Maryom's Picks of the Year - 2014

 Last year I couldn't cut my 'picks of the year' down to a small selection at all. This year, I'm being more ruthless and from an extensive longlist I've chosen a Top Twelve.....

I think there's a tendency to pick more recently read books for a list like this but, just to prove there are exceptions, top of my list is the first book I reviewed this year - Donal Ryan's The Thing About December The heart-breaking story of gentle but dim-witted Johnsey Cunliffe is played out over a year, a chapter for each month, leading to the climax in December; an immensely sad but compelling read.




Sticking with the grim side of life, and another book from early in the year - Cynan Jones' The Dig charts a clash of wills and lifestyles between Daniel, a farmer committed to his land and animals, and an anonymous badger-baiter, earning his living through cruelty. It's raw and bleak, a definite eye-opener for anyone who thinks the countryside is a rural idyll.







In A History of Loneliness John Boyne tackles the fallout from the paedophile scandals that rocked the Catholic Church in Ireland. Father Odran Yates has been a priest for forty years, has tried to live a good, blameless life, ignoring the abuses of power taking place around him, but now has to face up to his niggling conscience.






Carys Bray's debut novel, A Song For Issy Bradley, is about loss, hope, faith and family as a Mormon family face up to probably the most devastating thing that can happen - the death of a child. Ian and Claire, and teenage children Zippy and Alma struggle with their faith and their loss; only 7 year old Jacob can see an answer - to work a miracle and bring Issy back. Ultimately hopeful and life-affirming, there are without doubt some dreadfully dark moments but they're balanced by light, humour and love.






  Another family - this time the Saddeqs from Lahore in Pakistan. Roopa Farooki's The Good Children explores the complex relationships within this family- between children and parents, and between children themselves - as they grow up, spread their wings, leave home for England or the US, but always feel that tug that binds them together. It's grand in scale - moving from the1940s to the present day - and size - 620 pages, though it didn't feel a page too long.




I struggle to find ghost stories that scare me, so I was oddly delighted to stumble across this - Sugar Hall by Tiffany Murray. While his mother makes plans for a new life in the old family home, Dieter, the boy-heir, encounters a strange ghostly boy with evil designs. With a growing feeling of menace, this is a truly spine-chilling read, probably best avoided late at night.

 Another debut, this time an excellent sci-fi dystopian thriller. Tomorrow and Tomorrow follows grief-consumed Dominic as he wanders through the virtual archive that brings nuclear-blast destroyed Pittsburgh and its inhabitants back to life.  Not-too-distant future dystopia with TV-like 'adware' that constantly streams news, adverts and reality TV style porn direct into the brain, a destroyed city recreated in virtual form, a twisting turning thriller and grief-struck hero combine to create a wonderful, complex story.

 The Lemon Grove by Helen Walsh could easily have been just another tale of sun, sea and illicit sex but it's so much more; a perceptive portrait of a family reaching a turning point in their lives, a marriage that's a little too stale, and a woman seeking to re-gain her lost youth by tumbling heads over heels in lust with a hot 17 year old. I absolutely loved it.




The storyline to Hamid Ismailov's The Dead Lake reads almost like a fairy tale - a young boy ventures into a forbidden lake and is cursed for life - but the evil wizard here is the Russian government and the lake has been polluted by atomic testing. The first of Peirene's 2014 Coming of Age series deals with a boy who doesn't grow up, and a whole region caught, literally and figuratively, in the fallout from the arms race. Told in plain, straightforward prose, it's a tale to make your heart ache.






I've read a lot of crime novels over the year but this was my favourite. The fourth of Sharon Bolton's Lacey Flint series, A Dark and Twisted Tide, is set among the old wharfs and  abandoned warehouses of London. A complex story that developed in unforeseen ways, with the story told from multiple points of view and a timeline that jumps backwards and forwards. It's only at the very end that everything comes together - and in a totally unexpected way.







...and to round off my list two rather different 'lighter' reads...

First, something very dark and wicked - Lizzie Prain finds an unusual way to dispose of her husband's dead body as she lovingly cooks her way through his remains in Season To Taste or How To Eat Your Husband. Natalie Young's humour is dark and twisted - think Sweeney Todd meets Desperate Housewives - and not for the squeamish.





Last, not least but certainly the lightest of my list, another debut - from actor Sara Crowe. Campari for Breakfast is a delightfully quirky coming of age tale about finding love and finding oneself. There are family secrets to be unearthed and a ghostly visitor to be braved, while the house threatens to crumble down and desperate ways are sought to save it. I absolutely adored this. It's light, funny and sad by turns, but overwhelmingly full of 17 year old heroine Sue's belief that one day she'll find love and begin to live decadently, sipping campari for breakfast!







