Anne Enright

Anne Teresa Enright (born 11 October 1962) is an Irish author. She has published novels, short stories, essays, and one non-fiction book. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Before winning the Man Booker Prize, Enright had a low profile in Ireland and the United Kingdom, although her books were favourably reviewed and widely praised. Her writing explores themes such as family relationships, love and sex, Ireland's difficult past and its modern culture, preoccupations, spirit of the times.

The Gathering - Winner of the Man Booker Prize

The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan gather in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother Liam.

It wasn't the drink that killed him - although that certainly helped - it was what happened to him as a boy in his grandmother's house, in the winter of 1968.

The Gathering is a novel about love and disappointment, about thwarted lust and limitless desire, and how our fate is written in the body, not in the stars.

The Green Road - Shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2016, the 2015 Costa Novel Award, Longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize and Winner of the Irish Novel of the Year 2015

Hanna, Dan, Constance and Emmet return to the west coast of Ireland for a final family Christmas in the home their mother is about to sell. As the feast turns to near painful comedy, a last, desperate act from Rosaleen - a woman who doesn't quite know how to love her children - forces them to confront the weight of family ties and the road that brought them home.


The Forgotten Waltz - Shortlisted for The Orange Prize for Fiction

If it hadn't been for the child then none of this might have happened.

She saw me kissing her father.

She saw her father kissing me.

The fact that a child got mixed up in it all made us feel that it mattered, that there was no going back.

The story is, almost, an ordinary one. A 34-year-old married woman – sexy, energetic and independent-minded – falls in love with an attractive married man she meets at her sister's house. He has a daughter, who seems a bit odd. The affair goes through all the predictable stages: a drunken one-night seduction in a foreign hotel, a clandestine office romance, discovery and family recriminations, the romantic affair turning into a bickering second marriage, the ultimate loneliness of the woman.

But what deepens the mix are two discomforting, awkward and delicately handled factors. One is the sudden death of the sisters' dashing, stylish and gallant mother, who in the face of adversity would "get out the powder and blush" and spray on some Givenchy. Because of her consuming affair, Gina has not paid attention to her mother's illness, and the death catches her by surprise. Parental losses – as, over and over again, in Taking Pictures – are things that Enright understands, and in The Forgotten Waltz this grief is more touching than the grief of desire. The other fine thing is the difficult, insistent presence of Evie, the lover's daughter. First seen as an overweight, overwrought little girl, she grows up and makes more claims on our attention as the novel goes on. We learn her painful story, which changes our view of everyone else in the book, and Gina has to learn how to deal with her. That impossibly difficult yet involving relationship, between the father's mistress and the angry adolescent girl, gives us the last – and one of the best – scenes in the book.  The novel is told in retrospect from the end-point of the snow-bound winter of 2009, when Dublin has ground to a halt and the streets are empty and blanketed.  

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Three great Enright reads, with some wonderfully observed human interactions in each novel.  Notably for me, because the most memorable, is the New Year's Party in The Forgotten Waltz

A Political Memoir

Politics: Between the Extremes

Personally I find Nick Clegg a bit of a dish (shameful admission since he is the same age as my sons) so it was a particular treat to listen to him reading his political memoir, Politics: Between the Extremes, as an Audible production.

Here's the blurb:

Politics has changed. For decades Britain was divided between Left and Right but united in its belief in a two-party state. Now, with nationalism resurgent and mainstream parties in turmoil, stark new divisions define the country and the centre ground is deserted.

As Deputy Prime Minister of Britain’s first coalition government in over fifty years, Nick Clegg witnessed this change from the inside. Here he offers a frank account of his experiences – from his spectacular rise in the 2010 election to a brutal defeat in 2015, from his early years as an MEP in Brussels to the tumultuous fall-out of Britain’s EU referendum – and puts the case for a new politics based on reason and compromise.

He writes candidly about his mistakes, including the controversy around tuition fees, the tense stand-offs within government and the decision to enter coalition with the Conservatives in the first place. He also lifts the lid on the arcane worlds of Westminster and Brussels, the vested interests that suffocate reform, as well as the achievements his party made despite them. Part memoir, part road-map through these tumultuous times, he argues that navigating our future will rely more than ever on collaboration, reforming our political institutions and a renewed belief in the values of liberalism.

Whatever your political persuasion, if you wish to understand politics in Britain today you cannot afford to ignore this book.

