Tag: literary fiction

#BlogTour #BookReview The Jeweller by Caryl Lewis @Honno

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I’m delighted to be hosting today’s stop on the blog tour for The Jeweller by Caryl Lewis, translated from the Welsh by Gwen Davies. My thanks to Julia Forster for inviting me to take part in the tour and to Honno Press for my advance review copy.

the jeweller coverAbout the Book

Mari supplements her modest trade as a market stall holder with the wares she acquires from clearing the houses of the dead. She lives alone in a tiny cottage by the shore, apart from a monkey that she keeps in a cage, surrounding herself with the lives of others, combing through letters she has gleaned, putting up photographs of strangers on her small mantelpiece.

But Mari is looking for something beyond saleable goods for her stall.  As she works on cutting a perfect emerald, she inches closer to a discovery that will transform her life and throw her relationships with old friends into relief. To move forward she must shed her life of things past and start again. How she does so is both surprising and shocking…

Praise for The Jeweller

A moving, quirky, and gorgeously written meditation on the haunting afterlife of the objects we leave behind. There is a lapidary beauty hidden in almost every sentence.” Tristan Hughes

Format: Paperback, ebook (208 pp)         Publisher: Honno Press
Publication date: 19th September 2019 Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Literary Fiction

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk | Hive (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find The Jeweller on Goodreads

My Review

Mari lives alone in a remote cottage by the sea with only her cat and a rather needy and temperamental pet monkey for company.   The latter has the same love of trinkets as Mari. The ‘clutter’ that fills the cottage is the vintage clothing and jewellery gleaned from house clearances or bought at auction that Mari sells on her market stall, along with the letters and photographs she obsessively collects containing the stories of other people’s lives.

From the beginning, I was struck by the author’s imaginative and descriptive writing about landscape and nature, skilfully preserved in Gwen Davies’ translation.

‘The sea was breathing in the distance, dark against the growing light, and seagulls were being flung across the air like litter.’

‘Catkins of pussy willow and hazel caught the light like earrings: grey-silver droplets and knuckles of pale gold that twisted on an updraught.’

I particularly liked the way that inanimate objects become animate in Mari’s eyes. So a beech tree is described as ‘flirting its little fans of beaten neon-green at her’ or freshly laundered vintage clothes destined for her stall are ‘alive on the line as though their new owners were dancing in them right now‘.  Mari even sees the jewels she collects and works with as having a life and personality of their own. At one point, she refers to some jewels as ‘giving her a hard time’.

Unfolding over the course of a year, the reader witnesses Mari’s physical and mental struggles, especially when the future of the market where she has her stall is placed in jeopardy. As summer turns to stormy autumn, things grow darker, events from earlier in Mari’s life are revealed and the reader begins to understand the complex nature of her past relationships.  There is closure of a sort but also a sense of history repeating itself.

The Jeweller is a slim novel but beautifully written.  It’s a book which packs a lot into a small space.

In three words: Lyrical, evocative, intense

Try something similar: The Keeper of Lost Things by Ruth Hogan

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Caryl_Lewis_Photo_Credit_Keith_MorrisAbout the Author

Caryl Lewis has published eleven Welsh-language books for adults, three novels for young adults and thirteen children’s books. Her novel Martha, Jac a Sianco (Y Lolfa, 2004), won Wales Book of the Year in 2005. Caryl wrote the script for a film based on Martha, Jac a Sianco, which won the Atlantis Prize at the 2009 Moondance Festival. Her television credits include adapting Welsh-language scripts for the acclaimed crime series Y Gwyll / Hinterland. (Photo credit: Keith Morris)

GWEN Davies Credit Jessica RabyAbout the Translator

Gwen Davies grew up in a Welsh-speaking family in West Yorkshire. She has translated into English the Welsh-language novels of Caryl Lewis, published as Martha, Jack and Shanco (Parthian, 2007) and The Jeweller and is co-translator, with the author, of Robin Llywelyn’s novel, published as White Star by Parthian in 2003. She is the editor of Sing, Sorrow, Sorrow: Dark and Chilling Tales (Seren, 2010). Gwen has edited the literary journal, New Welsh Review, since 2011. She lives in Aberystwyth with her family. (Photo credit: Jessica Raby)

#BlogBlitz #BookReview Sleeping Through War by Jackie Carreira

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Sleeping Through WarToday I’m delighted to be joining the birthday blog blitz for Sleeping Through War by Jackie Carreira and once again sharing my review of this wonderful book.