Not really eligible for this list were some really amazing books published in previous years; Andrea Levy's Small Island, George Mackay Brown's Greenvoe, and Roopa Farooki's The Flying Man

The Flying Man by Roopa Farooki

review by Maryom

In a cheap hotel in Biarritz, an old man sets about writing a letter - one that won't be discovered till after he is dead; one that he feels will explain and excuse him to his friends and family. For even Maqil himself, compulsive gambler, inveterate liar, and charming con-man, is beginning to see that his life-style needs defending. Born in Lahore in the Punjab, he's travelled all over the world, lived in the US, England, Egypt, France, Hong Kong, adopting a new name and identity for each, blending in for a while then moving on again. Along the way, he's made and lost fortunes, married three times, fathered two children and is now a grandfather, but now is old, alone and penniless, facing the ultimate gamble - death and whatever lies beyond.

I discovered Roopa Farooki's writing earlier this year with The Good Children, a 600 page family-epic style novel, and have been searching my local library for more by her.  The Flying Man is almost as sweeping a novel, charting the life and 'careers' of Maqil Karam, as for most of his eighty years, trading on his good looks and charm, he flits and flies round the globe, moving on when the going gets too hard or when he might be called to account, financially or emotionally.
 Maqil is an entertaining, loveable rogue, who sees himself as moving on from one adventure to another, but beware anyone who gets too close, for at heart he's a commitment-phobe. Maqil believes, of course, that HE is the one who's had all the fun but while he's constantly on the move, escaping the responsibility of wives, children, and taxes, others are putting down roots, raising family, and  forming those lasting ties that bind us together. At the end, his life, supposedly full of glamour and intrigue, doesn't feel like it really adds up to much - he's just a lonely old man in an out-of-season holiday resort, waiting for the end - his one redeeming feature being his love for his second wife Samira.
This is the sort of story I love - a fully fleshed out world to lose myself in completely, with believable characters I can relate to; a story that pulled me in, moving from humorous to touching, that through one man's fictitious life made me think about the things that I believe to be important.

Longlisted for the Orange prize and the Impac Dublin Literary Award

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

The Good Children by Roopa Farooki

review by Maryom

Growing up in 1940s Lahore, the Saddeq children have their futures mapped out for them - the sons, Sully and Jakie, will study hard, earn a place at a foreign university, and after more study, become doctors like their father; the daughters, Mae and Lana, are brought up to be decorative and helpful around the house, to grow into perfect wives and mothers. Good children do as they are told, is their mother's firm belief and through a mix of pious sweetness and merciless bullying she manipulates the children to fit her ideal. When it comes to educating her sons, their mother is a firm believer in using the stick instead of tempting with the carrot, quite happy to literally beat knowledge into them; her daughters meanwhile are dressed up and made up, and played with as if they were dolls.
At first her plans seem to be going well  - Sully and Jakie  head off respectively to the USA and England for medical training; Mae and Lana marry young - but then things go awry. Sully marries a fellow student, half Indian, half German, deemed unsuitable in his mother's eyes; Jakie falls in love with a hard drinking Irishman, even more unsuitable!; the girls up and leave their husbands.
But it isn't that easy for them to shake their upbringing and no matter how grown up they are or how far away they live, home still has a way of drawing them back.. and in relation to their mother they'll always be children.

The first thing to say is how much I loved this book. There's something special about a good long book that I can slowly sink into - become familiar with its characters, learn their good qualities and their flaws, their hopes and disappointments - and The Good Children is definitely one of them. A story of how childhood influences continue their hold throughout life, of the things that bind families together, even while pulling them apart, and how freedom is a thing of the spirit not distance, it's a grand sweeping novel moving from Pakistan to England and the US, and from 1940 to the present day. Exploring the complex relationship between parents and children, and between the children themselves, the story follows their lives as they strike out for freedom, searching for love and fulfilment, become parents, and grandparents, themselves, but find themselves, like a jumper on a bungee rope, still tugged back to home. Jakie and Lana inherit their mother's pious caring qualities while Mae and Sully have more of her stern disciplinarian side - none of them though try to make and mould their children in the way that she did.
Despite its length - 620 pages - it never feels slow or too long; if anything the story whipped past far too quickly. Although she's a new author for me, Roopa Farooki has written several other books and I'm off to catch up on them - just hoping my library will stock some if not all.

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