Tag: contemporary fiction

#BookReview The Birdcage by Eve Chase

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The BirdcageAbout the Book

Kat, Flossie and Lauren are half-sisters who share a famous artist father – and a terrible secret.

Each has found their way of burying it. Over the years they’ve grown apart, and into wildly different lives. But an invitation to Rock Point, the Cornish cliff house where they once sat for their father’s most celebrated painting, Girls with Birdcage, reunites them.

Rock Point is a beautiful, windswept place, thick with secrets, electrically charged with the one subject the family daren’t discuss. And there is someone in the shadows watching the house, their every move. Someone who remembers the girls in the painting. What they did.

The sisters must unlock the truth to set themselves free – and find each other again.

Format: Hardback (400 pages)     Publisher: Michael Joseph
Publication date: 28th April 2022 Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Mystery

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My Review

I’ve been a fan of Eve Chase’s books since I read Black Rabbit Hall in 2016 and I very much enjoyed the books that followed it – The Wildling Sisters (originally published as The Vanishing of Audrey Wilde) and The Glass House.

Kat, Flora and Lauren have different mothers but share the same father: famous artist, Charles Finch. Summoned to Rock Point by their father, an unexpected announcement  – and the arrival of an individual from the past – threatens to widen the rift that already exists between the sisters as well as bring back  unwelcome memories of the dramatic event that occurred two decades earlier. It’s an event that hasn’t been spoken about since but which has lurked beneath the surface as unfinished business between the sisters. ‘It’s the secret they forged here twenty years ago that’s pushed them apart as it’s run through each day of their lives since. In each other they see too much of the worst of themselves.’

In Charles, the author gives us a portrait of a mercurial, rather self-obsessed artist who pours his energy into making art rather than sustaining relationships. ‘He has an ability to detach from his subjects; to see human beings as arrangement of form and flesh in space, volume and light; a technical challenge to be solved.’ His three marriages are not the only evidence of his inability to be faithful but his dedication to art has come at a cost.

In a striking metaphor, the sisters are ‘mismatching dolls, from different sets’. Kat is a high-flying successful entrepreneur (on the surface at least) and Flora is a wife and mother trying hard to live up to the expectations of her husband, Scott. Close to each other in age, Kat and Flora had a close bond when younger. Lauren, on the other hand, has always felt like the outsider right from the first moment she was introduced to her two half-sisters. ‘In the archipelago of the sisters, she’s still an island on her own.’ One other notable character is Bertha the parrot whose often ill-timed mimicry of snippets of overheard conversations proves key to what unfolds. ‘We all knew Bertha didn’t invent things, just repeated them.’

As with all Eve Chase’s books there’s a real sense of place – in this case the wild, expansive coastline of Cornwall. Rock Point’s remote location surrounded by moorland dotted with abandoned cottages and standing stones, contributes to the sense of unease.  As Lauren observes, ‘Everything was bigger. Skies. Rooms. Feelings. There was more to go wrong’.

The present day story (2019) alternates between the points of view of the three sisters. Interwoven with this is Lauren’s first person narrative of events in 1999. The author skilfully ramps up the tension through fleeting references and tantalising snippets of detail about events on an August day in 1999.  It soon becomes apparent that no-one has the full picture of what took place on the fateful day. It’s only when all the pieces are put together that the sisters – and the reader – find out what actually happened. Like me, you may have an inkling about the direction of some of the story but I’m pretty sure you’ll discover a few surprises.

The Birdcage’s combination of long-buried secrets and exploration of complex family relationships adds up to an intriguing, well-crafted and satisfying mystery.

In three words: Tense, atmospheric, suspenseful

Try something similar: The Beloved Girls by Harriet Evans

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EveChaseAbout the Author

Eve Chase writes rich, page-turning mysteries set in beautiful places, thick with secrets. The Glass House was a Sunday Times bestseller, Richard and Judy Book Club pick and word-of-mouth lockdown hit. Longlisted for the HWA Gold Crown award 2018, The Vanishing of Audrey Wilde went on to become an Amazon bestseller. In 2019, Black Rabbit Hall won the Saint-Maur en Poche prize in Paris for Best Foreign Fiction and also went on to be an Amazon bestseller. Before writing novels, Eve worked as a journalist in magazines and newspapers. Married with three children, she lives in Oxford, alongside a very hairy golden retriever called Harry. (Photo: Goodreads/Bio: Publisher author page)

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#BookReview Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson

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Open WaterAbout the Book

Two young people meet at a pub in South East London. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists – he a photographer, she a dancer – trying to make their mark in a city that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence.

At once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity, Open Water asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body, to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength, to find safety in love, only to lose it.

Format: Paperback (160 pages)         Publisher: Viking
Publication date: 3rd February 2022 Genre: Contemporary Fiction

Find Open Water on Goodreads

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My Review

Winner of the Costa First Novel Award 2021, Open Water is an inventive attempt to convey what it is like to be a Black man in today’s London and how racial prejudice by the police and other parts of society can have a damaging psychological effect.  The book also challenges commonly held ideas about masculinity, namely that men should hold their emotions in check.

The development of the relationship between the main character and a woman, whose name we also never learn, from a deeply felt friendship based on a shared love of music, dancing and art to something more is conveyed in a tender and touching way. It is she who makes the first move in putting their relationship on a more intimate footing. ‘She has swum out into open water, and it is not long before you join her.’ However, it’s a relationship that may be unable to survive in the face of an act of violence witnessed by the narrator, an act that might so nearly have happened to him, and which leaves him traumatised.

Written in the second person, the reader is encouraged to see themselves as the book’s unnamed protagonist. (For grammar nerds, the book also makes use of the historic present tense.)  Since the book references art, music and literature unfamiliar to me (although there is an accompanying playlist on Spotify), I’m not sure that it succeeded in making me experience events in a deeper way than if it had been written in the first person. In fact, given the similarities between the author and the book’s protagonist – they are both photographers, have grown up in South East London, and so on – there is an autobiographical quality to the book.

The writing is poetic in style with frequent use of repetition and utilising some imaginative similes, some of which worked better than others for me. For example, I liked the idea of the two of them being like ‘headphones wires tangling… A messy miracle’. However, the comparison of an extension lead trailing in the grass to ‘a loose thought’ or a ‘skinny whimper’ to being as ‘sharp as a butter knife’ (the whole point of butter knives surely being they are not sharp?) left me wondering if the author was trying a bit too hard to be profound.

Overall, I felt the important things the book has to say about racial prejudice, police violence and the everyday experiences of Black people, and in particular young Black men, just about survived the sometimes elaborate prose. I’m aware I’m in a minority when it comes to this since others have praised its ‘poetic brilliance’ and ‘lyrical and propulsive prose’.

In three words: Expressive, intense, thought-provoking

Try something similar: NW by Zadie Smith

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Caleb Azumah NelsonAbout the Author

Caleb Azumah Nelson is a twenty-seven-year-old British-Ghanaian writer and photographer living in South East London. His photography has been shortlisted for the Palm Photo Prize and won the People’s Choice Prize. His short story, Pray, was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award 2020. His first novel, Open Water, won the Costa First Novel Award, was shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year, and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize.

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