While I wrote Unsettled Ground, I listened to two pieces of music: Polly Vaughn (an old English folk song) sung by Tia Blake, and We Roamed Through the Garden, written by my son, Henry Ayling. Listening to only two songs for two years, it was probably inevitable that they were going to become part of the novel I was writing. But they had a bigger influence: Jeanie and Julius, the protagonists in Unsettled Ground became folk musicians.
I thought it might be interesting to create a playlist for Unsettled Ground, for those who are currently reading the novel or those who have read it already. I hope that this selection – which are all pieces of music I love – will help add to the atmosphere of the book.
Henry is an unsigned acoustic guitarist – teacher, performer, and composer – and therefore his song isn’t on Spotify. But you can listen to We Roamed Through the Garden, here: www.henryayling.com/music/ It is number five on this page.
The playlist below will allow you to hear a little of each song. Open it in Spotify to listen to all the songs in their entirety. And please do let me know which you might know already and if any particularly resonate. Happy listening!
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Unsettled Ground will be published in the US on May 18 and I have lots of online events planned, where, from the comfort of my writing room in England, I’ll be talking about the book, my writing process, and what it feels like for Unsettled Ground to be shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. It would be lovely if any US or Canadian readers could join me on Zoom.
I was recently invited to a Words Away Zalon about motivation and inspiration for writers. If you haven’t heard about Words Away, its a small organisation that hosts events for writers on all kinds of interesting subjects. Sometimes these take the form of writers being interviewed about their process, or other times they run day-long writing workshops in London. At the moment everything is online, which means that anyone can join in.
What the audience were most interested in during my interview, not surprisingly, were the little tricks I use for my own motivation. I’m not a very motivated person when it comes to writing, and I have to use every technique I can think of to keep going. I don’t really like writing, what I enjoy is having written. I didn’t get to mention all my tricks during my Zalon, so I thought I’d put them down here.
Let me know if you start using any and find them helpful, and please do let me know in the comments what tips and tricks you use to keep writing. Perhaps I’ll do a list about inspiration next; but do let me know if there’s anything in particular you’d like me to cover.
Pretend to write something that isn’t your work in progress (WIP). Open a new document and write in a stream of consciousness style, or morning pages. Let yourself go, fool yourself, and you never know you might just start to write your WIP.
Try the ‘This is Shit’ Technique. When those little voices in your head which tell you what you’re writing is rubbish get too loud, wherever you are in your WIP type [ and let the little voice have its say. Write [this is shit[, or [no one is ever going to read this] or [if I get run over by a bus please don’t publish this], and then when the voice has run out of steam type ], and carry on with your WIP.
Interview a character or yourself about a plot point you’re having a problem with. For me this works best if I write it, but I know that for some writers they have an actual conversation and record it. Open a new Word document and type a heading. (I use, ‘We need to talk about xxx’.) Then type a question and let your subconscious brain answer it. I find it works best if I type the ‘interview’ very quickly without time for thought.
Keep a writing diary for each novel. This is a long term project, but worth starting. Every time you have a writing session write in your diary the date, the current word count, and one line about how that writing session has gone and any major thoughts. For a start, it’s helpful to see the word count increasing – motivation in itself, and secondly when you go through a really difficult patch you can open a diary for a previous novel and see whether you’re feeling the same level of despondency at the same word count as then. (I always am.)
Give yourself deadlines. If you haven’t been given deadlines by anyone else (publisher or if you’re on a course, for example), then give yourself some. Or ask a fellow writer to give you a deadline and make sure they follow up to see that you’ve achieved it.
Read someone else’s (excellent) novel. Reading a bad book doesn’t make me think I can do better, but reading an excellent novel makes me try harder with my own WIP.
Work on several projects at once.
Find the music that’s right for your WIP (tone / style / period) and put it on every time you write. Eventually, putting it on will mean it’s writing time.
