The House By The Sea by Jon Godden

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My first – and I hope not only – contribution to #SpinsterSeptember! It’s an annual event organised by Nora and is rightly very popular. Because there are so many interesting spinsters in fiction, whether joyful or miserable, deliberate or left on the shelf, adventurer or domestic.

I’ve read a couple of novels by Jon Godden (sister of Rumer Godden), and I thought Told In Winter was especially good – so when my friend Barbara offered me a copy of The House By The Sea (1948), I gratefully took her up on it. The title made me think it would be a cosy story of a beautiful location – and, after all, I had already loved a memoir of the same name by May Sarton.

Well, reader, cosy is not the word for this book.

It does start with slow, coldly beautiful descriptions of the isolated house and its coastal scenery. Edwina is a middle-aged, unmarried woman who has recently moved there, keen to get away from the oppressive friendship of a woman called Madge (though Madge also seems to have a room in this new house). We never meet her, but it’s clear that she has domineered Edwina in the name of protection. It did seem possible that she and Madge had been in a romantic relationship but, if this is the case, Godden only hints at it. It is clear that Edwina is starting to feel free – but it is also clear, even at this stage, that the house is not an uncomplicated idyll.

When Edwina opened the door the hall was full of chalky blue light which came through the staircase window across the white banisters and on to the slate floor. Although she had spent the last three days in the house, unpacking, cleaning, and arranging her furniture, going back across the fields in the evening to her rooms in the village, she now felt as if she were entering the house for the first time. It was, she felt, entirely unaware of her, entirely empty, altogether silent, without life or breath – in spite of the furniture she had arranged, the curtains she had hung, the fire laid ready in the grate, her clothes in the cupboard. She hesitated on the doorstep, almost afraid to go in and break the silence.

Godden’s writing is beautiful, and Edwina is an interesting character. In some ways, she fits some stereotypes of middle-aged, unmarried women in mid-century novels: a certain naivety, a yearning for the domestic. But she is self-aware too, and realises how her life has been lived in the shadow of others. Coming to this new house is a chance, she believes, for transformation.

She thought, “For years I have been filled with Madge and before that there was someone else, who, I can’t remember, and before that another – my father, Jenny my nursemaid. I take on the colour of the person nearest me, just as I have taken on the colour and character of all these clothes in turn. Yes, a change of clothes is enough to change me completely.”

“What shall I do now that I am alone?” she thought. “What shall I become? An empty shell waits for any tide to flow and fill it. That is asking for trouble. That is dangerous.”

One of the things about opening an old hardback you know nothing about, which doesn’t have a dustjacket, means you are entering completely blind. There is no publisher’s blurb to give you clues, or even quotes from other authors to give you a sense of tone. So I did not at all expect the actual trouble and danger that arrive.

Edwina is walking through the empty rooms of her house, as usual, when suddenly she realises there is a man in the kitchen with her. He is hungry, dirty, tired and aggressive. His name is Ross Dennehay, and he quickly takes control of the house.

It is such an unexpected turn for the novel to take, and suddenly the long, slow, perhaps slightly boring, initial 70 pages make sense. We, like Edwina, have been lulled into thinking this is a quiet refuge at the edge of the world. Any unquiet has been in Edwina’s own mind, trying to establish her sense of identity when this has never hitherto been welcomed. And suddenly this scary man appears – threatening violence if he is not obeyed, and effectively keeping her prisoner.

But this shock somehow doesn’t shift the genre of The House By The Sea – it does not become a horror novel, or anything you might expect from the home invasion trope. Instead, Edwina seems to find something that she has missed: a new experience, and new roles. Instead of being the needy one in her friendship with Madge, she becomes cook, housekeeper, companion to Ross. He remains untrusting and angry most of the time, throwing her one kind word for every 20 rebukes, but she doesn’t seem to quashable. Instead, she keeps trying to assure him he can trust her – and there is even a lingering eroticism to the way she behaves.

