The Covenant of Water, by Abraham Verghese

 First, an apology/admission: I finished this book a couple of weeks ago, and really should have written about it straight away while it was fresh in my mind. It was so good that I raced through it, and really I should have re-read it before writing about it, but it's over 700 pages long, so that isn't going to happen!

It is set in the southern tip of India, in what was then called Travancore, but is now, I think, Kerala. It begins in 1900, with a 12 year-old girl called Maryamma (but always to be known as Big Ammachi), who is on her way to become the second wife of a much older man, and the mother of his child, Jo-jo. Parambil, where he lives, is a remote, tiny hamlet. You might expect this to end badly, but in fact it doesn't: eventually the unlikely couple fall in love, and Big Ammachi becomes the matriarch of a successful community. 

After a few chapters, there is a sudden switch to the other side of the world - to a boy named Digby, growing up in Glasgow with a mother who is incapable of looking after him. Despite this difficult start, he becomes a surgeon, eventually joining the Indian service. A terrible accident ends his career in the service, and by happenstance, he ends up not far away from Parambil.

It takes a long time, however, before we find out how these two stories intertwine. The novel is meticulously and very cleverly structured, with one thing leading to another seemingly inevitably. Everything, it turns out, is connected: something that happens in one generation is bound to affect the lives of later generations, sometimes for good, sometimes not - there is a lot of terrible tragedy in this novel, though also a lot of tenderness, a lot of love, and quite a bit of humour. It's a family saga - it takes us all the way up to the 1970s, telling us a lot about the history of India in the 20th century along the way. The large cast of characters are beautifully realised: it's like Dickens in that way: no character is too insignificant for the author to be fascinated by him or her, to want to get under his/her skin.

I found it quite rivetting - a marvellous book. One thing - Verghese, who also wrote Cutting For Stone, is a surgeon himself. He describes medical procedures and the pathology of various diseases in considerable - often excruciating - detail: I found myself skipping paragraphs at times. And therein lies another puzzle: how on earth does he find the time to write a book - especially one of this length - alongside maintaining such a demanding career? I have no idea. But I'm glad he does.

Allan Ahlberg

 This week, the great children's writer Allan Ahlberg died. (As with everything, people will have their own opinions as to what's 'great' and what's not, but I really doubt that anyone who's read Alan's books with children would dispute that accolade.)

Some of Allan's books.

You may not be able to see it very well from this small picture, but these books are very well-worn. Pages are creased, some are even torn: one has a couple of pages missing. That's because they have all been read many, many times, first with our children, now with our grandchildren. They are very, very well-loved.

All these were illustrated by Allan's wife, Janet, who died much too soon. (He went on to write more books with other terrific artists, but I don't think they will mind me saying that his partnership with Janet was particularly special.) The illustrations are brilliant: so detailed, with so much to look at and talk about. Peepo, for instance, describes what a baby can see when he looks around him. It is set in wartime - the baby's father is in uniform - and much of what he sees is familiar to someone who can recall a fifties' childhood, but I really don't think that matters: Peepo is for small children, who take in and are fascinated by everything they see - it doesn't matter if what they see is different to their own world, the point is that it's interesting - and that it's about a family, about everyday goings-on. So on one particular spread, these are Alan's words:

He sees a bonfire smoking

    Pigeons in the sky

His mother cleaning windows

    A dog going by.

He sees his sisters searching

    For a jar or tin

To take up to the park

    And catch fishes in.

Janet takes up the pointers in the text and runs with them - but she also adds so much more: an outdoor toilet with a coal-hole next to it, an old-fashioned pram, a skipping rope, a toy tricycle, the mother's pinafore, the baby's toys, a little dog, and much more besides. So much to talk about and discuss, so much to share and enjoy.

Each Peach Pear Plum takes figures from nursery rhymes and fairy tales and spins a tale that includes all of them, ending in a triumphant page turn that reveals all the characters having a joyous picnic together: the Wicked Witch chortles happily, Little Red Riding Hood strokes a sheep, Robin Hood feeds Baby Bunting, and so on. Pure genius. And the words are perfectly balanced, so that each page of text leads you into the picture opposite, and then, with bated breath, onto the next page. (This book is very well-worn.) 

The other books in the picture are for older children. They too are absolute classics. They're just lovely to read aloud. The text is perfectly paced, leading you to pause in just the right places for a reveal or a joke, and again, the pictures don't just illustrate the text, they add to it. I'll leave you with this picture of one of my favourite spreads in this or any other book. Allan, thank you for the stories. The angels are lucky to have you. I can just imagine them sitting around chortling - and asking for just one more before bedtime - please!

