passing through

This novel has astoundingly bad dialogue in it, all the way through to the bitter end, but it’s still a tough piece of British truth-telling. It’s about two things – class, and the possibilities of moving from the working class to the middle-class ( there’s a careful, excruciating listing of all the foodstuffs, clothing , drinks, modes of transport and social habits of each of the two classes – we learn, for instance, about the remarkable frequency and toleration of drunk driving in those days - how there was anyone left alive is a wonder); and sex, how men and women negotiate to get what they want, or often, what they can bear to put up with – how they shuffle the cards they’ve been dealt. And it’s another indictment of the selfish male, which God knows, has been anatomized and filleted many times. But it’s also the joy of sex 1955-style, with some nude bathing in the sea, and at least one knee trembler. And it’s about the cruelty of sex, how the young are immutably more attractive than the middle aged (which in this novel is anyone over 34). In this novel men are men and the women expect to be knocked about a bit. As for instance:I took hold of her roughly, then slapped her hard on the face. She gave a little cry of surprise, then flew at me with her nails. I held her off easily.“You’re not going,” I said, “and I’m not going to do what you asked me either. I love you, you silly bitch, and I’m the one who says what’s to be done. Now and in the future.” Then there’s some sex, followed by“You hurt me,” she said when I came to my sense afterwards, my whole body empty and exhausted. “You hurt me and you took all my clothes – look, I’m bleeding here – and here – and here. Oh Joe, I love you with all of me now, every little bit of me is yours. You won’t need her anymore, will you?”She laughed. It was a low gurgling laugh. It was full of physical contentment. Hmmm, I see now that I’ve just demonstrated that this novel is TERRIBLE. I mean to say, there’s your bad dialogue! But – er, it’s pretty good really. I mean, he’s not proud of himself about any of this stuff. He just knows that’s the way you have to do it. It’s not his world, he didn’t invent the rules. The blurbs will have you believe that our hero Joe Lampton is ruthlessly ambitious, destroying anyone in his path. Not at all, he’s the most agonized, doubting, hesitantly-ruthless young man you ever did meet. And the doubting and remorse is the best part of the book, and John Braine knew that was the point of it. There’s a Dark Night of the Soul section right at the end which is a real phantasmagoria.I‘m chomping my way through a lot of novels I should have read years ago, and this was one of them, and at the end of it I thought hmmph, I should have read this years ago! So I said to myself : told you so! But you wouldn't listen would you. And I said okay okay, you made your point. 3.5 stars and a sticker saying “Warning! Contains scenes some feminists may find disturbing”

An alternate cover of this ISBN can be found here.Vivid, bawdy and bitter' (The Times), Pat Barker's first novel shows the women of Union Street, young and old, meeting the harsh challeges of poverty and survival in a precarious world. There's Kelly, at eleven, neglected and independent, dealing with a squalid rape; Dinah, knocking on sixty and still on the game; Joanne, not yet twenty, not yet married, and already pregnant; Old Alice, welcoming her impending death; Muriel helplessly watching the decline of her stoical husband. And linking them all, watching over them all, mother to half the street, is fiery, indomitable Iris.

When twenty-two-year-old Gerty Freely travels to Russia to work as a governess in early 1914, she has no idea of the vast political upheavals ahead, nor how completely her fate will be shaped by them. Yet as her intimacy with the charismatic inventor, Nikita Slavkin, deepens, she's inspired by his belief in a future free of bourgeois clutter, alight with creativity and sleek as a machine.In 1917, revolution sweeps away the Moscow Gerty knew. The middle classes - and their governesses - are fleeing the country, but she stays, throwing herself into an experiment in communal living led by Slavkin. In the white-washed modernist rooms of the commune the members may be cold and hungry, but their overwhelming feeling is of exhilaration. They abolish private property and hand over everything, even their clothes, to the collective; they swear celibacy for the cause.Yet the chaos and violence of the outside world cannot be withstood for ever. Nikita Slavkin's sudden disappearance inspires the Soviet cult of the Vanishing Futurist, the scientist who sacrificed himself for the Communist ideal. Gerty, alone and vulnerable, must now discover where that ideal will ultimately lead.Strikingly vivid, this debut novel by award-winning writer Charlotte Hobson pierces the heart with a story of fleeting, but infinite possibility.

