4 out of 5 stars

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

There is a meme on the internet that showing which parts of the country comprise the alternative names for these islands; Great Britain, The British Isles, The United Kingdom. It was meant as a humorous guide for those trying to work out how this little part of the globe could have so many names depending on how you wanted to understand it. But in that humour is a serious question as to the makeup of our country and the fundamental laws that have held us together and the possible futures we have with the rise of English nationalism.

To answer the question; where are we going and how are we going to get there, is pretty complicated. The lack of a written constitution means that where other countries have clear and unequivocal limits and can work within them, we have a jumble of partly submerged laws and precedents that define who we are. In this murky definition of our country, there are very few people who actually know their way around it and the implications of any form of splintering following Brexit.

One man who is attempting to answer this question is Gavin Esler. He has lived in all the capital cities of the nations that make up our country and in his role as a journalist, he is well placed to ask the probing questions about the state of the state. To learn about how we got to where we are at the moment, first you need to understand our particular and peculiar history. Since the Normans invaded almost 1000 years ago, we have had a strong feudal society, it has been eroded to a certain extent and there have been some power transfers from crown to other positions, but the fundamental principles that existed then still exist now if you know where to look in our state structures. We have seconded the other nations in our Isles to be part of the union and whilst there have always been some separation and nationalistic elements in each of the individual countries, we have managed to stay and for the past 400 years have (mostly) acted as one country.

That started to change in 2014 though with the Scottish Independence Referendum and it was won narrowly by those wishing to remain a part of the Union. Part of what helped that was the promise that the UK would remain part of the EU. Two years later, partly as a response to the rise of UKIP in local elections and to placate a section of the Conservative party that had lurched to the right, the Prime Minister of the time called a Referendum about our place in the EU. We voted to leave by the narrow margin of 52% versus 48% and from that moment on the union was under threat. In Esler’s eyes, this was the point where the rise of English nationalism became a real threat to the union rather than just a low-level concern.

In this book, he lays out the reason behind why he thinks English nationalism has more of a chance of breaking up the UK than previous attempts by Welsh, Irish and Scottish nationalists. He looks at how the Conservative have moved further to the right and to a greater extent have tried to absorb the votes that previously went to UKIP and have co-opted nationalism as well as taking deep draughts from the poisoned well that is nostalgia. They are not huge fans of devolved power to the Scottish parliament and Welsh assembly, and they have been seeking ways that they are trying to recover some of the powers that have been lost. The concentration of power in Westminster is quite acute, and what happens there feels remote and irrelevant to most people outside of the London bubble, where being able to make decisions that are relevant at a local level are important to a lot of people. It feels like a democratic deficit and it isn’t going away.

He has some sensible suggestion on how we can avoid what is feeling inevitable at the moment, including repairing some of the damage done by Brexit, reforms and more devolution of power to the individual nations. It all seems sensible and rational stuff coming from a guy who has no political axe to grind too.

This is not an easy book to like, it is not an easy subject after all, but I thought that the way that Esler has laid out the book and sought to find a deep understanding as to how and why we have reached this point in our collective nation’s history has been well written and thought through. Might not be the most comfortable of reads for some people, but that seems a good reason to read it.

2.5 out of 5 stars

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

Lydia Quixano Pérez feels that she has the ideal life. She is happily married and has a young son. She is also lucky enough to have her own bookshop which she stock with books that will sell and a selection of personal favourites that rarely get looked at by the regular customers. This changes one day when a man comes up holding two of her favourite books among the pile he wants to buy.

He is a charming man and they slowly get to know each other a little better as he becomes a regular customer. Little does she know that this man is one of the drug cartels leaders who have been slowly strangling normal life in the city of Acapulco where they live. Their lives are going to all change dramatically when her husband publishes a in depth profile of him in his newspaper.

That moment changes her and her son’s forever. They are forced to flee from their old lives, her detail have been sent around the criminal network. She stops over night in a hotel and unbeknown to her, someone in the hotel has seen her and has passed her whereabouts on. She realises this in the morning and escapes again, just. She makes up her mind to head to America, where she has a relative that she hopes will be able to shelter her. Her and Luca make it to the bus station and they are finally safely out of Acapulco and on the way to Chilpancingo. To get beyond there would mean that she needs to find a way past the roadblocks between there are Mexico City. She finds that Sebastion has a friend in the city and heads to the church where they worship.

