Category: Fiction

The Italian Girl by Lucinda Riley

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The Italian Girl Rosanna Menici is only eleven years old when she first meets Roberto Rossini, the son of her parents’ best friends. Roberto is an opera singer at La Scala in Milan, a career which to Rosanna seems impossibly glamorous and out of reach. At a family party, Roberto hears her voice and recommends that she have singing lessons, but Rosanna tries not to get her hopes up. Her parents run a restaurant in the Piedigrotta district of Naples and although it is a successful business, they are not rich people and singing lessons are expensive. But when Rosanna’s brother, Luca, comes to the rescue and helps to pay for the lessons, it seems that her dream of becoming an opera star and marrying Roberto could eventually become a reality.

The Italian Girl is a lovely, romantic story spanning three decades and taking us from the streets of Naples and churches of Milan to a peaceful English village and some of the world’s greatest opera houses. It’s not a new novel – it was originally published as Aria in 1996 under the name Lucinda Edmonds – but has been revised and updated so that you wouldn’t guess it had been written so much earlier than the more recent Lucinda Riley books.

One way in which this book is different to the other novels by Lucinda Riley that I’ve read (The Girl on the Cliff, The Light Behind the Window and The Midnight Rose) is that the others have dual narratives, jumping between past and present, but this one, apart from a few letters written by an older Rosanna, follows one linear timeline. I like both types of book, but I do prefer to stay in one time period so I was happy with that aspect of The Italian Girl. Although this book isn’t really what you could call ‘historical’, being set in the fairly recent past, I think I would still have liked more period detail as the 1960s chapters didn’t feel any different from the 1970s or 1980s. On the other hand, this is a story driven more by the characters and their relationships rather than by the setting.

I initially found the young Rosanna a very endearing character. Things did seem to fall into place for her too easily, but I didn’t mind because I liked her and wanted her to succeed. Later in the book, though, I began to find her frustrating. I disagreed with a lot of her decisions, but I was hopeful that she would do the right thing in the end. As for Roberto, I had thought at first that he was going to be the sort of romantic hero I could fall in love with along with Rosanna…suffice it to say that this certainly didn’t happen, but I won’t spoil the story by explaining why not!

While the relationship between Rosanna and Roberto forms the main plot, there’s also a secondary romance between Luca and Rosanna’s friend, Abi. I liked both of these characters and found their story as interesting to follow as Rosanna’s and Roberto’s. I also enjoyed learning about the lifestyle of a professional opera singer and the amount of hard work and training it takes to reach the top. I’m not an opera fan and probably never will be, but this book made me want to listen to some of the arias Rosanna sings in the story.

The Italian Girl is a long book – almost 600 pages, which makes it quite a thick paperback – but after a slow start I was swept away by the story and it didn’t feel as long as it looked. It was the perfect book to read sitting outside in the summer sunshine we’ve had here this week!

I received a copy of The Italian Girl for review.

Family Roundabout by Richmal Crompton

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Family Roundabout Like many people, I read some of Richmal Crompton’s Just William books as a child but have never investigated any of her adult fiction. I don’t think I was even aware that she had written books for adults until just a few years ago when I discovered Persephone Books. This is the first Persephone I’ve read for a while and it has reminded me of all the reasons why I love reading the books they publish.

Family Roundabout is set in a small town in England in the 1920s and 30s and tells the story of two families, the Fowlers and the Willoughbys, each consisting of a widowed mother with five adult children. The families are initially drawn together when Helen Fowler marries Max Willoughby, and as the years go by their lives become more and more entwined as various other family members form friendships, fall in love or become rivals. Some of these family members include Anice Fowler, quieter and less confident than Helen, whose envy of her sister could destroy her chance of happiness; Oliver Willoughby, reluctant to go into the family business but lacking the courage and the spirit to do something different; Cynthia Willoughby and Judy Fowler, whose friendship becomes strained after they have the opportunity to meet their favourite author, Arnold Palmer; and Peter Fowler, unhappily married to the spiteful, manipulative Belle.

