Which Books Should You Be Buying This Week?
Your round-up of the newspapers' book reviews Feb 11/12
This week, for a special occasion, my mum took me to lunch at Thackeray’s. Those who live in Tunbridge Wells will be familiar with this restaurant, those who don’t might be interested to know that it is named after the writer, William Makepeace Thackeray who penned, among others, Vanity Fair, who stayed in the building in 1860. And so it seems this is a good segue into our first book reviewed in the newspapers this weekend, or at least a modern take on that very same classic.
The BECKY of this title is author Sarah May’s novel updated for the mass media age but not Thackeray’s Becky Sharp that we are familiar with. This BECKY, we are told in a review by Carrie O’Grady in the Saturday Guardian, is roughly drawn from Rebekah Brooks, the former News of the World and Sun editor and now CEO of News UK, although the author asserts at the beginning of the book, all characters are entirely fictitious.
The reader meets this protagonist as she is securing herself a job as a nanny to a media mogul. She bonds with the recruiter due to their shared experience at boarding school – except our heroine only knows it because her mum was the cleaner there. she lands the nanny job, falls in love with the eldest son from the media mogul’s first marriage and starts advancing her career in newspapers – hence the Brooks comparison.
“This could have been a standard rags to riches story,” O’Grady writes, “but May is too sophisticated a writer for that… this Becky Sharp, unlike Thackeray’s, rejects the Cinderella tactic of hitching one’s star to a high-ranking man. Yes, she marries Rawdon Crawley but it is her professional acumen that carries her to the editorship of the Mercury.”
It is then that our ruthless modern day BECKY splashes the scandals of her own friends on the front pages, publishes every awful detail of a child abduction keeping a nation on tenterhooks and gets wound up in her own phone-hacking scandal.
It seems that May really had fun with this novel, but there is a serious side too. “The comedy of Thackeray’s heroine stems from the way she knows how the world works from the very beginning, staying one step ahead of everyone else. This Becky walks a much more difficult path, fighting the system and learning to repress her own fears in order to capitalise on other people’s.”
Intriguing. And if you think so, you can buy BECKY here.
Memoir now and some of you may already be familiar with the work of poet Blake Morrison by way of his two previous memoirs, AND WHEN DID YOU LAST SEE YOUR FATHER? and THINGS MY MOTHER NEVER TOLD ME. Many of us can – and have – mined our family lives for our work as writers, as Nora Ephron famously said, ‘everything is copy’, and Blake Morrison’s attempts have yielded some fascinating results. His latest, TWO SISTERS, promises 288 pages of more family skeletons exhumed and told in Morrison’s inimitable prose.
The story of Morrison’s family life as told through the lives of his sisters, Gill and Josie, both now sadly passed away, is an intriguing one. Gill was his younger sister, and Josie was, what he thought, a childhood friend of his, until after his father’s death when DNA tests revealed that she was, in fact, his half-sister, the result of an affair with Beaty, their neighbour.
“In his childhood,” Rachel Cooke writes reviewing for The Observer’s New Review, “as he explained in AND WHEN DID YOU LAST SEE YOUR FATHER? Beaty and Josie were forever in plain sight, cherished friends who regularly joined the Morrisons at their holiday chalet in Abersoch; the likeness between Arthur (Morrison’s father) and Josie was obvious. Yet the words ‘daughter’ and ‘sister’ went unspoken…. What were the consequences of this open secret? The adults ran things on the principle of least said, soonest mended. Beaty and Kim (Morrison’s mother) loving the same man, first reached an accommodation and then became friends, a bond that existed beyond the aegis of Arthur’s monstrous male entitlement.”
But situations that can be explained away by adults, don’t necessarily make sense to children and Morrison wonders himself in this latest memoir what toll this took on his sisters, particularly: “Why did Gill, an alcoholic of 30 years’ standing, drink herself to death? And why did Josie, not long having discovered the truth of her paternity, take her own life?”