He is stunned by her news and promises to help her; she has a safe place to stay for a few days at least. They come up with a plan to get her safely to Mexico City and from there she is on her own. She hooks up with other migrants who have been travelling up from other countries in central and southern America and starts to make a tentative friendship with a couple of sisters who she meets by the railway line. They teach them the best way to get onto a moving train; jump from a bridge. They have seen too many injured trying to run and climb on. It is a heart-stopping moment the first time they jump…

The girls are from Honduras and they bring with them lots of personal trauma and heartache. They slowly get to know each other and end up sharing their stories. The girls help Lydia and Luca navigate the train networks, helping them not to get caught. All the way north she is still not sure that it isn’t being tracked or followed, though. The sisters have got a coyote to take them across the border when they get to America, Lydia is not sure if they even will make it to the border yet, let alone how they will get across…

I thought parts of this book were fairly well written, Cummings has created a storyline that takes the ride along with the two main characters as they flee from their home town. However, the main issue that I had with the book was that it didn’t feel authentic. Lydia seems to have an awful lot of good fortune, whereas I can imagine that most people heading north through Mexico are being exploited and threatened on a daily basis.

When this was first released it caused a lot of controversies. The author and publishers were accused of cultural appropriation, a number of migrants and Mexicans raised concerns about the book and the accuracies of what actually happens to those heading to the border. A big objection was that the people who have had to live a life fleeing from horrible events until now have never had the opportunity to tell their own stories in their own way. It has also changed some of the ways that the America publisher of this is going to publish books now, including appointing a Latina editor at large. Let’s hope it makes for a lasting change in publishing, so we get to hear the stories of a greater number of people.

4 out of 5 stars

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

Jonah Oblong has just been sacked from his teaching job after he was seen pouring a jug of water over a boy’s head just as the School inspector walked in the classroom. He left Moss Lane Comprehensive very soon after that and was struggling to get another job because of the lack of a reference. He happened to see an avert in the TES for a school in Rotherweird for a history teacher that required nor references. He applied and was offered an interview.

Getting there is not that simple though, he needs to catch a bus to the Twelve-Mile post and wait for a charabanc. So far so strange. He is offered the job on the spot, and lacking any other opportunities, accepts it. He cannot teach any history prior to 1800, and definitely no history about Rotherweird. This place is a part of England that was established back in Elizabethan times to hold Twelve children, gifted far beyond their years and who some thought they were the devil’s spawn; 450 years on it is still bound by its unique set of laws. Learning about its history is banned, but along with Jonah, there is a new guy in town who is there to uncover it for his own personal gain.

The other newcomer is Sir Veronal Slickstone, a rich merchant who has bough a manor house and a wife and sone to show that he is some legitimacy. He is there seeking to uncover the past and to find the objects that will allow him passage into the portals. Change is afoot and it doesn’t spell good news for the townsfolk and countrysiders of Rotherweird.

I liked that it was a richly imagined place that he had created but there were several things that didn’t work for me. It was nestled in an unspecified place in Britain and even though it had some modern items, there were other things that were not allowed in the town that I thought would have permeated from the modern world into Rotherweird. It felt like he based the book on the City of London a place that exists in a parallel to the London that most people know, but has its own set of peculiar laws and traditions and added some well thought out folklorish magic to the town.

Whilst there are two main characters, there are a plethora of others, (so much so that there is a list of them at the front) most with some really strange names. Occasionally it was a struggle to keep up with who was who. My favourite character was Ferensen, a man who was as old as the countryside and who knew things that would terrify most of the residents of the town.

Whilst certain elements of the story worked for me there were other parts that I struggled with. There are layers of plot tangled up in here as well as parallel storylines that do mostly converge as the book reaches its conclusions and it feels that there are things that are here that will be carried onto the next book. Hyddenworld is another book in this vein, but in that book, the otherworldly stuff is draped over certain parts of the very recognisable modern world and stuffed into the dark area that others do not notice. Overall I would recommend it, but it is not going to be for everyone though.

3.5 out of 5 stars

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

Sunny has a knack for seeing and hearing ghosts, he even has three living in his Mum’s shop; Herbert who lives in a blanket box, Violet who resides in the stationery cupboard and Walter who is lightly haunting the wardrobe.

