Category: Reviews

My Week in Books – 5th March 2023

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MyWeekinBooksOn What Cathy Read Next last week

Monday – I published my review of historical novel, The Paris Sister by Adrienne Chinn. 

Tuesday – This week’s topic was a freebie on the theme of genres and I chose to feature Ten Alternate History Novels.

Wednesday – I published my review of thriller, Cut Adrift by Jane Jesmond as part of the blog tour. And 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 February 2023 Reads. 

Friday – I published my review of Ponti by Sharlene Teo. 

Saturday – I took part in the #6Degrees of Separation meme forging a bookish chain from Passages by Gail Sheehy to Liar by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen.

Sunday – I published my review of Nothing Special by Nicole Flattery as part of the blog tour.

New arrivals

I confess to a splurge on books on the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2023 longlist as part of my personal project to read as many as possible before the shortlist is revealed in April… You ask: Yeah, and what’s the excuse for the others then?

The SettlementThe Settlement by Jock Serong (Text Publishing, Australia) Longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2023

On the windswept point of an island at the edge of van Diemen’s Land, the Commandant huddles with a small force of white men and women.

He has gathered together, under varying degrees of coercion and duress, the last of the Tasmanians, or so he believes. His purpose is to save them – from a number of things, but most pressingly from the murderous intent of the pastoral settlers on their country.

The orphans Whelk and Pipi, fighting for their survival against the malevolent old man they know as the Catechist, watch as almost everything about this situation proves resistant to the Commandant’s will. The wind, the spread of disease, the strange black dog that floats in on the prow of a wrecked ship…

But above all the Chief, the leader of the exiles, before whom the Commandant performs a perverse, intimate dance of violence and betrayal.

In The Settlement, Jock Serong reimagines in urgent, compelling prose the ill-fated exploits of George Augustus Robinson at the settlement of Wybalenna – a venture whose blinkered, self-interested cruelty might stand for the colonial enterprise itself.

Tiny Pieces of EnidTiny Pieces of Enid by Tim Ewins (ARC, Lightning Books)

‘A deeply touching story of love, age and companionship, evoking the unnoticed everyday moments that can mean the world to the people living them’

Enid isn’t clear about much these days. But she does feel a strong affinity with Olivia, a regular visitor to her dementia home in a small coastal town. If only she could put her finger on why.

Their silent partnership intensifies when Enid, hoping to reconnect with her husband Roy, escapes from the home. With help from an imaginary macaw, she uncovers some uncomfortable truths about Olivia’s marriage and delves into her own forgotten past.

AncestryAncestry by Simon Mawer (Little, Brown) Longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2023

Beginning with his great-great-grandfather Abraham Block, acclaimed novelist Simon Mawer sifts through evidence like an archaeologist, piecing together the stories of his ancestors.

Illiterate and lacking opportunity in the bleak Suffolk village where his parents worked as agricultural laborers, Abraham leaves home at fifteen, in 1847. He signs away the next five years in an indenture aboard a ship, which will circuitously lead him to London and well beyond, to far-flung ports on the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. In London he crosses paths with Naomi Lulham, a young seamstress likewise seeking a better life in the city, with all its prospects and temptations.

Another branch of the family tree comes together in 1847, in Manchester, as soldier George Mawer weds his Irish bride Ann Scanlon – Annie – before embarking with his regiment. When he is called to fight in the Crimean War, Annie must fend for herself and her children on a meager income, navigating an often hostile world as a woman alone.

With a keen eye and a nuanced consideration of the limits of what we can know about the past, Mawer paints a compelling, intimate portrait of life in the nineteenth century.

I Am Not Your EveI Am Not Your Eve by Devika Ponnambalam (Bluemoose Books) Longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2023

I Am Not Your Eve is the story of Teha’amana, Tahitian muse and child-bride to the painter Paul Gauguin. She shares her thougths as he works on one of his masterpieces, The Spirit of The Dead Keeps Watch, a work so important to Gauguin that it haunts his later self-portrait. As Teha’amana tells her story, other voices of the island rise: Hina goddess of the moon, a lizard watching from the eaves, Gauguin’s mask of Teha’amana carved from one of the trees.

