Category: Reviews

Book review: Freezing Point by Anders Bodelsen

1 Comment

Freezing Point book coverThe first Danish book I read on holiday this summer was Freezing Point by Anders Bodelsen (translated from Danish by Joan Tate). But it’s taken me time to put together my thoughts about it.

This 1969 sci-fi novel begins in 1973. In this near future, a young man called Bruno is offered a radical new solution to inoperable cancer. He can choose to be cryogenically frozen until medical science is capable of curing him.

Bruno’s life before this point is a lonely one. He’s an editor of a literary magazine. His greatest asset is coming up with ideas for short stories, which he communicates to his roster of regular writers. He doesn’t have close family or friends. But he does have a strange growth on his neck.

Continue reading “Book review: Freezing Point by Anders Bodelsen”

Book review: Vida by Marge Piercy

1 Comment

Vida book coverEarly last year I read Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy and loved it so much I bought two more of her books. But when I picked up her 1979 novel Vida, it took a while for me to get into. This was not a fault with the writing, the topic or the characters. It was simply too tense a read when I was a little stressed. It was only on the way home from holiday, and in the week that followed, that I was relaxed enough to let this story completely absorb me.

At the start of the book, it’s the end of the 1970s and Vida is a left-wing activist who has been on the run from the law for almost a decade. She is always on the move, changing her appearance and name, constantly weighing up the risks she is taking to be fed and sheltered.

She’s been separated from her husband Leigh for years, but is reluctant to accept that his girlfriend is the main woman in his life now, while Vida is the secret occasional liaison. Leigh is a talk show host at a small radio station, a minor celebrity living a safe, comfortable life.

Continue reading “Book review: Vida by Marge Piercy”

Book review: Waist Deep by Linea Maja Ernst

1 Comment

Waist Deep book coverOn our holiday in Denmark, we found a bookshop with a decent selection of Danish books translated into English. In a surprise turn, I picked out a sci-fi novel (Freezing Point by Anders Bodelsen) and Tim picked a literary novel: Waist Deep by Linea Maja Ernst (translated from Danish by Sherilynn Nicolette Hellberg).

A group of friends from university, 12 years after they first met, spend seven summer days in a lakeside cabin. It should be a lovely, relaxing time with their favourite people. But desires, anxieties and the realities of adult life are putting everyone under pressure. No-one is saying what they really think or feel.

Sylvia is our main point of view character. She’s a daydreamer, easily lost in her own thoughts and her version of reality. She’s also more than a little pretentious – she longs to be seen as artistic and insightful.

Gry is the mother hen – and the only literal mother in the group. She studies folklore, but worries that she is no longer taken seriously as an academic, or as a person beyond her role as a parent.

Continue reading “Book review: Waist Deep by Linea Maja Ernst”

Book review: Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith

1 Comment

Strangers on a Train book coverI’m a big fan of the Hitchcock film Strangers on a Train, which is based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith. And I have loved the other Highsmith books I’ve read. So this should have been my ideal read. But I must admit something about this book didn’t gel for me.

Perhaps it’s that the plot is quite different from the film, which I have watched many times. I certainly can’t fault Highsmith’s complex characters or chillingly believable depiction of criminal psychology.

The concept is simple. Two men meet on a train, each wishing (to greater or lesser extent) someone dead. Bruno suggests they swap murders – he will murder Guy’s estranged wife Miriam who won’t give him a divorce, while Guy can murder Bruno’s father who won’t pay him his trust fund. There would be nothing to link them to their crimes and they could time it so the obvious culprit is out of town. Guy laughs off the suggestion but two weeks later Miriam is murdered.

Continue reading “Book review: Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith”

Book review: Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

Wild Dark Shore book coverSometimes a bookseller presses a book into your hands that you had never heard of and it is the most absolutely perfect read for you. Booksellers like that are a precious, precious thing.

During Independent Bookshop Week in June, the Very Small Bookshop in Bristol had a cool way to share book recommendations. Leah, who runs the shop, created six lucky dips under topics including “somewhat bizarre” and “gaaaaaaay”. You picked out a slip of paper with a title and author, and if you liked the sound of it enough to buy the book you got 15% off. I love a book recommendation from someone whose taste I trust/share – and the selection of books in Leah’s shop already vouched for that. Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy was my pick from “soft or profound or lovely”. I certainly wouldn’t call it soft, but it’s very profound indeed.

This novel focuses on the Salt family – father Dominic and his three children – who live on an extremely remote sub-Antarctic island called Shearwater. Dominic is the island’s caretaker, a role that he chose after his wife died nine years ago. They live in an old lighthouse, no longer functional for that purpose but bringing with it more than a century of lonely histories. The extreme, harsh environment seems an appropriate setting for grief – perhaps one so extreme it can drive people mad.

Continue reading “Book review: Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy”

Book review: Big Swiss by Jen Beagin

1 Comment

Big Swiss book coverI’m a fan of the Weirdos Book Club podcast with Sara Pascoe and Cariad Lloyd, though I don’t always agree with their take on books. For instance, both hosts loved My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh, which I found…meh. So when they heartily recommended Big Swiss by Jen Beagin I couldn’t be sure I would like it. But it’s a comedy about a relationship that starts at a dog park, so I at least knew dogs would feature heavily. And it would hopefully be a light read. I’d say it achieves those things. And I did like it, though I wouldn’t go so far as love.

Big Swiss is sort of a love story, but it’s more about sex than romance. It’s certainly not sweet or romantic. It satirises life in the rich New York town of Hudson. And it’s very funny.

Greta lives in a falling-apart old farmhouse with her friend Sabine, her dog Piñon and a few thousand bees. She works from home transcribing audio of the local sex therapist’s sessions. It’s all supposedly anonymised but in their small community she often recognises the voices of patients. Lately she has become obsessed with the sessions of a new patient she nicknames Big Swiss, a woman who she knows is tall and Swiss.

Continue reading “Book review: Big Swiss by Jen Beagin”

Book review: The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell

The Old Drift book coverI forget where I saw the recommendation to read The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell. I suspect it was a listicle about African sci-fi. And indeed this book won the Arthur C Clarke Award in 2020. But I feel like calling it sci-fi is a bit misleading. This is an epic saga, incorporating some sci-fi elements in the last 20 years of its 125-year tale. With a touch of magical realism in the earlier part of the story. It’s also brilliant.

This is the story of three families in what is now Zambia. In 1904, on the banks of the Zambezi river, near Victoria Falls, a feverish British man, an Italian hotelier and a local African busboy become connected by what seems like a small incident. Percy Clarke is an archetypal colonist – a bored Englishman looking for adventure. He’s racist, often drunk and generally unpleasant. His is a disturbing mind to be inside.

Thankfully it is just a few pages before the narrative swiftly moves on to “The Grandmothers”. Serpell lays out the stories of three women connected to that moment in the prologue.

Continue reading “Book review: The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell”

Book review: Interstellar Megachef by Lavanya Lakshminarayan

1 Comment

Interstellar Megachef book coverI try to buy ebooks direct from publishers when I can. There are a few small publishers that are really good for this, such as Rebellion. When I go to their site for a particular book I almost always wind up buying a couple of random other books that just sound fun. Such as Interstellar Megachef by Lavanya Lakshminarayan – I mean, that’s quite the title, right?

A queer SF tale about an intergalactic cooking show, this sounded like it would be completely silly fluff. Which I was very much in the mood for when I bought it and when I decided to read it. But this is actually much better and less fluffy than I expected. Though it does have its sillier moments, and comedic ones too, this is largely a story about prejudice, migration, xenophobia and bullying.

Saras has run away from Earth, arriving on Primus with nothing but a small bag of belongings, her little robot Kili and a dream of winning the galaxy’s most watched, most prestigious cooking show, Interstellar MegaChef. As one of Earth’s most celebrated chefs she thinks she stands a good chance, but she is in for a rude awakening to reality.

Continue reading “Book review: Interstellar Megachef by Lavanya Lakshminarayan”

Book review: Passing by Nella Larsen

Passing book coverI probably hold on to more of the books I read than I will ever realistically reread, but there are some I know I will come back to. Like Passing by Nella Larsen, which I recently read for the second time in 14 months. It was chosen by my book club (with my encouragement) and I’m pleased to find I loved it second time around (as did all but one of the book club).

In this 1929 novella, two Black women reconnect years after having been children together. Irene and Clare bump into each other in a whites-only restaurant in Chicago. They’re both passing, but for Irene it’s a brief convenience to drink a cool drink on a dusty summer’s day. Clare is living her whole life passing for white – including being married to a racist white man who has no idea she’s Black.

Irene is married to a Black man who is a doctor and fund raises for civil rights. They’re prominent members of society in Harlem. She doesn’t approve of Clare’s life choices – even more so when Clare starts coming to socialise in Harlem when her husband is away.

“Did that woman, could that woman, somehow know that here before her very eyes on the roof of the Drayton sat a Negro? Absurd! Impossible! White people were so stupid about such things, for all that they usually asserted that they were able to tell; and by the most ridiculous means, finger-nails, palms of hands, shapes of ears, teeth, and other such silly rot…Nevertheless, Irene felt, in turn, anger, scorn, and fear slide over her. It wasn’t that she was ashamed of being a Negro, or even of having it declared. It was the idea of being ejected from any place, even in the polite and tactful way in which the Drayton would probably do it, that disturbed her.”

Continue reading “Book review: Passing by Nella Larsen”

Book review: Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell

Utopia Avenue book cover

Like many people I discovered David Mitchell through his bestselling novel Cloud Atlas. I went back and read his first two books and declared myself a big fan. I bought his next few books as hardbacks on release and loved them. But then after 2014 I for some reason didn’t pick up his next two novels – until now.

Looking back at my notes from the talk Mitchell gave in Bristol in 2014, he said he was writing “a book largely set in 1960s London and New York, due for publication in 2016”. Well that surely has to be Utopia Avenue, which was finally published in 2020. And which I finally read last month.

This is a novel about a fictional band called Utopia Avenue in 1960s London (mostly). They’re a cross-genre hybrid formed by a visionary manager, Levon Frankland, bringing together musicians he’s individually impressed by. Which at first seems like a plan so misguidedly hopeful it can’t possibly work. As these five strangers gradually become a team, life throws curveballs that could end the dream before it’s begun.

Each chapter centres around the writing of a particular song, told from the perspective of the song’s writer. All the band members and their manager get a turn – though two of the band do the majority of the writing and therefore get more chapters. It’s an interesting way to tell the story, though I did occasionally want more from the perspectives that were largely missing.

Continue reading “Book review: Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell”