Author: Paul (Page 37 of 171)

3 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

These eight stories have been translated from Catalan into English for the first time. They were originally written in the early 1970s when Spain will still in the shadow of fascism and Franco.

The collection opens with a woman in the hospital who wakes up every morning wondering if it is going to be her last. She hears the laboured breathing of the woman next to her and knows as the screens are pulled over that then it will become a death rattle soon enough. The second story, Love and Ashes, is about a husband and wife who make the decision to travel to Africa so he can see the reticulated giraffes.

On the island, I walked up to the sea and begged it to tell me its secret. But the sea would only answer to the wind.

Other stories concern the inhabitants of a graveyard, a censor who stopped the public from reading the erotic stories in books but had a number of flaws of his own. Another story concerns a child who knew by the shoes his mother was wearing, who she had been with and what her mood was going to be like. She tried to hide him when they were conscripting seventeen-year-olds, but they found him soon enough.  He had almost no training before being dispatched for war.

I thought that this was a reasonable set of short stories. Roig prose, whilst politically charged, does not lose its sensitivity. There is plenty of variety in each story, they feel dystopian without having a strong science fiction vibe to them and it is great that Fum D’Estampa are bringing this and other books to a wider audience.

Three Favourite Stories
Free from War and Wave
I Don’t Understand Salmon
Love and Ashes

3.5 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

The Kamanga Kings, a Khartoum jazz band have been disbanded for a long time, and not all of the original seven members are still alive. One of those members was Rushdy’s late father, whose brother, Maher, also played in the band too. He was an old man now and he liked his routines, one of which was to check his mailbox each week. It was normally empty, until one day he received a letter from America.

It was from the John F. Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts. The Kamanga Kings were being invited to travel to America and perform at the annual festival of world music. Rushdy’s uncle sighed at the news and said it would be impossible for them to go. Rushdy has other ideas though, he feels he is in a dead-end job and that having an opportunity to see another part of the world is too good a chance to miss.

He decides to have a go at reviving the band with the help of his slightly unreliable friend, Hisham and after persuading Alkanary, another original member they advertise for new members. They are inundated with potential musicians who have a wide range of musical skills, but they eventually manage to select a new line-up. A businessman offers to help fund them and act as their manager. They are on the way to America.

America is an alien place compared to Khartoum, full of bright lights and strange sights. After they get through the tough immigration, they make it to the hotel. In no time at all it is time to play the venue but before they can bask in the praise they realise that their manager has taken the money they are due and disappeared. Rather than feel sorry for themselves Rushdy wants to go after him, but before he knows it, all the band members want to come too. They escape from the hotel and before they know it they are wanted by the immigration authorities and the FBI…

It was about the music, about excavating a spirit had been buried for decades, something that we each had carried within us all these years as a longing.

This was an unsolicited copy that I was fortunate enough to receive from the publisher. I wasn’t sure if this was going to be my sort of thing at first, I don’t read that much fiction for one thing and when I do, this is not going to be very high on the list of books that I would have selected. That said, I actually enjoyed this. I thought it was a genuinely heartwarming tale that made me laugh as much as it did make me feel for the characters. Give it a go, you might like it!

2.5 out of 5 stars

Even though people spend an inordinate amount of time looking at our phones or other forms of screens at the moment, one of the things that we have learnt in the past few years is just how much we as a species are dependent on nature. In one form or other, it feeds, clothes and shelters us. Everything is utterly interlinked too, so as we change one thing, we inadvertently affect numerous other things.

The other thing that the natural world can do though, is to heal us. Time spent near rivers and trees has all sorts of benefits for our mental and physical health. This is not just speculation, but scientific evidence has demonstrated this in many different studies.

For some people reconnecting with nature is not always easy, sometimes this is an access thing nut there are often other reasons behind this. In Grounded, Ruth Allen is here to help those who want to reconnect to the natural world in eight separate stages. Beginning with Presence, each of the chapters has simple explanations as to what she is trying to get you to do, along with clear steps to bring you closer to nature.

I thought that it was written in a very clear and straightforward way and it is a beautifully presented book with some stunning images and what feels like a lot of space around the prose. A lot of what Allen writes here makes sense, and it picks up on similar themes that I have read in other books, such as Forest Therapy by Sarah Ivens. However, I didn’t think that this book was really for me; I found it had too much mindfulness for my liking.

4.5 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

Commuting by train is no fun, I did it for a little while before a friend got a car and then we could get where we wanted and when. I always regret never taking the time when younger to go interrailing, sadly circumstances never allowed me the time to do that. Until recently it is something that had never crossed my mind to do, but reading this book has made me think that it could still be possible.

