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.