novellas

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.8

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Eve Out of Her Ruins – Ananda Devi (2006, transl. Jeffrey Zuckerman, 2016) 164 pages

I picked up Eve Out of Her Ruins as I hadn’t read any Mauritian literature before and I’m enjoying seeking out new-to-me authors as part of my Around the World in 80 Books reading challenge.

The story is told from the point of view of four young people: Eve, Saad, Savita and Clélio who live in Troumaron, a cité geographically close to and societally far away from the capital Port-Louis. As Saad observes:

“Our cité is our kingdom. Our city in the city, our town in the town. Port Louis has changed shape; it has grown long teeth and buildings taller than its mountains. But our neighbourhood hasn’t changed. It’s the last bastion.”

Saad runs with the gangs to not draw attention to himself, but he loves poetry ever since he discovered Rimbaud, and he dreams of being a writer and escaping the ghetto.

“Just as the island unfurled it’s blues and oranges, so the words unfurled still more vividly purple rages in my head.”

He is in love with Eve, who learnt early on that although she had nothing, she still had something to sell. She has been trading her body to boys and then men, for school supplies and other things she needs, since she was a child. At 17, she is still a child, but a worn-out one.

“Saying no is an insult, because you would be taking away what they’ve already laid claim to.”

“I think I look like lots of things — organic, or mineral, or strange and sloughed off, but I don’t look like a woman. Only a reflection of a woman. Only an echo of a woman. Only the deformed idea of a woman.”

Eve’s sex work is portrayed carefully. It’s not explicit but nor is it obfuscated. I thought this was responsible without being overly harrowing or voyeuristic.

Clélio likes to sing from the rooftops, but is bewildered at how to escape the cité when he is already known to the police. He pins his hopes on his elder brother who has escaped to France, while simultaneously recognising that his brother’s life may not be going well, and he is unlikely to return to collect Clélio as he promised.

“I am Clélio. Dirt poor bastard, swallower of everyone else is rusty nails. What can you do? Nobody changes just like that.”

Eve and her friend Savita are in love, and it is Savita who recognises that Eve is getting more and more closed off as she tries to protect herself from the impact of her sex work and the domestic violence her father metes out at home. It is also Savita who recognises that as they get older, the boys’ anger is growing and the girls are increasingly vulnerable.

Saad sees this too, but knows Eve won’t listen to him however desperately he tries to reach her. There is real tension in the narrative as the sense of imminent violent explosion grows.

Eve Out of Her Ruins is a tough read and a million miles away from the paradisical tourist resorts of Mauritius. It is not poverty porn though, or voyeuristic. The voices of the young people ring true and lack any self-pity. The reader is not asked to pity them, but recognise their resilience and feel the desperation of seeking a way out when the odds are against you.

“They tell me I’ll succeed. But success does not mean the same thing for everyone. It’s a slippery word. In my case, it simply means that locked doors could open just a bit and I could, if I sucked in my stomach, slip through and escape Troumaron.”

In the Author’s Preface, Devi explains “I loved them and wanted to find a way out for them. I couldn’t, not for everyone. So I have left a trail of crumbs for some of them to follow.” Hence, there is hope in Eve Out of Her Ruins, it is not relentlessly bleak. But neither is it unrealistic or sentimental. It definitely doesn’t promise a happy-ever-after for the youngsters of Troumaron.

“I read in secret, all the time. I read in the toilets, I read in the middle of the night, I read as if books could loosen the noose tightening around my throat. I read to understand that there is somewhere else. A dimension where possibilities shimmer.”

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.7

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Weather – Jenny Offill (2020) 201 pages

I have broken my self-imposed page limit for defining a novella (70-200 pages) by including Jenny Offill’s Weather, which breaches by one whole page. I regret nothing: I had really enjoyed her Dept. of Speculation when I read it for this project back in 2020 and was pleased to be picking her up again.

Lizzie is a college librarian, looked down upon by other librarians because she doesn’t have formal qualifications. She has a lovely husband Ben, and a son Eli. Her brother Henry, now sober, reappears and her mother rings occasionally causing tensions but nothing extraordinary. Still, family life can be exhausting:

“I’m too tired for any of it. The compromise is that we all eat ice cream and watch videos of goats screaming like women.”

Lizzie takes a job with her old college professor Sylvia, who hosts a podcast about climate change.

“Once I took Eli. We stood and looked at some kind of meadowland. He waited patiently until we could go back to the car.

