The Jhalak Prize 2017

AND THE WINNER IS: 

JACOB ROSS FOR THE BONE READERS

by Catriona Troth

On Friday 17th March, the winner of the inaugural Jhalak Prize for books written by British BAME authors was announced from a shortlist of six. Fiction and non-fiction, books for adults and books for children: all have been represented on the shortlist and I can’t begin to imagine how the judges are going to pick the final winner.

I’ve spent the last couple of months reading all the books on the Jhalak short and long lists and reviewing them for Book Muse UK. It has been an absolute joy - every one of the books a voyage of discovery. You can read extracts from my reviews below but first, here are some comments from four of the panel of judges: chair of the judging panel, Sunny Singh and her colleagues Musa Okwanga, Yvvette Edwards and Catherine Johnson.

Why were you keen to support the inaugural Jhalak Prize?

Sunny Singh: I founded the Jhalak Prize because I was tired of seeing brilliant writing not receive the attention it deserves, from the press, bookstores, prizes and therefore never getting to readers. And of course I was seeing great writing either not being published or not being published properly. I have been thinking about the prize for about four years now but after the Writing the Future report and various other attempts at raising the issues, we decided go ahead with it. I was at the Polari Prize and got talking to the judges and supporters and realised that a prize may push the issue into consciousness for the various players in the industry. Of course, I am also being selfish: I want to read the writing I love from writers I love. And hopefully Jhalak can help bring them into the market.

Catherine Johnson: The prize came out of BareLit, an incredible crowdfunded festival - I have been a published writer for over twenty years, and it has always been said, if not openly then tacitly that there is not the big audience for books written by BAME authors. This was the first time it was made blatantly clear that there really was a readership and an audience hungry for those stories.

Also, sadly, the 'big' awards in my field - eg The Carnegie, consistently ignore BAME writers - only two have ever been shortlisted in its 80 year history. Here is a chance to give those books air and space and the accolades they deserve. If the mainstream ignore us, why not do it ourselves?

Musa Okwanga: I feel that it is vital that writing of the highest quality gets its due recognition, whoever makes it; and that, so far, too many people of colour do not have the platform that their talents deserve. The Jhalak Prize, in my view, is a wonderfully proactive and progressive way to address that concern.


Just as the Baileys Prize (formerly the Orange Prize) did initially, any literary prize that restricts it potential entrants to a given category of writers tends to attract criticism that entrants are being judged not for their writing but by their gender/colour of skin etc. How do you answer that criticism in the case of the Jhalak Prize?


Sunny Singh: I don't and I won't answer this question! We know the playing field is not level. We have the statistics, the reports, the endless reams of paper but when we flag up the iniquities we are told to 'quit whining and do something.' Well, the Jhalak Prize is us DOING something. You don't like the Jhalak Prize? Then start with working to make that playing field level and actually based on meritocracy!

Catherine Johnson: I think the Bailey's Prize is a good parallel, it may have been contentious at the start but readers understand and accept it as a useful award which draws attention to the best of women's writing. Of course it would be brilliant if we didn't need a prize like this and there was that level playing field we've heard so much about. But there isn't. Society has its flaws. We could either lie down and accept that books by BAME authors are going to be overlooked or do something to draw attention to the fantastic breadth and depth of writing out there.

Musa Okwanga: I would say that this form of criticism of the Jhalak Prize is a little like criticising a doctor for diagnosing and providing medicine for an ailment, rather than criticising the causes of the ailment itself. Because I think that the lack of diversity in publishing at the moment is an ailment, and one which is depriving us all of some of the most exciting writing out there. So let’s do what we can to cure that.

Yvvette Edwards: There are many literary prizes. There are prizes that restrict submissions to writers from a particular part of the country, ones that only judge debuts or second novels or crime or romance or science fiction, or writers of a particular age or religion or gender, or any of a hundred other criteria. It is not a matter of discrimination why this is so, but an effort to ensure that writers who are unlikely to be put forward to or nominated for the big literary prizes, yet are nonetheless producing great writing - sometimes very progressive, experimental and original writing that deserves a wider audience - that those writers are acknowledged and the quality of their work is recognised. In the case of the Jhalak Prize, there’s nothing ominous about it; it’s simply another literary prize with a submission criterion.


