The Spinoza Problem: A Novel - Irvin D. Yalom

I can see why the author felt the need to add the rather defensive subtitle "a novel": this book exists mainly to present history / philosophy in a readable way, so it has an unusual structure and there are a lot of rather artificial conversations where people explain their theories and beliefs to each other, but if you don't mind that then it's a fascinating read.  It contains two intertwined stories, one following the 17th century philosopher Spinoza as he is excommunicated by the Jewish community in Amsterdam for his radical ideas, and another imagining the inner life of Alfred Rosenberg, an anti-semitic writer who influenced Hitler in the early days of the Nazi party, as he struggles with his ambivalent feelings towards Spinoza, hating his Jewish origins but admiring his powerful writings against religious authority.  The strand about Rosenberg is largely fictional, based on one genuine incident where the Nazis seized a collection of books from a Spinoza museum, noting in their report that they were "of great importance for the exploration of the Spinoza problem". Although this description sounds rather dry, I was utterly captivated by this book, even at one point having a nightmare after reading a passage describing Hitler's early "impassioned" speeches and the wild applause he got from the audience. (A nightmare that then became even more frightening when I woke up to hear news of Donald Trump's latest victory...)  My only real complaint is that the last paragraph in the book's Epilogue states that the bodies of the war criminals executed after the Nuremberg trials were incinerated at Dachau - this ghoulish idea made such an impression on me that I immediately looked it up, trying to work out why it happened, but the most reliable-looking accounts that I found stated that they were in fact burned in a Munich crematorium.

De Klenge Prënz - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

This was a significant read for me as it was the first book I'd attempted to read in Luxembourgish (other than picture books I'd read for the children).  I'd selected it as it was short and familiar (I'd enjoyed it in English when much younger) but I did find it a bit of a struggle in places - certainly significantly harder than reading in German - and there were several passages that I had to go over two or three times to get the meaning of them.  I did make it to the end though, learning a few new words along the way, and I even understood enough to feel quite emotional at the end of the afterword, when the narrator speaks of his sadness and asks the readers to tell him if the prince returns.  As I've been thinking a lot recently about drawing, and how people learn to draw and gain or lose confidence in their abilities, I was also quite struck by the repeated mentions of how the narrator stopped drawing as a six year old due to the poor response of adults to whom he showed his first efforts, and by his decision to take it up again as an adult so that he could create pictures to help him remember his friend.

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ - Philip Pullman

In this retelling of the gospel story (which is also a fascinating exploration of how and why such stories come to be written) "Jesus" and "Christ" are two separate characters: twins, who embody different kinds of religious faith and have very different ideas about how to do God's work.  I remember being very impressed a few years ago by David Boulton's "Who on Earth Was Jesus?", which emphasises the distinction between the "Jesus of history" and the "Christ of faith", and I liked the way that this idea was humanised and explored in this story, as Jesus simply speaks from his beliefs, while Christ, the chronicler of these events, is persuaded by a mysterious stranger that the Kingdom of God can be brought about by "writing about things as they should have been" and "letting truth into history".  This leads to reversals such as Jesus's encounter with Mary and Martha, where he actually tells Mary to "go and help your sister", but Christ feels that this was "another of those sayings of Jesus that would be better as truth than as history".  The way that events are embellished into myths is also nicely illustrated by Christ's encounter with Thomas after Jesus's death, where the people present are persuaded of the resurrection without seeing wounds from the crucifixion, but soon the "vivid and unforgettable" story of Thomas touching the wounds becomes widespread.  I was also struck by Christ's final thoughts on the allure of storytelling, as he reflects on the morality of the newly formed church and his part in its creation, and concludes that he still wants to be involved in creating a record of Jesus's life so that he can "knot the details together neatly to make patterns and show correspondences, and if they weren't there in life, I want to put them there in the story for no other reason than to make a better story".

Coming Home - Sue Gee

I found this book very unsettling. It is a family saga about a young couple with high hopes "coming home" to start a new life in England after Indian Independence, and contains plenty of sweet and funny period details, but I found the character of the mother very disturbing: her attempts to create an identity for herself by writing about her experiences are repeatedly unsuccessful, even leading her to a breakdown at one point.  I was also troubled by the description of the various ways that the children suffer because of well-intentioned or thoughtless actions (or in several cases, inaction!) by their parents. Perhaps I overreacted to these themes due to my current situation as a full-time mother who has just moved countries and is wondering to what extent choices we make for them now will have a long-term effect on our children's characters and happiness, but to me this book seemed essentially tragic. I was surprised to learn afterwards that the book is largely autobiographical, and seems to have been intended as a sort of affectionate tribute to her parents. I wonder whether, knowing that she was in part motivated by love and nostalgia, she worked hard to avoid writing something sentimental or saccharine, and perhaps went a little too far the other way.

