january-february 2022 books…

Convenience Store Woman (Sayaka Murata): This is our next Storysmith bookgroup book. It’s a novel about a 36 year-old woman, Keiko, who’s been working in the same Japanese convenience store for 18 years. Keiko is an oddball character (bullied and friendless at school)… she once hit a boy with a spade to stop him fighting; another time she asks her mother if she can eat a dead budgie found in the park. I came to the conclusion that she was perhaps slightly autistic(?) – certainly her love of organisation, structure and routine was hugely important to her. She’s never had a boyfriend. Her parents want her to get a better job. Her friends wonder why she won’t get married… but Keiko loves her job and she’s an excellent employee – efficient, courteous, never late, never absent. She knows what makes her happy and she’s not going to let anyone take her away from her convenience store. Much of the book reads more like a non-fiction description of convenience store life and routines. It’s a ridiculously absurd novel and yet also quite compelling, funny and charming.
No One Is Talking About This (Patricia Lockwood): Four of my friends nominated this novel as their favourite book of 2021… so I thought I’d give it a go! The first half of the book is something of a whirlwind description of the absurdity (and reliance?) of online life. Frankly (not being part of any Twitterworld and not even really understanding such things), it took some time to get my head around what Lockwood was talking about - “the new communication, the new slipstream of information”. It’s written as something of a third-person diary and, clearly, Lockwood is a very gifted, imaginative and exceptional writer - even though I really struggled to keep up with her ‘stream of consciousness’ observations (bluntly, perhaps I’m just not clever enough?). While the second half of the novel continues in similar vein, it abruptly becomes far more ‘real’ in that the central character’s sister becomes pregnant, and the child is born with very severe birth defects (the book’s acknowledgements refer to Lockwood’s real-life sister and brother-in-law who let her “share in their daughter’s life” – she had been diagnosed with Proteus Syndrome). It’s something of an emotional rollercoaster – when (as the book jacket tells us) “real life collides with the increasing absurdity of a world accessed through a screen”. Impressive in its way, but not exactly my particular cup-of-tea.
When The Lights Go Out (Carys Bray): This is our next “Bloke’s Books” selection. It’s a novel about relationships and families set against the background of financial insecurity, climate change and the nature of faith. The husband is something of an obsessive eco-warrior - as well as being a struggling self-employed gardener/odd job man – who’s become a paranoid stockpiler of food, who turns off the domestic heating and is a constant moaner about everything that life conjures up for him; the wife also used to be a keen fighter for the environment, peace, the preservation of public services and worked as a librarian (until they closed her library). She’s now the one left to take up the household burden – coping with her two sons and their challenging, adolescent ways… and her ‘difficult’ husband. They live in the north-west of England, in an area that seems to be regularly battling against flooding issues. Things come to a head at Christmas when the husband’s mother turns up for a visit… and the cracks start to show. I think I’ll leave it there (*no spoilers)… apart from saying that, although the novel addressed a lot of complicated and relevant issues and was a very ‘easy read’, I found it rather lacked depth.
The Beekeeper Of Aleppo (Christy Lefteri): My good friend Ed lent me this book (published in 2019) and I think it’ll end up as one of my books of the year. The author worked in a refugee centre in Athens. While she was hugely affected by the stories she heard of traumatised people from Syria and Afghanistan, she also realised no one else would tell them.  So the tale of Afra, a woman blinded by the explosion that killed her son, and Nuri, her beekeeper husband, formed in her mind. This powerful, courageous book is the result: a heart-breaking story of loss and resilience, but also of love and hope, as the couple escape Syria for, eventually, the UK. At least 350,000 people have died in 10 years of fighting in Syria, and this number is likely to be higher according to the UN, with 13.5 million people (half the population) forcibly displaced. The passage in which Nuri describes his meeting with the UK authorities (and the ridiculous questions they asked) when he was seeking asylum is both shocking and shameful. Having worked myself with a 20 year-old asylum-seeker from Afghanistan (whose family had all apparently been killed by the Taliban) for 18 months and being instructed that I shouldn’t ask him for details of his ‘story’/journey to the UK, I’m well aware of some of the frustrations of this broken process. My friend was refused asylum and has had to appeal against the decision – largely, it seems, because he got some details of his story ‘wrong’ (his passport indicated he’d been through Greece, for example, but he couldn’t remember… he was 16 at the time and traumatised, for goodness sake! This is a wonderful, inspiring book and I think you’d love it too (and perhaps learn a little about the perils and challenges facing refugees).
Bad Apples (Will Dean): This was my fourth Nordic noir crime novel by Dean - set in the northern wilds of rural Sweden (Dean grew up in the English Midlands and now lives in the middle of a Swedish forest). Tuva Moodyson is a deaf reporter, recently promoted to deputy editor of the local newspaper in Visberg. All I can say is that she works in a pretty dangerous environment (think ‘Midsomer Murders’?) – if it’s not the elks or the wolves, it’s the odd murderer in their midst! I love the Tuva character and the pace of these ‘adventures’… LOTS of suspense and uncertainty. It’s probably best if I don’t try to explain any plot-related stuff (* no spoilers) – except perhaps that ‘heads roll’ and that it’s tense right up to the end. There will no doubt be a sequel. As usual with Dean’s novels, I read it very quickly (and am now ‘in recovery’).