Tag: books

The Pharmacist’s Wife by Vanessa Tait

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The Pharmacist’s Wife is an atmospheric piece of historical fiction about female empowerment, manipulation, and addiction, set in Victorian Edinburgh. Rebecca Palmer’s husband Alexander opens a pharmacy and dreams of dreams of success with his new chemical invention: heroin. At the same time, he claims that it is the perfect cure for Rebecca’s hysteria, but the drug reminds her of her lost first love and draws her into a friendship that will reveal all her husband’s sexual secrets. Soon, she is fighting to escape Alexander and his obsession, but her position as his wife doesn’t make things easy for her.

The novel is a gripping read, with a dark Victorian vibe that emphasises both the dangers of addiction and abusive men and the difficult position for women in various situations. Tait focuses on creating the right atmosphere rather than on overloading on historical or scientific material, as could happen in drier historical fiction. The narrative is interesting, particularly the abusive ways in which Rebecca and other women are manipulated by men for science and for gain, plying them with drugs to make them docile and easy to manage. Sometimes the time jumps in the narrative are a little disjointed, but overall it is a good read.

The Pharmacist’s Wife is a historical novel that looks at problems that are not gone today, including the disempowerment of women, drug addiction, and abuse, as well as touching on other areas like the treatment of sex workers. It is one for fans of dark Victorian fiction, particularly those who’d enjoy the genre with a very slight dash of Trainspotting.

Whistle in the Dark by Emma Healey

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Whistle In The Dark is a gripping novel about family, depression, and how imagining a mystery can be so far from the truth. When Jen’s fifteen-year-old daughter goes missing in the Peak District, there’s a hunt to find her. But Lana is found after four days, claiming that she can’t remember anything and she’s fine. They go back to London, but things don’t feel right to Jen. She believes that whatever happened in those four days holds the key to what is going on with Lana and is desperate to find out the truth about her teenage daughter and why she’s now afraid of the dark.

The premise of the book is quite simple: it follows from a mother’s perspective the story of her daughter’s depression, of an attempt to help via an artistic retreat holiday, and how that turned into a horrible four days and a troubling aftermath. It starts as Lana is found, jumping backwards in time in between showing what happens once they are back in London. As it is from Jen’s perspective, the visions of the characters are very specific: her husband is often positioned as useless or unhelpful, her worries about Lana take over all over thoughts, and she finds it difficult to balance this with her job and dealing with her elder daughter Meg’s sudden announcement. This gives a suspense to the narrative as the reader must untangle what is Jen’s paranoia and what might be the truth. At the same time, her mindset also shows the times she isn’t able to help Lana, not listening at the right time or jumping to conclusions.

Healey really gets into the mind of Jen, showing how both mother and daughter cannot deal with Lana’s depression and with their relationship. The other characters feel like background to these two, in a way which actually suits Jen’s singleminded focus and inability to detach herself from the situation to see it in other ways. This is a moving novel that portrays the complexity of teenage depression and how a family might attempt to deal with it, as well as looking at how social media can impact on traumatic events and self-worth.

We Are Young by Cat Clarke

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We Are Young is another powerful novel by Cat Clarke that combines suspense, serious issues, and real, flawed characters. Seventeen year old Evan’s mother gets married to breakfast DJ Tim on the same night that her new stepbrother Lewis is involved in a terrible car accident. As the only survivor, Lewis is scapegoated by the local media, but Evan and her journalist father Harry think there’s more than meets the eye. Their investigating turns up a complex story of disturbing truths, mental health problems, and complicated relationships that not everyone wants to face head on.

Clarke writes a rich narrative that gives a lot of detail to characters and their lives, particularly Evan and Lewis, which makes them feel realistic and immerses the reader in the novel’s world. As well as the tragedy and the problems with her new stepfamily, Evan deals with her relationship with her somewhat estranged dad, her complicated band-made-up-of-exes situation, looking after her little brother, and some teenage secrets she’d rather keep from her mum. Glimpses into the lives of supporting characters suggest similar ranges of things going on in their lives. This combined with the narrative that looks into solving the mystery of a tragedy makes the book feel multi-faceted: a young adult novel that combines the suspense of plot with richness of character and regular teenage concerns.