Instructions for a Heatwave - Maggie O'Farrell

The heatwave of 1976 makes a good backdrop for this novel about three siblings brought together to help their mother search for their missing father.  It's a gripping read, full of well-observed characters and situations, which uses multiple overlapping scenarios to explore the impact of keeping secrets on relationships and families. I particularly liked the 'wild child' Aoife whose rebellion was forced upon her by a personal difficulty she was unable to acknowledge.

The Fifth Child - Doris Lessing

This horror story about a cuckoo in the nest did a good job of portraying the rapid and total unravelling of a 'perfect' family after the birth of an unexpected and unloveable fifth child. I particularly liked the description of the mother's inability to abandon her monstrous child even when it meant defying the rest of the family and sacrificing her chance at resuming a peaceful life with her older children. It covered similar ground to We Need to Talk About Kevin but was written more as a straightforward disaster narrative rather than exploring the nature vs nurture question. I was a little uncomfortable with the explicit labelling of the child (towards the end, by his mother) as a genetic "throwback" - this seemed unconvincing and to me detracted from the very real air of menace that was created when he was simply described without explanation.

All My Puny Sorrows - Miriam Toews

This deeply likeable book about a woman struggling to hold on to her suicidal sister is both a strangely enjoyable read and a powerful reflection on the nature of suffering, the inadequacies of psychiatric care, and the case for euthanasia. I was intrigued by the idea discussed in the book (in the context of Mennonite families whose ancestors had fled from persecution in Russia after the revolution) that "suffering... is something that is passed from one generation to the next, like flexibility or grace or dyslexia", but assumed that it was meant metaphorically. Shortly after reading the book, however, I came across this article on inherited trauma, which suggests a disturbingly literal interpretation. I was horrified to discover on reaching the end that the book was based on true events - I suspect it would have been a much more painful read if I had been aware of that at the start.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves - Karen Joy Fowler

I absolutely ADORED this book, and was relieved to find that my prior knowledge of it from reading several detailed reviews did not spoil it for me at all. I think that this was because, in addition to being brilliantly written, it took a subject that already fascinated me and explored it from a new perspective, subverting my expectations around issues of perceived capabilities, direction of influence, and family relationships, and considering the long-term implications of an unusual situation through well-realised characters and compellingly ambivalent relationships. One particular memory of how the narrator's sister used to "press her face and body into my back, match me step for step when we walked, as if we were a single person" resonated with me as it is something my own children do a lot at the moment. I can also thank the author for introducing me to the "uncanny valley" effect, which I found highly intriguing.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane - Neil Gaiman

This classic Gaiman fantasy adventure manages to pack in a lot of thoughtful observations about childhood ("Adults follow paths. Children explore.") and the nature of memory ("Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.") I loved the opening epigraph, a quote from Maurice Sendak that sets the tone perfectly: "I remember my own childhood vividly... I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew. It would scare them." There were some powerful and insightful scenes, such as the father trying to drown his son in the bath while under the influence of an evil spirit, but failing because of his grim determination not to hit his children as he was hit, and the child's later announcement when presented with the possibility of erasing that portion of time that he wants to remember it "because it happened to me. And I'm still me." The ending, where the narrator's briefly regained memories and understanding fade away once again, is beautiful and bittersweet.

Life After Life - Kate Atkinson

I adored this slightly insane tale of multiple alternative versions of one woman's life, which made me want to grab a pen and start charting the many decision points and their consequences, an urge I haven't felt since trying to untangle the many connections and chance encounters in the same author's One Good Turn. The sections on life in World War II (from the German as well as British perspectives) were horribly compelling, and I loved the way that many details echoed through Ursula's different lives, and some events seemed to have a force of their own, finding a way to happen despite choices that 'should' have stopped them, like water flowing downstream around an obstacle, requiring more and more dramatic actions to be taken to prevent them...

