3.5 out of 5 stars

If there is one thing that you need more than your brain, then it is your heart. Over the course of a normal life, the heart will beat around 115,00 times a day which equates to 42 million times a year. Over your lifetime it will pump a staggering 158 million litres of blood. For years was seen as the centre of our soul too, but that attitude changed with the rise of scientific understanding of the way it worked. But what goes around comes around and modern research has shown how the heart can react and change shape as it reacts to feeling and trauma. It is the organ that is the very centre and essence of us.

Sandeep Jauhar has a close affinity with this organ, not only is he a practising cardiologist, but he only needs to go back to his grandparent’s generation to find the roots of his own heart issues. That journey from them to him will take us to the pioneers and mavericks who have discovered so much about it. There is William Harvey who discovered that the blood flowed down the arteries and somehow passed through the flesh and was pumped back up the veins. Inge Edler who made the connection that ultrasound that was being used to find battleships could also be used on the heart to see it working and John Heysham Gibbon who spent thirty years of his life developing a heart and lung machine to oxygenate the blood, opening the doors to being able to perform surgery on the heart without the patient dying. This and many other innovations and groundbreaking advances have lead us to the point where we move ever closer to the artificial heart.

This is a good overview with enough depth in it too for the casual reader of how we have got to where we are now with our understanding and treatment of the heart. There is also Jauhar’s personal story of heart disease in his own family and how it impacts his health, but how these diseases have affected all sorts of people from all levels of society.

4 out of 5 stars

Growing up as an only child in Japan was quite unusual, but Hajime had go used to not having other brothers and sisters around. He was attracted to Shimamoto, another of his age who was an only child. They spent many afternoons listening to her father’s record collection. His parent decided to move away and they lost contact. He had a girlfriend, Izumi, but they never got close and his attention was diverted elsewhere. He drifted around for a while ending up working for an educational publisher until one day he got caught in a storm and dashed undercover, there were two girls sheltering from the rain and it was there he met who was to become his soul mate and wife, Yukiko.

Now in his late thirties, he is the owner and manager of two successful jazz cocktail bars and is happily married with two daughters. Life is good, but it is about to change once again because as he is sitting at the bar one night he realises that one of his customers is Shimamoto, the girl who haunted his teenage years and has been a figment of his dreams is now there, in his bar, and looking more beautiful than ever. Even though this is the moment that he has dreamt of so often, all that he has achieved is now going to be in jeopardy.

I think that is one of my favourite of Murakami’s that I have read so far. It contains a lot of his familiar tropes, ideal if you are playing Murakami bingo (here). There is less magical realism in it as well, instead, it is firmly rooted in real life. He is not yet at the mid-life crisis point, and while he isn’t unhappy, he is not feeling happy either. The girl who he knew and once loved reappearing in his life once again is the catalyst to unravel what he thought was never going to change. There are elements of mystery in it too, another ex who appears in the same area he is living now who he glimpses through a window one day and Shimamoto who comes and goes like the wind and leaves no trace of her movements. Can thoroughly recommend this as I felt it was more readable than his other books.

2 out of 5 stars

This is the story of three women, each a generation apart, told over one day in their lives. One of the threads tells the story of Clarissa Vaughn who is hosting a party for her award-winning poet-friend Richard who is suffering from the ravages of AIDS. Around fifty years earlier, Laura Brown is an American housewife and young mother who over the course of her day spends some of it reading Mrs Dalloway hoping to escape domestic drudgery in the pages of the book. The third main character of the book is the troubled author, Virginia Woolf and it is set on the day that she begins to write Mrs Dalloway.

It is a clever idea linking the three stories all intertwined together with the common link of the book Mrs Dalloway. Picking up on details of their lives, Clarissa shopping for flowers for Richard, Laura wanting to stay in bed rather than face the stark realities of that day and Virginia avoid eating to spend time alone and writing. He picks up on their fears and insecurities as well as the small victories they pass through the day.

I have read one of his other books previously, Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown, and really liked it. This had been recommended to me via a friend on Twitter and managed to get hold of a copy, so I’d thought I’d give it a go. However, even though the writing is quite special, especially one particular moment that is one of the key points of the book, it really didn’t work for me. Not sure why, possibly because the link between the three characters is gossamer thin, but I think it might have been because of the Woolf connection. The only book of hers that I have read before, To The Lighthouse, I could not get along with and so it seems with this one.