Have a ‘word race’ with another writer. Agree a time you’re going to start and the length. Maybe 11am for an hour. Check in with each other just before you start and at 12 to see how it went. It isn’t meant to be competitive, but it helps to know that someone else is writing at the same time as you.
Visit the work every day. Write some of your WIP if you can, but if you can’t, then think about it – when you’re driving, washing up, cooking, whatever. If you have a good thought, email it to yourself or record it (if you don’t, you won’t remember it, or at least I never do). If you do this every day when you do get back to writing the WIP you will have something to write and you will be able to jump into it much faster.
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My fourth novel, Unsettled Ground will be published in the US on May 18, when I’ll be doing lots of online bookshop events, including reading from the book, chatting about my writing process, the inspiration behind the novel and lots more. All tickets are free, but you need to register. See the list of dates here.
Unsettled Ground is already published in the UK, and is shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Buy a copy here.
I’m absolutely delighted and thrilled that Unsettled Ground has been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. The panel of five judges, chaired by Booker prize winner, Bernardine Evaristo whittled down the longlist of sixteen books to just six. You can find out more about the other shortlisted novels, and watch Bernardine Evaristo reading from Unsettled Ground, here. The winner will be announced on 7th July.
Unsettled Ground is available to buy in the UK from all independent book shops, Waterstones, and other online shops. If you’d like a chance to win the whole shortlist, Bloom and Wild, as well as Love Reading are running competitions to win all six novels.
The Women’s Prize has organised a 2021 Virtual Shortlist Festival over three days, where you can hear readings from all six novels, see author, Kate Mosse interview us all, and get the opportunity to put your own questions to the shortlisted authors.
I’m still doing a few more UK events for the publication of the book, and I have lots of online US events lined up. (Unsettled Ground will be published on May 18 in the US and Canada.) It would be lovely to see some of you at them. Click to visit my events page.
This article was originally published on Isabel Costello’s blog – The Literary Sofa. Please visit her website for lots more author articles and information about her latest novel, Scent. Just before the post was due to be published I put out a call on Twitter for people’s dog pictures which could accompany the article. Many thanks to everyone who introduced us to their gorgeous furry friends. Isabel chose the adorable Johnny as Official Dog – thanks from Isabel and me to his owner Leah Bergen for use of the photo.
The dog in Unsettled Ground
This might be an odd confession for an article about dogs in books, but I am more of a cat person. I’ve never owned a dog; growing up, my family never owned a dog. We’ve always had cats, and my current one is a tabby called Alan. But I do like dogs, and that’s why I wasn’t too surprised when a dog appeared in my fourth novel, Unsettled Ground. A biscuit-coloured lurcher wrote her way in and became central to the story. But what to call her? I asked Twitter of course. Lots of people responded with their favourite dogs’ names (Luna and Mabel came up over and over). But in the end, I chose Maude, partly because that was what I thought her owner, Jeanie Seeder, would name her.
The Seeder family go through some difficult times and Maude, unfortunately, suffers along with them. What do you feed your dog when you can’t afford dog food, let alone meat? How do dogs behave when they sense illness, or when their owner is under threat? I did a great deal of dog research online, even joining a lurcher appreciation society on Facebook, where I lurked and read lots of posts about the funny things the members’ lurchers did. I watched lots of videos on YouTube of lurchers running (very fast) and sleeping (a great deal). I went for walks with my friends who had dogs, and I asked some of them lots of tedious details about how their dogs would react in certain situations. What I really learned from all my research, is that like humans, and cats, dogs have their own characters. Of course.
And just like human characters in novels, dogs in books can be used in all sorts of ways: to add tension, to gain sympathy, for light-relief and to reflect what’s happening to the human characters. If, like me, you love a good dog (or a bad one) in a novel, then here is a list of some of my favourite novels with dogs in them.
Fluke by James Herbert I read this book about forty years ago but it has stuck with me all this time. James Herbert was a master of the horror genre, but Fluke is not horror. This is a story about a dog, told in the first person, who remembers being a man. He believes he’s been murdered and sets out to try and protect his family. It’s about life and reincarnation and is probably due a re-read about now.