The Rabbit Back Literature Society - Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen

This Finnish novel about a mysterious group of authors and the society that shaped them was a "wild-card" present and I'm extremely glad to have received it - it is both brilliantly insane, and insanely brilliant. As the story develops, we are presented with an increasingly disturbing set of answers to the perennial question of where writers get their ideas from, as well as being reminded that nothing is ever as it seems. Although this book contains several elements that I would usually find irritating - a blurred line between fantasy and reality, and overt reminders that we are reading a work of fiction - I was drawn in by the viewpoint of the central character, who is both likeable and strongly grounded in reality, and totally won over by the originality of the ideas explored.

The Birth of Love - Joanna Kavenna

An absorbing and thought-provoking book dealing with the subject of birth and nonconformity from several different angles: a nineteenth-century physician whose campaign against puerperal fever set him so at odds with the medical mainstream that he ended up in a lunatic asylum; a novelist struggling with the social demands of promoting his book; a mother going through the terrifying beauty of the birth - the gory sundering"; and a prisoner being punished for her belief in family relationships and motherhood in a dystopian future where "it is necessary for the survival of the species that we regulate procreation". My timing was a little off on this one - while pregnant for the second time it was unnerving to read about women dying due to doctors failing to wash their hands after autopsies, and then a detailed account of a second birth that is worse than the first... Despite this, there are moments of warmth and positivity in the book, and the concluding paragraphs, describing the initial reactions of the new parents on meeting their baby daughter, are powerfully uplifting.

The Slap - Christos Tsiolkas

Although complex and engrossing, this initially struck me as a disappointing missed opportunity of a book. The main premise is timely and interesting, but the characters through which it is explored came across as unsympathetic stereotypical extremes, almost caricatures. I also found the writing style alienating - the male characters all seemed to see the world through a filter of sexual desire and barely-controlled violence, and casual racism & infidelity seemed to be the norm. I almost abandoned it part-way through, but it did improve after the first few chapters. Gradually-revealed back-stories added depth and complexity to some of the characters when it was their turn to speak (e.g. the smothering mother who blanked out all negative thoughts in her attempt to cancel out her own past and her initial inability to bond with the baby), and the later sections told from the point of view of the two teenagers were a little more appealing and hopeful. The author also displayed real skill and insight in the portrayal of the ambivalence of close relationships through the moment-by-moment reversals and fleeting contradictory beliefs in the interior monologues.

Girl Reading - Katie Ward

A collection of vivid short stories on the theme of images of women reading. One of the cover review quotes compared this to David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, and it is indeed another impressionistic journey through time, made up of diverse stories told from very diverse viewpoints. In both books, each story is individually powerful, but they are enhanced by the many subtle echoes creating resonances between the tales.
The two stories that had the greatest impact for me were both about relationships between women: one about an 18th century lady mourning her lover and the completion of her posthumous portrait, and the other in which a pair of 19th century twins meet after a long period apart following the breakup of their partnership as celebrity mediums.
The only one that lost me slightly at the time, although strangely it seems to have grown on me in memory, was one set in a dystopian future characterised by almost total virtualisation and disengagement from direct experience. In a flirtation with meta narrative that seemed a little out of keeping with the naturalistic tone of the rest of the book, this story features a 'Sibil' that allows people to engage with a series of artworks via an immersive experience that conveys the (or at least, 'a') story behind the image. I thoroughly enjoyed this book but this last story did make me uncomfortably aware that I had not seen any of the images that inspired it...

The Year of the Flood - Margaret Atwood

A tale of a dysfunctional future society and post-apocalyptic survival (or otherwise?) that celebrates and gently mocks the extreme environmentalist religion whose members are among the few with the skills and resources to endure after the "flood" of illness that wipes out most of the population. Closely entwined with her previous novel Oryx and Crake, this features several of the same characters and institutions and is set during roughly the same period of time. I enjoyed it, although it is pretty violent in places and some of her ideas of the future are rather disturbing, particularly in the light of her comment in the acknowledgements section that the novel "is fiction, but the general tendencies and many of the details in it are alarmingly close to fact".

