Which Books Should You Be Buying This Week?

Your round-up of the weekend's newspaper reviews March 18/19

Spring has almost sprung! I feel I’ve been saying that for a few weeks now, but the daffodils are out, the nights are getting lighter, finally the mild weather is here and this time next week you’ll be receiving your Sunday evening round-up from me while it’s still light – hurrah!

So let’s start this week’s digest of what the newspaper book reviews are talking about with this little riot of colour, it’s Woman Prize longlister FIRE RUSH. Some of you will know that this is currently on my own TBR pile, so I was interested to read what Saturday’s Guardian had to say about it.

Colin Grant reviewing described this book as a ‘startling debut’ which probably explains its place on the longlist. “Jacqueline Crooks has crafted a richly textured world, artfully drawing on her youthful experience of raves and gangs in 1970s west London, as well as supernatural believes in Obeah (an African diasporic tradition of healing and spell-casting).”

The book centres around Yamaye, the daughter of Caribbean migrants, who lives a tough life in a council estate tower block ‘where grey-white curtains billow like spirits at dark windows and metal coffin lifts shuttle between heaven and hell.’ Yamaye and her factory-worker friends are even less safe outside of the estates, where violence on the streets is rife and so they seek sanctuary at dancehall dub nights in the shape of a London club called The Crypt, yet in this same underground world there is danger of a different kind, the world of gangsters which Yamaye falls into.

“The novel ably conveys Yamaye’s dismay and churning fury as, in the aftermath of tragedy, she flees to Bristol. Here FIRE RUSH shifts into a darker and more sinister register. Taking refuge with a man called Monassa, she doesn’t initially heed the warning signs. Only gradually does it become clear that Monassa is a controlling sadist rather than a saviour, and possibly the embodiment of a duppy or malevolent spirit. His violent crew of burglars inhabit a world where sexual coercion of women is the norm, and Monassa’s ‘safe house’ is a cafe from which Yamaye will struggle to escape.”

She does this with the help of Obeah, but it’s clear from the review that Yamaye’s own intriguing storyline is set in a dark backdrop of oppressed youth, intergenerational trauma and rich Caribbean culture. I wanted to fling down the writing of this newsletter to read it immediately.

“For her debut, Crooks has set herself a complex task… she succeeds with great aplomb, mapping lives ‘caught in the contradictions of the past, trying to find their futures.’”

You can buy FIRE RUSH here, and don’t forget there is ten per cent off all Woman’s Prize longlisted books all the way until the shortlist is announced on April 26th, use this code to get your discount: WPTENOFF

Next up, Max Porter returns with a new novel SHY. Those who visited my pop-up will have found his debut GRIEF IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS on display, a book I can’t rave enough about if you have not yet had chance to read it. SHY looks like it will be another bestseller if its review in Saturday’s Telegraph is anything to go by.

“In 1995, the golden age of drum’n’bass, a teenage boy walks away from Last Chance, the residential special education facility he’s wound up in, wearing a rucksack full of rocks. ‘As he makes his way over a rural landscape, he’s visited – perhaps more accurate to say ram-raided – by memories of childhood, recent scuffles, therapy sessions, the desperate entreaties of his mum and stepdad, and the violent or self-destructive decisions that brought him to Last Chance and kept in there.”

So far, so dark, but the review in The Telegraph promises us that this novel involves no ‘rubber-necking’ of troubled working-class men, and instead, as always, Porter weaves together a complex and beautifully conjured character study that never feels patronising.

“Porter has an uncanny ability to demonstrate the way a spark of childlike anger or disappointment can conflagrate into a life-ruining inferno,” writes Luke Kennard reviewing. “In the efforts of those around the boy – teachers, counsellors, family – what is dramatised is the unstoppable force of love, care and patience, however clumsy, meeting the immovable object of Shy’s misunderstood rage. The novel is brilliant on the multiple humiliations of adolescence: the stench of Lynx Africa, and the merciless gibes of teenage boys, a constant exchange of insults ‘like flirting’s grim twin’”.

Kennard believes that the gritty subject matter will help this book to the bestsellers lists, and yet he points out the Porter has already ‘developed a body of work distinguished by its concision, poetic facility of language and polyphony’ and its this skill as a writer that will ensure this book is considered for prize lists.

“SHY is an act of humanity and grace, heightened by its distinctive form and artistry.”

I can’t wait to read it, and if you would like to order SHY you can do so here.

Many people have fallen for the charms of Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet (Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring) which she wrote consecutively and contemporaneously keeping up with the seasons themselves and writing in real time. This, entitled COMPANION PIECE, is well… what it says on the tin and it is out in paperback and was reviewed in Saturday’s Telegraph thus: “This follow-up has a puckish, polemical edge, taking in hot topics from immigration to transgenderism. It doesn’t always hit the mark – but when it does, it zings.”

Sounds like COMPANION PIECE is one not to be missed by Ali Smith fans, and you can buy it here.

