The first thing one might notice when reading this novel is the breaking of conventional prose style. Its lack of full stops or speech marks and use of enjambment and repetition of single words follows a more poetic style. The structure of the novel is also unconventional; each character’s life is summarised from childhood to adulthood with some of them being loosely connected.
Following the generations through this kind of structure lends itself well to the telling of family history, and lineage is an important theme of this novel. It reminded me of the television series Roots which begins with the African slave Kunta Kinte and follows the journeys of his sucesssive children, grandchildren and so forth into modern day Afro-America.
I read The Lonely Londoners just before reading this but was disappointed by the lack of female voices in the narrative. I was glad that Girl, Woman, Other was addressing this gap in the diaspora. It was even more enjoyable for me as a British Caribbean woman to be able to relate to this novel.
I haven’t read much around the novel’s creation as I wanted to read it without any preconceptions. I wonder how many of these characters are based on real people and which parts have been fictionalized. I felt like Evaristo was using the expanse of the story to address every trope and stereotype rather than creating authentic characters. Nevertheless, she successfully creates emotional nuance; I found a few of the stories really heartbreaking.
I’m glad that this sort of writing is receiving acclaim and I hope it facilitates more modern and diverse writers to have an impact on our canon.
About the reviewer
Tionee Joseph is completing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. She has a blog where she writes about writing and gives lifestyle advice, which you can read here. Her articles on film, TV and adaptations have been published. She is currently working on her first thriller novel and writing her first album.
It is a truism that all children should be grateful to their parents; it is not often we hear the reverse of that. Philip Tew should be pleased that his son advised him to refresh his manuscripts and add a third short story to the collection that has been published as Fragmentary Lives.
Here are three novellas, three very different aspects of a life, three versions of how life can twist and turn, bring us down or build us up. These are three stories well worth reading in isolation or more importantly together.
For me the middle story, “Swimming the Goldfish Bowl” is the stand out. It is a visceral description of a man's downfall. Luke has no idea that he is the victim in a tale of sex, abuse and kidnapping. He has no reason to conclude he is being used by a woman with her own agenda, no idea that his world can be so easily be brought crashing down. This seems to me to be the ideal building block of a full length crime or mystery thriller - a start to what could be an outstanding plot with so many outcomes possible. The denouement is both shocking and questioning, surely the perfect short story that has the reader pleading to know more.
The final novella "After the Revolution (Failed to Materialize)" is a visceral tale of a life lived, mistakes made and wrong turns taken. It is a withering account of the years of Thatcher and how the Hard Left failed in its attempt to gain power. Disillusionment is rife in this piece as we see how relationships can break down so easily despite the well-meaning of the participants. It is all so real, the accounts of partnerships foundering for so many reasons and of mistakes made in choices taken. This is a real-life account of how things don’t always work our for the best, yet an account that gives us a little hope as the writer comes full circle in his search for contentment. The beauty of “After the Revolution” is that we can meet protagonist Jim Dent again in Tew’s outstanding first novel Afterlives (reviewed here).
The first novella “Another Long Weekend” skirts around romance and infatuation as we see how relationships grow and fail. Friendship is at the centre of the story and how the writer takes advantages of friendships at all levels whilst being taken advantage of himself. It is the story of a life that we can all recognise and want to know more about.
Life is fragmentary and these pieces can join together or be shaken apart. The novellas throw all the pieces up into the air and we wait as we turn each page to find where they have landed and what effect they will have on the protagonists. This is the final conceit of the three novellas. We are left engaged and don’t want the stories to end. We are being invited into Tew’s world and we want more as a result of this invitation.
About the reviewer
Jon Wilkins is sixty-three. He has a gorgeous wife Annie and two beautiful sons, and loves to write. He is a retired teacher, lapsed Waterstones’ bookseller and former Basketball Coach. He taught PE and English for twenty years and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years. He has always loved books and reading.
To the extent that many of the poems in this collection aim to give a picture of Jinny Fisher’s physical world, real and remembered, they succeed. In ‘Sunday Lunch’ Mother ‘works oil into the surface’ of a ‘long table’ with her ‘bleached wooden brush’; in ‘Screen Memory’ a ‘shiny red hand-pump … spurts brook water for the kettle,’ while in ‘Antiphon’ a crowd ‘almost trample / two tiny wellington boots, painted with daisies, / half buried in the mud.’ Fisher, who has undergone a series of metamorphoses from classical violinist, to psychotherapist to poet, has an eye for detail. Her descriptions are precise. The reader is treated to a series of clearly defined images, but a number are inert. The scene is set but nothing happens.
