I’ve been busy reading for Karen and Lizzy’s #ReadIndies month, and here are three of the books that came off my tbr pile for it. They could scarcely be more different!
The book: Bramton Wick by Elizabeth Fair
The publisher: Dean Street Press (their Furrowed Middlebrow series)
The date: originally 1952, reprinted by DSP in 2017
My friend Barbara bought me a whole pile of Furrowed Middlebrow titles, very excitingly, and a few people recommend I pick Bramton Wick off the pile. It’s a classic story of small village life – one of my favourite things – including a group of young people who might fall in love, and a host of wealthy neighbours and neighbours who used to be wealthy. The introduction compares it to Angela Thirkell, which is a fair comparison – perhaps the humour is a bit different, but the characters wouldn’t be out of place in Thirkell’s Barsetshire.
I particularly liked the dog-obsessive women living together, and enjoyed hating the venomous sister among the Misses Cleve. There an awful lot of characters, in fact, and I occasionally wondered if Fair should have narrowed her canvas a little – but I quickly determined the ones whose lives I felt most invested in, and they also turned out to be the ones who got the most focus. Unlikely to be an accident!
The book: Stardust Nation by Deborah Levy and Andrzej Klimowski
The publisher: SelfMadeHero
The date: 2016
I can’t remember if this was a review copy or if I bought it, but it came in a period where I was trying to expand my knowledge of graphic novels. This one is based on Levy’s earlier short story ‘Stardust Nation’ (2013), and is essentially a story of contagious trauma. Tom is the main character – one day his colleague Nick phones him to say that his (Nick’s) father beat him as a child. But this is Tom’s life, not Nick’s. Memories become shared and stolen and it’s all quite unsettling. I loved Levy’s words, but wasn’t sure about Klimowski’s illustration. A lot looks quite poor draughtsmanship to me, but I suspect it’s deliberate and I don’t fully understand it.
The book: Hello Friend We Missed You by Richard Owain Roberts
The publisher: Parthian
The date: 2020
This novel won ‘Not the Booker Prize’, which is probably why my book group is reading it. It’s a novel on a small Welsh island where ‘Hill’ goes to visit his invalid father, have an affair with his father’s nurse, wonder if Jack Black is ever going to get back to him about his ‘promising’ film script. It’s all built up of minute, often banal, observations – usually on separate lines, and often ending ‘thinks Hill’. There are no speech marks, which seems to be a thing people do.
I quite enjoyed it, and it’s certainly an unusual and confident prose style. What confuses me is how funny the blurb and puff quotes claim Hello Friend We Missed You is, because I didn’t find it remotely funny – i.e. I would have no idea it was meant to be a comic novel if the back cover hadn’t told me. Confusing. Maybe book group will clear it up. Not really my cup of tea, overall, but always interesting to see something so out of the ordinary.