Category: Review (Page 67 of 133)

5 out of 5 stars

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

On a shingle island, a figure called the Armourer is at work. He is standing in the Green chapel and is assisted by the Engineer, the botanist the physicist and the ornithologist. He is invoking the Firing song, a dark ceremony that will bring destruction. Five human-like forms are converging on the Green Chapel and are intent on stopping him.

She makes green & green fills the air around her & warps hard into objects within her radiance.

There is Drift, who is a world shaper, He who is water, She who is earth, They who are rock and As who is the very air around. They are moving through land, sea, time and space to the Green Chapel where they will become one, where they will become Ness. They want their island back.

Listen. Listen now. Listen to Ness

This is a stunning if slender book. It is part story and part poem, with taut writing that writhes with dark metaphor. Macfarlane takes familiar tropes from folk horror, dystopia, science fiction and drapes them over this unreal landscape to make a thriller that is as troubling as it is surreal. A hagstone allowing a glimpse of the future and the past separate each section. This unreal landscape of shifting shingle and harsh military structures is bought to chilling life by the stunning art from Donwood that captures the eeriness of the place. Very highly recommended.

4.5 out of 5 stars

It is not long after the end of the Second World War and the country is still in the grip of post-war blues and rationing. Robert Appleyard has just turned sixteen and faces heading down the local pit as did his father and grandfather before him. It is not something that he fancies so he decides to head away from his home town of Durham and discover a little bit more of the world.

Slowly making his way across the northern landscape, walks the road and trackways doing days of work at smallholding and farms and helping out at houses that didn’t get their men back from the war. He slept in barns or under hedges or sheltered by his makeshift tent. He made do with food, apples from the places he passed and gifts from people that he met. He route took him past the horrors of war, twisted and burnt aircraft that showed the insignia of the common enemy. Until one day he reached the coast and the village of Robin’s Hood Bay.

He discovered her home at the end of the lane and it overlooked the sea, though people could no longer able to see it as she had let the scrub grow up. He stopped at the end and heard a dog growling and then she stood up from the garden and spoke to him. Her name was Dulcie and his life would never be the same again.

He helps by doing odd jobs around the place and she feeds him food that he has never even contemplated, let alone tasted. For someone who had come from ration book meals, the taste of lobster and wine was a revelation. They settle into a routine and as well as feeding his body she begins to work on his mind, bringing piles of books from her home to educate and stretch his mind and then she introduces him to poetry. Dulcie has a past that she is trying to forget and a lover who was taken from her. As their friendship deepens, she stretches Robert’s mind to make him see the world from a different perspective, slowly he teases her past out from her.

That distant stretch of sea where sky and water merge. It’s called the offing

This is another cracker from Myers. By placing together these two characters, who under normal circumstances would have been very unlikely to meet, he has created a tender story about the strength in a true platonic relationship. Dulcie was way ahead of her time and could also see a very different future for Robert than he envisaged. Coupled with this plot is Myers evocative writing about the land and seascape and natural world of this part of Yorkshire. I really liked the ending of the book. It is a very different book to the Gallows Pole, but like that one, he has a way of drawing you into the story and captivating you.

3 out of 5 stars

For someone who never really had the opportunity to settle as a child as her family kept moving home, you’d think that living on a canal boat that has to keep moving every couple of weeks might not be the best way to put down roots. However, the costs of living in London mean that bricks and mortar are not an option for Couchman.

Our capital city can be a really lonely place, but with her unusual home comes a diverse and welcoming community of people who also live on the river. She learns to be self-sufficient and practical, a canal boat takes a lot of care and attention to keep it going and afloat. She also reveals a part of London that most people are blissfully unaware of.

I thought that this was an enjoyable and mostly unchallenging read. Couchman bares her souls in a couple of parts of the book and tells of her relationships and the inner strength to get through life some days. If you want to read about life on the waterways of London, I can also recommend, Circle Line by Steffan Meyric Hughes

3.5 out of 5 stars

Hannah Sullivan’s debut collection, Three Poems, has unsurprisingly enough got three poems within. The first is set in New York, and is about the experience of living there compared to the perception of what it was going to be like. The second poem concerns a move to the other side of America and is full of disconnected but repetitive themes. The final poem is about birth, life and death.

Three sooty wraiths
Fade on a bridge like figures on a vase

This a debut collection isn’t like a conventional collection of poetry, the poems are mix of short two line elements and longer more story like sections. Her writing flows from a tautness in certain parts to a fluidity in others, as she writes about sex, history, politics and place all seen from a very personal perspective.

Now nothing will ever be the same again
And everything will be as it always was

I did like this, mostly because it is not conventional, the short story form is mixed with short bursts of poetry, before longer passages return. I am still not sure that I get poetry still, I find it very difficult to review some poets work. However, I am not going to stop reading it as the mastery that Sullivan and other poets have over language is quite something.

