Tag: Reviews

#BookReview These Days by Lucy Caldwell @FaberBooks @ReadersFirst1

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These DaysAbout the Book

Two sisters, four nights, one city.

April, 1941. Belfast has escaped the worst of the war – so far. Over the next two months, it’s going to be destroyed from above, so that people will say, in horror, My God, Belfast is finished.

Many won’t make it through, and no one who does will remain unchanged.

Following the lives of sisters Emma and Audrey – one engaged to be married, the other in a secret relationship with another woman – as they try to survive the horrors of the four nights of bombing which were the Belfast Blitz, These Days is a timeless and heart-breaking novel about living under duress, about family, and about how we try to stay true to ourselves.

Format: Hardback (288 pages)      Publisher: Faber & Faber
Publication date: 3rd March 2022 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

These Days is set between April and May 1941, focusing on four days during which Belfast was subjected to intense bombing raids. The book is structured in three parts – The Dockside Raid, The Easter Raid and The Fire Raids. Through the experiences of the Bell family – sisters, Audrey and Emma, their younger brother, Paul, and their mother and father, Phillip and Florence – the author illustrates the impact of the raids on the people of Belfast.

When the novel opens, Belfast has so far escaped the intense bombing experienced by other UK cities so, initially, the concerns of the family are close to home.

Audrey, the eldest daughter, is due to marry Richard, a doctor who works alongside her father Phillip, also a doctor. However, she has started to have doubts about whether her feelings for Richard are strong enough and whether the direction her life is moving in is the right one. ‘I wish, Audrey says, impulsively. I wish – But she doesn’t know what she wishes.’

Emma, a volunteer at a First Aid Post, is attracted to one of the other female volunteers and has taken the first tentative steps towards an intimate relationship, a relationship that would be considered shocking by her family, possibly even by wider society, but which has opened up for her a whole new set of feelings. ‘She hasn’t known, ever, that it is possible to feel so – ardent.’

Although by all appearances happily married, unbeknownst to her husband, Florence secretly continues to pine for her first love, lost in the First World War. ‘How is it, she sometimes thinks, that this is her life […] It isn’t, she hastily thinks, that she’s unhappy, nor ungrateful with her lot; just bemused, she supposes, that this has turned out to be it.’

Everything changes when the bombing raids start, initially targeting the docks but later becoming more indiscriminate in nature.  (Over the night of 4th and 5th May 1941, the so-called Fire Raids, nearly 100,000 incendiary bombs were dropped on Belfast including in residential areas.) The experiences of the Bell family are a microcosm of the impact of the bombing raids on the city: loved ones killed or injured, people desperately searching for missing family or friends, families seeking to be reunited.

The descriptions of the death and destruction inflicted on the city are harrowing but horrifyingly realistic: homes and buildings demolished, people buried beneath rubble, bodies in their hundreds laid out in a makeshift morgue. I found it impossible to read the scenes of the aftermath of the raids and of people fleeing the bomb-damaged city without thinking of the dreadful scenes we are currently witnessing in Ukraine.   ‘Cars, carts, bicycles, perambulators, batch chairs, even children’s bogey-carts, anything with wheels has been pressed into service, loaded with human and material flotsam, leaving the city.’

I found Florence’s compassionate and empathetic response to Phillip’s experiences tending to the injured and dying and the terrible images that are now seared in his memory, particularly moving. ‘It will never go away, she wants to say then. None of it does – the real or the imagined. Once you have seen those images, whether with your eyes or in your mind’s eye, they are etched there – seared into the body. They are there for ever and you can’t pretend otherwise.’

These Days is a compelling, hard-hitting depiction of the realities of war but also an illustration of the resilience of the human spirit, the instinct to rebuild and to carry on, in the words of Emma, come what may.

I received a review copy courtesy of Faber & Faber via Readers First.