Slow Trains Around Spain is a fairly self-explanatory title, and in this book, Tom Chesshyre wants to discover a Spain that most people never come across when they visit that country. But first, he has to get there, and rather than fly, he arrives at St Pancras to catch the Eurostar to Gard du Nord in Paris. He crosses Paris to catch the sleeper to Spain. It is an uneventful journey and he first glimpses the country after emerging from a long tunnel in the town of Figueres. There is sort of a plan, he wants to travel around the country taking the slowest trains possible between the provincial towns of Spain is a lazy and badly drawn S.

The sense of Spain being in some way cut off and removed is quite strong here. Yes, Spain is part of mainland Europe, but it feels quite apart too. You get that straight away after crossing the Pyrenees.

Each of the chapters takes us with him on the route that he followed around the country and this book is as much of a cultural tour as it is a geographic one. There are hundreds of mini-stories and vignettes in here about the people that he meets either on the train journeys or who he talks to in the places he stops at. Woven into this modern-day narrative are the histories of the places, from the tragedies of the country under Franco to the structures built by the Romans that are still standing 2000 years later and the Moorish influence that still resonates in the architecture of Southern Spain.

Spain by train seems to reward the lazy traveller – the more ad hoc you make it, the more you lose your way, the more the country unravels before you, revealing itself.

I thought that this was a wonderful book to read. He has a wonderful way with words and it goes to prove that you don’t need to travel to extreme places to have a wonderful journey and make memories. One gauge of a good travel book is, does it make me want to recreate a similar journey and discover that part of the world for myself and the answer, in this case, is yes. Very much worth reading.

4 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

There has been a lot of talk in the publishing world recently of underrepresented authors. If you haven’t been fortunate to go to the right universities or know the right people then getting the words you have written between the covers of a book can be an uphill struggle.

In this crowdfunded collection, Inkandescant has given thirty authors the opportunity for their voices to be heard. There are authors who bring lots of life experience to the page, working-class writers whose perspective is not heard often enough. They have also selected queer scribes and people of colour who all have stories to tell. Some of these have had their words published elsewhere and some are seeing their name for the first time in print in a book.

Ass with any collection that I read, I can’t say that I loved every story equally.  What everyone likes is deeply personal and I am the same. I did have three that I thought were outstanding though, The Birdwatchers, The Reluctant Bride and A Life That Isn’t Mine To See. What I would like to see though are these authors that have appeared for the first time have the chance to write longer pieces in other publishers as their voices are just as relevant as everyone else.

4 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

I always look for the red dot that is Mars in the sky when it is clear. It seems quite peaceful there, so why it ever became the God of War in the Roman Empire is a bit of a mystery to me. Even though it looks peaceful now it had an equally tumultuous beginning as Earth did during its formation.

There is a renewed interest in the planet too, there have been a number of probes sent on missions to the planet, some of which have been successful and sent back gigabytes of useful data and pictures; there have been others that have just become the latest crater on this lifeless planet…

It was formed 4.5 billion years ago, and how it came to be is the subject of many studies at the moment. Reading the Marscapes and geology is the remits of a few people, one of whom is Simon Morden, a planetary geologist. In this fascinating book, he will take us through the known stages of the planet and how it got to where it is today.

Some facts can be determined from the photos and data that have come back from the probes that are on the planet and he expands in some detail of each of the ages that it went through and explains the current theories and known facts. There are some points though where the evidence they have collected is not as clear cut and he takes time to explain each theory and the reason why scientists have reached their conclusions. These are things that can only be checked by getting evidence from those specific regions.

I thought this was a well-written book about our neighbouring planet by an expert planetary geologist with a knack for telling a story. Occasionally it felt like it was getting a bit technical, but thankfully it didn’t veer into the opaque world of academia too much. If you want to know about Mars and the unique and peculiar traits behind its creation then this is a very good place to start.

3 out of 5 stars

I don’t know what it is about islands, but there is something quite special about being on one. It is a fascination that Gavin Francis shares too, and he has been lucky enough to spend thirty years of his life travelling to some of the best islands on this planet, including the Andaman Islands, the Faroe Islands and even the Galapagos.

Most of these travels were because of his work as a doctor. But the book looks at lots of other writers experiences of islands as well as the use that islands have been put to over the years, for example for prisons, leper colonies and for pilgrimages.

This is a beautifully laid out book, full of wonderful maps of islands that Francis has been too, or he has lived on. It feels like a large print book as the text is a larger font and well-spaced. However, the maps are sometimes too small to read any detail from. The prose is well written, but it is a thin veneer of detail about his life travelling to these marvellous places. It is a shame really as it could have been so much better.