The Weekend by Charlotte Wood Three old friends in their 70s meet in the house of their fourth friend, Sylvie, who has recently died. They are there to help sort out the contents so the house can be sold. The three women, suffering from the usual ailments of old age and griping about each other, are wonderfully drawn. They might be getting on a bit but there are no old-age stereotypes here. Wendy brings along her old dog, Finn, who acts as a symbol of the women’s decline.
Help Yourself by Curtis Sittenfeld This is a short story collection with only three short stories in it. But what stories! In the first, White Women, LOL, Jill, a white Jewish woman is videoed accusing a group of Black people of gate-crashing her friend’s party. The video goes viral and Jill is ostracised by her friends for being racist. At the same time, an African-American TV presenter has lost her dog and the whole community wants to help her find it. When Jill discovers the dog in someone’s yard, she is determined to catch it. Sittenfeld’s writing and situations skewer suburban life.
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters A wonderfully gothic novel with a haunted house (or person) which includes an old lab called Gyp. Caroline Ayres lives with her mother and disfigured brother in the run-down Hundreds Hall. They host a drinks party and their neighbours bring along their precocious eight-year-old daughter. At the party, the young girl is at first scared of Gyp, and then, behind a curtain she teases him, the dog bites, and the girl is injured. There are of course disastrous consequences for everyone. It’s a very tough read for dog lovers, but the incident helps to kick off the unsettling things that happen in the house.
So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell An old man remembers when, as a child, one of his neighbours was murdered and how afterwards he did something which he has been ashamed of ever since. In the middle section of the novel, the man imagines how the murder happened, moving between the minds of the main characters including the family’s dog. Unlike Fluke, the mind of the dog in So Long, See You Tomorrow remains very dog-like, but I still felt huge sympathy for his predicament.
Isabel Costello’s review of Unsettled Ground
UK Cover of Unsettled Ground
In her fourth novel, Claire Fuller unearths lives rarely seen in contemporary fiction through middle-aged twins Jeanie and Julius, whose experience of rural poverty is all they have ever known. The novel is set in my home county of Wiltshire (which doesn’t happen very often either); we knew of people who lived ‘off-grid’ near the village where I grew up, long before it became a lifestyle choice for some. The gap between them and mainstream society was huge but not as wide as it would be now, when those without access to technology find themselves further marginalised from the infrastructure of everyday life. This happens to Jeanie and Julius when the death of their mother jeopardises an already precarious domestic set-up.
In less sensitive hands this could have backfired, but there is nothing patronising or romanticised about Claire Fuller’s vision of the protagonists’ rapidly deteriorating circumstances. In fact, she achieves an effective juxtaposition of hardship and, at times, squalor, with the simple joys of a life lived close to nature and as far as can be from materialism – few could read this novel without reflecting on their own situation. Both siblings have musical talent and the author’s characteristic sensory prose and artist’s eye make the story spring up around the reader in every dimension, including the emotional. The dark tone gives Unsettled Ground more in common with her debut Our Endless Numbered Days than her two most recent novels and if it was sometimes almost unbearably distressing, this is a testament to the empathy Fuller has and creates for the characters, despite heaping one terrible loss or setback after another on them – Jeanie’s vulnerability is especially poignant. A motif shared by all four novels is that of complex and unusual parent-child bonds, mostly extending into adulthood, and on that score this one is as fascinating as its predecessors. A literary highlight of 2021 which merits the recognition it received even before publication.
Buy Unsettled Ground
Unsettled Ground is longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and is available to buy in the UK as a hardback, ebook or audio book. Click here to buy in the UK. Click here to pre-order in the US. Click here to pre-order in Canada.
Unsettled Ground is published in the UK today, 25th March 2021. It’s had wonderful reviews from readers, book bloggers, and many of the national papers, including the FT and the TLS, with The Times calling it, ‘a beautiful and powerful tale’.