They tell him one day that they want to visit a local castle where there is supposed to be a notoriously scary ghost called the Wicked Lady. She was rumoured to ride in a coach made of human bones. They have a lovely day at the castle but see no other ghosts at all. They climb back into the van and head home. Herbert happens to glance out the back window and sees a ghost staring at him and alongside her is a spectral black dog.

Strange things are afoot; the following day a lady turns up at the shop, wanders about for a short time before buying the blanket box. Herbert is not in there at the time, but he has nowhere to sleep that night so joins one of the other ghosts. The same lady is back the following day with a young man and buys another item for her museum. Inside is one of the ghosts from the shop. The two ghosts that are left are convinced that it is the Wicked lady that has taken their companion. He doesn’t expect her to turn up in her coach of bones driven by the headless coachman and walk through the door though!

I don’t read that many children’s books now, partly because I have a massive stack of other books to read and my children all being teenagers read themselves, some with much more encouragement than others… (Any tips for getting a teen boy to read are appreciated). Salt sent a small pile of books to me and this was in with them so I thought I might as well give it a go. It is a charming little story about a boy and his friendly ghosts. It has a simple plotline that children will be able to follow easily. These are not scary ghosts, rather they share some of the foibles and flaws of normal human beings and there are even parts that made me laugh, so I can imagine that children will love it too.

4 out of 5 stars

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

Frank had been inside for a while as he was serving a life sentence for murdering his son’s drug dealer. It wasn’t much of a life, so he was surprised when he was told that there was someone who wanted to see him. He is chained to the chair and table before this unknown visitor is escorted in. A guy in a sharp suit is allowed in through the door, he sits placing his briefcase on the table between them and opens it up. He takes a folder out with Frank’s name on it. The guy, he is calling himself, Mark is there to make Frank an offer. Not to commute his sentence, but to serve it in another location, Mars.

He would be there with seven other ex-cons to build and maintain the first permanent base on the red planet. It is not something that Frank is expecting and it takes him a while to think it through. Die in prison on Earth or live a little on Mars. As choices go, it wasn’t much of one, but it was one more than he had yesterday. He signed.

The journey to the desert training ground was unpleasant but uneventful; It was there he realised just what he had got himself into, the company owned him completely. He made the decision to get on with it if the training didn’t kill him first though. He must have passed the initial training as he was asked to report to Building Six through the implant in his head. He headed up to the first floor and pressed his finger against the glass and the door clicked open. Inside were six others wearing the same uniform as him; they came across as ex-cons by the way that they held themselves; this must be his new team.

The training is intense, they have to learn how to assemble the fab that will be living accommodation for them and then the astronauts when they arrive sometime later on Mars. Frank with his experience of building starts to become the natural leader. The guy running the show, Brack, is a nasty piece of work, and whilst the team begins to work together well after a few teething issues, none of the others seems to like him. Their short six month training period is up and then they are heading to Mars with being in suspended animation for eight months.

Their journey is long and uneventful and the first thing that Frank feels on waking, is pain. It soon passes and he finds out that their supply cylinders are scattered far and wide. When he is with it enough it will be up to him and Marcy to walk out to where the buggies are and return with them. That way they will able to get to the other drops for the remainder of the supplies. They suit and set off knowing that they only really have enough air to just make it there and back.  It is tight, but they just make it back.

It takes time to head to the various places to get to the supply drops and they find various things are damaged. They make a plan to make do and mend and assemble as habitable a Mars base as they can. But their very short training is causing accidents, and that soon turns into casualties. It is a tough environment, but the attrition rate seems far higher than Frank would expect; then it dawns on him that there might be someone on the team that is doing this deliberately…

As space-based thrillers go, I thought this was pretty good. It is fast-paced, the systems and stuff that they were making the base out of seemed plausible and it is full of strong and flawed characters. I liked the way that the beginning of each chapter had some of the internal emails and transcripts that add to the back story of the book. The strong plot builds in intensity as the end of the books approaches and I zipped through the final chapters in the rush to find out what happens. I thought that it was much better than The Martian and will be getting the sequel to read at some point.

4 out of 5 stars

We have a rich and long literary history in this country and whichever part of the country that you start in you can find an author and a little bit of history behind them to explain the context. In Footnotes, Peter Fiennes has chosen a dozen of his favourite authors to write about and travel to the places that they are best known in.

