Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson

Written with the same understated and yet resonant style as the other novel of hers that I've read, Gilead, this was a captivating and strange story of orphan girls choosing either a 'normal' life following social conventions or preserving their one remaining family connection, to their eccentric drifter aunt. Deserved to be read more slowly and carefully than I found time for!

The Language of Others - Clare Morrall

Beautifully engaging tale about the life of a woman learning to connect with other people, with twin narratives about her past as an awkward girl whose only emotional release was her passion for music, and her present as a mother slowly coming to understand her relationships with those around her. I found this very positive and enjoyable.

Something to Tell You - Hanif Kureishi

A rather large book filled with not-quite-likable characters which more than proves the point that "psychoanalysis doesn't make people behave better, nor does it make them morally good. It may well make them more of a nuisance, more argumentative, more demanding, more aware of their desire and less likely to accept the dominion of others". Well, all apart from the awareness bit - one of the things that I found frustrating about this was how the central narrator (a psychotherapist) never seemed to find satisfaction in the places he looked for it...

The Loss Adjustor - Aifric Campbell

Rather bleak novel about a woman trapped and isolated by memories of a teenage tragedy and the resulting loss of her first love. A compelling read, but I found it strangely difficult to connect with one of the main characters because of the author's careful refusal to label her "difference" (eventually revealed as autism on page 228) which had me confused at times as to whether she was perhaps just younger than the others, or simply a "difficult" personality, and prevented the central relationships from coming fully into focus for me.

The Hours - Michael Cunningham

Having found Mrs. Dalloway itself a little inaccessible, I was delighted to find that this re-imagining did a great job of capturing its essence and interpreting it for a modern (lazy?) reader. It is a powerful novel in its own right, beautiful and full of vivid characters, but also full of echoes of Mrs. Dalloway, and a mark of its success for me was that it made me feel that I could go back to the original novel and get more out of it after reading this. Most memorable - and unsettling - for me were the sections about the 40s housewife Mrs. Brown, describing the sense of unreality that can come with being alone at home with a small child: "Alone with the child, though, she loses direction. She can't always remember how a mother would act.".

Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf

I read this as preparation for reading Michael Cunningham's 'The Hours', and must confess that it took so much concentration that it felt a little like doing homework... Virginia Woolf is an author that I've always wanted to like, but never really managed to. I'm not even sure exactly why - perhaps because her approach has been so influential that it no longer has the same impact? I suspect that as someone who often picks up a book in order to be immersed in someone else's world to drown out my own inner monologue for a while, I just find it too challenging to be confronted with other people's! Strangely, for me the book started to feel less depressing at around the point that the shell-shocked Septimus committed suicide.

The Queen's Sorrow - Suzannah Dunn

This fed my new-found hunger for historical fiction perfectly - a really gripping story that kept me hooked right up to the terrible (but totally satisfying) conclusion, combined with lots of atmospheric period detail as London under Mary Tudor is described by a sundial maker just arrived from Spain. I believed in the characters and in their (sometimes shockingly naive) choices, and I also came away wanting to find out more about the real Queen Mary.

The Piano Teacher - Janice Y K Lee

This captivating novel describes two love affairs involving the same man in colonial Hong Kong, set a decade apart. The narrative structure, switching between the 1940s and the 1950s, works well, as the central plot is revealed through a mixture of memory and real time, and the characterisation is interesting as the main characters switch roles, with Will being first the more naive and then the more cynical partner in his two relationships. I found it an unexpectedly traumatic read in places - having picked it up thinking it would be a light period romance, I found it to be a surprisingly disturbing story including political intrigue and some shocking material about the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong. I think that this would repay a re-read at some point.

The Camel Bookmobile - Masha Hamilton

Thoughtprovoking story about a meeting of cultures, as the books brought to a small settlement in the Kenyan desert have a strong impact - and unexpected consequences for the people of the tribe and the American woman who is so passionate about the project. Nicely written, with varied narrators so that different perspectives are voiced, and an honest - if painful - conclusion. The book shows the potential benefits of the project, but also reveals the dangers of wrong assumptions, and the risks of arrogantly trying to 'educate' others - one character reflects on "how uncivilized it was to bring an unsolicited gift from their world and then dictate how it must or must not be used".

