NEWRELEASES
Flames By Robbie Arnott, Atlantic Books, £12.99 Reviewby Alys Key
Flames is a bold piece of writing that will leave any reader yearning to visit the wild Australian landscape of Tasmania. Robbie Arnott
(right) takes his native island as the setting and injects it with a magic realist flair that will appeal to fans of Karen Russell and Angela Carter.
Loosely speaking, it tells the story of the McAllister family. After Charlotte and Levi’s mother dies, she is briefly reincarnated only to burst into flames on their father’s lawn. As Levi worries the same will happen to his sister, he becomes obsessed with building her a coffin. Charlotte, meanwhile, hits the road, disappearing into the most remote parts of the island.
Each chapter is written in the voice of a different character, some only tangentially connected to the main thread, giving it some of the breadth of a short story collection.
Some sections, like the diary entries of a wombat keeper slowly descending into madness, could serve as standalone stories. Others, like the slightly cliched private detective, serve only to push the plot forward.
It is glorious, messy and a bit weird, but it works.
Courage Calls To Courage Everywhere By Jeanette Winterson, Canongate, £7.99 Reviewby Liz Connor
Named after the words featured on Gillian Wearing’s Millicent Fawcett statue in Parliament Square, this timely essay celebrates how far women have come in the past century, while issuing a wake-up call about why, in a climate of #MeToo and the gender pay gap, there’s still a long way to go for women to achieve true equality.
Winterson (below) makes some interesting comments about how advancements in technology affect women, particularly that if artificial intelligence is the future, then we should be worried that so few women are attracted to Silicon Valley’s top jobs.
She follows up her points with a reprint of Emmeline Pankhurst’s 1913 ‘Freedom or Death’ speech, reminding us why brave, not silent, women often shape the future.
It’s powerful and frank, but at just 80 pages long, I felt like there was more to say on many of the subjects Winterson touches on. However, it’s a great primer for anyone who isn’t sure whether they identify as a feminist, or why they really should.
House of Glass By Susan Fletcher, Virago, £16.99 Review by Jemma Crew
It is summer 1914 and life is changing for Clara Waterfield and England. Hopelessly naive, and mourning her mother, our sheltered narrator is summoned to Gloucestershire to create a greenhouse the country will envy.
But at Shadowbrook, bodiless footsteps sound at night, flowers shed their petals within hours and the master of the house never wanders the sprawling gardens he supposedly loves. Determinedly atheist, Clara is keen to explain these unnerving goings-on and clear up the rumours swirling around the prior occupants.
Who was Veronique, whose malevolent presence is said to haunt the creaking house? And why was her family so hated? These questions unwittingly lead Clara to unearth personal truths she had not expected to confront. Fletcher
(left) skilfully constructs a world where war looms with a heavy inevitability, where rumours twist and strangle like vines and the most straightforward of scenarios are riddled with deceit.