Starting in my home county of Dorset with the famous children’s writer Enid Blyton. Standing on the seafront in Swanage in a brutally cold wind, he imagines her in one of her books describing the weather as ‘lovely’. She was a complicated character and some of her books could be described as controversial in our more enlightened times. It was a place that she fell in love with after a day trip there from Bournemouth, and when you read some of her books you can sense the presence of the Purbecks.

His next author is Wilkie Collins and this part of Fiennes grand tour takes him to Cornwall. Collins was there to write a travel book set in Cornwall and he had got as far as Plymouth on the new-fangled railway, he would then have to rely on coaches after the boat across the Tamar. He stays with Colins in the next chapter and journey from Lamorna Cove to Launceston and is joined by Ithell Colquhoun, author of The Living Stones. There are no blue plaques celebrating her, unlike a lot of the other artists who were based here, but they do find where her hut was. It is very different from the corrugated iron shack she lived in though. Wending his way up the North cast he tops at Tintagel and has a heart-stopping moment crossing the slender bridge to get to the island.

He then heads on to Hereford, this time accompanied by Celia Fiennes, who is a distant relation of his. But as he points out you don’t have to go very far back up the family tree to see that we are much more interrelated than people think. She was moving around the West Country in 1698 where they had long miles and it was a time when very few people knew how far they were travelling and when they could expect to arrive. From Hereford, it is easy to cross the border into Wales and the earliest author in this book, Gerald of Wales. Gerald was part Welsh and in one of his books he spends half of it praising the people of the country and the later half denouncing the people. Heading to North Wales he is following Edith Somerville and Violet ‘Martin’ Ross and joins them struggling up Snowdon. They had discovered a demand for travel journalism and this was a Welsh jaunt to write and make some money.

Next Fiennes heads to the Midlands and is tracing the routes of J.B Priestly and Beryl Bainbridge from Birmingham to Liverpool. They had taken similar routes, but five decades apart and had both written books called, English Journey. He has a trip around the Cadbury factory whilst feeling slightly delicate after a night in a pub. Wilkie Collins is back again, but this time accompanying Dickens on a train journey to Cumberland and they undertake an almost disastrous climb of Carrock Fell. Samuel Johnson and James Boswell are the two authors that he has chosen for a brief visit to Scotland. Johnson had been invited by Boswell to visit for ages and was always too busy, but he relented and suddenly decided he wanted to see one of the last wildernesses in the UK. Heading south, Fiennes joins J.B Priestly and Beryl Bainbridge again in Newcastle. He bumps briefly into Celia Fiennes before heading to London and finally Kent to meet with Dickens again.

This book feels like a homage to his formative years as a reader rediscovering his favourite authors. But it is more than that, at its heart, it is a travel book as he moves around the country in the virtual company of his chosen writers and intertwined with this is history and a snapshot of modern Britain. It is a gentle and relaxed form of travel too; he is not in a rush to get to the next place and it gives him time to mull things over and discover those nuggets of information about the places he is staying and his virtual companions. Well worth reading.

3.5 out of 5 stars

We have a rich and deep literary history in this country, there are poets, playwrights and authors who have been inspired by the places that they have lived and created works that still resonate today.

Tearle’s journey around begins in Scotland with William Topaz McGonnal, sometimes known as the Bard of Dundee. He is widely considered to be the worst poet in the English language. He applied for patronage from Queen Victoria, who politely declined, but he took to be an expression of interest. He agreed to read some of his works, in a circus, on the condition that the audience could pelt his with rotten vegetables and eggs. He agreed as the money was handy.

Moving on from this auspicious start, Tearle takes us past Robbie Burns, Sir Walter Scott and how a break in Whitby gave the creator of Dracula, Stoker, plenty of material to work with. In York, he tells us the favourite poem of the middle ages and it isn’t what you think it is before recounting stories about Bradford’s favourite literary son, Priestly. Further south in Nottingham, DH Lawrence is in trouble again with his book, The White Peacock.

There are stories about books and poems that have been written in jail, authors who stayed in towns that no longer exist, one about the oldest bookshop in Britain and why Thomas is buried in two locations. Even, Terry Pratchett does get a mention twice.

It is not too bad overall. There are various stories in here that were new to me, though I was aware of a few of them. It can’t have been easy choosing from the vast number of writers to make this a complete country tour. Glad it wasn’t London Centric too. If there was one flaw, I would have liked a few more contemporary authors to get a mention, but that is only a small thing.