Each of these characters has his or her own storyline and there are other Fowler and Willoughby children too – and later, grandchildren – so as you can imagine, there’s a lot happening in this novel. At the centre of the story, though, are the two people around whom all the others revolve: Mrs Fowler and Mrs Willoughby.

Mrs Fowler was once Millicent, a strong, independent person with opinions of her own, but after her marriage she became Milly, obliging, submissive and gentle. Millicent hasn’t disappeared entirely, but Milly is now the dominant side of her personality. She is always there for her children when they need her, but takes quite a passive approach to parenting, rarely interfering and allowing them to choose their own path in life. Mrs Willoughby, on the other hand, is practical, efficient and likes to control every aspect of her childrens’ lives. Even after they marry and leave home, she continues to make decisions for them and tell them what to do. The author never judges these two different styles of mothering and it is left to the reader to decide which, if either, is the most successful parent.

Family Roundabout endpapers

Family Roundabout endpapers

Family Roundabout is a very character-driven novel and fortunately almost every character in the story is well drawn and interesting. There were some that I didn’t like (Belle has to be one of the most horrible, vile people I’ve come across in fiction for quite a long time) but I enjoyed following all of their stories through to the end of the book. I loved the portrayal of the self-absorbed author, Arnold Palmer, and I thought the child characters were very well written too, which is maybe not surprising from a writer who wrote so many successful children’s books!

There’s a lot of unhappiness in this novel, a lot of bitterness and jealousy, but there are also some funny scenes and some amusing bits of dialogue, which means it doesn’t become too dark. I’m not sure I would rank this among my very favourite Persephones but I did really like it. It’s a shame more of Richmal Crompton’s adult novels aren’t still in print, as I would definitely be interested in reading them having enjoyed this one so much.

The Orchard of Lost Souls by Nadifa Mohamed

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The Orchard of Lost Souls In 2013, Nadifa Mohamed was named one of Granta’s “Best Young British Novelists”. This is her second novel, set in Somalia in the 1980s as rebel forces clash with the military dictatorship and the country heads towards civil war. The events of this turbulent period are seen through the eyes of three female characters:

* Deqo, a nine-year-old orphan who grew up in a refugee camp and has now found herself homeless and alone in the city of Hargeisa.
* Kawsar, a widow mourning the death of her daughter, who becomes confined to her bed after a violent beating at the police station.
* Filsan, a soldier sent to Hargeisa from the capital city of Mogadishu and feeling homesick for the life she has left behind.

During a military parade at a stadium in Hargeisa, the paths of these three women briefly cross before they are separated again and go on to have very different experiences of this troubled time in Somalia’s history.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a book set in Somalia before and I knew nothing about the causes of the civil war or the situation in Hargeisa, so reading The Orchard of Lost Souls meant I had an opportunity to learn something new. Telling the story from three different perspectives allows the author to explore different aspects of the war; through Deqo and Kawsar we see what it was like for people living in and around Hargeisa, trying to survive from one day to the next, while Filsan’s story gives us some insights into the military regime. As you can probably guess, many of the things the women experience are traumatic and brutal, though I won’t go into any details here.

As well as being educational, this is also a compelling story (or stories, as there are really three of them in this one novel) and I was interested in all three characters, although I thought Filsan was much more difficult to like than either Deqo or Kawsar. However, I did have some problems with the structure of the novel, especially at the beginning. For the first fifty pages of the book, the viewpoint switches rapidly between each of the three women which I found very overwhelming and confusing. I was relieved to discover that this didn’t continue all the way through the book! The opening section was followed by three longer sections concentrating on one character at a time, so I was able to get to know each of them separately before they eventually meet again near the end of the novel.

I can see why Nadifa Mohamed has won awards for her writing because she clearly has a lot of talent and her descriptions of Somalia are beautiful. I’ll leave you with one of my favourite passages, where Filsan remembers the streets of Mogadishu:

In the centre of the city where the alleys narrow at points to the width of a man’s shoulder blades, you can walk as if in a dream, never certain of what might appear after the next bend: a bare-chested man with a silver swordfish slung over his thin black back, a shoal of children reciting Quran from their wooden slates, a girl milking a white, lyre-horned cow. The place has enchantment, mystery, it moves backward and forward in time with every turn of the feet; it is fitting that it lies beside an ocean over which its soul can breathe, rather than being hemmed in by mountains like a jinn in a bottle.

