Tag: UK

YOU ARE HERE by David Nicholls

I really liked this one. I read the whole thing in 24 hours, not such a feat except in that same 24 hours I worked for 9 hours and went to a play for 3 hours (MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN at the Almeida is amazing), and I assume also ate and slept and hopefully bathed.

Let’s quote extensively, as I like to do with books I like. It’s basically a rom-com, and starts with the main characters both lonely. Here’s the woman:

“She was not one of those girls who hired a nightclub for her birthday but she’d easily filled a room above a pub for her twenty-first, a long table in an Italian restaurant for her thirtieth. For her fortieth she thought she might go for a walk in the park with a friend or two, a once popular band obliged to play in ever smaller venues. Year by year, friends were lost to marriage and parenthood with partners she didn’t care for or who didn’t care for her, retreating to new, spacious lives in Hastings or Stevenage, Cardiff or York while she fought on in London. Others were lost to apathy or carelessness, friendship like a thank-you letter she kept meaning to write until too much time had passed and it became an embarrassment.”

And here, I’m sorry but this one’s just for Londoners, is a bit Euston train station: “a building whose exterior is somehow disguised – no lifelong Londoner can draw a picture of it – as is its function, the trains departing furtively from a back room.”

So true. I used to leave from that station once a week for about 6 months and I myself could not tell you what it looks like. And this one’s also specially relevant to Londoners, especially younger ones: “Her old age pension promised an income of two pounds twenty a week, and she furiously resented belonging to a generation whose future security depended on their parents’ death, so that only orphans could afford a holiday.”

I love the rage. And now here’s one not just for Londoners, but all British people: “The downpour sounded like a great, exasperated exhalation, as if even the rain was disappointed by all the rain”

Sadly, I’ve heard this particular rain myself.

I loved this one, strongly recommend.

THE MISSIONARY’S WIFE by Tim Jeal

Here is a story about a missionary’s wife. It’s set in the 1890s in Zimbabwe around the time of the first Chimurenga. I’ve read Tim Jeal’s work before – I love his biography of Stanley – but I was sort of torn about this one.

On the one hand, it is kind of stilted. Here is the wife, shortly after she gets married to the missionary, in her home town of Sarston in the UK: “Their lovemaking became for her not just the greatest pleasure in her life but a perfect expression of their real union.” M’kay.

On the other hand, it was full of interest. The wife’s mind is completely blown when she finds out that the locals allegedly rub bats’ dung into their labia to make them as long as bats’ wings. She tried to ‘imagine such things being mentioned in Sarston. People would faint at the very idea.’ I am doubtful this was ever the case, but I think it is super interesting to imagine what it must have been like for both sides of that wild first meeting of cultures.

Eventually it turns into an adventure story, and then unexpectedly a love story, and I enjoyed it in the end. It did make sad to think how little historical fiction there is, not just about Zimbabwe, but about Africa as a whole. So big thanks to Tim Jeal for adding to the small pile, ‘perfect expression of real unions’ aside.

NAPLES ’44 by Norman Lewis

I feel like I spend half my time trying to dig up ideas of books to read. Someone gifted me a subscription to the London Review of Books, and it’s proving a goldmine of obscure ideas. This one is non-fiction, a journal of a British intelligence officer in Naples in 1944.

It’s a fascinating look at what it was like for civilians on the losing side. Guys, it was bad. Really bad. No one has anything to eat, to the point that a huge proportion of the female population is having to do sex work. It’s grim.

I don’t know who this author is, but the writing is banging. One small example – he casually describes a minor character has having “a face the colour of a newly unwrapped mummy.” Lol!

LOVE AND SUMMER by William Trevor

I liked another book by this author, FELICIA’S JOURNEY. It was all about a poor Irish girl trapped by her society. It didn’t like this one nearly as much. It was also about a poor Irish girl trapped by her society. It started to make me feel like this guy just likes torturing poor Irish girls. This one was particularly grim. It’s about a girl brought up in a Catholic orphanage who goes out to be a maid and marries her employer and then SPOILER ALERT falls in love with a young man. From page 1 you just know that this isn’t going to be a story about finding happiness or escape. You just know everything’s going to turn out bad. And I just don’t have the tolerance for it. It’s almost like gratuitously miserable.

ADELAIDE by Genevieve Wheeler

In this book we see what happens when you date someone who’s not that into you.

