Which Books Should You Be Buying This Week?

My round-up of the weekend newspaper book reviews May 20/21

It’ll be a short, and bit of an unusual, round-up today, because I have a To Do list as long as my arm. Apologies for no round-up last week, I was doing two events at the Tunbridge Wells Literary Festival last weekend, one about my own writing and the second interviewing Rebecca Humphries about her book which was a fascinating chat.

I read her book WHY DID YOU STAY? A MEMOIR ABOUT SELF-WORTH as soon as it was published and absolutely loved it.

I don’t usually go to literary festivals myself, so it was nice to attend even if it was simply because I was appearing there myself. But yesterday, I went to Charleston Festival to see Deborah Levy, and it was magical.

I’ve just read her latest book AUGUST BLUE, which I know I have been plugging to all of you for the last few weeks, but it was wonderful to hear Deborah herself talking about it and reading from it and it opened up many more layers of the book for me.

If you have never been to Charleston, it is such a beautiful place and well worth a visit, especially on a sunny day.

I had to take time out of my own writing schedule this weekend to go because my deadline is fast approaching for the current book I’m working on, hence why today will be a short round-up but I couldn’t let you down two weeks running.

Before I start though, I know I plugged this book a couple of weeks ago and it’s been great to see some orders of it from you, but I am finally reading it myself now and I must, must press it into your hands because it is wonderful - A LIFE OF ONE’S OWN by Joanna Biggs.

Navigating her own marriage break-up and her new-found freedom, Biggs explores the lives of nine other female writers who sought, or carved our freedom of their own. Some of the writers featured are Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath (among others) and one writer who I hadn’t come across before but have immediately ordered one of her books, Zola Neale Hurston.

Anyway, let’s start today’s round-up with a book The Sunday Times last week declared one of the books of the year and tipped for prize lists. I had it all lined up to write about last weekend and then just ran out of time so I was pleased to see it appeared in the reviews again this weekend.

SOLDIER SAILOR is Claire Kilroy’s first novel in ten years and by all accounts it’s been worth the wait.

‘Written in the second person, SOLDIER SAILOR takes the form of a monologue from a first-time mother (who sees herself as a ‘wounded soldier’) to her son, her ‘little sailor’. It is a love story and a horror story about human neediness and, because it is so startlingly honest, it’s also very funny. “Be an astronaut, be a nurse, be a postman, be whatever. Just don’t be a dick,” Soldier tells him,’ wrote Joanna Thomas-Corr reviewing in last weekend’s Sunday Times.

Thomas-Corr asks herself whether there have been enough books inspired by first-time motherhood. ‘Didn’t Rachel Cusk’s A LIFE’S WORK break every taboo worth breaking?’ she asks. ‘Well I thought so too, but I was gripped right from the opening pages…’

I was sold from this review last weekend and have had it on my list of books to buy ever since.

‘Motherhood, and what it does to women, is so often treated as a lightweight domestic issue rather than a complex concern that demands serious scrutiny,’ writes Thomas-Corr. ‘Kilroys’ book confers ton the subject all the imagination, intelligence and profane wit that it deserves. I will be surprised (and annoyed) if it doesn’t end up on this year’s Booker shortlist. It’s certainly one of the finest novels published this year.’

You can see why it’s been in my basket all week. If you would like to join me and purchase it yourself, you can buy SOLDIER SAILOR here.

Leïla Slimani is just so prolific. It was only a few weeks ago that she featured in this round-up with a work of non-fiction THE SCENT OF FLOWERS AT NIGHT and now she is here again but this time with a novel.

WATCH US DANCE is the follow up to her previous novel THE COUNTRY OF OTHERS, or at least features characters that were introduced in it. Again, Slimani has drawn on the experience of her own family’s elders to write a powerful yet political novel about love and freedom.