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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Americanah Americanah is the story of Ifemelu and Obinze, two Nigerian people who have very different experiences of immigration. Ifemelu leaves Nigeria as a young woman to complete her studies in America. Thirteen years later she is still there, having established a successful career for herself as a blogger, but she has now made the decision to go home. Before she returns to Lagos, Ifemelu goes to an African hair salon in Trenton, New Jersey, to have her hair braided – a process which takes six hours, giving her time to reflect on all the things she has learned and observed during her years in America.

Obinze, who was Ifemelu’s boyfriend before she left Nigeria, also has dreams of going to America but is unable to obtain a visa and ends up working in London as an illegal immigrant. Obinze and Ifemelu are eventually reunited in Lagos, but will their love have survived so many years of separation?

As promised on the book cover, there is a love story to be found in Americanah, but this is not the main focus of the novel. The focus is on Ifemelu and her life in America, with several chapters following Obinze and his experiences in England. On arriving in the country that will be her home for the next thirteen years, Ifemelu faces a lot of challenges and difficulties, ranging from finding a job to learning how to cook hot dogs! She has many encounters with examples of racism (sometimes very subtle and sometimes much more obvious) and at the other end of the scale, people who are trying too hard to avoid talking about race because they’re afraid that they might cause offence. All of this gives Ifemelu plenty of material for her blog, which she calls Raceteenth, or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-­American Black.

Some excerpts from Ifemelu’s blog posts are included in the book and are fascinating to read, particularly when she writes about the differences between being a black American and a non-American black person. Something I found interesting was Ifemelu’s comment that “I came from a country where race was not an issue; I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America.” This is in contrast to her cousin, Dike, who leaves Nigeria with his mother as a very young child and so has a very different perspective on life.

While I didn’t love Americanah quite as much as I’d hoped to, it was full of insightful observations and it’s a book that I would recommend to everyone, whatever your race, nationality or skin colour. As a white person, I confess that many of the aspects of race discussed in the novel are things that have never even occurred to me. So, as a commentary on race and immigration, I thought this book was excellent – the best I’ve read on these subjects. The various devices Adichie uses (blog posts, discussions at dinner parties, the conversations of the women working in the hair salon) give her an opportunity to explore important issues in an interesting and often witty way rather than just lecturing the reader.

Purely as a novel, though, I thought Americanah was less successful. It felt a lot longer than it really needed to be, considering the plot is not a particularly complex one, and while I was interested in following Ifemelu’s and Obinze’s separate storylines, I found I didn’t really care whether they got back together at the end of the book or not. I think for me personally this is a book I enjoyed on an intellectual level rather than an emotional one, which is not necessarily a negative thing, but probably the reason why, of the two books I’ve now read by Adichie, I prefer Half of a Yellow Sun to this one.

The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout

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The Burgess Boys Although the title of this novel is The Burgess Boys, there are actually three Burgess siblings – Jim, Bob and their sister Susan. Jim and Bob live in New York, while Susan is the only one to have remained in Shirley Falls, Maine – the town where they grew up. Jim is an ambitious and successful lawyer, whose defence of the singer Wally Packer has made him a household name. His younger brother, Bob, also has a career in the law but has never matched Jim’s achievements; he has spent his whole life blaming himself for an accident which killed his father, and as a result he doesn’t have a lot of confidence. Susan, Bob’s twin, is a single mother living in Shirley Falls with her troubled teenage son, Zach.

Shirley Falls, predominantly a white community, has recently become home to large numbers of Somali immigrants. Racial tensions in the town are already high and when Zach throws a frozen pig’s head through the door of a mosque during Ramadan, it causes a national scandal. Jim and Bob return to the town of their childhood to support their sister and find out why their nephew has done something so terrible, but in the process they make some surprising discoveries about themselves and about each other.