He isn’t a rough and ready man who is hiding a heart of gold, by any means. In one tense, ruthless scene, he forces Edwina to listen to his story – why he is on the run, and why he ends up there. It involves rape and murder. As I say, this is not a cosy book. The dark edges of Told In Winter are a more present foundation in The House By The Sea.

I almost gave up on The House By The Sea because I was finding it so slow. Even after Ross arrives, Godden doesn’t alter her pace – just the intensity of the narrative. It is still steady, steady, steady – the most langurous thriller you can imagine. Throughout, she makes space for beautiful and evocative descriptions of the natural world around the world, like this:

The wind was up and moving round the house. It came from the sea and with the rain tore inland across the fields, crying and calling as it went. It found the house and beat at the walls and roof and plucked at the windows. The house stood firm. It presented a smooth unbroken surface to the night; the wind streamed like water over and round it and rushed on defeated. In the black spaces of the night the lamplit circle in the sitting-room, where the two armchairs were drawn close to the fire, was an oasis of peace and warmth and strength.

I’m really glad I continued with the book, though I still can’t entirely work out what I thought of it. It has to be read slowly, and it requires a patient reader. Ultimately, I don’t know whether it was a triumph or needed significant restructuring. But I’m sure the characters, the voice, and the feeling of it will stay with me – and that is certainly an achievement. You certainly won’t come across anybody quite like Edwina, or any similar situation, in any other novels this Spinster September.

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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Happy weekend, everyone! I’m off to a wedding – for the past five or six years, I’ve been down to one wedding a year. How did I ever have the energy to go to five or so in a year? Anyway, this one is local and the weather looks good (but not too hot to put on a suit), and there are lots of people I know there – all ingredients for a fantastic day.

Hope you’re having a good one, however you’re spending it. Here’s a book, a blog post, and a link to accompany you through it.

1.) The book – I still haven’t read any Laurie Colwin, but was very tempted by Another Marvelous Thing (though that US spelling of ‘marvellous’ is very hard to take). Indeed, any W&N Essentials book looks irresistible in their striking new packaging, but Colwin stood out as a writer I’ve been meaning to try for a long time.

2.) The blog post – Moira at Clothes in Books has picked the best cosy crime novels.

3.) The link – is there more to say about the Salt Path situ? Yes, it turns out – Polly Aitken is a disabled nature writer who was told her writing was uncommercial if it didn’t include a miracle cure, and she has some very interesting things to say.

Trance by Appointment by Gertrude Trevelyan

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Recovered Books by Boiler House Press continue their admirable work of bringing out G.E. Trevelyan’s novels and sent me Trance By Appointment back in March. I read it in July and I’m finally writing about it – and, gosh, Trevelyan was such a varied writer. That sort of variety might explain why she hasn’t had perhaps the legacy she deserves, since it is hard to describe what sort of writer she is, or what to expect when you open one of her novels.

Trance By Appointment (1939) was Trevelyan’s final novel, and is in many ways the most traditional of the ones I’ve read by her. Two Thousand Million Man-Power is formally interesting, doing rather brilliant things with fluid prose and a sense of diving from the general to specific; William’s Wife has an extraordinary single-mindedness in its focus on one woman’s self-inflicted downfall. And Appius and Virginia is a little experimental in style as well as unusual in topic.

Against that backdrop, Trance By Appointment feels more ordinary in style and topic – though ‘ordinary’ is not a criticism in this case. Jean is certainly living an ordinary life: she is a working-class girl living in London, and that does mean that we have to put up with a little of Trevelyan’s attempts to paint a portrait of everyday, working-class Lond0n life (she even uses “You won’t ‘arf catch it if Mum sees you!”) She is good at this sort of milieu in William’s Wife but a little unconvincing in the outset of this novel.

But try not to let that hold you back – because we see Jean in a fascinating world. Simply to earn a little money, she becomes a sort of apprentice to ‘Madame Eva’ – a kind, canny woman who charges her clients to read palms, tarot cards, or a crystal ball. Her instructions are an interesting mix of showmanship and insight: she takes for granted that their service is inherently charlatan – but she also gives hints of how you can genuinely interpret people’s demeanour and their words to give accurate understandings of their future.