If you’ve pre-ordered a copy, hopefully it will be arriving soon if it hasn’t already. If you’d like to buy Unsettled Ground you can do so online from Bookshop.org or from your local bookshop. I’ve got lots of online events arranged, and most of the bookshops that are hosting these are also offering a book included in the price of the ticket. See my events page for more details.
(Thank you to Olivia Partridge @ayoungwritersworld on Instagram, for this gorgeous picture.)
I’m so thrilled to let you know that my fourth novel, Unsettled Ground has been longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021. The announcement was made last night, and Unsettled Ground appears alongside 15 other novels. The shortlist will be announced on 28th April. Keep your fingers crossed for me.
Unsettled Ground will be published in the UK on 25th March, and in the US and Canada on May 18. It can be pre-ordered from any independent or bricks and mortar bookshop, or if you’re interested in pre-ordering and attending one of my online events in the UK or the US, click here.
Unsettled Ground will be published in the UK on 25th March, and that evening, my local independent book shop, P&G Wells, will be hosting an online celebration at 7pm. In previous years of course, launch events for my novels happened ‘in real life’ both in London and Winchester. This time we’ll only be able to see each other via Zoom, but the big benefit is that people from near and far can join in.
There will be live music (technology permitting) from acoustic guitarist Henry Ayling, I will do a short reading, talk a little bit about the book, and there will be time for a Q&A. Wine and party hats optional. Tickets are either free or with a purchase of the hardback at a discounted price. Click here to book your ticket.
For North American readers I’m delighted confirm that I will be having an online launch on May 18th, hosted by McNally Jackson bookstore in New York. So you might want to wait and sign up for that one when I have more details.
For the past six years my husband and I have been taking a picture a day and at the end of each year making them into printed books. I wrote an article about it for Good Housekeeping which has just been published in their February 2021 issue. We started the project because we ended up without any decent photos of the two of us from our wedding, so now we take a picture every day of mostly everyday things. When not in lockdown this has included lots of book events, holidays and meeting up with friends and family. For the past year though there have been a lot of pictures of the two of us doing silly things or pictures of Alan the cat. The article isn’t online, so if you do want to read the whole thing I’m afraid you’ll have to go out and buy a copy of the magazine…or you could just start a project of your own.
My fourth novel, Unsettled Ground will be published in the UK on 25th March, and in the US and Canada on 18th May. Find out more about it here.
I watched 75 films this year. Unfortunately, I only got to watch two at the cinema before the UK lockdown. Here are my top ten in no particular order, and the places in the UK you can watch them. I prefer to give my viewing money to organisations other than Amazon, but I’d still rather watch films than boycott the company altogether, nevertheless as well as summaries of each film, I have listed the places you can currently see them in the UK. Read to the bottom and you’ll find a few bonus movies that I also recommend.
A few facts and figures about my 10 movies:
Five female directors, five male (which I’m pretty pleased about)
Four American-made movies, the rest from different countries
Three subtitled films
One from 1992, one from 2013, the rest from 2019 and 2020
Speculative / science fiction. Gemma and Tom go with a peculiar estate agent to visit a house on an estate of identical houses. When Gemma and Tom try to leave they can’t. It gets more and more odd, and ends with a clever circular twist. Available on Curzon Home Cinema and bfi.org
Once Upon A Time in Hollywood 2019 Dir: Quentin Tarantino USA
Action drama. It’s the 1960s and Rick is an actor in LA. His stunt man and friend, Cliff lives in a nearby caravan with his dog. The pair go to Italy to film some spaghetti westerns, and when they return they get to know Rick’s heavily pregnant neighbour, Sharon Tate. A reworking of the Charles Manson murders, this doesn’t end as expected. Violent, yes. Brilliant, yes. Available on Amazon.
The Assistant 2020 Dir: Kitty Green USA
Drama. Jane is an assistant in a film company in New York. She starts early and performs mundane tasks: clearing her boss’s office, fetching sandwiches, photocopying, as well as lying to his wife about where her boss is. When another assistant arrives in the office, Jane is concerned about her welfare but when she tries to report her suspicions things don’t go as planned. Quiet, reflective, excellent.
