Juxtabook

The Book of Summers by Emylia Hall

The Book of Summers by Emylia Hall is a review copy which is why I read it. I would have never have been drawn to such a saccharine cover otherwise. It's external sweet shop tones belie the rather tough well written interior however, so I am very glad to have been given a copy.

The book begins with Beth Lowe, a young professional in London, living in a flat and awaiting her father on a visit from Devon. He brings with him a parcel for Beth from Hungary with a letter telling Beth her mother has died and a photograph album displaying the photographs of seven consecutive summers of her late childhood. The Book of Summers is structured around this album as Beth tells us the stories of those summers, of her parent's marital breakdown, of her own relationships with both her mother and father and of her growing-up and falling in love with a Hungarian boy Tamas.

The album idea and series of flash backs are, like the cover design, rather overworked features of some forms of genre fiction (Chick lit? Holiday reading? Maeve Binchy chest flatteners? Take your pick) and at this point I'd have been wondering what the heck the publicist thought they were doing sending this to me had not I been immediately enchanted with both Hall's prose and the protagonist Beth. Not, in the end, that I particularly like Beth (she is self-focused, juvenile, and full of misplaced anger and loyalties) but that in itself already lifts this novel away from what it first appears. Unlike typical holiday reading you need not identify with the main character, nor like her at all; she is too real, and like a colleague or a neighbour one just accepts.

Throughout the book has so much to recommend it. The handling of the troubled teenage years is done beautifully and if I am frustrated by Beth's rather arrested emotional development, then the events of her youth and the progression from happy child to surly adult is clean, clear and believable. The descriptions of life in Devon versus Hungary are lively, colourful and full of believable details. Relationships too are handled well, believable but not too tidy.

In the end I found myself thoroughly enjoying the book. As a bookseller I should know better than to judge a book by its cover. But what of the reader who picks this up seeking holiday reading? Well, it is a lovely read but it also has a very dark heart, and it is one that darkens as you finish the book and think about the events over the next days. On a sunbed I'd have been rather un-nerved by this. The colours of this book, despite the summers of the title, seem rather more autumnal to me. It has pretensions to literary fiction but it is at the more entertaining end of that spectrum. To me it is a warm throw and open fire kind of book, to mull over as the nights draw in.

All in all a very readable and worthwhile book, rather oddly packaged.

The Book of Summers by Emylia Hall is due out in paperback this week.

New in stock

A recent book buying trip has meant we have rather more fiction in stock than usual. I thought you might like an early peep ...

These copies of Philip Larkin's novels Jill and A Girl in Winter, in matching red and grey Faber paperback editions are rather tempting me. There a bit faded to the spine but I still wish I could keep them!

Another nice pair are these David Storey novels in dust wrappers. Flight into Camden, which won the 1963 Somerset Maugham Award and was Storey's second novel, Radcliffe was his third. Storey is best known for his first novel This Sporting Life, about a rugby league player, which was filmed staring Richard Harris.

We have a few new works in translation in stock including these: Memoirs of a Korean Queen by Lady Hong and The Swing and Other Stories by Vera Cacciatore.

Other new fiction includes this nice hardback in dust wrapper of The Bell by Iris Murdoch which is a very early printing but sadly not a first edition, and a Virago edition of The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West.

We also have these less well known works by Christopher Isherwood and Wilkie Collins. Basil by Collins is in the old style Oxford World Classics series, and A Meeting by the River, here in a Macmillan paperback, is a novel set in India.

Also of interest are this volume of short stories and other odds and ends by Mary Shelley, which is a substantial volume rather nicely illustrated, and this UK first edition of Seek My Face by John Updike.

We also have a range of other items in by early to mid-twentieth century writers, in both paperback and hardback, plus quite a few from Heinemann's African Writer Series. They should be catalogued some time in the next month when they can be viewed on our new website! Should you wish to jump the gun however please just drop me an email.

A New Bookselling Website and a Reading Round-Up

Well, it has been rather a while... and I have really missed blogging. The business has been keeping me busy and one of the reasons for this you can see here - ta daa!!... the new Clhawley.com. This is my new bookselling site thanks to Daniel at Eviam. Most indie booksellers in the world of used and out-of-print books have online shops powered by an American company that used to be independent but is now owned by A... well you can guess who. I have one of those sites too, but I have been looking for something brighter and speedier and easier to use for sometime. My new site is by an independent British developer which, as I am sure you'll agree, is rather more in keeping with being an indie bookseller in the first place! It seems to be running very nicely so far, but if you notice any niggles please let me know.