Since the disastrous, in my opinion, result of the June 23rd referendum on the UK's place in the EU, I have been politically engaged in a way since never before.  I joined the Lib Dems and now find I belong to the Liberal Elite, a member of a demographic that is being maligned for this pigeonholing.  It is giving rise to humorous posts and comment on one of the 'Remainers' Facebook groups to which I belong:

"Inspired by the cornucopia of fragrance ads on television this Christmas, I am working on my new perfume called 'Liberal Elite'. People will say "What is that delightful aroma" and I will say....... "Shhhh. It's 'Liberal Elite'. A heady combination of books (without pictures), avocados, facts, tolerance and being right."

Lol :)

Some Novels of Ian Pears

I first encountered Ian Pears as a writer back in the very early 2000s.  He has written seven books in his Jonathan Argyll series (art history mysteries).  In addition he has a further five novels of which An Instance of the Fingerpost was the first, being published in 1997.  This was, I think, the second title that a group of us tackled under the banner of our recently formed Book Group in Godalming.  t The book had a mixed reception amongst our number: 
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Most of the characters are historical figures.  Set in Oxford in the 1660s - a time and place of great intellectual, religious, scientific and political ferment - the narrative centres around a young woman, Sarah Blundy, who stands accused of the murder of Robert Grove, a fellow of New College. Four witnesses describe the events surrounding his death: Marco da Cola, a Venetian Catholic intent on claiming credit for the invention of blood transfusion; Jack Prescott, the son of a supposed traitor to the Royalist cause, determined to vindicate his father; John Wallis, chief cryptographer to both Cromwell and Charles II, a mathematician, theologian and master spy; and Anthony Wood, the famous Oxford antiquary.

Each one tells their version of what happened and these are contradictory accounts.  But only one reveals the extraordinary truth.


The Bernini Bust by Ian Pears

Published in 1993 this is the third title in Pears' series centring on a team consisting of detective art historian Jonathan Argyll who works with two members of the (fictitious) Italian Art Squad: Flavia di Stefano (deputy) and General Bottando (head of the squad).

Argyll is also a dealer and the hardest part of being an art dealer is having to sell your beloved works. For Jonathan Argyll, the pain is soothed when an American billionaire agrees to pay a vast sum for a relatively minor piece.

Arriving in the Californian sunshine eager to collect his cheque, Jonathan bumps into one of his less scrupulous colleagues, and discovers he is not the American's only seller. A bust of Pope Pius V is being smuggled out of Italy, and trouble is following in its wake.

Within hours, Jonathan's billionaire is dead and both the smuggler and his bust have gone missing. Thinking things can't get any worse, Jonathan calls for the help of the Italian Art Theft Squad – and instead finds himself the killer's next target…

The plotting is convoluted; you have to concentrate and juggle the twists and turns and the machinations of the players in your mind.  There is a final surprising turn in the final pages.  A classic whodunit.

Natura regionis

There is much synchronicity in the lives of Robert Macfarlane and Roger Deakin, authors of the books featured below.  They knew each other, were friends.  Robert wrote a fulsome celebration of Deakin's writing for the Guardian  after Deakin's death in 2006.

"A month ago, I drove to Mellis to see Deakin for the last time: held his hand, talked a little, until he fell asleep. The next day, I went with two friends, who had also known him, out to the north Norfolk coast. We swam in wild waves at dawn and dusk, and in the evening we read aloud the pages from Waterlog describing that magnificent coastline. We slept in the pine forests which run down almost to the sand at Holkham. I spent half the night in a hammock he had lent me, and half of it down on the needle carpet, where it smelt of sap and resin. Roger died a week later, still in the house that he had built around himself 38 years earlier."

The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane.

"The Wild Places" is both an intellectual and a physical journey, and Macfarlane travels in time as well as space.

Guided by monks, questers, scientists, philosophers, poets and artists, both living and dead, he explores our changing ideas of the wild. From the cliffs of Cape Wrath, to the holloways of Dorset, the storm-beaches of Norfolk, the saltmarshes and estuaries of Essex, and the moors of Rannoch and the Pennines, his journeys become the conductors of people and cultures, past and present, who have had intense relationships with these places.Certain birds, animals, trees and objects - snow-hares, falcons, beeches, crows, suns, white stones - recur, and as it progresses this densely patterned book begins to bind tighter and tighter. At once a wonder voyage, an adventure story, an exercise in visionary cartography, and a work of natural history, it is written in a style and a form as unusual as the places with which it is concerned. It also tells the story of a friendship, and of a loss. It mixes history, memory and landscape in a strange and beautiful evocation of wildness and its vital importance.

Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees by Roger Deakin

Roger Deakin, who died in August 2006, shortly after completing the manuscript for Wildwood, was a writer, broadcaster and film-maker with a particular interest in nature and the environment. Wildwood. He is the author of Waterlog, Wildwood and Notes from Walnut Tree Farm.

He lived for many years in Suffolk, where he swam regularly in his moat, in the river Waveney and in the sea, in between travelling widely through the landscapes he writes about in

Wildwood is about the element wood, as it exists in nature, in our souls, in our culture and our lives.
From the walnut tree at his Suffolk home, Roger Deakin embarks upon a quest that takes him through Britain, across Europe, to Central Asia and Australia, in search of what lies behind man's profound and enduring connection with wood and with trees.

Meeting woodlanders of all kinds, he lives in shacks and cabins, travels in search of the wild apple groves of Kazakhstan, goes coppicing in Suffolk, swims beneath the walnut trees of the Haut-Languedoc, and hunts bush plums with Aboriginal women in the outback.

Perfect for fans of Robert Macfarlane and Colin Tudge, Roger Deakin's unmatched exploration of our relationship with trees is autobiography, history, traveller's tale and incisive work in natural history. It will take you into the heart of the woods, where we go 'to grow, learn and change'

'Enthralling' Will Self, New Statesman

'Extraordinary . . . some of the finest naturalist writing for many years' Independent

'Masterful, fascinating, excellent' Guardian

'An excellent read - lyrical and literate and full of social and historical insights of all kinds' Colin Tudge, Financial Times

'Breathtaking, vividly written . . . reading Wildwood is an elegiac experience' Sunday Times

Fasting, Feasting by Anita Desai, shortlisted for the Booker in 1999.

FASTING, FEASTING takes on Desai's greatest theme: the intricate, delicate web of family conflict. It tells the moving story of Uma, the plain older daughter of an Indian family, tied to the household of her childhood and tending to her parents' every extravagant demand, and of her younger brother, Arun, across the world in Massachusetts, bewildered by his new life in college and the suburbs, where he lives with the Patton family.

Anita Desai's novel of intricate family relations plays out in two countries, India and the United States. The core characters comprise a family living in a small town in India, where provincial customs and attitudes dictate the future of all children: girls are to be married off and boys are to become as educated as possible. The story focuses on the life of the unmarried and main character, Uma, a spinster, the family's older daughter, with Arun, the boy and baby of the family.  Aruna gets married.

Uma spends her life in subservience to her older demanding parents, while massive effort and energy is expended to ensure Arun's education and placement in a university in
Rather a series of events from a life than a complexly plotted work. We follow the fortunes of Uma and Arun as they engage with family and strangers and the intricacy of day to day living.
The novel is in two parts. The first part is set in India and is focused on the life of Uma who is the overworked daughter of Mama and Papa. She is put upon by them at every turn, preparing food, running errands. In the early part of the novel we see her struggling at school. She is not very bright but loves the sisters who teach and appreciate her. Finally she is made to leave school and serve her parents.

Uma's parents attempt to marry her off on three occasions; on the first occasion the chosen man fell for Uma's younger sister, Aruna. On the second her parents accept her marriage on behalf of her before finding out later that their dowry has been spent and the engagement is cancelled. On the third occasion a marriage took place but it turns out the Uma's new husband already has a wife. She lives with his sisters while he lives in another town spending her dowry on his ailing business. Uma's father quickly spirits her home.  We are also told of the episode of Anamika's (Uma's cousin) sad fate. She has won a scholarship to Oxford but her parents insist that she get married. She does and fails to please her husband by providing him with children. He keeps her for a time as a servant but eventually she dies by burning. It is strongly hinted that her in-laws killed her. The final scene of Part 1 is the immersion of Anamika's ashes in the sacred river.

In Part 2 we meet Arun, Uma's privileged brother. He is attending college in America and during summer holidays he lives with the Pattons an all American family. Again, plot is not complex or intricate. The events are told in a serial manner as Arun encounters them.  Of note is his intense dislike of American food and cooking methods. He is dismayed at the behaviour of Melanie, the daughter who is deeply troubled and suffering from bulimia. Although Mrs Patton seems to care about Melanie, she does little to help.  While apparently close, the family are actually distant from one another, something very different from Arun's experience of family life in India. Arun spends most of his time alone and isolated. Arun tries his best to escape from the western society but in vain.