3.5 out of 5 stars

Regardless of their particular hue, politicians, these days have made themselves one of the least respected professions for a whole raft of reasons, being out of touch, self-serving and how shall I put this, economical with the truth a lot of the time. A sizeable number of them have never worked outside the Westminster bubble either, going straight from a degree from the right university into a policy unit or working for politicians directly. Very rarely these days do you come across one who has a hinterland. In essence, this means someone who has finally become a politician after having experienced the world and workplace and is probably better placed to make a sensible decision.

Mullin was one of those people who did have a life before politics, he had been a journalist reporting from the wars in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Tracked down the survivors of a CIA operation in Tibet, written three novels and successfully campaigned to free those wrongly imprisoned. He was first elected to parliament as a Labour MP at the age of 39 and immediately set about asking the difficult questions to those who had made themselves too comfortable.

Because of this he was not always liked, even by those in his own party, but his persistence and consistency meant that he earned the respect of other MPs in the end. He was asked to be a junior minister under Blair and New Labour and worked for three departments by the end of his time in government. Mullin much preferred being on the Select committees though where he felt he had much more influence that he did as a junior minister.

I picked this it up because his diaries were a brilliant expose of what it was like to be an MP and a junior minister. It is a little different from those though as this is a potted biography of his life before and outside the political arena, though naturally, he does venture in there as it did take a lot of his life up before retirement. He has far more depth than most current shallow politicians and that alone makes this worth reading.

3 out of 5 stars

Over the course of six years from the late 1950s the bodies of eight prostitutes were found murdered close to the River Thames. It took the police a while to realise that they had a serial killer on their patch, but the similarities between the murdered girls and the way that they had been killed and left meant that there was no speculation. What the motives of the killer were, puzzled the police and as to his identity, they had no idea at all. The media at the time called him Jack the Stripper and there was no end of speculation as to who he was.

The last murder was committed in 1965 and that was the last time that he was thought to have killed. Five years later the detective in charge of the case claimed that as they closed the net on the suspected killer he committed suicide. The Police then declined to reveal his identity and it was this act that prompted further speculation as to who it was. This book is David Seabrook’s take on who that person was, based on interviews with surviving police officers, witnesses, and others who knew the victims personally.

I first discovered David Seabrook when Granta kindly sent me a copy of All The Devils are Here. It was one of the strangest books that I read last year, and in it, he mentions these murders. As my library had a copy, I thought I’d give it a go. Seabrook peers into London’s dark seedy underbelly and the underclass of people who inhabited the bedsits of this world. Naturally, he comes across the Krays and many other unsavoury types and slowly reveals who he thinks is behind the deaths of these poor girls.

There is almost too much detail at times in his profile of the victims and I felt that this spoilt the flow of the narrative a little. This crime has never been solved. There were various conspiracy theories as to who the man was from security guards, police officers and even a murderer who had escaped the gallows. This is the time before DNA analysis and the essential clues that would be found now were not recoverable then and it wasn’t helped by all the evidence being either lost or destroyed. That said, it was still a compelling read.

4 out of five stars

This collection demonstrates that Duffy is a current master of all that she writes, there are poems in here that are very personal and others that are contemporary and political. The common thread that links them though is that they are all written with passion. Duffy is not angry in these but furious, seething with the injustice and unfairness of the world and the vested interests that seek to keep it that way.

My hand on what I take from time and this world

And the stone’s shadow there on the grass with mine

This bold and political book can be summed up in the poem, Swearing In. In this, she does not pull any punches at all as she welcomes the tangerine terror to his new job… I liked the fact that the poems varied in style and length, each written to suit the story she wanted to tell in those few words. Really enjoyable collection.

Three favourite poems

Stone Love

Wood

Once

4.5 out of 5 stars

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

Should you wish to escape from the relentless 24 / 7 grip of the digital world then you need to turn off your phone and head outside. That will help in all sorts of ways, even if it is just for an hour or so. However to really get away from it all you need to head to the wilder parts of the world, to walk the hills, climb the mountains and cross the deserts. It is in these places where the changes over deep time are almost imperceptible, and that are as wild as they are beautiful.

The last thing that you would expect or actually want to see when you are miles from civilisation though is evidence that humans have already been there. However, occasionally a bothy appearing on the horizon can be a welcome sight. Five Star accommodation it isn’t, however, these very simple huts or shelters can offer some respite from the relentless weather that you will often find in the wild.

