Are You Somebody? - Nuala O'Faolain

Although I'd never heard of Nuala O'Faolain before picking this memoir up in the library, the title intrigued me and the reviews were complimentary, so I borrowed it.  I found it utterly enthralling, as her combination of intelligence and naivety as a young woman was very likeable, and her writing seemed very honest and self-aware.  Her clearsighted descriptions of the situation of women in Irish society were especially captivating - and I was particularly struck by the incident she describes where a psychiatrist she visits when depressed admonishes her: "You are going to great trouble," he said, "and flying in the face of the facts of your life, to re-create your mother's life."

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.

A Man Without a Country - Kurt Vonnegut

This "memoir of life in George W Bush's America" is, as you'd expect, quirky, angry, and funny, with the author sharing witty and perceptive opinions on socialism, art, politics, religion, relationships, the environment... His view of modern society is pretty bleak (psychopathic personalities are in charge, "we are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial", and it's too late to do anything about it) but he includes a rather beautiful requiem for life on Earth, and urges us, despite this, to "please notice when you are happy", and reflect, as an elderly relative used to, "if this isn't nice, I don't know what is". The most memorable part for me was a brief section on the decline of extended families ("A husband, a wife and some kids is not a family. It's a terribly vulnerable survival unit.") His analysis that women want "a whole lot of people to talk to [...] about everything" and that most marital arguments can be interpreted as the couple saying to each other, "You are not enough people!" resonated with me during a period where, having just moved abroad, I was expecting my husband to fill the gaps left by my missing friends and listen to everything I wanted to talk about...

Breakfast on Pluto - Patrick McCabe

I was curious about this book as I had enjoyed the film, which I remembered as quite quirky and upbeat, but either I had misremembered the film, or the source material was a lot darker. The central character, a transvestite prostitute obsessed by the idea of his true mother, comes across as extremely fragile and delusional, and the political situation in Northern Ireland is more central to the story than I'd remembered, with the fate of the trio of friends seeming to portray possible outcomes of traumatic situations: one is killed, another (the main character) escapes into a fantasy world, and the third eventually moves forward to a healthier future. The writing is witty and tender, however, and the humanity of the characters prevents the often bleak subject matter from becoming depressing.

In One Person - John Irving

When I started reading this, it was a few weeks after I picked it up at the library, and I'd forgotten why I'd selected it and who it was by. A couple of pages in, I was startled by a sudden jolt of recognition on reading a sentence (a parenthetical sentence, with a key word italicized) that was so typical of John Irving, it was like unexpectedly bumping into an old friend. Thankfully, in this case the old friend hadn't changed too much, and we still got on very well. The book was packed with comfortingly familiar settings and themes, although the extremely frank and specific descriptions of the central character's sexual experiences and preferences were a little unsettling at times. I found the section of the book dealing with the AIDS epidemic to be particularly powerful, especially a sad anecdote about the panic caused when the central character has a nosebleed while training at the wrestling club where his sexuality had previously been grudgingly accepted. Unfortunately I felt that the ending fell a little flat (perhaps because the characters were eclipsed by the desire to deliver a message?) but overall I found this to be an enjoyable read.

Suite Française - Irène Némirovsky

This book provided a fascinating glimpse into life in France following the German occupation in 1940. The first part portrayed the chaos and desperation of the masses fleeing Paris following the initial reports of the German advance, and the second, which made more of an impression on me, described life in a small village as it returned to a sort of uneasy calm despite the presence of occupying German soldiers. A tentative romance between a French woman and a German officer was well described, as were the ongoing tensions between personal and political sensibilities, identities and loyalties. Unusually for me, I actually found myself shouting at some minor characters in the book at one point when I felt that they were being particularly thoughtless and naive... Perhaps the most compelling part of the book were the two appendices, one containing the author's notes on her plans for this series of novels, and the other consisting of a set of deeply sad correspondence showing her difficulties in surviving under the increasing restrictions placed on Jews in occupied France, and her husband's desperate attempts to obtain news of her after her arrest (which, heartbreakingly, continued after we now know that she had died at Auschwitz).