I received a review copy of this book from the publisher last year but didn’t read it as it didn’t sound very appealing to me and as I hadn’t requested it I didn’t feel under any obligation to read it if I didn’t want to. I do remember reading some positive reviews of it, though, and when I noticed it was named on the shortlist for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction I decided to give it a try. Now that I’ve read it I think my initial reaction was correct because it really wasn’t my type of book at all; I was interested enough to keep reading right to the end and I appreciated the quality of Elizabeth Strout’s writing, but this was a book that I could admire without particularly enjoying.

I found this quite a subdued and depressing novel. All of the characters, even the secondary ones, seem to be such unhappy people, dissatisfied with their lives, their marriages and their jobs. With the possible exception of the good-natured Bob Burgess and one of the Somali characters, Abdikarim Ahmed, I didn’t like any of them. I thought Susan was cold and bitter, Jim was over-confident and insensitive, and Helen (Jim’s wife) was shallow and self-absorbed. There’s certainly a lot of character development and by the end of the book it’s obvious that there is more to each person than originally meets the eye – but they are simply not people that I had much interest in getting to know.

I do think it was a good idea to write part of the novel from the perspective of the Somali immigrants. I was struck by the way so many of the non-Muslim people in Shirley Falls, while not necessarily racist, seem to have almost no knowledge of Islamic culture or the customs of the Somali people who are living among them (they incorrectly refer to them as Somalians, for example, and in some cases have never heard of Ramadan and don’t know why a pig’s head might be offensive to a Muslim). However, I never felt I completely understood Zach and why he did what he did, although the author does her best to make us feel sympathetic towards him by portraying him as a shy, awkward teenager who (slightly unbelievably) was unaware of the implications of his actions.

The Burgess Boys is a thought-provoking read and a good portrayal of a dysfunctional family, but I found the story disappointingly flat and boring, lacking any sort of drama or interesting plot developments. However, despite not enjoying this book very much I haven’t ruled out trying one of Elizabeth Strout’s other books at some point, particularly Olive Kitteridge which sounds much better than this one.

Ghostwritten by Isabel Wolff

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Ghostwritten As a ghostwriter, Jenni’s job involves writing books for people who are unable or unwilling to do the writing themselves. Many of her projects include celebrity biographies and self-help guides, but some of her clients are ordinary people with extraordinary tales to tell. At a friend’s wedding she is introduced to a man who tells her about his mother, Klara, a Dutch woman who survived the Japanese internment camps in Java during World War II. Klara has said very little to her family about her wartime experiences, but as she approaches her eightieth birthday she has decided that the time has come for her story to be told. Intrigued, Jenni agrees to visit Klara at her home in Cornwall and help to put her memories down on paper.

The only problem with this new project is that the little Cornish town of Polvarth where Klara lives is a place that holds traumatic memories for Jenni, but although she is not very happy about returning to Polvarth, the temptation of hearing Klara’s story is impossible to resist. After meeting Klara and listening to her talk about her childhood, her family’s rubber plantation in Java, and the unimaginable horrors of the internment camps, Jenni is both moved and inspired. She has been going through a difficult time with her boyfriend, Rick (he wants children and she doesn’t), and she is still haunted by her own tragic past – but being with Klara gives her the strength to start facing up to her problems.

I enjoyed Ghostwritten and while I was initially drawn to it because of the Java storyline, I thought the balance of the contemporary and the historical was just right. I did prefer Klara’s storyline to Jenni’s, but ghostwriting sounds like an interesting career and I loved reading about Jenni’s work. I was also curious to find out more about the secret Jenni had spent her whole life trying to hide and her connection with a little girl called Evie who visited Polvarth years earlier in 1987.

Klara’s story, though, was fascinating, especially as I knew very little about Japanese internment camps and what conditions were like for people in Java during the war. As you would expect, some of Klara’s tales of the suffering she and the other prisoners experienced are quite upsetting to read. There are descriptions of what it was like being packed onto an overcrowded train for twenty-eight hours to be transported from one camp to another, living crammed into a house with up to one hundred other women and children, being made to stand outside in the relentless heat of the sun for hours with no shelter and nothing to drink, and worst of all finding yourself separated from a parent, a spouse or a child with no idea where they are and whether they are alive or dead.

