MUSTREADS
Out now in paperback
GIRL, BALANCING by Helen Dunmore (Windmill £8.99, 400 pp) WHEN Helen Dunmore died in 2017, her readers mourned the loss of the novels that she might have written.
But her posthumously published collection of short stories, edited by her son Patrick, is a reminder of what a tender and perceptive writer she was.
Her keen eye for unheard voices, and the strength concealed by fragility, shines through. In the title story, a lonely girl uses a trick learned in childhood to outwit an attacker.
Portrait Of Auntie Binbag, With Ribbons reveals the unsuspected talent of an eccentric aunt, while the final story, Writ In Water, is a moving account of John Keats’s death, as told by the friend who was with him at the end. MOSCOW CALLING by Angus Roxburgh (Birlinn £9.99, 384 pp) AS THE Moscow correspondent for the BBC from 1991 to 1997, Angus Roxburgh was a familiar figure on TV, reporting the historic events as Gorbachev was overthrown, Boris Yeltsin took over and capitalism came to Russia.
Roxburgh’s love affair with the country began when he was a teenager in Seventies Edinburgh, twiddling the knobs on a Pye valve radio in search of the Russian station, Radio Motherland.
Although he had no idea what was being said, he ‘luxuriated in the euphony of the language . . . the music of its intonations’.
Having studied Russian at university, he landed a job at a Moscow publishing house, and acquired an intimate knowledge of the then USSR.
Set against a backdrop of political drama and everyday Russian life, this is an intimate account of a passionate love-hate relationship with an infuriating, captivating country. LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO by Helen WalmsleyJohnson (Picador £8.99, 320 pp) HELEN Walmsley-Johnson traces the origins of her memoir to Radio 4’s The Archers, which had recently explored the coercive control of Helen Archer by her partner, Rob Titchener.
Listening to Helen’s story, Walmsley-Johnson ‘began to feel an overwhelming compulsion to set something down about what had happened to me’.
She, too, had experienced coercive control, first by her husband, and again two decades later when, by now divorced, she met a charming French businessman, Franc, on a blind date.
At first Franc’s masterful behaviour — editing her wardrobe, insisting that she go to the gym — seemed evidence that he cared for her.
But a far darker pattern of abuse quickly emerged.
Her account of their relationship makes harrowing reading, but she concludes that something good came out of it: ‘[Franc] taught me how to protect myself.’