Historian Anna Bennett has a book to write. She also has an insomniac toddler, a precocious, death-obsessed seven-year-old, and a frequently-absent ecologist husband who has brought them all to Colsay, a desolate island in the Hebrides, so he can count the puffins. Ferociously sleep-deprived, torn between mothering and her desire for the pleasures of work and solitude, Anna becomes haunted by the discovery of a baby's skeleton in the garden of their house. Her narrative is punctuated by letters home, written 200 years before, by May, a young, middle-class midwife desperately trying to introduce modern medicine to the suspicious, insular islanders. The lives of these two characters intersect unexpectedly in this deeply moving but also at times blackly funny story about maternal ambivalence, the way we try to control children, and about women's vexed and passionate relationship with work. Moss's second novel displays an exciting expansion of her range - showing her to be both an excellent comic writer, and a novelist of great emotional depth.

Margaret Forster presents the 'edited' diary of a woman, born in 1901, whose life spans the twentieth century. On the eve of the Great War, Millicent King begins to keep her journal and vividly records the dramas of everyday life in a family touched by war, tragedy, and money troubles. From bohemian London to Rome in the 1920s her story moves on to social work and the build-up to another war, in which she drives ambulances through the bombed streets of London.Here is twentieth-century woman in close-up coping with the tragedies and upheavals of women's lives from WWI to Greenham Common and beyond. A triumph of resolution and evocation, this is a beautifully observed story of an ordinary woman's life - a narrative where every word rings true.

I do know how to behave - believe me, because I know. I have always known...'Behind the gates of Temple Alice the aristocratic Anglo-Irish St Charles family sinks into a state of decaying grace. To Aroon St Charles, large and unlovely daughter of the house, the fierce forces of sex, money, jealousy and love seem locked out by the ritual patterns of good behaviour. But crumbling codes of conduct cannot hope to save the members of the St Charles family from their own unruly and inadmissible desires.

Librarian note: An alternative cover for this ISBN can be found here.In Hanky Park, near Salford, Harry and Sally Hardcastle grow up in a society preoccupied with grinding poverty, exploited by bookies and pawnbrokers, bullied by petty officials and living in constant fear of the dole queue and the Means Test. His love affair with a local girl ends in a shotgun marriage, and, disowned by his family, Harry is tempted by crime. Sally, meanwhile, falls in love with Larry Meath, a self-educated Marxist. But Larry is a sick man and there are other more powerful rivals for her affection.

From the Winner of the Thwaites Wainwright Prize 2015Traditional ploughland is disappearing. Seven cornfield flowers have become extinct in the last twenty years. Once abundant, the corn bunting and the lapwing are on the Red List. The corncrake is all but extinct in England. And the hare is running for its life.Written in exquisite prose, The Running Hare tells the story of the wild animals and plants that live in and under our ploughland, from the labouring microbes to the patrolling kestrel above the corn, from the linnet pecking at seeds to the seven-spot ladybird that eats the aphids that eat the crop. It recalls an era before open-roofed factories and silent, empty fields, recording the ongoing destruction of the unique, fragile, glorious ploughland that exists just down the village lane.But it is also the story of ploughland through the eyes of man who took on a field and husbanded it in a natural, traditional way, restoring its fertility and wildlife, bringing back the old farmland flowers and animals. John Lewis Stempel demonstrates that it is still possible to create a place where the hare can rest safe.

\ What better place to spend the holidays than Cold Comfort Farm? \ Available for the first time since its original publication more than fifty years ago, Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm is a charming collection whose hilarious title story features Christmas dinner with the Starkadders before Flora's arrival. With Adam playing Santa while draped in Mrs. Starkadders's shawls, the family shares their traditional "Christmas pudding"-a mélange containing random objects of doom foretelling the coming year: a coffin nail for death, a bad sixpence for financial ruin, and a menthol cone to indicate that the lucky recipient will go "blind wi' headache." These lively tales will delight anyone who loves Stella Gibbons and her signature wit.

