Eliza Clark’s second novel charts a journalist’s investigation of a murder that slipped past the tabloid news hounds thanks to it taking place on the night of the UK’s EU Referendum. It is presented as a reissue of a true crime book that, at the time of first publication, was seen as contentious and withdrawn by the publisher. Its author, Alec Z Carelli, is a seasoned hack who formerly reported on crime for a left-wing tabloid.
Continue readingApril comes around again and with it the first Saturday of the month. Shall we hammer together some links in a Six Degrees of Separation chain?
This month, our host Kate has chosen The Correspondent by Virginia Evans as our starting point. You can find out more about the meme at Books Are My Favourite and Best.
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It’s the National Year of Reading in the UK. At work, the library service is running a book bingo challenge, with a theme per month. March’s theme is Cosy Crime. It has been a while since I read anything in this genre and, as I finished my last book earlier than expected, I popped into the library to borrow something. With an eye on adding an extra book to my Reading Wales Month tally as well, I chose The Case of the Dotty Dowager by Cathy Ace. I’d summarise it as easy reading with an interesting locked room mystery at its core.
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Miki Berenyi’s memoir Fingers Crossed is a rough read at times. It chronicles the dysfunctional childhood of an only child whose parents were more interested in their own happiness than that of their daughter. It features a Nazi-sympathising grandmother who sexually abused her granddaughter. It lays bare the chaos of Berenyi’s coping strategies and the defensive callousness she shows to people who care about her. It calls out the sexism of the indie music scene of the 1990s. For all that, it’s immensely readable.
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Here’s an unusual Reading Wales Month contribution. I’m including it in celebration of the academic institutions in Wales and the contributions they have made to society. I’m an alumnus of Aberystwyth University. When I was there, Aber was a college of the federal University of Wales, along with Bangor, Cardiff, St David’s and Swansea. Aimee Grant is a post doctoral researcher at Swansea University and has written a brilliant guide to how to analyse information contained in documents. She comes at the subject from a social science angle, but what she describes is relevant to all of us in a world of overwhelming information.
The foreword to Doing Excellent Social Research with Documents makes the point that we are creating and consuming written content and images at an increasing rate, across a range of sources that have expanded to include digital sources like social media. The need for skills in critically reading these sources is becoming increasingly important so that we can all “read between the lines” and understand what lies behind these documents, which are considered by Grant “not simply as topics of study but for what they can tell us about the richness of the lives of individuals in a variety of social situations.”
As someone working with documents (I’m an archivist) with a background in Economic and Social History (my first degree that still informs my professional practice), this introduction had me excited for what was to follow. You might not feel as excited as I did, but hear me out.
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Isabel Adonis is an artist and writer based in North Wales. I first got to know her work as an artist when The Weavers Factory gallery held an exhibition of her show Scraps, Patches and Rags in 2021. The works in the show explored meanings of ‘home’, a theme that is also a strand in And… A memoir of my mother. Here, Isabel reflects on her childhood and her mother’s place in it, alongside an examination of what ‘home’ meant to her mother. It’s a book about fragmentation and division, about how society tries to constrain individuality, and how the search for the true self is almost impossible.
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Nights at the Circus opens with a bang, in the dressing room of Fevvers, an aerial Helen of Troy billed as “The Cockney Venus” who performs in a London circus show. She is loud, bold, sure of herself, and she is speaking to a young journalist about her legendary life. I liked her instantly for her raucous good humour and fondness for spinning a tale.
Nights at the Circus preceded Angela Carter’s last novel, Wise Children. I haven’t read it, but I have seen a theatrical adaptation of it by the theatre company that takes its name from the book. I got a similar feeling from Fevvers as that which emanated from the actors on the stage during Wise Children – the pure joy of being a performer.
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I wasn’t sure about Tracy Chevalier’s Falling Angels at first. Its episodic, first person narrative across multiple characters felt clumsy at the start. Some of the voices became stronger as the story progressed, though, and I ended up loving it and being heartbroken by it.
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Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse is more than the book I was expecting it to be. I thought it was going to be an examination of city streets and public spaces and how they welcome or exclude women, of a similar ilk to Leslie Kern’s Feminist City. It turned out to be more like Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City. Which is fortunate, because I loved Laing’s book and hated Kern’s. Elkin blends personal memoir with the stories of other women who have worked things out through walking and sought anonymity in city streets across the world. It gave me a lot to think about. This one’s going to be a long one – make yourself a brew.
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Set in Norfolk, London and Australia in the first half of the 19th century, The Low Road follows Hannah Tyrrell from the quiet of a rural life, to the bustle of the city, and finally to the world of the convict. The author, Katharine Quarmby, is an investigative journalist who has drawn on real events to write this, her first novel.
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What I Think About When I Think About Reading 