Author: whatcathyreadnext

My Week in Books – 14th June 2020

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MyWeekinBooks

On What Cathy Read Next last week

Blog posts

Monday –  I shared my review of The Sea Gate  by Jane Johnson as part of the blog tour.

Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was Books Added To My TBR.

Wednesday – WWW Wednesday is the opportunity to share what I’ve just read, what I’m currently reading and what I plan to read next…and have a good nose around to see what other bloggers are reading.

Thursday – I published my review of Warriors for the Working Day by Peter Elstob as part of the blog tour.

Friday –  I introduced my Buchan of the Month for June – Homilies and Recreations. 

Saturday – I published my review of The Bell in the Lakeby Lars Mytting. 

As always, thanks to everyone who has liked, commented on or shared my blog posts on social media this week.

New arrivals

9780241404799Belladonna by Anbara Salam (eARC, courtesy of Fig Tree)

It is summer, 1954, when fifteen-year-old Bridget first meets Isabella. In their conservative Connecticut town, Isabella is a breath of fresh air. She is worldly, alluring and brazen: an enigma.

When they receive an offer to study at the Academy in Italy, Bridget is thrilled. This is her ticket to Europe and – better still – a chance to spend nine whole months with her glamorous and unpredictable best friend.

There, lodged in a convent of nuns who have taken a vow of silence, the two girls move toward a passionate but fragile intimacy. As the year rolls on, Bridget grows increasingly fearful that she will lose Isabella’s affections – and the more desperate she gets, the greater the lengths she will go to keep her.

Belladonna is a hypnotizing coming-of age story set against the stunning and evocative backdrop of rural Northern Italy. Anbara Salam tells a story of friendship and obsession, desire and betrayal, and the lies we tell in order to belong.

9780241441329The Housing Lark by Sam Selvon (eARC, courtesy of Penguin UK)

Sitting in his cramped basement room in Brixton, Battersby dreams of money, women, a T-bone steak – and a place to call his own.

So he and a group of friends decide to save up and buy a house together. But amid grasping landlords, the temptations of spending money and the less-than-welcoming attitude of the Mother Country, can this motley group of hustlers and schemers, Trinidadians and Jamaicans, men and women make their dreams a reality?

‘Selvon’s meticulously observed narratives of displaced Londoners’ lives created a template for how to write about migrant, and postmigrant, London for countless writers who have followed in his wake, including Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith’ Caryl Phillips.

9780857523617V for Victory by Lissa Evans (eARC, courtesy of Doubleday)

It’s late 1944. Hitler’s rockets are slamming down on London with vicious regularity and it’s the coldest winter in living memory. Allied victory is on its way, but it’s bloody well dragging its feet.

In a large house next to Hampstead Heath, Vee Sedge is just about scraping by, with a herd of lodgers to feed, and her young charge Noel ( almost fifteen ) to clothe and educate. When she witnesses a road accident and finds herself in court, the repercussions are both unexpectedly marvellous and potentially disastrous – disastrous because Vee is not actually the person she’s pretending to be, and neither is Noel.

The end of the war won’t just mean peace, but discovery…

With caustic wit and artful storytelling, Lissa Evans elegantly summons a time when the world could finally hope to emerge from the chaos of war. As sharply comic as Old Baggage and emotionally poignant as Crooked Heart, V For Victory once again shows Lissa Evans to be one of our most brilliant and subtle writers.

9780715653555The Young Survivors by Debra Barnes (proof copy courtesy of Duckworth)

What if everyone you loved was suddenly taken away?

When Germany invades France in the Second World War, the five Laskowski children lose everything: their home, their Jewish community and, most devastatingly, their parents who are abducted in the night. There is no safe place left for them to evade the Nazis, but they cling together – never certain when the authorities will come for what is left of them.

Inspired by the poignant, true story of the author’s mother, this moving historical novel conveys the hardship, the uncertainty and the impossible choices the Laskowski children were forced to make to survive the horrors of the Holocaust.

20200613_094839-1The Englishman by David Gilman (proof copy, courtesy of Head of Zeus and Midas PR)

A clandestine war on the desert border of Mali and Algeria; murder and kidnap on the suburban streets of West London; a Moscow CID police inspector investigating the assassination of four of her fellow officers by the Russian mafia; a young MI6 officer facing the possibility that a long-running operation has been fatally compromised: connecting them all is the Englishman – Dan Raglan, outsider, exile, one-time member of the French Foreign Legion, fully trained killer.

Raglan’s quest for answers will become a quest for vengeance. It will lead him to the winter-ravaged wasteland of the Sverdlovskaya Oblast and Penal Colony #74, a place that holds Russia’s most brutal murderers. A place of death and retribution.

How will he get in? More importantly, how will he get out?

 

On What Cathy Read Next this week

Currently reading

Planned posts

  • Blog Tour/Book Review: One Day in Summer by Shari Low
  • Top Ten Tuesday: Books On My Summer 2020 TBR
  • Waiting on Wednesday
  • Audio Book Review: Then We Take Berlin by John Lawton

The Bell in the Lake by Lars Mytting (trans. by Deborah Dawkin) #BookReview

whatcathyreadnext1 Comment

The Bell in the LakeAbout the Book

Norway, 1880. Young, inquisitive Astrid is unlike the other girls in the secluded village at the end of the valley. She dreams of a life that consists of more than marrying, having children, and eventually dying from hard work in the fields. And then the young Pastor Kai Schweigaard comes into her life.

