The Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad follows the fortunes of Cora, a slave born on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Colson Whitehead constructs a framework for his novel that is grounded in history, but is more allegorical than factual, a sort of Pilgrim’s Progress through the worst of American history mixed with the satire of Gulliver’s Travels.

My historian brain battled with this, struggling to place the narrative in a fixed time period, questioning the veracity of the experiences Cora has, confused by seeming representations of American history that sources I checked couldn’t verify. There are anachronisms and a prefiguring of certain post-slavery methods of controlling black lives in among the events that have their roots in fact.

Safely Gathered In

Safely Gathered In is the first collection of short stories by Sarah Schofield, an author and lecturer in creative writing based in the north west of England. The stories have an edge to them, presenting a skewed perspective on the mundanities of life, the things unspoken in relationships, the way we assimilate grief and fear rather than confront it head on. It is a largely female perspective, the women in the stories and their survival mechanisms the focal point. The men depicted in these tales are fools, the women looking to them for something they can’t give.

Father May Be an Elephant, and Mother Only a Small Basket, But …

Gogu Shyamala’s collection of short stories uses allegory, magical realism and fable to document a rural childhood in the Indian state of Telangana. These tales are not whimsical, though, dealing with matters of caste, sexualisation of girls and the violence of poverty. They also reflect Shyamala’s politics, her involvement in Indian democratic movements and her activism, without this being overbearing. There is a lightness to the way Shyamala presents her stories.

The Red Queen

Margaret Drabble’s 2004 novel The Red Queen is inspired by the memoirs of Lady Hyegyeong, a Korean Crown Princess in the second half of the 18th century. In it, Drabble has constructed a fiction in which the ghost of Lady Hyegyeong possesses the mind of a British academic, Dr Babs Halliwell, in order to correct some misconceptions about her life and who she was as a person.

I’M A FAN

I’m A Fan is Sheena Patel’s debut novel. On the surface, it’s about online culture and how it impacts young women, and a story about one woman’s relationship experiences on the road to maturity. Deeper than that, it’s about certain kinds of sickness present in Western society: overconsumption, obsession, structural racism, inequality.

Best of Friends

Best of Friends was a Xmas present last year from one of my sisters-in-law. She has good taste in books so, despite having appreciated rather than enjoyed Shamsie’s previous novel, Home Fire, I was curious about her latest outing. My curiosity was rewarded with a beautifully observed exploration of female friendship that I found compelling.

Flesh and Blood: A History of My Family in Seven Maladies

Flesh and Blood, Stephen McGann’s medical memoir of his family, is a book I was convinced that I had read, but I hadn’t. I’d read about it because of McGann’s work as a science communicator who has spoken at the Cambridge and Cheltenham Science Festivals, and bought it on Kindle where I promptly left it languishing in the digital doldrums.

McGann is from Liverpool, part of the troupe of acting brothers that includes Joe, Paul and Mark. The family traces its origins to Ireland, with an earlier generation emigrating to Liverpool in the mid-19th century as a result of the Great Famine. McGann appears in the tv show Call the Midwife, which I’ve never watched. His role as Dr Turner, alongside a childhood full of illness, sparked an interest in medical science, leading to him undertaking a Master’s degree in Science Communication. The introduction to the book is a wonderful combination of McGann’s artistic, actorly brain and his science brain. As an actor, his job is to tell stories by imagining himself into the character he is portraying, feeling his way into that character’s being. When he began researching his family history, he says he did the same, imagining what might fill the flesh and blood gaps in the documentary data to try to form an idea of a recognisable personality for each ancestor he will never truly know. For this book, he has married that storytelling with his academic interest in the relationship between health and society.

Delicacy: A Memoir About Cake and Death

Delicacy is an examination of what it’s like to grow up as a tall, clever, quiet, funny woman in the UK. Katy Wix shares moments of trauma from her adolescence and adulthood and explains how cake has become associated in her mind with the awfulness of life. Cake is ever present, as a treat, a comfort, a distraction. It’s often eaten in stressful circumstances. Possibly more often than it’s eaten simply for pleasure.

Industrial Roots

Industrial Roots is a collection of short stories from award winning Canadian poet, author and translator Lisa Pike. I received an advance copy of the collection from the publisher, Héloïse Press, in exchange for a fair review.

Pike captures the world of working class Canadian women in Ontario through their voices, employing slang, vernacular and standard English to bring the women to life. In some ways, the narrative voices put me in mind of Flannery O’Connor’s writings, in others the Anne novels of L M Montgomery. There’s a robustness to the exchanges between characters and the way the women telling the stories relate them that lifts them from the page and allows the reader to be in the scene with them.

Six Degrees of Separation: From Passages to Industrial Roots

It’s March. I’ve had a couple of months off from Six Degrees of Separation, but this month’s starting book made me think about my mum’s bookshelves in the late 1970s and I decided to join in again.

Six Degrees of Separation is the book meme hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite And Best where we start with the same book and then create a chain of six books that link to the one before. Sometimes kismet allows you to link all of the books to each other, but it’s okay if it doesn’t. You don’t have to have read any of the books in the chain, either. Which is handy for me because I’ve rarely read Kate’s starting book.