Whilst working I have of course been reading so by way of a catch-up here are a few thoughts on some of my recent favourites:

The Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth is subtitled 'A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language' and that is exactly what it is.  We potter along with Forsyth teasing out the meanings, origins and associations old and new for each word before progressing to another word, like a word-association game with a PhD. Part linguistic treasure chest and part history book it is a delight from start to finish, not that you ever do really finish. I keep picking it up and going round again. I know quite a bit about words, in part because of my academic background, in part because my father collects them like other people collect stamps (actually he collects stamps too), but there was plenty new to me here. Having waded through Paradise Lost as an under-grad I closed my eyes and my mind, I think, to the linguistic richness, and the section on new words by Milton was the one that amazed me the most. How did I miss all that!

I am delighted to see from Icon's catalogue that plopped through my door last week that Mark is doing it all again in the The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt Through the Lost Words of the English Language . As many of you no doubt know you can follow Mark via his blog and on twitter.

I have been reading some really good crime fiction recently. Favourites include the Inspector Banks series by Peter Robinson. Some of the titles have been filmed recently for the ITV series with Stephen Tomkinson , which I enjoyed, but I wish I had found the books first as they are so much better. They are set round here (Yorkshire Dales) and I am very much enjoying the local flavour.

My favourite crime fiction read so far this year though is The Stepmother by Simon Tolkien. Strangely out-of-print I thought this was an utterly engrossing book on both plot and character levels. An MP's second wife is accused of conspiring to murder his first wife setting her husband and his son against each other at the trial. Part conventional detective story, and part coming of age novel, I think The Stepmother captures the difficult relationships perfectly. Tolkien is a lawyer and much of the novel is courtroom based giving it a 'Witness for the Prosecution' layer, but it is so much more than that. I will be hunting down Simon Tolkien's other books. And, yes, he is of that family.

Edited to add: Simon Tolkien is the grandson of J. R. R. Tolkien, and the eldest son of Christopher Tolkien. I've discovered that the reason that The Stepmother appears to be out of print is that it has been renamed Final Witness and it is very much still available in that edition. There are two subsequent books too and you can read more on the author's own website here.

Last up for this little round-up is Promised Land: A Northern Love Story by Anthony Clavane. This is a wonderful book that I can see myself reading and re-reading. It is about football, but that is not the half of it and you should not let the football put you off. Promised Land is a tripart history telling, in lovely old-fashioned narrative style, the story of the arrival and rise and then dispersal of the Jewish community in Leeds; the arrival and rise of Leeds as a large commercial centre and newly minted city and its subsequent fall into depression with the other industrial towns of the north of England, and then its further yo yo economic fortunes; and the arrival and rise (and fall), (and rise), (and fall...) of Leeds United FC.

The author is a former history teacher turned sports reporter so he is well qualified on all counts. He is also a Leeds fan, which if you support any other club can prove to be irritating when he lauds the club known to the rest of us as 'Dirty Leeds'. In that sense the non-football-fan will enjoy the read more! It is however a pretty balanced account, often funny as it details the peculiarities of the managers (Don Revie getting a gypsy in to pee on the corner flags to lift a curse??), and quips that the Jewish support was so large that the Rabbi had them in the morning and Revie in the afternoon, and that's before we start on Brian Clough.

Overall it is a wonderful piece of history covering families, industry, and the wider socio-economic ups and downs of Britain. Much of what happens in football - racism, financial mismanagement, social cohesion, urban planning, stadium architecture - parallels important parts of British life as a whole. I found the chapters on the late Victorian and early twentieth century especially engaging, and if you find the social history of novels of that era fascinating then there is much here for you. Important and interesting, this is definitely not a book to ignore because you don't like football.

The Composites

I've just come across this site The Composites via SimonNRicketts on twitter and I thought you might like it. It is images created using law enforcement composite sketch software and descriptions of literary characters. Which is to say the author's physical description of the character is fed into the software and the resulting image published. I rather liked Tess from Tess of the d'Urbervilles but Edward Rochester (scroll right to the bottom) looks like the missing link. Pinkie Brown and Keith Talent are good ones. You can suggest characters for inclusion too.

Newly in for the TBR pile

My biggest influx of books for my own use (as opposed to stock) is always in December and January. Despite living in a bookshop my favourite presents are still books and with a birthday and Christmas in those months the TBR pile is always teetering at this time of year. I thought I'd share a few of the titles with you.