It must be particularly challenging to judge a prize that encompasses non-fiction, adult fiction and young adult fiction and fiction for children. How have you approached making those sorts of comparisons?

Sunny Singh: As chair of judging panel, my role has been mostly to hear out what the panel has says. I think we were clear that books were judged within the category they fell. So YA was seen as amazing within that particular category. Nonfiction the same. And the rest. We got particularly lucky as so many of the books also transcended their particular tag. The shortlist is utterly extraordinary.

Catherine Johnson: I think this is one of the strengths of the prize. Isn't it marvellous to say Children's and YA are just as important as non fiction and literary fiction? Our prize is about readers just as much as writers, about saying to readers how wonderful and rich and varied the work that BAME writers are producing.

Musa Okwanga: The only true challenges have been the creation of a longlist, and then a shortlist - to say nothing of selecting the eventual winner. When judging work, I think that we have all tried to look for originality, for creativity - it will sound like cliche, but we have looked for work which has a unique voice. It’s been very difficult to narrow the submissions down, but I am confident that we have managed that.

Yvvette Edwards: The task was made much easier by the fact that we were not required to longlist a specific number of books. The decision was made early on that every book that deserved to be on the longlist would be, which meant that we were able to put forward every book that the judging panel agreed deserved to be nominated, irrespective of whether it was non-fiction or adult, children or YA fiction. Once we were down to the longlist, we had lengthy discussions about the merits of each book, judging them on their own terms and within their genre.


Can you tell us what has particularly excited you about any of the six books on the shortlist?

Sunny Singh: Gosh all of them! Insightful, innovative. One of the judges commented at a meeting that the longlist was made up of great books and the shortlist is all phenomenal ones. It's been a pleasure to read and reread them during the judging process. And one can't say that about many books, forget about all on a shortlist!

Catherine Johnson: Definitely the breadth and depth. Look at those books, every one is a total gem. I have no idea which is the winner, they all deserve the prize.

Musa Okwanga: We all have our own favourites, I am sure, but I have loved the bravery of the work - the fearlessness and empathy shown in tackling the most taboo of subjects. That’s all I feel that I can say publicly, but I will have to drop that particular writer a private message of congratulation at some point.

Yvvette Edwards: I have to say - and I am not attempting to be diplomatic or coy - that all the shortlisted books excite me. Every one of those books deserved its place on the Jhalak Prize shortlist and to be widely read. Although I had a couple of favourites in mind, I approached the final judging panel with an open mind, because any of those books would have been a worthy winner of the inaugural prize.


Finally, what are your hopes for the future of the Jhalak Prize?

Sunny Singh: I started the prize with the hopes of ending it! The prize succeeds when it is no longer needed. So that is all I hope for: that one day, in not too far future, a prize like the Jhalak Prize will not be necessary because it will truly be a 'level playing field.' I guess one can and must dream!

Catherine Johnson: I think the prize has hit the ground running, I hope it will grow and earn a reputation for flagging up brilliance across genres.

Musa Okwanga: That it will continue to flourish and to provide a platform for spectacular writing for as long as it is needed. It has been a pleasure, an honour and a privilege to have helped it on its way.

Yvvette Edwards: I hope it becomes an established fixture in the literary calendar, and that it goes from strength to strength.


Thank you! Look out for the announcement of the winner on the evening of Friday 17th March 2017.
Now here are my reviews of the six shortlisted books. 

Another Day in the Death of America by Gary Younge

A day chosen at random - unremarkable in any way, including for the number of young people to die of gunshot wounds in a 24 hour period. On this day, seven of those killed were black, two Hispanic and one white. The oldest was nineteen; the youngest nine. “The truth is it’s happening every day, only most do not see it.”

Each chapter is both a personal account of a young person whose life and death would otherwise have passed unremarked by anyone outside their immediate neighbourhood, and an essay on the factors that create this appalling death rate.

Segregation also creates a numbing distance across which empathy becomes all-but impossible. This book may be one strut in a bridge across that divide.

Genre: Non-Fiction

Read my full review here.

