Fairlight Moderns

I made it! I’m genuinely amazed! May has been a really busy, slightly chaotic month and I can’t believe I managed to sustain my daily novella reading and posting. I’ve enjoyed it so much, and a massive thank you to everyone who has liked and commented, and ignored grammatical errors and general waffle, as some of these posts were written when I was very tired 😊

Many of you will know Simon has also been doing his #BookaDayinMay project, so it feels very apt to be finishing with a book he reviewed this month which had me scurrying off to spend my bookshop.org vouchers. The Driveway Has Two Sides by Sara Marchant (2018), is published by the lovely Fairlight Moderns and it arrived just in time!

The Driveway Has Two Sides follows the arrival of Delilah on an East Coast island. “The matriarchs” of the island are sceptical of this self-contained young woman.

“They were taciturn by nature, and the environment on the island required tact, discretion, and independence.”

They watch her clean out her house and start to reorganise her garden. Some of their questions are answered when Delilah changes out of her overalls into a dress, in order to greet a man the matriarchs judge as “too old for his long hair and overly blue denim jeans.”

This is Alan, Delilah’s married lover who is paying for everything. He’s entirely self-focussed and just likes Delilah as a pretty young thing to feed his ego, the same as his sports car:

“Delilah’s silence was one of Alan’s favourite things.”

Delilah doesn’t seem too bothered by this, as she views her relationships with older men as transactional. With Alan the material gains are obvious. With Ted, the sweet, kind, widowed Sherriff of the town, she wants his gardening know-how:

“She saw his gardening instinct win out over lust. She hugged her arms around her waist. She loved older men.”

There is a lot about gardening in this novella, which is a big win for me, I loved all the descriptions of garden plans and planting. But if you’re not into gardening don’t let that put you off, it’s not overwhelming!

“The shades and variations of green, highlighted by the specimen plants that were not green, looked more than natural. They looked supernatural. It was an Impressionist painting come to life. It was a masterpiece. Ted was an artist.”

We follow Delilah as she gets her physical house in order, while trying to work out how she is going to live. (Teeny criticism: there is talk of her ‘completing’ her garden. Any gardener knows you never complete your garden!)

“Later, during his trips by her house, Ted watched as she developed her kitchen garden in the front. He understood her reasoning; there was more room, more sun, a fence to use as garden bones. He still found it scandalous, yet also intriguing, he had to admit.”

The titular driveway is shared with her mysterious neighbour, someone even more contained than Delilah. He is attracted to her, as is seemingly every man in the book. Their relationship builds, and so in a sense the plot is who of three men Delilah will choose.

But that’s not a plot that particularly interests me, yet I enjoyed Driveway. I enjoyed it for its depiction of small-town life, its gentle humour and its humanity.

Unusually for me, I finished the short novel for once wishing it had been longer – I would have liked to have met Maisie Thompson, Delilah’s “friend and sparring partner” who we only hear about (unless I’ve forgotten a brief portrait near the start) and I would have loved to have had more of Mrs Oakapple and her fellow matriarchs. I also really wanted to know by the end what one of the characters did next.

The Driveway Has Two Sides is a gentle, quick read, especially recommended for those who like Katherine Heiny or Anne Tyler. I’m hoping Sara Marchant is going to be one of those authors who return to the same setting in further novels, so I can hear much more about the town and its sparky, kind residents.

I’m late joining Reading Ireland Month, hosted by Cathy at 746 Books which is such a shame as I really enjoy this event every year. But I’m hoping to squeeze a few reads in before the end of the month and so far I’ve manged two novellas by a new-to-me author.

Voting Day by Clare O’Dea (2022), is published by indie Fairlight Books. The author is originally from Dublin but has been living in Switzerland for more than two decades. The novella explores the failure of women’s suffrage in the referendum of 1959; Swiss women didn’t get the vote until 1971.

We start the day of the referendum with Vreni, exhausted wife of a farmer, who believes:

“The system worked well and women didn’t know enough about politics.”

She is travelling to Bern, for surgery on her prolapsed womb. I really felt for her when she reflected:

“Rest was the word that jumped out at her when he explained the ins and outs. She was giddy about the prospect of rest. She would be looked after, two weeks in hospital and one week in the convalescent home.”