System Crasher 2019 Dir: Nora Fingscheidt Germany
Drama. Nine year old Benni, angry and out of control, is in the German care system. She runs away, back to her mother who is unable to provide the love and care Benni needs. She makes a connection with Micha and his family, and goes with him to the woods for three weeks to learn to take care of herself and although this at first seems to help, the system is unable to cope with her. Eye-opening, emotional, tough. Available on Curzon Home Cinema
The Last Days of Chez Nous 1992 Dir: Gillian Armstrong Australia
Family drama. Beth lives with her partner, JP, daughter Annie, and lodger Tim, in a house in an Australian city, when her younger sister, Vicky comes to stay. The house is wild with laughter and arguments between Beth and JP. Beth goes on a road trip with her father and when she returns much has changed in the house. Real, touching, memorable. Available on Google Play.
Parasite 2019 Dir: Bong Joon-ho South Korea
Black comedy thriller. Ki-woo, a poor young man living in a semi-basement with his parents and sister gets a job tutoring a rich family’s daughter. Over time he gets his sister, mother and father jobs for the family, ousting the existing staff. When the rich family are away, Ki-woo and the rest of them discover something unexpected in the basement of the house. Tense, thrilling, eye-opening. Available on Curzon Home Cinema and bfi.org
Ordinary Love 2019 Dir: Lisa Barros D’sa Britain
Family drama. At Christmas Joan discovers a lump in her breast. She begins treatment and her husband, Tom supports her through chemo and a mastectomy. At the hospital Joan recognises a fellow patient, who is her daughter’s former teacher, and a friendship develops. Quiet, emotional, beautiful. Available on Google Play.
Only the Animals 2019 Dir: Dominik Moll France
Mystery Thriller. Using a complex but satisfying narrative, this film weaves five different stories and perspectives together. A woman disappears in a snow storm and her car is found. Five people know something about what has happened and as the film visits each perspective we learn something new about the previous section. Clever, absorbing, satisfying. Available on Curzon Home Cinema
Blue Ruin 2013 Dir: Jeremy Saulnier USA
Action drama. Dwight, apparently a down-and-out, goes after Wade, the killer of his parents, after he is released from prison. But Dwight is neither a killer nor a homeless man, but he quickly gets tangled up in looking for and running from revenge for various murders. It’s complicated and violent, but very satisfying. Available on Netflix.
Never Rarely Sometimes Always 2020 Dir: Eliza Hittman USA
Drama. Autumn is 17 when she discovers she is pregnant. Not finding support from her family or her local clinic, and living in Pennsylvania where she needs parental consent to have an abortion, Autumn and her cousin, Skylar travel to New York. Female friendship, quiet, emotional.
Bonus Movies
There were a few more films that almost made my top ten which you might be interested in looking up. They are:
Good Posture
Paddleton
The Lunchbox
It Follows
Nancy
Calibre
Which of my top ten have you seen and loved? Which have you seen and hated? And do you have any recommendations for me?
2020 didn’t turn out to be the year anyone was expecting. Many people found it difficult to concentrate on reading, others, like me and Tim, found reading to be a solace and a distraction. (Not so much with the writing though.) My free little library outside my house got more use than ever over our lockdown periods and continues to do so now. I received some lovely notes from my neighbours, saying how much it helped them especially when the libraries were closed.
This is the sixth year that Tim and I have been tracking the books we’ve read over the previous year and trying to work out which ten we’ve liked the best. We rate all the books we read out of five as we read them, and of course always end up with more than ten 5-star books each. Then the discussions begin! You can see previous year’s lists here: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015.