This is not true of all of these poems. ‘Half-Sister’s Lunch’ neatly captures the tensions between the two women; sharing a plate of food and tearing bread dramatically portray their closeness and rivalry and there is genuine tension in the build up to the magnificent last line. Another work that should be singled out for praise is ‘Regeneration’ which simultaneously keeps in play the shock, the relief, and the new found freedom that comes from the end of what appears to be an abusive relationship. But that’s not all. A faint air of regret hangs about the poem. As someone who has studied psychoanalysis, Fisher is all too aware of the dangerous ambiguity of human emotion.
One of the eye-catching qualities of the collection is the layout of Fisher’s poems. Some, like the title poem, are laid out in paragraphs, others like ‘The Scarf’ follow the shape of the object they describe. All of them, whether they are about home, family relations or even her violin have something to recommend them.
About the reviewer
Gary Day is a retired English lecturer. His research mainly lay in three areas, the history of literary criticism, the workings of class in British literature and the persistence of sacrificial ritual in the development of drama. He had a column in the Times Higher for a number of years and has also edited two volumes on the history of British poetry as well as the three volume Wiley Encyclopaedia of British Literature 1660-1789. He hates management speak, has been involved in amateur theatre for over thirty years and is still trying to write poetry.
The fictional town of Holdersea is easy to picture if you’ve ever been to a seaside resort which has grown suburbs. The old lighthouse and the phenomenon of longshore drift are both recurring motifs in One Scheme of Happiness, a novel rich with metaphor and imagery - a real writer’s read.
The narrator, Helen, a forty-something homebody who has been caring for her mother for twenty years, understandably finds herself lacking direction when her mother passes away. Having lived in one house in one town all her life, its features and people crowd around her, especially when her childhood “best friend” Vicky and her husband Sam, another friend from school days, move back to Holdersea with their two children. Vicky quickly reconnects with Helen, who in turn becomes infatuated with Sam.
The narration is one of the strengths of the novel, by turns poetic, unreliable and with moments of obvious dramatic irony. Seldom does it fall into the trap of being too conversationalist, especially considering the overall structure. Helen frequently reminisces about her childhood, showing rather than telling the reader about Vicky’s abusive, controlling tendencies and drip-feeding background to the plot and characters in the present. One thing she doesn’t explain much is what makes Sam attractive, but we’ve probably all struggled to put into words why we like someone at some point.
A hornet’s nest growing within a Tuscan holiday villa, swelling as the house itself is weakened, reflects the extramarital affair which begins in the warm Italian hills. Ann, a high-flying academic from a deprived background with whom Helen has actually kept in touch since school, tries to offer advice, but is ignored. Helen’s obsession increasingly unsettles the reader, culminating in her taking sudden and shocking measures.
The conclusion of the story is rather brief, although this does emphasise the impact of the twists, one of which seems something of a deus ex machina. The ending is open to interpretation and is therefore as satisfying as you want it to be. An intriguing and accomplished novel.
About the reviewer
Rob Jones studied English with Creative Writing options at the University of Leicester and completed an MA in Victorian Studies there. He lives in Sileby with his wife, sings with Leicester University Chamber Choir and dreams of working in heritage.
In this manga, the main character Tanjiro is fighting two powerful demons from the Upper Moon 6, called Daki and Gytaro. Uzui and his three helpers are helping Tanjiro defeat Gytaro, while Inosuke and Zenitsu try and defeat Daki. There are two main battles in this book.
The two demons have been eating the residents of the entertainment district for years. Daki has dressed herself as an upper-class Orian to disguise herself.
This book is extremely dramatic and exciting. My favourite character is Tanjiro’s sister Nezuko. She saves everyone from dying by burning off some poison. I love this book so much I have read it twelve times. A brilliant manga!
About the reviewer
Rosalind Taylor is eleven years old. She loves reading manga, especially Demon Slayer, and watching anime. She also loves drawing her own manga. She has a twin sister called Miranda.
The sea is everywhere in Claire Walker’s beautiful new pamphlet of poems, Collision, haunting its geography, its characters’ voices, language and dreams. Here, ‘brine rises to the surface … / it coats our skin, our hearts,’ and ‘it creeps like a vine / across the map of this town.’ Sailors wear sweaters threaded with ‘waves, … [and] salt hides / in the Arran twists.’ The sea ‘calls to them like a lover,’ and ‘at night, she nestles in their heads, / whispers in waves.’
And if the sea’s voice is female, so too are the other voices which Walker recovers from the sea’s histories, its romances, legends and shipwrecks. These all-too-often-overlooked voices do not tell macho sailors’ yarns, but rather the stories of women who ‘swam / against history, made the coast’ – of mothers, lovers, mermaids, ‘The Fishwife,’ and the groundbreaking nineteenth-century palaeontologist Mary Anning.
