Random Jottings

Stranded - Emily Barr

The courts fall silent, the racquets are folded away, the gates are shut and the caravanseri moves on from SW19 to the next port of call which will be the US Open. Before that reseeding is being started on the grass for the Olympics, but for now it is time to look forward to Wimbledon 2013 and for Random to get back to reviewing the odd book or two.

Last year I read a book by Emily Barr called The First Wife sent to me by those generous souls at Headline.  I had never read any by this author before though she has written over ten books and was not sure what to expect.  Well, I thoroughly enjoyed it, a real page turner and if you wish to see what I thought about it read my earlier review, here.

I was pretty sure that I would enjoy Stranded and found it totally gripping, far more so that I thought when I started reading it.  Esther Lomax is feeling bruised and fragile after the breakdown of her marriage and feels the need to get away.  Spurred on by a chance remark by somebody met at an art gallery, she sets off on a trip to Malaysia, partly to get away from everything and to give herself time to think, but also to prove to her disbelieving ex that she is more than capable of embarking on such an adventure.  

At first, nervous and unsure she gradually finds her feet and takes a trip to the Perhentian Islands, which were named by her chance art gallery acquaintance "My instincts were right. This place will be exactly what I need it to be.....the sea is silenced by the rock.  I have my own little verandah with a hammock on it and a small table and two white chairs, and when I stand there, I look down past the other huts to the edge of the sand. The air hangs hot around me"

Here she rests, relaxes and sleeps and later joins others on a trip to a remote island, an out of the way non-touristy trip especially organised by one of the staff at the resort.    She is joined by Katy, who has befriended her, a woman of her own age also recovering from a break up, Mark and Cherry a honeymoon couple, Edward from Scotland and an Australian couple Gene and Jean who are obviously on this trip to revive their embittered relationship and who are failing to do so.

They arrive at the island "this is a perfect place, a genuine desert island.... it is small and as far as I have seen, covered in dense jungle apart from this beach.  We pile off the boat onto the white beach. Everything is silent.  This feels like a place that is not used to people"

Samad, their guide, lays out their lunch, realises he has left the matches behind and without them is unable to light the cooker and prepare their meal. He decides to take the boat, return to base and be back in an hour to cook lunch.   They wave him off, settle down with a glass of wine or two and await his return.  The hours drift by and it soon becomes apparent that he is not returning that day.   Joking and cheering each other up the party eat what they can and spend the night on the beach sure he will arrive in the morning.  He does not and as time passes by it is apparent he is not returning and they are stranded with no food, water or shelter.

It becomes increasingly difficult not to give matters away and let slip the outcome if I give any more details so I must be careful.  Suffice it to say that there are many in the group who are hiding a secret in their lives, which eventually is discovered.  Relationships are forged and then there is mistrust and jealousy.  I did wonder if we were going to end up in a Lord of the Flies situation but though it seemed to be heading in that direction, they are rescued before matters get totally out of control.

The story does not end after their rescue.  It seems their being stranded was not an accident, it has been planned, but why and who is behind it all?   Returning home there are even more shocks in store for Esther and the book has a nail biting finish.

As with the previous book, The First Wife, there are two threads running through the narrative which, seemingly disparate, are linked.  I rather thought this would be the case and made wild guesses as to who and why and was proved totally mistaken.

I had one of my wakeful nights last week and know from long experience there is no point in trying to get back to sleep, so at 4am I was up and made a cup of tea. Back to bed, light on and picked up Stranded.   Read straight through and finished it by 6.30 am and then keeled over to waken at 10 am with my glasses on the end of my nose, light on and radio playing.

Terrific pin you to the end of your seat read and I loved it.

Publishers - New Imprints

I think that most readers would be forgiven for thinking that publishers are doomed and books will soon no longer be printed, or wanted, as we all turn to E-books for our reading materials.   Now I have a Kindle and love it.  The amount of interesting free books one can track down from various sources is amazing and the knowledge that if you really really really want to find out what happens in the next book in a series you are reading and you know you can do it in thirty seconds, is irresistible.  However, I will never cease to love 'real' books, the smell and the feel of them and will always have a core library in my home, with other books coming in and out and visiting for a while.

It is therefore very heartening to hear of publishers starting new imprints. Most, if not all, leading publishing houses now produce all their books as an E-source as well as the hard/paperback for those who prefer their books in this way and this makes sense.   But it does not seem to have stopped new initiatives and new launches along the way and two publishers have recently come up with exciting news.  Today I was emailed by Headline about their new imprint, Tinder Press.