I read 96 books this year. Here are some facts and figures about my top ten books I read in 2020:
Two books published this year (Writers & Lovers, and The Weekend)
The oldest published in 1976 (Bear)
One book in translation (Youth)
Nine books by women, and one man (The Innocents)
Two books set in England (The world Before Us and Expectation), one in Denmark (Youth), four in America (Severance, The Hare, Writers & Lovers, A Crime in the Neighborhood), two in Canada (The Innocents, and Bear), one in Australia (The Weekend)
One about a pandemic (Severance)
One not published yet (The Hare)
One winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction (A Crime in the Neighborhood)
Three of my books are also in Tim’s list (A Crime in the Neighborhood, Writers & Lovers, and Youth)
All but one of my books are available in the UK. (The Hare is yet to find a UK publisher.) I have created a list on Bookshop.org to make it easy to buy books from my list online in the UK, here. The Hare is available here (currently pre-orders). But please also consider ordering from you local independent – they need our business more than ever. Please try not to buy your books from that other place which really doesn’t need your business – you know the place I mean.
My Best Reads of 2020
Top three (in no order)
Bear by Marian Engel
Controversial and prize-winning, and a masterpiece. Is what I’m going to say now a spoiler? Maybe. This short novel is about a woman who has sex with a bear. There, it’s said. Avoid it, or read it, now you know. But it’s so much more than that – although these scenes are handled expertly. It’s about nature, a woman working out who she is and what she wants, falling in love (yes), feminism, loneliness, connection. Engel writes beautifully, plainly, elegantly. There is nothing lurid or salacious here; it is all part of the whole.
The Hare by Melanie Finn
With The Hare, Melanie Finn has written a powerful story of female perseverance, strength, and resilience. This book has rare qualities: beautiful writing while being absolutely unputdownable, and I will be pressing it into the hands of every reader I know. Teenager, Rosie meets the much older Bennett and for a while is in thrall to him, but when he leaves Rosie and their daughter in a run-down cabin to fend for themselves, Rosie toughens up and fights for her freedom and her daughter.
Writers and Lovers by Lily King
Don’t be put off by the cover – I thought that it was going to be whimsical, a bit too cute for my tastes, but it was almost my perfect read. (I still don’t like that jacket.) It is funny in a downbeat way, brilliantly written, and with such an engaging main character and story. Casey is grieving the death of her mother, juggling debts and gruelling shifts in an upmarket restaurant in Boston (the waitress scenes were so good). And she’s been writing a novel for six years. (All the parts about writing books were spot on.) Writers & Lovers covers the few months where she has relationships with three men and finishes her novel. It’s about creativity and commitment, work and love.
Best of the Rest
The Weekend by Charlotte Wood
In The Weekend three female friends in their seventies gather at the holiday home of a fourth friend who has recently died, in order to clear it out. Bitchy, grumpy, private, candid, supportive, loving, these three women are so real, so full of life, I absolutely loved them and the book.
The Innocents by Michael Crummey
This book starts with the death of Ada’s and Evered’s parents and baby sister, leaving the siblings aged 9 and 11 completely alone on a cold and inhospitable New Foundland shore. Ada and Evered – see what Crummey has done there – labour through the seasons only with very occasional visits from The Hope to deliver supplies and take their catch of cod. Ada and Evered know just about enough to survive (and the book is full of the work they do, and the landscape they have to submit to), but like Eve and Adam before the time of the apple, they know next to nothing about the world beyond their cove and even less about their bodies. A brilliant, visceral, evocative coming of age novel.
A Crime in the Neighborhood by Suzanne Berne
Marsha is looking back to a couple of months in the summer of 1972 when as a child her father leaves her mother for her aunt, and a boy she knows a little, and doesn’t really like, is molested and murdered in her neighbourhood. Hot days and boiling nights make everyone in the claustrophobic suburbs suspicious of strangers until the undercurrent of hysteria bubbles up into a terrible accusation. This book positively simmers. But don’t expect a crime novel; it’s more about asking why we do the things we do, and not always knowing the answer.
