Review: "The Dead Father's Club" by Matt Haig

Matt Haig’s wonderful take on Hamlet-meets-Patrick Ness’ A Monster Calls is an absolute delight to read – but be prepared to have your heart melted and broken and deliciously/masochistically destroyed in a variety of ways. It’s the tale of a young boy, son to a pub landlord who dies under suspicious circumstances, an anxious little chap struggling with the loss of his father while having to navigate the tricky seas of a dodgy uncle honing in on his mother and the inheritance… if that wasn’t enough, he speaks to the ghost of his father who demands revenge and thinks up plots to stop the union of Dodgy Uncle and Mum. It’s an incredible burden to place on a kid’s shoulders, and of course young Philip feels overwhelmed, but his sense of duty, love for his father and fear for his mother leave him little choice than to follow suit. In his young mind, it’d be betrayal to go against his parents’ will, but even more so, to deny his father’s last wish. More so, to have to save his father from a fate worse than death.

It’s an intense contradictory mix of the inner world of a grieving child, of loyalty, of bravery, of grief and of weights a child’s shoulder shouldn’t carry. Even the least maternal soul may well go all protective and parental on the young protagonist. And the twist in the outcome is just as unexpected as life’s turns itself.

Review: "The Last Family in England" by Matt Haig

Matt Haig has solidified himself among my go-to authors, especially when I need a dose of the profound, of something that affirms life without forgetting to validate its struggles.

There aren’t really any books so far I have read by him that disappointed me, although with How to Stop Time he has set himself a benchmark of genius that will be hard to beat.

The Last Family in England he wrote, as he said, after his breakdown – writing, I fully agree, is an incredible therapeutic tool – and he clearly poured the intensity of is experience at the time into this. It’s now being re-released, with a gorgeous new cover to match the design of his previous masterpiece.

It’s an unusual story, to be sure, narrated by the family dog, Prince, a Labrador, who is utterly devoted to his family. I adored the background story of a code of ethics, practiced by Labradors, but ignored for the sake of self-gratification by other breeds, to the point of ridicule.

Prince’s family is in trouble. It’s an accelerating clusterf**k of considerable proportions affecting and involving all family members, to the point of tragedy and utter heartbreak (without being soppy, oh I love how Matt Haig does it)… and poor Prince has tasked himself to what he considers his duty – keeping the family together and happy, consulting his mentor, another Lab, who patiently instructs him in all ways the code entails. But difficulties keep coming, and they even come from places Prince never expected.

I thought it a perfect parable on religion, on its function, appeal and failings – how you can follow instructions to the letter with the best intentions without being guaranteed a desired outcome… and how to come to terms with not having all the answers, with life not going your way, but that doing your best, even if it’s not enough, is sufficient.

While that sounds utterly depressing, it is actually liberating. Your heart will ache after reading this, but feel fuller and wiser, and perhaps even a little bit more prepared for it.

Lots of Pupper Love,

Patty

Review: A Very British Christmas

The Home Office should scrap the  Life in the UK test as proof someone is perfectly integrated and anglicised. Nothing will prove more that you're a Brit than reading this book and both feeling caught out and crying with laughter (and recognition). If the Very British Problems volumes and Twitter account already nail the unique quirks of Englishness, A Very British Christmas is the ultimate culmination of our nation's glorious weirdness summarised between two covers, like a strange limited edition Christmas sandwich from Boots. I was crying. With laughter, hysteria and the certain knowledge that I've been so Britified, I'll never feel at home in another nation on earth.

Toodle Pip and Merry Christmas, old chaps!

Patty x

Review: Ken Follett's "Column of Fire"

Few novels have so totally and utterly gripped and consumed me as Pillars of the Earth has. Only few novels I return to read and re-read again, and Pillars is one of those I consistently and passionately recommend to pretty much readers of any genre because the storytelling, tension, characters and atmosphere are universally beyond compare. Pillars converted me to historical fiction, Pillars is one of the few books that gives me an itch to write myself. There is a reason this book has a cult following, we weren’t kidding, y’all. In my nigh 12 years as a bookseller, I have made countless people sit down to just read the first page, most of whom would quickly become so absorbed they would be rendered unresponsive to hell fires and high waters. I have never had a customer come back to me and tell me they hated it. In fact, many told me they consequently became Folletteers. (That’s a term now. I retain all rights and royalties. But when the Kool-Aid comes out, I had nothing to do with it, just saying…)

Now there’s a build-up! But then, it’s preaching to the choir, because I assume most people reading this review have been gagging for this sequel anyway. I myself have been hyperventilating since I saw Follett’s Instagram pictures of doing research into Elizabethan England and put two and two together many moons ago.

