John Higgs calls Britain a "divided island [which] has lost a workable sense of identity". He journeys along Watling Street in an attempt to understand that division and because, "when you lose something, you retrace your steps until you find it again."
In "Watling Street: Travels Through Britain and Its Ever-Present Past" Higgs explores some of the quintessential myths and histories that feed into a sense of British nationality: the White Cliffs, Thomas Becket, Dick Turpin, bawdy humour, the sport of rugby, Merlin, Boudica.
Quartet in Autumn traces the lives and thoughts of four office workers in London over the course of about a year, as they approach retirement. Written in 1977, Barbara Pym had herself reached the age of her protagonists and she paints a bleak picture of how the over 60s are viewed by those who are younger.
Marcia was "ageing, slightly mad and on the threshold of retirement." Her colleagues "shied away from her or made only the most perfunctory remarks." Janice, her social worker was patronising, and her neighbour Priscilla sanctimoniously believed "the poor souls just long for somebody to talk to."
'You may think that Germans are political idiots [-] and you may be right, but of one thing I can assure you, they won't be so stupid as to fall for that clown.'
Such was the opinion of many in Germany in the early 1930s, including Peter Bielenberg, the lawyer husband of Christabel, an English woman who took German citizenship following her marriage. The Past Is My Life is based on diaries she kept while living in Germany during the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, through to the end of WW2.
What makes a good book? There are as many answers to this question as there are readers. And this reader's requirements weren't met by Hyeonseo Lee's The Girl With Seven Names.
That's not to say it isn't a good story. It's an autobiography/memoir of a North Korean woman who defected "by mistake" aged 17. She lived and worked as an illegal immigrant in China for several years before making her way to South Korea, where she was automatically entitled to citizenship. Then she executed a plan to help her mother and brother to defect and join her. They now all live happily ever with her American husband in the USA.
The Man in the High Castle poses an alternative history in which Japan and Germany were the victors of WW2, but don't be fooled by the book's blurb: "Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. [-] All because some twenty years earlier the United States lost a war - and is now occupied by Nazi Germany and Japan." This is misleading. Sure, slavery is mentioned once, but it has no bearing on the story. There is one Jewish character, but to promote this as a key theme is also deceptive. So, forget about slavery and the Jews.
I would never be gratuitously mean or violent, [-] but then nor would I ever put up with anybody or any situation that made life unbearable [-]. I would be honest and reasonable, generous where generosity was due, and I would always always choose the road that led to a happy, healthy, normal life.
So says George Crawley, whose missionary father had been murdered for his faith. In Tim Parks's Goodness, George and his sister Peggy return home with their mother, whose "one thing I regret in my life is the words they made me speak" before they killed her husband.
A ferry makes a foggy approach to the Port of Dover in the atmospheric opening of The Confidential Agent. Graham Greene's descriptions are no less brilliant when the action moves to London and to a mining village. Unfortunately I didn't much care for the characters.
D., the eponymous protagonist, has come to England on a mission to buy coal. An ex-academic, he has been widowed by the civil war that continues to be waged in his country. He is also something of a pacifist with principles, as he says, "You've got to choose some line of action and live by it. Otherwise nothing matters at all." Unfortunately the rebels and their representative agent L. are also after the coal.
Their Eyes Were Watching God is set in the southern USA when ex-slaves were still alive, and it's about the tribulations of a black woman as she searches for self-fulfilment and love.
On reaching puberty, the story's protagonist Janie Crawford is persuaded to marry an older man by her grandmother, who had been a slave. It's not the man "Ah wants you to have, baby," says the old woman, "it's protection." Janie quickly realizes that this is not what she expects of love or life and sets out to find her own way in the world. As she says, "Two things everybody's got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin' fuh theyselves."
By the end of the first page of John Lanchester's book, you know that the eponymous Wall is cold. So one could be forgiven for finding it a bit tedious to continue reading about the cold, the concrete, the sea and sky well into chapter two.
The story is narrated by Kavanagh, a new Defender on a two-year posting at the Wall. His mission is to keep the Others from climbing over it. If his unit fails to keep them out, then Kavanagh himself may be banished and cast adrift into the ocean.
What happened to Rebecca Shaw? At the opening of Reservoir 13, a group is waiting to set out in search of the missing teenage girl, and we're led to believe this is a mystery story.
It's divided into thirteen chapters, each of which covers a year in the life of the Derbyshire village and surrounding countryside from which Rebecca disappeared.
