Akin by Emma O’Donoghue

This is the same writer who produced Room, which was a riveting book. On the strength of that I bought this one, only to be marginally disappointed. Room was such a powerful exploration of a dreadful situation, but this was less powerful, more sentimental and of course totally predictable. Chick lit really, OK for travelling when you really don’t want to concentrate and the guy might be coming round with drinks at any moment. So this light and entertaining read is about a crusty old bloke who suddenly finds himself lumbered with a disturbed child. They take off for France and spend their time there investigating the old bloke’s family history, uncovering secrets and changing their attitudes to one another as things warm up. That’s really all to be said about it. Pleasant but not important.

The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple

Wowee, what a book. I read this in preparation for my trip to India. Originally I had planned to fly into Delhi because that’s where the plane went. I’d have a look around and then move on. Now I know I will be visiting the hub of the Mughal Empire. Before this book I knew nothing about the Mughals, this proud dynasty of Muslim warrior emperors with their vast wealth and political and battle prowess. Nor did I know much more than the name of the British East India Company. Tom Hardy’s TV series Taboo hinted at their dark dealings but that was about it. Little did I know: this was the world’s first stock holders company, a company that used its financial and political influence to gain a trading monopoly in India, where they essentially bankrupted the entire country to satisfy the greed of their shareholders. Bengal has been the richest region in the world, home to the wealthiest man in the world, responsible for something around thirty percent or more of the world’s wealth. England was responsible for less than 5 per cent. Through political influence, the raising of armies, warfare, betrayal and corruption, the EIC completely turned the tables. William Dalrymple tells all this in his fabulously conversational story-telling style. Not only do we learn about the action-facts, but there is also a load of detail about the daily lives and predilections of the people we meet. For my tastes there’s altogether too much detail about the wars, blow by blow in all their gory misery, but for true history buffs that’s probably essential. This was a great preparation for India and I’ll be looking at the Red Fort in Delhi through entirely different eyes because of it.

Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood

Oh what a joy to read! I loved, loved, loved this book. This is the true so-far life story of the writer and poet Patricia Lockwood, whose father is a married Roman Catholic priest. She and her husband Jason move back home while they are regrouping both financially and emotionally and she uses that time to write a book about her family and upbringing. The book is wicked and hilarious, deeply moving, poetic, philosophical, angry, thoughtful and satirical. And did I already say it? HILARIOUS. Lockwood lays herself bare, with all her vulnerabilities and self doubt mingling with a wonderfully observant wit and irreverence for the culture in which she finds herself. Her characters, with all their flawed eccentricities, are both recognizable and memorable. And her language and metaphor is that of a poet. This is one of the best books I’ve read in years, beautifully balanced, filled with moments of extreme hilarity mixed with reflection and at times pain.

Noughts & Crosses by Malorie Blackman

Such a disappointment. This was one of the Guardian’s best 100 books or something, but it was just rubbish. The plot itself is obvious and heavy handed. The noughts are the white people and the crosses are the black people. And they have reversed roles so that the noughts are victimized by the racist crosses. There’s nothing more to it than that, all tied up in a first person teenage love story that reads like a thirteen year old’s dear diary. Ordinary writing, no characterization to speak of, no nuance, no surprises: really, really disappointing. Blah. I want my money and my time back!

Light by M John Harrison

This is one of the trickiest books I’ve read in a long time and I struggled to understand it. However I was utterly compelled to keep going with it. It’s a science fiction novel in three strands. In the twentieth century we have Michael Kearney, a physicist who is investigating singularity (which I have no idea about) and his ex wife Anna. Hundreds of years in the future we have two people who are living on planets that are part of the Kefahuchi Tract, which is a singularity. I looked this up and found this: ‘In the center of a black hole is a gravitational singularity, a one-dimensional point which contains a huge mass in an infinitely small space, where density and gravity become infinite and space-time curves infinitely, and where the laws of physics as we know them cease to operate.’ First we have Ed Chianese, a ‘twink’ ie someone who lives their lives in a virtual reality tank, who was once an ace space ‘surfer’ and then there is Seria Mau who is a female who allowed her body to be fused with her spaceship and has become a freelance assassin. Kearney is on the run from a creature called the Shrander which he believes he can only keep at bay if he murders women. Ed is deeply in debt and on the run from his creditors until he is recruited to join a circus as a soothsayer. Seria is trying to find the meaning of a box that she has obtained. So the story moves from one strand to the other. Surprisingly, although I spent a lot of time frustrated because I couldn’t understand the science behind what was happening, it was the detail – the mathematics (an entity which runs the ship) and shadow operators, and cultivars and the ‘new men’ with their gangly limbs and red hair and the genetically engineered rickshaw girls and the ‘tailor’ who is a genetic engineer and all the other wonderful invented creatures, and the development of the characters - that make this such compelling reading. I think the more you read this book the more you get out of it. There are threads of imagery that run through it, and once you are confident enough to forget to worry about the science, then you can immerse yourself in this fabulous detail and also in the wonderful imagery on Harrison’s writing. And in the end, all is explained – and though I wasn’t sure what that explanation entirely meant, a book as rich as this has left me thinking about all its other aspects instead

Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck

This is a strange almost ghostly story about place. A landscape, earth and water, is formed over millennia. And then a house is built on the shores of the lake. As the politics of the German twentieth century unfold, the house changes hands. The Jewish family are forced to sell, for half the market value, to the German architect who works with Speers on the Germania project. He renovates the house with love. At the end of the war, it is occupied by the Russians. Under the GDR, the architect must also flee because he has done business with the west and faces imprisonment. Returning exiles from Siberia claim the place. There is a court case over illegal possession. And they then sell the house. Through all of this the character of the gardener appears, going through is routine of lovingly managing the grounds and the boatshed and the woodshed, opening and closing the house as summer moves in to winter, dismantling and re-erecting the wharf for the summer season. There is a sort of poetic movement about all this, and of course that’s reflected in the lovely language. Erpenbeck tells the story of the house as a detached observer, describing the thoughts of her characters but never allowing them anything other than an internal life, as it were. What is horrifying though are the vignettes of utter, despicable violence, the no holds barred cruelty of humankind, which are all the more searing because of the tranquility of the setting. This is an old book, published in 2008 I think, but a classic.

One Hundred Years of Dirt by Rick Morton

Journalist Rick Morton really exposes his belly in this honest and arresting memoir. Born into a family who owned millions of acres of land beyond the dingo fence, (we’re talking Birdsville Track territory here), Morton grew up in the shadow of a violent, unpredictable father. His mother took the three kids and left when he was about seven, and then began years of living below the poverty line in a small town an hour and a half inland from the Gold Coast. He talks about why poverty is endemic, about how and why the poor have very little hope of escaping, about the role of luck in life, and about the role of desperation. He addresses issues that most people are shy of confronting – his brother’s ice addiction and his surprise that he escaped the same fate. It’s not as if he made wise decisions about his life, he says, it’s simply that he responded to the horrors of their lives in a different way from his brother. He talks abut the marginalisation of ‘other’ groups, such as homosexuals, about the latest research showing the genetic makeup can be altered by poverty, about depression, about the traumas of childhood that mould who you are and your behaviours as an adult. His thesis is that most people cannot and do not escape poverty and his arguments are compelling, to say the least. Yet there’s no self pity here. And it’s certainly not a misery memoir of the kind so popular a couple of decades ago. But he’s certainly angry about the type of society that institutionalises poverty, all the while looking the other way.