Speak Gigantular by Irenosen Okojie

Following on from her Betty Trask winning debut novel, Butterfly Fish, Speak Gigantular is Irenosen Okojie’s first collection of short stories. And it is almost certainly not like any other short story collection you have ever read. Okojie’s writing rarely stays long in the recognisable world of the five senses. In these stories, emotions take on physical form.

These are unsettling stories. Reading them is like walking through one of those trick rooms whose crooked walls make you think the floor is unstable. Okojie’s range is formidable and her imagination extraordinary.

Genre: Short Stories

Read my full review here.

The Bone Readers by Jacob Ross

Two cold cases twist and turn through the pages of The Bone Readers. Michael ‘Digger’ Digson needs to find the truth behind the death of his mother, killed when he was a young boy. And his boss, Detective Superintendent Chilman, is obsessed with the case of Nathan, a young man who disappeared and whose mother is convinced he was murdered.

Written by Granadan born Jacob Ross, The Bone Readers is set on a tiny, fictional Caribbean island. The multiple strands of the book all play on themes of sexual violence, sexual exploitation, gender power struggles and corruption. The women in the book are tough, shrewd, emotionally intelligent and sassy. Yet they are trapped by male prejudice, male violence and the male stranglehold on power. Many carry scars from the sexual violence they have experienced.

An unconventional crime novel, and one that exposes the dark underbelly of ‘paradise.’

Genre: Crime Fiction

Read my full review here.

The Girl of Ink and Stars by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

Ink and stars - the two most fundamental tools of the cartographer.

Isa is the daughter of a cartographer, and his unofficial apprentice. But Isa’s Da no longer roams the world to map its continents, but walks heavily supported by a stick. And the only guide to the Forbidden Forest is an ancient cloth map left behind by Isa’s mother. So when a girl is found dead in the Governor’s orchard, and his daughter, Isa’s friend Lupe, disappears into the forest, it is up to Isa to don the mantle of cartographer and guide the search party into the heart of the island, where no one has travelled for years.

Maps have a magic about them. They can say as much about the people who made them as they do about the lands they depict. Kiran Millwood Hargrave has spun that magic into a tale of adventure that is - as all good heroic journeys should be - about friendship and courage, self discovery and self sacrifice.

Genre: Fiction for 9-12 year olds.

Read my full review here.

Black and British: A Forgotten History by David Olusoga

Written as a companion to the BBC television series of the same name, David Olusoga’s book shows how the Black presence in Britain can be traced back to Roman times and has been a feature of life, particularly in London and other big cities, since Tudor times. It demonstrates how British economic interest, first in the slave trade itself and then in slave-produced cotton, warred for centuries with a mixture of the exalted believe that British air was ‘too pure for slaves to breathe’ and genuine courageous humanitarianism.

Britain may have been one of the first countries to outlaw the slave trade, but in the years before abolition, it was also its biggest player. As Olusoga shows, British involvement in the slave trade began in the early 17th C and gained the Royal seal of approval in 1672. In just the 20 years before the slave trade was outlawed by Act of Parliament in 1807, three quarters of a million slaves were transported from Africa to the Americas aboard British ships.

Britain has things to be proud of in the history of relations with its Black citizens, but much to be ashamed of too. A powerful, emotional and eye-opening read.

Genre: Non-Fiction

Read my full review here.

A Rising Man by Abir Mukherjee

Calcutta in 1919.The “Quit India” movement is beginning to gain momentum. Calls for violent uprising clash with Gandhi’s approach of non-violent noncooperation. And the British were doubling down on their control with an oppressive set of laws called the Rowlatt Acts. In the midst of this, a senior British civil servant is found murdered in the ‘wrong’ part of town, with piece of paper stuffed in his mouth inscribed with a subversive slogan.

Mukherjee takes you down into the streets of Calcutta, from the stinking gullees of Black Town and the opium dens of Tiretta Bazaar, to the poky guesthouses for the itinerant British, where “the mores of Bengal were exported to the heat of Bengal,” the maroon-painted colonial neo-classic buildings of the Imperial civil service and the exclusive clubs of the rich, mini Blenheim Palaces, sporting signs that declare ‘No dogs or Indians beyond this point.’

