Which Books Should You Be Buying This Week?

My round-up of the weekend's newspaper book reviews June 10/11

How could I not start with a review of a book penned by yours truly that appeared in the physical edition of The Times’ Saturday Review this weekend?

I wrote about it on Thursday, and for those who missed that newsletter you can find it here. But suffice to say, the first review of the latest book by myself and Wendy Mitchell, ONE LAST THING, was a good’un.

“Do you realise you could die today?” begins the review by Alice O’Keeffe, which doesn’t sound particularly cheery but wait, she hasn’t finished yet. “On a rational level of course you do. But how often do you stop to think about it, let alone plan for it? Three in five British adults don’t even have a will, which is just one indication that most of us are puttering around in a state of woolly-headed denial. As Wendy Mitchell points out in this admirable, practical and inspiring book, the mortality rate for humans is 100 per cent.”

O’Keeffe tells us we are ‘lucky’ to have Wendy to navigate this part of life with us, she even goes as far to say: “Mitchell is the type of woman who, if humans were in any way rational, would run the world.”

I would second that, of course. The last two books that Wendy and I have written together – SOMEBODY I USED TO KNOW and WHAT I WISH PEOPLE KNEW ABOUT DEMENTIA – have been Sunday Times Bestsellers, we are hoping beyond hope to make it a hattrick for our last book together.

But don’t think that this practical, wise, and yes, at times, funny book will make you die just because it deals with death – as we say in the book, talking about sex doesn’t make you pregnant.

“Living life to the full is [Mitchell’s] default mode, and she brings her energy and efficiency to planning for her death. ‘Be sure not to let it make you feel sad,’ she writes in her introduction. ‘Know that I am making my own choices as far as I can, and one day you will make yours. I would like to be the light that guides the way.’”

Go on, be brave and give it a read, you won’t regret it, but you might regret not having read it… though, er, technically you’d be dead then so that wouldn’t matter. Anyway, you can buy ONE LAST THING here.

As I write this I am staying in North Norfolk for this heatwave weekend and obsessed with a book of foraging recipes that I bought my mum a few years ago. Once I have finished writing, I intend to go out searching for wild roses so I can make their Wild Rose Jelly recipe, or even some Wild Rose and Pistachio Turkish Delight – which I know will go down very well with Mum. And so, I’ve fallen head over heels with this next book, LA VIE by John Lewis-Stempel.

Lewis Stempel is a British farmer who, to learn the ways of French organic farming, swapped Blighty for a farm in rural France for a year. I mean, I say ‘reasons unknown’ but to me this sounds like an absolutely perfect life choice.

Rather than living ‘faire de lézard’ Lewis-Stempel sets about life as a peasant farmer with gusto, buying a brickette maker to create logs for the fire from old pulped newspapers, trying his hand at sunflower oil pressing and getting €200 a pop for shearing his five little knee-high sheep. He arrives in France with his wife, his horse Zeb (who bolts at the sight of a salamander having never seen one before – quite understandably), a border terrier called Rupert and a young black lab who must be named something beginning with P as all pedigree dogs in France are named according to the year they were born – a little like the old British number plate system, we are told.

So far, so charming, and I haven’t even told you the bit about the five nightingales who sing outside his window at night yet.

“The home to which he and his wife committed themselves for a year stands just outside the village, a fin de siècle, honey-coloured limstone maison toute seule, ‘the loveliest I have ever lived in’, with a hay bar, a dovecote, fields, orchards, 30 vines and a precious potager (kitchen garden),” writes Richard Preston reviewing in The Times’ Saturday Review, “…his ten-metre square potager is the focus of his attention, for good reason: about 20 per cent of fresh produce grown in France comes from these little plots, he says.”

Now you see why I fell in love with this book whilst reading another about foraging (our common law right, according to my book).

I am ready to sign some kind of contract now – anyone want to give me a little maison toute seule for a year? (or like, forever?)

Alas, I am completely impractical and wouldn’t last a minute with all those salamanders around, so I shall have to make do with this book. Apparently it’s also littered with recipes which is an added bonus.

If you have fallen for its charms too, you can buy LA VIE here.