"Forgetting is an art like other arts, It needs dedication and practice."The title of the first page of this book is 'SAD CASES, GOOD SOULS' 1970' and just below it on the left corner of the page, I had written, in feeble black, by a graphite pencil, a date on which I started reading this novel. It is 12 September 2012, and after that it is written 'to desert', again by me using the same pencil.I remember, I had bought this novel just before my train journey to the desert land of India and most part of this book was read by me during that journey.This is a well written novel, indeed a very well written. I had moved ahead with this novel due to its exquisite writing style.I am writing this review today because after rereading In a Free State, a few days ago, the plot of this novel flashed in my mind because a part of it is also set there in Africa like that of 'In a free state.'This entire story moves around the theme of "good souls and bad cases". It's an intelligent novel with the family saga of Ralph and his wife Anna Eldred.They live in England but later move to Africa as missionaries, not as religious one but for doing some good work only.Their difficulties in the South Africa and then their getting drawn into the politics there and getting engaged in the constant conflict has been perfectly woven in words by Mantel. There happens,with the family such things which ultimately shape their rest of life.The characters of novel are made really strong. Apart from Anna and Ralph, their son is strongly portrayed. Emma, sister of Ralph, who is unmarried but is having an affair with a married man, is also a character with command. When her lover Felix dies, she goes to a shrine,there is, a vast book in the porch, its pages ruled into columns. A notice promises there. "All whose names are inscribed in the book will be prayed for at the shrine." But She does not write her name or name of her lover, rather she puts down the name of Ralph and his family !Then returning from there, lines of poetry run through her head, those are insistent lines, stuffed with a crude menace." The glacier knocks in the cupboard,  The desert sighs in the bed,  And the crack in the tea-cup opens  A lane to the land of the dead." This book leaves us with some very difficult questions.Questions about faith and betrayal !Questions about injustice and bereavement !I loved the way this book is written, in quite an impactful and elegant manner ! 

Here is the ritualism of Tokyo where lovers ponder the intangible reflections of themselves, 'reflections of nothing but appearances, in a city dedicated to seeming', and 'the velvet nights spaked with menace' of a wasted London, poised on the brink of destruction. In these extraordinary tales Angela Carter pinpoints the symbolism of the city streets and weaves allegories around forests and jungles of strange and erotic landscapes of the imagination.

Set in wartime London, Westwood tells the story of Margaret Steggles, a plain bookish girl whose mother has told her that she is not the type that attracts men. Her schoolfriend Hilda has a sunny temperament and keeps her service boys 'ever so cheery'. When Margaret finds a ration book on Hampstead Heath the pompous writer Gerard Challis enters both their lives. Margaret slavishly adores Challis and his artistic circle; Challis idolises Hilda for her hair and her eyes and Hilda finds Gerard's romantic overtures a bit of a bind. This is a delightfully comic and wistful tale of love and longing.

4.5 starsThis is an autobiographical novel about life in a Catholic Girls school, quite closely based on White’s own life. Like the protagonist of the novel, Nanda, White was a Catholic convert at the age of nine and was sent to a school very like the one in the book. Nanda wants to be a good Catholic as is shown in her prayer on her first night at the convent:“Nanda felt a wave of piety overwhelm her as she knelt very upright in her bench, her lisle-gloved hands clasped on the ledge in front of her. "Oh dear Lord," she said fervently in her mind, "thank you for letting me come here. I will try to like it if You will help me. Help me to be good and make me a proper Catholic like the others."”The novel covers Nanda’s life from the age of nine to fourteen. It is the first of four autobiographical novels. White had mental health problems throughout her life and she referred to them as “The Beast”. When she was twenty-two her mental health was so bad that she was admitted to a public asylum, Bethlem (whose nickname was bedlam). She didn’t really begin to write until her mid 30s. The novel vividly describes daily life in a convent school. There are no beatings and direct physical abuse, the cruelties are psychological. It is about expectation and not disappointing The Lord (or Our Lady). The little things are cumulative, like putting salt on the stewed fruit as a form of mortification. The girls were expected to sleep on their backs with their arms folded across their chests:“That way ... if the dear Lord were to call you to Himself during the night, you would be ready to meet Him as a Catholic should.”The whole is about the crushing of innocence and the smothering of the natural instincts of children. Nanda is a convert to Catholicism and so is automatically viewed with some suspicion. The goal of the nuns is generally to break the will of the child to ensure they become the right sort of Catholic. Mother Radcliffe, the Mistress of Discipline is a particularly unpleasant character, the more so as she appears kind and pleasant:“'You are very fond of your own way, aren't you, Nanda?''Yes, I suppose so, Mother.''And do you know that no character is any good in this world unless that will has been broken completely? Broken and re-set in God's own way. I don't think your will has been quite broken, my dear child, do you?' “The ending is very powerful and shocking, describing Nanda’s expulsion from the school. Her distress and her father’s coldness are very well written and it is clear that White is writing form her personal experience. This is a well written and competent description of life in a Catholic Convent school in the early twentieth century and a great advert for atheism!