He was fascinated as a child by the picture of his father and his team outside a small shed in Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard, where they had stayed and the pelvis of a polar bear that his father had brought back from the far north. Richards’ desire to head to these far out of the way places is genetic. As you’d know if you read his previous book about his great-great-aunt, Dorothy Pilley, who was one of the pioneering women climbers of her time. With this inspiration and background, he sets off on his journeys from Scotland to Washington, to a mountain in Japan and a retreat in Switzerland and from the heat of Mexico to the bleakness and cold of the Arctic hoping to walk in his father’s footsteps. He ends up in Denmark to see an artistic interpretation of a shed too, but he starts his journey in the land of ice and fire; Iceland.

All these landscapes have these tiny places of refuge in common and it is these places that have inspired all sorts of people to write and make art and to seek their peace with our planet. In this book, Richards’ has sought them out to gain his own insight in what appeals with these remote and beautiful places. He writes in a lyrical way that also has an impish humour too, I know that you shouldn’t really laugh at others misfortune, but Dan’s description of his hangover as he stepped off the train in Scotland is truly hilarious. As this is the second family inspired travel book that Dan has written, I am hoping that he has got some more relatives that we don’t know about yet for his next book. Cracking stuff and one for anyone who likes well-written travel writing.

For those that want to go and find the bothies for themselves then there is this guide here: https://www.mountainbothies.org.uk

Or perhaps you have skills that can help keep them weatherproof:

https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2019/jan/25/mountain-rescue-why-bothies-need-a-helping-hand-a-photo-essay

4 out of 5 stars

Despite the recent shenanigans about our relationship with Europe, if you were to go back about 7000 years ago, you’d find that we were physically connected to the continent. This connection point was where the North Sea is now. We know that there were people and animals there because of the number of bones and other artefacts that keep being bought to the surface by trawlers. This land has a name too now, Doggerland.

For lots of people, the past has a lot of allure, there are stories to be told from the things that we find and tales from bumps in a field. Julia Blackburn is one of those who seeks out objects that can speak to her across the bridge of time. She has amassed more and more things but didn’t really feel that she knew much about this land just below the sea. Her curiosity would take her back and forth across this shallow sea and far back in time to the people that inhabited this landscape. She gets to see footprints from humans that had been fossilised in mud and silt, hold flint arrowheads that were last used  a millennia ago, discover the traces of plants that must have come across on the land bridge and even get to see those that have been preserved in the acid waters of the bogs that surround the North Sea.

This fascination, or almost borderline obsession with the past, stemmed from Blackburn’s desire to collect and hold objects from history. The paths she takes as she walks back in time are sometimes walked alone and sometimes with others there to guide her to the wider view or the minutia of the items she is looking at. Entwined with the history and archaeology is her very personal journey as she reminisces about her late husband, the artist Herman Makkink. This the second of Blackburn’s book that I have read now, the other was Thin Paths which I really enjoyed. She is such an evocative and beautiful writer and this has an intensity that makes you think of elements of it long after you have set it aside. I loved the art that was included from Enrique Brinkman, but personally wasn’t that keen on the Time Songs. However, they added a pause to the intensity of the writing. Can highly recommend this.

4 out of 5 stars

Most people headed to the after-hours bar called the Diogenes to concentrate on the serious business of drinking, but some chose to talk and tell each other stories. Men who are on the fringes of society telling each other unexpected strange tales. And they are slightly strange too, there is a girl Charlotte who appears in a soft porn magazine and who never seems to age as a photographer follows her career with interest. There is a man who is neighbours with an old lady who needs to feed on raw meat and a man who has somehow acquired an embarrassing disease and finally there is the ghost story with the suitably creepy house.

Somehow Gaiman manages to take what looks like a normal situation and with some of his magic turns it into something that just isn’t quite normal and it is the same with these four interlinked stories, Foreign Parts, Feeders and Eaters Looking for the Girl and Closing Time. The stories aren’t that dark compared to some of Gaiman’s that I have read, but they are reassuringly disturbing. It is very much an adult graphic novel too… I loved the art from Mark Buckingham, it lifts the book to another level. However, I would have liked to have seen nine panels per page for the stories rather than sixteen as it felt a little cramped. Definitely one for the NG aficionado, but if you have never read one of his graphic novels then you may just enjoy this as first.