Woven in are the origin myths that cradled Polynesia before French colonists brought the Christian faith. Distant diary entries by Gauguin’s daughter Aline – the same age as her father’s new ‘wife’ – recall the other hemisphere of his life. This is the novel that gives Teha’amana a voice; one that travels with the myths and legends of the island, across history and asks to be heard.

The ChosenThe Chosen by Elizabeth Lowry (riverrun) Longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2023

One Wednesday morning in November 1912, the aging Thomas Hardy, entombed by paper and books and increasingly estranged from his wife Emma, finds her dying in her bedroom. Between his speaking to her and taking her in his arms, she is gone.

The day before, he and Emma had exchanged bitter words – leading Hardy to wonder whether all husbands and wives end up as enemies to each other. His family and Florence Dugdale, the much younger woman with whom he has been in a relationship, assume that he will be happy and relieved to be set free. But he is left shattered by the loss.

Hardy’s bewilderment only increases when, sorting through Emma’s effects, he comes across a set of diaries that she had secretly kept about their life together, ominously titled ‘What I Think of My Husband’. He discovers what Emma had truly felt – that he had been cold, remote and incapable of ordinary human affection, and had kept her childless, a virtual prisoner for forty years. Why did they ever marry?

He is consumed by something worse than grief: a chaos in which all his certainties have been obliterated. He has to re-evaluate himself, and reimagine his unhappy wife as she was when they first met.

Hardy’s pained reflections on the choices he has made, and must now make, form a unique combination of love story and ghost story, by turns tender, surprising, comic and true. The Chosen hauntingly searches the unknowable spaces between man and wife; memory and regret, life and art.

Elizabeth FinchElizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes (Vintage)

Elizabeth Finch was a teacher, a thinker, an inspiration.

Neil is just one of many who fell under her spell during his time in her class. Tasked with unpacking her notebooks after her death, Neil encounters once again Elizabeth’s astonishing ideas on the past and on how to make sense of the present.

But Elizabeth was much more than a scholar. Her secrets are waiting to be revealed . . . and will change Neil’s view of the world forever.

The Great PassionThe Great Passion by James Runcie (Bloomsbury)

Leipzig, 1726. Eleven-year-old Stefan Silbermann has just lost his mother. Sent to Leipzig to train as a singer in the St Thomas Church choir, he is rescued from his homesickness and grief by the Cantor: Johann Sebastian Bach himself. Stefan is brought into the Bach household as an apprentice – until a devastating loss brings his period of sanctuary to an end.

Something is happening, though. In the depths of his loss, the Cantor is writing a new work. As Stefan watches the work rehearsed, he realises he is witness to the creation of one of the most extraordinary pieces of music that has ever been written.

On What Cathy Read Next this week

Currently reading

Planned posts

  • Blog Tour/Book Review: The Last Party at Silverton Hall by Rachel Burton
  • Book Review: The Witch in the Well by Camilla Bruce 
  • Book Review: Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry

#BlogTour #BookReview #Ad Nothing Special by Nicole Flattery

whatcathyreadnext2 Comments

Welcome to today’s stop on the blog tour for Nothing Special by Nicole Flattery. My thanks to Tabitha Pelly for inviting me to take part in the tour and for my review copy via NetGalley.

Nothing SpecialAbout the Book

Seventeen-year-old Mae lives in a run-down apartment with her alcoholic mother and her mother’s sometimes-boyfriend, Mikey. She is turned off by the petty girls at her high school, and the sleazy men she typically meets.

When she drops out, she is presented with a job offer that will remake her world entirely: she is hired as a typist for the artist Andy Warhol. Warhol is composing an unconventional novel by recording the conversations and experiences of his many famous and alluring friends.

Tasked with transcribing these tapes alongside several other girls, Mae quickly befriends Shelley and the two of them embark on a surreal adventure at the fringes of the countercultural movement. Going to parties together, exploring their womanhood and sexuality, this should be the most enlivening experience of Mae’s life.

