The bedside bookstack – August 2024

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this month.

Loved & Missed by Susie Boyt, Virago, 2021

Ruth’s daughter Eleanor is an addict. Their absence of a relationship and Ruth’s inability to change it shape her days. But then Eleanor has a baby, Lily, and Ruth gets a second chance to be a mother.

This is a beautiful book. She gets to the essence of it all, life’s beginnings and endings and the muddle that comes in between. She also has the knack for humour when you thought there couldn’t be any and her side-kick best friend is so vivid and possibly my favourite character. It came out in 2021 but seems to be everywhere at the moment. Not sure if it’s because delayed publication in Australia or just a zeitgeist thing.

Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan, Faber & Faber, 2007

This was an interesting read. It was definitely Claire Keegan in style but these stories were written before the novels she is so well known for now (Small Things Like These and Foster) and you can see how she has grown as a writer since then. The quiet way of telling a story with space around it is already there as are her observations of Irish life on a local level that speak of bigger cultural themes and there are still sentences that need to be reread or written down just for the truth and beauty in them:

“There’s pleasure to be had in history. What’s recent is another matter and painful to recall.”

And at a wedding, “Any time promise are made in public, people cry..”

The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding by Holly Ringland, Fourth Estate, 2022

Esther Wilding is trying to out run the grief of losing her sister Aura but Tasmania is a small island and she’s got to go home some time. When her mother presents her with Aura’s diary, there are questions that can only be answered by going to Denmark and finding out what happened in the three years Aura lived there.  

Nature and the elements play a starring role in this as well as female relationships and emotional matrilineal inheritance. It made me want to hug my sister and swim in saltwater.

This tale is built around the idea of myths and story, from Denmark and the Faroe Islands in particular, just a note if you don’t fancy fairy tales and origin stories.

A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J Maas, Bloomsbury, 2015

This is my first foray into spicy romantasy territory and I get the hype. In fact, I finished the book and looked up the rest of the series. Too bad there are another four books, my TBR list is already way too long.

Feyre Archeron is human and has grown up hearing about the fae wars and brutality. The lands of Prythian are strictly forbidden and a one-way ticket for her kind. When she kills a shapeshifter wolf his fae kin, Tamlin, comes to collect her according to an old treaty.

Tamlin is high fae and has a court which is facing its own internal threats. You might spy the enemies(captor)-to-lovers trope which works just as well with magic as it does in any contemporary romcom.  

Love Objects by Emily Maguire, Allen & Unwin, 2021

Lena’s Aunty Nic is her favourite person in the world. She’s the reason Lena feels safe enough to move back to Sydney and go to uni which is way out of her comfort zone. It’s a complete surprise when she discovers Aunty Nic has had an accident, is a hoarder and can’t go home until her place is deemed safe enough. As she is trying to clean things up in wanders her brother who hasn’t been seen much since a prison stint after their dad died.

There’s a lot going on here, multigenerational trauma and grief, sex tapes, sibling rifts and a lot of clutter. But there’s also a family in crisis that looks to their past so they can fix the present.

Fifty-two Stories by Anton Chekhov, Penguin, 2020

It’s Chekhov, right? He’s always going to do what he always does – present something seemingly simple which then adds up to way more than the sum of its parts, so that you’re left asking how exactly he pulled it off.

This is one I love to pick up and put down, a few stories at a time so they can marinate. It’s permanently on my bedside table, like actually up there on the sacred space and not on the dusty floor pile. I know.

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