Reviews – Page 298 – What Cathy Read Next…

About the Book

The characters in Glenn Haybittle’s first collection of short stories are all caught in moments of life that bring about a revelation of identity.

A young woman who, after the war, catches sight of the guard who knocked to the ground her blind grandfather on the platform at Auschwitz. The backstory of the man accused of murdering Martin Luther King. The experience of a young girl on Kristallnacht and the subsequent tragic upheavals in her life. A dance teacher accused of sexually abusing one of his young students. A man constrained to return to his mother and look after her while she goes through dementia. A CIA operative grooming a patsy to take the blame for an assassination.

Format: eARC (285 pages) Publisher: Cheyne Walk
Publication date: 16th October 2023 Genre: Short Stories

Purchase links
Hive | Amazon UK
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My Review

The stories in this collection vary in subject matter and location, and, in particular, in length. Initially I found it hard to detect in all of them the underlying theme of identity described in the blurb. However, gradually I did start to see the connections, some of them obvious (but not necessarily apparent at the time of reading an individual story), some more subtle and others just the odd mention of a name or place. An example of the first is the stories entitled ‘The Patsy’ and ‘Raoul’ whose sinister mood only increases when you read the second story.

There were two standout stories for me. The first was the very moving ‘Mother Love’ in which a son who is caring for his mother suffering with dementia, who has become ‘like a puzzling anagram of herself’, struggles to come to terms with the change in his role, the intimacy of the tasks he has to carry out and the difficult decisions he faces.

The second was ‘The Girls of his Youth’ in which the reader witnesses the chaotic thoughts of a man, possibly also suffering from dementia. Written in a style akin to stream of consciousness, he continually harks back to his past punctuated by a refrain that occurs over and over again. ‘The girls of his youth. The girls of youth break his heart. The girls of his youth make his heart whole again.’

I also enjoyed the first story in the collection, ‘Archaeology’, in which a recently widowed man has to deal with feelings of guilt about his wife’s death and his acute sense of loss. ‘Bereavement is sometimes like wading across a succession of snowfields with no landmark in sight. You are a lone small figure in a vast barren landscape. Other times it’s like a Ferris wheel ride. Like being strapped into a swinging spinning bucket. The dizzying dislocation from familiar grounded reality. The brain regrouping, re-coding, re-evaluating, adjusting itself to a bewildering change in the engrained mental landscape.’ He is also coming to terms with the change in his role, that ‘he’s no longer a husband, just a father’, and gradually realising his limitations as a sole parent to his two young daughters.

The story that gives the collection its title is the longest in the book. Subtitled ‘Brits abroad’ it might just as well have be entitled ‘Brits behaving badly’. Jake arrives in Italy and meets Felix, an actor who has recently played Byron in a film and Ivan, who is writing a biography of Shelley. Alongside their drink and drug fuelled escapades they attempt to discover the whereabouts of a young woman who has mysteriously disappeared. The story’s conclusion is a clever echo of events in the lives of the poets of its title.

The book contains some wonderful descriptive writing and imaginative metaphors. ‘The waves embroider the shingled beach with a ragged silvered stitching; the percussive assent they make as they break and the lamentation as they withdraw over the pebbles seems to come from a distance in time as well as space.’

Byron and Shelley is an interesting and varied collection of stories, with a few misses but also with several that would repay rereading.

I received an advance reader copy courtesy of Cheyne Walk via NetGalley.

In three words: Intriguing, insightful, diverse

Try something similar: The Wooden Hill by Jamie Guiney

On What Cathy Read Next last week

Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was Reading Goals I Still Want to Accomplish Before the End of the Year.

Wednesday – I published my review of historical novel, Adama by Lavie Tidhar. As always WWW Wednesday is a weekly opportunity to share what I’ve just read, what I’m currently reading and what I plan to read next… and to take a peek at what others are reading.

Thursday – I shared my Five Favourite September 2023 Reads.

