Which Books Should You Be Buying This Week?

Your digest of the weekend's newspaper book reviews Oct 21/22

I’ve been meaning to write and tell you about my appearance at Cheltenham Literary Festival earlier this month. I was on stage with Wendy Mitchell discussing our latest book ONE LAST THING with neurosurgeon Henry Marsh, author of (among others) AND FINALLY, a book I had read during the writing process for Wendy’s book. As you can probably gather from the two titles, it was a talk mostly about death which might not be everyone’s cup of tea and yet it’s amazing how many times we raised a chuckle from the audience. 

Afterwards, I was lucky enough to be able to enjoy the hospitality tent (free food!) and attend other writers’ talks and one I was really looking forward to was Tomiwa Owolade as his book THIS IS NOT AMERICA has been on my ‘to be read’ pile for the last few months. Tomi was in conversation with commentator Trevor Phillips and it was a fascinating talk comparing race in Britain and America – the subject matter of Tomi’s book. For example, one thing that really stood out for me was how the dual heritage population in Britain and America was, quite literally, conceived in two different ways - in America through rape, and in Britain through love. A very sobering thought. I was lucky enough to spend time chatting with Tomi later on in the day and downloaded his book to listen to on my journey home. It is fascinating and I recommend it wholeheartedly. You can buy THIS IS NOT AMERICA here.

This seems a good segue in to our first book this week, Jesmyn Ward has a new novel out which she wrote under testing circumstances. She already has two Booker award winning novels (my Jesmyn ward ‘claim to fame’ is that I bumped into her in the loos at the Women’s Prize a few years ago when she was shortlisted for SING, UNBURIED, SING). Life turned upside down for Ward in January 2020 when her husband and father to her two children died suddenly. Ward was interviewed in The Guardian’s Saturday and she talked about how, after losing her husband, she thought she would never be able to finish her new novel, LET US DESCEND. 

’Losing my partner almost made me stop writing. It was so hard for me to access these characters and I asked myself: is this it? Because you’re not working. You’re not writing this book…’

It was, she says an internal voice that answered her: ‘…an intuitive voice that has popped up throughout my life. It spoke up, piped up, and was like: ‘No, this is not it. This is the last thing that Brandon would want, for your grief at him leaving to silence you. He loved you. You can’t stop.’

And we should be grateful she found that strength because what came out of it sounds like an incredible novel. LET US DESCEND is set in New Orleans in the early 1800s and focuses on the domestic slave trade. 

Ward admits before she started researching this book, she ‘knew nothing about chattel slavery in America: how plantations worked, or the slave pens, or the fact that one of the reasons that so many enslaved people were brought to New Orleans was because of the agriculture in the upper south failing – tobacco and rice weren’t turning the kind of profits that sugar and cotten were, and so they began selling masses and masses of people.’

In the Saturday interview Ward discusses her fear of whether people wanted more books about this particularly ugly period in US history, but she was encouraged by the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, who told her that millions of people were enslaved which means there are millions of different experiences and stories to write. There is no one ‘slave story’ as there is no one experience of any story — something that I was discussing at a talk this week, there is just the writer’s telling of it.
This story focuses on Annis, a teenage girl who is transported from the plantations in the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans, and it sure to be evocative and keenly observed by Ward. 

You can buy LET US DESCEND here.

There were so many brilliant books in the newspapers this weekend, but one quick mention must be made of Sarah Ditum’s much anticipated TOXIC, a series of essays exploring the women who made up column inches in the noughties and the misogyny that was borne out of writing about them: Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Kim Kadashian and others.

Gaby Hinsliff reviewing in The Observer’s New Review loved it': ‘If you were an even vaguely young woman in the 00s, these celebrities’ first names alone probably conjure memories They were our cultural wallpaper, female icons made, and too often broken by mass media, in whole we hunted “for clues about whom a woman ought to be”.. Sexy, but not too sexy; empowered, but still unthreatening.’

Ditum uses these celebrities to springboard off into topics such as porn, #metoo and even fertility.

Hinsliff asks by the end of the review: ‘Was fame easier back when Heat magazine was bitchily highlighting your cellulite, or now, when anyone can point it out to you directly on Twitter, in among the death threats? But perhaps that’s the real message; that every generation unwittingly creates something the next will eventually regard with horror.’

You can buy TOXIC here

Philippa Gregory is best known for her historical novels, but she has now put ten years of research to use for a non-fiction project that sounds amazing. Gregory describes NORMAL WOMEN as her ‘life’s work’ and it received a great review in The Times Saturday Review. 

“Great events of the past millennium are spun from a woman’s perspective,” writes Melanie Reid reviewing. “The Black Death in the mid-14th century, for instance, was a game-changer for female influence. As the population of England halved, the Church got desperate, declaring that if no priest or man was available the dying could confess their sins “even to a woman”. So many men died that women found themselves taking over family plots of land and inheriting businesses. Labourers were in such demand that women earned equal wages, took up 30 per cent of apprenticeships and found better jobs.”

