Books and films don't really make me cry. I've sat guiltily dried-eyed next to tearful friends inWarning, spoilers!
I drank this book down in a day.
Books and films don't really make me cry. I've sat guiltily dried-eyed next to tearful friends in the cinema (two different friends for 'Barbie'), or been handed a book and told it will break my heart, which has a good old twang at the strings but fails to produce a sniffle. Through experience I've learned that my tear-jerk barrier is just set higher. I don't say this because I'm an ice-queen, but to emphasise that I don't cry at books.
Catriona Silvey's book, 'Meet Me in Another Life', had me sobbing.
The premise is quite simple. Girl meets boy. Girl and boy feel a connection, a kinship. Tragedy strikes. Then girl meets boy again. And again. And again. Their relationship takes a different dynamic each life - of teacher and pupil, sister and brother, parent and adoptive child, friends, lovers, confidants - but every time they meet in the same city of Cologne, each time searching for something more. As the number of their cosmically entwined lives builds and memories begin to bleed between them, they become desperate to discover the meaning of it all and uncover what they are to each other.
Thora is a scientist at heart, strong-willed, data-driven, results-focused. Santi is more of a dreamer, God-aware and looking for higher meaning. One of the best parts of the book is watching these staunch characteristics become drenched by each other's outlook and their repeated lives, and begin to disintegrate, surfacing ferally strong in some lives and being drowned in others. It's a brilliant exploration of character, asking whether there is such a thing as a core personality or if it depends entirely on the circumstances. Both share a trait of wanting to know the answer to the phenomenon they're living through, rather than just enjoying the blessing of a hundred lives, and this is the bridge that creates a common dialogue between them, both desperate to understand and be understood by the other.
I'm going to toot my own horn and say I guessed the twist (I did not predict the level of wounding my heart would endure, however). The simple reason is that I had just listened to episode 6, 'A Dreamless Sleep', of the 'Sayer' podcast. In the episode, an AI pilot sadistically informs the passenger in hypersleep that they will be awake until the spaceship reaches its destination, but in the meantime every minute the passenger feels passing will in reality be a nanosecond. By the time the ship docks, the passenger will have experienced over three hundred years, banging around in their own skull. It's the same concept here, except Cologne is an artificial sandbox for two copilots in hypersleep, on their way to a new planet.
The revelation would run the risk of being almost campy, eye-roll-worthy ('it was all a simulation!'), but not in the hands of such a character-driven story which is less about the result as the meaning.The idea of a mind being kept occupied and even trained during hypersleep is intriguing, and what takes the book to next level is the sheer humanity of it. Needing to spend lives with your co-pilot so you can be exactly what the other needs when isolated together on an alien planet. Having 'echoes' of loved ones implanted into the simulation to remind you why you're venturing into the unknown of space in the first place. The breadcrumbs through the first two thirds of the book - their shared love of astronomy, the name of the pub they both like (Der Zentaur, while the name of the star they're flying towards is Proxima Centauri), the flash of their own faces in the reflection of their sleep pods between lives, etc - were artfully scattered. On a first reading they seem to be sweet quirks of the characters, charming coincidences, or odd but explicable recurrences, but in hindsight their trail is as bright as the constellations the astronauts are passing through.
I liked that the two were not always romantically entwined. The hook quote from the front of my edition says (and these are so often terrible) that this is not a love story, but a story about love, and it's remarkably apt. The central message is simple and manages not to be preaching: trying to understand another person - completely, holistically - is like trying to understand the universe; futile, but there is no endeavour so important as the act of trying.
I have no idea why this book isn't rolling in five star reviews on Goodreads. It is a perfect book, in the dictionary definition of the word: pure, total, lacking in nothing. It has heart, it has spark, it has originality, and it has beautiful prose. On occasion the philosophising felt a little repetitive, the same arguments rehashed across multiple lives, but otherwise there is no area of this book that lets it down.
Plus, to top it all off, I had the pleasure of meeting the author at a book event and she is delightful in person as well.
**spoiler alert** I really liked this book, which I received as an advance. It is a wonderfully magnetic and brooding story, tugging at the double-edg**spoiler alert** I really liked this book, which I received as an advance. It is a wonderfully magnetic and brooding story, tugging at the double-edged feeling that old English woods always evoke; the deep attraction of the shadows and the pull of the uncharted, and the terror of what it means to be truly lost.
It's fantastically written and creates a powerful feeling of a looming Other, unknowable and menacing, and builds a heavy tension as the strangeness of the forest plays on the minds of the two groups stumbling through it.
I really loved the ending. It's the ultimate tragedy of being a historian, that you'll never truly know what happened in the era you're studying, that there's an uncrossable gap of time between you and the events you've made your life's work. And that's the ultimate lot of Dr Christopher: she's stuck without any way of understanding of what happened to the group of soldiers she gave up so much to research, and without a way to understand what has happened to her....more
This is a wonderful, colourful, clever book, introducing the concepts of modern quilting from first principles to final product, complete with a QuiltThis is a wonderful, colourful, clever book, introducing the concepts of modern quilting from first principles to final product, complete with a Quilting Dictionary and an introduction to materials and equipment (including sewing machine TLC).
