Review by Mike O'Driscoll of "PoppyHarp" by Simon Avery

It’s always a pleasure to encounter a new work from Simon Avery, whose evocative and humane short stories illuminated many issues of Black Static magazine before it folded. His superb novella, The Teardrop Method, is a hauntingly eloquent exploration of the nature of creativity and how it manifests in the work of a musician. The complex and compelling forces at play in the creative process seems to be a recurring theme and it’s one he returns to in his first novel, PoppyHarp, a much less austere and bleak work than the novella, but one still redolent with an air of sadness and lost opportunities.

The story focuses on writer Noah’s attempts to discover the fate of Oliver Frayling, creator of 1970s kids’ TV show The Adventures of Imogen and Florian, who had disappeared some years previous to the novel’s present. Noah reunites with Oliver’s daughter Imogen, a former girlfriend, who was the child star of the show alongside Florian, a somewhat down-at-heel rabbit. As the narrative unfolds through a series of elegantly structured flashbacks, we learn of Oliver’s fleeting success and the profound effect the brush with fame has on his life, particularly on his relationship with his wife and daughter. Oliver’s struggles to come to terms with his sexuality, and his subsequent feelings of guilt are beautifully rendered by Avery, as is the evocation of the British television milieu of the 1970s, calling to mind a host of children’s shows from the era, but in particular works by Oliver Postage and Peter Firmin, including Bagpuss, The Clangers and Pogle’s Wood.

Following the initial success of The Adventures of Imogen and Florian, Oliver, through his relationship with his producer Malcolm Church, is drawn into the orbit of characters loosely based on David Hockney, Kenneth Williams, and perhaps Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Avery gives us convincing and affectionate portraits of these actors and artists, showing not only their foibles and petty jealousies, but also their compassion for and loyalty to each other. This sense of empathy permeates the novel, particularly in the rekindling of the relationship between Noah and Imogen, both now middle-aged, the former separated from his wife, the latter caring for a husband suffering from Alzheimer’s. Their faltering efforts to reconnect with each other mirror Oliver’s tentative and ultimately doomed attempts to reconcile with his family. And always there beneath the narrative surface, is the question of PoppyHarp, ostensibly a failed television play created by Oliver and Malcolm, but at its heart, a work much more suggestive of the magical and restorative power of art.

The breadth of the ideas and themes that Avery touches upon in fewer than 300 pages is nothing short of astonishing: the dark side of fame and celebrity, the mysterious power of the creative urge, the pervasive fear engendered by the Cold War, the dreadful physical and social toll of AIDS, the extent to which Britain has been reshaped by social and political forces to become, as the novel suggests, a more compassionate and tolerant society. PoppyHarp is a sensitive and singular work that more than fulfils the promise of Avery’s shorter fiction.

About the reviewer
Mike O’Driscoll is a writer living in Swansea. His work has appeared in Black Static, Interzone, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and numerous anthologies. His story ‘Sounds Like’ was adapted for a TV movie by Brad Anderson, as part of the Masters of Horror series. Mike blogs on different aspects of genre writing and film here. 

Review by Kim Wiltshire of "The University of Bliss" by Julian Stannard

The University of Bliss is a dystopian campus novel set ten years in the future and we join this terrifying new world just as new Vice-Chancellor Gladys Nirvana is about to take up her position at The University of Bliss, or UOB (pronounced YOB) as it is known to its students.

In the political climate of 2035, any academic endeavour is strongly discouraged, with the one poor scholar who managed to publish a book being demoted to Head Trolley Pusher on the university’s very own train. As the management seek higher salaries, fewer pesky academics and more bureaucracy, can the last of the humanities lecturers save higher education from itself? Focussing on Harry Blink, the poor poet who hasn’t published any poetry in years, we meet a range of Deans, Pro-Vice Chancellors and Professors whose sole aim is to disassociate higher education from any notion of learning, instead rewarding those lecturers who spend time on their Lego creativity and awaiting the visit of the Weeping Aubergine / Eggplant from the Light of Idaho. Sounds both surreal and scary? Well, it is. 