But as she grows increasingly obsessed with the tapes and numb to her own reality, Mae must grapple with the thin line between art and voyeurism and determine how she can remain her own person as the tide of the sixties sweeps over her.

Format: eARC (240 pages)                  Publisher: Bloomsbury
Publication date: 2nd March 2023 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

Nothing Special is a coming of age novel set in 1960s New York in which the author imagines the lives of two young women – Mae and Shelley – caught up in the hedonistic world of Andy Warhol’s studio, known as The Factory. It became the place to be for artists, musicians, socialites and wannabe performers. The book brilliantly captures the art scene of New York of the period, a time of sexual experimentation, drug-taking, non-stop parties and pushing the boundaries of convention.

Teenage Mae is something of an outsider. She has a troubled relationship with her mother and the only person she is really close to, or who looks out for her, is her mother’s sometime partner, Mikey. Mae says things others wouldn’t dare, or even think. One such occasion brings about the end of her relationship with her only schoolfriend. Alienated, she drops out of school in favour of aimlessly wandering the streets of New York City or riding the escalators of Macy’s department store.

A chance encounter brings her to The Factory where she is given a job as a typist – typing being the only thing she excelled in at school – and is befriended by Shelley, a fellow typist. The girls form a bond over their shared desire to escape from a life of boring convention. Or at least that’s what Mae believes as Shelley, although presenting herself as a runaway, is noticebly reticent about her family background.

Initially Mae is employed typing up fairly humdrum documents, mainly letters requesting money written in the name of the rich girls who hang around the loft space of The Factory. When Mae joins Shelley transcribing the tapes which will form the basis of Warhol’s book, a, A Novel, she views it as a sign of her specialness. Mae comes to believe she is playing a key role in producing something important, not realising that her role will only ever be peripheral. However, until that point she is drawn into a frenzied, hedonistic lifestyle where anything goes. When understanding dawns, it brings disillusionment and a feeling of worthlessness. ‘The prospect of success, the possibility that I could have become known through these typewritten pages: it now seemed like an obscene, perverted dream…’

Although I was familiar with Andy Warhol and some of his art, I had no idea he had written a novel and knew nothing about the nature of the book or that it was based on a series of taped conversations, reproduced verbatim complete with pauses, repetitions, etc. I had also never heard of ‘Ondine’ (the stage name of actor Robert Olivo), one of the people who appears on the tapes. So, thank you, Google. I think this put me somewhat at a disadvantage although we do, through Mae and Shelley’s reaction to what they are listening to, get a sense of the explicit, sometimes disturbing and voyeuristic nature of the material. I had some sympathy with Mikey’s no-nonsense response to Mae’s description of the work she’s engaged in as ‘writing’. “Who is on the tapes?”, he asked. “Friends, people like that.” “Recording your friends,” he leaned back. “That doesn’t sound like writing, Mae. It’s eavesdropping. It’s surveillence.” I have to say Warhol, the figure to whom everyone gravitates, comes across as self-absorbed and manipulative, taking advantage of people’s desire for their ‘five minutes of fame’.

The author really puts the reader inside Mae’s head, allowing us to witness her sparky humour and rebellious spirit but also her neediness and frequent loneliness. For me, this is the standout aspect of the book. One of the painful things about her story is that we know pretty much from the beginning that Mae’s life will be one of disappointment.

Nothing Special is definitely not ‘nothing special’. It’s inventive, thought-provoking and original.

In three words: Sharp, provocative, intense

Try something similar: Ponti by Sharlene Teo

Nicole FlatteryAbout the Author

Nicole Flattery is the author of the story collection Show Them A Good Time and the novel Nothing Special. She is the winner of a Post Irish Book Award, the Kate O’Brien Prize, the London Magazine Prize for Debut Fiction and The White Review Short Story Prize. Her work has appeared in The Stinging Fly, the Guardian, The White Review and the London Review of Books. She lives in Galway, Ireland. [Photo credit: Twitter profile]

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