Genre: Crime Fiction, Historical Fiction

Read my full review here.

And my own personal favourite? One that only made it to the longlist, the haunting novel Augustown by Kei Miller.

Augustown by Kei Miller

Augustown is a poor suburb of Kingston, Jamaica, set up by the slaves set free by royal decree on 1st August 1838. It is also closely associated with Alexander Bedward, the preacher who inspired Bedwardism, the roots from which grew Rastafarianism.

Kei Miller’s novel takes place largely in 1982, when most of those who remember Bedward are dead or dying and the events of his life have become tales told by grandmothers like Ma Taffy. And on the day that Ma Taffy sits up straight on her verandah and smells something high and ripe in the air, she knows an autoclapse is coming. ( Autoclapse: (Noun) Jamaican Dialect. An impending disaster; Calamity; Trouble on top of trouble.)

A stunning novel that takes modern Jamaican history (and the history of Rastafarianism in particular) and spins from it a fable the might stand for any people suffering from ingrained economic disadvantage and religious intolerance.

Genre: Literary Fiction

Read my full review here.



Finally, a couple of 'special mentions' from Yvvette Edwards of books that did not make the longlist:

"One of the books that excited me was Hibo Wardere’s incredibly brave memoir, Cut: One Woman’s fight against FGM in Britain Today, which was a harrowing yet life-affirming read. Another personal favourite of mine was a children’s book, The No1 Car Spotter Fights the Factory, by Atinuke. Aimed at 6 to 9 year olds, it was a social commentary on the positive power of social media and the capacity of the community to affect change, whilst exploring the reality of the lives of the poor in third world countries and the ways in which they are exploited by large corporations. At the same time, it was a genuinely enjoyable and accessible read."

Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them - Review

By JJ Marsh

A deep and thoughtful storyworld, this film deserves to be watched more than once. The terrific pace, sensory immersion and taut storytelling rockets the audience through this two-hour journey, leaving you wondering where the time went. Then watch it again to appreciate all those nuanced details of story, set, character, creatures and messages.

Eddie Redmayne as Newt Scamander

The story takes us to semi-familiar territory - the magical world introduced by Harry Potter - but in a very different time and place. This is New York in the 1920s and the wizarding world is under threat. Not just from the No-Maj (Muggle) community, but from malevolent forces within.

Diffident British magizoologist Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) arrives off the boat with a special suitcase, stuffed with fantastical creatures. Beasts he can relate to, but people? Not so much. When a Niffler (platypus-cross-mole with a magpie personality) escapes, it leads to a chance encounter with Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler) and Porpentina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston). Their challenge is to safeguard the beasts while evading capture by the authorities, aided and abetted by Tina’s beautiful sister, mindreader Queenie (Alison Sudol).

Newt (Redmayne) and Tina (Katherine Waterston)

Glorious sets, jaw-dropping effects, a swooping soundtrack and cinematography in which every frame is a picture, this film has many layers. The adventure of the four main characters is a rollercoaster in itself, yet there are several powerful angles underpinning this world.

Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogel), Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston), Queenie Goldstein (Alison Sudol) and Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne)

Tolerance, suspicion, extremism, prejudice, conditioning, acceptance and repression all feature as part of a changing environment. Generalisations are magnified into threats while individual bias evaporates at the personal level. Manipulation and influence, via the character of Creedence (Ezra Miller), plumb a theme far scarier than any of the fantastical creatures. Set ninety years ago, this atmosphere has unsettling real world echoes, such as when the death penalty for a witch resembles a ducking stool.

Creedence (Ezra Miller) and Graves (Colin Farrell)

For Potter fans, references to the wizarding world abound. For those new to the magic, everything makes sense. For those feeling unsettled by less-than-magical reality, here be salutary reminders of common humanity and our duty to our fellow beasts.

You can enjoy this as two hours of fabulous escapist entertainment. But like Newt’s suitcase, if you lift the lid, there’s so much more inside.

Images courtesy of Warner Brothers

Harry Potter and The Cursed Child - Review

Review by JJ Marsh

Here is a prophecy. Not Professor Trelawney’s but mine.