Children cannot abide a vista, Sylvia said.”

Wading through Sylvia’s email correspondence is heavy-going “I’m really hoping all these people who write to Sylvia are crazy, not depressed.” and in the wake of ongoing environmental destruction and the election of a President whose second term we are now in, Lizzie starts to become a doomsday prepper.

“My book ordering history is definitely going to get me flagged by some evil government algorithm. Lots and lots of books about Vichy France and the French Resistance and more books than any civilian could possibly need about spycraft and fascism. Luckily, there is a Jean Rhys novel in there and a book for Eli called How to Draw Robots. That’ll throw them off the scent.”

But while Weather is absolutely about anxiety and fear of what is happening now and what will happen in the future, Lizzie’s voice remains witty and self-deprecating:

“Then one day I have to run to catch a bus. I am so out of breath when I get there that I know in a flash all my preparations for the apocalypse are doomed. I will die early and ignobly.”

Like the Dept. of Speculation, Weather is written in a fragmentary style, with the focus primarily on the female narrator. We remain inside her head as she struggles to sustain family life, work, and the wider demands of living now. I thought Offill balanced all of this expertly.

The humour never detracted from the seriousness of the wider issues, but it also carefully portrayed Lizzie trying to find a way to live when the world – both big and small – seems overwhelming.

“My husband is reading the Stoics before breakfast. That can’t be good, can it?”

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.6

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Brian – Jeremy Cooper (2023) 180 pages

Brian by Jeremy Cooper is a book which I knew I would absolutely love. I’m always in the market for tales of loners finding their tribe and building tentative friendships, and Brian had the added bonus of being largely set at the British Film Institute (BFI) cinema on the South Bank. I’m not sure how long I’ve been a member of the BFI but I think it’s about 25 years. Like Brian, when I joined it was called the National Film Theatre (NFT) and it’s a place that has brought much joy over the years.

Brian works at Camden Council, enjoying the predictability of his self-devised filing system and trying to avoid socialising with his colleagues. He lunches every day at the same place with its friendly but unobtrusive manager Lorenzo, and heads home to his flat. He just about keeps his anxiety at bay, most of the time.

“Keep watchful. Stick to routine. Protect against surprise.”

We later learn of Brian’s early childhood trauma that has contributed to his way of living, without him being overly pathologized.

“Learn quick as lightning from your mistakes or die, his mother melodramatically threatened him as a boy. And meant it, he had come to understand.”

He changes his routine one day to attend a revival of a film he’d missed the first time round, Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales. This outing changes his life, as he finds the joy of the BFI programmes and how to not be in his flat, or entirely in his own company, in a way which isn’t overwhelming.

“Brian made the vital discovery that night that something he needed to be true proved to be so: that a nakedly emotional film on themes and feelings close to his own story did not necessarily shake alive his stifled memories of the past.

He was safe. The narratives of others were not his.”

In the foyer he notices a group of regulars chatting:

“Participation in the gathering of buffs appeared to be unconditional – the fact that they were all white males, no women, was more a matter of endemic social habit than the individual prejudice of the buffs, Brian felt, in recognition of his own narrow conventions.”

Cooper’s creation of the buffs is carefully balanced. They are enthusiasts, who welcome other enthusiasts. There is no gate-keeping of film, no declarations of what is a ‘good’ film. Any snobbery is side-stepped. As Brian discovers and develops an abiding love of mid-twentieth century Japanese film, he does so with feeling, without having to intellectualise it, although he always reflects and makes notes afterwards.

“Brian tended to experience film in the moment of watching, for what it meant to him right then, regardless of when it was made or set or how accurate in pretension it might or might not be.”

Time passes, and the BFI becomes another of Brian’s routines, but with the new contained within it: all the films to experience and explore. Alongside this, his relationships with the other buffs develop, albeit at snail’s pace:

“To Brian the most extraordinary occurrence during the first decade of his every-evening visit to the BFI was the incremental formation of what he had come to accept as friendship.”

Brian definitely had an extra resonance for me, describing a London I recognised, journeys I’ve undertaken and a particular place which has a special place in my heart. There were so many echoes, from grieving the closure of the Museum of the Moving Image to Brian being an inpatient at UCLH the same time as I worked there. But I hope my response won’t alienate anyone reading this post. It has such wide-ranging appeal beyond the specifics.