Firstly, in honour perhaps of Euro 2012, Mr J had a football theme to his present. I do love football (this is not one of those examples of weird male present buying) and these come highly recommended:

J. L. Carr is a favourite with many bloggers I know and I've wanted a copy of How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the F.A.Cup for ages. This is the lovely Quince Tree Press editon. Quince Tree was Carr's own publishing firm and is these days run by his son.

Dirty Leeds is Robert Endeacott's fictional account of the life of a long suffering Leeds United fan and the history of the club through the Don Revie era. This is the first of a trilogy and I am looking forward to it. I know Leeds, the city, well and very much enjoyed David Peace's The Damned Utd . I am NOT a Leeds United fan though and it will be interesting to see if this book can hold the attention of someone whose footballing heart lies at the far west of the M62.

Promised Land: A Northern Love Story by Anthony Clavane is also about Leeds United and strictly speaking it is no longer on the TBR pile, except that it was so good I want to read it again! Fascinating throughout you don't have to like football, and you certainly don't have to like LUFC, to think this is a cracking read. A review will follow soon.

Mr J received one football book of his own The Anatomy of England: A History in Ten Matches by Jonathan Wilson and I might be having a read of that once he's finished. There'll be plenty of reading time once England are knocked out of the Euros early... I have had a sneaky peak and I loved Wilson's description of trying to finish a finals paper on Old English at super speed so he could make it to watch a match. Rushing your Anglo-Saxon translations, now that's dedication!

Away from football much pleasure is anticpiated from these:

Spurious by Lars Iyer was a present from an old friend Anna from 6th form days. Lars Iyer is a philosopher and this is his first novel though he has another, Dogma out later this year too. Anna reminded me that I met the author over 20 years ago when she brought him to my parents' house for a meal. She and I cooked the meal, my first ever entertaining, and I still have a photograph somewhere of our 18 year olds selves and me with long black hair as opposed to the mid-length stripy badger coloured version I sport these days. A lovely present to get, though a bit nerve-racking in the 'I hope I like it' sense.

The next two I dropped hints for (Mr J is very good with book hints). Steampunk? Well why not? There's a time for everything and this year seemed as good as any for steampunk.This anthology inventively titled Steampunk is edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer.

The Richard Russo, Straight Man, is one I read a glowing review of on someone's blog and now I can't remember where. The majority of my bookbuying is stimulated by Cornflower, Gaskella and ShelfLove but I can't find the Russo reviewed on those sites, so I am afraid I don't know who to credit for this. I remember leaving a comment on whichever blog it was so if you know it was your review please let me know so I can link to it.

Next up are a couple of review copies. I don't get many review copies: 90% of the books that I review I buy new, have in stock secondhand, or borrow from the library. These two I am pleased to get however.

Of the two I am most drawn to The Little Shadows by Marina Endicott. Described as "Little Women meets Water for Elephants" it is the story of three sisters making their way in the world of vaudeville before and during the First World War. It makes me think of the film Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? though that's not very Little Women.

Another comparision strapline is being bandied about for Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway, in this case "Dickens meets Mervyn Peake", and again how appealing is that? A sneaky pre-read suggests it is going to be just as frenetic, exciting and inventive as other reviews suggest.

And lastly this is a book I bought myself as a birthday treat.

The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English Since 1950 compiled by Carmen Callil and Colm Toibin was reviewed by Dovegreyreader last week. She made it sound very tempting so I let myself be tempted. Despite two degrees and twenty years working with books and readers there are still many, many books in here that I've not read, or thought of reading, or read so long ago I've forgotten. The page per book format feels very luxurious and I enjoyed all the reference sections at the back - gosh it used to feel like this before blogs and wikipedia, browsing a reference book by the fire with a cuppa... I shall be returning to this frequently and it is NOT going to help my ever growing TBR pile one  bit. To be honest though, that's how I like it!

Juxtabook talking Charles Dickens and favourite books on Radio Leeds

I was taken aback by a phone call at 8.20 this morning asking me to go on Radio Leeds to talk about Dickens and my favourite books. With the school run to do before my allotted timeslot I didn't have time to worry about it too much. I had just scampered back through the door when the producer rang and we were off.

So here, in an internet first, the dulcet tones of Juxtabook are available to listen to for the next 7 days on the show dated 07/02/2012 here- I am on after about 24 minutes. I was more nervous listening to it afterwards than during the chat but apart from thinking that I say "lovely" too often it is not too bad for my first ever live interview. I fluffed my opportunity to publicise my website by stumbling over the words at that point so in case you missed it, my site is here!