Jean is timid and uncertain, and stumbles her way through the initial readings – never quite understanding that any element of it might be fraud, despite Madame Eva’s best efforts. And then one day…

Jean set out the cards and started off reading them to her, and then, while she was talking, all at once it was as if the cards went big and misty and faded out, and she was looking all along a road that had sunshine at the end of it. She didn’t know any more until she came back the way she did when she was by herself and heard her own voice as if it had been talking. There were the cards still laid out in front of her, but she was sitting back in the chair and she hadn’t moved them from the first layout, hadn’t even turned up the wish.

She was going to do it when the girl got up and took her hand. “Oh, thank you,” she said, with tears in her eyes. “You have helped me such a lot.”

She put down her money and went out, and Jean went and told Madam Eva. She felt all in a daze.

Jean discovers that she has The Gift. She goes into a trance, without any recollection of what took place during it – except it clearly helps people. She then learns that her spirit guide, leading her into this realm, is a young girl called Daisy – the late little sister of Mr Mitch. In introducing us to Mr Mitch, Trevelyan doesn’t show her greatest moment of restrained subtlety: ‘Mr. Mitch was a bit fat, with a white face, and his hair was curly except that he oiled it down, and was starting to go bald on top, he brushed it across.’

Things progress, and Mr Mitch becomes increasingly controlling of Jean – including marrying her, and swiftly showing her little affection. His total disdain towards his offspring is a little exaggerated, perhaps. I’m sure such men exist, but I think he would have been a more interesting character had he been a little less full-throated in his hatred of Jean spending any time with their children, and his total lack of care for Jean’s wellbeing. Sometimes showing us the worst of humanity is, while possible, not paricularly likely.

The reader can see where the novel is going to go, more or less, and we see Jean’s descent into misery – not done as well or as gradually as the descent in William’s Wife, but engaging nonetheless. And there is a revelation in the latter part of the novel that truly shakes Jean’s outlook on her unasked-for talent, as well as asking wider questions about everything we’ve done so far. It was a decision on Trevelyan’s part that certainly made Jean a more compelling character.

Trance By Appointment is a short novel and I think that’s for the best – because, on its own terms and at a reasonable length, it works very well. Lacking the subtlety of character and plot in some of Trevelyan’s other novels, and the ambitious stylistic choices she makes elsewhere, it would have dragged had it been any longer. As it is, I can safely recommend Trance By Appointment as a good read – and, if not a final flourish in a fascinating career, at least a respectable culmination of a writing life that had rather better highlights.

The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg

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For my second and final entry to this year’s Women in Translation month, I’ve read The Dry Heart (1947) by Natalia Ginzburg, translated from Italian by Frances Frenaye. I’ve read and loved a handful of the short Ginzburg books that Daunt are diligently republishing, so opened it up with high hopes – and immediately encountered this striking opening paragraph:

“Tell me the truth,” I said.

“What truth?” he echoed. He was making a rapid sketch in his notebook and now he showed me what is was: a long, long train with a big cloud of black smoke swirling over it and himself leaning out of a window to wave a hankerchief.

I shot him between the eyes.

Gosh! Well, if that doesn’t draw you in, then what will? Most of the novella is then told in flashback, with occasional returns to ‘present day’ and the aftermath of this shooting. It’s not my favourite structure for a novel usually, as I find putting the entire story in flashback often deadens it – but it worked well in The Dry Heart.

As so often, it wasn’t until writing this review that I realised that the narrator is unnamed. (Do others notice this while they’re reading? I never seem to.) She is an emotional, hopeful woman who becomes a little obsessed with an older man she sees at the theatre – a man we later learn is called Alberto. When he’s present, she can’t quite understand why she is so fixated on him: he isn’t especially attractive or charismatic, and seems rather diffident and unwilling to develop anything approaching an emotional connection. But when he isn’t there, the narrator can’t stop picturing their future life together.

Alberto doesn’t try to disguise that he is in love with another woman – but she is married. He has determined on singleness, since he can’t have her, but – with those cards on the table – is willing to propose.