I managed to read this book in one day, which is a good thing, and at times it made me laugh out loud and other times nod in sad recognition. Yes, it is a bit broad at times perhaps, and certainly you can feel the author’s frustration with the current higher education climate, but anyone working in the Humanities will recognise the tropes that this novel satirises, such as compulsory attendance at events during Staff Wellbeing Weeks instead of doing any research, 87% of students receiving first class honours degrees and the Creative Writing programmes being viewed with deep suspicion and loathing by those in charge. 

Stannard uses to great effect the dystopian device of keeping the near future near enough for us to recognise many of the directives and initiatives but extrapolating them just far enough for the reader to think: yes, actually, that could well happen. We only have to consider the changes the last decade has seen in higher education, the way league table position and awards are trumpeted at open days whilst redundancy policies are rife, leaving a shrivelled team of lecturers to work forty or fifty hours a week to keep up. And, heaven forfend, should there be a fall in the league table, a fall in the NSS, a fall in the REF, the blame is placed firmly back at those same lecturers’ doors – why aren’t they doing more in terms of outreach, pedagogy, knowledge exchange, public visibility, reflection? The move towards obsessions over lanyards and a consideration of whether robotic dogs might do a better (and of course cheaper) job of teaching students than actual people doesn’t actually seem so ridiculous.

But I would stress that this is not just a book for those working in humanities in HEIs across the UK, this doesn’t just speak to that handful of Creative Writing academics who get asked ‘Yes, but what are you employability statisitics like?’ It is for anyone who values education, who values culture, who considers the world their children or grandchildren are going to inherit in terms of learning, philosophy, literature and art. It is a highly readable novel, biting, funny and fast paced, but at the same time, do take a pause every now and then to consider the world Stannard is creating – how close do you think we’re getting to that now?

About the reviewer
Kim Wiltshire is a writer and academic, Reader and Programme Leader for Creative Writing at Edge Hill University. She writes scripts, short stories and was a British Academy Innovation Fellowship researching ways of embedding arts into healthcare settings during 2022 and 2023. 

Review by Jonathan Taylor of "The Moon Looks on Them All: Of Friends and Friendship" by John Lucas

Despite their reputation for egocentrism, memoirs are often – perhaps always – about relationships between a narrator and other people. As critics Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson point out, “there is a relational aspect to most life writing," and many others have claimed something similar. This “relationality” (as they call it) most commonly encompasses fathers, mothers, siblings, children; but there is a growing sub-genre of memoirs and personal essays which recognises the vital role played by friends in our lives. John Lucas’s fascinating and wide-ranging The Moon Looks on Them All is a significant and beautifully-written contribution to this sub-genre of friendship-memoirs (filikigraphy?). 

Like all the best books about friendship, what Lucas’s memoir recognises is that “relationality” does not simply mean that the story is about two (or three, or fifteen) people rather than one. No: "relationality" means that the relationships themselves become focal points, main characters, above and beyond the individuals involved. Friendships are themselves stories: friendships have narrative arcs of many different kinds, and each of the chapters in Lucas’s book is, first and foremost, a story of a key friendship in the author’s life. Of course we find out about the amazing individuals involved – poets, academics, jazz musicians, E. M. Forster, Brian Clough, Lucas’s cat – but above and beyond that, we follow the story of Lucas’s changing relationships with them over time.

The result is a life-affirming patchwork of interweaving friendships, voices, anecdotes, poems and brilliantly-drawn character portraits. At one point, Lucas admits that “sooner or later, everyone I meet, and get to know, will remind me of a character in Dickens” - and The Moon Looks on Them All is rather like a Dickens novel, teeming with memorable characters. If the cumulative effect of a Dickens novel is often that the reader feels immersed in a vibrant all-encompassing community, something similar might be said, on a microcosmic scale, of the community of friends in Lucas’s memoir. He cites E. M. Forster’s faith in “Love, the beloved Republic,” in “an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky” – and that seems to me as good a description as any of the utopian community of friends which Lucas depicts in this book. 

About the reviewer
Jonathan Taylor is an author, editor, lecturer and critic. His two most recent books are the memoir A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline & Other Lessons (Goldsmiths, 2024), and the short story collection Scablands and Other Stories (Salt, 2023). He directs the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. 