Three Favourite Poems
Well, there are only three in here…
You, Very Young in New York
Repeat Until Time
The Sandpit after Rain

4 out of 5 stars

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

It is the near future, not that far from where we are now, a place where water has become a scarce commodity

The city demands water, it is bought in on The Water Train and guarded by man and machine against sabotage.

Dry rivers mean that there is not enough water. Icebergs are calved and dragged south. A new Ice Dock is planned and then expanded, it will evict more people than was first thought. The city tenses as the protests start.

In this stark new world, people are trying to live; a marksman whose wife is dying, a woman meeting a lover. A man collecting limpets off the rocks, a boy looking for his brother who is searching for his dog.

All are uncertain about this bleak future.

This short dystopian novella is quite something. Jones writes with surgical precision, twelve short chapters fill in more detail about the harshness of this place through the eyes of his characters. He paints an outline sketch of a society that is on a knife-edge between surviving and failing, whilst still have very human and believable characters.

I thought it was a stunning book and I love the cover too. It has a sense of urgency in the writing. I think because it was conceived for radio first, and the limits of time in that medium, both constrain and liberate his writing.

3 out of 5 stars

John Stewart Collins is best known for his book, The Worm Forgives the Plough, which is an account of his time spent working as a farm labourer in the Land Army in Sussex and Dorset. Whilst in Tarrant Hinton, Dorset he was asked to clear and thin an ash wood using only an axe and bill hook.

It was while undertaking these simple and repetitive tasks that he considered the wood around him in the context of the natural world and how being outside daily meant that you could sense the imperceptible change of the seasons throughout the year.

This short volume is an extract from The Worm Forgives the Plough with a focus on the woodland work. I really enjoyed this, as he writes in a very gentle way, enjoying the manual labour while bringing the woodland back to some semblance of order, but his perception of what is happening around his is razor-sharp. Must read his other book at some point.

4 out of 5 stars

If you were to hear Kerry Hudson speak now, you would hear her soft Scottish lilt. She would be telling you about her prize-winning books that have enabled her to travel all over the world. She is in a strong relationship and has plenty of opportunities and has access to many wonderful things.

It could have been so different.

Her score for the childhood trauma on the Adverse Childhood Experiences was eight out of ten. Her mother and step-father had a tumultuous relationship. She moved constantly as a child with her single mother between sordid flats and crumby B&Bs supported by social services. She attended fourteen different schools by the time she was sixteen. It was a tough upbringing, no money for the basics let alone luxuries and that poverty was grinding and dehumanising. She almost ended up with a drinking problem, like her mother had and dropped out of school. Was fortunate that a teacher saw her potential and as she put it saved her life.

She is proud to be working class. She was never proud of her poor background.

Hudson was one of the lucky ones, she managed to escape from the vicious cycle of poverty, but the spectre of the past continues to haunt her. This book is a brutally honest account of her upbringing and the cathartic effect on revisiting those demons from her past lives. But more than that this is a process of revisiting those place that she grew up, reconnecting with some of the people that she knew in from that past.

It is also a health check on the state of our country too. Pervasive poverty spares no one and austerity for the past decade has made the people who were in just about managing, now much worse off. She was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time with her opportunities, but the majority will not have this. It should have been a depressing book, but Hudson writes with deft authority and in amongst the gloom shows that it is possible to be happy. I think this should be required reading for all tory ministers, but as they are almost all heartless, so I doubt that they will be moved by this at all.

3.5 out of 5 stars

On hearing that Lotte Eisner, the film-maker and critic, was dying, Werner Herzog made the sudden decision that he would walk from Munich to Paris where she was in the hospital. For some reason, he believed that his pain would help her live that she would still be alive as he walked over 500 miles. He set off as soon as he could carrying the minimal possessions and a map and a compass. This slender book is a record of his journey.

The walk would take him from the 23rd November to the 14th December and being winter, the weather was bitterly cold and icy. His route on the back roads would take him along the Rhine, seeking shelter by breaking into unoccupied homes and wading through the snow as his walk is hit by blizzards, rain and other season weather.

The walk that he is making is a part pilgrimage and part meditation on his life at the moment. He battles weather, exhaustion and blisters with the hope of finding his mentor alive when he reaches Paris. He observes all around him as he walks, ice that is clear as glass on a stream, a raven in the rain with its head bowed, but there is an extra element in here, he sees something beyond reality at times.

I have not seen any of his films, but understand that they possess a similar strangeness that this psychogeographical journey has. You can see he is facing his physical and mental demons as he trudges towards his destination, but there is something about the way that he writes and see the world around him that makes this special. This is a book that I found through the fantastic Backlisted Podcast that explores that rich vein of books in publishers back catalogues that don’t see the light of day that often.

