What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this month.
This Must be the Place by Maggie O’Farrell, Tinder Press, 2016
She’s at it again. Maggie O’Farrell just being bloody brilliant! She does family dynamics with such precision and nuance. No one is perfect or a monster, more the composite of traits that come from their life experiences.
What I loved about this one was that each chapter was from the POV of different characters, sometimes really on the sideline but bumping up against our main crew in life somewhere. It could easily be read as a collection of short stories within a novel and as a short story lover, I’m a big fan of that – something Anne Tyler also does quite a bit.
I am. I am. I am. By Maggie O’Farrell, Tinder Press, 2017
Yes, it’s back-to-back Maggie for me! And guess what? She’s just as good with non-fiction as fiction. This is seventeen essays about brushes with death, hers and those close to her. It makes for beautiful reading and is a reminder of our mortality and how slender and unknown our relationship with it is. I loved it.
Days of Innocence and Wonder by Lucy Treloar, Picador, 2023
Till is running. She has been ever since her best friend was taken from their Kindergarten playground by a man. When she finds an abandoned train station in a remote South Australian town, she stops and starts to make a home. But there’s someone looking for her and as serious assaults start to happen in this quiet middle-of-nowhere town, she knows they’re getting closer. I read this book constantly looking over my shoulder.
As in her previous novels, the environment both natural and built plays its own part in the narrative. There’s also an interesting parallel memory narrative when Till spent lockdown with her parents. Lockdown is in novels now and always it’s interesting to read the fictionialised version of something we all lived through.
Eventually Everything Connects by Sarah Firth, Joan, 2023
This graphic novel of eight essays on uncertainty was something completely different in my reading pile. I’ve never experienced stream-of-consciousness in a visual format but this was it, a completely honest, curious, reflective and unpredictable journey along Sarah Firth’s thoughts on everything from the self to desire and joie de vivre. I loved her letting us be in her head!
If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio, Affirm Press, 2017
Did I mention I’m writing something which has an actor as a character? So, anything I’m reading which is also about actors, theatre, film etc, is great because it also counts as research. Tick.
A cross between Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and a complete edition of Shakespeare,
this is set in a prestigious American Arts college where the acting students only do Shakespeare. The seven 4th year students live and study in each other’s pockets. If you’re a Shakespeare fan, you’re going to love how effortlessly they can chat cutting lines from comedy to tragedy. But it’s their final year and while some students want to get out of type, others are finding it harder to distinguish between what’s real and on stage. Things get more tense and build until there’s a real body in the lake. If you don’t love Shakespeare or have much interest in behind-the-curtain details, then you’ll do a lot of skipping, but it was a total page-turner for me.
Harmoney by Whitney Hanson, Penguin Life, 2023
This collection of poetry is by a young TikTok poet. I’ve mentioned before that I don’t like poetry which makes me feels stupid. None of that here. These poems read more like diary entries. Thoughts. Asides to oneself. They are heavy with the grief of losing a best friend, which she did when she was 16. She’s 24 now and so time has passed and though the loss is still there, it shares a space with life, with the sun rising and bare feet on dry soil, with the shade of a favourite tree. The loss was very heavy to read page after page and we’re all just trying to stay afloat, so halfway through, I was happy to flick forwards and read the more hopeful pieces.
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Nina Cullen 