3 out of 5 stars

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

The desire to be a politician should bar you for life from ever becoming one. ― Billy Connolly

In the last three years if you were ever brave enough to mention politics to anyone else then you would probably have a fairly heated discussion right up to a full-blown row. Unless they happened to share your point of view that is and then your point of view is often heard, amplified and echoed back to you. There are lots of people who have had enough too, and never intend to vote for anyone ever again.

Opinions are polarised, nationalism is on the rise, partly fuelled by people who are scared about change and the pace of the modern world and we have lost the ability to see a point from anyone else’s perspective. We have reached the point of Breakdown according to Spiller. This book has come from his work on Simple Politics, a project that is striving to make politics, clear interesting and most importantly, still relevant.

To do this he looks at a variety of different subjects that have caused strife over the past few years; immigration, privatisation, taxes, austerity and that political football of the past few years, Brexit. He takes each and look at it from the range of political viewpoints, considers some of the details like is tax good or bad, are immigrants taking our jobs or just doing some of the jobs we are keen on doing?

We all listen to voices that we are comfortable within our own echo chambers, regardless of what we think that we are doing. These are all complex and nuanced subjects that do not have a simple binary solution and as Spiller says, we have lost the ability to see the point of view from the other side that we used to have. What he is trying to do here is demonstrate how listening to an alternative point of view in an argument is not being shouted down by the other side, rather it is learning as we do as a small child that other people can know, feel and understand different things.

It is written in an easy-going conversational style that he has deliberately not made threatening. He has some reasonable suggestions to help us get on better politically, sadly though, I think that the people that really need to read this won’t ever consider picking it up. I would have preferred to have the How It All Works section at the beginning. I feel this would have set the framework of how everything works (or at least should do) and set the framework before moving onto the how others think and the main battlegrounds at the moment. I was slightly surprised that he doesn’t mention royal prerogative – the power of the prime minister to completely overrule and ignore, his cabinet, parliament and party, but that was a minor detail. Just remember to buy a different paper every now and again just to see where people that you might not agree with are coming from.

4 out of 5 stars

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

Some mother-daughter bonds are hugely strong and able to resist the traumas of all that life can through at them, others have much more traumatic relationships with their mothers, and Charlton was one of them. She took the brunt of her stepfather wrath too, as he blamed her for all sorts of things that were almost nothing to do with her. She left home at the age of 16, heading over to Australia to be a cowgirl, teaching in Japan and Catalonia to do a degree. She forged her own way in the world, but she knew she would never be safe or close to her mother again.

Marram – A coarse grass found on sandy beaches. From Old Norse maralmr, a compound of marr (“sea”) and halmr (“straw, reed”).

She had been out to the Outer Hebrides with her dad a long while ago for a fortnight’s holiday and it was a time that still meant so much to her many years later. He was a rock in her life, offering her the stability that living with her mother never gave her. Seven years after her mother had died, an act that she thought would loosen the bonds between them, she still felt the grief of her death was becoming overwhelming. What she did get from her mother that gave her some comfort was a love of horses, and in the planning for a long-distance trek through the islands of the Outer Hebrides with her friend, Shuna, she came up with the idea leaving a trail of beads as they trekked through.

Getting there with a truck and horsebox is not the easiest journey and the weather is not always the kindest as they were to find out over their two week trip from Barra all the way up to Lewis. However, it is a beautiful part of the world to travel through, and they were to be equally blasted and drenched as well as having glorious days of riding their horses, Chief and Ross. She had a small purse of beads from her mother, who was a jewellery maker. From here Charlton selects one or two beads at certain points on the journey to leave them; a bothy, on a gatepost, on the beach where the sea is just reaching and in some faerie milk holes.

My memories of her are a palimpsest like the sea-licked Lichens on the rocks at our feet, merely a thin breathing skin over the unfathomable story of the rock

I really liked this book because it is very different from a regular travel book. Several themes inhabit the prose; friendship, travel, memory, relationships, landscape and Charlton has deftly folded them together in such a way that they enhance each other, rather than one element becoming overbearing. Charlton is not relying on the natural world as a cure for her past life, rather the journey and the symbolism of placing the beads at significant points in the landscape is a release from the trauma of the past. There are moments of humour and anguish in equal measure, but mostly this is a book that is permeated with human kindness and warmth. Her evocative descriptions of the landscape that they are trekking through make this a special read too. It is one of those parts of the world that I’d love to go to when we’re allowed out again.

3.5 out of 5 stars

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

It was getting caught helping himself to a tomato from his grandfather’s vines and a conversation with Mr Fowler, the gardener, that he first became aware of bees. This led to a promise of tea at Mr Fowler’s and a visit to his hive. Having been stung the odd occasion before, being shown 50,000 of them is a wooden box was almost too much, but the gentle reassurance of his mentor meant that his worries ebbed away. Mr Fowler shut the hive up and promised a return visit when it was time to harvest the honey. He never went back.