The Times’ review cribs tonnes of such anecdotes from Gregory’s book, all equally fascinating, and it is this that makes up this 900-page tome. Another of the talks I attended at Cheltenham was the literary editor’s talk which featured the editors of the books pages from The Times and The Sunday Times. The latter described a great review as one that took all the best bits from a non-fiction book so that by the end of reading the review ‘the reader doesn’t need to buy the book’. As a writer of non-fiction and someone well aware that those people wouldn’t even be in jobs were it not for those very same books they’re trying to dissuade people from buying this irritated me somewhat (read here hugely), so I, for one, won’t list all the wonderful anecdotes that Gregory spent ten years painstakingly putting together to earn a crust, but trust me, this book sounds incredible. 

You can buy NORMAL WOMEN here.

On Wednesday I crossed one off the bucket list when I went to see Madonna at the O2, she was absolutely brilliant, and I am now reading that Madonna book I mentioned to you a couple of weeks ago MADONNA: A REBEL LIFE (so, so good by the way!). Madonna has always been a guiding light for women of my generation, whether we are fans or not, whether we know it or not, I love her. Though when I mentioned to one friend that I’d been to see her he said ‘she looked in one clip like she needed help getting up on her chair’ (part of her performance on stage). She’s 65! I’d like to see any of us dancing and singing for two hours to a sell-out O2 show at that age! But then hasn’t Madonna always broken the mould, and hasn’t she always been judged for it? As she said during the show: ‘the most controversial thing I’ve done is stick around’ which, in another perfect segue, leads us onto our next book. If I could be churning out bonkbusters in my ninth decade then that would be some achievement and that’s exactly what Jilly Cooper is doing. 

I was obsessed with her books as a teen, and they left a lasting impression on me, for example, to this day I think of Sevenoaks as glamorous because one of her characters spotted Rod Stewart in the high street there (I’m from Peterborough, practically anywhere else was glamorous for us). 

Now she has published TACKLE! and a review by Cleo Watson in The Telegraph on Saturday announced that Cooper not only shoots but scores at 86 — though apparently she’s writing less sex now than she was a few decades ago, which may disappoint some of you. TACKLE! sees the return of an old favourite character, Rupert Campbell-Black who has now bought a football team, Searston Rangers FC, though apparently while ‘he sets his sights on winning the Premier League, whilst the players largely concern themselves with wife-swapping.’

So far so vintage Cooper. 

“The only problem with TACKLE! is that you have to ration yourself or you’ll gobble it up in one go,” wrote Watson. “Once I finished I felt bereft, no longer able to look forward to a cheerful night at the Dog and Trumpet with the Searston team, or Taggie’s cosy Aga fare of shepherd’s pie and chocolate tart. Still, I’ve easily remedied that – I’ve simply started the entire series again from the top.”

I actually ordered some of the old books myself having read this review yearning again for those innocent days of Rod Stewart strutting down Sevenoaks High Street in tartan kecks. 

You can buy TACKLE! here

As I was compiling this newsletter, my friend, poet and novelist Sarah Salway text and I replied that I was just writing about Jilly Cooper. She is also a fan and agreed to generously share with you a poem she penned about the author.

If you don’t already follow Sarah’s own substack EVERYDAY WORDS I cannot recommend it highly enough and you can do so here. Sarah also has a new poetry collection, Learning Springsteen on my Language App, which I have loved curling up with in these Autumn days and you can buy it here.

Sarah’s poem is below, enjoy!

A love letter to Jilly Cooper

Angel Clare left me cold, all that too pure

for second hand goods stuff, and don’t get me started

on Jude. Keats felt like those boys who’d write my initials

again and again on their desks but never talk to me.

And was Shakespeare real? I was never quite sure,

but Heathcliff came for my heart every stormy night.

I could have been the one to cure him.

I think you understood that, which was why I chose

his book to hide yours in when I first found them.

I wasn’t sure what they were. Were you supposed

to actually laugh at novels? And could women

get things so hopelessly wrong? And still live?

Admittedly I saw it happen all around me,

Mum laughing on the phone about it all,

her friends getting drunk, falling over

into another husband’s arms, and then there was hair

drama, tennis matches, car prangs, second G&T’s,

children hugged too tightly or left alone, whole

chocolate bars missing, diets started, abandoned,

fistfuls of waist compared, rumours started. But…

that was real life. In novels, women either got it right

or died, on train tracks, or in rivers, or were left

to rot in dusty houses somewhere in the country

with husbands curiously maimed. But not your women.

No wonder I hid your books, they were my map

to a future where I'd party in London with dark haired men

who’d reach across to stroke my cheek laughing

when it all went tits up. I liked it. I liked them.

And knowing I wasn’t ready for any of it just yet

made you even more delicious. I cut your photo

out of newspapers, read the gossip pages enough

to know that you were every one of your heroines

and possibly the heroes too, and not only were you

still alive, you were laughing about it all too.

How I loved you, pretending it was your books I loved,

knowing all along it was you I wanted to be.

– Sarah Salway

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