The Glassmaker, by Tracy Chevalier

Tracy Chevalier's new novel is set in Venice, and it's about a glassmaker named Orsola. The author - perhaps best known for Girl With A Pearl Earring, inspired by Vermeer's famous picture - does very strange things with time in this novel. I'm still not entirely sure that this aspect of it works for me: I felt mildly irritated by it as I read the book - until I reached the end, when it suddenly came together triumphantly, and I almost burst out clapping.

What she does is this. The book starts in 1486 with nine year-old Orsola Rosso, the daughter of a glassmaking family on the island of Murano. It ends in 2020, with the Covid epidemic. At this time, Orsola is sixty five. The premise is that time flows differently in Venice, so that Orsola and her family and associates live somehow outside the passage of time on Terrafirma - the world that is not Venice. This enables the author to encompass centuries of Venetian history, as she takes up Orsola's life at various key points.

As a girl, Orsola is not expected to work in the family business. But when her father dies in a tragic accident, and the business, under the direction of her brother Marco, starts to go downhill, she is determined to do something to help. She learns how to make beads - and then she goes to Venice to persuade the merchant who handles the family's exports to sell them for her. On her trip she meets Antonio, a handsome young man who wants to learn glassblowing, and his friend Domenego, a Black gondolier who is a slave. These two become important threads in her life.

At this point, Venice is a powerful trading nation. But things change, as they always do, and time moves on - though not for Orsola and her circle. She experiences the plague, the advent of Napoleon, the wars of the twentieth century, and then the Covid epidemic of the twenty first. So it goes, until that very clever, satisfying ending.

I'm still not sure about the timing device, though it certainly enables the author to convey the sweep of more than 500 years of Venetian history. But quite apart from that, the writing is beautiful; the descriptions of Venice and particularly of the glassmaking process are extraordinary. It's clear from the novel itself that Tracy Chevalier did a vast amount of research for it, and this is confirmed in her note at the end. And the portrayals of Orsola, her family and friends, are vivid and engaging - we come to care about them. In the end, a very satisfying read.

Paris '44 - The Shame and the Glory: by Patrick Bishop

 Full disclosure: someone gave this to my husband for his birthday. It joined a fairly hefty to-be-read pile, and so I decided to liberate it and read it first. I don't think he minded.

I've read quite a lot of books about the Second World War. I probably would have anyway - how can you not be interested in all the stories that emerge from such a conflict? - but my particular interest arose when I decided to write a book inspired by - but not a faithful account of - my father's experiences as a prisoner of war for five years. It's not yet been published (interested publishers, please form an orderly queue) - but even if it never is, I don't regret the years of research I put into it. I visited Kew Records Office and the Imperial War Museum, I was enthralled by the many accounts in the BBC's People's War archive, and I read many books. The ones I enjoyed most - probably because I'm not an academic or a trained historian - were the ones that told their story by focusing on individual lives. Books such as Dunkirk, The Men They Left Behind, by Sean Longden, Home Run, by John Nichol and Tony Rennell, and, by the same authors, The Last Escape (this last was particularly relevant for my book, because it was about the experience of prisoners of war, and particularly about the terrible march they were forced to make in the bitter winter of 1945, ahead of the advancing Soviet armies - my father took part in this. It's a marvellous book.)

Patrick Bishop's book is called Paris '44 - but it's about much more than that particular point in time. It's about what led up to it - about what it was like in France, and particularly Paris, during the occupation. Like the others I've mentioned, it uses the stories of individuals to tell the story, as well as focusing on the well-known leading figures: de Gaulle, Petain, General Eisenhower, Hitler himself, and people such as is J D Salinger, who took part in the liberation of France; Ernest Hemingway, who just seemed to love being wherever a war was - and Picasso, who emerges as a fairly ambiguous figure in his method of navigating the war. But there are many other less-well-known people, whose stories help to show what a complex business it was living through the Occupation: was it better to be a hero, at the risk of endangering many innocent lives (notoriously, when the Resistance shot a German, many more French people were executed in retaliation) - or to keep your head down and compromise? Easy to judge from the outside, perhaps - less so if you had to live through it. The subtitle hints at this complex picture: there is shame as well as glory. 

It's a fascinating story, as readable as any novel. As a companion piece, I'd recommend Anne Sebba's Les Parisiennes, a fascinating book about the women of Paris during the 1940s.

Shrines of Gaiety, by Kate Atkinson

 I've decided that from now on, I'll begin with a bit of context as to how I came to read each book. I find that my reaction to a book is very much affected by all sorts of external circumstances - mood, place, time of year, who recommended it etc. Do you find that? Would be interested to know - do put something in the comments!

So I read Shrines of Gaiety whilst staying with my son and his partner, both of whom are voracious readers and tend to have books I haven't come across. They live in Brussels, and I only visit once or twice a year, so there are always new books to dive into and read while they are at work and the grandchildren are at school.