Severance by Ling Ma
This was pure enjoyment, even though it’s mostly a book about a world after a virus has killed most people off. I love a good apocalit. But it’s much more than that, and has a lot to say about immigration, consumerism, capitalism, millennial ennui, and office work. It is also an elegy to New York, or cities in general. Candace is an office worker when a deadly pandemic kills people, but not before they repeat the same routine again and again. She escapes New York and finds the scary Bob and a small team of people heading to The Facility in Chicago. The story flips backwards and forwards in time looking at how Candace ended up in New York, and her brief time in China, as well as the immigration of her parents to the US. The more I’ve been thinking about this book in the months since I read it, the more I’ve found to love.
Youth by Tove Ditlevsen (translated by Tiina Nunnally)
Second in Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen trilogy and from the start it was definitely going to be in my top ten reads of the year. Tove is a teenager moving from job to job, longing for love and to have her poems published. The writing is so fresh despite it being first published in 1967 and being set in 1930s. I’m not sure I’m ready to say goodbye to 20 (or so) year old Tove.
The World Before Us by Aislinn Hunter
How had I never heard of this book until this year? How have I never read it before? when it is exactly my kind of book. Layered, ambiguous, thoughtful, beautifully written, but with a strong narrative. When Jane was 15, Lily the child she was minding, vanished on a walk. The disappearance has haunted her into adulthood, shaped her decisions about work, relationships and study. Jane is obsessed with two things: a girl known only as N who disappears from the pages of history in a similar location, and William Eliot, Lily’s father. When Jane meets William again after more than fifteen years it doesn’t go as she has always imagined, and forces her into action. Following Jane around is a group of ghosts who talk about themselves in the first person plural and are trying to work out who they are and why they are here. If that sounds ridiculous, it isn’t – I found the ghosts very moving.
Expectation by Anna Hope
While the story might not be particularly new, something about the way Hope writes just pulled me in and I ended up reading this in any spare moment, even standing up cooking the dinner. The author doesn’t show herself in even the tiniest way and so it was as though I wasn’t reading at all, but walking along the London streets with these women, lying in the park in the dusk, smoking in their flat with them. Hannah, Cate and Lissa are in their mid 20s and are best friends living together in London. They have the rest of their lives ahead of them: they can be anything, go anywhere, do anything. The book skips ten years on (and back again) to see how their lives have unexpectedly turned out. For fans of Ann Tyler, Maggie O’Farrell, and Esther Freud.
Tim’s Top Ten Reads of the Year
Tim’s Top Three (in no order)
A Crime in the Neighborhood by Suzanne Berne
Tim says: Originally published back in 1998, this is amazing. As close as it comes to time travel by reading a novel as you can get. I read it and it was 1972. I read it and the sun pounded down. I read it and I was in the Boston suburbs. Great characters and so much wonderful detail. If you like your books vivid and bright, try this one.
Burning Bright by Ron Rash
Tim says: Raw and honest. Sometimes brutal, sometimes intimate, always just right. I’ve read tons of incredible short stories this year (see Emma Cline and Jeffrey Eugenides in my top 10), but this is something else. Brilliant. Ron Rash is new to me. Claire and I give each other books all the time. She always gets it spot on, or at least that’s what I thought. Then I found out that she asks her Twitter and Instagram friends for suggestions after briefing them on my tastes. I don’t care if that’s cheating, but if it was you who pushed her in the direction of Ron Rash, I thank you. Pushing it back.
Love by Hanne Orstavik (translated by Martin Aitken)
Tim says: Tense, Nordic, and beautiful in equal measure, with a bit of eerie thrown in too. Love takes place over the course of a single night. Jon is locked out of his house. He and his mother have very different journeys. I couldn’t put it down. Makes me want to go back to Scandinavia right now. How do books do that?
Tim’s Best of the Rest
Feast Your Eyes by Myla Goldberg
Daddy by Emma Cline
Medicine Walk by Richard Wagamese
Valentine by Elizabeth Wetmore
Fresh Complaint by Jeffrey Eugenides
Youth by Tove Ditlevsen
Writers and Lovers by Lily King
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My fourth novel, Unsettled Ground will be published in March in the UK, and in May in the USA and Canada. Find out more here.