Teeny tiny Red House giveaway

This post must be a contender for the tiniest ever giveaway. Going through my Mary Taylor things I discovered I have duplicates of a couple of postcards of The Red House and leaflets about Taylor and the Brontes. Bearing in mind the tiny number of visitors the house gets I am guessing most of you have never been and if The Red House does close then you'll never get the chance so it seemed right to offer these few things:

The stained glass postcard is the an image of the glass described in Shirley (the house features as 'Briarmains' in Shirley).

If you'd like them the just leave your name in the comments before the end of Wednesday. If there is more than one of you I'll draw names out of a hat.

Save The Red House Gomersall: Museum of writer, and friend of Charlotte Bronte, Mary Taylor's home

I've blogged before about the less well known Bronte pilgrimage destination The Red House, Gomersall. Though less famous than the Haworth Parsonage it is a beautiful house with a wonderful museum. As well as the Bronte connection Mary Taylor (whose home it was) is an interesting writer and early feminist in her own right.

 

Kirkless Council currently own and run The Red House and, like most councils, they need to make savings but it will be a terrible loss to the literary heritage of Yorkshire if this museum is allowed to close.

You can view The Red House's own site here and an article in The Guardian here and there is a petition to save it here.

Daylight Saving by Edward Hogan

Daylight Saving, published this week, is novelist Edward Hogan's first book for young adults. I was delighted to receive a copy to review. I am considerably less pleased now to have to write a review because it was so very, very good I'm going to sound like the author's mother. Do others find it hardest to review their favourite books? Anyway ...

Daniel and his father are on holiday, the worst kind of mid-teen holiday where nothing between parent and child seems to go right. Daniel is awkward and embarrassed about his father, himself, everything. His father is over-concerned about Daniel and fussing in the wrong ways. He also drinks too much. Both father and son are heartbroken over the end of the parents' marriage and neither is doing well to handle it. The October half-term break is supposed to clear the air, help them heal a little but from the start this seems unlikely. Then Daniel meets Lexi. This is no obvious teen romance but a subtler relationship where both parties gain strength and balance from the friendship. It is also a supernatural relationship. Daniel realises something terrible has happened to Lexi and it is destined to be repeated unless he can find a way to stop it.

The friendship is balanced against a superbly handled plot. As a ghost story it has plenty of tension but the overall effect, thanks to the wonderful characterisation, is delightful rather than scary. The setting of the half-term week with its definite end and the contained panic of that key hour, when the clocks go back (hence the title) keeps everything ticking briskly. This is not just the usual few hours left of the holiday friendship but something altogether more sinister. Lexi, as the victim, was a remarkably strong, clear cut, personality. She is the least victim-like of victims, and the narrative neither pities her nor makes light of what happens. She moves away from being defined by the event by seemingly changing elements and appearing to defy time itself as she swishes on her watery way.

Hogan writes terribly well about teenagers: Christopher in The Hunger Trace and the slightly younger Vincent from Blackmoor are wonderfully real creations with the charm, irritability, irrationality, insecurity and quirkiness of the complex creature that is a teenager. He is just as successful in Daylight Saving. There is nothing trite about the portrayal of Daniel and Lexi, no making light of feelings, nothing in the narrative of Hogan, the grown-up pulling the strings. Remarkably for such a book, a ghost story that relies on the power of the build-up, there is no let-down at the end. The final hour is as exciting as can be, and the personal resolutions for the characters are plausible and satisfying and I loved the last sentence of the book.

The cover of my copy has a female figure cutting through water and this sense of buoyancy, movement and purpose is on every page of the book: in the plot, in the charcterisation and finally in the resolution. Whilst remaining suitable throughout for its intended audience, it had enough of the scary stuff to keep this hardened fan of the supernatural gothic engaged too. No quibbles, Daylight Saving is just perfect for anyone from the teens up, and I'm honestly not his mother!

Jill by Philip Larkin

I've had a lot of pleasure over the years disliking the poetry of Larkin (like the style, hate the substance) and so it was with little enthusiasm that I opened Jill, one of Larkin's two novels. Shock, horror, I enjoyed every page. Not that it is without faults, but it is very much a piece of juvenilia and Larkin pleads for leniency in the introduction to my 1986 Faber edition.