This jumped out at me from the shelf firstly because it was a hardback with a striking blue cover, and second because it was by Kate Atkinson, a writer whose books I've always enjoyed. I particularly like her dry humour - very much in evidence in her Jackson Brodie books: detective stories with a difference.

This sounded as if it was going to be another detective novel, albeit set in the 1920s. It has a DCI, as all self-respecting detective novels do. This one is called John Frobisher. He is well-intentioned, with a moral compass set in the right direction - but he turns out to be rather a lost soul, gloomy and hapless. He has flashes of inspiration, but somehow nothing ever quite works out for him - so he's not a typically charismatic and clever lead character.

The real star of the book is one Nellie Croker. When we first see her, she is being released from Holloway. She's small, dumpy and middle-aged - but she's also a powerful figure in the 1920s London underworld, and is considerably tougher than a pair of old boots. She runs a number of nightclubs - on one occasion a fight breaks out which develops into total mayhem - but when Nellie appears and shouts at them, calm instantly descends. (I've known teachers like that. I once had a very difficult group. It was last lesson on a Thursday afternoon, and all was not calm. Then a certain senior teacher walked in with a message: he didn't have to say anything, he just glanced round, and suddenly, magically, I had a classful of little angels...)

Anyway, back to Nellie. Her empire is under threat from various quarters, and DCI Frobisher is interested. Into the mix comes our second heroine, a cool and capable librarian from Yorkshire called Gwendolen Kelling, who comes to London in search of two missing girls, Freda and Florence. We, the readers, know what these two are up to - and we also know that other young girls have gone missing, and that they are in danger, though we don't know from whom.

Nellie has quite a few children, the eldest of whom, called Niven, is a veteran of the Great War. He's an interesting character. Tough, charismatic, very capable - he's really everything you would kind of expect the lead detective to be. Niven and Frobisher are both drawn to Gwendolen... so you can see that here is a mix of characters with great potential to create interesting story lines.

The glittering, tawdry world of 1920s London is vividly evoked, with its desperately bright young things, its war-weary veterans, its determination to have fun at any cost. The story twists and turns like a thief threading his/her way through the murky alleyways of the great city itself - and it's told with Kate Atkinson's trademark crispness and dry humour. Really, a very good read.

The Whalebone Theatre, by Joanna Quinn

 

I first read The Whalebone Theatre a couple of years ago. Lots of people had enjoyed it, and I did too, but it probably suffered a bit from something akin to 'tall poppy syndrome': do you know what I mean? It's when you hear so many good things about a book/film/place that when you eventually read it/see it/visit it, there's no way it can live up to all those high expectations. Also, I read very quickly, and I think I probably raced through it for the story and didn't accord it the time and attention it so richly deserved.

So I'm glad that my friend Penny Dolan mentioned earlier this week that she had read it recently, and, already having it on my Kindle, and being in search of a book to read while away on holiday, I was able to dive straight into it.

Reader, I'm so glad I did. It is a remarkable book. Of course, that's already established - it's been a huge best-seller - but it's one thing people telling you a book is good, and quite another to find it out for yourself.

In case you haven't come across it, it's a family saga, a little bit in the vein of Elizabeth Howard's Cazalet Chronicles, in that it tells the story of the fortunes of a well-to-do (to start off with) family, starting just after the end of the first world war, and finishing after the second. In particular, it focuses on Cristabel, a small child at the beginning, a grown woman by the end. But no character is neglected: each is gradually revealed in all his/her complexity - all reveal hidden depths, or indeed levels of shallowness. 

And because of the range of characters, Joanna Quinn is able to explore what is happening on both the national and international stages, in what seems like a perfectly believable and natural way. Old family friend Colonel Perry is key in this. He is a significant figure in one of the intelligence organisations, so he knows what's going on, and is also able to propel some of the other characters into particularly interesting places - notably, into wartime France. He's cool and perceptive, and clearly very fond of the Seagrave family - an enigmatic, pivotal character, though at first he seems like a bit of a bystander.

The writing is subtle and beautiful. I loved the way the author described the slowly unfolding relationship between Flossie, Cristabel's younger half-sister, and a German prisoner of war. They are two gentle characters, and theirs is not a dramatic affair, but it's a very moving one. And the descriptions of the Dorset landscape are simply gorgeous. (I'm sorry for not quoting in illustration of this, but useful as Kindle is, it doesn't easily lend itself to finding quotes.)

But it's not all gentle. Cristabel is a wild creature, prickly and tough: not surprisingly as her mother died at her birth, and her stepmother, Rosalind, ignores her as much as she can. The last section of the book, when she becomes an SOE agent in France, is very powerful - particularly towards the end, when she is searching for her beloved brother, Digby, in Paris, as the allies are marching to liberate the city. There were tears, I must confess, and it's a while since a book has made me cry.