From one companion to another now, I found a nice little discovery in The Independent this weekend, DOG HEARTED: ESSAYS ON OUR FIERCE AND FAMILIAR COMPANIONS is published by Daunt Books (I’d love The Book Room to have it’s own press one day – it’s a dream) and it sounds like a gorgeous read for those of us who bore the pants off people about our own canine companions. Those who buy from The Book Room locally will have met my own doggy on deliveries, but in this essay collection we hear from other writers on their own furry pals.

“Many of us bow down to our four-legged friends – and what better way to do so than make doggos the subject of a book of erudite literary essays?” writes The Independent’s Arts Editor, Jessie Thompson. “This collection is edited by Rowan Hisayo Buchanon and Jessica J Lee, and features writing from Cal Flynn, Evie Wyld and Nell Stevens among several others. Perfect to press into the hands of the devoted dog owners in your life.”

You can buy DOG HEARTED here.

I’m going to include the next book for two reasons, firstly its cover is yellow and I’ve noticed a bit of a yellow cover theme this week, and secondly it’s Miranda July and if you haven’t discovered her short story collection yet, you must. And as I spied in the Guardian’s New Review that the poet Warsan Shire gave her a mention, then you’re getting it too. Shire was doing a walk through of her favourite books, and for her comfort read she picked Miranda July’s NO ONE BELONGS HERE MORE THAN YOU. I studied Miranda July for my Creative Writing MA at UEA, and I remember falling for this collection immediately. Shire picked out one line from the collection to impress on people how wonderful she found it: “This line not only comforts me but also describes me,” she wrotes, “‘This person realises that staying home means blowing off everyone this person has ever known. But the desire to stay in is very strong. This person wants to run a bath and then read in bed.’”

Ok, it describes me too. Miranda July is a brilliant and original writer. Treat yourself to NO ONE BELONGS HERE MORE THAN YOU here.

Some of you may remember that I have been mentoring working-class writers for the last eighteen months and recently they produced an anthology of their work. I’m proud to say that for a couple of them, this anthology has resulted in interest in their work in progress, but it’s not always easy for working class-authors to break into the publishing world which can be so heavily guarded by middle-class editors. Plus, even when it does happen, I question how much heart has gone into the decision, or whether it is just an exercise in diversity. Or perhaps that’s just the cynic in me. But the point is, when a working-class writer breaks through it is something to be celebrated, and that seems to be the case with our next book OXBLOOD by Tom Benn.

“Until he picked up The Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year award on Tuesday night, Tom Benn was one of the publishing world’s best-kept secrets. The 35-year-old Stockport-born author has been writing crime fiction since he was 21, winning small prizes and acclaim, but mostly operating below the radar. His fourth novel, OXBLOOD – an engrossing family saga about a violent Mancunian crime dynasty and its bruised, tea-drinking women – was rejected by at least two dozen publishers,” writes Joanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times.

The book was eventually published by Bloomsbury and fans of Catherine Cawood will be pleased to hear that “as portraits of hardy, psychologically complex, northern working-class women, OXBLOOD certainly gives Happy Valley a run for its money."'

The novel is set in 1985 – ah, I have such happy memories of growing up on a council estate circa 1985 – and focuses on three generations of women who are haunted by the ghosts of their dead men, villains who preyed on Manchester in the sixties and seventies. “It’s a world of decaying mills and unemployment, stale cigarette smoke and cussed wit.”

Sounds perfect.

“The book begins with an author’s note – a timely manifesto for a writer’s freedom of imagination at a moment when some publishers feel the need to censor problematic texts. Benn wanted to grant his characters the ‘freedom to speak wrong, think wrong, act wrong, love wrong and live true.’ He aims to resist softening the ‘pervasive casual bigotries’ of that period, he says; his characters sometimes use sexist, racist terms such as ‘half-caste slut’ because it feels dishonest to erase this ugly language.”

Publishers take note, you don’t get the authenticity of time periods or different classes without the bigotry of those moments, they are a part of our history, they should show how far we’ve come, to erase them altogether, to call in sensitivity readers to sanitise texts takes away the authenticity. I remember arguing the case against comments made by a sensitivity reader for a book I’d written (for Bloomsbury in fact), my argument was that they had chosen that particular woman – another working class woman – to tell that particular story, because of her personality, because of her take on life, the editor’s attempts to clean up the language or anecdotes mentioned for fear of offending people would have left a book that could have been written by …well, anyone.

Publishing needs to be braver and our resulting reading will be richer for it. If you would like to buy OXBLOOD and see what all the fuss is about for this young writer, you can do so here. I’ve popped the pre-order for the paperback in the online shop as it’s due out in a few weeks, but if you really can’t wait, you can send me a custom order for the hardback which is available now.

Right, I’m off to nag Bloomsbury for a copy for myself – one of the perks of being published by them.

Until next week’s book reviews!

• 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.

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