But there’s the dilemma. With the massive gaps between the three books (Pillars was released in 1989), each of them had plenty of time to work themselves up onto an unrivalled Olympian pedestal, putting more pressure onto the follow-up. I love World without End, but had to read it a couple of times to succumb to Pillars Polygamy.  And the key was to accept WWE as a book in its own right, not one attempting to be its literary mother. (Parenting analogies, see! We’ve come to that. There goes Larkin’s “your children are not your children”.)

The same goes for A Column of Fire. Face it. It is not Pillars of the Earth. It’s set over 400 years later, so it couldn’t be. All the original characters are long dead, though I was glad to see Prior Philip got a decent tomb out of it, even though it gets abused as a hiding place for Elizabethan teenage canoodling. But the red-haired Jack Jackson gene is still going strong. The female leads are still feisty. Kingsbridge Cathedral is still standing in all its glory, even though the Puritans have some beef with its riches and idolatry and might have clobbered some saint statues (how dare you touch Jack’s fine handiwork!). The monastery is falling apart though, thanks a lot, King Henry VIII.

Kingsbridge has expanded, but is still torn by polarised families and its usual villains and heroes, that being exacerbated by the outright war between Catholics and Protestants, which thwarts, in true Follettesque Romeo & Juliet fashion, the romantic relationship between protagonists Ned Willard and Margery Fitzgerald. But the cathedral is no longer a focal point in the story, and Kingsbridge, despite being a returning setting, is no longer the centre of the story. A large part is set in France and the bitter, murderous feuds between Catholics and Huguenots, and the focus is on Elizabeth I and her network of spies trying to stay in power while Catholics scheme left, right and centre to get rid of her; Mary Stuart lingers in various prisons trying to communicate with the outside world, and generally everyone is constantly under threat of being either a heretic or a traitor, depending on where the fickle winds of power blow.

Kingsbridge characters play key roles in this epic battle, and oh do they play them well. The heroes are as deliciously human, flawed and tormented as the villains are delightfully Waleran/Lady Reganesque, with their trademark sadistic psychopathy. A group of characters you’ll grow to love embody the larger conflicts they inhabit in cinematic storytelling, bringing this turmoiled era home to you like a missile. It’s a cracking historical epic which you will just devour (it took me less than two weeks) and thoroughly enjoy once you manage to let go of the idea that this is not attempting to be a rehash of Pillars. And you’ll probably grow to love it even more once you re-read it.

Follett truly has outdone himself once again.  I bow to thee, master.

With Elizabethan curtsies,

Patty

Review: Under a Watchful Eye by Adam Nevill

Adam Nevill is unpredictable. Unpredictable but never boring. He plays ball in all horror subgenres, and he plays it hard, merciless and oh so delightfully f***ed up. And his prose is so stylish he makes the likes of James Herbert look positively infantile.

I’ve read Under a Watchful Eye twice (so far), simply because the horror in it is in places of such an uncanny, eerie dreamlike quality that stays with you less in what you saw but more how it made you feel, the way you wake from a nightmare, shaken and scattered by it all day but only able to remember snippets - probably just the tip of the iceberg wreaking havoc in your subconscious now. Which makes the book utterly re-readable, leaving you to discover new bits each time you touch base with it again.

You wouldn’t think a picturesque Devon seaside town would give you the heebie-jeebies as much as a dilapidated house rented out by a psycho live-in landlord in a poor part of Birmingham. But fear not – when successful writer Seb spots an oddly floating figure staring at him from a distance, one that looks unpleasantly familiar to someone he had escaped decades ago, the sunny beachfront soon turns into a creepy negative like the intro from Tales from the Darkside.

The figure keeps popping up in his path, out of thin air and coming closer and closer, just to disappear again, making Seb question his sanity. Until it appears in his drive, the disturbing figure of his uni housemate Ewan, a man so filthy and unkempt, Nevill’s description practically makes you gag, with no redeeming features whatsoever. He’s far from a hobo with a heart of gold – he displays delusions of grandeur and psychopathic traits and plants himself into Seb’s classy house like a human tick. You might wonder why Seb just doesn’t chuck him out – but once you’re exposed to the threat and mind-twisting manipulation he endures, you feel as trapped as him. 

And not just that. With Ewan, things appear in the house. Things from another Arthur-Machenesque plane that followed him there and start stalking Seb, as well. Things so unspeakably horrible, images Nevill plants into your head like demonic seeds that will sickeningly blossom before your inner eye just as you turn off the lights. Lost creatures, barely human, in a nightmarish fog. Condemned spirits and souls lost in a hellish dimension after dabbling in a cult practicing astral projection. A cult that soon starts stalking Seb, as well. And Seb’s life begins to crumble as he desperately tries to find out what Ewan has let loose on him, that he needs to get involved with that cult in order to find a way to free himself of the demonic forces in his life, just to get entangled deeper and deeper, with no hope of any human forces to rescue him.