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian - Marina Lewycka

I'd heard a lot of positive comments about this book but when I finally got around to reading it I was a little disappointed. In my view the lighthearted writing style, although funny, distracts from the subject matter, which is actually pretty serious in places, dealing with family memories, identity, and the impact of wartime traumas on adult relationships in addition to the main plotline about two women's attempts to disentangle their elderly father from a bizarre marriage.

Amenable Women - Mavis Cheek

A quirky book that blends historical drama about Anna of Cleves (narrated by a portrait, no less) with an 'aga-saga' style story about a widow adjusting to life lived outside of the shadow of her irritatingly flamboyant husband. A fun and satisfying read, although I preferred the historical sections, which avoided the tendency of the modern-day narrative to drift towards caricature.

Music, in a Foreign Language - Andrew Crumey

Self-consciously intellectual novel about the construction of a (literary, historical, personal) narrative. The "author" presents several attempts at writing about two people who meet on a train, but each time veers off into a story about death and betrayal centred on the father of one of the characters, and complains that

the tree of possibilities branches so quickly, that it soon becomes impossible to follow with any degree of completeness, all the many middles and ends which can spring from a single beginning.

The whole thing is set in an alternative present, the inverse of the situation the "author" describes when he observes that

the alternatives seem impossible only because they didn't happen. It's left to writers now to dream of all the other equally probable outcomes which history could have chosen - like that genre of novel now appearing, based on the premise that the German occupation never occurred, and that the Communists were not elected in 1947.

Despite all the complexity, the central story is presented as a straight narrative and was engaging and satisfying.

The Lucky Ones - Rachel Cusk

Five interlocking short stories with themes of parent-child relationships, identity, and family memories. I found two of them particularly compelling: Confinement, about a woman going into labour in prison, and Mrs Daley's Daughter, a bleak tale about a rather unpleasant woman struggling to cope with her daughter's post-natal depression as memories of her own difficult experience of motherhood, and the harsh way she treated her daughter as a child, seep to the surface and threaten to overwhelm her.

I was drawn to this because I'd enjoyed (if that's the right word!) the dark humour of her rather gruelling account of becoming a mother, A Life's Work, and I wasn't disappointed. The difference was that whereas with A Life's Work I recognised myself in even the darker passages, and found it comforting to read about someone else having the same experiences, the comfort in The Lucky Ones came from feeling (extremely!) lucky not to be sharing the situations or feelings of the characters - in fact, reading about painful transitions to parenthood and difficult family relationships during the "honeymoon phase" of motherhood made me feel rather smug.

The Invention of Everything Else - Samantha Hunt

In theory I shouldn't have liked this as much as I did, as it combines two features that I normally find offputting: a fictional account of a real person (Nikola Tesla, the inventor of AC electric power) and elements of fantasy. Despite this, I really enjoyed it, perhaps because I knew nothing of Tesla's life beforehand and the fantasy passages were presented as subjective, in keeping with the opinion attributed to Tesla that "every time you dismiss aspects of this world as somehow supernatural, you are dismissing the wonder due this world".

The novel is a celebration of imagination, curiosity and possibility in a world where people are "so mesmerized by technology that they are no longer even curious enough to try to discover where the electricity they love comes from". The young woman Louisa was a very engaging character, and the story made me want to find out more about Tesla and also Mark Twain / Sam Clemens. A phrase from the book has stayed with me: "strands of coincidence that are like a piece of lace holding the world together exactly as it is in this second here".

The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt

A big dense saga about the complex intertwined lives of several families, stretching from 1895 to the aftermath of the First World War. This demanded concentration but richly rewarded it, as it seamlessly blended social and cultural history with a gripping novel about tangled relationships, betrayals, and the unintended and often tragic outcomes of trying to reconcile ideology and aesthetics with personal relationships.

