LITERARY FICTION
A GOD IN EVERY STONE
IT’S 1914 and Vivian Rose Spencer, a young and adventurous Englishwoman, is in Turkey, on a dig, pursuing her love of archaeology and her mentor archaeologist.
But theirs is a doomed love — first thwarted by the outbreak of war, then by a tragic misjudgment that will see her lover killed and Vivian Rose tormented by her inadvertent betrayal.
The story’s second protagonist is Qayyum Gul, who starts the novel as a soldier in the British Indian Army. Wounded at Ypres, he returns to his home town of Peshawar.
It’s here that their two paths cross when Vivian Rose travels to the city on an archaeological hunt for a fabled ancient artefact and the main characters become embroiled in the struggle for freedom from British colonial rule.
That outline might sound a bit ho-hummish, but this is a novel that’s far from run of the mill.
The main characters and their storylines are strong enough in themselves, but they also combine very cleverly to build to a dramatic climax.
This is the sixth novel from the awardwinning Kamila Shamsie, and it is firstrate — intelligent, vivid and completely absorbing.
MY BIGGEST LIE
THIS is a first novel by a former editor at a little publisher in Birmingham. It stars a would-be novelist who used to work for a little publisher based in Birmingham, but I trust that’s where the autobiographical element ends in this tale of death and debauchery.
Our unheroic hero is Liam Wilson who splits up from his girlfriend and then runs off to Argentina.
Liam is in the middle of a breakdown caused by the break-up and his guilt and shame after an unfortunate night out when he and a famous, hell-raising novelist painted the town red on a bender fuelled by drugs that Liam supplied — and which killed the celebrated writer.
As they did back home, Liam’s misadventures in Buenos Aires involve some sex and a lot of drugs (‘I had gone without cocaine for over an hour now,’ is a fairly typical sentence), but even so the novel struggles to gain any momentum — and its melodramatic literary sub-plot seems as implausible as its weird literary bigwigs and, indeed, its debauched literary parties.
The reality, alas, is a glass of warm white and a mushroom vol-au-vent.
STRANGER THAN KINDNESS
NOTE the middle initial — this Mark Radcliffe isn’t the annoyingly incoherent and up-himself Radio 1 DJ, but another Mark Radcliffe entirely — one who has written a couple of novels and has worked in psychiatry and healthcare.
It’s a CV that stands him in good stead in this novel about psychiatric nurses and their charges.
The first part is set in 1989, with our quietly decent hero, charge nurse Adam Sands, toiling away at a Victorian asylum in North London.
His patients include Libby, who is adamant that she doesn’t have a body, Maureen, who thinks she’s a man, and Michael, a schizophrenic who’s very worried about the radio transmitter in his teeth and who has tattooed a swastika on his own forehead.
And Adam has problems of his own, particularly his continuing trauma after another patient killed himself by drinking bleach.
A cut to the present brings us up to date on Adam, and on the newest trends and scandals in psychiatric nursing — it was care in the community in 1989 and now it’s the nefarious workings of the drugs companies.
Public issues and private lives mingle rather successfully in this gently paced and understated, but engaging novel.