The book is really well written and has a wonderful warmth all through it; you can feel the author's love of quilting and their desire to make it easy, accessible and fun for readers. Appropriate for all levels, from the complete novice to the battle-hardened quilter, this book has something for everyone.
The quilts themselves are beautiful and beautifully photographed, and have a very definite style - primary colours, clever quilting design (I learned the correct phrase from the book's handy dictionary) and bold, eye-catching shapes - with room for your own interpretation. The patterns are easy to follow and clearly explained.
I would recommend this book to anyone who is keen to get into quilting for the first time - and needs their newbie fears banished - and anyone looking for helpful tips, tricks and techniques. I'll be buying a copy for anyone I know who is even remotely crafty!...more
I found this book quite difficult to rate, but I really did enjoy it.
It's beautifully written, slow, almost dreamlike. Some of the turns of phrase arI found this book quite difficult to rate, but I really did enjoy it.
It's beautifully written, slow, almost dreamlike. Some of the turns of phrase are pure poetry. Armfield has a gift for describing very abstract, specific emotions with one carefully chosen metaphor. On occasion the book felt almost like an exercise in personal validation; Armfield's characters both have small, self-assuring quirks which I've only ever witnessed in myself, and I enjoyed feeling seen.
I always like creature books where (view spoiler)[ you never find out what the creature is. It lends itself to an Eldritch horror aesthetic, letting the readers' minds extrapolate by the power of suggestion (hide spoiler)].
In a lot of media there is a non-communication trope which I really struggle with, where if only one character spoke to another, whole chunks of narrative would be made unnecessary. I understand why Miri was so absent for most of the book, going through the motions in the denial stage of grief, but I couldn't help but find it horribly frustrating that she didn't reach out to a single person (view spoiler)[ as she watched her wife deteriorate (hide spoiler)]. Similarly with Leah; again, I understand why she spoke little, but it was still frustrating to read. A large part of the book felt like it was given to navel-gazing instead of plot.
The book has the opposite of a crescendo. We start with the main event, a return of the wife, and walk backwards. The readers are watching an attenuation, and I think if you're happy to wallow in the prose and let yourself sink, it's a real gem of a book....more
When I read the blurb for this book I didn't take the premise too seriously, thinking a story about a man turning **spoiler alert** Warning, spoilers!
When I read the blurb for this book I didn't take the premise too seriously, thinking a story about a man turning into a shark could only be so poignant. How incredibly wrong I was! The book is surreal, weird and wonderful.
Shark Heart follows the lives of two characters affected by a medical phenomenon of animal mutation; a gradual onset of symptoms that heralds the complete transformation of a human being into an animal. Recently married, their whole lives ahead, a young couple - Wren and Lewis - realise that Lewis has a Carcharodon carcharias mutation: he's going to turn into a great white shark. The book follows their individual adaptation to this diagnosis, flashing back on occasion to the transformation of Wren's mother into a komodo dragon. While Wren battles to keep Lewis with her, building him a saltwater pool in the garden, enduring Lewis' fading memories and increasingly violent behaviour, Lewis is forced to experience the deterioration of his character and the painful transformation of his body.
I actually had to stop halfway through the book, when Wren has just released Lewis into the ocean, and take a short time out before reading further. Having witnessed others in my life deteriorate and become unrecognisable from what they once were, and the effect of this on loved ones, the book struck just a little too close to home.
The animal mutation feels like it could be a metaphor for any number of things. The slow onset of dementia that strips a person of who they are and makes them steadily more reliant on loved ones. The slow battering of a person by bad experience into something hard and foreign. Even the simple change of a person throughout their life, making them gradually more incompatible with those around them.
But the book is chock full of other explorations too, into grief, love, fear of the future. I particularly loved the side story about the Tiny Pregnant Woman who resents the birds growing within her, ready to tear out of her as if her womb were a shell. It would be easy to labour the metaphors and see it as a comment on the declining laws on access to abortion, denied to so many even when there are medical risks, but I think it's really more simple than that. Her body is made something that is not her own, something foreign and dangerous to her, which I expect isn't an unfamiliar feeling to a lot of mothers.
The characters are rounded and very different from each other. Lewis is a dreamer who wants to act and write plays, and inspire his schoolkids to become great. Wren has her feet on the ground, forced into a role of responsibility at too young an age, certain until she's proved wrong that she can find a way to keep their marriage whole. Wren's mother Angela, a teen mother who finds purpose in her child. All of them share a sort of wide-eyed innocence as their lives are torn apart.
The writing style of the book, short vignettes and sometimes single phrases per chapter, often in the style of a play, gives the book a cascading feeling, like you're being swept along in the lives you're reading with no control over the end result. Perhaps I'm reading into it, but it reflects well the theme of being beholden to change, regardless of whether you're ready for it.
