Bookclub Reads

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell

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The Marriage Portrait

A luscious historical drama

I’ve been craving a juicy historical drama and along comes The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell. Set in Renaissance Italy, the novel is loosely based on Lucrezia di Cosimo de’Medici’s disastrous marriage to Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara. As many aristocratic girls of her time, poor 13 year-old Lucrezia becomes a chess piece in the political game of strategic unions. Farrell gets under the skin of our bewildered heroine as we follow her from one golden cage to the next. Her writing transports us to a different time with evocative descriptions of landscapes, interiors, clothing, smells and sounds. Is it as good as the fabulous Hamnet?  Not quite, but it’s nevertheless a delightful, fairytale-esque, page-turner.

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Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin

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Madonna in a Fur Coat

Haunting Turkish tale of love and destiny

A novel of doomed love in 1920’s Berlin, Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali is a Turkish treasure. It tells the story of Raif, an introspective and solitary young man who leaves Turkey for the bright lights of Weimar Berlin. In this city of flourishing intellectual and cultural freedoms, he encounters Maria, an enigmatic artist who will come to transform his melancholic life. Told in two parts by an unnamed narrator, we follow Raif’s journey of discovery, as the free-thinking Maria challenges his notions of romantic love, gender roles, and self-reliance.

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Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley

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Nightcrawling

An exciting new voice for young black womanhood

Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley positively springs from the Booker Prize 2022 longlist, and not merely for its conspicuously pink cover. At the age of 20, Mottley is the youngest author ever to make the longlist, dazzling with a debut coming-of-age novel set on the meanest streets of Oakland, California. This is 17-year-old Kiara’s story, technically still a child, but with adult-sized problems. When a dire financial emergency pushes Kiara into prostitution, her ‘baby ho,’ status renders her irresistible to a certain type of man, some of them even sporting Oakland Police Department uniform. What follows is a blistering study of corruption, abuse of power, and young black womanhood.

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Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck

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Travels With Charley

On the road with an American great and his beloved French poodle

First published in 1962, Travels With Charley by John Steinbeck captures a momentous period in the writer’s life. Ageing, ailing, and concerned that he has lost touch with the American spirit, Steinbeck invites us on a road trip. Complete with customised camper van and a poodle named Charley, we motor thousands of miles under wide skies, in search of the essence of modern America. From his love affair with Montana, to misgivings about Texas, Steinbeck considers the ways that his country has changed since his wandering youth. In this gem of a travelogue, we’re in the finest of company.

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Briefly A Delicious Life by Nell Stevens

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Briefly A Delicious Life

Compelling tale of a lovelorn ghost and the legendary George Sand

Briefly A Delicious Life by Nell Stevens is an intoxicating debut novel, blessed with a brilliantly inspired storyline. Set in a Mallorcan former monastery in 1838, it tells the story of Blanca, the ghost of a teenage girl. Habit has kept her haunting its environs for centuries, measuring her days in the tiniest increments, ‘A pomegranate seed, nudged in the path of a sparrow. A spider scaling a pane of glass.’ This three-hundred plus years interlude is interrupted the day George Sand and Frédéric Chopin come to stay. Smitten by their creative, free-thinking ways, Blanca finds herself falling in love. Read full Review

Spies in Canaan by David Park

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Spies in Canaan

Ghosts of the past

Michael Miller lives a comfortable East Coast life as a retired diplomat. One day, a padded envelope arrives which will rip open a part of his past he’d rather forget. As a young man, Michael was a paper pusher at the American embassy during the final days of the Vietnam War. Ostensibly a benign role which became less so as he fell under the spell of hawkish CIA analyst Ignatius Donovan. Spies in Canaan by David Park, follows on from his exquisite Travelling in a Strange Land, and, again, Park creates a complete and gripping fictional universe within a mere 200 pages.

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Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart

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Young Mungo

A darker, quieter follow up to Shuggie Bain

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart follows on from Stuart’s outstanding Booker Prize winning debut Shuggie Bain.  Although the setting is very much the same – Glaswegian tenements, dysfunctional families, absent fathers and alcoholic mothers – the story feels different enough to engage even those who’ve read Shuggie Bain. A burgeoning love between Mungo and fellow loner James is at the core of this book, the moving tenderness of their relationship in stark contrast to the rough realities on the street and at home. In true Stuart style, characters and places rise from the page but I felt some of the pace and immediacy of his debut was missing in this book. Still a good read, but not the mind-blower that was Shuggie Bain. Read full Review

The Tenants of Moonbloom by Edward Lewis Wallant

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The Tenants of Moonbloom

A bizarre epiphany in bygone New York

The Tenants of Moonbloom by Edward Lewis Wallant is an unjustly neglected American gem. A deliciously peculiar novel, comic and melancholic in equal parts, it takes us to a down-at-heel New York at the turn of the 1950’s and the dreary life of daydreamer and rent collector, Norman Moonbloom. Norman’s days are spent chasing rent from hapless tenants, whilst attempting to dodge their numerous demands, complaints, and often riotous domestic dramas. Too sensitive for the world of the mercenary slumlord, he will undergo a quiet epiphany against a disintegrating backdrop of leaking taps and treacherous wiring.

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All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami

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All the Lovers in the Night

Melancholy and metamorphosis

When 34-year-old Fuyuko Irie catches a glimpse of herself in a shop window, the drab and defeated figure she sees reflects her shrunken spirit. The only thing that sparks joy in this sad young woman’s heart is the luminosity of Tokyo at night, its dazzling lights a bitter irony when she considers how the monotony of life has extinguished any glimmer of brightness within herself. In All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami, we join Fuyuko as she reaches crisis point and a chance encounter shows her the potential for change.

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Elena Knows by Claudia Pineiro

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Elena Knows

Gripping on illness and women's rights

A cantankerous Parkinson’s sufferer is the unlikely heroine of International Booker Prize short-listed novella Elena Knows by Claudia Pineiro. Elena is crippled by Parkinson but that doesn’t stop her from travelling across Buenos Aires to find out if her daughter Rita’s death was murder or suicide. Elena Knows is not a murder mystery, rather, it’s a story about determination, ageing, religious hypocrisy, illness and most of all, women’s bodies. I’ve rarely read a more convincing portrayal of debilitating illness which in this book becomes the very symbol of who controls women’s bodies.

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