When Alberto asked me to marry him I said yes. I asked him how he expected to live with me if he was in love with somebody else, and he said that if I loved him very much and was very brave we might make out very well together. Plenty of marriages are like that, he said, because it’s very unusual for both partners to love each other the same way. I wanted to know a lot more about his feelings for me, but I couldn’t talk to him for long about anything important because it bored him to try to get to the bottom of things and turn them over and over the way I did. When I began to speak of the woman he loved and to ask if he still went to see her, his eyes dimmed and his voice became tired and faraway and he said that she was a bad woman, that she had caused him a great deal of pain and he didn’t want to be reminded of her.

If you’re not familiar with Ginzburg’s writing, this is a good indication – she writes fairly plain prose, and uses it to crystallise emotions and emotional miscommunication in a simple way. It works very well, getting to the heart (pun not intended) of any scene with the directness of an arrow.

As the story progresses, we already know the ending – and we can guess how we might end up there (and learn pretty soon that, yes, Alberto is having an affair with the woman he’s in love with). But Ginzburg does a couple of more subtle things with this premise. One is the significance of the drawing, and the drawings that Alberto does as the story progresses – and the other is the scene in which the narrator and the woman Alberto loves meet each other. I think that’s the strongest moment in the story, overturning expectations.

Perhaps, also, it’s the scene I found most interesting because of the relationship between the two women: rivals, but both vulnerable, neither getting what they want from the situation or from their lives. And, as a complementary point, the reason I didn’t love The Dry Heart as much as the other Ginzburg novellas I’ve read is a matter of personal taste: I find stories of romantic couples much less interesting than the other sorts of relationships that Ginzburg has centred narratives around, particularly parent/child.

Perhaps that’s because narrative art of the past few centuries has been so obsessed with romantic love that it is refreshing to find somebody (especially somebody of Ginzburg’s talent) turn an equal attention to one of the many other fundamental relationships that make up our lives. So The Dry Heart is doubtless just as good as the other books I’ve read by her – but didn’t captivate me in quite the same way.

Project 24: Books 17 and 18

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Well, we have got ahead of ourselves. But ‘we’ I mean ‘I’. Because the calendar is saying it’s late August, and my Project 24 tally says that September has already ended – I’m up to book 18 in my Project 24 restrictions. But hopefully you’ll see why I couldn’t resist these two beauties.

Last weekend, I went to Stratford-upon-Avon with my brother and some friends to do a treasure hunt. I knew there might also be treasure in Chaucer Head Bookshop, which I hadn’t been to for the best part of a decade and was delighted to discover still existed. They’ve got a nice range of very reasonably priced books – and I came away with these two.

Theresa’s Choice by Rachel Cecil (daughter of David Cecil) seems to be about some sort of love triangle – but, let’s be honest with ourselves, I bought it because I loved the cover. And I’m always willing and ready to try a mid-century woman writer that I don’t know anything about.

Nina by Susan Ertz is the black blob underneath the colourful dustjacket – less captivating on the eye, but more exciting to me since it is SIGNED by her! I’ve only read a couple of Ertz novels, and they’ve been very different from each other, but I’m interested to read more by her – and I think there might be something special among her output. Fingers crossed it’s this one!

#141: Do We Care About Weather in Novels? and Crooked Cross vs The Spring Begins

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Sally Carson, Katherine Dunning, and the weather – welcome to episode 141!

tea or books logo

In the first half, Rachel and I discuss significant weather scenes in novels, and whether knowing about the weather in novels makes a difference to us. In the second half, we compare two very different novels from 1934, both recently republished: Crooked Cross by Sally Carson (reissued by Persephone) and The Spring Begins by Katherine Dunning (reissued by the British Library).

Here is the LitHub article about rain in novels: lithub.com/the-best-rain-in-literature

You can get in touch with suggestions, comments, questions etc (please do!) at teaorbooks[at]gmail.com – we’d love to hear from you, even if I’m quite bad at replying quickly. Find us at Spotify, Apple podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. If you’re able to, we’d really appreciate any reviews and ratings you can leave us.