Meanwhile, her daughter Margrit is one of the first generation of young single women to work independently in the city, encountering misogynistic assumptions from male colleagues about what this means for her sexual availability:

“They did not profess their profound respect for you before beginning a campaign of casual touching that seemed to reflect special understanding between you […] nor were they handsome and cultured, these dangerous men. They hid their claws until it was too late.”

On her admission to hospital, Vreni catches the eye of the cleaner Esther, who is from the Yenish traveller community. She has suffered under the racist policies of social services:

“Somebody somewhere decided that our little home was too full and too free. They took three of us away and left the younger ones. They wanted to see children in straight lines with clean dresses and plaited hair.”

Esther subsequently struggled as a single mother:

“I had to solve my problem during Ruedi’s naps before the money ran out. When he fell asleep in my arms after a feed, I would gently place him in the playpen where he would be safe if he woke. And I would run, run from one end of the town to the other, looking for solutions.”

And we realise that Ruedi is Vreni’s foster child. The situation is so heart-rending, Vreni unintentionally exacerbating Esther and Ruedi’s pain. Pivotal is Beatrice, Esther’s boss and the only one of the four protagonists truly concerned with the referendum.

“She thought she had braced herself for this, but hope would always wriggle in, that treacherous friend.”

Voting Day effectively demonstrates the way women’s rights are circumscribed in society by both formal and informal systems of power. It does so without losing sight of its characters and conveys so much of their individual stories in an incredibly short space. I found it highly readable, whizzing through it to an end that was reassuring without being entirely unrealistic.

“Can you be content and heartbroken in the same bed on the same night? It seems you can.”

In Before the Leaves Fall (2025, also Fairlight Books) O’Dea revisits Ruedi and Margrit, now both in old age. There are some lovely echoes throughout, such as the opening scenes of rösti, Vreni’s homemade expertise contrasting with Ruedi’s ‘slimy’ shop-bought version.

Margrit is in a care home, spiky and determined to avoid the enforced social niceties at all costs:

“Better this than the nonsense Nadja was peddling, yoga and meditation. Margrit had been caught in a talk about mindfulness the other day because her legs were acting up, and she hadn’t been able to leave the dayroom quickly enough. You had to be vigilant in this place.”

Ruedi is retired, widowed and now working for Depart, an assisted dying organisation. This is the decision Margrit has taken, reluctant to live through another winter (hence the title) and struggling with her significantly reduced mobility and lack of independence. Ruedi is her assigned volunteer, to ensure she is comfortable with her decision. He mustn’t become emotionally involved.

“She was not only escaping. She was also reaching for something. Not freedom necessarily, not oblivion, but the feeling of putting herself first. She wanted to own herself once and for all, regardless of what the others – her husband, had children, the experts, even the people in this home – might think or want.”

But of course, once they realise who one another are, feelings are quick to grow. Margrit was a beacon of kindness and compassion in Ruedi’s difficult childhood.

“Margrit, a person who finally looked at him and saw something worth kindling. Margrit Sutter with the lovely wavy hair and smart clothes, the girl who smiled and played Ludo with him and told stories of Bern.”

He now becomes one of the few she allows beyond her tough carapace, as they remember the old days and learn who one another became. Both are disappointed in the relationships they have with their children and grandchildren. Both are grieving their spouses, particularly Ruedi who had a happy marriage.

“‘I grew old.’

‘It happens to the best of us.’ She smiled for the first time since he had met her.”

O’Dea is very good at writing children – sweet Ruedi in Voting Day and now his grandson Florian, perhaps less likeable but entirely believable.

Before the Leaves Fall follows the developing friendship between Margrit and Ruedi, as they both reflect on seemingly uneventful lives and how well these have been lived, as well as what living there is left to do. It’s deeply moving in its portrayal of how we hurt the ones we love and how insurmountable gaps in communication can seem.

As different relationships grow and develop through Before the Leaves Fall, they are evoked with compassion but without sentimentality.

Both novellas tackle Big Issues but without any didacticism. The interest is not in what should or shouldn’t be happening, but in what does happen and how this affects ordinary people.

“The bottle of grief was never empty. Always another sip to take, and another sip after that. You got used to the taste.”

To end, how I first learnt of women’s suffrage, dubbed into the language of the characters of these books: