3.5 out of 5 stars

It was following an interview with a fellow author called Russell Norman about his book Venice that made up Grigson’s mind. She would sell of give away anything that she couldn’t get into her purple car and move to Puglia in Italy. In May 2019 she arrived back there after an absence of 40 years.

Stopping in the town of Vieste she felt welcomed by a magnificent dinner and epic firework display to celebrate a saint. But this wasn’t the place for her, she wanted to go further south and ended up in Ceglie Messapica where she finds a place where she will make her home.

Whilst the food in Puglia is Italian, it is also very much not Italian as it doesn’t take long for her to notice the differences and discover the unique flavours and styles. Each chapter picks up on a food-centric theme about life there, from wood-fired ovens to the absence of cows in the landscape. Some of the dishes look wonderful and will be trying some out.

I liked this a lot, she paints a wonderful picture of life there. I have been to Sardinia and Sicily and Umbria but not this part of Italy as yet. There are more recipes than travel writing than I would have preferred, but Grigson is still an entertaining and informative writer and each recipe has an introduction or a potted history about the dish. If you like Italy and want to make yourself hungry whilst reading this is a good place to start.

4 out of 5 stars

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

On the northwest of the island of Jamacia is a tiny hamlet called Cousin Cove. It is alongside the sea and it is full of larger-than-life characters who are making the best of the life that they have there. There are no secrets in this place and as soon as anything of interest begins to happen people are drawn in to see what is happening.

There are eleven short interconnected stories in the book, with a rich array of characters in each. They are always on the lookout to supplement their meagre incomes but any means, fair or foul and had nothing to lose by taking a chance. Most people, especially tourists didn’t stop unless they happened to come unstuck on the road in. There were always lads waiting to help them out of the swamp in the hope of a few dollars.

Other stories concern those asked to look after tourists second homes and are quite surprised to find that they have returned without telling them they were returning. They have half an hour to reclaim the possessions that have been borrowed by other villagers. They all dream of getting of the island, something that they are very unlikely to ever have the chance of. Half of them have no idea where their birth certificate is.

My favourite story was Tree Bay Gyal. It is about three women who are using every trick they know to seduce a tourist. They, along with everyone else in Cousin Cove have plans for a money-making scheme and yet almost none get off the ground. Like all the other stories, there is always the scent of ganja in the background as they mull over their lives at the end of a spliff.

Kennaway has painted this evocative image of a tiny Jamaican village and I really liked this. It has a dark streak of humour that runs all the way through the story as we learn how the characters try to make money from the various schemes they concoct. The patois took me a little while to get used to, but it feels authentic. I can recommend this is you want a little insight into how life was in Jamacia in the 1990s.

3.5 out of 5 stars

In the UK set in the near future, the much smaller population is recovering from a flu pandemic. The countryside is more or less empty and the cities have absorbed most of the remaining people. One of the few left in the country is Jesse’s family, but they realise that they have to head to the city as they have no work left and head into London to begin a new life.

After her mother was killed in a terrorist incident, Isolde grew up in a children’s home. It made her tough, but happiness for her was mostly absent. She decides to exercise her right to see the man convicted for the crime in prison. After three decades of not knowing what happened, she learnt that it was not as she had been led to believe. She wants to learn more and starts to walk out to Suffolk to a small farmstead.

Lee is the third main character in this book. He is escaping from one of the White Towns where he has been a resident all his life. They have discovered that he is gay, or tainted as this group calls it. They want him back to inflict their cruel justice on him. He meets Isolde en route and they walk to Suffolk together. At this farmstead, the stories of these people come together briefly before unravelling once again.

She feels the space around her, stretches into it. She feels pressed thin as a membrane between earth and sky, between liquid and light.

There was a lot to like about this. The dystopia that she portrays after the flu pandemic feels utterly plausible. There are enclaves of white-only towns, a much-reduced population that is eking out a living in various small settlements around the country and centralised cities that are run by a strong authoritarian government. Allison has a very lyrical way of writing and I really liked her style. I kind of liked the chorus of the feral cows that are scattered liberally throughout the book, but I thought it was a little overdone. I did feel that the plot wasn’t as strong as it could have been, but it feels like a future that I would like to read more about other people who inhabit this place in another book.

