Best of 2020

 I haven't been able to settle and read as much this last year. A much higher number of books than usual have been abandoned part way through because they didn't grab my wandering attention, but it means I was left with lots of really good reads. Out of those, here are the ones I'd really push onto people, saying 'read this!

Strange Flowers by Donal Ryan - Moll Gladney runs away from her home in rural Ireland, leaving her parents distraught. One day five years later, she just as unexpectedly returns, not long after followed my a husband and small son. I've loved all of Ryan's books, but this is a tie for favourite with The Thing About December. As always, his storytelling is full of compassion and warmth. seeking to understand those who might not quite fit into society, and the writing is lyrical and beautiful, capturing the lilt and cadence of his native Tipperary.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E Harrow - One day January Scaller discovers an old book in which she reads of doors to other worlds. This can't be true, can it? but among half-forgotten childhood memories is one of a door which did exactly that. Pure escapism, which we all needed last year, and possibly will this, not though to a sunlit beach somewhere exotic, but to a myriad of other worlds. A mesmerising tale of romance and adventure, loyal friends and evil societies. I just wish I could have found a door to take me away from this past year.

Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell - speaking of plague years, Maggie O'Farrell's first venture into historical fiction takes the reader to Stratford on Avon, to the home of Will and Agnes Shakespeare, their son and two daughters, in the year that plague spread through England. O'Farrell is spot on at capturing the period, the characters, and the all-encompassing emptiness of grief and loss. 

We've all been forced to live like hermits this year, but Snow, Dog, Foot by Claudio Morandini takes things a stage or two further - an elderly man living in self-imposed isolation high on a mountain, is slowly losing his grip on reality. As winter's snows thaw, he uncovers a human foot, and his state of mind finally slips, muddling current events with those of the war. 

The Girl With The Louding Voice by Abi Dare - a coming of age story told in the words of its fifteen year old Nigerian heroine, Adunni. A disturbing tale, spotlighting the treatment of girls and women as commodities to be traded, in a society where men are all-important, and the gap between rich and poor is astronomical. It's a stunning debut novel told in a highly original voice, as through everything that happens Adunni keeps her cheerfulness and a belief that things will one day be better, not just for herself but for all Nigerian women.

Another African author I discovered this year (via her online Edinburgh Book Festival event) was Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, billed as 'Uganda's First Woman of Fiction'. Her novel The First Woman is both the story of Kirabo, a young girl finding her place in the world through the discovery of her family history, and that of the wider history of Uganda, its culture and way of life.

It's a long way from the heat of Uganda to the setting of my next pick. Sarah Moss's Summerwater is set in the Scottish Highlands on a day of endless rain. Through close observation and dipping into their thoughts, the author follows the visitors at a holiday park - bored with the weather, tired of trying to entertain the kids, curious about the other holiday-makers - as the day unwinds and tragedy waits to strike. It's a brooding, atmospheric novel, reminiscent of Jon McGregor's If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things in that nothing in itself seems remarkable, until the ending.

Carys Bray's latest novel, When the Lights Go Out, has, I feel, slipped under the radar a bit - its original launch a victim of the first lockdown, a re-scheduled date overshadowed by the autumn lockdowns. It tells of Chris and Emma, and the gradual breakdown of their marriage due to something bigger than them both - climate change. Once, they both were equally concerned about saving the planet, but whereas Emma, weighed down by juggling a job, family and income, has compromised her beliefs, Chris has become more focused, preparing for the end of the world-as-we-know-it. Something, somewhere has to give.  

I'm going to end on a cheerful note with Kate Spicer's autobiographical Lost Dog: a love story - a happy ending because he's no longer lost. You might, like me, have followed Wolfy's story on social media when he went missing, leaving Kate in disbelief and despair, and was eventually found, with much rejoicing. What I didn't know then was the impact Wolfy had had on Kate's life - bringing meaning and purpose to a life which was beginning to seem empty and aimless, turning alcohol-fueled late nights and subsequent hangovers into cosy snuggled-up evenings and early-morning walks. It's a story which speaks of the bond between dogs and men, and the unconditional love our furry partners offer. 

Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell

TWO EXTRAORDINARY PEOPLE. A LOVE THAT DRAWS THEM TOGETHER. A LOSS THAT THREATENS TO TEAR THEM APART.

On a summer's day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help. Why is nobody at home?