4 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

As we stumble into the Anthropocene, we humans are in the process of making numerous plants and animals extinct. Some of these we know are happening, the western black rhino is now gone forever and the northern white rhino has only got two females left; the last male dies in 2018. Just in the UK alone, there are 67 birds on the red list.

Knowing that these are threatened is bad enough, but it is more poignant when you can see photos of the animals that have vanished in the past century or so. In this book, Fuller has found photographs of 28 different species that we will never see again in the wild. Of the 28 there are a lot of birds that we have photos of including the Laughing Owl, the pink-headed duck, the Imperial Woodpecker and what was once the most numerous bird on the planet, the passenger pigeon. There are a few mammals included too, the greater short-tailed bat is quite a beauty and there are lots of pictures of the Thylacine, the carnivorous marsupial from Tasmania. While this is thought to be extinct, there have been recent reports of sightings again.

I can’t really say that I liked this book, as the subject matter is too tragic. However, it is well written and researched and I thought that Fuller has put together a book that is worth reading for its historical context. It should also be read as a warning for humanity about just how easy it is to lose some of the unique and wonderful creatures that we have on this planet.

4 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

How can somewhere that you have never visited feel like home immediately? It can and it does. For Pamela Petro, this happened the first time that she visited Wales to study for a Master’s Degree at a university English Department. She knew almost nothing about the place or the country or its particular and unique history, culture and especially its language. But she felt at home in this place. On returning to America, her family there wondered if the infatuation with Wales would fade over time.

It didn’t.

The was her first physical experience of the Welsh word, hiraeth. She had discovered it before when looking at a bilingual poster, on the English section the word was repeated in italics and she asked her friend, Andy why it hadn’t been translated. He replied saying that it couldn’t be translated. It would be a while before she would come to know the meaning herself, even though she had come across the inadequate ‘homesickness’ as an explanation. A close definition, if you could call it that, is the sense of being out of one’s home place.

The longer she was away, the greater the longing to be back there.

This multi-layered memoir is her exploration of her inner self and the feelings she has towards what has become her adopted country. But there is much more to this than just Wales, it is also about her parents, the train accident that nearly killed her, of her sexuality and long term partner, Marguerite, her teaching and her writing and travels for her book on the Welsh language. But this is mostly about Wales, how the people and their outlook have helped define who she is, the inevitable rain and relishing a sunny day and driving the slow and twisting roads to the coast.

She has a wonderful way with words in this book, managing to capture perfectly that first time that she knew that the landscape, people and language of Wales had for some reason always had a place in her heart. Even though the elusive meaning of hiraeth is very difficult to explain, what Petro does with this book is to tease out the multiple threads of meaning that this word has for her and how she has always sought it on her many trips to Wales. I am not sure I can explain it either, but I know when we moved from Surrey to Dorset, I felt a connection to this place that I didn’t have in Surrey. The is the first of Petro’s books that I have read, even though I have had Travels in An Old Tongue on my bookshelves at home for quite a while I have never got to read it. I am going to have to rectify that soon.

3.5 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

There are lots of Second World War based history books that remember the heroism, battles and losses of the Second World War, just walk into any bookshop and you can pick from subjects as diverse as spies, naval battles, the D Day landings and so it goes on. There is very little around on those people that took the moral high ground and decided that they would not or could not fight. This book concerns a group of pacifists who in 1943 took possession of a vacant farm in Frating, a hamlet on the Essex Tendring Peninsula and it was here that they set about making a community farm.

Their inspiration was a number of writers who were associated with the Adelphi Journal such as Orwell and Lawrence who were thinking about radical ideas for society. It became a livelihood for individuals and families who wanted to do something different and came to support and help other refugees and even some prisoners of war. It was hard work, but it did manage to earn the respect of other farms in the area with its successes in arable and livestock farming.

Worpole tells how it began with a small community of 30 people, but by the time it had got to 1948, there were considerably more people living there and numbers swelled at harvest time too. It was never a utopia though, the work was hard and relentless and there always seemed to be some conflicting opinions between some of the main people on the farm in the book. The children who lived on the farm all seems to go on to do a whole variety of careers in educational or artistic positions. The farm was making a profit by the end of its tenure, but they still had to service its debt and those obligations meant the end of the venture.

I thought that this was a fascinating insight into a part of society in World War 2 that is very rarely written about. The research is meticulous and there are lots of photos of the people that are in the book as well as some of the activities that took place on the farm. I thought that Worpole has managed to make this a useful historical reference document as well as a series of personal stories about some of the characters that were at the farm. If you like history books with a different spin then this is well worth reading.