3.5 out of 5 stars

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

In the early 1900s E M Forster twice visited India where he served in the post of private secretary of the Rajah of Dewas. Even though he lost his father when he was two years old, he had grown up in a life of privilege in the UK and had an inheritance to ensure that he could live of independent means.

Arriving in this country was somewhat of a culture shock to him and this book is a collection of letters that he wrote describing what he saw all around him. They reveal details of the ancient court system that treated the Maharajah as a saint. He doesn’t quite go fully native, but he partakes in the rituals and court life and was in a uniquely privileged position.

I thought that this was a fascinating insight into life in the last days of the Raj in India. Forster gives a glimpse of what life was like for those at the top end of Indian society and the way they had been moulded under English rule. He never judges what he sees, rather he is amused and bemused with what he witnesses considering sometimes to be stranger than fiction.

4 out of 5 stars

As regular readers of my reviews will know I have read a lot of travel books and have even been fortunate enough to be a judge on two of the prizes on the Stanford Travel writing awards. Of all of the books that I have read, I have had a number that I thought were outstanding, for example, An Unexpected Light, To A Mountain in Tibet and The Bells of Old Tokyo.

Each person reads a book differently, and in Scraps of Wool, Bill Colegrave has collected here some of his all-time favourite passages from the vast quantities of travel books that he has read. He hasn’t done this alone either, he has minded the minds and bookshelves of the greatest travel writers such as Dervla Murphy, Jan Morris and Sara Wheeler to name a few.

It is an eclectic and very personal collection and that is its strength. Some of the passages come from my favourite books and they are not the passages that I would have selected, which for me goes to show that each and every person gets something different from each book.

If you like travel writing then this is a great book to be able to dip into old favourites and discover books that you have not yet read. I have made a list and will slowly work my way through all the others that I haven’t read.

4 out of 5 stars

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

Those of us who read travel writing, have a familiar canon to choose from the British set, Thubron, Raban, Thesiger, Young and Leigh Fermor. These guys and they were almost always guys in those days have written some really good books that still need to be read by those wanting to discover the world from their armchairs.

But the world was changing and since the Covid pandemic, it has changed immeasurably again. The writers that are making waves, following footpaths and rediscovering this dynamic world are bringing different voices and perspectives to the body of literature. For this collection, four editors, Levison Wood, Monisha Rajesh, Simon Willmore and Jessica Vincent, have chosen articles and short essays by a whole variety of authors.

I thought that it was a great introduction to the latest crop of writers that are making the travel writing genre their own now. I thought that the editors had pulled together an interesting variety of subjects and most importantly a diverse crop of authors for this book. I have read some of these writers before, but there are others in here that I have not come across until now.

I had a couple of minor issues with the collection though. I felt it would have been nice to have a little more of an introduction to the authors and the selected piece just before you went on to read it. I would have also liked to have seen some newly commissioned items in amongst the previously published work or extracts taken from books from authors like Gail Simmonds, Lara Prior-Palmer and Isambard Wilkinson, for example. I would recommend this if you want to discover new travel writing and I have another batch of writers to discover more from too.

4 out of 5 stars

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

I have only read one of Lysaght’s books before now, the excellent Eagle Country. So when he offered me a review copy of his new poetry collection, New Leaf I jumped at the opportunity. As I expected he focuses his poems on the natural world, in particular from his adopted place but there are poems from the wider world too.

With pencil strokes as light
as marks on sand

The subjects covered are broad, The Green man is a very different take on what I would expect from this character from folklore. Orchid Darkening is about saving seeds from these precious plants from the mower. GAVDIVM, The Tuscan Sketchbook is the longest in the book and conveys the intensity of the Italian countryside.

Every day now I visit
my own wood to see
how wildness structures space

I really enjoyed the variety in this collection. All the poems vary in length and style which I really liked. As I found with his non-fiction book, he has a razor-sharp eye for the detail that he sees as he travels, and this comes across in his poetry too. But with that is a lyrical power to fill the details of a scene in a sparse number of words. If you want a collection that is rooted in the natural world with a strong view of life flowing past then I can recommend this.

Three Favourite Poems
Seashore
An Opening
Light