We Are Young is not a light book: it features death, a car accident, mental health problems, and suicide, along with abusive relationships and the pressures on modern teenagers. However, it is also a book full of finding support and working on the relationships that matter. Once again, Cat Clarke creates a vivid tapestry of older teenage characters who behave like teenagers do—not shying away from either the major issues in the narrative or others like drink, drugs, and sexuality—and uses a tense plot to keep the reader turning the page.

House of Gold by Natasha Solomons

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House of Gold is a compelling novel about a rich banking family who are pushed to breaking point by the First World War. Greta Goldbaum is part of the Austrian branch of the Goldbaum family, who have banking outposts in the major countries of Europe. She has no choice in her marriage to Albert, her cousin from the English section of the family, despite being defiant and always looking for trouble. She finds herself moving to England, but just as she can grasp herself a little happiness through her loneliness, the war begins and threatens everything.

The novel focuses on both the personal and the larger scale: on Greta’s attempts to reclaim her own life and on the situation for a wealthy Jewish family across Europe on the eve of the First World War. It is this combination that makes the book particularly gripping, as it has a human centre through Greta and also a sense of a wider impact of war, especially in a family that has members of both sides of the conflict. She is a fantastic character and her narrative shows how a woman tied by society, family, and expectation can still fight and still not always understand other women’s struggles.

House of Gold was far more of a riveting read than expected: it has varied and interested characters and a sense of real human emotion, all whilst highlighting different kinds of privilege and prejudice. Even if the war setting isn’t necessarily appealing, it is worth giving this novel a chance.

Quick book picks for April

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With a whole load of books out this month, it was actually hard to pick out some recommendations. These are a mixed bunch aimed at a variety of audiences, but not limited to those audiences. Click on the title links to full reviews for more details.

  • I Still Dream by James Smythe – A novel about a girl who builds an AI to listen to her problems and how that AI becomes so much more, but also stays as her personal friend and confidant. Proof that books about tech can also be about memory, loss, and the minutiae of people’s lives.
  • The One Who Wrote Destiny by Nikesh Shukla – A story of three generations of the same family, and how their different cultural experiences in Kenya, Keighley, and beyond and their differences of opinion and life shape how they interact.
  • Clean by Juno Dawson – Exciting whilst also hard-hitting, Clean is a young adult novel about addiction, but also about privilege, what makes people different, and how you can have sympathy for abrasive characters. Treats the subject matter seriously, but is also witty and clever.
  • Circe by Madeline Miller – Miller turns from the Iliad to the Odyssey in this rewriting of the story of Circe that weaves together a great deal of stories, showing the tension between gods and mortals from the perspective of an outcast.
  • The Chosen Ones by Scarlett Thomas – The next book in Thomas’ charming magical children’s series that imagines a world where electricity is no longer reliable and magic and books become crucial.
  • Macbeth by Jo Nesbo – The next book in the Hogarth Shakespeare series takes Macbeth and gives it a crime thriller treatment that strips that magic and retains the paranoid corruption. Undoubtably will be popular in libraries.

Macbeth by Jo Nesbo

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Ex-addict cop Macbeth in a grey town: Macbeth by Jo Nesbo

The Hogarth Shakespeare series has been a fairly up and down ride (which I’ve been reviewing my way through). Some of the modern novelisations of Shakespeare’s plays have worked better than others, as might be predicted. With Macbeth, Jo Nesbo goes for a direct approach. From the title (unlike the others in the series, this new version isn’t renamed) to the plot, this is recognisably Macbeth. The title character is updated to an ex-drug addict cop in a town beset by two major gangs, corruption, and drugs, in a relationship with Lady, the proprietress of one of the town’s two casinos. As expected, it doesn’t take long after a bloody drug bust for Macbeth to see a chance to rise rapidly up the ranks. Whatever it takes.