John Kemp, fresh from grammar school in northern England, is about to start at Oxford University. We meet him on the train where his social inadequacies (desire to be seen to be doing the right thing combined with no understanding of what that actually is) sees him fail to eat his lunch, and then get ostentatiously and embarrassingly fed by all those sitting near him. This kind of amusing-cum-squirm-inducing moment is where the book's success lies. I can't imagine anyone having quite as many of these moments as John Kemp but we've all had enough of them to feel considerable empathy.

Once at college our young friend gets into worse pickles seemingly by the hour, is intimidated by the public school boys and repulsed by the peculiarities of the other grammar school boys. By page 100 there was still no sign of the promised 'Jill' from the cover but she appears soon after in the midst of John's loneliness and was not at all what I was expecting.

There is more to this than a kind of poor-man's-Alan-Bennett northern boy frustration, but not much more. John is engaging enough to keep the interest in this short book and Jill is a clever little twist. In the end though it is a bit like Margaret Drabble's early work: elegant enough prose, but what's the point? The whole thing is so terribly middle class, and it's a version of the middle class that existed only briefly in the middle years of the twentieth century. It is also full of that rather demeaning distance with which Larkin deals with women. Again, to some extent this was perhaps a natural feature of the age, an age of single sex education apart from anything else, but other characters in the book lack the ineptitude and peculiarities of John (doing my best to avoid spoilers here but one could write reams on attitudes to women as displayed in Jill).

Jill does have one more point of interest though in the history of the novel. This is a sort of 'campus' novel and it has as its focus a working class young man out of his milieu. Larkin, in his introduction, notes that James Gindin has suggested that Jill contained the first such of these working-class heroes but he notes:

...if it is true, I feel bound to say that it was unintentional. In 1940 our impulse was still to minimize social differences rather than exaggerate them.

And herein lies its interest. In 1940, in time of war, one can believe that there was a genuine unifying effect. Larkin's John Kemp is not really horribly out of place: much of his isolation is in his head. It is more the perceived social inadequacies of an unconfident young man than rabid social commentary. This gives the portrait a subtlety that surprises in so young an author, and also in comparison with the rather in-your-face humour of the Lucky Jim style of novel that came shortly afterwards.

In the end, Jill is rather a sweet little book, an interlude in social and literary history, and a pleasant though undemanding read.

Juxtabook's Books of 2011

This is just a quick post before it becomes too late to write it! I have three stand-out books of the year amongst the newly published and four favourites amongst the long tail, and here they are:

Like Bees to Honey by Caroline Smailes is my book of the year. It is unspeakably lovely and you can read my review here.

Edward Hogan and Jude Morgan were my favourite discoveries this year. The Hunger Trace by Edward Hogan was a great pleasure and was probably my second favourite book of those published this year. His Blackmoor however is going to go into my Top Ten Books of the Last Ten Years when I get a moment to update the list. I read Morgan's The Taste of Sorrow and Passion and Passion is one of my favourites from the already-published pile.

The last of the 2011 publications that blew my socks off was one of the last I reviewed: The Ascent of Isaac Steward by Mike French. Original. Amazing. Do give it a go.

Of the long tail I also loved The Crowded Street by Winifred Holtby and published by the lovely Persephone, but my very favourite of the older pre-2011 publications was The Youngest Miss Ward: A Jane Austen Entertainment by Joan Aiken. It is not really a sequel to Mansfield Park but a very creative spin off, inventive and with some wonderful characters.

So to summarise:

Juxtabook's Best 2011 Books:

Like Bees to Honey by Caroline Smailes

The Ascent of Isaac Steward by Mike French

The Hunger Trace by Edward Hogan

Mike French, Caroline Smailes, and Edward Hogan are all on twitter if you are on there. Click their names for the links.

Juxtabook's Best Books Read in 2011 and published earlier:

Blackmoor by Edward Hogan

Passion by Jude Morgan

The Crowded Street by Winifred Holtby

The Youngest Miss Ward: A Jane Austen Entertainment by Joan Aiken

It has been surprisingly hard to pick these books. Taking the long view, as I very much do selling used books, it seems to me that the literary novel is in fine strength, remaining as innovative and entertaining as it ever has been. Whether that can be said to be reflected in the major literary prizes is another matter!

Thank you all for sticking with me during this weak blogging year, and I wish you all, customers, fellow bloggers and fellow booksellers, twitter friends and those quiet readers who never comment, a very Happy and Book-filled New Year!