Adelaide is madly in love with her boyfriend Rory. He thinks she is okay. She puts in an incredible amount of time and effort for him, and he enjoys it. To be fair, he does not lie to her. When she tells him she loves him, he explicitly tells her he doesn’t love her back. And yet somehow she just cannot let him go. I get it. It’s sad. She’s drinking too much, working too hard, and not eating enough, and SPOILER ALERT it all goes pretty badly wrong.

One thing I really enjoyed was that this book was set very precisely in recent years in London. The main character and I have been to the same plays, same exhibits, same restaurants. That was kind of eerie and I enjoyed it.

THE PLACES IN BETWEEN by Rory Stewart

In this unhinged memoir, Rory Stewart decides it is a good idea to walk across Afghanistan by himself. In 2002! In winter!

He has already been walking for many months by the time he gets to Afghanistan, and is constantly being told by warlords about how dangeorus the route is he has chosen, as it is across the mountains in the snow. You would think you would listen when TALIBAN WARLORDS are telling you something is dangerous. He does not. We learn a lot of things in this memoir, but not the answer to the most important question: why?

I did find it interesting when he said about how frequently locals sit in silence, especially if nothing interesting has happened of late, because as he notes they have all known each other since childhood, and none of them has read or seen anything interesting (because they can’t read and don’t have TVs). He is often with locals, because his plan for accommodation and food is to ask locals for them. I appreciate that due to the emphasis on hospitality in Islamic culture this is not such a very weird plan, but I personally would have been uncomfortable. The people he is walking among are very poor, and I don’t know if the fact that poor people are willing to give you their food means you should take it.

Also of interest is the fact that he is following in the footsteps of Babur, the 15th century founder of the Mongol empire, and he often refers to his memoir. It started to feel familiar to me, and then I realized this is because I have read it. It is, btw, one of the first memoirs even written. And I was like: DAMN, I am well read. Though I only remember the killing parts, to be honest.

KINGFISHER by Rozie Kelly

I typically avoid books described on the back cover as ‘lyrical,’ and this one sailed dangerously close to that dreaded adjective. I can’t say it was a bad book; it’s just not my kind of book.

It tells the story of a gay man who finds himself falling in love a woman. This part was interesting, actually, about how unexpected desire is and what it means for your life and identity. But then it just got kind of sad, and well, lyrical. A great book for someone, just not for me.

IN CHANCERY by John Galsworthy


This is the second book in the Forsythe saga, a story of wealthy British family in the early twentieth century. The first one was about a man whose wife falls in love with someone else. As divorce was very hard to achieve, cue a lot of being tormented. In this second book, everyone gets their acts together and does what they should have done in the first place, i.e: ignore the haters and just get a divorce! Meanwhile some other characters die in the Boer War. I am not sure how many more of these books I am going to do. The wife character is really an insufferable ‘perfect fantasy’ and it’s really irritating me for some reason.

SUMMER OF BLOOD by Dan Jones

Here is a piece of non-fiction about the Peasant’s Revolt in 1381. I’d never heard of it. Apparently after the plague, there were so few working people that they were able to up their day rates, which the nobles didn’t like. Hilariously, they therefore tried to fix prices at the pre-Plague rates. In addition to this great idea, they were also busy trying to rule France by means of an expensive war, and decided that peasants should accept the introduction of taxation to pay for it.

This did not go down well. Inspired by a priest called John Ball, who was basically miles ahead of Marx with the communism (and from who the famous line “When Adam delved and Even span, who then was the gentleman?” comes), the peasants marched on London, killed a lot of nobles who deserved it (and some who potentially did not), and took the Tower of London. Richard II, then fourteen, granted them all their demands, and the revolt started to ease. So then he set up vindictive kangaroo courts and had thousands of peasants executed in revenge. Rich people got to rich I guess.

FELICIA’S JOURNEY by William Trevor

A very compelling story about a young Irish girl who gets pregnant and comes to England to find the father with whom she had a holiday romance. She doesn’t find him, but she does find what we slowly conclude is some kind of SPOILER ALERT serial killer. This makes it sound like it’s cheesy, but it’s really not. Trevor is a really gifted writer and tells the story from both POV in a very compelling way. My main take away is, THANK GOD FOR FEMINISM. This poor girl is so messed up that she really is barely able to advocate for herself in even the most basic ways, and that’s before she meets the serial killer.