Highway Blue by Ailsa McFarlane

 

Anne Marie and Cal got married young; she was just nineteen, he a few years older. A year later, he walked out one morning, leaving Anne Marie to an aimless life of bar work, shared apartments and one night stands.

Two years later, he shows up out of the blue, trying to put things right, but he brings trouble with him, and the couple are soon on the run, taking the Highway Blue in search of love and belonging.

Highway Blue is a short novel (less than 200 pages), but a compelling, memorable one. 

Despite the violence that sets Anne Marie and Cal on the run, the book isn't plot-driven as such - this isn't the sort of road trip that involves fast car chases or the encountering of odd people or unusual places. Instead, as they travel south by car and hitch-hiking back to the town where Anne Marie was born, she journeys back though her life, not nostalgically but in an attempt to understand herself and the position she finds herself in now. 

It's beautifully written, told by Anne Marie in the first person, with a haunting, yearning quality. With her, the reader dips back into her childhood and her realtionship with her mother, experiences her all consuming but brief love for Cal, and shares her hunger for something better than she's known so far. 

Love, Sex and other Foreign Policy Goals by Jesse Armstrong

review by Maryom

1994 - and what used to be Yugoslavia is splitting into innumerable factions, all at war with each other. Into this turmoil venture a group of well-meaning young activists from Manchester, convinced that if they can reach Sarajevo in their van, and perform their peace-promoting play, all will be right with the world.

Andrew has definite views about the situation in Yugoslavia, believing utterly that war is a bad thing, but more importantly, from a personal perspective, beautiful, desirable Penny is writing the play and going along on the trip - volunteering will surely help him win her love, won't it? Certainly it will mean he can keep an eye on his rival Simon, and any moves he might attempt on Penny's affections. So Andrew joins the group, and they head off through Europe in a Transit van, carrying supplies for those displaced by war and bringing hope to all, or so they believe.

This is the first novel from Peep Show and The Thick of It writer Jesse Armstrong, a tale of naive do-gooders off to bring peace and happiness to a worn-torn country when all UN intervention has failed. As you'd expect it's fairly light, a lot nearer to Summer Holiday than The Killing Fields; even by the group's leader, passionate, fiery American Shannon, the whole thing's seen as more of a road trip with a little philanthropy on the side than a serious peace mission. The group potter about, making friends with a small-town war lord, hiring mercenaries, dodging bombs and bullets, seemingly unaware of the danger they could be in, and with Andrew's eye always fixed on his real reason for being there - getting to sleep with Penny.
 It's not big on characterisation or deep insights into the plight of man, although the group do come to realise the horror of war and the futility of their plan. Overall the feeling is of wry humour, rather than laugh out loud comedy but it's an enjoyable enough read, though it felt at times like it might have been originally intended for screen rather than page.

It seems odd to label this as 'historical fiction' but set in the 1990s, what else could it be!

Maryom's review -  3.5 stars

Publisher - Jonathan Cape

Genre - adult fiction, historical fiction, humour, road trip

Last Bus to Coffeeville by J Paul Henderson

Review by The Mole

Nancy, Gene and Bob met at university as young activists trying to bring about the end of segregation. Gene was studying to become a doctor and Nancy took a shine to him. Nancy comes from the deep south where desegregation is the most stalled. When she takes him home to meet her family she confides the awful truth that Alzheimer's Disease is hereditary in her family - amongst the women - and she manages to get him to promise that when (not if) her time comes he must help her to die rather than suffer the degradation that the disease brings.

On returning  to college later Doc (Gene in the early part of the book) finds a note that Nancy is splitting up with him.

A lifetime later and a call out of the blue from Nancy about meeting up. Their friendship is re-kindled and Nancy explains that the early signs of Alzheimer's are showing.

While this book is ostensibly about their trip back to the deep south where Nancy wants to spend her final days that would be like saying that "War and Peace" is about Russia - there is so much more story along the way that the reason for this group of friends coming together is very much secondary.

The most part of the first half of the book is more like a group of linked short stories. With each character we meet we are treated (a carefully chosen word) to hearing their back story - and every one is an interesting delight. Then when the friends come together and the journey starts the book changes to a proper story telling.

This group of friends is a very diverse group in age, outlook and history and the journey bumps along with incident after incident but frequently returning to that horrific subject of Alzheimer's.

Did I mention the humour? I need to mention the humour... while trivialising nothing and not making fun of the disease or its victims in any way, this story is laced with humour throughout from this eclectic list of characters.

Doc - who's been dealt a bad hand by life but when he does get a good hand then life goes and trumps it. He tends to be a bit miserable.

Bob - an ex FBI hit man - a job he couldn't resign from so now he's hiding from them but despite this he is the most optimistic and realistic of the bunch.

Eric - a 13 year old boy whose parents have died and his guardians have enrolled him in a deaf school. He's not in the slightest bit deaf.

Susan - Eric's exotic dancing cousin and only family.

Jack - an ex weatherman most noted for his on-air resignation and terrified he's losing his hair.

And finally, Nancy - the most normal of the bunch but perhaps normal is overrated.

A brilliant début by this author and I look forward to what he pens next. Funny and sad in equal measure this book will appeal to most adult readers but as for a genre? I have no real idea.

Publisher - No Exit Press
Genre - Adult, road trip, humour

Laikonik Express by Nick Sweeney

 review by Maryom

Nolan Kennedy and Don Darius are two thirty-something Americans living abroad, moving round Europe and the Middle East, teaching English. When Don leaves Istanbul for Warsaw, he leaves his novel draft in the rubbish bin. Kennedy finds it, believes it will make Don the next great American novelist and sets out in pursuit of him. From hot steamy Istanbul to snowy Warsaw is an epic enough journey in itself but Kennedy has barely arrived when Don insists they travel up to Abel on Poland's Baltic coast in search of a girl he's met on a train. Along the way they meet strangers that become friends and change the course of their lives.


Laikonik Express is a road-trip novel with a difference - it's by train! Like all road-trippers, long-time friends Kennedy and Don are chasing their dreams: Kennedy wants to be the man to discover that next great thing in American literature; Don just wants to meet up again with a woman he thinks he's fallen in love with. What they discover is that their goal might not be somewhere else or at some distance point in the future but here and now - and not in quite the form they'd expected.

 It took me a while to get into reading this novel. In part this could have been due to getting used to e-reading on the new Kindle or that I feared, with Kennedy harping on about his discovery of new great American novelist and constant literary references, that it was trying too hard. It didn't really grab me till the start of the 'second leg' of the journey - up to the snowy wastes of Abel via, seemingly, most of the bars in Poland! Abel itself is wonderfully imagined - an out-of season seaside resort trapped under snow and ice - and it's here that they meet not the woman they'd been looking for but Krystyna, former war-time guerrilla fighter, former car development engineer in the US now returned home and dying but still beautiful and full of life.

It's a book that, having read it, discovered the overall pattern and seen how it ends, I'd go back and re-read, expecting it to grow on me.

Maryom's review -  3.5 stars

Publisher - Unthank Books
Genre - Adult, literary fiction 

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