In three words: Moving, dramatic, immersive

Try something similar: Blitz Writing: Night Shift & It Was Different At The Time by Inez Holden

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Lucy CaldwellAbout the Author

Lucy Caldwell was born in Belfast in 1981. She is the author of three novels, several stage plays and radio dramas, and two collections of short stories: Multitudes (Faber, 2016) and Intimacies (Faber, 2021). She has twice been shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award, and has won the Commonwealth Short Story Award (Canada & Europe) and the Edge Hill Readers’ Choice Award. Other awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the George Devine Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize – for her novel The Meeting Point – and a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018 and in 2019 she was the editor of Being Various: New Irish Short Stories. (Photo credit: Publisher author page)

Connect with Lucy
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#WWWWednesday – 2nd March 2022

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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

Mouth To MouthMouth to Mouth by Antoine Wilson (Atlantic Books via Readers First)

A struggling author is stuck at the airport, his flight endlessly delayed. As he kills time at the gate, he bumps into a former classmate of his, Jeff, who is waiting for the same flight. The charismatic Jeff invites the author to drinks in the First Class lounge, and there, swearing him to secrecy, begins telling him the fascinating and disturbing story of his gilded life, starting with a pivotal incident from his youth…

Alone on the beach one morning, Jeff notices a swimmer drowning in the rough surf – and so he rescues and resuscitates the unconscious man, before leaving him to the emergency services. But Jeff can’t let go of the events of that traumatic day, and he begins to feel compelled to learn more about the man whose life he has saved, convinced that their destinies are now somehow entwined. Upon discovering that the man is the renowned art dealer Francis Arsenault, Jeff begins to surreptitiously visit his Beverly Hills gallery, eventually applying there for a job. Although Francis doesn’t seem to recognize him, he nevertheless casts his legendary eye over Jeff and sees something of worth – and so he initiates him into his world of unimaginable power and wealth, where knowledge, taste and access are currency, and the value of things is constantly shifting, constantly calling into question what is real, and what matters.

As Jeff finds himself seduced by the lifestyle, he pursues a deeper connection with Francis, until morals become expendable and their relationship becomes ever darker, leaving him to wonder… should he have just let Francis drown?

A Night of FlamesA Night of Flames (A Time For Swords #2) by Matthew Harffy (Head of Zeus)

Northumbria, AD 794. Those who rule the seas, rule the land. None know the truth of this more than the Vikings. To compete with the sea-faring, violent raiders, the king of Northumbria orders the construction of his own longships under the command of oath-sworn Norseman, Runolf.

When the Northern sea wolves attack for the second year, the king sends cleric turned warrior, Hunlaf, on a mission across the Whale Road to persuade the king of Rogaland into an alliance. But Runolf and Hunlaf have other plans; old scores to settle, kin to seek out, and a heretical tome to find in the wild lands of the Norse.

Their voyage takes them into the centre of a violent uprising. A slave has broken free of his captors, and, with religious fervour, he is leading his fanatical followers on a rampage – burning all in his path.

Hunlaf must brave the Norse wilderness, and overcome deadly foes to stop this madman. To fail would see too many die…

Crow CourtCrow Court by Andy Charman (Unbound)

Spring, 1840. In the Dorset market town of Wimborne Minster, a young choirboy drowns himself. Soon after, the choirmaster – a belligerent man with a vicious reputation – is found murdered, in a discovery tainted as much by relief as it is by suspicion. The gaze of the magistrates falls on four local men, whose decisions will reverberate through the community for years to come.

So begins the chronicle of Crow Court, unravelling over fourteen delicately interwoven episodes, the town of Wimborne their backdrop: a young gentleman and his groom run off to join the army; a sleepwalking cordwainer wakes on his wife’s grave; desperate farmhands emigrate. We meet the composer with writer’s block; the smuggler; a troupe of actors down from London; and old Art Pugh, whose impoverished life has made him hard to amuse.

Meanwhile, justice waits…

Recently finished

Love in a Time of War by Adrienne Chinn (One More Chapter)

These Days by Lucy Caldwell (Faber & Faber via Readers First)

Sell Us The Rope by Stephen May (Sandstone Press)

What Cathy (will) Read Next

Lean On MeLean On Me by Serge Joncour, trans. by Louise Rogers Lalaurie and Jane Aitken (Gallic Books) 

When a flock of crows invades their shared apartment block, farmer-turned-debt collector Ludovic and fashion designer Aurore speak for the first time. With nothing but the birds in common, the two are destined for separate lives, yet are drawn inexplicably together.

Though their story is set in Paris, the tale of Ludovic and Aurore is far from an idyllic romance. With one trapped in an unhappy marriage and the other lost in grief, the city of love has brought each of them only isolation and pain. As Aurore faces losing her business and Ludovic questions the ethics of his job, they begin a passionate affair. Love between such different people seems doomed to failure, but for these two unhappy souls trapped in ruthless worlds, perhaps loving one another is the greatest form of resistance.

From the award winning author of Wild Dog, Lean on Me explores the realities of unlikely love, and how connection and intimacy offer us an escape from all that is harsh and cold in our modern day lives.