Macbeth as a gritty crime thriller perhaps isn’t all that surprising. One notable element is the lack of the supernatural: in Shakespeare’s play, the otherworldliness is one of the most memorable elements, from the weird sisters to visions that could be madness or magic. In Nesbo’s version, Hecate is a crime boss and visions come from drugs and trauma. Macbeth isn’t so much caught up in fate as caught up in the world of gangs and police corruption, where promises are made and broken and allegiances quickly cast off. Some will be disappointed in this grittier focus, but it foregrounds the fact that it only takes a few suggestions of potential power to push Macbeth forward, even without the showmanship of the supernatural.

The large cast of characters are woven together as questions of who is a traitor to who run throughout the novel. This element feels very Shakespearean; it is, like with many of Shakespeare’s plays (and indeed as with many crime novels), easy to forget who is who to begin with. Macbeth has an extended past with Duff, giving the novel a central relationship that is far more powerful than Macbeth’s with Lady (Macbeth), who in this version seems downplayed.

Nesbo has created a solid rewrite of Macbeth, placing the titular figure’s ambitious and bloody story amidst a grim drug-stricken landscape. Perhaps impressively, one of Shakespeare’s shorter plays becomes a long novel. Sometimes it drags, but a lot of the time the length is to follow conventions of the crime genre: following numerous characters through set ups, personal problems, and remembrances of their tormented pasts. Using a specific genre gives this addition to the Hogarth Shakespeare series a sense of purpose, a reason for existing that highlights how the original play is similar and different to a crime story.

Ordinary People by Diana Evans

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Ordinary People is a story about two couples living south of the river in London in 2008 and how they reach tiny breaking points. Melissa and Michael have a terraced house and a new baby along with their daughter Ria, but they are falling slowly apart. Michael focuses on his commute on the 176 bus and an image of Melissa in the past that doesn’t account for who she is now, whereas Melissa thinks the house is bearing down on her and doesn’t want to let Michael close. Further out in the suburbs, Michael’s old friend Damien and his wife Stephanie are trying to keep together after the death of Damien’s father and the realities of no longer living in the city.

This is a novel about relationships, family, and location, tied together by south London and by different characters’ versions of being a black Londoner. It shows the minutiae of domesticity and the ways in which tiny misunderstandings and closed off moments build up. The narrative is focused upon the characters and their relationships rather than events, which gives it a sense of being a kind of fictional snapshot into people’s lives.

The highlight of Ordinary People is its depiction of south London, full of geographical specificity and recognisable elements and descriptions. It is a novel for people who like reading books set in London that focus on character and relationships and how people’s identities are shaped by themselves and others.

I Still Dream by James Smythe

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Cloudbusting and what the Cloud might do to humanity: I Still Dream by James Smythe

I Still Dream is an immersive and thoughtful novel about humanity, artificial intelligence, and memory that moves from a basic AI created in 1997 to a future where humanity needs fixing from the technology it has inflicted on itself. As a teenager, Laura Bow creates Organon, an artificial intelligence who will listen to her thoughts and ask her questions about how she is. She uses Organon to help her deal with the disappearance of her techie father and her undiagnosed depression. She continues to work on Organon and Organon continues to learn. At the same time, tech giants work on their own AIs, but these ones aren’t taught the same way as Organon and are without the morals that Laura has built into her creation. When things go catastrophically wrong, Organon might be the only hope to fix the world, but that means Laura would have to share her technological best friend with everyone.

The narrative moves across the decades to follow Laura, her life, her loved ones, and the ways in which artificial intelligence could help or hinder these things. Much of the focus is on thinking, brains, and intelligence: not only Organon and the other AIs, but also brain chemistry, memory, dementia, and how morality gets tied up with thinking. The deeply personal aspect of Organon and of Laura’s story—the novel follows her rather than following tech advances or events on a wider scale—is what makes the novel particularly compelling. Because of this and despite the technological focus, I Still Dream often does not feel like sci-fi. There is never a need to understand computers or AI to appreciate or enjoy the novel; indeed, its most long-running reference (and where the title is from) is Kate Bush’s ‘Cloudbusting’.

