Hi! I missed January’s book recs because I was travelling with my family and getting married (again) (lol), but here I am, right on time. I came back to Berlin with the ease of fairytale logic, like the carnival merry-go-round plugged me back into place. It is at once colder and brighter and everyone on the train looks familiar, all the strangers I see all the time. I never really think of Berlin as home except for when it catches me off-guard like this; I am pleased to be back and am, of course, romanticising everything, so here are some book recs that stray right up to the edge of mythology and blink at it. Some are retellings that gain their modern sea legs halfway through. Some are technically realism but leave you unsettled. Most follow that foreboding rhythm of divinity. There’s a plan here, even when we’re not paying enough attention to notice.
Prizewinner books seem blessed and cursed at once; all that attention for a year, and then there’s no surer way to lose my interest than to tell me something won the Booker in, idk, 2013 (sorry, Luminaries). But I’m very glad I came back for Kamila Shamsie’s HOME FIRE, which won the 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction and is at once caught in a very specific moment — Britain in 2017, the rise of IS and a new flush of British Islamophobia — and simultaneously follows Antigone’s ancient, implacable beat. I’ve written before about hard it is to pull off a modern retelling of a classic, but this one manages it. Something about the sleight-of-hand in its first protagonist; something about the deeply sexy relationship between Aneeka and Eamonn; something about Karamat Lone, the most compelling and Grecian villain I have come across in a long while, who finally strolls into the action on page 103 and promptly knocked the breath out of me. I tricked myself into hoping for a happy ending, which seems appropriate, the gentle leer of the gods.
(buy @ hive)This is the tale of the Abbess Radegunde and what happened when the Norsemen came, goes the first sentence of Joanna Russ’s SOULS, which won the 1983 Hugo Award for Best Novella and needed only a short evening to really mess with my head. It plays a bait-and-switch with its medieval setting and has one of those very good, very frightening heroes, who doesn’t ever do what you expect from her until you learn to just give yourself up into her hands, open and warm without comfort. I love its stone walls and seas, its sudden introduction of something altogether new, its small boy hero who can’t help himself but be interested.
(buy as part of her Extra(ordinary) People collection, on ebay)The thing I love almost most of all about Diana Wynne Jones’s writing is her rhythm, that modest march that never misses a beat, that rewards rereading, that hides its lovely details in its always brilliant plot. I’m reading a lot of DWJ at the moment for various reasons and have been struck by how clean her writing is; there is never a superfluous sentence, and she somehow never seems to get bogged down in the rules of magic the way others can. THE GAME is a novella about a small girl (or is she!) staying with her young cousins (or are they!). Everything is perfectly straightforward and calm, and when it finally clicks that you are, of course, reading about gods, the feeling is more satisfaction than revelation. All the same, look out for Orion, who made me punch the air with pleasure.
(buy @ betterworldbooks)I am bad with Russian novels; I might not have the stamina for them. Or maybe I want them all to be written with the light, dry touch of Penelope Fitzgerald, who brings Moscow and its surrounding countryside to shivering life in THE BEGINNING OF SPRING. The book is about Frank Reid, born and brought up in Moscow, and what happens when his wife inexplicably leaves him and his children, but true to its title it feels like a book suffused with the clear light of early morning, when not everything is good but you can see all the landscape before you. “For the life of me I can’t decide how properly to respond to this book,” Jan Morris wrote in the Independent when it was published, wondering if it contained a latent moral or allegorical message: I am also unsure. Maybe it’s about Jesus? In any case, Fitzgerald’s Moscow is full of creaking windows and rye-bread, “heavy as a tombstone”, and tea drunk with pickled lemons and mushrooms hanging from ceilings. It has one of the best last pages I have ever read, and I think about Fitzgerald’s windows all the time, a weird and nice compliment to give.
(buy @ readings)I don’t reeeeally want to recommend Robert Harris’s THE SECOND SLEEP, a book which annoyed and disappointed me, a book where everything moved extremely slowly until everything moved very quickly and all the same nothing seems to have happened (??!), a book whose internal aesthetics were underexploited and whose characterisation was All Too Easy. Unfortunately I cannot stop thinking about it. Briefly: in the late fifteenth century, young priest Christopher Fairfax arrives in an English village to bury the priest who has just died there. He is dragged into his predecessor’s heretic mania for history, which involves collecting old Roman coins and—drumroll, please—defunct iPhones. Maybe it was the excellent conceit that has made me so interested in this book? Maybe it was the occasional flashes of brilliance? Maybe it was the criminally underutilised intervals-of-sleep theme? Anyway, please read it so we can complain about it together.
(buy @ hive)ALSO READ: a good short story by a not so great person, Joyce Carol Oates’s Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been, the spiritual successor to Flannery O'Connor’s also semi-mythic A Good Man Is Hard To Find; Zbigniew Herbert’s poem Elegy Of Fortinbras (Anyhow you had to perish Hamlet you were not for life); a very brilliant children’s novel about Irish mythology, featuring an excellent fox; all the old Anne Carson translations. And if by chance you know the name and author of this short story about an angel showing up to a woman in the shower, please tell me — this random Reddit user and I would be appreciative.
I also wrote about books recently for the Guardian, talking about the queer-normative worlds cropping up more and more in sci-fi and fantasy. For it I interviewed C.S. Pacat, Tamsyn Muir and Ellen Kushner, which was extremely fun. Read it here!
I can’t imagine anyone doesn’t already know that they need to read Carmen Maria Machado’s In The Dream House if they haven’t yet, but just in case, I reviewed it for the i.
Putting it out into the universe like a hopeful little goblin: I want to review more books this year! If you would like me to review books for your publication, pls let me know.