Roll on a few decades later and he is looking out the window with his friend, and Jim says that is the third one he has seen recently. Third what? is the question; swarm is the reply. Thankfully Jim was once a beekeeper and suggested that Roger tried to take it off the branch and get it into a box. It was going well until he dropped something in the middle of the swarm and it was not long after that, that he spots a couple of bees inside the veil…

Taking Jim’s old hive and with several thousand irritated bees in the boot of the car, he heads home to start his beekeeping adventure. It was one of those pivotal moments though, that little spark that was almost extinguished years earlier was fanned into life once again. It would become a flame after meeting Duncan, a new guy in the village. As they head out of the pub, Duncan picks up a pot of honey from the shelves where people sell a few bits and pieces and nearly falls over at the price. He mentions the failed attempt with the swarm earlier and together they concoct a plan to get a couple of hives.

What could possibly go wrong…

It is the beginning of a warm friendship between the two men as they try to get their heads around these tiny insects as they produce this liquid gold. It is very amusing at times especially when they are at the auction or trying to decide the next plan of action. It is a steep learning curve too, the initial budget is blown out of the water and they suffer setbacks and celebrate successes in equal measure. It is full of poignant moments, a spot of cricket, an expensive bottle of whisky and the odd hangover. I’m not totally sure what the price per pot of honey worked out at, but this isn’t about the money. It is a book about forging friends for life and a growing respect for these amazing insects. It did remind me a little of Allotted Time: Twelve Months, Two Blokes, One Shed, No Idea by Robin Shelton which is a book in a similar vein but about allotments.

4 out of 5 stars

Verity is known as the app whisperer and even though she doesn’t like working for big corporations this startup seems more interesting than most assignments, besides she needs the money. They want her to evaluate and test a set of glasses with a phone and an earbud. She’d chosen the plainer grey pair, but plugging them all in and turning on gave her a bit of a shock when the voice talks to her. It is not a recorded voice, rather it is a personal AI that calls herself, Eunice.

Unnerved by this, she decides to head to her local coffee shop, 3.7 sigma, as she walks in the door the barista pushes her favourite drink across the counter to her. It is starting to dawn on her that Eunice is not the usual digital assistant, she is much smarter than anyone she has ever met and is continually scanning everything, what makes her certain of that though is after coming out of the show a courier knocks on the door and hands her a package. In it is $100,000 that Eunice says Verity is going to need very soon…

If that was unexpected, she is contacted by a guy called Netherton, but what she really is not prepared for is to be the fact that he is from 100 years in the future from a different timeline where Brexit and Trump happened. This is very different from her timeline and he is there to stop something nasty happening with Eunice’s particular skills.

I have liked Gibson’s writing since I first came across his in Neuromancer, he has a knack of picking up the trends and projecting them into a future that might happen. It is often a future that has some positives and also some downsides. It is the same in this book, it is dripping with cool tech, drones and AI. Coupled with all of this is a deeply layered plot that is full of moments that happen and make no sense until 50 or more pages later. Snappy chapters keep the pace fast and it has this slightly sinister black ops vibe running all the way through it. The main characters have depth but the rest are a little two dimensional. I liked the use of stumps; alternative storylines to regular time travel episodes in world history that branched the other way to the timeline that you are on, it is a technique that fully messed with my head. Great stuff from Gibson once again.

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

3 out of 5 stars

Delphine Venner has been around a long time, whilst some people the same age as her have fading memories, she has not forgotten anything. She remembers being a child of war, and fighting for her life, she remembers the gateway and the world and terrifying creatures that live the other side of it. Most of all she remember those that she lost. She is offered a chance to pass through the gateway once again. On the other side of the gateway is someone who has been an assassin for centuries. She is waiting for her.

This assassin, Hagar, is planning one last kill, and this death will cost demand from her everything she has, but to do it she needs Delphine. She is there to find her father but is dragged unwittingly into this, the whole society descends into chaos. Venner must learn the art of fighting once again in the battle to destroy an ageless evil.

I hadn’t read the first in the series before picking this book up, and while you didn’t have to have read the first one, I think that the context from the first books would have helped me with a greater understanding of the characters. It has a complex plot with lots going on too and occasionally you have to put the books down and take a moment to get it clear in your head just what was happening. It has a frantic pace at the end and probably not one for the squeamish at times. At times it was very weird but in a Miéville sort of way. That said, this is a richly imagined book of two linked worlds and a very different fantasy from what you might have read in the past. It has a sumptuous cover too.

4 out of 5 stars

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

We may think that we are a separate species from all the others but we are as much a part of the earth as the rocks and soil that we stand on. To start with we are made from the same elements and all the things that you can see around you we are an integral part of this planet. Secondly, if you know where to look and how to interpret the data you can see the traces of our long development in the rocks too.