Just as the Harry Potter novels got millions of young people reading, this play will create a new generation of theatregoers. Because Harry Potter and The Cursed Child is theatre at its best; simply great storytelling.

The cast of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child; Photo by Manuel Harlan

Keeping an audience of wildly varying ages and experience enthralled for over five hours speaks for itself. The story and its world are as absorbing as ever but this is an entirely new tale. Complex, well-plotted and filled with fascinating characters, the story plumbs many classic Potter themes. Family. Love. Friendships. Loyalty. The weight of expectation. And what magic really means.

No spoilers - #keepthesecrets - but it’s common knowledge the play takes place nineteen years after Harry’s final year at Hogwarts. He is now 37 and a dad of three. However, parenting is proving to be a tougher challenge than the Triwizard Tournament.

L-R Noma Dumezweni (Hermione Granger), Jamie Parker (Harry Potter) and Paul Thornley (Ron Weasley); Photo by Manuel Harlan

The magic at the heart of this piece is how all the elements of great theatre work together. Impressive acting, breathtaking effects, imaginative design and quite brilliant direction all combine with a powerful script to create an immersive experience. The audience does not so much suspend disbelief, but willingly joins in the extraordinary illusion. The result is a layered, exciting, thrilling and touching adventure - the antithesis of push-button emotional manipulation.

L-R Sandy McDade (Trolley Witch), Anthony Boyle (Scorpius Malfoy), Sam Clemmett (Albus Potter) and the cast of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child; Photo by Manuel Harlan

So well do all the aspects of the performance work, it’s difficult to pick out a single feature for special mention. Yet Movement Director Steven Hoggett deserves extra applause for his use of physicality, both from cast and crew, so that even scene changes become part of the shapeshifting impression. Trains, staircases, forests, doorways and corridors are all magicked into being through understated suggestion and effective staging.

The Cursed Child is a triumph of theatrical storytelling, leaving the audience stunned, satisfied and awed by what the combination of imaginations can achieve.




Photos by Manuel Harlan

250,000 tickets to be released tomorrow (4 August 2016)

Changing My Mind: Occasional essays by Zadie Smith

Reviewed by Rebecca Johnson Bista

Changing My Mind is the perfect mental challenge for those fascinated by the acts of reading and writing - surely all of us here. In 17 scintillating essays, covering culture, cinema, race, politics, identity and family as well as literature itself, Zadie Smith reveals more about the writer’s experience of reading and the reader’s experience of writing than anyone else I have read. She does so with a fierce and precise intelligence, a light touch of self-aware humour and a streetwise contemporary voice that draws you in and on through her philosophical arguments. She can move seamlessly from Heidegger and Spinoza to Katherine Hepburn and George Clooney; from literary theory to confessional sneak-peek into the writer’s secret craft, and from personal experience to international relations with the same confidential charm and laser vision.

The essays in this collection are arranged in sections. In the first, ‘Reading’, are her critical essays on authors including her beloved E M Forster and Nabokov, Zora Neal Hurston, George Eliot, Kafka, and a comparison between Netherlands (Joseph O’Neill) and Remainder (Tom McCarthy). The second, ‘Being’, includes essays on the craft of writing, Liberia, and Barack Obama’s “vocal flexibility” of bi-racial rhetoric. In the third, ‘Seeing’, is film criticism including an essay on the gender politics of Hepburn and Garbo. In the fourth, ‘Feeling’, are autobiographical writings; and in the fifth, ‘Remembering’, her essay on David Foster Wallace, which seems to sum up in a sense the essence of all else she has said about what constitutes the craft and significance of reading and writing.

Along the way we discover that Zadie the writer is a pantser (in NaNoWriMo terms, that is - she calls it a ‘micro-manager’) not a planner (I think we knew); that Zora Neal Hurston was her awakening into the possibility of a literary identity as a black woman; that she rewrites her first 20 pages dozens of times to get the tone and voice right for the rest of the novel, and that she’s ashamed to re-read her own work. We also find out that she thinks of novels as houses in which to live and writing as construction (including scaffolding); that she writes only one ‘draft’; that the writer, as person and creator, is just as important to her as the text itself and that David Foster Wallace is, in a sense, her ultimate reading experience.