Unsettling love and stifled horror create and then destroy the claustrophobic world of this lush, literary gothic set in turn-of-the-century England. Catherine and Rob Allen, siblings two years apart, grow up in a world of shameful secrets. Their mother creates a public outcry, abandoning her family for a bohemian life on the Continent. Their father, whose mental state always has been slightly precarious, is committed to an asylum in the country. The children are sealed off with their grandfather in a crumbling country estate accompanied by their sturdy and well-loved servant, Kate, and the predatory tutor, Miss Gallagher. In true gothic fashion, terror, violence and eroticism collect beneath every dark surface. Against this strange and secretive backdrop, Cathy and Rob develop a closeness so fierce that it eventually threatens to smother them both. Kate makes the first crack in their hermetically sealed world, which World War I eventually bursts wide open. With Kate's departure for Canada and Rob's for the front, destitute times at home force Cathy into self-reliance. It's only after she's redeemed by hardship that she's given a second chance to be redeemed by love.

Quaint & beautiful. Why Kate Winslet played the mother in the film version after doing "Titanic" is obvious... this is an attractive role. The matriarch is positively enigmatic, & the little girls are total darlings. Morocco is a land of enchantment & magic (my one day spent there was one of my most memorable experiences ever), and just like that North African country of camels, couscous, acrobats, bazaars, scorpions, winding roads, this book manages to, in a little less than 200 pgs, cast one tremendous spell.

One quiet evening in Salisbury, the peace is shattered by a serious car crash. At that moment, five lives collide – a flower seller, a schoolboy, an army wife, a security guard, a widower – all facing their own personal disasters.

Written with such a lightness of touch that it seems miraculous, these stories are a further revelation of Tove Jansson’s heart warming genius. - ALI SMITHFollowing the widely acclaimed and bestselling The Summer Book, here is a Winter Book collection of some of Tove Jansson’s best loved and most famous stories. Drawn from youth and older age, and spanning most of the twentieth century, this newly translated selection provides a thrilling showcase of the great Finnish writer’s prose, scattered with insights and home truths. It has been selected and is introduced by Ali Smith, and there are afterwords by Philip Pullman, Esther Freud and Frank Cottrell Boyce.The Winter Book features thirteen stories from Tove Jansson’s first book for adults, The Sculptor’s Daughter (1968) along with seven of her most cherished later stories (from 1971 to 1996), translated into English and published here for the first time.As smooth and odd and beautiful as sea-worn driftwood, as full of light and air as the Nordic summer. We are lucky to have these stories collected at last. - Philip Pullman"A Winter Book" offers what proper books so peerlessly can – the sense of a unique and authentic voice that speaks to the reader across time and culture, heart to heart. - Boyd Tonkin, The Independent

Taking up where Invitation to the Waltz left off, The Weather in the Streets shows us Olivia Curtis ten years older, a failed marriage behind her, thinner, sadder, and apprently not much wiser. A chance encounter on a train with a man who enchanted her as a teenager leads to a forbidden love affair and a new world of secret meetings, brief phone calls, and snatched liaisons in anonymous hotel rooms. Years ahead of its time when first published, this subtle and powerful novel shocked even the most stalwart Lehmann fans with its searing honesty and passionate portrayal of clandestine love.