Brian is a beautifully tender novel about community, friendship, and passion. It shows the deep value of a life well-lived, when outwardly that life seems unremarkable, because it is quiet and deliberately demands so little of others. It is a novel about the value of art in our lives and the value of people in our lives, accepted on their own terms.

“Brian recognised for that his entire pre-BFI life he had been a mouse, a termite, shut in dark tunnels of his own creation. Not that he had now become a lion, of course not. More of a squirrel.”

There’s a lovely interview with Jeremy Cooper about writing Brian on the BFI website here.

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.5

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Minna Needs Rehearsal Space – Dorthe Nors (2013, transl. Misha Hoekstra 2014) 89 pages

I really enjoyed Dorthe Nors’ Mirror, Shoulder, Signal as the final novella when I first undertook this month-long challenge back in 2018. Since then I’ve read her short story collection Karate Chop, and was delighted to find Minna Needs Rehearsal Space in my beloved charity bookshop. I think it has been published in editions with Karate Chop, but this Pushkin Press edition was standalone.

This is definitely a novella where the style will alienate some readers. It’s written entirely in a series of short sentences.

“Minna walks around in bare feet.

The flat is full of notes.

Bach stands in the window.

Brahms stands on the coffee table.

The flat’s too small for a piano, but

A woman should have room for a flute.”

At first I wasn’t sure I could read a whole novella like this, but then I suddenly clicked with the rhythm and it seemed a lot less jarring.

Minna is a musician living in Copenhagen, trying to write a “paper sonata” and struggling to find a place to work. She is struggling more widely too: with ambivalence towards potential motherhood; with her tightly-wound sister; with her boyfriend who has just dumped her by text.

This spurs Minna to do some dumping of her own, as she unfriends people on social media.

“Minna eats a cracker.

Karin’s missive awaits.

Karin wants to be nasty.

Karin wants to upset her applecart, but

Minna’s cart has no apples.”

She ends up packing Ingmar Bergman’s Billeder as the director becomes almost a Greek chorus/silent interlocutor, when Minna heads for Bornholm and the sea.

The short sentences act as constant present-tense status updates, a commentary on our online living. Yet by piling on the banal observations, gradually a more subtle picture emerges between the sentences. Minna’s frustrations and vulnerabilities shine through.  It’s a brave approach which for me worked well, but I already knew I liked Nors’ observations, characterisation and humour.

Minna Needs Rehearsal Space is a reminder to look beyond what is immediate to a whole picture; one that is always changing in the present and is much more complex than the surface would have us believe.

“Minna’s broken heart dwells in the breast of an optimist.”

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.4

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Burning Secret – Stefan Zweig (1913, transl. Anthea Bell 2008) 117 pages

Stefan Zweig is such an exquisitely tender writer. His precise, compassionate observations are deep with humane understanding. It makes him a perfect novella writer.

Burning Secret has a very simple structure. Edgar is twelve years old and recuperating from an illness in the spa town of Semmering. He is lonely and disregarded, bored and unnurtured.

“His face was not unattractive, but still unformed; The struggle between man and boy seemed only just about to begin, and his features were not yet kneaded into shape, no distinct lines had emerged, it was merely a face of mingled pallor and uncertainty.”

Unfortunately for Edgar, the Baron, an irredeemable cad and bounder, arrives in Semmering.

 “He felt no inclination to be alone and avoided it as far as possible; he didn’t really want to become any better acquainted with himself. He knew that, if he was to show his talents to best advantage, he needed to strike sparks off other people to fan the flames of warmth and exuberance in his heart. On his own he was frosty, no use to himself at all, like a match left lying in its box.”

This vacuous young man plans on whiling away his time in a meaningless love affair, and his sights soon settle on Edgar’s mother. As she is initially resistant to his charms, he callously decides to leverage Edgar in order to win favour.

“The Baron easily won his confidence. Just half-an-hour, and he had that hot and restless heart in his hands. It is so extraordinarily easy to deceive children, unsuspecting creatures whose affections are so seldom sought.”

Poor Edgar. He falls hook, line and sinker.

“A great, unused capacity for emotion had been lying in wait, and now it raced with outstretched arms towards the first person who seemed to deserve it. Edgar lay in the dark, happy and bewildered, he wanted to laugh and couldn’t help crying.”

