The Making of a Marchioness

The Making of a Marchioness by Frances Hodgson Burnett is the story of Emily Fox-Seton, a young woman from a lesser branch of a wealthy family who was plunged into penury when her mother died. Emily works for others, her sweetly innocent nature and willingness to help others a commodity among the rich and selfish. She is resourceful, living within her means, keeping herself stylish and making the most of life. It’s a delight of a book.

Tomb of Sand

In northern India, an 80-year old woman takes to her bed after her husband dies. Her children try to bring her back to their land of the living, but she is tired of being the breath they all breathe.

Tomb of Sand won the International Booker Prize in 2022 and I bought a copy because I haven’t read much Indian literature and wanted to support the independent publisher Tilted Axis Press, as well as read more books by women writing in a non-European language translated by women.

This is a big book, in more ways than one. It is 735 pages long and deals with the nature of tradition and convention, the position of women in patriarchal societies, the borders that exist everywhere, who polices them and whether the barriers they represent are insurmountable. It explores one woman’s experience of Partition and the immediate impact the separation of India and Pakistan had as well as its long reach into the 21st century. It considers family structures and the unspoken rivalries and power plays within them. It examines what it is to be a woman of a certain age whose body is changing in ways that feel like an entirely new person is squatting in her brain. And it talks about the tension between humans and the rest of nature and how our species would do well to listen better to those that have evolved differently to us.

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.

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.

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.

Quick Reviews of Comic Books

I spent some time catching up on comic books from my To Read pile recently. I read Tales of Woodsman Pete with Full Particulars by Lilli Carré, and Hunter & Painter and Baking with Kafka, both by Tom Gauld. I bought the first two in a small bookshop in Bristol a good few years ago. The second is a book plate limited edition that I bought from Gosh! Comics.

The Memory of the Air

The Memory of the Air is a novella in monologue form from the Belgian woman of letters, Caroline Lamarche. First published by Gallimard in 2014 as La mémoire de l’air, the English language edition is translated by Katherine Gregor for Héloïse Press.

The narrator of The Memory of the Air is unnamed. She begins by telling us about a dream she had. In it, the body of a dead woman is lying at the bottom of a ravine. Across the rest of the book, the narrator tries to reach that woman by recalling her past and how it has led her to where she is now as a woman.

Somebody Loves You

Mona Arshi’s novella Somebody Loves You is the story of Ruby, a young girl who chooses mutism as her coping mechanism to deal with the stresses of her suburban life. It opens with a quote from Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet that speaks of feeling unnoticed and finding a way to preserve your inner self.

Six Degrees of Separation: From The Book of Ramallah to The Book of Istanbul

It’s the first Saturday of the month and time once again for Six Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. This month we start our chains with the book that was the final link in last month’s chain.

I chose The Book of Ramallah, a collection of short stories by writers from or based in this Palestinian city. This month, I’m going to use it to promote the books of its Manchester-based radical left wing publisher, Comma Press, and the female editors and writers featured in their books.