Their mother, Agnes, is over a mile away, in the garden where she grows medicinal herbs. Their father is working in London. Neither parent knows that one of the children will not survive the week.

Hamnet is a novel inspired by the son of a famous playwright. It is a story of the bond between twins, and of a marriage pushed to the brink by grief. It is also the story of a kestrel and its mistress; flea that boards a ship in Alexandria; and a glovemaker's son who flouts convention in pursuit of the woman he loves. Above all, it is a tender and unforgettable reimagining of a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, but whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays ever written.

William Shakespeare has to be England's best known playwright - four hundred years later his plays are still performed regularly, and he's there in every other English and drama lesson at school. Probably few of us know anything about the man himself though, his private life, and the loss which (some scholars say) lies behind his finest play Hamlet. This is where Maggie O'Farrell's first venture into historical fiction takes us - into the annex, next to his parents' house where Will and Agnes live (though he spends most of his time in London) with their son and two daughters, and where tragedy is waiting to strike.

This latest work of Maggie O'Farrell's brings all the empathy and understanding that I've found in her previous work and applies them to the Shakespeare family. As the hours tick down, as Judith takes to her bed feeling ill, and her brother Hamnet desperately tries to find his mother, another thread moves back to the first meeting of Will and Agnes, their passionate love affair and rather pressing marriage, and the bond which has kept them together even though Will has fallen in love again - this time with the theatre.

O'Farrell captures the period and the characters brilliantly. The reader is right there, alongside the women collecting eggs, tending to herb beds, and making tinctures and ointments ready for times of need, with the children trying to skip their chores and play instead, following after them round the house and garden or sneaking into the adjoining workshop of Shakespeare's father, where furs and skins are turned into gloves, from the plain serviceable pairs to the fashionable finery aimed more at show than hard wear.

Then lives are stopped by tragedy and all-encompassing grief - and O'Farrell is spot on in its description. I've lost family members over the past couple of years, and I felt that here I'd found someone who knew the emptiness and immense feeling of loss, who understood how I've felt for months, and could put it into words for me.

This is possibly O'Farrell's best work (to date, who knows what will come next?) but it just seems unfortunately timed. I think for some readers, as we head into months with corona virus dominating our lives, it may just be a little too close to home.

Maryom's review - 5 stars
Publisher -  Tinder Press
Genre - Adult historical fiction,

This Must Be The Place by Maggie O'Farrell

review by Maryom

When Daniel and Claudette met on a lonely road in Donegal, he was a New York based linguistics professor, bruised and battered by a broken marriage, in Ireland to pick up the ashes of his grandfather, and she was an ex-film star, who had famously disappeared from out of the media spotlight, now hiding out with her young son in a remote, almost derelict, old house. For ten years, they've lived together, had two more children, restored the house, created a home. Life seems to be going well, but then, on the way to visit his estranged father in New York, Daniel hears something disturbing about a woman he knew twenty years before - and his life seems ready to slip off course again.

I haven't read all of Maggie O'Farrell's novels but enough of them to know I'll be settling down to a good read. This Must Be The Place, though, is even better than I expected - in short, engrossing, stunning, compelling, moving, brilliant! 

It tells the story, not only of Claudette and Daniel, but of their wider families - children, siblings, parents, grandparents - juggling a multitude of characters with their individual stories. It doesn't progress in a straight-forward linear way but loops round itself, moving backwards and forwards in time, and from Ireland to the USA to London or Sweden, as the story is teased out, like pulling a length of yarn from a tangled skein, with O'Farrell handling all the threads seemingly with ease (though I'd love to know how she managed to keep track of everything while planning and plotting!) As if that wasn't hard enough, it's told with a variety of different writing styles, moving between first and third person narratives, a script-style interview and an auction listing of Claudette's possessions (which admirably illustrates the scary lengths that 'fans' will go to to possess a little bit of their idol).
I'm not sure Daniel and Claudette are the most loveable book characters ever, but characters with no faults make for a dull book - if they don't have 'real-life' dragons or hijackers to combat, they need internal emotional demons to overcome (otherwise A and B would meet, fall in love and 'lived happily ever after' would come on the second page) In this case, both leads have a streak of self-destructiveness running through their make-up. Daniel's shows in a tendency to drink, to cut himself off from family, to wallow in the remembrance of things that have gone wrong for him. For Claudette, it's her need for extreme privacy - having escaped the invasive media circus that surrounds celebrities, she tends towards a hermit-like existence with an inclination to protect her private space violently if needs be. 
Without it being pointed out and underlined too obsessively, the place, Claudette's tumble-down house, was the healing force that brought them together and helped mend their lives, and those of others around them, but when Daniel leaves on his round of soul-searching, will its influence persist?