"Tinder Press is to be a distinct imprint publishing 10–12 titles a year, standing alongside Headline’s existing imprints. Tinder Press is created to build on recent Headline successes, for example Maggie O’Farrell’s Costa Novel Award winning THE HAND THAT FIRST HELD MINE, Sarah Winman’s Galaxy National Book Award winning  WHEN GOD WAS A RABBIT, and  Andrea Levy’s Man Booker prize shortlisted THE LONG SONG.  The imprint will be steered by Mary-Anne Harrington, Fiction Publisher, and Leah Woodburn, Associate Publisher, who have a remit to publish extraordinary stories from original voices: books that inspire a  passionate response and will stand the test of time.

 Mary-Anne Harrington said: ‘Tinder Press is conceived as first and foremost a fiction imprint, supported by a dedicated in-house team in sales, publicity and marketing: the same team that made WHEN GOD WAS A RABBIT or Eowyn Ivey’s THE SNOW CHILD absolutely unmissable.  The time seemed right to grow our literary fiction publishing, giving a small number of titles additional space and the special attention they require to enable them to flourish.  We know how to create a real community around our books: it’s a wonderful marriage of new media and old-fashioned enthusiasm.’ We want Tinder Press books to be books to treasure – books you will want to keep – and our production values will reflect this.  We will produce beautiful hardbacks and innovative e-books for first format, followed by paperbacks with strong mass-market appeal.’

 The Tinder Press list will launch in spring 2013 and will include playwright Peggy Riley’s AMITY AND SORROW, an extraordinary debut about sisters in an end-of-the-world cult, run by their father; THE YONAHLOSSEE RIDING CAMP FOR GIRLS by Anton DiSclafani, a lush first novel of Southern decorum, family secrets and girls’ school rituals; Michel Rostain’s THE SON, a bestseller in his native France, and winner of the Prix Goncourt Debut Novel award; SNAPPER, Brian Kimberling’s heartfelt and humorous first novel about love and birdwatching in rural Indiana, which was awarded the Janklow and Nesbit Bath Spa Prize; and Maggie O’Farrell’s sixth novel, the story of four eventful days in the life of an Irish family in the heatwave of 1976"

I have had many books sent to me by Headline and some of my favourite and most interesting reads over the last few years have come from them.  Just recently I reviewed The Gods of Gotham here; one of the best debut crime novels I have ever read came from them, American Devil reviewed here, and I have a copy of the Snow Child on my shelves awaiting my attention. Every blogger I know has read this and raved about it and my apologies to Headline for being so slow in getting round to it.

I shall be keeping my eye out for the books mentioned above and wish them all the best for this new venture.

The other publisher I mentioned was Bloomsbury.   They are a lovely bunch of people, so friendly and interesting and sooooo good to all us bloggers. Not only do they appreciate our thoughts and reviews they also give mighty good teas for us all and I look forward to the next one (hint, hint...).    Their new imprint is Circus and here is what Alexandra Pringle, Editor in Chief, has to say about it all:

“Last year Bloomsbury celebrated its 25th birthday. From inception it was Bloomsbury’s aim to publish the finest of international fiction and these years on we have a list filled with distinguished writers from TC Boyle, Richard Ford, Donna Tartt, Edmund White and Tobias Wolff in the US, to Margaret Atwood and Anne Michaels in Canada, to William Boyd, Justin Cartwright, Esther Freud, Howard Jacobson and Barbara Trapido in the UK, as well as writers from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and many other countries. In order that Bloomsbury can continue to discover and grow exciting new voices, we have decided to launch a new imprint: Bloomsbury Circus.

The books in Bloomsbury Circus will be mostly fiction, unashamedly literary, always fresh and sometimes surprising. In its first year, we will publish nine titles and from there the list will grow to up to four each month.

In this digital age we are determined to make our books look more desirable and collectible than ever. Bloomsbury Circus books will be published as unusually-sized trade paperbacks with photographic covers, wide flaps and colour printing inside the cover. They will have all the beauty of a hardback with the ease-of-read – and price – of a trade paperback. And there is a lovely new logo – our goddess Diana dangling on a half-moon trapeze"

As well as introducing new books and new authors, these two imprints have something else in common: Tinder Press tell us "We will produce beautiful hardbacks and innovative e-books for first format, followed by paperbacks with strong mass-market appeal"

Bloomsbury says " In this digital age we are determined to make our books look more desirable and collectible than ever. They will have all the beauty of a hardback with the ease-of-read – and price – of a trade paperback"

The highlighting is mine and both Headline and Bloomsbury have realised that book lovers LOVE beautifully produced books which are a pleasure to hold and to handle and to keep.   OUP and Yale UP are other publishers who have sent me books which have high production values, the smooth paper, the clear font, a stylish look about them which, whether it is trivial or not, all adds to the reading experience.  This is where traditional publishing can score against the E-books and delighted that this has been realised.    (I have noticed when visiting the US and checking out their book stores that their paperbacks are so much better produced than ours and make the owning of them more desirable.  I have my thoughts on this and some comments and contrast to make, but that is a post for another day).