The Birth House - Ami McKay

A novel based around one of my current favourite topics: childbirth. Set in a remote part of Nova Scotia in the early years of the twentieth century, the book follows the life of a young girl learning traditional midwifery from the local wise woman, and continuing to practice it in the face of increasing opposition from the doctor who attempts to replace her with a commercial medical facility in a nearby town. The traditional midwives are portrayed as sympathetic characters, acting out of love and knowing the circumstances of the women who come to them for help, and the folk remedies they offer are shown to have a kernel of effective power buried in the supersition & rituals. The doctor, on the other hand, is portrayed as aggressive and de-humanising, interested only in the moment of (sterile, controlled) birth and not offering ante-natal care or interested in the impact of the birth experience on the mother's recovery or bonding with her child. While I have much sympathy with this view, I found it a little overstated - my own opinion is that both approaches are valid and the real tragedy of the story is in the failure of the two to communicate and share knowledge, rather than in the medicalisation of birth. (I was fortunate myself to experience care from compassionate midwives within a medical context, which allowed for a swift & effective intervention using modern medical techniques when required - I truly feel that I experienced the 'best of both worlds' and that this should be the ideal.) A couple of other points that caught my attention: the revelation that the vibrator was originally developed as a remedy for 'hysteria'(!), and the description of married life for many women as an inexorable series of babies arriving under harsh circumstances, resulting in moral dilemmas for midwives approached for help by women desperate to prevent or 'lose' pregnancies.

The White Tiger - Aravind Adiga

A darkly funny fictional autobiography showing the violent consequences of the emergence of a "half-baked" caste of partly educated men whose ambitions are thwarted by institutionalised inequalities and endemic corruption in Indian society. It is really disturbing in places - I was horrified by the price at which the narrator's freedom has been bought. There are also some fascinating contradictions - his violent rage is brought on, not by the casual harshness with which he is accustomed to be treated, but by the glimpse of a different way of looking at his situation offered by his employer's wife's obvious feelings of guilt towards him. The final anecdote, showing how he has shaped a different future while working within the corrupt system, is particularly brilliant and thought-provoking.

Consequences - Penelope Lively

I loved this book. It was the first novel I found time to read after my baby daughter was born, and the clear understated writing style had a soothing and calming effect which fitted my mood perfectly while being absolutely captivating and transporting me to the times and places being described. It lived up to its own description of "the function of books", from the musings of a young girl working in a library:

That is the function of books: they offer a point of view, they offer many conflicting points of view, they provoke thought, they provoke irritation and admiration and speculation. They take you out of yourself and put you down somewhere else from whence you never entirely return.

This is essentially a family saga, written as a collection of short descriptive passages capturing significant, or everyday but revealing, moments in a manner which sometimes resembles a collage or photograph album more than a linear narrative. The shifts of focus between the generations are handled smoothly and draw your affections and interest along with them, and all of the characters are distinctive and likeable. The main theme of the book is the impact of chance meetings and extreme choices on the lives of generations...

"More provocative was the erratic process whereby you went in one direction rather than another, did this, not that, lived here, not there, found yourself with this person and not someone else quite unknown, quite inconceivable. How did this come about? Oh, you made choices, but in a way that was sometimes almost subliminal, at others so confused that, in recollection, the area of choice is obscured entirely: what was it that was not chosen? And, sometimes, choice is not an option."

Reading this as a new mother with my own mum staying with me at the time I was also struck by the comment that:

"When Ruth became a mother she had the universal, unexceptional, hackneyed revelation - she perceived her own mother differently."

All in all, the perfect first book for me as a new mother :)

Tribe - Bruce Parry (with Mark McCrum)

An interesting account of the experiences behind the recent TV series where Parry spent a month at a time living with 15 different remote communities around the world. I enjoyed some of the 'behind the scenes' material - such as initial misunderstandings where his hosts did not understand his determination to share their lifestyles and assumed that he was sharing the rich feasts that his crew were having in their tents. I was also fascinated by the reflections on ethical issues such as the impact of the filming & associated gifts on the host communities, and most challengingly, Parry's conclusions about the inappropriateness of passing judgement on traditional practices, even ones as extreme as cannibalism, the ritual whipping of women, or female circumcision.

This book did leave me a little confused, however - if the book could be described as the 'making of...' for the TV series, it left me wanting to go back another level and read a 'writing of...' for the book, because the thing that I found most compelling about the book was Parry's 'voice', his frequent self-examination and reflection on the process and impact of the filming, and so I couldn't help but become extremely curious about what this meant when there was clearly a ghostwriter involved - how much of this voice was authentic? (In Parry's thanks section at the end he thanks the writer for putting up with him being an "insufferable control freak" which seemed promising!)

The Best a Man Can Get - John O'Farrell

One I wouldn't normally have picked up, but I felt like something light & it came recommended, so I gave it a try, and was glad I did as I found myself laughing out loud all the way through it. The story itself, about a young father whose secret double life as an unencumbered bachelor is starting to unravel, plays out fairly predictably for the most part (one section did take me completely by surprise & make me laugh even harder, but this was balanced by the next "twist" being really predictable), but the writing style - full of genuinely funny one-liners - makes this well worth a read.