In brief, it's a love story about grown-ups; not bright new teenage love but that between older people, set in their ways, not necessarily ready to compromise, and dragging baggage from their past relationships along with them. 
I absolutely loved it! Need I say more?

Maryom's review - 5 stars
Publisher -  Tinder Press
Genre - Adult fiction, 

The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O'Farrell

review by Maryom

Lexie has been sent down from University and idling her time away at home in Cornwall when a chance meeting with sophisticated Londoner Innes Kent opens a whole new world for her. Following him, she moves to London and a journalistic career in the 1950s Soho art scene.
In the present day, Elina is physically and emotionally wrecked, trying to come to terms with the world after the birth of her first child. Her boyfriend Ted finds fatherhood brings back a flood of memories that don't seem to tie in with what he knows of his childhood. His search leads him to unexpected places and events which link Lexie and Elina.

My first thought was Wow Why haven't I read this sooner? Since winning the Costa prize back in 2010 and all the great things I'd heard about it, it had sort of been on my radar as something I should read sometime but was just one of books I'd never got round to. Reading O'Farrell's latest novel, Instructions for a Heatwave, gave me the little push I needed to visit the library and borrow this at last. Now I'm annoyed that I hadn't read it before.
O'Farrell's appeal lies in the way she seemingly effortlessly gets into her characters, finds out what makes them tick, how they live, sleep and breathe. The way she captures the upheaval caused by the birth of a child is astounding - that feeling that the world now revolves around the baby and everything else falls by the wayside. That isn't to say that the other plot line is slight by comparison - both carry the same weight and impact. They move round each other and compelled me to read, read, read to find out how and when they would meet - and when they did, the realisation of what had happened hit me like a bomb shell!
An excellent book and if like me you've just not got round to reading it, do it now!

Maryom's review - 5 stars
Publisher - Headline
Genre - adult fiction


Buy The Hand That First Held Mine from Amazon

Instructions For A Heatwave by Maggie O'Farrell

review by Maryom

If you're old enough (I am) to remember the long hot dry summer of 1976, the memories of it will come flooding back - parched gardens, saving ever drop of water and above all the unbelievable, unrelieved sunshine for months! In this most un-English of summers, the Riordan family is in crisis. One morning Robert Riordan leaves his house, telling his wife Gretta that he's off to pick up his morning paper - and doesn't return. There are no clues to show where he may have gone; nothing was any more remarkable about this particular day over any other; he just seems to have disappeared. The absence of his passport and some money soon lead to suspicions that he hasn't had an accident or randomly wandered off, but deliberately planned a journey somewhere. As his three grown-up children, Michael Francis, Monica and Aoife, gather back at the family home we realise that each of them has secrets to hide - though their mother's is the biggest of all.

Instructions For A Heatwave is a marvellous absorbing read; a slice of family life, full of insight and unforgettable characters. O'Farrell gets under their skin so they spring to life off the page, seeming like people I'd known forever; lifelong friends or the next door neighbour who you think you know every last thing about - but then they surprise you with secrets!  Monica and Aoife have been estranged for several years: Michael Francis is busy trying to stop his marriage from sliding into divorce; but it's Gretta's revelation towards the end of the book that brings the jaw-dropping 'who would have guessed' moment. The only enigmatic one is the father Robert. No one knows why he's disappeared or where he may have gone. Always known as a quiet listener, rather than a talkative person, it appears no one, not even his wife, really knew his real thought and feelings.
There's an amazing attention to detail throughout - building up the atmosphere and letting the reader feel there whether with Gretta baking bread, determined that a mere heatwave won't stop her or lying on the old bedroom rag rug with Michael Francis, spilling his secrets to Aoife while Monica eavesdrops on the landing.

One of those books that grabs you at beginning and that you won't want to leave at the end!

Maryom's review - 5 stars
Publisher -  Tinder Press
Genre - Adult fiction

Buy Instructions for a Heatwave from Amazon