Kai Schweigaard has taken over the small parish of Butangen, with its 700-year-old stave church. The old church is one of the few remaining examples of early Christianisation, with effigies of pagan deities carved into the wooden walls. And the bells – two sister bells forged in the 16th century, in memory of the conjoined twins Halfrid and Gunhild Hekne – are said to have supernatural powers. Legend has it that they ring of their own accord when danger is imminent.

But the Pastor wants to tear it down, to replace it with a more modern, larger church. He has already contacted the Kunstakademie in Dresden, which is sending its talented architecture student Gerhard Schönauer to oversee the removal of the church and its reconstruction in the German city. For Astrid this is a provocation too far.

But Astrid falls in love with Gerhard. He is so different from the young men in Butangen: modern, cosmopolitan, elegant, he even smells different. And she must make a choice: for her homeland and the pastor, or for an uncertain future in Germany. Then the bells begin to ring . . .

Format: ebook (400 pages) Publisher: Quercus
Publication date: 19th March 2020  Genre: Historical Fiction

Find The Bell in the Lake on Goodreads

 

Purchase links*
Amazon UK| Hive (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience not as part of an affiliate programme

My Review

I loved the author’s first novel, The Sixteen Trees of the Somme, so I was excited to learn about his new book, The Bell in the Lake, especially since it is the first in a planned trilogy of historical novels. The book is translated from the Norwegian by Deborah Dawkin.

1880 is a time of change in the world. However, very little has changed in Butangen, or ever seems likely to. “The village was twenty years behind its neighbouring villages, which were thirty years behind Norway’s towns and cities, which were fifty years behind the rest of Europe.” That tension between old and new, change and tradition forms the heart of the novel.

For Astrid Hekne, with her ‘restless mind’, real life, as she sees it, is happening elsewhere. She finds it hard to accept the life path she seems expected to follow. “Tradition favoured girls with course hands who toiled silently as the grindstone turned, who gave birth without fuss…” In a way, Astrid represents the meeting point between the old and the new. Her keen intelligence tells her there is so much more to life, even if she’s not quite sure what it is. “The only thing she knew was that she was searching for something, and that whatever it was, it was not in the village.”

Initially, the new Pastor, Kai Schweigaard, seems to offer the chance of escape for which Astrid is searching. She trades information about the village with him in return for access to newspapers which she reads greedily, grabbing “the outside world with both hands.” The attraction appears to be mutual. Rarely has the folding of a tablecloth been the source of such sexual tension. However, when Schweigaard’s intentions for the old church and, more importantly, for the Sister Bells, become clear, Astrid’s feelings change.

The arrival of Gerhard Schönauer to oversee the demolition of the church creates waves in a number of ways. For one, he is the first human being from the outside world Astrid has ever encountered. Furthermore, he recognizes the old church for the work of craftsmanship it is and its significance for the village, whereas Kai Schweigaard sees it only as a relic of a bygone age. A clash is inevitable and when it comes it has dramatic consequences.

Given the book is translated from another language, I found it interesting that a feature of the book is language and meaning – and its limitations. For example, Kai Schweigaard relies on Astrid Hekne to interpret for him the ‘peculiarities’ of the local people, especially when they are trying to outwit him. And Gerhard Schönauer’s native language is German whereas Astrid’s is Norwegian but using a dialect unique to the area in which certain words simply aren’t in the vocabulary. “Love. This word, which did not exist in her dialect… She could show it, through loyalty and devotion, and through actions, but to say it was impossible.” There are intimate scenes as Gerhard and Astrid teach each other words from their native languages – the word for lip, for love, for kiss.

I loved Astrid as a character for her independent spirit, resourcefulness and questioning mind. Faced with adversity, her response is to, “Collect herself with the same strength that the women before her had collected themselves, through avalanches and floods, tuberculosis and dysentery, frost-ruined harvests and barn fires.”

At times, the novel has a fairy tale or fable like quality, especially in the opening section recounting the story of how the Sister Bells came to be cast. Overall, it is an intriguing mix of myth and romance that explores the tension between the modern world and traditional ways and poses the question whether ‘moving with the times’ always brings about improvement and enlightenment.

Given events towards the end of the book, it will be interesting to see how the story unfolds in the next instalment in the trilogy. In the meantime, if (like me) the book has made you curious to find out more about Norwegian stave churches, you can find information and some wonderful pictures here.

I received an advance review copy courtesy of Quercus via NetGalley.

In three words: Atmospheric, dramatic, mystical

Try something similar: Things Bright and Beautiful by Anbara Salam

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About the Author

Lars Mytting, a novelist and journalist, was born in Fåvang, Norway, in 1968. His novel The Sixteen Trees of the Somme was awarded the Norwegian National Booksellers’ Award and has been bought for film. Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way has become an international bestseller, and was the Bookseller Industry Awards Non-Fiction Book of the Year in 2016. The Bell in the Lake, the first in a trilogy, was a number one bestseller in Norway and nominated for the Norwegian National Bookseller’s Award 2018.

Connect with Lars
Website | Goodreads

About the Translator

Deborah Dawkins originally trained in theatre at Drama Centre, London before turning to translation. Her translations include The Blue Room by Hanne Orstavik and Buzz Aldrin: What Happened to You in All the Confusion by Johan Harstad, shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Awards in 2012. She is the co-translator of eight plays by Ibsen for Penguin Classics, and is presently working on a PhD about the life and work of the Ibsen translator Michael Meyer.