4 out of 5 stars

The question, who owns England? is such a simple question. And yet the answer to this is one of our country’s oldest and best-kept secrets. And the keepers of those secrets? Our ancient aristocracy and elite, who between them own vast swathes of our land. So much so, that only 1% (yes one per cent) of the population of the country owns 50% of the land. The Land Registry only knows for definite around 83% of the actual owners of the land of England.

To understand how we are in this situation you have to head back in our history nearly 1000 years, to the time when William the Bastard became William the Conqueror. His victory over Harold allowed him to have the largest land grab and to reward favourite people in his court with lands and property. He commissioned the Doomsday report, to ensure that he hadn’t missed any land that could be of some benefit to the crown.

Some of the descendants of those people granted land by William still own it.

The Crown owns large tracts, as you’d expect and pays tax on the income from those lands. However, it uses its two Duchy’s (Cornwall and Lancaster) to ensure that it isn’t paying tax on other vast swathes of land it has spread all around the country. A lot of land is owned by organisations like the National Trust, the Forestry Commission, the Church owns a lot too, but not as much as they used to, plus other big businesses now own substantial amounts. However, most of the elite and aristocracy don’t want people knowing how much land they have nor do they want you to know how much they are able to claim in benefits from it. They have built walls, moved villages and used the enclosure acts to steal the common land for their own use. All to stop us discovering exactly how much they own.

They now use modern tools to hide their assets away from us and the taxman, so he discovers that lots of land is now owned by shell companies based in tax havens. But the same tools that enable them to do this, can be used to answer the question posed; who owns England? Guy Shrubsole has spent lots of time exploring some of the vast estates and tramping over moors and entering empty Mayfair mansions as well as using the modern tools of digital mapping to answer this question.

This book is his expose of the truths of land ownership and what we can do to wrestle back control of this very limited asset. He has a lot of sensible suggestions on how we can ensure that this tiny elite are no longer the sole beneficiaries of the wealth and power that is derived from land. This struggle will be a long and tedious one as these people will not want to give up land that they have held for time immemorial. He is impassioned about this subject and writes in a very clear way with very well thought out solutions to solve the problem. As you read it you can sense his fury that in the modern age this is still an issue.

It is a must-read for anyone remotely interested in our countryside and landscapes and a call to virtual arms to apply the pressure needed to change the system for the better.

4 out of 5 stars

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

Bouvier has been travelling for a long time, he left Geneva in 1953 to go to Yugoslavia. He had no intention of returning and the story of that journey became a book eight years later. He kept travelling, heading out via India and Sri Lanka to Japan, which in time became another book. This latest book is a collection of shorter pieces and essays of his time spent in other parts of the world. Beginning in the Aran Isles, he then heads to Scotland and Islay. We then join him heading to Xian in China and Korea, and finally to his childhood home in Switzerland.

He is in Aran in the depths of winter walking the headlands and being battered by the winds from the Atlantic, sitting in the pubs being warmed and gently smoked by the peat fires and meeting the locals. He notes the desolation of the landscape, feeling that it is missing a certain something that other places have, but it isn’t something that he can quantify or identify.

Arriving in Scotland with sciatica he has no plan of what to do or see is not to be recommended, but it does give him the opportunity to discover things in Edinburgh by chance. Heading out of the capital, he heads east along the coast exploring the ports and to people watch in the pubs. Then onto Melrose via the Lammermuir Hills and finding how the Scots travelled the world taking their engineering skills with them. One rough sea journey later and Bouvier arrives in Port Ellen to discover the delights and drams of the island of Islay.

Leaving the windswept west coast of the British Isles the next essay takes us to the foggy heartland of China, Xian. Her were meet Monsieur X who will be his guide. This man had collected a small library of French books, but the Red Guard had destroyed all bar one of them, the last books, a Larousse was now buried in his garden. They have a good relationship in the brief time that he is in the province, Monsieur X revealing elements of the culture that he really should have been concealing.

The penultimate essay is on Korea. There were once seen as the poor relation compared to China and Japan and suffered at the hands of both countries, however, they were the source of writing, fire and Buddhism for Japan, amongst other things. He headed there in the early 1970s, and it was a place that wasn’t on most peoples itineraries of places to visit. However, it never really got over the war that almost triggers another world war and he finds a country that is crumbling and tired. But in amongst the dust and decay, he discovers a culture that is as rich and magnificent as its neighbours. Finally, he is back home in Switzerland, reliving memories from when he was eight years old.

This is the first of Bouvier’s books that I have read and I thought that it was really good. He has a gentle way of writing almost poetic at times, his keen eye selecting details, like the sparkle of ice on the sea of the coast of Arun, that turn the prose from a sketch of the moment to something with greater depth. He also lets the experiences of his travels come to him rather than seek them out. I do have a copy of The Way of the World that I must read very soon and must get hold of a copy of the Japanese Chronicles too.