Tou can support the podcast at Patreon – where you’ll also get access to the exclusive new series ‘5 Books’, where I ask different people about the last book they finished, the book they’re currently reading, the next book they want to read, the last book they bought and the last book they were given.

The books and authors we mention in this episode are:

Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
All The Little Live Things by Wallace Stegner
William Maxwell
Hot Milk by Deborah Levy
August Blue by Deborah Levy
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
Braided Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
The Position of Spoons by Deborah Levy
Autocorrect by Etgar Keret
Suddenly, A Knock On The Door by Etgar Keret
The Five Good Years by Etgar Keret
Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster
Emma by Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Dark Like Under by Alice Chadwick
Heatwave by Penelope Lively
Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell
The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley
Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns
The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
Black Narcissus by Rumer Godden
The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
Landscape in Sunlight by Elizabeth Fair
Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield
To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Between The Acts by Virginia Woolf
The Years by Virginia Woolf
Funny Weather by Olivia Laing
The Sandcastle by Iris Murdoch
The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch
The Five Year Sentence by Bernice Rubens
Other People by Celia Dale

Autocorrect by Etgar Keret

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A few years ago, one of my favourite reads was Suddenly, A Knock on the Door by Israeli short story writer Etgar Keret – so when I saw that a new collection had been published, I was keen to get a copy. Autocorrect (2024; English translation 2025) was sent as a review copy, and I loved getting back into Keret’s strange mind. The stories in here were published in various places over the past few years, translated from Hebrew by Sondra Silverston and Jessica Cohen. (Only one was written after the 7 October attacks in Israel, and the subsequent extreme violence upon citizens in Gaza, and this story does look at the aftermath of the October attacks in a fairly oblique way. He is not the sort of writer you’d expect to write un-obliquely about it.)

What I love about Keret is his matter-of-fact surreality. The first story ‘A World Without Selfie Sticks’, for instance, opens like this:

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have yelled at Not-Debbie. Debbie herself always said that yelling doesn’t solve anything. But what is a person supposed to do when, a week after saying a tearful goodbye at the airport to his girlfriend, who was flying to Australia to do her doctorate, he bumps into her at an East Village Starbucks?

From here, things just get weirder. We quickly learn that Not-Debbie is from a parallel universe. She is taking part in a gameshow where five contestants are ‘sent to a universe that contains everything they have in their own world, except for one thing’ and their goal is to figure it out. (The last episode was the one with selfie sticks – the solution to this particular iteration is in the final line of the story.)

I don’t think anybody would describe Keret as sci-fi, but there are elements he borrows from that world. Another story, for instance, is about overcorrection when trying to make robot boyfriends have the right level of sensitivity. The title story, ‘Autocorrect’, is about somebody continually restarting their day to make subtle changes, hoping to evade her father’s death. In all of these odd scenarios, what makes Keret so good is how little time he spends on world-building. He gives us a couple of sentences about what’s going on, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, and we are thrust into the plot for a handful of pages that are disorienting in the best possible way.

He’s very good at opening lines. The example above is a good’un. ‘Gravity’ starts “Three days after they moved into their new apartment, the woman who lived upstairs jumped out of her window.” How could you not want to read on? But he is not all stark sentences – ‘Present perfect’ opens rather more philosophically, with rather a striking image:

It’s about time we acknowledge it: people are not very good at remembering things the way they really happened. If an experience is an article of clothing, then memory is the garment after it’s been washed, not according to the instructions, over and over again: the colours fade, the size shrinks, the original, nostalgic scent has long since become the artifical orchid smell of fabric softener.

There were some stories I thought less successful than others. Quite a few are extremely short – three pages, say – and that feels too abrupt to try and do something that leans into the unusual as much as Keret does. Others have pay-off with a comment on faith or politics that feels trite and undergraduate-y – can he really think he’s being profound in these moments? For those reasons, I still prefer Suddenly, a Knock on the Door. But it’s also true that our first encounter with a striking, new-to-us authorial voice can be the one that we retain the greatest fondness for, with the glow of discovery.