For the Baron it is all a game. He has no feelings for Edgar or his mother, the latter only prey with which to amuse himself. He views her ruthlessly, identifying her snobbery and pretentions and knowing how to exploit these by emphasising his nobility. He gives no consideration to her marriage or vulnerabilities as a woman who will be judged much more harshly than he if they have an affair.

What he doesn’t reckon on is Edgar’s dawning, imperfect realisation, and the fury of a hurt child. What follows is a coming-of-age story where the lessons are learned through emotional brutality.

And yet, the resolution is hopeful, and without bitterness. It feels realistic and reflective, not undermining what has gone before but demonstrating human endurance too.

In less subtle hands Burning Secret could be sentimental and mawkish. With Stefan Zweig, it is emotionally devastating.

“He didn’t understand anything at all about life, not now he knew that the words which he thought had reality behind them were just bright bubbles, swelling with air and then bursting, leaving nothing behind.”

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.3

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With or Without Angels – Douglas Bruton (2023) 107 pages

Having loved Hope Never Knew Horizon by Douglas Bruton when I read it in February for #ReadIndies, I was keen to try more by him. With or Without Angels is an intriguing novella, attempting to capture the process of creating art at the end of life.

Written in the third person but mainly from the point of view of “the old artist”, Bruton portrays Alan Smith’s memories and thoughts as he works on his final piece, The New World, which was a response to Giandomenico Tieplo’s Il Mondo Nuovo. (In the Afterword Bruton explains that Alan’s widow had read the novella and she encouraged publication, with permission for the art to be reproduced.)

The New World is a series of images and they are reproduced in the book, after the fictional prose passages which evoke the creation of them. So for the first one, a photograph taken on a trip to Tate Modern:

“Out on the street the air was wet and chill and shifting. It smelled of bus exhausts and damp wool and faintly of cigarettes. And his wife it smelled of, too. Something with flowers in her perfume. Patchouli maybe – a shrub of the mint family – something of wet soil or apples that are past ripe, the smell of a cork pulled from a bottle of strong red wine. It’s the last of the senses to go, smell. He had heard that somewhere and was comforted that when all else failed he would know his wife was at his side by her smell.”

The smell of patchouli is something that is returned to at different sections along with other recurring motifs. This was so clever; it evoked the layering of memory and movement back and forth in time as someone contemplates the past from a present where they know their future is limited. (Also, a special thank you to the woman who stood next to me on the tube and was wearing patchouli as I read this 😊)

Time collapses in on itself at various points for the artist, disorienting but without him losing sight of his work.

“Some things are so familiar that you expect them to be there even when they are not and cannot be. The blue hat had been eaten into holes by moths. But he is sure that he has seen it hanging on the last hook in the hall as recently as a week ago.”

Bruton never attempts to interpret the work or lay claim to an absolute meaning in The New World. He is too subtle for that, and part of what With or Without Angels explores is that there are no final answers to be gleaned from a work of art.

“It’s not that he fears the questions. He wants them to be asked. That’s part of the point. It’s the answers that he frets over. He has come to a time in his life where the answers are like Brighton’s running pebbles under his feet.”

There’s also no sentimentality in the artist nearing the end of his life. Instead it is a gentle, tender, compassionate portrait.

“The thing she did with her hair […] and how he felt when he saw her do that, somehow there was meaning and hope and love in that. The old artist does not tell anyone this, not even his wife, but maybe she knows.”

With or Without Angels captures so much in so few pages. It is a remarkable work which manages to explore enormous themes with such a light touch, without ever seeming superficial.

The New World link at the start of this post will take you to Alan Smith talking about the work.

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.2

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Day two of NADIM and I’m delighted that Simon at Stuck in a Book will be reading a book a day for the month too!

The Victorian Chaise-Longue – Marghanita Laski (1953) 99 pages

It’s been years since I read the very powerful Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski, and I kept meaning to get back to her. The Victorian Chaise-Longue is a short tale of domestic terror, and would appeal to anyone who is a fan of Daphne du Maurier’s short stories, or The Yellow Wallpaper.

It opens with Melanie who has recently given birth, and is now recovering from tuberculosis, being patronised by her doctor and her husband.

“‘Now listen to me,’ he said. ‘Because you’ve managed to be a good obedient girl so far, we’ve been able to conquer what might have been a very nasty little flare up, and if you let yourself get perfectly well and we keep a steady eye on you, there’s no reason why anything of the sort should ever occur again.’”

And…

“‘How clever you are, darling,’ said Melanie adoringly. ‘You make me feel so silly compared with you.’