I read Slimani’s first two novels that were translated into English, LULLABY and ADELE, though never got round to THE COUNTRY OF OTHERS, though I knew it was a very different breed from the others, as The Times said: ‘…[it was] eschewing the sensational effects of thrillers for a much deeper, more considered exploration of her characters’ inner lives. Some engage with the battle between youthful idealism and authoritarian repression that will reshape their country: some stand aloof.‘

It sounds like a place so many people are at right now, in countries all over the world (I’m thinking particularly of the Turkish elections which I have been watching with interest), but this book is set in the late sixties in Morocco, and while the rest of the world was celebrating free love and growing their hair, the newly independent country banned young men with long hair from its borders. But how does being freed from previous regimes affect a family?

‘Amine, the struggling farmers of the first novel, can now afford a swimming pool (if gardens are symbols of innocence, then the brutal clearing of his wife Mathilde’s beloved flower beds to make way for the pool casts an ominous foreshadow at the start of WATCH US DANCE). Meanwhile, his daughter, Aicha, a social and political naif, is studying in her mother’s native Alsace to become a doctor. His listless, underachieving son, Selim, will lose himself in the sexual revolution, not to mention in the drug-sick delucions of the hippie invasion that is turning parts of rural Morocco into hell holes,’ writes Claire Allfree reviewing.

Allfree praises Slimani’s skill at observing character: ‘Omar, Amine’s brother, is a policeman whose job is to ‘make things that should not be seen disappear’, including the bloodied bodies of student protestors after a riot.’

How do families and different generations survive and evolve through these political divides and changing times? I have a feeling Slimani will show us.

You can buy WATCH US DANCE here.

It was wonderful to sit in the tent at Charleston and listen to Deborah Levy speaking yesterday, she is after all a woman in her early sixties who has only really found this literary fame in the last ten years since a Booker nomination. Before that, she hadn’t even got a home for SWIMMING HOME the novel that went on to be shortlisted.

And so it was equally wonderful to read in the Observer’s New Review an interview with Annie Ernaux who, at 82, is ‘living life to the full’. Time for a confession, I have never read her work, however a chat with one of my writer friends put that right for me this week, because I am a great fan of autofiction so how could I possibly not have read her books? Perhaps because they have only relatively recently been translated into English. Because the world has realised that these women of a certain age, rather than become invisible, should be extremely visible and their wisdom should be re-packaged for a new generation. She has two more books that are due to be released in September this year, SHAME (which starts ‘My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon…’) and THE YOUNG MAN (her latest work about an affair she had in her fifties with a man thirty years her junior). Her Nobel Prize-winning speech will also be published. You can pre-order them by clicking on the titles of course. But I am starting, with THE YEARS, if you would like to join me.

The reason Ernaux was being interviewed this weekend is because her debut film The Super 8 Years had its release at Cannes this week, and will be released in the UK in June. Who would have thought that in your ninth decade you could be such a hot ticket? It gives us all hope. The interviewer asked her how in her eighties she had the energy to return from a victory lap of Manhattan after her Nobel Prize win and then the same day joined a cost of living protest in Paris.

‘"Weren’t you exhausted?” I asked, thinking that, at 82, she might have wanted at least 24 hours to sleep off the jet lag. “Have you always had such energy for political engagement?” She looks about her airy living room, accented with a large bouquet of flowers and a handsome wall of books, then fixes me with her intent gaze. “When an event demands you rise to the occasion, and you feel that you cannot… Well, actually you can.”’

She offered the interviewer, Alice Blackhurst, one piece of writing advice: “If it’s not a risk [to write it] then it’s nothing.”

Annie Ernaux

As the sunset and we drove home from Charleston yesterday, my friend, Sarah, asked me what I would have liked to ask Deborah Levy (if I had been brave enough to put my hand up when the audience had chance to ask a question). I said I would have liked to ask why her own trilogy of autofiction (THINGS I DON’T WANT TO KNOW, THE COST OF LIVING and REAL ESTATE) had ended when she had just come into her own in her sixties – didn’t we need to know how to be at sixty and beyond? I had always hoped that Madonna might lead the way for my generation, but she appears to have gone off-piste, so it is left to Levy and Ernaux to guide us instead.

Isn’t it great when you discover a whole backlist to get through? That’s what I’ll be doing now with Ernaux, in the same way my daughter is now doing with Judy Blume.

But for now, I must get on and finish this latest book as I’ve got to file it in a few weeks — wish me luck!

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