That voice is sparse and conversational, which makes the strangeness work. I’m glad to reacquaint myself with him, and glad to know there are others I’ve yet to read.

Follow Your Heart by Susanna Tamaro

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Follow Your Heart by Susanna Tamaro cover

I wanted to join in Women in Translation month, so was looking around my shelves for possible candidates – and chose Follow Your Heart (1994) by Susanna Tamaro, translated from Italian by Avril Bardoni. I picked it up in a nearby charity shop a couple of years ago without knowing anything about her – I was attracted by the slimness of the book first and foremost, but the description also intrigued me: a grandmother writing a long letter/diary/confession to her estranged granddaughter. And, wow, it didn’t disappoint.

Apparently this was a huge international bestseller in the mid 90s, so possibly everyone knows about it already – I was only nine years old when it was first translated into English, so it passed me by. I’m always slightly suspicious of bestsellers (can they truly be good when that many people are reading it?) but I was blown away by the way Tamaro captures the voice in this novella.

Olga is an 80-year-old who has raised her granddaughter (I think unnamed?) almost single-handedly, since Olga’s daughter died in a car crash when her daughter was only a few years old. She describes moments of beautiful synergy, as they experience and love the magic of the natural world together – and how she naively hoped this would last forever. But the granddaughter is now newly an adult and has decided to study abroad – splintering an already fragile relationship.

I remember the day you left. What a state we were in! You wouldn’t let me come with you to the airport, and every time I reminded you to pack something or other you told me, ‘I’m going to America, not the desert!’ As you walked through the door, I shouted in my odiously shrill voice, ‘Look after yourself,’ and you, without even turning round, left me with the words, ‘Look after Buck and the rose.’

At the time, I must confess, your words left me with a deep sense of frustration. Sentimental old woman that I am, I had expected something more banal: a kiss or a word or two of affection. Only later that night, when I had given up trying to sleep and was wandering round the empty house in my dressing gown, did I understand that looking after Buck and the rose meant looking after the part of you that still lives with me – the happy part.

The first section of the novella is really just Olga walking around her home, remembering, thinking, reflecting. It is in the form of a letter to her granddaughter, but in the same way that Gilead by Marilynne Robinson is a letter to John’s son (and, indeed, Gilead is the book I was most reminded of – a very big compliment from me, of course). That is to say, Olga’s granddaughter is the one being continually addressed, but we have no idea if this letter will ever be sent – it’s really a way for Olga to frame her thoughts. And it’s beautiful. She is painfully honest with herself, not allowing the refuge of any comforting lies – whether about her own behaviour, the future of this relationship, or even about the lifespan of the birds and beasts she delights in seeing.

Tamaro’s (and Bardoni’s) major achievement is that capturing of voice. That’s what carries you through a book like this, and there is a rich gentleness throughout.

As the novella progresses, there is more plot – specifically about a past lie that Olga told, and an affair she had. We learn more about her marriage, about the man she had an affair with, and about the long shadow of implications this had on her relationships with her husband, daughter, and granddaughter. I think I preferred Follow Your Heart when it was less tethered to specific incidents, but Tamaro manages to get plot in without losing the strength of the novel – that voice. And, like anybody coming towards the final years of their life writing to a much-loved, younger person, she wants to share wisdom.

I kept thinking that Follow Your Heart is the sort of novel that people claim The Alchemist is. I wrote in my review of The Alchemist that ‘the novel tries to become extremely profound, and succeeds in sounding rather silly. There’s an awful lot about following your heart and the truth being in all of us etc. etc., and it began to feel a bit like a thought-a-day desk calendar’. Despite Tamaro having chosen exactly a ‘follow your heart’ title – well, in fact, the original Italian translates as Go Where Your Heart Takes You – there is so much more profundity and depth in her novel. In isolation, it may not show all of that depth – but, in context, it was beautiful. But I’m going to isolate it, nonetheless…

Little by little the music faded into silence, and with it went the profound sense of joy that had been with me in my first years. The loss of joy, I must say, is the thing I have mourned more than any other. Later, indeed, I felt happiness, but happiness is to joy as an electric light-bulb is to the sun. Happiness is always caused by something; you are happy about something, it is a feeling that comes from the outside. Joy, on the other hand, is not caused by anything. It possesses you for no apparent reason; it is essentially rather like the sun, which gives off heat thanks to the combustion of its own core.