Review by Jonathan Wilkins of "Lie of the Land" by Kerry Hadley-Pryce

The Black Country. Dark, foreboding  gloom-ridden. Lie of the Land is exactly the same: dark, foreboding with an aura of gloom and added tension as our main protagonist, Jemma, is faced with ever-increasing anxiety as she makes major life changes that have unforeseen consequences for herself and those around her. She had what seemed the perfect life but after what she thought would be a one night stand she is sucked into a relationship which has tragic consequences and tilts her balanced lifestyle. 

After an incredibly short relationship and against all her own misgivings, Jemma moves with Rory into a dilapidated house with ‘prospects’ so she is told, and endures a shocking nightmare event which the end of the novel contends with. The event is so unbelievable that it tilts her world from its axis as she faces life-changing dramas as she is pulled from normality into a world and life not of her choosing. There are so many strands to this novel. Does Jemma fall for Catherine her neighbour? What will happen to Rory as he is seduced into the orbit of Ed her husband? What happened to Amber, is it all a dream? Will Kaitlin prove to be a friend and to whom, Jemma or Rory? Just what happened to the missing child? Who or what is the lie of the land? Will Rory’s former fiancée Sophie ever recover? Exactly why did Jemma visit her in hospital? She doesn’t seem to be one who is clouded by guilt, but the nervous tension of her relationship with Rory and her ambivalent feelings towards him seem to push her into situations that she does not want to be involved in. She is yanked, almost kicking and screaming, into a world that is everything she doesn’t want and cannot escape. Is this the lie of the land, the bleak and threatening Black Country fugue?

All these questions remain unanswered. We are kept thinking, we are involved in the story and need to make a commitment to it. Throughout the tension that builds up is tangible. We feel every emotion alongside Jemma and care about her which is no small thing as she started off as quite an unattractive character. Hadley-Pryce writes and describes her world with consummate ease as she draws us into a nightmarish domain where reality and threat merge and Jemma cannot see what is real and what is illusory. Just what is it that wakes her at night? Who or what is making the sounds that invade her mind? What is the unseen threat to her happiness? Does her guilt shape her world, her truth? This is a fine example of a story with so many layers and themes, that we are compelled to read on - a story of a woman whose mind is teetering on the edge of fracture, a story that leaves us wanting more.

About the reviewer

Jonathan Wilkins is 69. He is married to the gorgeous Annie with two wonderful sons. He was a teacher for twenty years, a Waterstones’ bookseller and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years before taking up writing seriously. Nowadays he takes notes for students with Special Needs at Leicester and Warwick Universities. He has had a work commissioned by the UK Arts Council and several pieces published traditionally as well as on-line. He has had poems in magazines and anthologies, art galleries, studios, museums and at Huddersfield Railway Station. He loves writing poetry. For his MA, he wrote a crime novel, Utrecht Snow. He followed it up with Utrecht Rain, and is now writing a third part. He is currently writing a crime series, Poppy Knows Best, set at the end of the Great War and into the early 1920s.

You can read more about Lie of the Land by Kerry Hadley-Pryce on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Peter Raynard of "Our Fathers" by Michael Brown

 

In a world where on the one hand powerful men are abusing their position through predatory activity towards women, whilst on the other there are surging rates of suicide in men under the age of forty-five, it is important that we write to fill the picture with positive portrayals of men, by subverting the notion of what a "real man" is. Poetry has responded to this more recently, with books by Jack Underwood and Ray Antrobus gaining recognition.

Michael Brown’s Overton Poetry Prize-winning pamphlet Our Fathers is a welcome addition to this trend. Being both a parent (of a daughter) and a son himself, Brown’s poems convey tri-generational relations, relations with other men, and boyhood escapades.

The opening poem "In the Men’s Group" sets a sad scene of "a man whose wife told him he is a waste of space," and "a policeman sleeping on a blow up bed at his parents."

We then move to a short powerful poem "Shift" which is reminiscent of poems by Fred Voss: "The man made of shopfloor swarf put down / The battered gold and green baccy tin // The machinery in his head diminishing // At the sink his wife can sense the shift in him."

His relationship with his father is set in the family car, a place where measures of a relationship unfold. In the poem "In Late Summer, 1983" they are on the M1 taking Brown to live in another town. Looking at his father to "stare across the front passenger seat / at Watford Gap, or some other nondescript place he’d check on the map / to look at the way we’d come, how far."

There is a confidence in the variety of form and sound of each poem, such as in "Aqua Terra," with off rhymes across lines, such as skill, kill, flint, and microlith.