The Ultimate Reading Crowd Pleaser

Lee Child  was born Jim Grant on 29th October 1954.  He is a British thriller writer known for the Jack Reacher novel series.   The books follow the adventures of a former American military policeman who wanders the United States. His first novel, Killing Floor won the Anthony Award for Best First Novel.

Here's a bit about the man:
After being made redundant from his job due to corporate restructuring, Grant decided to start writing novels, stating they are "the purest form of entertainment." In 1997, his first novel, Killing Floor, was published, and he moved to the United States in the summer of 1998.     His pen name "Lee" comes from a family joke about mispronunciation of the name of Renault's Le Car, with "Child" indicating where Grant would place his work on bookstore shelves, i.e., between crime fiction stars Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie. 

Grant has said that he chose the name Reacher for the central character in his novels because he himself is tall and when they were grocery shopping his wife Jane remarked: "'Hey, if this writing thing doesn't pan out, you could always be a reacher in a supermarket.' ... 'I thought, Reacher — good name.'"  Some books in the Reacher series are written in first person, while others are written in the third person. Grant has characterised the books as revenge stories – "Somebody does a very bad thing, and Reacher takes revenge" – driven by his anger at the downsizing at Granada. Although English, he deliberately chose to write American-style thrillers. 

There is something about the success of this man that appeals to me.  Whilst he may not have been down on his uppers when he was made redundant nevertheless he seems to have taken up writing as something he could turn his hand to.  Like J K Rowling. 

I've nibbled away at the impressive list of Jack Reacher novels.  There are 21 to date and I have just read number 7, Persuader. 

Never forgive, never forget.

Jack Reacher lives for the moment. Without a home. Without commitment. But he has a burning desire to right wrongs.   The book is written as a first person narrative, the second Jack Reacher novel to be treated in this fashion.  Jack Reacher is working unofficially with the Drug Enforcement Administration to bring down a boy's father, Zachary Beck, who is an arms smuggler. By pretending to save the boy from his supposed kidnappers, Reacher gains access to Beck and gradually gains his confidence by working as a hired gun/bodyguard. While workind undercoverr he regrettably has to eliminate a few of Beck's minions to prevent them from exposing him. Reacher's primary motivation in getting involved at all in this off-the-books operation is to have another go at Francis Xavier Quinn, a former Military Intelligence agent who brutally mutilated and murdered a female military colleague of Reacher's ten years before. Reacher had originally presumed Quinn to be deceased after their last little encounter but eventually found that assumption to be incorrect after running into Quinn in public. It's ten years later and Quinn somehow just happens to be Zachary Beck's boss in a supremely lucrative, international gun-running enterprise. As always, it is Reacher's all-consuming obsession with revenge, or at least with his personal interpretation of doling out justice, which pushes him far beyond the normal boundaries of physical endurance and acceptable risk.

 

Olde Worlde Murder Mysteries

The Red House Mystery is a "locked room" whodunnit by A. A. Milne, published in 1922. It was Milne's only mystery novel.

Alan Alexander (A. A.) Milne (1882-1956) is most prominently remembered as the author of the well-known Winnie-the-Pooh tales, written for his son, Christopher Robin. Milne was born in London and raised in his father's private school, Henley House, after which he attended Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge to study mathematics. By 1925 he had published 18 plays and 3 novels, including "The Red House Mystery". This was Milne's first and final venture into the detective and mystery genre, despite its immediate success and an offer of two thousand pounds for his next mystery novel.

The setting is an English country house, where Mark Ablett has been entertaining a house party consisting of a widow and her marriageable daughter, a retired major, a wilful actress, and Bill Beverley, a young man about town. Mark's long-lost brother Robert, the black sheep of the family, arrives from Australia and shortly thereafter is found dead, shot through the head. Mark Ablett has disappeared, so Tony Gillingham, a stranger who has just arrived to call on his friend Bill, decides to investigate. Gillingham plays Sherlock Holmes to his younger counterpart's Doctor Watson; they progress almost playfully through the novel while the clues mount up and the theories abound.

Milne lets his readers inside the head of his amateur detective, disregarding the clichéd romance or violence of other detective novels, as the mystery becomes a puzzling sort of parlour game for the novel's characters and readers alike.

Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitze

As a professional pasticheur, Anthony Horowitz has already copied (and pasted) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Ian Fleming. Here he turns his attention to Agatha Christie. The first 200 or so pages are a perfect parody of a typical Christie mystery by one Alan Conway featuring his regular detective, a German refugee called Atticus Pünd. It is the Fifties and, in an idyllic country village, a nasty housekeeper and then her employer, the ghastly Sir Magnus Pye, are found dead. There are lots of suspects and lots of secrets. So far so good.

