What we read in June
Time travel, cosy mysteries, bizarre short stories - our Reader Services Librarian Lucy shares some of her favourite June reads.
Guilty by Definition by Susie Dent
Over a decade after her older sister Charlie vanished, Martha Thornhill returns to Oxford from Berlin to take up a management position at the CED (read OED). Fleeing demons in Berlin and living with her truculent and grieving widower father, Martha is shocked to receive a post card hinting at her sister's fate. Soon one postcard becomes many, sent to her colleagues Safi, Alex and Simon too. Each card contains a lexicographical clue which the quartet mush decipher, the trail leading them around the city of Oxford, to pubs and graveyards, manor houses and antiquarian book dealers. But it soon becomes clear that people know more about Charlie's disappearance than they let on at the time. Lexicographer Susie Dent brings her wordy skills to this light crime thriller that will please anyone who enjoys a cryptic crossword.
Shaka lives with a congenital deformity that means she uses an electric wheelchair and a trach tube. She lives in a care group home that her parents set up for her before they died. She wants for nothing physically, but emotionally she feels less than a real woman and writes erotic articles on swinging online and tweets that she'd like to be a high class sex worker. When a new male nurse finds her online life and propositions her, Shaka has the opportunity to live out her unrealised dreams. Hunchback is an unusual story, and an intriguing voice I would like to hear more from.
Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
Anne Boleyn is now Queen and Katherine of Aragon is dying. But still Henry VIII can't get a son, and his eyes are turning towards Jane Seymour. Mantel returns to the world of Thomas Cromwell for the 2nd in her multi award winning trilogy, a lush and fully realised Tudor England where the historical figures are real people with loves, lusts and long held grudges.
Rocky and Nick are in their 50s, a writer and a physiotherapist. Every year since their children were babies they've spent a week in the same cottage on Cape Cod. This year, their son Jamie is 24 and their daughter Willa 21 along with Jamie's girlfriend Maya. Over sandwiches, seafood, and swims, Rocky remembers back to the earliest days of parenthood when she and Nick experienced two losses, one of which she hasn't told her husband about. Sandwich is redolent in motherhood, it oozes and pulses from the page. I laughed and cried. I loved the dynamics between Rocky and her children, especially Willa, and between Rocky and her parents Mort and Alice who arrive at the end of the week. Sandwich is a gentle, hilarious and genuine examination of love, grief and family and reminded me a lot of Tom Lake and Anne Tyler.
The Book Censor's Library by Bothayna al-Essa
An allegory, a fairy tale, a metaphor, mixing Alice in Wonderland, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Pinocchio, Zorba the Greek, and Fahrenheit 451, this the story of a book censor, his imaginative young daughter and a plot to save the world.
On a farm outside Pretoria, South Africa, Rachel Swart dies, leaving her three children, Anton, Astrid and Amor, and a promise that Salome, her long time maid, will inherit and rightfully own the shack she and her son live in. But time passes and the promise isn't kept. Amor, lightning struck as a child, leaves for London, only to return when her father dies and the siblings inherit the farm. And still Salome doesn't get what was promised. Over four decades, four deaths, marriages, affairs, murders, suicides, several religions and the tumultuous history of the country, Galgut gorgeously paints the story of one ordinary family.
On the Calculation of Volume volume 1. by Solvej Balle
The first of two (very different) time travel novels I read in June.
When Tara Salter wakes up in a Paris hotel on the 18th of November she witnesses a woman drop a piece of toast on the ground in the restaurant, and then goes about her day, buying antiquarian books for her and her husband's business, meeting friends and purchasing a Roman coin as a gift for her husband. The next morning, she again witnesses the same woman drop the same piece of bread, and the 18th of November begins all over again. For 366 days, Tara experiences the same day, trapped in time - or perhaps everyone else is trapped and she is the only one aware of it.
Balle's writing is beautiful, spare and lucid, following Tara's exploration of her situation, her relationship with her husband Thomas and her eventual attempt to break free from her situation. Balle concentrates on the minutiae and mundanity of Thomas' life, which Tara is witnessing from her hiding place in the couple's spare room. The noise his shirt makes against the wall as he walks past the door, the rain drops on the window pains, the movement of clouds over the moon. A superbly crafted novel.
Recently divorced English teacher Jake Epping is offered the opportunity to travel back to a balmy September afternoon in 1958, to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy, thereby changing the course of history. No matter how long he spends in the past, only 2 minutes will elapse in the present, but each time he returns, the past resets itself. Armed with copious notes from his predecessor, Jake heads back to a time of full fat milk, big cars and segregation, to Dallas where a young, disaffected Lee Harvey Oswald is soon to arrive from Russia to change the path of history forever.
King handles the intricacies of time travel writing with a deft hand. 11/22/63 is utterly enthralling both as a work of science fiction and a love story, and asks that age old question - if you could change the past, would you? This is a spectacular story.