Saturday – I took part in the monthly #6Degrees of Separation meme, forging a chain from I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith to A Wake of Crows by Kate Evans.

New arrivals

A bumper week thanks to a trip to Henley Literary Festival and Henley’s excellent Oxfam Bookshop.

Mrs Quinn’s Rise to Fame by Olivia Ford (ARC, Michael Joseph)

Jennifer Quinn has a secret. Her love of baking has just won her a spot as a contestant on a primetime TV show. It’s only the second time in fifty-nine years that she’s kept something from her beloved husband Bernard.

She’s about to be whisked into an unfamiliar world of cameras, timed challenges and celebrity judges. She could be in with a chance of being crowned the best baker in Britain.

But, as Mrs Quinn’s quiet ambitions turn into unexpected stardom, the other secret she’s been keeping is in danger of resurfacing. It was supposed to stay hidden forever.

Will Mrs Quinn rise to the challenge? Or, will her success become a recipe for disaster?

Sweetness in the Skin by Ishi Robinson (ARC, Michael Joseph)

Fourteen-year-old Pumkin Patterson lives in a two-room house in Kingston Jamaica with her devoted grandmother, her beloved Aunt Sophie, and a mother who could not care less about her. When her conniving estranged father shows up Pumkin’s only real escape is baking – while making sweet potato pudding and apple turnovers she can forget the fighting at home.

When Aunt Sophie is offered the chance to move to France, she promises to send for Pumkin as soon as she can afford to. But when things take a turn for the worse in Pumkin’s household, she’s determined to raise the money herself. Her mother is determined to make her stay, but will her friends, neighbours and talent for baking be her escape?

Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín (Viking)

It is Ireland in the early 1950s and for Eilis Lacey, as for so many young Irish girls, opportunities are scarce. So when her sister arranges for her to emigrate to New York, Eilis knows she must go, leaving behind her family and her home for the first time.

Arriving in a crowded lodging house in Brooklyn, Eilis can only be reminded of what she has sacrificed. She is far from home – and homesick. And just as she takes tentative steps towards friendship, and perhaps something more, Eilis receives news which sends her back to Ireland. There she will be confronted by a terrible dilemma – a devastating choice between duty and one great love.

Trespasses by Louise Kennedy (Bloomsbury)

There is nothing special about the day Cushla meets Michael, a married man from Belfast, in the pub owned by her family. But here, love is never far from violence, and this encounter will change both of their lives forever.

As people get up each morning and go to work, school, church or the pub, the daily news rolls in of another car bomb exploded, another man beaten, killed or left for dead. In the class Cushla teaches, the vocabulary of seven-year-old children now includes phrases like ‘petrol bomb’ and ‘rubber bullets’. And as she is forced to tread lines she never thought she would cross, tensions in the town are escalating, threatening to destroy all she is working to hold together.

Pure by Andrew Miller (Sceptre)

A year of bones, of grave-dirt, relentless work. Of mummified corpses and chanting priests. A year of rape, suicide, sudden death. Of friendship too. Of desire. Of love . . . A year unlike any other he has lived.

Deep in the heart of Paris, its oldest cemetery is, by 1785, overflowing, tainting the very breath of those who live nearby. Into their midst comes Jean-Baptiste Baratte, a young, provincial engineer charged by the king with demolishing it. At first Baratte sees this as a chance to clear the burden of history, a fitting task for a modern man of reason. But before long, he begins to suspect that the destruction of the cemetery might be a prelude to his own.

Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller (Penguin)

1976: Peggy Hillcoat is eight. She spends her summer camping with her father, playing her beloved record of The Railway Children and listening to her mother’s grand piano, but her pretty life is about to change.

Her survivalist father, who has been stockpiling provisions for the end which is surely coming soon, takes her from London to a cabin in a remote European forest. There he tells Peggy the rest of the world has disappeared.

Her life is reduced to a piano which makes music but no sound, a forest where all that grows is a means of survival. And a tiny wooden hut that is Everything.