Winter in Madrid - C J Sansom

A big book with a great mix of intricate but satisfying plot, detailed historical setting and believable characterisation - the social and political realities of Madrid in 1940 are vividly described, as are the complex interactions of a small group of English people whose past relationships lead them to keep powerful secrets from each other in situations that they do not fully understand and cannot really hope to control. The back cover blurb mentions "the profound impact of impossible choices" which seems like a fair assessment...

The Lieutenant - Kate Grenville

The Lieutenant is set during the initial British settlement in New South Wales in 1788, and describes the impact on a young astronomer of a tentative friendship he forms with an Aboriginal child with the intention of learning her language. His character is convincingly drawn and easy to empathise with, starting with his childhood in Portsmouth where he is initially dismissed as stupid "for failing to respond to a question so simple he had not thought to answer it". I enjoyed, and found plausible, the way in which the plot develops as the unsociable outsider, who has always found it hard to relate to his peers and retreats alone into a love of mathematics and order, is paradoxically the only one who is able to recognise and connect with the humanity of the "other" as he discovers a shared enjoyment of language and learning with the Aboriginal girl Tagaran. I was also moved - and challenged! - by the moral strength of his eventual refusal to rationalise and compromise to ensure his own survival, as he concludes that:

"If an action was wrong, it did not matter whether it succeeded or not, or how many clever steps you took to make sure it failed. If you were part of such an act, you were part of its wrong... If you were part of that machine, then you were part of its evil."

In fact, I found his courage and integrity almost unconvincingly impressive - until I reached the author's endnote and was delighted to discover that the book was inspired by true events. I think that this novel captivated me a little less than it deserved to because I'd already read her previous book, The Secret River, which (together with her account of writing it, Searching for the Secret River) covers some of the same territory (geographically as well as thematically), and did make a huge impression on me.

The Other Hand - Chris Cleave

Hard to say much about this without disobeying the instruction in the back cover blurb to refrain from telling people what happens... but this is an extremely compelling story about the power of chance encounters and the impact of people's choices in the way they respond to each other and to situations. Much of the subject matter is truly shocking and "should" make for a very bleak and draining read, but somehow there is a dreamlike beauty to it - coupled with some very funny observations and well-rounded characters - which makes it feel uplifting and strangely enjoyable to read.

The Spirit Level - Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett

A clearly written and yet powerful book with the subtitle "why equality is better for everyone", this struck me as one of the best presented books based on mathematical findings that I've ever come across, although I'm prepared to believe that this is because my preferences tended towards simpler writing that usual due to reading this while pregnant, and therefore tired & hormonal!

The key argument is that once a certain level of economic development has been reached, equality is more significant than absolute wealth as a determinant of wellbeing within a society. The evidence presented here is based on showing strong correlations between inequality and many different measures relating to health and social wellbeing (including infant mortality, homicide rates, obesity, teen pregnancy etc) when measured across developed countries or US states. It is striking how the same countries appear at the "good" and "bad" ends of the graphs for each measure (with Japan & the Scandinavian countries consistently doing well, and Portugal, the UK, and - often spectacularly - the USA doing poorly). The two points that stuck with me most strongly were that the effects of this are felt at almost all levels of society (i.e. it's not just at the levels of extreme relative deprivation that people feel negative effects within an unequal society), and that the mechanism by which equality is achieved is less important than the result (as shown by comparing Japan, where pre-taxation incomes are more similar but goverment intervention is low, to other societies where this effect is achieved through redistributive taxes and benefits).

I liked the idea, apparently taken from Richard Layard, that "the consumption of the rich reduces everyone else's satisfaction with what they have, by showing it up as inferior" and that this dissatisfaction is "a cost which the rich impose on the rest of society" which could reasonably be used as an argument to justify a 60% tax rate on the better-off. I was also persuaded by the sections that attempted to interpret the data by reference to the corrosive effects of inequality on communities, and on the dangers of the increased - and often desperate - focus on status that results from greater inequality. Some of the other conclusions, for example democratic employee-ownership of businesses as part of a possible solution, while appealing to me, seemed less grounded in the data, but on the whole I found this a very convincing book.

An ongoing campaign has grown out of this book - see http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/ - and there are some slides available there showing the key findings presented in the book.