The Long Song - Andrea Levy

In a fascinating 'writing of' section, the author explains that her intention in writing this book was to explore slavery as "a massive social system - a society in the true sense - that endured for three hundred years". In emphasising the "guile and humour" needed to survive, she creates realistic - strong yet flawed - characters, and succeeds in her aim of portraying slaves as more than "simply a mass of wretched voiceless victims"". This focus on complexities and contradictions is also applied to the white reformers, particularly the newly-arrived Englishman who is unapologetically delighted with his cleverness when he tells the slave July of his plan to marry the white mistress so that they can be together, and whose ideals give way to anger and cruelty when he fails in his attempts to persuade the freed slaves to work the same long hours as before. Most poignant for me was the way in which slave children were treated as property, with the casual removal of the child July from her mother to be a house servant echoed later in the way July's own child was taken away to England, and particularly the surprise and disbelief with which July's attachment to the master's child was met: "But what, Miss July, did you wan' keep that little pickney for your own?" The description of dances arranged so that coloured women could meet white men in the hope of "raising the colour" of their children was horribly plausible, both in the fine graduations of status from 'mulatto' to 'mustiphino', and in the demeaning entrance examination where lips, nose, hair and skin were assessed for negro characteristics. Finally, in keeping with this novel's refusal to tell a simple story, the desperate harshness of post-emancipation survival is also described. Despite the sometimes dark subject matter, this is an engaging and enjoyable book, with an often playful tone.

36 Arguments for the Existence of God - Rebecca Goldstein

This was one of those happy library finds that made me want to run out and buy the author's entire back-catalogue (or possibly just hide under the duvet and sulk because I'll never be as clever as she is). The very likeable hero Cass is uncertainly enjoying his new-found fame and success after publishing a best-selling psychology book in which he demolishes the '36 arguments' of the title while asserting that 'theistic propositions' like 'God exists' are confusing and irrelevant metaphors for the attitudes and emotions which form the true basis of religion: "what it feels like to hold a spiritual attitude to the world and live accordingly". A lively debate on this topic forms the climax to an entertaining story in which Cass is pitted against a range of characters ranging from the hyper-rational but heartless Lucinda, who believes that "most of what matters in life is a zero-sum game", to the increasingly delusional Professor Klapper, who considers Cass a Judas because he refused to write a dissertation on the Qabalistic significance of the potato kugel. For most of the novel I felt that the balance between the irrational and rational characters was not quite being held, as Klapper seemed by far the most ridiculous and destructive figure in the book, but the poignant heroism of the young Valdener Rabbi who gives up his potential future as a mathematical prodigy to return to his community is described with such warmth that I changed my mind on this at the novel's conclusion. As an entertaining bonus, 'Cass's' appendix containing the 36 arguments and their refutations is included in full as an appendix to the novel.

Advice for Strays - Justine Kilkerr

This powerful story initially presents itself as a rather charming fantasy about the return in adulthood of a young girl's unusual imaginary friend - a lion - but soon turns into something rather darker. As it gradually emerges that the child had reasons to need such a protector, the question begins to be raised - at what point does a necessary coping mechanism become unhelpful and destructive? The book manages to maintain psychological realism while dealing with wildly unrealistic content, as the lion's actions become harder to restrain, and is genuinely disturbing in places (how troubled do you have to be for your own imaginary friend to decide you are "asking for it"?), but manages to remain an enjoyable read for the most part. I loved the ending, as the gradual disconnection was described from both points of view, with the lion losing his memory as he fades away, and the girl waiting for him to return while deep down knowing that she needs him not to.

The Coward's Tale - Vanessa Gebbie

The clever narrative structure of this gentle collection of stories about a Welsh community's secrets in the aftermath of a mining disaster pulls the reader along - like the newly-arrived small boy who listens entranced to the old beggar's lyrical tales about the mysterious behaviour of the town's inhabitants, we find ourselves wondering what is truth, what is myth, and perhaps also how much it matters. An intriguing and engaging book with a surprisingly uplifting ending.

Homesick - Eshkol Nevo

This story about a young Israeli couple making an attempt to live together was an unusual reading experience, in that I seriously considered abandoning it half-way through, but persevered and was glad I did. With hindsight I think that reflects well on the skill of the author in managing to convey the loss and alienation felt in different ways by each of the multiple narrators so well that it almost pushed me away, before allowing most of them to experience some form of homecoming at the novel's conclusion. I felt that it was significant that most of the characters are able to achieve this because they were "homesick" for something they themselves had withdrawn from, whereas the only character who was still trapped at the end (literally, in an Israeli prison) was the Arab worker whose family had fled their home years before and were unable to return.