OTHER BOOKS

Cherries on a Pomegranate Tree by Li er, tr. Dave Haysom (SINOIST BOOKS)

In one-child China, when a mother runs from home because of her illegal pregnancy, it’s Kong Fanhua’s problem.

She’s the only female village chief in Xiushui County, and her day-to-day tasks range from the mundane to the near-impossible: tracking down this runaway who left her twins behind, keeping rumours of a vengeful ghost at bay while trying to convince some rich American to invest in the local paper plant. Not to mention looking after her own farm and family. After all, the crops aren’t going to plant themselves.

While the incompetent men in local government fail to get much done, Fanhua picks up the slack. But when higher-ups start investigating her hometown’s birth quotas, just as she’s up for re-election, the squeeze is on. Can she keep all the plates spinning? Or will she resort to
villainous tactics to preserve the peace? And why won’t her lazy husband shut up about camels?

IF the river is hidden by Cherry smyth & Craig Jordan-baker (époque press)

If the River is Hidden charts the journey of two writers from the source to the mouth of the Bann, Northern Ireland’s longest river. Through a dialogue of prose and poetry the history, landscape and divisions that have come to define the North are explored and challenged. 

With backgrounds from each side of the sectarian divide, theirs is a journey of uncovering a sense of place and of searching for meaning; a reshaping of the authors' own memories, experiences and expectations. For like the river, it is not just what is visible, but what is hidden, that comes to define us.

Also click here to listen to a unique composition by flautist Eimear McGeown, specially commissioned to accompany this book.

RIAMBEL by PRIYA HEIN (THE INDIGO press)

Fifteen-year-old Noemi has no choice but to leave school and work in the house of the wealthy De Grandbourg family. Just across the road from the slums where she grew up, she encounters a world that is starkly different from her own ­– yet one which would have been all too familiar to her ancestors. Bewitched by a pair of green eyes and haunted by echoes, her life begins to mirror those of girls who have gone before her. 

Within Noemi’s lament is also the herstory of Mauritius; the story of women who have resisted arrest, of teachers who care for their poorest pupils and encourage them to challenge traditional narratives, of a flawed Paradise undergoing slow but unstoppable change.

In Riambel, Priya Hein invites us to protest, to rail against longstanding structures of class and ethnicity. She shows us a world of natural enchantment contrasted with violence and the abuse of power. This seemingly simple tale of servitude, seduction and abandonment blisters with a fierce sense of injustice.

WITH OR WITHOUT ANGELS by DOUGLAS BRUTON (FAIRLIGHT BOOKS)

The thought in my head does not yet have shape or form, only direction, one picture leading into another.

An ageing artist, faced with his own mortality, embarks on one final artwork. As he battles to complete the project, working with an enigmatic young photographer, he finds his past and present blurring. Through the act of creation and the memories it excavates, the artist comes to a realisation about what matters most, and what he will leave behind when he is gone.

This hybrid and innovative short novel responds through fiction to The New World, the final artwork by the late artist Alan Smith – which is in turn a response to an eighteenth-century fresco, Giandomenico Tiepolo’s Il Mondo Nuovo. In With Or Without Angels, with sparkling, dreamlike prose, Bruton weaves a story around these artworks, arriving at both a profound exploration of the creative process and a timeless love story told in a new way.

FEMKE by DAVID CAMERON (TAPROOT PRESS)

Turn-of-the-century Amsterdam. Femke walks its streets and parks with her loyal dog, Bibi. A daughter of the colonial Dutch, a magnetic personality prone to petit mal seizures and destructive relationships – and a liar? This is her story.

Femke is the outstanding new novel by Hennessy Literary Award-winner David Cameron. Told from the unreliable point of view of Femke, a drifter living in turn-of-the-century Amsterdam, the novel charts her integration into the unsettling world of a British filmmaker and his wife, before meeting and befriending the ageing Dutch poet Michiel de Koning. Revelations about De Koning’s past work and involvement with real-life poet-murderer Gerrit Achterberg soon lead Femke to try and track down his mysterious great love and inspiration, ‘M’. Could finding M restore the ailing poet to health? And what else might she discover in the process – about her past, her mother, herself?

Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg (trans. Wendy H Gabrielsen) Weatherglass Books

Near Distance was published in Norway 2019 and won both the prestigious Tarjei Vesaas debutant prize and the NATT&DAG Oslo prize for best literary work. And The Wigeland Prize given to the best translation from Norwegian by a resident of Norway.

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Her whole life, Karin has fled from everyone and everything that wants to possess her. She has a daughter she rarely contacts, a job she never wanted, and she mainly socialises with men she meets on the internet. But when her daughter’s marriage risks falling apart, she is forced out into a world that demands something from her.

Astute observations in a narrative shifting between the past and the present gradually reveal the vulnerabilities of this 53-year-old store manager, who would rather go for a drink with a new man than babysit her grandchildren.

Against a background of meditation retreats and personal shoppers, Near Distance deals with intimacy, introspection and self-deception. It’s about longing for purity in a world of chaos – and how strange the story we tell about ourselves can seem to others.

Sylvia by Maithrey1 karnoor | Neem Tree Press

At the centre of this kaleidoscope of tales is Sylvia, a young woman named by her parents after their favoured poet, Sylvia Plath. She sets off in search of an estranged uncle and finds him quite by chance in Goa. Her uncle who has come to be known as Bhaubaab by the locals is an eccentric man, who after having lived in Tanzania and the U.K. returns to Goa to live by the mystical baobab tree. He is pleased to rekindle a relationship with his newfound niece. But after Sylvia feels she's crossed a line from which she cannot be redeemed, she disappears. What follows are a series of stories in which the reader catches glimpses of Sylvia in cameo appearances in the lives of others; sometimes a wife, others a lover, in another she is a mother, and yet another she is a mentor, until finally she is revealed again in full at the end. 

The story is infused with themes of women's lived realities, Indian mythology, motherhood and mental health.