Sleeping Through WarAbout the Book

The year is 1968. The world is changing. Students are protesting, civil rights are being fought and died for, nuclear bombs are being tested, and war is raging in Vietnam. For three women, life must go on as usual. For them, as it is for most ‘ordinary’ people, just to survive is an act of courage.

Rose must keep her dignity and compassion as a St. Lucian nurse in East London. Amalia must keep hoping that her son can escape their seedy life in Lisbon. And Mrs Johnson in Washington DC must keep writing to her son in Vietnam. She has no-one else to talk to.

Three different women in three different countries, They work, they bring up children, they struggle to make ends meet while the world goes around and the papers print the news. History is written by the winners – and almost all of it has been written by men. The stories of women like these go unremarked and unwritten so often that we forget how important they are.

Format: Paperback (224 pp.)               Publisher: Matador
Published: 28th February 2018         Genre: Literary Fiction

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk   ǀ Wordery | Waterstones
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find Sleeping Through War on Goodreads

My Review

Sleeping Through War tells the stories of three different women and is set against the backdrop of world events in 1968, a turbulent time of student demonstrations throughout Europe, civil rights marches in the United States, political tension in Eastern Europe and the Vietnam War.   Although the backgrounds of the three women are different, they live in different parts of the world and there is no direct connection between them, their concerns are similar: home, family, worries about the future.  In addition, the church plays a role in all their lives.

Both Amalia, a single mother widowed in the war between Portugal and Angola, and Mrs. Johnson, with a son serving in Vietnam, are coping with the consequences of war.  Rose, a nurse recently arrived in England from St. Lucia, is engaged in a different kind of war – a war against racial prejudice and discrimination.  The author, Jackie Carreira, is a playwright and therefore used to communicating the stories of her characters to an audience through dialogue.  Her skill at this is evident from the stories told in the first person – by Rose and Mrs. Johnson – in which the reader gets a real insight into their thoughts and feelings through the distinctive narrative voice of each.

Having said this, Amalia’s story was probably the one I found most engrossing.  Left alone to support her son, she is forced to do whatever it takes to earn money to put food on the table, placing herself at the mercy of others as a consequence.

You would have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by the letters Mrs. Johnson writes to her son, Rod, in which the cheerful snippets about domestic life back home barely disguise the despair she obviously feels at being parted from him.  A final revelation is heartbreaking, but not in the way you may have been expecting.

Rose was definitely my favourite character.  Although she encounters both casual and overt racism, she responds with kindness, understanding and tolerance to those around her, particularly towards her neighbour, Brenda.  I also loved her observations about the differences between her birthplace in St. Lucia and England – the cold and rain, the English fixation about discussing the weather, the queuing, the feigned politeness, and how ‘everything in London always looks so dull’.   I particularly liked her experience of attending a church service in London.  ‘I sing with everyone else during the hymns, but not as loud as I might have done at home.  The songs they sing in church here are all so slow.’ Rose felt so real to me in the end that it got to the point where I found myself thinking, ‘Yes, that’s exactly what Rose would do’ or ‘You go for it girl!’.

Sleeping Through War is an engrossing, beautifully written novel about the challenges facing three women in a time of upheaval and change.  It made me laugh, it made me cry, it taught me some things I didn’t know and it made me think.  Honestly, what more do you want from a book?

I received a review copy courtesy of the author and Rachel’s Random Resources.

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In three words: Touching, insightful, thought-provoking

Jackie CarreiraAbout the Author

Jackie Carreira is an award-winning novelist, playwright, musician, designer, and co-founder of QuirkHouse Theatre Company, and award-winning playwright. A true Renaissance woman or a Jack Of All Trades?  The jury’s still out on that one.

She grew up in Hackney, East London, but spent part of her early childhood in Lisbon’s Old Quarter. Sleeping Through War was inspired, in part, by some of the women she met when she was young. One of her favourite places to write is the coffee shops of railway stations. Her second novel, The Seventh Train, was born in the cafe at Paddington Station. Jackie now lives in Suffolk with an actor, two cats and not enough bookshelves.

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