By the way, those who read Nevill’s privately published short story collection “Some will not sleep” (another absolutely unmissable, by the way) will recognise the characters from an equally fascinating and gag-inducing short story called “Yellow Teeth” – to me, one of the most disturbing one in the lot, and that’s a walk in the park compared to UWE - ; its title featuring as the name of a novel Seb produces in UWE after his harrowing experiences with Ewan and his ghastly entourage.

I swallowed this book in two sittings, leaving my eyes dry and my flesh creeping. The imagery is as haunting as scenes from recent paranormal films: put visions of Silent Hill together with the various Furthers and Upside Downs, flavoured with the spirit of Arthur Machen and Aleister Crowley, you’re getting there. Nevill induces that cosmic horror in you that he’s become famous for. That sense of spiralling out of control, with no reprieve and escape. Seb’s terror will infect your own bones and not let go. Word of advice: plan in a few recovery periods with Disney films to get through this experience with your sanity intact.

Highly recommended, easily the best horror of this year.

Review: Bastardography by Simon Jay

I'm not usually a fan of autobiographies. It takes skill to write something as personal as that without producing either self-aggrandising tripe or sensationalist misery memoirs. But once in a while one comes along that stops you dead in your tracks. And this is one of them.
I plowed through it in less than a day; I was hooked from page 1.

Obviously I would be somewhat biased. Some of you may remember Simon as a bookseller in our shop in the second half of 2012. A fine bookseller indeed he was, but the talent doesn't end there. He's been a writer and actor since childhood, always thinking up tales, plays, always performing - and doing it well. As long as I have known him - which is nigh 9 years now - he has been frantically, feverishly producing, creating, making things, a productivity that I envied much, compared to my own sluggish endeavours, but took equal inspiration from. Last year he took his Donald Trump satire show Trumpageddon to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival where it sold out continuously through its month-long run, with reviews featured in the Scotsman and Guardian. Not too shabby, eh?

What I only gradually became aware of over the years (and only fully so after reading his book) was that his frenzied productivity served a bigger purpose than just being a creative outlet. Many creative people will tell you that it's a way of exorcising their demons - for Simon it literally became a lifesaver. 

Considering that Simon Jay has lived through incredibly dark and painful moments and struggled with serious mental distress, this book could have easily become self-indulgent – a “Not with the scissors, Daddy” type of book, as he describes it.
Instead, it is a candid, intelligent, self-deprecating (in a good way) and at the same time darkly hilarious account of his struggle with depression, anxiety and Borderline Personality Disorder symptoms, exacerbated by realising early on that he is gay while growing up in an entirely homophobic, bullying environment. It makes a harrowing read more often than not, but then he’ll throw in a bizarrely funny or wry comment or description that will reduce you to mad (and not entirely guilt-free) cackles, which reminded me much of the writing of Caitlin Moran, Jeanette Winterson and Augusten Burroughs.

"Bastardography" is not just a heartbreaking meditation on the experience of mental illness but also an acerbic commentary on society’s prevailing homophobic attitudes, dished out mindlessly without a thought for the psychological damage it causes. At the same time it is liberating and downright inspiring to see how Simon relentlessly fought his illness by channelling it creatively – into writing, acting, theatre and any tool possible – and finally found, and continues to find redemption through it. 

It reads as if Quentin Crisp had written “Girl, Interrupted”, roughed up by Shane Meadows’ grit, and pitch black surreal humour massaged into the scrapes. 

I've known Simon for years, but his book opened up a whole new level of him. I knew of things that happened, but not the extent of it, and reading it left me shaken, devastated, but with a new level of admiration for him. You don't need to know him personally to adore this book - his wit, his quirky and at times even surreal charm, his strength and warmth and honesty will win you over. "Bastardography" has, to me, been a balm, an acknowledgement and encouragement, and helped me to accept and continue to deal with my own mental illness, rather than being consumed by it,  in a constructive way. 

With bookish love,

Patty

Simon in 2012 at a book event in our store. 

Simon as Donald Trump at the Edinburgh Fringe 2016

Review: The Recovery Letters

The Recovery Letters fell into my lap just at the right time. Coming out of a personal crisis, these letters have been a lifesaver for me - written by people who have been through the same mind-bending horror of depression, but who got through it and who have got the clear mind and experience talking sense to me when my own head is too clouded with despair to think straight. Validating, compassionate, personal, heartfelt - along with Matt Haig's Reasons to Stay Alive, this is a balm and a must-read title for sufferers. 

Dip in and out of it or read it from cover to cover, and mark your favourite letters to be ready for the next onslaught.

Sweet, delicious Prozac in book form.

Out 21/7/17.

Wishing you well and happy,

Patty x