Shark Heart is one of those rare books that reaches right into you and reflects lived experience so exactly, and so poetically, that it feels like you're being seen. It wears its heart openly and unapologetically on its sleeve. Equal parts tenderly comedic and tragic, the book was a difficult one to read, but I'm so glad I did.
Thank you to Jo Fletcher books for the advance copy. ...more
**spoiler alert** This book was a delight from start to finish, I had so much fun reading it. Amina Al-Sirafi is a tough, no-nonsense ex-pirate with a**spoiler alert** This book was a delight from start to finish, I had so much fun reading it. Amina Al-Sirafi is a tough, no-nonsense ex-pirate with a moral code and a tongue sharp as steel who has has been cajoled into one last adventure over the high seas. She faces down sorcerers, leviathans, and demi-god ex-husbands, and her own terrors as a mother. Her swashbuckling adventures over the high seas took me completely out of myself; I haven't felt such a feeling of complete escapism in ages, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Chakraborty's world, based in the historic Middle-East, is vibrant and alive, and Al-Sirafi's crew are likeable and well-rounded, with a real sense that they have a tangled history with their nakhudha of which we're only seeing the tip.
Being introduced to the captain later in her life, when she has resigned herself to retirement, gave this book an amazing depth. Amina Al-Sirafi's internal struggles between remaining safe and well for her daughter and returning to her ship, to the adventure of the seas that is the love of her life, is a constant throughout the book and was incredibly convincing.
I loved the fantasy elements towards the end but honestly could have spent way more time with the captain on her ship, visiting ports and getting up to hijinks. It's such a rich world on its own that I felt a little blindsided by the addition of a second, its weirdness a little jarring, although I imagine it was supposed to be as disconcerting for the reader as it was for Amina Al-Sirafi.
Regardless, I can't wait for the next two books....more
One of the most intricately crafted worlds I've ever read for a debut. I believe it's drawn from very real Chinese military history, and you can tell One of the most intricately crafted worlds I've ever read for a debut. I believe it's drawn from very real Chinese military history, and you can tell the author knows her stuff by the sheer level of detail she uses to build the world from the bottom up. I feel like I learned something reading this!
At first I was worried the main character was going to be a Mary Sue, over-powered and infallible, but the sheer torment the author subjects her to in order for her to achieve her goals just makes you admire her. Her academic and military prowess are hard-earned, and her inner turmoil is painful to read; the battle within her between desire for revenge and a genuine urge to be a decent human being, despite her inherent cynicism, is very believable. There were a lot of supporting characters but they were all distinct and memorable in their own ways.
The plot turn caught me by surprise towards the end, getting very dark very quickly (all the more disturbing because of the real-world inspirations). It didn't become gratuitous, but I had to have a stiff drink to hand!
Altogether, the book combines a very earthy realism during a time of war with a magic system that lets the author show off her power of description. Gird yourself, you're in for a cracking read!...more
You have no idea what’s going on for a large part of the book but your curiosity is just piqued. It’s so heartfelt; the main character has no idea whoYou have no idea what’s going on for a large part of the book but your curiosity is just piqued. It’s so heartfelt; the main character has no idea who they are but you still love the way they think, how they view the ethereal world and interact with it. Susanna Clarke writes with grace and poetry. It’s beautiful!...more
This review has been a long time coming! I really enjoyed this book, it's a chunk but I read it in a couple of days. It's intelligent, fast-paced, andThis review has been a long time coming! I really enjoyed this book, it's a chunk but I read it in a couple of days. It's intelligent, fast-paced, and well-researched.
As an ex-linguist, I thoroughly enjoyed the idea that translation is a betrayal of a mother tongue, and becomes a new beast heavily burdened with its own cultural heritage and the individual predispositions of the translator. It's an incredibly clever idea, and works so well because Kuang is a complete authority in the subject. She writes beautifully, and the footnotes throughout the book could have run the risk of making the book dense, but instead they're extra flavouring, sprinkled on top and interesting in their own right. The characters are all inviduals you could imagine yourself having a pint with and engaging in night-long table-top-bashing arguments.
My own incredible greed stops me from putting five stars. I wanted to know more about the world; there's an incredible alternative system inserted into the industrial revolution, and we see empires rise and fall on it. It explores colonialism, racism, education. But - and I appreciate that there is a limit to what can be squeezed into a book, and Kuang will have made executive decisions about what to explore and what to leave to imagination - there are so many more areas where this thought experiment can be run. What effect would a system, which would appear to the civilian to be magic, have on religion? On studies in metaphysics?
Regardless, I loved it. It spoke to my own university experience, although sadly I never came across a leaning tower of oysters. Kuang reminded me of the long library hours, writing essays through the night and somehow still having energy to attend lectures and parties, riding exhaustion without the risk of burn out because it was fuelled by genuine interest.
Thank you to HarperVoyager for sending me a copy....more
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