Over the years I abandoned my self, the deepest part of me, to become another person, the person my parents wanted me to be. I exchanged my personality for a character. Character, as you will find out for yourself, is valued much more highly than personality.

From the opening pages, I fell in love with Follow Your Heart. As I say, it reminded me a lot of Gilead, and I’m always looking for books that have that exceptional creation of character – and especially ones that manage to be gentle without being saccharine. Tamaro has written a lot, though only a few of her books seem to have been translated into English – I’ll certainly be looking out for more.

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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I had a few days where I couldn’t get into this blog, and the advice I got in various forums was kind but totally incomprehensible to me (PHP error log, who she?) – but the good people at the hosting company were able to sort me out, and I’m back. And I do have a pile of books to review, as per, though I’ve been doing more listening than reading quite a lot of the time. Anyway, hopefully will tell you about some of those soon – for now, it’s a book, a link, and a blog post.

1.) The blog post – Caro does such wonderful reviews of many of the British Library Women Writers titles, and I love her enthusiasm for G.B. Stern’s The Woman in the Hall.

2.) The link – in case any of you can get to the excellent (and chaotic) Hurlingham Books in London, they currently have piles of Virago Modern Classics going at £3 each.

And How Are You, Dr. Sacks?: A Biographical Memoir of Oliver Sacks

3.) The book – how did I not know about And How Are You, Dr Sacks? by Lawrence Weschler? I love memoirs by people who knew and loved the great and the good. This one has been out for a few years, but my friend Rachel mentioned it this week and I knew it would have to be in my hands at some point.

 

Project 24: Book 16

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The Pink House by Nelia Gardner White cover

I’m always excited when a new reprint publishing house pops up – and there are so many out there now, whether imprints from big publishing houses or tiny indies. Obviously I think the British Library Women Writers list is the best one out there, but there are plenty of others doing wonderful things – and I love it when they are specialising in something specific. So when I heard about Quite Literally Books, I was very intrigued.

You can see plenty of intel on their website. I chortled at their header ‘Reader, we reprinted them’. Yes, we’re among friends here. And they say ‘We are a heritage press devoted to discovering and reissuing ought-to-be-in-print books by American women authors—and occasionally others—who’ve been shelved for far too long.’ You can tell it’s American because their email address begins ‘writeus’. Then again, Jane Austen used that sort of phrasing too.

I’ve listened to the two co-founders on a couple of podcasts, and they seem to have delightful curiosity about the literary past, a taste for books that are both enjoyable and have something to say about a moment in time – and (this will help) clearly have enough funding from somewhere to make Quite Literally Books a very chic concern.

Their first three titles are The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Plum Bun by Jessie Redmon Fauset and The Pink House by Nelia Gardner White. Perhaps they will always publish books exclusively by women with doubled-up surnames. Anyway, of course I already have the Persephone edition of The Home-Maker, so I had to choose between the other two titles for my exploration into Quite Literally Books. My weakness for books about houses made The Pink House the obvious choice. It was actually only after I ordered it that I joined the dots and realised it was a book (under an earlier edition) that Gina had raved about.

One problem: their books aren’t (yet) available in the UK. And shipping from the US is extremely expensive. And that’s where my friend Jo stepped in! She was visiting a mutual friend in Seattle, and so I got the book shipped to my friend’s Seattle house, and Jo brought it back in her suitcase. Thank you, Jo! (I wonder if this qualifies for the ‘has anybody asked you pack anything?’ question that airports always pose.)

I haven’t started it yet, but I love the quality of the physical book, the beautiful cover design, and the very promising blurb. Watch this space! I’m so interested to see what they bring out next – and, for once, I’m writing about something that American readers will find much easier to locate.