‘But I like you silly,’ said Guy, and so he does, thought Dr. Gregory, watching them. But Melanie isn’t the fool he thinks her, not by a long chalk, she’s simply the purely feminine creature who makes herself into anything her man wants her to be.”

So as you can see, the horror is there from page one 😀

They decide that Melanie could do with a change of view, and so she lies down on the titular furniture, which she had found in a junk shop before she became unwell. It’s heavy and ugly, but she had been taken by it; she had also experienced a memory which wasn’t hers when looking at it, which she quickly brushed aside.

When she wakes up, she is still on the chaise-longue, but in a different room and a different era, with a harsh woman who calls her Milly not Melly. At first she believes herself to be dreaming, but:

“It was real, that touch of flesh. There was no conceivable atmosphere of dream of which that touch of rough dry flesh could be a part.”

Melanie is trapped there, feeling even more unwell, cared for by the woman who turns out to be Milly’s sister Adelaide, and a stereotyped housemaid.

Milly is in some sort of disgrace, incurring her sister’s barely concealed wrath. As she tries to piece together what has happened, Melanie recognises parallels with her own life:

“Sin changes, you know, like fashion.”

I mentioned at the beginning Daphne du Maurier and the feminist classic by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The Victorian Chaise Longue perhaps suffers by these comparisons. It’s not quite as horrifyingly unnerving as du Maurier’s stories, or as overt in its wider themes as The Yellow Wallpaper. But it is an engaging, quick read, which doesn’t offer trite answers to Melanie’s predicament or the wider issue of women’s bodies so often being constrained by forces more powerful than they are.

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.1

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After a break last year, I’ve decided to return to my novella a day project in May. I always try and give myself a head start of a few posts and I’ve not managed as many as I would have liked this year, so we’ll see how it goes… My TBR is ridiculous so if I can stick to this, it will hopefully help!

The Fell – Sarah Moss (2021) 180 pages

I wasn’t really in the market for a pandemic novel, but I was so impressed by the previous novellas I’d read by Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall and Summerwater (particularly the former) that I decided to give The Fell a try.

This novella is reminiscent of Summerwater, written just a year earlier, in its use of multiple viewpoints. There is no direct speech but the story progresses from the points of view of Kate, a furloughed waitress; her teenage son Matt; their elderly neighbour Alice; and local volunteer Rob.

Kate and Matt have been told to self-isolate in their cottage in the Peak District, having been exposed to someone with Covid-19 infection. Kate is really struggling, while her son is more stoical:

“I know, she said, I’m making a fuss, I just find this really hard, I knew I would. Not, he thought, as hard as getting sick, not as hard as Deepak’s dad who was in Intensive Care for three weeks or the grandparents of kids in his class who’ve died this year or his maths teacher who’s back at work but can’t get enough breath for sentence half of the time, compared to that doing the garden instead of going up the fells is actually quite manageable, so how about he games and she does yoga the garden and they hope neither of them starts with the fever and loss of taste and smell.”

But Kate breaks the isolation, risking spreading the disease, a £10,000 fine or imprisonment, in order to go for a walk on the fell. She doesn’t take her phone with her and she reasons she won’t see anyone up there anyway.

“Damp, not quite raining. Keep moving, get warm. The relief of it, being out, being alone, starting to warm up from her own effort, wind and sky in her lungs, raindrops on her face, weather.”

Alice, her neighbour who is classed as extremely vulnerable due to her cancer diagnosis, sees Kate go.

 “Self-isolating, one of those horrible new nonsensical phrases. Social distancing, whoever came up with that […] medical distance, they should call it, or why not just safe distance, and when did ‘distance’ become a verb? Language is also infected. Return, George Orwell, England has need of thee.”

Alice was my favourite character, baking biscuits and worrying about her weight, blasting out tunes to cheer herself up, and refusing any self-pity:

“More Springsteen, there’s a reason they don’t write protest anthems about well-off retired people feeling a bit sad.”

The pandemic means that as well as isolation and frailty, she also has to contend with Zoom calls with her daughter’s family:

“Sometimes Alice thinks she’d rather have a Radio 4 podcast than Susie with her dinner.”

Kate’s walk doesn’t go according to plan, and she ends up stranded with one, possibly two broken limbs. Rob and his team of volunteer Mountain Rescue therefore have to risk themselves coming together to try and find her, and Matt is old enough and astute enough to pick up the police’s hinting questions as they try and ascertain whether Kate is a suicide risk.