I’ve never read anything by Isabel Wolff before, but looking at her previous work it seems that this book is a bit different from her others. I was so impressed by it. It’s not just a book about ghostwriting or Japanese internment camps, but also a book about friendship and love, about learning to forgive and to move on with life.

Ghostwritten will be published in the UK on 27th March 2014 and I hope it will be available elsewhere very soon.

Little Man, What Now? by Hans Fallada

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Little Man What Now I know it’s only the middle of January and it’s ridiculously early to start talking about books of the year but I’ll be very surprised if this one is not on my list in December! I loved every minute of this funny and charming yet dark and poignant German novel from 1932.

Johannes Pinneberg (Sonny) and Emma Morschel (Lammchen) are a young German couple in their early twenties. After discovering that Lammchen is pregnant they get married and move into their first rented home together in the town of Ducherow. As they await the birth of their child (who they think of as The Shrimp), Sonny and Lammchen struggle to get by in the harsh economic conditions of 1930s Germany.

When Sonny loses his job (because his employer has discovered that he is married and no longer free to marry his daughter), he and Lammchen are forced to move to Berlin in search of work and cheaper accommodation. The trouble is, in times of high unemployment and widespread poverty, jobs are not easy to find and rents are high (and the situation isn’t helped by Sonny’s impulsive decision to surprise Lammchen with the expensive dressing-table she’d set her heart on, or Lammchen, suffering from cravings, eating all the salmon on her way home with the shopping). But while others around them lie, cheat and think only of themselves, the honest, hard-working Pinnebergs are determined to survive and to create a happy, safe environment for their new baby.

It was such a relief to find that I loved this book, as I’ve had mixed experiences with Hans Fallada’s novels in the past. Alone in Berlin, which I read in 2011, remains one of my favourite books that I’ve read since I started blogging, but the next one I picked up, A Small Circus, was a huge disappointment and put me off wanting to try any more of his books. I was hesitant to start reading Little Man, What Now? but I’m so glad I did because the problems I had with A Small Circus – the translation, the unlikeable characters, the unfamiliar politics and the fact that most of the novel was written in the form of dialogue – were not problems at all with this book. I was happy with the translation (though I wish I was able to read it in its original German), the Pinnebergs were both lovely, the politics stayed in the background and there was a good mixture of dialogue, action and description.

The book was originally published in 1932 in German as Kleiner Mann, was nun? and a successful film version followed. It’s easy to see why it was so popular, as according to the Afterword, 42% of German workers were unemployed in 1932 (compared with 22% in Britain) and many people would have been able to identify with Lammchen and Sonny. The book still feels relevant today, with many countries around the world suffering high unemployment in recent years. In 1930s Germany, the resulting poverty opened the way for the National Socialist and Communist parties. Yet the novel is far less political and far more domestic than I thought it would be at first.

As Sonny moves from job to job he meets people from a range of different backgrounds and religious or political beliefs, but he doesn’t side with or against any of them; his biggest concerns are for his wife and unborn child. This is not a story that deals with the bigger issues of the time, but about the immediate day to day struggles that ordinary people faced. Sonny is the ‘little man’ of the title, aware that he is only one of millions in the same position, but what sustains him throughout his ordeals is his love for Lammchen and his knowledge that however hard things may be he is still lucky in so many ways.

I liked both of the Pinnebergs from the beginning. I couldn’t help thinking how rare it is that we actually get to read a book about the daily lives of a couple who are happily married, rather than a book that deals with the breakdown of a marriage or one that ends with the wedding rather than beginning with it, as this one does. Sonny and Lammchen are a husband and wife who really love each other, who discuss things together and make decisions as equals. Their story feels completely realistic and the problems they face are the same problems that many young married couples will face: managing their money, finding somewhere to live, worrying about their jobs and preparing for the arrival of their first child. There’s an innocence about Lammchen and Sonny that makes them completely endearing and I think it would be almost impossible to read this book and not fall in love with them both!

While this book is available for Kindle, it seems that paperback and hardback copies of this particular Fallada title are harder to find. If you do have the opportunity to read it I hope you’ll enjoy this glimpse of 1930s German life as much as I did.