In the short sequence of poems dedicated to her, Anning becomes both a powerful counter-voice to a male-dominated history of palaeontology (‘they … try and erase me’), and a displaced representation of the female poet. A kind of poet-scientist, Anning collects symbols from the sea (in her case, symbols of evolutionary history), and then marks them, writes on them: ‘my fingerprints are spelled out on flint / letters chiselled in the lines of my nameless bones.’ Walker’s description of Anning in the poem ‘She Sells Seashells’ might almost stand as an allegory of her own method:
Now picture the girl.
I gather the coast; hidden art waits
for my fingers to unfold rocks.
I line my finds out on a table,
little fancies I’ve cleaned
to show the shape of all our pasts …
Limestone presses messages
on the seashore.
As Anning knew well, though, these messages from the seashore are never straightforward: ‘most would laugh me off the [cliff] edge,’ she says, ‘claim a hoax.’ Messages, symbols, images from the sea are ambivalent, complex, over-determined, culturally and historically loaded, sometimes even laughable.
Walker understands this, too – the way in which age-old sea imagery can overwhelm the real, drown it in signification, as it were. In ‘Self-Fulfilling Prophecy,’ symbolic language has become just that – a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby ‘real’ seagulls seem to have been overtaken by their representation: ‘tired / of our assumptions’ they ‘are living up to their reputation.’ The symbolic has almost erased the real. Similarly, in ‘A Tattooist’s Mistake,’ sea imagery takes on a life of its own, overwhelming the human subject:
You ask for a mermaid,
so that is what I give you.
My needle draws her slender back,
arching to surf that nibbles her skin.
Hair red and long, floating
like crimson seaweed out against water …
After you leave,
you spend the night beachcombing –
she, supple in the twist of your arm.
You return at sunrise, hollow-eyed,
ask me for starfish, seaglass, oysters;
the entire spill of an ocean.
The language of the sea – its imagery, cultural weight, symbols – cannot be contained; it ‘doesn’t pack neatly into crates,’ and ultimately overwhelms the tattooist, artist, poet, palaeontologist. Voices, selfhood, identities, whether male or female, are all too easily ‘lost to the fetch of a wave.’ Nonetheless, as Walker’s evocative poems demonstrate, the attempt to swim against the tide, ‘against history,’ in itself remains worthwhile. Even if the sea will always, in the end, overwhelm representation, drowning out all other voices, something beautiful might be salvaged in the attempt. As Walker puts it, ‘something in us admires the wreck.’
About the reviewer
Jonathan Taylor is director of Everybody's Reviewing. His books include the poetry collection Cassandra Complex (Shoestring, 2018), and the novel Melissa (Salt, 2015). He directs the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. His website is www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk.
A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees is a short selection of essays taken from Yoshida Kenkō's longer collection called Tsurezuregusa, or Essays in Idleness.
Kenkō (c.1283 - c.1352) was a Japanese monk who wrote in the zuihitsu (follow the brush) stream-of-consciousness style, which was often used to create loosely connected personal essays reflecting on the ephemeral aspects of life.
Now, you might be wondering, "What could I possibly have in common with a medieval monk?"
Well, as we now live in times of self-isolation and social distancing, who better to relate to than the introspective Japanese monk?
Whilst monks are typically seen as recluses who are far removed from society in every aspect, what I have learnt from Kenkō is that the musings of monks are still very much about people, society and the connections we can forge through finding the same sparks of inspiration. Kenkō himself reflects on this by saying, "It is a most wonderful comfort to sit alone beneath a lamp, book spread before you, and commune with someone from the past whom you have never met." He then goes on to admire "scholars of former times" whose "moving" works date to around 6th century - 4th century BC ... leaving us with a rather cosy picture of a monk happily settling down to discuss his favourite authors in the same way that you or I might.
What's particularly interesting about this concept is that Kenkō reinforces the age-old idea that words transcend space and time. In fact, you almost get a sense that you're physically holding generations of human inspiration in your hands, when you listen to him speak about what people of former times found beautiful or captivating:
"Should we look at the spring blossoms only in full flower, or the moon only when cloudless and clear?"
"Could poems on the themes of 'Going to view the blossoms to find them already fallen' or 'Written when I was prevented from going to see the flowers' be deemed inferior to 'On seeing the blossoms'?"
"It is natural human feeling to yearn over the falling blossoms and the setting moon - yet some, it seems, are so insensitive that they will declare that since this branch and that have already shed their flowers, there is nothing worth seeing any longer."