Finally I like the way Brown ends the pamphlet with the poem "Cot Song" about the birth of his daughter (who is now a teenager at least), subverting a linear narrative, showing the fragility of a newborn life, the responsibility of a parent, and the signalling of constant renewal:

          Little limb reaching up

         for some response
         from us, such Gods

         who kept you
         in the cosmos of your cot.

When asked what a poet should do in their writing, Louis MacNeice said "mention things." Brown mentions plenty of things in a short space of sixteen poems. He is rewriting what a man is, and what men can be, in a world where other so-called men catch the headlines for all the wrong reasons.

About the reviewer

Peter Raynard is an independent researcher, poet and editor of Proletarian Poetry. His three books of poetry are: Precarious (Smokestack, 2018), The Combination: a poetic coupling of the Communist Manifesto (Culture Matters,2018), Manland (Nine Arches Press, 2022). A debut pamphlet (a heroic crown of sonnets), The Harlot and the Rake: poems after William Hogarth, was published by Culture Matters in September 2024.

Review by Neil Fulwood of "Beethoven: The String Quartets" by David Vernon

Erudite without being pretentious, learned without being dustily academic, philosophical without being obfuscatory, David Vernon’s wonderful book, Beethoven: The String Quartets, whirls the reader through Beethoven’s sixteen string quartets, locating them in every possible context - social, political, religious, historical, contemporary - as well as rigorously exploring their relationship to the rest of Beethoven’s oeuvre. Vernon comes across as a polymath, an intellectual and a man of culture. That he also demonstrates wit, warmth and humanity is the icing on the cake. Beethoven: the String Quartets is the kind of book that sets the gold standard for non-fiction.

About the reviewer
Neil Fulwood lives and works in Nottingham. He has published four full poetry collections with Shoestring Press, No Avoiding It, Can’t Take Me Anywhere, Service Cancelled and The Point of the Stick; and a volume of political satires, Mad Parade, with Smokestack Books.

Review by Lee Wright of "Two Sisters" by Blake Morrison

Blake Morrison’s younger sister, Gill, passed away at 67 from complications related to alcoholism. His latest memoir, Two Sisters, recounts Gill’s heartbreaking decline into severe alcohol addiction, worsened by the additional burden of losing her eyesight. Though Morrison cannot directly live through Gill’s specific challenges, he empathises with the physical, and psychological toll of such a loss. 

Morrison’s half-sister, Josie – the result of their father’s affair with a family friend – is the second sister featured in the memoir. Her paternity was confirmed through a DNA test just eight months before she tragically took her own life. 

Another interpretation of the title is that it reflects two versions of Gill: one sober, the other intoxicated. As a young girl, Gill was bullied at boarding school, and ultimately died alone, curled up on a strip of carpet between a bed and a radiator. Two Sisters is more experimental than Morrison’s earlier memoirs, blending excerpts from his diary with chapters that explore real-life brother-sister relationships, such as those between Charles and Mary Lamb and Dorothy and William Wordsworth. This elevates Two Sisters from a straightforward memoir into a broader, more reflective examination of familial dynamics and the complexities of sibling relationships. By weaving in these external examples, Morrison invites readers to compare his own experiences with those of historical and literary figures, prompting questions about the ties that bind. Many argue that those who are stronger have a responsibility to help the weaker. On the other hand, there are opposing views that emphasise individual responsibility, suggesting that it may not be the duty of the strong to help the weak if it infringes upon personal freedom. Morrison maintains that ‘It’s what happens with addicts. They kill your compassion. For a time Gill’s drinking killed mine.’ 

Whether it should be a brother’s responsibility to look out for his sister depends on individual values, and the specifics of the relationship between siblings. Do siblings have a moral obligation to support and care for each other? In the end, each familial relationship is unique. ‘Sisters do go missing,’ writes Morrison. ‘They go missing in horrible ways, abducted, murdered, forcibly married, disappeared for causing trouble to the powers that be. And sometimes they go missing by choice, to escape their families or – as we’ll discover later in this story – because they’ve fallen out of love with life.’ Morrison’s decision to write about his sisters is driven by a desire to make sense of their lives and to reconcile with the past. Two Sisters is infused with a profound sense of sadness as Morrison also processes his own emotions and commemorates his lost siblings as if their spirits were peering over his shoulder, watching him type and reading his words. After finishing the memoir, the final few lines of enslaved poet, Phillis Wheatley Peters’ 1773 poem, 'To a Gentleman and Lady on the Death of the Lady's Brother and Sister, and a Child of the Name Avis, Aged One Year,' came to mind: 

          Methinks I hear her in the realms above,

          And leaning forward with a filial love,
          Invite you there to share immortal bliss
          Unknown, untasted in a state like this.
          With tow'ring hopes, and growing grace arise,
          And seek beatitude beyond the skies.