This is a gripping novel that uses technology to explore questions of loss, life, and privacy, creating for the most part a future that seems recognisably something that could come after our present day. It also is full of hope—it may feel similar to a number of Black Mirror episodes, but its message feels more in-keeping with the more hopeful ones like ‘San Junipero’—and the idea that despite the immorality and huge problems with much of technology, there is also a lot of positive and useful things that can come from it, as long as humans are programming it with the right attention and intentions.

Anyone with a worry about what Alexa might do next might enjoy this novel, but also those who enjoy books considering near-future implications of the contemporary world, using settings that feel recognisable rather than far-off. This is not a dark, cynical look at humanity and technology, but rather a book that opens up possibility, something we perhaps need in today’s world.

The One Who Wrote Destiny by Nikesh Shukla

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The One Who Wrote Destiny is a compelling novel about three generations of one family and their destinies, successes, and failures. It opens with Mukesh, who moves from Kenya to Keighley in the 1960s expecting to find a rock ’n’ roll lifestyle and instead finds a foreign and strange place, racism, and the love of his life. Neha, Mukesh’s daughter, is a logical computer programmer and she’s also dying whilst trying to avoid telling her father or her twin brother, Rak. Rak’s a stand up comedian who is facing the fact it might not be his jokes, but who he is that is causing his career problems. And finally, Ba meets her young grandchildren for the first time and has to care for them, but Neha and Rak are used to England, not Kenya, and Ba is haunted by the deaths in her family.

The characters are endearing and interesting, reflecting on their personal situations and also on more systematic issues around race, immigration, and difference. The novel is held together by the stories and certainties that families hold close, for example their tendency to die of certain things or their belief in something or another being their destiny. Neha’s portion of the narrative is perhaps the most engrossing, with her specific view of the world causing her to try and organise her family’s deaths in categories whilst dealing with her family, her cancer diagnosis, and her almost-romance with a girl in her local bar. Both Neha and Rak’s sections of the story are set in the modern day and this allows Shukla to highlight different forms of oppression and cultural identity today, from comedy panel shows to tautology.

This is a novel that is both crucial and heartwarming, with great characters and a carefully woven narrative. It foregrounds the importance of language and place in a variety of ways, from the languages characters do and don’t speak to the ways people frame their lives and their homes using words. and raises important points that arise in the lives of its characters. It is undoubtably a big novel for 2018 that is current and clever.

Clean by Juno Dawson

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In-your-face YA: Clean by Juno Dawson

Clean is a sharp and in-your-face young adult novel about addiction, recovery, and seeing everyone has different problems. Lexi Volkov is an heiress and socialite whose dad owns a chain of hotels. When she overdoses aged seventeen, she finds herself forced into an expensive rehab facility by her older brother, and thinks things can’t get any worse. She’s drawn into knowing more about the others in the facility, unravelling their problems along with her own, but can she really change? Can any of them?

Dawson has written the kind of hard-hitting and abrasive YA novel that needs to exist and is difficult to put down. Lexi is obnoxious at times—insulting and judging people in her head and more openly—and makes a great flawed central character, someone who doesn’t want to admit their addition or the ways in which their life has become centred around it. Most of the characters come from money and privileged, meaning the book also has a level of seeing how the elite live, whilst showing problems that the characters must admit don’t care about wealth or position.

Setting the novel predominantly in a rehab centre for under 24s means that it covers a variety of kinds of addiction and ways in which mental health affect people particularly when young, but also that it can have witty and harsh banter and modern pop culture references mixed in. Lexi is always ready to mock current hipster and celebrity culture even though she’s a part of it, and it’s a novel that loves as well as hates London for what it can offer. There’s plenty of seriousness and darkness in the novel—from death, drugs, and sex to what happens when all the options seem to be failing someone with mental health problems—but also fantastic characters and a sense of hope that people can pick themselves up from their lowest depths.

Clean doesn’t pull any punches. It deals with difficult topics—drug, alcohol, and sex addiction, anorexia and binge eating, and OCD are among some of the major ones—and shows another side to the life of the rich and privileged. Dawson shows how young adult novels don’t need to shy away from gritty topics that can’t always be neatly fixed. At the same time, she situates the book firmly in the contemporary world, in a recognisable London and with a modern sense of image versus reality engendered by the internet and social media. This is YA fiction being loud and bold.