#WWWWednesday – 29th March 2023

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WWWWednesdays

Hosted by Taking on a World of Words, this meme is all about the three Ws:

  • What are you currently reading?
  • What did you recently finish reading?
  • What do you think you’ll read next?

Why not join in too?  Leave a comment with your link at Taking on a World of Words and then go blog hopping!

Currently reading

Drums of WarThe Drums of War (Thomas Tallant #3) by Michael Ward (Sharpe Books)

London 1642. The King has fled London with the drums of war ringing in his ears. Across the country, lines are being drawn and armies raised.

Influential royalist Lady Carlisle switches sides and presses spice trader Thomas Tallant and his partner Elizabeth Seymour into Parliament’s service. Soon Thomas faces double-dealing in his hunt for a lethal hoard of gunpowder hidden on the river, while Elizabeth engages in a race against time to locate a hidden sniper picking off Parliamentary officers at will in the city.

The capital also witnesses a vicious gang of jewel thieves take advantage of the city’s chaos to go on the rampage, smashing homes and shops, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. They hand pick their targets but refrain from selling any of their loot. There are more questions than answers.

When war finally erupts, Elizabeth is caught in the brutalising carnage of Edgehill while Thomas joins the Trained Bands in their defence of the city. As he mans the barricades at Brentford, in a desperate rearguard action to repel Prince Rupert’s surprise attack, he realises the future of London rests in the hands of him and a few hundred troopers.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth believes she has identified the jewel thief and goes underground to trace his hoard.

But all is not as it seems.

God's Children Are Little Broken ThingsGod’s Children Are Little Broken Things by Arinze Ifeakandu (Wiedenfeld & Nicolson) Longlisted for the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize 2023

A man revisits the university campus where he lost his first love, aware now of what he couldn’t understand then. A daughter returns home to Lagos after the death of her father, where she must face her past – and future -relationship with his longtime partner. A young musician rises to fame at the risk of losing himself and the man who loves him.

Generations collide, families break and are remade, languages and cultures intertwine, and lovers find their ways to futures; from childhood through adulthood; on university campuses, city centres, and neighbourhoods where church bells mingle with the morning call to prayer.

Recently finished

A Brief History of Living Forever by Jaroslav Kalfar (Hodder & Stoughton)

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

Elizabeth 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. (Review to follow)

What Cathy (will) Read Next

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 – the extraordinary new novel by Elizabeth Lowry – hauntingly searches the unknowable spaces between man and wife; memory and regret; life and art.

#BookReview #Ad A Brief History of Living Forever by Jaroslav Kalfař

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A Brief History of Living ForeverAbout the Book

When Adela discovers she has a terminal illness, her thoughts turn to Tereza, the child she gave up at birth.

Leaving behind her family in their native Czech village, Adela flies to the United States to find her long-lost daughter before it is too late. Raised in America and living in a fractured New York City, Tereza is working for two suspicious biotech moguls hellbent on immortality.

But before Tereza can imagine a cure for Adela, her mother dies and her body disappears. Narrated by Adela’s restless spirit, the novel blends an immigrant mother’s heart-breaking journey through Reagan’s American dream with her children’s quest to reclaim her in the near future.

Format: eARC (320 pages)                   Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Publication date: 28th March 2023 Genre: Science Fiction

Find A Brief History of Living Forever on Goodreads

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My Review

I described the author’s first novel, Spaceman of Bohemia, as part space adventure, part chronicle of recent Czech history. It also featured an encounter with a strange companion prompting the protagonist to revisit the events of his early life.  Apart from the space adventure bit, you can tick off all the rest with this latest book – a magical talking carp anyone? – but add a large helping of dystopia.

In the author’s frighteningly plausible scenario, America in 2030 is a country where surveillence of citizens is omnipresent and the boundary between the human brain and AI technology is increasingly thin. Many have adopted an implant that connects the Internet directly into their brain. Commerce is dominated by biotech giants such as the VITA corporation, an entity run by two individuals called Steve and Mark. (Random choice of first names? I don’t think so… ) They are investing billions into research on increasing human longevity.  Adela’s daughter, Tereza, is one of their employees although her research has a much more altruistic motivation.  And America is now governed by the Reclamation Party, a far right, ultra-nationalistic government whose first piece of legislation closed the country’s borders to immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers, and requires those few visitors who do make it to their shores to be electronically tagged and tracked. Unlikely, surely? Climate change has also caused rising sea levels, rendering parts of America uninhabitable.

After only one day with her long-lost daughter, who was adopted by a Danish family as a newborn, Adela dies but lives on in a virtual state able to witness the attempts of her daughter to retrieve her body which has mysteriously disappeared, possibly for ominous reasons. Travelling back to Czechia, Tereza meets her 109-year-old grandmother, the wonderful Babi, and her brother, Roman. He has become infected with the same nationalistic attitudes as those in America.

Between observing their efforts and browsing through the entries in Tereza’s online journal via her implanted device, Adela makes virtual trips back in time to ‘the adventures of her youth’. These include her experiences as a dissident in 1980s Czechoslovakia, as an undocumented immigrant to America and as the wife of a budding filmmaker. We witness their ill-fated attempt to make a film based on the science fiction novel, War of the Newts by Czech author, Karel Čapek, which features an interspecies relationship. (If Wikipedia is to be believed, the author and his novel actually exist.) The latter section felt overlong to me although it did prompt me to search for information about salamanders.

I admired Adela’s resilience. As she herself reflects, ‘I had lived well, loved well, betrayed well, failed well. In all my triumphs and in all my faults, no one – not a cosmic force, not a god, not my children saving my remnants – could ever accuse me of letting life pass me by, of capitulating, of giving in once I’d been broken’.  However I did find her willingness to jettison relationships questionably selfish. ‘In each person’s life, there came a time to cut losses and run’.

A wry humour runs throughout the book that often satirises potential technological developments. I chuckled (and so, I suspect, did the author) at the idea of a publishing house promising ‘to revolutionise the field of literature’ by creating custom books for each reader based on a detailed questionnaire which would enable them to identify a reader’s preferences, such as favourite genres, views about politics and identity, their capacity for empathy, favourite foods and music, etc.

A Brief History of Living Forever is endlessly inventive, occasionally bizarre but never less than entertaining. The author’s vision of a dystopian world dominated by extreme nationalism is scary not least because it seems like it could be a possibility.

I received an advance review copy courtesy of Hodder & Stoughton via NetGalley.

In three words: Inventive, quirky, thought-provoking

Jaroslav KalfarAbout the Author

Jaroslav Kalfař, born in the Czech Republic, immigrated to the United States at the age of fifteen. He is the author of the critically acclaimed debut Spaceman of Behomia, a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award that was translated into fifteen languages and is being made into a major motion picture starring Adam Sandler and twotime Oscar nominee Carey Mulligan. Kalfar holds an MFA from New York University and lives in Brooklyn. (Photo: Goodreads author page)

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