April Books: Fiction

 I was transported to several different places in April as I read a bunch of novels.

A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa 

Wow! That was my reaction to this book. I came across the title in a list of books by Irish women writers that were on sale at Kenny’s Bookshop in honour of International Women’s Day. I bought a poetry collection, a short story collection and this novel. I’d read work by the other two authors before, but although I’d heard of this woman in the context of her poetry, I had not read any of her other work. I was immediately drawn into this book, which surprised me to be honest. I was a bit put off by the image of the earlier poet’s reaction to her husband’s murder in the description,  but that gruesome detail is not really dwelt upon. The book is characterized as auto-fiction, but in listening to an interview with the author after I finished the book, it seems like it hews pretty closely to her own life. I almost never re-read books, but I think I will do so with this one. It’s a keeper for sure! And I love the cover, too!

Higher Ground by Anke Stelling, translated from German by Lucy Jones

I was drawn into this book from the first page and this continued throughout. It’s a great books. It sounded good from this description on the library’s e-books site and it did not disappoint:

‘A prize-winning novel about class, money, creativity, and motherhood, that ultimately reveals what happens when the hypocrisies we live by are exposed ..

Resi is a writer in her mid-forties, married to Sven, a painter. They live, with their four children, in an apartment building in Berlin, where their lease is controlled by some of their closest friends. Those same friends live communally nearby, in a house they co-own and have built together. Only Resi and Sven, the token artists of their social circle, are renting. As the years have passed, Resi has watched her once-dear friends become more and more ensconced in the comforts and compromises of money, success, and the nuclear family.

After Resi’s latest book openly criticises stereotypical family life and values, she receives a letter of eviction. Incensed by the true natures and hard realities she now sees so clearly, Resi sets out to describe the world as it really is for her fourteen-year-old daughter, Bea. As Berlin, that creative mecca, crumbles under the inexorable march of privatisation and commodification, taking relationships with it, Resi is determined to warn Bea about the lures, traps, and ugly truths that await her.

Written with dark humour and clarifying rage, Anke Stelling’s novel is a ferocious and funny account of motherhood, parenthood, family, and friendship thrust into battle. Lively, rude, and wise, it throws down the gauntlet to those who fail to interrogate who they have become.’

The book reads in such a way that it reflects the frazzled narrator—quick shifts in time and perspective as Resi thinks back to her history as well as that of her mother and gains new insights into what is going on in the present. 

The End We Start From by Megan Hunter (audiobook read by Louise Brealey)

This sounded like a great book when I came across it in the e-audiobook collection of the library website. 

‘Megan Hunter's honed and spare prose paints an imagined future as realistic as it is frightening. Though the country is falling apart around them and its people are forced to become refugees, this family’s world – of new life and new hope – sings with love. In the midst of a mysterious environmental crisis, as London is submerged below flood waters, a woman gives birth to her first child. Days later, the family are forced to leave their home in search of safety. As they move from place to place, shelter to shelter, their journey traces both fear and wonder as the baby's small fists grasp at the things he sees, as he grows and stretches, thriving and content against all the odds.’

It was not what I expected. After listening to the first couple chapters, I was moving towards the idea of skipping the rest, but I was oddly compelled to continue listening, so I finished it (it’s pretty short, otherwise I might have chosen differently). I ‘enjoyed’ the dystopia aspect of the book, but the motherhood/baby stuff, not so much.

The book is written in short bursts with sudden shifts to excerpts from various creation myths. The whole narrative goes back and forth like this. After finishing the book, I looked it up and read a couple reviews, one of which said the author is also a poet. This shows in the way the book is written. It was well written and her descriptive writing is quite good.

The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

I read about this book somewhere last year and sent the article to Bill, who requested it from the library during the window of time between lockdowns when that was possible. Our local library has not been open for more than a year because the county council decided to open one in each of the county’s municipal districts and ours wasn’t one of them. Still, we could request things nationwide again for a while and our local librarian was nice enough to do call and collect. Either she’d let us know when something was in or we’d see it online and call her. She’d let us know when we could pick things up and we would go. Then we went into another lockdown and everything closed again, requests stopped, and that was that—until last month sometime when a different librarian called Bill to say that there were things in and he could pick them up. He called her from outside the building and she came to the door with books, including this one. He read it and liked it, so I decided to read it, too. 

The story takes place decades in the future and covers a number of years, describing the effects of the climate crisis and responses to it. The book begins with a deadly heatwave in India that kills a lot of people. Frank, an aid worker originally from the US, is the only survivor in his area. He is in rough shape when found and after recovery is a changed person with PTSD and other issues. He sets out to make a difference.

Irishwoman Mary Murphy is the director of the Ministry for the Future, a UN agency tasked with representing generations of people yet to be. They don’t really have any power, but they do what they can and Mary’s thinking evolves as the book goes on.

These are the two main characters and the author keeps returning to their stories throughout the chunky book, but there are many different stories, people, settings, and locations scattered throughout the book. Many different disciplines are represented in these stories—economics, various sciences, geography, sociology, anthropology, and more. Much of the book takes place in Zurich, and the descriptions of that city are vivid and it becomes almost a character in its own right.

The book was very well-written and the story moved along well, with the exception of a few pages which were essentially a very long list of projects undertaken around the world. The book jumps around in time and place, from one story to another quite quickly. Many chapters are very short, so there’s a brief glimpse into one situation and then suddenly readers are on the other side of the world.

I enjoyed the book, but to be honest, while I found the analysis of the climate crisis and responses to it, on both individual and national levels to be very plausible in the beginning, I found it less so as the book went on. However, it’s a work of speculative fiction and it really doesn’t matter what I think of the author’s speculations! It was a good story.

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