It was the setting of Philip Kerr's March Violets that appealed to me: 1936, Berlin, Germany. Bernhard "Bernie" Gunther narrates the tale, a private investigator who specialises in finding missing persons. He's employed by the industrialist Hermann Six to recover some diamonds that were taken from the safe in his daughter Greta's home. The thieves set fire to the house and Greta and her husband Paul Pfarr die.
Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk is both the title of David Sedaris's book and one of its animal tales. Few humans appear in the stories, and when they do, it's usually as a harbinger of pain or death for the creature concerned. Many of the tales are humorous, even more are dark, but then the habits of birds, animals, reptiles and amphibians can be pretty disgusting when humans judge them against those of themselves.
We're all going to die but most of us don't know when, unlike the characters in Nevil Shute's book On the Beach.
The story takes place in 1963, around five years after the book was written. A nuclear war that started by mistake and lasted thirty seven days has wiped out all human life in the Northern Hemisphere. As the world tilts on its axis, the deadly fallout is slowly carried into the Southern Hemisphere, and in Melbourne, the scientists calculate that there is up to 9 months left before residents of the city will start to die from radiation sickness. The story describes how some residents prepare for death.
Jonathan Dee's The Privileges is less a story, more a character study of a family. It's divided into four parts. In part one, we join Adam Morey and his fiancee Cynthia on their wedding day. Six years later, in part two, the couple have two small children, April and Jonas. By part three, the children are teenagers, and in the fourth section April and Jonas are in their early twenties.
The narrative explores Adam and Cynthia's growing wealth and endless greed.
David Nobbs's Reggie Perrin is "a man who had given his best years to puddings," and wonders in his mid-forties what the point of it all has been. His relationship with his wife has become stale and he has no enthusiasm for his job. What is he to do?
Having watched The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin on TV in the 1970s and in 2009, I knew exactly what Reggie would do, but I wanted to see if there were differences between the book and the adaptation.
The Seraphim Room by Edith Olivier is a story driven by the character of Mr Chilvester, twice widowed, and living with his two daughters: the invalid Lilian, and the teenage Emily. The lease on their home passes through the male line, and Mr Chilvester, knowing that "the name of the family would die with him," transfers all his passion into his house.
First there was "Sinatramania", then there was Elvis, and in the 60s it was The Beatles. When I was ten years old, I passionately defended David Cassidy and vilified Donny Osmond. The Bay City Rollers, Bros, Take That; Goldy Moldavsky's book, Kill the Boy Band, will speak to anyone who has had a teenage crush on an inaccessible, world-famous popstar.
The story begins in a hotel suite, where Rupert P., member of The Ruperts, is tied to a chair with a pair of tights. Four Strepurs, as fans of the band call themselves, are discussing what to do, and one of them, a self-confessed liar who is in therapy, narrates the story.
Labeled as a YA book, it's a very easy read, written in a casual and chatty style, with a lot of humour. There's a dark side too, raising questions about obsession, friendship and mental health. I found myself, early on, thinking if I would be chuckling quite so much if it were a bunch of teenage lads who had captured a female pop star.
You have to suspend disbelief at a couple of plot points, but overall it's a fast-moving, entertaining who-dunnit mystery.
Towards the end of his life, John Steinbeck took a road trip across America, "determined to look again, to try to rediscover this monster land." He converts a truck into a mobile home he calls Rocinante, and sets off with only his aged French poodle, Charley, for company.
Steinbeck's relationship with Charley forms the major part of the book's charm. The author's love for his dog shines through, and Charley's scenes are written with a great deal of humour.
What would you do if you lost your home and your source of income, then your partner of 30 years was diagnosed with an incurable, degenerative disease? In Raynor Winn's case, she decided to walk the South West Coast Path to give her and husband Moth one or two months to consider their options.
The couple survived on benefits income of 48 GBP a week, living in a tent, eating packet-noodles. In spite of the hardship, "a wet sleeping bag in a wet tent on a windy headland," Winn says "I was grateful that I wasn't on a piece of cardboard behind the bins in a back alley."
Reading Josie Dew's Slow Coast Home is very much like cycling: plenty of ups and downs, and a few diversions.
Josie says she "never planned to cycle around the coast of the British Isles. It just happened that way," which is a very pithy description of the book. I didn't really believe she had done no planning, but when 40% of the way in she had only got as far as Plymouth, a mere 185 miles from home, it seemed more likely that she had been telling the truth.
John Higgs calls Britain a "divided island [which] has lost a workable sense of identity". He journeys along Watling Street in an attempt to understand that division and because, "when you lose something, you retrace your steps until you find it again."
