Joy and misery

At this year’s Cheltenham Literature Festival, Sebastian Faulks said that after a career spent chronicling the miseries of the 20th century ( Birdsong,

Charlotte Gray, Where My Heart Used To Be, etc), it was time to write something a little lighter. He felt that he had paid his dues after confronting the century’s ‘unutterable’ horrors. ‘I am not really a sad person,’ he stated... ‘Maybe now I’ve got my rail pass, maybe I will have some fun.’ However, as a

Times leader pointed out, there is ‘great joy to be had in misery… One of the tasks of great writing is to shed light in the gloom, to make the difficult seem bearable.’ The writer Elise Valmorbida published a book a while ago called The

Book of Happy Endings, a collection of feel-good stories about finding love. But, as she told the Guardian, which had asked her to choose her top ten novels with happy endings, ‘Tragedy is generally more interesting and most of my favourite books are bleak...when I write fiction, it’s normally bleak, which perversely makes me happy.’ Her top ten of ‘happy ever after’ books included The Shipping News by Annie Proulx, Pride and Prejudice, Cold Comfort Farm and To Kill a Mockingbird.

There’s plenty of scope for misery – but also perhaps for joy? – in some of the novels reviewed in this supplement on pages 26 and 27. For example, in A Single Thread by Tracy Chevalier, which follows the life of Violet a few years after the First World War (in which she lost her brother and fiancé); in Edna O’brien’s Girl, a portrayal of the young women abducted by Boko Haram; or in The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, with themes of subjugation, sexual crimes and sisterhood. Misery? Joy? Read them and find out…

Liz Anderson