All this means Kate is not a sympathetic character, but her harsh self-judgement and realisation of the impact of what she has done portrays her as a flawed human who took a really bad decision. And now she is being haunted by a raven:

“Go away, Kate thinks, bugger off. Are you a spirit guide or my mother? Oh God what if it’s both.”

Five years on from the time portrayed, and surely written very close to it for a publication date of 2021, The Fell has aged well. It captures a lot from the pandemic, and certainly reminded me about elements of daily life then which I had largely forgotten. However, it is not beholden to its pandemic setting. The characterisation is strong enough that it is a story of four people bound together psychologically by an extreme situation, while remaining entirely physically separated. It explores what survival means for different people, and the prices paid for endurance.

“You’d just sometimes rather have dark conviction than the appalling uncertainty of hope.”

“Waiting for something to happen in the deathly, unhappy silence.” (Edna O’Brien, The Country Girls)

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This is the first of what I hope will be a few posts for Cathy’s annual Reading Ireland Month aka The Begorrathon.

I really enjoyed August is a Wicked Month by Edna O’Brien when I read it a few years ago, and resolved to read The Country Girls trilogy. Admittedly it’s taken me a while but I have finally picked up the first in the trilogy, and O’Brien’s debut novel, The Country Girls (1960). Cathy and Kim are also hosting A Year with Edna O’Brien throughout 2025 so I’m joining in with that too 🙂

The girls of the title are Cait and Baba, growing up in 1950s rural Ireland, and the tale is told by Cait. Once again, I found O’Brien so intensely readable. She is great at small details that illuminate so much, without overwriting:

“Slowly I slid onto the floor and the linoleum was cold on the soles of my feet. My toes curled up instinctively. I owned slippers but Mama made me save them for when I was visiting my aunts and cousins; and we had rugs but they were rolled up and kept in drawers until visitors came in the summer-time from Dublin.”

Cait lives with her parents and man-of-all-work Hickey, on their farm which is hanging on by a thread, not helped by her father going on frequent alcohol benders. Her mother is loving but they all live in fear of her father’s return and the violence he brings.

“Her right shoulder sloped more than her left from carrying buckets. She was dragged down from heavy work, working to keep the place going, and at night-time making lampshades and fire-screens to make the house prettier.”

Baba’s family is better off financially, but they have their own sadnesses including her mother also self-medicating with alcohol. Baba can be a spiteful bully, but Cait experiences a growing awareness of how much Baba needs her too.

“Coy, pretty, malicious Baba was my friend and the person whom I feared most after my father.”

Village life is not idyllic in O’Brien’s world. There is a lot of poverty, there is violence, deep unhappiness and gossip. The girls are subject to the sexual attentions of much older men, even as they are at school.

Cait is academic and wins a scholarship to a convent school. Baba’s family pay for her to have a place too, and so the girls leave their village for the first time.

Baba despises the school with her whole being:

“Jesus, tis hell. I won’t stick it for a week. I’ll drink Lysol or any damn thing to get out of here. I’d rather be a Protestant.”

O’Brien brilliantly creates the cold, the disgusting food, the boredom and the oppressive rules laid down by the nuns.

“The whole dormitory was crying. You could hear the sobbing and choking under the covers. Smothered crying.

The head of my bed backed onto the head of another girl’s bed; and in the dark a hand came through the rungs and put a bun on my pillow.”

Eventually Baba engineers a way for her and Cait to leave, which to my twenty-first century eyes was very funny, but perhaps contributed to the banning of the book in Ireland and the burning of it by a priest when it was first published.

So in disgrace, the girls make their way to Dublin and all the seductions of city life, which Baba in particular is keen to embrace.

“Forever more I would be restless for crowds and lights and noise.”

The scandal The Country Girls created in 1960 seems very dated now. The only part I found concerning was a relationship that Cait begins with Mr Gentleman, a married man much older than she is, when she is still at school. This continues throughout the novel; it remains unconsummated but is wholly inappropriate and what we would now call grooming.

Apparently O’Brien wrote this in three weeks which is just extraordinary. Her evocations of environment and people, her ear for dialogue and her fluidity of style are all so well observed.

The novel ends on an anti-climax which initially I found an odd decision, but reflecting on it I think it is one of its strengths. It emphasises O’Brien’s choice to write about the realities of life for young women at that time, the life she knew. It insists on its truth, more than overly dramatic scenes, to engage the reader.

