Tea is So Intoxicating – Mary Essex

To my shame, this is the first time I’ve read Ursula Bloom in any of her many authorial guises. As Mary Essex, Bloom wrote at least eight books (that I can find) and here provides us with a somewhat spiky rural village comedy. Not many of her characters are particularly likeable, and she has a …

The New Wilderness – Diane Cook

This took me a little while to get into – the premise of a group of volunteers becoming nomads in The Wilderness State as part of an experiment as escape polluted city life is really quite challenging from the outset – but Cook’s been clever with her tale, and I was caught up in this …

Father – Elizabeth von Arnim

Literature is full of overbearing or manipulative fathers - Dr Sloper in Henry James' Washington Square springs to mind - and Richard Dodge, the father of this 1931 novel, is up there with the finest. From a young age, Jennifer has looked after and supported her widowed father, typing up his manuscripts and maintaining his …

Shuggie Bain – Douglas Stuart

Oh man – this is a tough but brilliant read. Shuggie’s childhood is so bleak that there were times when I had to have a breather from the novel, mired as it is in deep-set poverty and cruelty. But I became so involved in the endless cycle of unhappiness and glimmers of hope that I …

Burnt Sugar – Avni Doshi #BookerPrize 2020

'And even now, when I am without her, when I want to be without her, when I know her presence is the source of my unhappiness - that learned longing still rises, that craving for soft, white cotton that has frayed at the edge.' This is an unsettling read, one which charts the intense relationship …

Ali Smith’s Summer

‘Summer’s like walking down a road just like this one, heading towards both light and dark. Because Summer isn’t just a merry tale. Because there’s no merry tale without the darkness.’ And so we come to the final instalment of Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet, a collection I have loved so much. Once again, I’m left …

Dangerous Ages – Rose Macaulay (British Library Women Writers)

Waking on her 43rd birthday, Neville takes a moment to herself. And as most women know, it is these snatched moments of quiet which restore, however briefly, a sense of one’s own identity. ‘Swimming, bread and marmalade, sitting high in a beech tree in the golden eye of the morning sun – that was life. …

A Thousand Ships – Natalie Haynes

In her third novel, Haynes has, as the muse Calliope says, ‘picked up the old stories and … shaken them until the hidden  women appear in plain sight.’ And it is a great cast that tell us the story of Troy and its aftermath from this female perspective. Helen is present, but Calliope tells us, …

Dominicana – Angie Cruz

The shock of the opening line, ‘The first time Juan Ruiz proposes, I’m eleven years old…’, sets us up for an uneasy insight into the life of a young girl from the Dominican Republic, whose life is to be shaped by the poverty of her homeland and the ambitions of her mother. Ana’s mother is …

Weather – Jenny Offill

This is my fourth review of the Women’s Prize shortlist – so far, I’ve looked at the novels by Mantel, Evaristo, and O’Farrell – and this is another sharp and intelligent novel to add to the pile. At times drily witty, and yet also threaded through with a tangible fear about the future, Weather is …