Ooh, this next book is a bit of a literary hot potato. EVERYTHING’S FINE was won by Picador in an eleven-way auction. For those who don’t know, and you might find this bit interesting, when books, both fiction and non-fiction, are submitted by editors by literary agents, the hope is always that several publishing houses want to buy it and that will get an auction going. An eleven-way auction is the stuff of dreams, and usually means that the winning publisher paid big bucks for this book, so let’s see what all the fuss was about, and fuss it is. So here is the precis according to The Sunday Times: “Jess is a young black woman who goes straight from an Ivy League college to Goldman Sachs, there she bumps into Josh a former classmate whose conservative views were always a turn off for her. What follows is an enemies-to-lovers story, a blend of romantic tropes and political debates.”

The fuss, it seems, centres around some of Josh’s views, including the fact he is a Trump supporter, and that they are ‘so inflammatory’ he does not deserve to be a romantic lead.

“At college Jess and Josh sparred over such issues as Barack Obama’s election and affirmative action. ‘I’m not saying that discrimination isn’t real, but is throwing open the doors to elite universities the answer?’ he asks. To Josh, who makes it clear he is not racist, these questions are a good deabte, but to Jess they are all too real.”

However, it seems to Goodreads reviewers (first mistake, never read the reviews on Goodreads), this fictional romantic hero needs to be cancelled: “It’s not enemies to lovers if you use it to excuse racists,” one wrote, and “Everything is not fine…[this book] is harmful and I am sad that it was published as it is.” And: “Everyone who had a hand in this must be held accountable immediately.”

But the author Cecilia Rabess is a black woman herself (she also worked in corporate banking), so does she not have a right to write about racism and these political clashes?

I’m reminded of a quote I wrote here a few weeks ago from an Annie Ernaux interview, from memory it is something like: “if it is not a risk, it is not worth writing.”

Should we ensure our writing does not offend? Do readers deserve a ‘safe space’ or do they read to be challenged?

I know what I think, but I’d like to know what you think. Picador beat off ten other publishers for this book, it is described as their ‘super lead title’ for 2023. As Laura Hackett reviewing concludes: “Rabess’s ability to sit with difficult questions should be applauded, not denounced. Why else write fiction at all?”

Why else indeed. If you would like to see what all the fuss is about, you can buy EVERYTHING’S FINE here.

Let’s bookend this newsletter by coming back to the topic of death, and this week The Telegraph’s Mia Letvitin loved Lorrie Moore’s new novel, I AM HOMELESS IF THIS IS NOT MY HOME, the author’s first in fourteen years.

Moore is more commonly known for her short story collections, and Letvitin believes that one of those short stories from 2005 The Juniper Tree, may have provided inspiration in some way for this new novel.

The novel begins as Finn, our protagonist, is visiting his brother Max who is dying of cancer. Finn leaves Max’s deathbed when he hears of the death of his ex-girlfriend Lily, and rushing back to the Midwest on her account finds her in limbo or rather the bardo, she has unfinished business and cannot pass to the other side until she has completed this journey.

“The pair set off on a road trip to a ‘body farm’ in Tennessee where Lily wants to leave her body to science,” writes Levitin. “En route, they stop at the Jumping Rest Tourist Lodge Home, where Finn discovers a notebook of unsent letters signed by Elizabeth, the innkeeper during Confederate times, addressed to her dead sister.

“The letters recount a rascally gentleman boarder – an actor we suspect may have been John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin. (The mysterious circumstances around Booth’s death are among the theories Finn shares with Max, and provides the plot of the letters.”

Levitin says that this novel is perfect for fans of Moore’s wordplay and dark humour but: “Underneath the jokes runs an achingly poignant reckoning with grief. As Finn is susceptible to delusions, we’re never quite sure if he’s really seeing Lily or if it’s all in his head. It doesn’t much matter: the regrets he’s left with for her and his brother are undoubtedly real. (“For the rest of his life he could begin every sentence with ‘Regrettably” and never tell a lie.’)”

With sentences like that we can see why it has taken 14 years for a new novel from Moore.

“Like Finn and Elizabeth, we are all haunted by our dead, however they may choose to appear. As the novel concludes, with Finn still grappling with his ghosts, ‘nothing in the world was ever truly over’.”

I think this book sounds intriguing. If you do too, you can buy I AM HOMELESS IF THIS IS NOT MY HOME here.

Right, I better get on with writing a book myself now. Until next week…

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