Kenkō's vivid imagery gives us moving glimpses of what humanity was and still is. He chooses to discuss the "spring blossoms" and "setting moon" - things that are unchanging with time, making his essays read like conversation starters with us. He paints pictures of the smallest striking moments and decides to share them with none other than your good self.
Now, it is easy to feel intimidated by such grand portrayals of nature and mankind. Those of you who were initially wondering "What could I possibly have in common with a medieval monk?" may now be thinking "How could I possibly relate to someone as cool as this monk?"
Fear not.
Kenkō very clearly says: "No-one could be less enviable than a monk. Sei Shōnagon wrote that people treat them like unfeeling lumps of wood, and this is perfectly true." I challenge you to find anything more relatable than that.
About the reviewer
Thilsana Gias is an MA Creative Writing graduate from the University of Leicester. Her favourite Shakespeare play is Macbeth. She is an English tutor and will train to teach Secondary School English soon. She's also hoping she'll finish re-working her dissertation into a publishable piece of writing.
This stunning flash fiction debut takes us on a compelling journey, with Laura Besley skilfully weaving together a variety of narratives as far removed from the familiar womb-warmth of traditional tales of motherhood that one could possibly imagine.
This is an exploration of motherhood, in all its complexities. Besley refuses to hold back, plunging the reader into the realisation that motherhood is often stark and terrifying, with her opening story, "Mothers Anonymous." We hear from Melissa: "'I’m Melissa,’ she says in a raspy voice like she smokes a pack a day… And I hate being a mother.'" And from there, Besley drags us through each tale by the heartstrings.
In "Everything’s Fine," we see how being a new mum means discarding one’s own self, to emerge unrecognisable, even in your own mirror: "I see a face and step back, knocking over a bin when I realize it’s me. The new me. The she who doesn’t wear make-up, have time to wash or sometimes even brush her hair."
Then, we have moments of wry humour in "Down To Earth," a humorous story about Earth mothers, told from an alien point of view. But quickly we find ourselves hurtling downward again, with the horrifying "Wish Upon a Star," a story that takes your breath away in just three, short paragraphs.
Besley dips into dystopian futures, with two tense and terrifying stories, "In Hiding" and "The Unmothers," and she’s also not afraid to acknowledge the non-mothers, with her uncompromising story "That Face" and with the brief, but intensely powerful, "How to Grow Your Own Baby."
The Almost Mothers is a wonderful collection of short fiction which has real depth and poignancy. Besley captures motherhood beautifully in this raw and uncompromising debut. I look forward reading much more of her work in the future.
About the reviewer
Kathy Hoyle is an MA graduate from The University of Leicester. Her short stories and flash fiction have appeared in a variety of literary magazines such as Virtualzine, Silver Apples, Reflex Fiction and Another North. She was shortlisted for The Exeter Short Story Prize, The Fish Memoir Prize and the Ellipsiszine Flash Fiction Collection Prize. She is currently working on her first novel.
This is a poignant, compelling story of love and desolation amid the sterling work of ambulance women during the 1914-18 World War.
As any good reader or writer knows, it is the detail that convinces and transports us to the virtual landscape of a story. Like all great novels set in the First World War (All Quiet On The Western Front; A Farewell To Arms …), Jon Wilkins’s excellent novel, Poppy Flowers At The Front, airlifts us directly into the sights and smells and sounds and mud and blood and horror and senseless waste of the trenches.
We are in safe hands, though (we hope), with the engaging narrator Poppy Loveday, who guides us through her story as surely as her ambulance negotiates the muddy rutted tracks between the field hospital and the Front, with shells exploding around her. She is diligent in her selfless efforts, but is consumed daily by the suffering of "young boys in pain, a pain they did not deserve. Boys who screamed in terror, far from home and their mothers."
Yet, amid it all, there is light-hearted relief, humour and sensitivity, especially in the jaunts to Paris, rural France and rural England. And on a visit home, there is a beautifully understated exchange as Poppy’s father quizzes her about how hard life really is on the Western Front: "'Now tell me all about France, the truth mind…' So, I did and he was very quiet and very shocked."
The main counterpoint to the horrors of trench-warfare is embodied in a wonderfully handled and sensitive love story. The reader turns the pages in anticipation of something dreadful happening to the heroine or her lover at any time … and … (no spoilers!). Recommended.
About the reviewer
Gus Gresham is an avid reader and writer. He has a Master’s degree in Creative Writing and has worked variously as a mechanical engineer, construction worker, fruit picker, community activist for Greenpeace, writer, English tutor, audio-book producer, interpersonal and communication skills facilitator, and building surveyor. He’s had short stories published in literary magazines Brittle Star and Under The Radar, and his recently published novel, EARTHRISE, is available on Amazon. You can read a review of it here.