About the reviewer
Lee Wright has an MA in Creative Writing and is currently working towards a PhD researching memoir and film. His fiction and poetry have been published with Fairlight Books, époque press and Burning House Press.

Review by Julie Gardner of "The Box" by Susan Jordan

This novel tackles difficult themes but Susan Jordan’s experience as a psychotherapist means that she writes with authority and compassion. The two main characters are Richard, overwhelmed with grief after the sudden death of his wife, Kate, and Kate’s twin Jo whose already fragile mental health is at breaking point as she tries to deal, not only with the loss of her beloved sister, but also with emerging memories of traumatic events from their childhood. 

The novel is written in the third person but each chapter focusses on one of the key characters, mostly Richard and Jo, although three chapters are given up to Marian, the mother of the twins and one to Fran, Richard’s sister. This shifting perspective works well and the unfolding narrative provides insights into how different people deal with grief and trauma as well as suggesting ways in which well-meaning relatives, friends and even professionals can sometimes get it wrong. 

The box of the title contains Kate’s ashes and a thread running through the novel is the need Richard and Jo both feel to find the right place to scatter them. This provides a satisfying framework within which the story is told. Jordan avoids sentimentality and while the ending provides a satisfying conclusion to the narrative, it avoids being too neat.

About the reviewer
Julie Gardner is studying towards a PhD at Nottingham Trent University, focussing on Silence and Voice in the poetry of Vicki Feaver and her contemporaries. He poetry pamphlet Remembering was published by Five Leaves Publishers in 2024.

You can read a review of Remembering on Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Review by Peter Raynard of "Orbital" by Samantha Harvey

Set completely on a space ship, the Booker Prize-winning novel Orbital by Samantha Harvey (her fifth) melds the claustrophobic (as opposed to clashes) with the constant expanse of Earth, as the ship zips around in sixteen orbits. The descriptions of our planet are beautifully done, and you get an understanding of the different terrains, whilst accepting their common home. Inside, the inside lives of the astronauts and cosmonauts (British, Russian, American) are traced against this backdrop. The research that must have been put into the writing is exhausting – but never did the research distract from it being a novel. 

There is the constant paradox of a vessel moving at enormous speed whilst they are cocooned static within it: "They retreat inside their headphones and press weights and cycle nowhere at twenty-three times the speed of sound on a bike that has no seat or handlebars, just a set of pedals attached to a rig, and run eight miles inside a slick metal module with a close up view of a turning planet." 

I would have liked a bit more narrative to the personal story about each naut, but realise this is only a minor frustration, given their static station. But the poetic nature of the earth is brought out in Harvey’s poetic descriptions: "The way the planet seems to breathe, an animal unto itself …. It’s the black hole of the Pacific becoming a field of gold or French Polynesia dotted below, the islands like cell samples, the atolls opal lozenges."

I was surprised to see the book only getting 3.3 out of 5 on Goodreads/Amazon; however. I would agree with some of the criticisms regarding the limits of the inner life of each character but disagree with those who felt it repetitive – it was of course repetitive. They keep on going round the planet, but it is never the same view and that is the point. Our planet keeps coming up with surprises. This will be a novel I will go back to, as there is much to consume in such a small space, one spinning in parallel to the earth’s kaleidoscopic vastness.

About the reviewer
Peter Raynard is an independent researcher, poet and editor of Proletarian Poetry. His three books of poetry are: Precarious (Smokestack, 2018), The Combination: a poetic coupling of the Communist Manifesto (Culture Matters,2018), Manland (Nine Arches Press, 2022). A debut pamphlet (a heroic crown of sonnets), The Harlot and the Rake: poems after William Hogarth, was published by Culture Matters in September 2024.