To begin this story, Dartnell takes us back to that moment in time when we moved down a different and new branch of the family tree, along with other primates. This happened in East Africa in the rainforest belt around the equator, but instead of being dense forest, this part of the world was dry savannah grasslands and it was this difference that altered the trajectory from swinging primate to bipedal creatures. Why this part of the planet was so very different to similar latitudes was down to plate tectonics several million years earlier that led to the East African Rift, a wide deep valley with high mountainous ridges. These cause a rain shadow and stop the formation of forests, hence the dry landscape that was there.

This theme is repeated throughout the book. He looks at the geology of different regions and sees how human beings have exploited the water that seeps up through fault lines or taken advantage of the rich soils close to volcanoes. He explains why the civilisations of the Mediterranean were mostly on the northern coastlines, how we used the rocks beneath our feet to build our homes and how we used cooking to get more nutrients from food. He can even trace the voting patterns of the UK and US in the geology.

This is a book about deep time, how long some things take to come to fruition and pulling together these tiny but significant moments in our history. It also reinforces the view that I have that we are this complex interdependent system and that as a species we have pushed it to the very edge. It makes for a fascinating read and I really enjoyed it. Dartnell is an eloquent and engaging writer and I can highly recommend this.

4 out of 5 stars

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

Even as I write this with COVID-19 totally dominating the news, climate change is still one of our biggest challenges that we are facing as a planet and as a human race. There have been many books written on the science of what is happening, and the possible effects of what our planet could be like with a temperature rise of 4 degrees. There are fictional responses too, Stillicide by Cynan Jones and Doggerland by Ben Smith are two books set in a future UK that has suffered from the effects of climate change.

The barren shelves wait

For just in time deliveries to cities

Where no one can eat barcodes

But there aren’t many poetry books about this crisis, so when I was offered a copy of this to read, I jumped at the chance. This collection by Sam Love is split into four themed sections, Awakening, Origins, Impact and Recovering Hope. The emphasis for each section is fairly clear and the poems open up things that are important to him, such as the way the atmosphere traps the heat from the sun, the imagery of a Plastic bag as tumbleweed before joining the other detritus of our legacy is very poignant, the joy of picking fruit from a bush in your garden rather than a punnet that has travelled a quarter of the way around the world. The view that a forest is a sustainable resource for local people and not just a one-off source of profit for an outsider.

The butterfly’s bright wings offer a glimpse

That tomorrow the sunrise will paint the landscape

What comes across most in the short collection is the fury that he has about the way that we have reached the situation that we are in. The final section gives us a little hope that this is merely a transitory phase and that there will be some positives on the other side of this crisis.

Three (ish) Favourite Poems

Our Legacy

Crazy Water

Ghost Stumps

Awakenings

4 out of 5 stars

There are parts of Europe that rarely get mentioned, these out of the way places often have turbulent and complicated pasts. One of these places is mountainous borderlands of North Macedonia, Albania, and Greece. The border of the three countries passes through the two ancient lakes formed by tectonic activity and are joined by underground rivers, Ohrid and Prespa.

It is a place that is deeply rooted deeply in Kapka Kassabova’s heart too, her maternal grandmother was a huge influence on her and she came from the region. It was somewhere where she wants to go to and spend time there, but it hadn’t been appropriate until now. It was a region that had known conflict for years, but there had been peace for a little while now and there was no time like the present.

Amongst all the history here though and there has been an awful lot of history; wars and constantly changing borders and regimes, it is a place scarred deeply by conflict. It is now coming to terms with peace, and she is here for the human stories and to see if there are any traces of her family left. Landing at the airport in Albania, she immediately feels at home, the men who are hoping for work all look like her cousins. They pass through a medieval gate into the town on Ohrid on the way to the villa she was staying at. The owners looked familiar and it didn’t take long to realise that there was a family link.

Form this initial meeting she heads off around the region to meet and talk with the people of the region, from the fishermen, mothers, aunts, poets and border guards. She learns about how and when Sufism appeared in the region, speaks the those that got across the Iron Curtain and visits monasteries high in the mountains and walks in 2000-year-old tombs that were untouched until recently. But all of the trip out centre on these amazing lakes

As she travels between town and villages and crossing the lakes she keeps bumping into people that look familiar. Quite often after a short conversation with them, she invariably finds out that they are related in some way or another. And it is that sort of thing that sums this book up, it is a little-understood area of the world and through her wonderful prose, Kassabova untangles the people from the politics. Slowly the rifts are being healed, even when she is there it is finally agreed with Greece that Macedonia can formally be called North Macedonia. With all these things though, it is a process that has taken far too long, but it does show that even after years of conflict they still have so much more in common than the differences between them.