We are told in Cooke’s review that Morrison peppers his own investigations with other tales of literary siblings, though she didn’t seem to find this necessary, as his own excavations into his family life keep the reader far more interested.
“…as an investigation of a brother’s pain and as a memorial, TWO SISTERS is a wonderfully heartfelt and tender thing: delicate and unstinting and clear-eyed. Something has been worked out - a knot eased just a little - and I hope there’s comfort in that for him.”
You can buy TWO SISTERS here.
We are only in February but The Sunday Times declared SEND NUDES by Saba Sams as one of best paperbacks of the year. I have seen this short-story collection everywhere, and my curiosity has been piqued over and over by its cover alone, here’s why The Sunday Times loves it so much:
“The 25-year-old, Brighton-based Saba Sams takes late girlhood as her special territory in SEND NUDES, an award-winning debut short-story collection that lays bare the age group not far below her own in what often seems to be the scuzzy wasteland of teenage existence. It is a gritty book, but moments of redemption keep breaking through.”
You can buy SEND NUDES here.
I consider Kate Hamer a friend of THE BOOK ROOM simply because she is married to another one of our friends, Marc Hamer, whose nature curation is on sale here.
Kate is the author of the bestseller THE GIRL IN THE RED COAT and her latest THE LOST GIRLS received a rave review in the Sunday Express’ Sunday Magazine this weekend which described it as ‘a searing, unsettling and beautifully written exploration of loss, guilt and anger.’
At the age of eight, Carmel Wakeford was kidnapped by a preacher who believed she had the power to heal people. She was returned to her mother five years later, and this book picks up her story eight years later when she is 21 and living with her mother who is desperate to put the past behind them. Carmel though is obsessed with what happened to the preacher’s first victim, a girl called Mercy, and in a dual timeline told by Mercy, Carmel sets out on a mission to track down the girl in her quest to discover answers about the other lost girls.
“This is a slow-burning but mesmerising read that will linger long in the memory,” Jon Coates reviewing writes and you can buy THE LOST GIRLS here.
In The Times’ Saturday Review section this weekend, novelist Kate Mosse wrote about her favourite non-fiction books by women to launch The Women’s Prize Trust’s new non-fiction prize, something as a writer of non-fiction I am extremely pleased to hear about.
I thought I’d pop a couple of these in your digest today as I too consider them some of the best in non-fiction.
First up there is THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING by Joan Didion. Kate says: “I defy anyone to read this book and not be deeply moved. Written in the glare of grief after her husband died unexpectedly, this exquisite book is about death, illness and loss, but also about finding meaning, about the nature of memory, and about love. The book is intensely personal, but also universal, and it is a privilege to spend a year with this remarkable writer.”
You can buy THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING here.
Next up, and particularly as Nora Ephron already had a mention in this newsletter it is I FEEL BAD ABOUT MY NECK. Kate says: “It’s great that Nora Ephron has found a new generation of readers in recent years, and it’s hardly surprising given how brilliantly she conveys the absurdity of life, relationships and womanhood. At once funny, entertaining, sharp and sad, I FEEL BAD ABOUT MY NECK is also life-affirming – and a great title, to boot.”
You can buy I FEEL BAD ABOUT MY NECK here.
And seeing as I just mentioned to Mum over lunch that I’m feeling bad about my own neck too at the moment – that’s another birthday for you, still I’d rather have one than not (a neck, and a birthday) – I might just pick this essay collection from my own bookshelves and give it a re-read.
• Thank you to all who have been ordering from my online bookshop in the last week. Remember you can still support THE BOOK ROOM while I am waiting to open my physical store again by shopping online, in fact now I would appreciate the support more than ever. I can order ANY BOOK for you and you will receive it within 48 hours. It has never been a more important time to support both writers and independents bookshops, and by buying from me, you are doing both and contributing to a vital ecosystem.