Apart from this being a really good read and a beautifully written book, though, it made me think how valuable fiction can be in shining a spotlight (appropriate: I haven't mentioned about Cristabel's interest in the theatre) on historical events. Because history isn't just about the figures who set great events in motion: it's also about the countless millions of ordinary people who are affected - and often suffer - as a result. People sometimes ask writers which book they would like to have written: well, I would most certainly love to have written this one.

The One True Thing, by Linda Newbery

 

This is a book about a family, the Harpers. Like most, the Harper family might seem fairly ordinary at first glance - but in fact it's seething with conflict and secrets. The Harpers live in a lovely old house near Oxford called Wildings, and the novel begins and ends in the lyrically described garden which surrounds the house. At the beginning, Bridget, the mother, is gazing at this garden which she loves so much: 'Against the wall the clematis and climbing rose were fully out, the deep purple of Etoile Violette against the pink-flushed clusters like hedgerow dog roses. Next year she wouldn't see them...In three weeks it would be midsummer, and from that turning point her life would wind down as the days shortened...' So we meet Bridget just as she has found out that she's dying, and we are instantly intrigued and engaged: who is this woman? If this is the end of her story, where will the story go next?

Well, it moves on six years, with a new character, Meg, taking centre stage. Meg, to her surprise, has received a message that Anthony, Bridget's husband, is now also dying - and wants to see her. Meg and Anthony have never liked each other - Meg, a stone carver, was Bridget's friend, emphatically not Anthony's - and neither she nor any of the three Harper children, Rob, Suzanne and Jane, can imagine why Anthony wants to see her. When she arrives he is no longer able to speak, and so there is a mystery here: what did he so badly want to say to her?

Gradually, moving effortlessly from one character to another and from one time frame to another, Linda Newbery reveals the answers to these questions and others. We get to know the quite large cast of characters: how their past histories link them together, and what is 'the one true thing that motivates each of them. For Meg, who first uses the phrase which provides the title of the novel, it is her stone carving. For Bridget, we eventually learn, it is gardening. Arriving at Wildings as a new bride, she feels at a loss: she has had to give up her job to move out here to the countryside, and though it wasn't a job she cared about, she feels she needs to be doing something. The large garden is neglected, and she wonders if she could bring it back to her life. It turns out that she can. She has a natural gift for gardening, and gradually makes a successful career out of it, often working with Meg. The pair are even invited to make a garden for Chelsea - the ultimate accolade. In contrast, Anthony, at the beginning of their life together a successful, enthusiastic university lecturer embarking on writing a book, finds that his star is waning: frustrated by his inability to complete the book, he becomes embittered and depressed.

Each of the characters needs to find his/her 'one true thing' - though it's clear that some of them probably never will: there doesn't seem to be much hope for Rob, for instance, Anthony's eldest child, financially successful but cold and unsympathetic. Jane, the youngest daughter, is consciously searching for her own one true thing, at the same time as she is searching for answers about her parents' relationship and the mystery son. But alongside those explorations - which are fascinating enough - there is a central mystery. For a long time, we're not aware of the nature of this mystery, only that it exists, and has to do with the puzzling relationship that existed between Anthony and Bridget. 

Matters come to a head when Anthony's will throws up a number of surprises - in particular, the existence of another son, hitherto unknown to the rest of the family. But this is only the beginning - there is far more to learn, and the author skilfully keeps us guessing right till the end, when we can finally guess what it was that Anthony wanted to say to Meg right at the beginning.

Running underneath this family story is the issue of climate change and environmental activism. This is never heavy-handed, but it is there: it's a bedrock concern for at least two of the characters, and clearly, for the author. Alongside this awareness of the profound threat to nature, there is a profound appreciation of its beauty: here, for instance, is Meg, remembering Bridget and how she always looked forward to the arrival of the swifts in May: 'And now it was touched with a kind of grief, because everything, everything, was under threat: but there was joy in that too, because this evening was now, here, poignant in its fragility.' The writing is beautiful, particularly the descriptions of the garden and the landscape - but also in its depiction of Meg's carving, and the stones she uses. Here, for instance, is a description of the stone she wishes to use for Bridget's headstone: 'a local limestone, iron-rich, with subtleties of colour revealed in the cutting, blue-shaded grey against ochre and rust. A stone to suit the place, to suit Bridget.'

But as well as all these fine qualities, what any prospective reader will want to know, of course, is whether or not the book is a page-turner - whether it captures and maintains the reader's attention. And it does - it is a very good read.

One last thing - the cover, by Owen Gent, is gorgeous, as are the motifs - mostly swifts, the harbingers of summer, all the more poignant for their fleeting presence - by Victoria Heath Silk, which head up every chapter.