In the meantime I wish Headline and Bloomsbury all the luck in the world with their ventures.

The Gods of Gotham - Lyndsay Faye

I was lucky enough to be given a proof of Gods of Gotham last October and having read it through straight away (was meeting the author at a dinner so thought it would be a good idea to sound intelligent), have had to sit on the review until now as I didn't want to write about it and then have it lost in the Mists of Random.

Well, publication day is almost here, 15 March 2012 (ooh Beware the Ides...) and this really is a book that comes under the heading of Must Read.  It is set around New York's Five Points in the mid nineteenth century, during the summer of 1845 when the Great Irish Famine began and NY is flooded with desperate immigrants. Social chaos ensures and the founding of the NYPD is an attempt to bring order.  The central character, Timothy WIlde, is one of the first brave 'copper stars' in that early police force.

The first chapter gets off to a cracking start:

"On the night of 21 August 1845 one of the children escaped. The little girl was aged ten, dressed in a delicate white shift with a single row of lace along the wide, finely stitched collar. She exited through the window of her room by tying three stolen ladies' stockings together and fixing the end to the lowers catch on the iron shutter"

Timothy Wilde is out in the night "the girl slammed into me, aimless as a torn piece of paper on the wind. I caught her by the arms. She had an unforgettable face, square as a picture frame, with somber swollen lips and a perfect snub nose..........but the only thing I noticed clearly when she stumbled to a halt against my legs as I stood in front of my house that night was how very thoroughly she was covered in blood"

Now you have to admit that is quite a start and I was hooked straight away.  The sights, sounds and smells of the old city are there, they leap off the page at you and there is a lushness and febrile intensity to the writing which put me in mind of The Crimson Petal and the White by Michael Faber, it has the same slight edge of decadence and something vaguely rotten in the air.

Timothy  searches out the truth from the child's wild stories.  She has escaped from a brothel and it seems a brutal killer is on the loose and it is not long before a field where the grisly remains of multiple bodies is uncovered. All those dead were children "Did they kill the other kinchin slow or quick?"

Difficult to do justice to this wonderful book.  I have mentioned in the past that there are some book reviews where I find it impossible not to use the word 'teem' and this is another such.  The streets of New York do teem, there is no other word for it: "Colored footman sitting atop phaetons and wearing summer straw hats and pale green linen coats whirred past me, one nearly colliding with a Jewess selling ribbons from a wide hinged box hung round her neck.  Ice delivery men from the Knickerbocker company, shoulders knotted with painful seeming muscles, strained with iron tongs to hoist frozen blocks onto cards.....and weaving in and out, mud crusted and randy and miraculously nimble, trotted the speckled pigs, rubbery snouts nuzzling the trampled beet leaves.  Everything begrimed, but the storefront windowpanes, everything for sale but the cobblestones, everyone pulsing with energy but never meeting your eye"

Transport Dickens to New York and this is the sort of descriptive narrative you would get.  I was bowled over by this book and, though I would love to write more on this post, it is almost impossible to pull out all the strands of the plot, so closely and intricately do they interweave with each other.  If I tried I would do it very badly and this post would be never ending.  Suffice it to say, that I think this is a marvellous book, full of colour and vivid imagery, beautifully written, characters that just leap off the page and grab you by the throat and the denouement and resolution is nothing, simply nothing as I imagined it would be.

I have already mentioned that I had the pleasure of meeting the author at a dinner given by her publishers, Headline, and here we are. 

I found her to be charming, witty and great company. But then if you had written a book like The Gods of Gotham, you are unlikely to be boring...

Brilliant.  

Good things just read and to come

I am getting really behind in reviews and posts on same and so am going to do an all encompassing round up today.  Some of the books I am mentioning have been sent to me well ahead of publication date so I prefer to hold back on my thoughts until that date, but I want to flag some of these up for your attention as they are titles I have really enjoyed. So here we go starting first with books published and read:

The Kashmir Shawl by Rosie Thomas.  I have read several of this author's titles over the last few years.  She is not a writer I actively seek out but when I find her books in the library or, as in this case, was sent a copy I know I will enjoy it.  In my library they are inevitably filed under Sagas which I really dislike as I feel it is a lazy way of categorising a book's content. I also feel that this rather downgrades a book. My opinion only I hasten to add.