I’m looking forward to catching up with Cait and Baba in The Lonely Girl – hopefully it won’t take me another two years!

“I was not sorry to be leaving the old village. It was dead and tired and old and crumbling and falling down. The shops needed paint and there seemed to be fewer geraniums in the upstairs windows than there had been when I was a child.”

To end, a great interview with the author from the time of her memoir being published. She discusses The Country Girls around 11 minutes in:

“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers.” (Emily Dickinson)

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This week as part of Kaggsy and Lizzy’s #ReadIndies event I’m looking at book published by Taproot Press, “an Edinburgh-based publisher committed to presenting challenging, contemporary voices from both Scotland and beyond.”

I was keen to read Hope Never Knew Horizon by Douglas Bruton (2024) as Susan’s review and Kaggsy’s review were both glowing. It sounded truly inventive and unlike anything else I could remember reading.

There are three strands to the story, united by the theme of hope. It opens in 1891 with the Wexford Whale, beached off the coast of Ireland, caught and ultimately sent to the Natural History Museum. One of the locals is sure there is money to be made, but his love interest is sceptical:

“And all Ned Wickham’s spittle-words slap against the walls of the Wexford Arms like the sea in a breached harbour, and they fall back on Ned Wickham and wash over him, and soon enough he slumps in his chair and falls into sleep. And if you lean into the sleeping drunk and listen sharp as pins, you can sometimes still hear the man talking, all his words sluiced and slopping”

The second strand follows Emily Dickinson in the 1850s, through the eyes of her housekeeper Margaret. She sees what no-one else seems to, that Emily is in love with her sister-in-law Susan:

“If I delayed in passing the letter on to Miss Emily it was only briefly and only so I might have something of that love to myself a while.”

The third strand is set in 1880s London, narrated by Ada Alice Pullen, model to famous artists of the day and stage actress under the name of Dorothy Dene. She is painted by Frederick Leighton for the most part, and enters into a Pygmalion-type relationship with him (there is an amusing scene where they are visited by George Bernard Shaw who apparently did base the famous play at least partly on their experience):

“How could I not love the man who made that possible, who took me to the highest point of the world and showed me what was to be conquered – now that I had conquered his heart?”

But it is George Frederic Watts who will capture her as Hope forever.

Bruton is so good at evoking the various voices in his tale. Cheeky, knowing Ada; reverential Margaret, and the various voices that make up the whale strand, which runs up to the twenty-first century, where the whale skeleton has been cleaned and repaired and reinstated at the Hintze Hall. Throughout the bones’ history, people have heard their “hopeful song”:

“Do not think for a moment that the bones in those boxes sat quiet and still […] and if you asked that museum assistant what that sound was he would shrug and say it was like the shushing of the sea, the same that you hear when holding a seashell to the ear, and it was the kick and kick of water and a moaning sound, like music that is wayward and wordless and wild.”

Historical fiction can be hard to pull off and in this short novella Bruton avoids info-dumping. The historical details emerge organically from the narratives, keeping the various stories’ momentum throughout. Similarly, his beautiful prose style never weighs the stories down. There is stunning imagery but it always serves the characters voices.

He also manages the issue of fictionalising real people and events adroitly, not only through an epilogue but also in Margaret’s acknowledgement of her narrative’s shortcomings:

“She din’t actually say that about her heart surely breaking but in what she did say was the sense of what I have written or the feeling anyway.”

“I have perhaps invented a life for her that is more to do with my hopes than hers.”

Which of course aren’t shortcomings at all. We all have faulty memories and we all interpret. Margaret’s story may be hers as much as Emily’s, and it is so moving in her love and hopes for her mistress.

The narratives are united by a theme of love as well as hope. Ada and Frederick’s relationship is filled with love even when not expressed; the whale strand ends on a very moving evocation of the love of teaching and learning. The various parts are finely balanced and I found Hope Never Knew Horizon immensely moving across all three timelines.

What Bruton shows is that hope is an enduring and fundamentally human experience. We live with uncertainty and while there is uncertainty there is hope. He demonstrates that hope can exist alongside the realities of the life that has to be lived. Hope Never Knew Horizon is a gentle, compassionate book to be treasured.

Hope the Whale

“Hope” is the thing with feathers by Emily Dickinson

Hope by George Frederic Watts