the right of the original creator to ownership and control of their own work? For all his  care and civility, the Maestro's language betrays how rapacious the creative mind can be in pursuit of its own aims.

“For now I wanted to keep picking the bones for all remaining flesh from her story, because there was truth in the contrary view: that the story was more important than she was, and I would do what it took to secure it.”

The book is subdivided into chapters, but within the chapters there is no paragraphing and no punctuation of dialogue – just as if someone were pouring words into a journal. Style-wise, it feels like a book that could have been written somewhere in the early to mid-twentieth century. Although it is clearly set in the present day, something about its tone reminded me of authors such as Doris Lessing, Thomas Mann or Virginia Woolf. 

A tender and intimate portrait of that peculiar mixture of insecurity and arrogance that makes up the creative mind.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved:  Exquisite Cadavers by Meena Kandasamy

Avoid If You Dislike: Reading long unbroken blocks of text

Perfect Accompaniment: Un doppio (double espresso)

Genre: Literary Fiction

Buy This Book Here

All My Lies Are True by Dorothy Koomson

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought of It:

I am, I’m sorry to say, a late comer to Dorothy Koomson. But over the last year or so, I had heard so much praise of her, I felt it was high time I rectified the gap in my reading.

I chose All My Lies Are True simply because it was her most recent book. But one of the perils of buying an ebook though is that they tend to open on the first page of the first chapter, bypassing little things like author’s notes. So I had no idea, for most of the novel, that this was in fact a sequel to Koomson’s earlier novel, The Ice Cream Girls. Not that that in any way detracted from my enjoyment of this tense psychological thriller.

Poppy and Serena were the Ice Cream Girls – two schoolgirls groomed and sexually abused by their teacher, and then subsequently tried for his murder. Poppy was found guilty and send to prison. Serena was acquitted. Now, thirty years later, Serena is married with a grown-up daughter, Verity, who knows nothing of her past. Poppy has a young daughter too, but she is still struggling with the aftermath of her years spent in prison. And her brother, Logan, is determined that there has been a miscarriage of justice.

So what happens if Logan and Verity meet and start a relationship?

Much as Michaela Cole’s masterful I May Destroy You examines the idea of consent from multiple different angles, All My Lies Are True explores the different forms that grooming and domestic abuse can take and shows insidious it can be and how difficult to recognise from inside a relationship. And also how difficult, from the outside, to tell the victim from a manipulative, truth-twisting perpetrator.

In this novel, we are privy to the points of view of Poppy, Serena and Verity, and a timeline that shifts, teasingly, between the present day and events that unfolded over the past three years. But not until right at the very end can we be sure who is telling the truth and who is lying, perhaps even to themselves.

This is a clever, powerful novel that, once you pick up, you won’t want to put down again.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: What Was Lost by Catherine O’Flynn

Avoid If You Dislike: Stories centred on grooming and abuse

Perfect Accompaniment: Ice Cream

Genre: Crime Fiction, Psychological Thriller

Buy This Book Here

Fragile Monsters by Catherine Menon

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought of It:

"Stories twist through the past like hair in a plait. Each strand different, weaving its own."

Fragile Monsters tells the often parallel stories of a grandmother and granddaughter, growing up either side of the Japanese occupation during the Second World War and the Emergency that followed, as the British colony of Malaya struggled to become independent Malaysia.

Durga is a lecturer in mathematics who has recently come back to Malaysia from Canada following an unhappy end to a love affair. She pays a dutiful visit to her Ammuma’s (grandmother’s) home for Diwali. But when an accident with cheap market-bought Diwali fireworks lands Ammuma in hospital, Durga is forced to confront ghosts from both of their pasts.

Durga was brought up by Ammuma after her mother died when she was a baby – or at least that’s what she’s always believed. But then why has she found an obviously much more recent notebook with her mother’s name and address written in a childish hand?

And then there is Tom, now a doctor in the same hospital, with whom Durga shares the guilt of an accident which killed one of their schoolfriends.

The book is laced through with dry-as-bone humour that underlines the prickly relationship between grandmother and granddaughter. (“Granddaughters, she thinks, should stay where they’ve been put.”)

Equally, the mastery of language that was displayed in Menon’s short story collection, Subjunctive Moods, is used here to evoke the atmosphere of Malaysia – from the sticky heat to the class-and-race ridden society that is the legacy of British efforts to divide and rule.

Menon herself is a mathematician, and the text is sprinkled, too, with mathematical metaphors that sent me right back to my student days.

“We leave this as an inference for the reader,’ a mathematician will happily write. Too trustful, these mathematicians. Too trustful by half” she writes - a joke perhaps perhaps only someone who has sat through First Year Maths lectures will fully appreciate. 

A complex and tender story that manages to blend maths with folk legend, and complicated human relationships with scars of war and colonialism.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: Ponti by Sharlene Teo, Suncatcher by Romesh Gunesekera, Subjunctive Moods by Catherine Menon (writing as CG Menon)

Avoid If You Dislike: Overlapping timelines

Perfect Accompaniment: Rendang curry and tea

Genre: Historical Fiction

Buy This Book Here

Mayflies by Andrew O'Hagan

Reviewer: David C. Dawson

What we thought of it:

Only occasionally does a book come along whose every page contains at least one quotable phrase, at least one pithily worded exposition of the human condition that makes you stop and think.

Mayflies is such a book.

On the surface it's a story about what happens to two friends from a small, nondescript Scottish town. The book starts in their optimistic late teens when they are carefree, daring, and rebellious. Then it jumps forward thirty years to when they are jaded in middle age.

But Mayflies is about far more than that. Woven lightly into this witty story of friendship are significant issues that may at some point affect all of us.

James, the narrator, is eighteen and his best mate Tully Dawson is twenty. They live in Scotland -  “Irvine New Town, east of eternity.”

Tully “had innate charisma, a brilliant record collection, complete fearlessness in political argument, and he knew how to love you more than anybody else.” James is in awe of him.

The first half of the book follows a reckless weekend in Manchester, when the two young men go to the G-Mex for a music festival headlined by The Smiths. Over the weekend they meet up with their friends and reveal dreams, ambitions and their rejection of practically every aspect of conventional life. 

“What we had that day was our story. We didn't have the other bit, the future, and we had no way of knowing what that would be like. Perhaps it would change our memory of all this, or perhaps it would draw from it, nobody knew." 

Thirty years later some of them are married, some of them are divorced. And Tully is about to reveal a major twist in the story. It puts James in an ethical quandary. Its resolution left me thinking for a long time after I’d finished the book.

O’Hagan’s story is genuinely unpredictable. He writes deceptively simple prose, which gives deep insights into our relationships with each other on every page. One of the best books I’ve read in a long time.

You’ll enjoy this if you like: Trainspotting by Irvine Walsh

Avoid if you don’t like: References to euthanasia

Ideal accompaniments: An indie soundtrack from the 1980s and a pint of Black & Tan

Genre: Contemporary

Buy This Book Here

Mrs Death Misses Death by Salena Godden

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought of It:

How do you even begin to talk about a book like Salena Godden’s Mrs Death Misses Death? It is a book that defies description, let alone comparison.

It is, at its core, an uplifting meditation on the nature of death. Structured more like a mind-map than a novel, it branches out in multiple directions, using poetry and prose, narrative, monologues and conversations.

At the heart of the story are Wolf, and Mrs Death. One Christmas Eve, Wolf uses the rent money to buy an antique desk with a dusty red leather top. But the desk used to belong to Mrs Death. And sitting at her desk, Wolf begins to hear her stories.

Mrs Death is fed up of the way the world has imagined Death as a man. “For surely only she who bears it, she who gave you life, can be she who has the power to take it. […] And only she who is invisible, ore readily talked over, ignored, betrayed or easily walked past then a woman: a poor old black woman, a homeless black beggar-woman with knotty, natty hair, broken back, walking ever so slowly…”

And she tells her stories to Wolf. Wolf who met her once before, the night a fire swept through their block of flats. The night Wolf's mother died and Wolf didn’t.

As well as listening in on the conversations between Wolf and Mrs Death, we find ourselves in the slums of Victorian England, in 15th Century Spain and 18th C Edinburgh, in Holloway Prison and the Australian Outback. As Wolf says, “This work has a very high dead and death count.”

The book captures the sense of existential crisis so many of us felt, even before Covid-19 took over our lives. “What is wrong with everyone?” Wolf rails. “I am not catastrophising. This is a f*** catastrophe. […] Maybe I’m crying because you aren’t crying with me right now, because you just aren’t mad enough.”

But the book is also incredibly life affirming. Because if life is short and death is inevitable, then is up to us to live it in the best way be can. As Mrs Death exhorts us, “you all need to be heroes, to step up, to speak up, to support each other.”

It is extraordinary, in hindsight, that this book, which must have been completed before the end of 2019, should come to be published just when the whole world has been forced to come to terms with the nearness of death. But though the victims of Covid-19 play no role in the text, Godden has found a way to remember “all we are losing and have lost to the corona virus pandemic [as well as] the murdered, the disappeared, the stolen and the erased. The fallen and the pushed.” The last six pages of the book are left blank, and in her final section, Godden invites her readers to “add your loved one’s name on one of these blank pages, maybe add a date, a memory or a prayer. In this one act of remembrance, we will be united. From now on every single person who reads this book will know their copy contains their own dead. As time passes, if this book is borrowed or passed along, their names will live on.”

In my head, I imagine readers, fifty or a hundred years from now, searching second-hand bookstalls for copies of this book, just to find the secret memorials hidden in each one. Please make it so.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: Remembered by Yvonne Battle-Felton, American Gods by Neil Gaiman

Avoid If You Dislike: In the author’s own words, “If you are sensitive or allergic to talk of the dead or non-living things, use this work in small doses.”

Perfect Accompaniment: “The spicy aroma of jerk chicken and rice and pea. The sizzle of plantain. Curried Goat.”

Genre: Literary Fiction

Buy This Book Here