In the Kashmir Shawl the author uses a device which I always love, ie a story in two time lines.  Mair Ellis is clearing out her father's house after his death and finds an exquisite Kashmir shawl and a lock of a child's hair. Nobody knows anything about their provenance or where they came from and Mair decides to travel to Kashmir to trace her grandparents and their life as missionaries.  Nerys Watkins (Mair's grandmother) and her husband are sent to India and high up in the heart of Kashmir she discovers the lakeside city of Srinagar, where the British live on carved wooden houseboats and live in a frivolous whirl of society. With her husband away for several months Nerys stays with friends in Srinagar and soon the naive young wife changes and becomes a different woman.

Flipping backwards and forwards between the two protagonists, full of wonderful descriptions of India which make me want to visit (the author has spent time there), and with a pacy narrative that made me not want to put the book down for a minute, I loved it and have since renewed my acquaintance with Rosie Thomas and borrowed a couple from the library. I know they are going to keep me in good company,

Five Days to Die - Kathia Lief.   Another serial killer book, I do wonder why I keep getting sent these I really do.   Her first book, You are Next, ditto and read by me and though it did not set the world on fire as far as I was concerned, it was a tight little book and well written.   This book is, to all intents and purposes, her second but it really is her first as it was originally published in 2004 under a different title and name - Five Days in Summer by Kate Pepper. Presumably it did not do well and so it has now been reissued on the back of You are Next. Can't blame the publishers I suppose and it gives the author a holiday but not sure I really approve and it seems from some of the Amazon reviews that others feel the same. (Note: a 'new' book by Tess Gerritsen on Amazon turns out to be an old title reissued and I think it is reprehensible that it is being promoted in this way.  I have had an email drawing my attention to the 'new' book).

OK so is Five Days to Die worthy of attention?   It whiled away an afternoon very easily and is a solid little read.  A wife is kidnapped from a car park in broad daylight and the police have no clues as to her whereabouts or the reason behind her abduction.  A retired FBI profiler attached to the case (he is researching a book apparently) suspects she has been taken by a serial killer who targets others. He strikes every seven years and he keeps the victims for five days of mental torture before inflicting the worst punishment of all upon them.  No need to rush out to get this but if it comes your way then give it a go.

And now those books to come which I want to flag up.

Women of a Dangerous Age - Fanny Blake.  I had the pleasure of meeting Fanny last year when her publishers threw a tea for book bloggers at the top of the Oxo Tower.  Food and chat were enormous fun and delicious and I was delighted to meet her having just read her first book What Women Want reviewed here.  I read her second novel last week and found it witty, amusing and warm. 'Lou is married to  a man who no longer loves her. It's time to move on.......Ali is a serial mistress. But when she returns home she finds her latest lover is not the man she took him for. She needs a new beginning"

And so begins a friendship in which both Lou and Ali discover they have more in common than they thought.  I will be reviewing this later but nothing to stop you nipping over to Amazon and putting in a pre-order. A lovely book due to be published on 26 April 2012.

Mem: If the publishers feel that they would like to throw another tea party at the top of the Oxo Tower then I shall be delighted to attend................

The Gods of Gotham - Lyndsey Faye.  I have mentioned this book before as I read it prior to meeting with the author last October at a dinner given by Headline, link to my earlier post here, but make no apologies for flagging it up again. Due to be published in March, so not long to wait, a story of life in lower Manhattan in 1845 and the founding of the NYPD.  Great stuff.

Sidney Chambers and the Shadow Death - James Runcie.   Am reading this at the moment and am spinning it out as long as possible because I am enjoying it so much I don't want it to end. Described as 'with a whiff of Agatha Christie and a touch of Midsomer Murders the Grantchester Mysteries introduces a new hero into the world of detective fiction'

Sidney is a vicar and really should have nothing to do with crime, detection or murder but it comes his way.   I am not sure about Midsomer Murders but do agree with the Christie metnion as these stories are gentle and delightful and Sidney reminds me of Miss Marple and the village where he lives sounds like St Mary Mead.   He has a friend in the police force who he meets every week for a game of backgammon in The Eagle in Cambridge. Having been in this pub several times myself this all helps to place the story and create an atmosphere for me.   There are several stories in this first volume and I have one more to go and may just have to give in and read it this afternoon.  I think this book is going to do very well - it just has that feel.  And surely with a name like Runcie and being set in the world of vicardom, he must be a relative.............

Publication date 10 May 2012 and this is going to be another winner from Bloomsbury.

Right - that's it. Feel better now I have had this catch up. Always feel guilty when I get a bit behind, but as you will all know by my burblings, my wonderfullygorgeousandenchanting Florence has just had her second birthday and all other things were pushed into the background.

Au reservoir.