However, Horowitz, much to his credit, wants to have his fake and beat it. The last chapter of the Magpie Murders typescript is missing so Conway’s editor goes in search of it — and, when the obnoxious writer is found dead at the foot of a tower, his killer.

It’s almost half a century since Roland Barthes published The Death of the Author — and Gilbert Adair borrowed the title for his 1993 novel — but Horowitz has great fun showing how art imitates life and vice versa. The narrative is full of in-jokes, allusions and anagrams (and unmentioned typos). Somehow he manages to make all the inconsistencies and interconnections hang together while providing a cynical yet accurate portrait of modern publishing. 

The plot runs as follows:  when editor Susan Ryeland is given the tattered manuscript of Alan Conway's latest novel, she has little idea it will change her life. She's worked with the revered crime writer for years and his detective, Atticus Pund, is renowned for solving crimes in the sleepy English villages of the 1950s. As Susan knows only too well, vintage crime sells handsomely. It's just a shame that it means dealing with an author like Alan Conway...

But Conway's latest tale of murder at Pye Hall is not quite what it seems. Yes, there are dead bodies and a host of intriguing suspects, but hidden in the pages of the manuscript there lies another story: a tale written between the very words on the page, telling of real-life jealousy, greed, ruthless ambition and murder.

O is for Icelandic nOir - 7 and 11

Two titles in the Detective Erlendur Sveinsson series by the popular Icelandic writer, Arnarldur Indridason.

Outrage

He offered her another margarita, and, as he returned from the bar, he carefully slid the pill into her glass. They were getting along fine, and he was sure she would give him no trouble...

Then 48 hours later a young man is found dead in a pool of blood. There is no sign of a break-in at his flat. The victim is found wearing a woman's t-shirt, while a bottle of Rohypnol lies on the table nearby.

Detective Elinborg, already struggling to juggle family life and the relentless demands of her job, is assigned the case. But with no immediate leads to the killer, can she piece together details of the victim's secret life and solve a brutal murder?

Oblivion

A woman swims in a remote, milky-blue lagoon. Steam rises from the water and as it clears, a body is revealed in the ghostly light.

Miles away, a vast aircraft hangar rises behind the perimeter fence of the US military base. A sickening thud is heard as a man’s body falls from a high platform.

Many years before, a schoolgirl went missing. The world has forgotten her. But Erlendur has not.

Erlendur Sveinsson is a newly promoted detective with a battered body, a rogue CIA operative and America’s troublesome presence in Iceland to contend with. In his spare time he investigates a cold case. He is only starting out but he is already up to his neck.

Indridason's signature is to run two threads that need solving in the same title. 

Growing up in the Shadow of 'The Troubles'

Two Booker Prize Shortlist nominees, both Irish authors writing about the Troubles, their stories focused on the City of Derry, Northern Ireland.

Shadows on our Skin by Jennifer Johnston.

Recognised as a small masterpiece when first published in 1977, and shortlisted for the Booker Prize. A poignant novel about a boy in Derry jolted into early adulthood by harsh circumstances.

Derry in the 1970s: teenager Joe Logan is growing up in the teeth of the Troubles, having to cope with embittered parents, a brother who's been away and come back with money and a gun in his pocket, harsh school teachers, and the constant awareness of the military presence in the background. Central to the story is the friendship that tentatively grows up between Joe and Kathleen, a young school-teacher who brings a fresh perspective to his familiar world.


Reading in the Dark by Seamus Deane, shortlisted in 1996

"What we misleadingly call ordinary life is destroyed by politics in our part of the world, generation after generation. I had to show how that happens." Seamus Deane

A haunted childhood, lived out in two dimensions. One is legendary: the Sun-fort of Grianan, home of the warrior Fianna; the Field of the Disappeared, over which no gulls fly; the house in Donegal where children are stolen away by demonic forces. The other is actual: the city of Derry in the Northern Ireland of the 40s and 50s; a place that is also haunted by political enmities, family secrets, lethal intrigue. The boy narrator of Reading in the Dark grows up enclosed in these two worlds, sensing that they are intertwined in some mysterious ways that he both wants and does not want to discover. Through the silence that surrounds him, he feels the truth spreading like a stain until it engulfs him and his family. Claustrophobic but lyrically charged, breathtakingly sad but vibrant and unforgettable, Reading in the Dark is one of the finest books about growing up - in Ireland or anywhere - that has ever been written.