In examining the elements that inform her readings and construct her writer’s world, she offers a beautifully delicate exploration of Forster’s “humane charm” and cultural acuity. She praises George Eliot’s “surround sound” and her ability to “pull it all out into the light” in terms of human folly and self-deception, and knocks Henry James from his self-important perch. She also looks at creative pleasure in Nabokov’s idea of inspiration, consisting of a hot, brief “rapture” at the conception of a book, followed by a cool, sustained “recapture” during which the actual labour of writing happens. Part of this, she says, leaving college-study Barthes behind, is the author being in control: “putting walls around the playground” to define and delimit the reader’s “play”.

In examining writers’ political credentials, historical circumstances and literary antecedents, she leaves no stone unturned. And by similarly setting out her own influences, history, family, political hopes, practice, voice and cultural context she shines the same light on her own writing, and the roots of her own ideas. She is particularly coruscating about notions of ‘ethnic authenticity’ and any hint of racial bad faith from any quarter - she’s down on “keeping it real” or any single unified concept of blackness (in literature as well as life) while also defining herself as a black woman writer. At the same time, she will not let this constrain her and insists pithily: “like all readers I want my limits to be drawn by my own sensibilities, not my melanin count.” Smith has no limits but her own. And she is fully in control of those, delineating them with such pinpoint accuracy, brilliantly articulate thinking and erudite wit that there is little space for disagreement.

Having said that, Smith’s world is not for the faint-hearted. She leaves no place to hide and no zone of comfort in her writing. Her world is a very precise place in which every word, image and emotional response is critically analysed. She is as aware of context as she is of voice, of political implications, identity markers, the tone, texture and flavour of words and what they say about your origins, truthfulness and intentions. She misses none of the layers. There is no escape. Her essays are so dense with ideas that every sentence needs attending to. This is not a book you can knock off at one sitting. You will find yourself desperately needing to (re)read all of Nabokov, or George Bernard Shaw, or Begley’s biography of Kafka, or the complete works of Spinoza, or view the oeuvres of Garbo and Werner Herzog. You will feel inadequate, but in the nicest possible way.

Sometimes I found myself wishing she would not write with such precise fully-formed opinions or be so head-girlish about her moral authority and clear-sightedness and that just once in a while she would fumble her lines or come up against a limitation in thought or feeling that even her well-stocked mind can’t quite handle. She doesn’t. And yet, if I were Zadie Smith herself, I would also point out that of course I am aware that my wish is just a dog-in-the-manger fantasy born of envy and would immediately offer a more morally and emotionally impeccable alternative. Except that I confess I have no replacement, just an untidy, unattractive longing to be as smart, well-read and charming as she is. Zadie rocks.

My Name Is...

by Catriona Troth

Sudha Bhuchar - photo by Robert Day

My Name Is... is a play by Sudha Bhuchar, currently on a short tour with the Tamasha Theatre Group.
It is based on the true story of a twelve year old Scottish/Pakistani girl who disappeared from her home on the Isle of Lewis.

When the story first exploded onto the front pages of British tabloid newspapers in 2006, it seemed like a classic tug-of-love, clash-of-cultures story - a young girl ‘kidnapped’ by her father and taken to Pakistan to undergo a forced marriage with an older man.

The true story was far more nuanced, as Sudha Buchar’s script, drawn from many hours of interviews, reveals.

At the Platform Theatre at Central St Martins in London, a tiny stage encompasses two sitting rooms, one in Pakistan and one on the Isle of Lewis. At the back of the stage, half obscured by a gauze curtain, are the newspaper headlines that sought to force them into one or another stereotypical box. More newspaper cuttings litter the floor.

The picture that emerges is complex and layered. By allowing us to see each family member as a true individual, by allowing their stories to unfold over time, we see how the free and easy mixing of communities in the 1980s was slowly warped by events happening in the wider world. How a damaged young woman’s need to belong drove her to create a version of herself as a perfect Muslim wife until, in her own words ‘Suzy was gone, well and truly gone.’ This is a pressure cooker created, not by the clash of cultures, but by these families and these individuals.

Bhuchar has resisted the temptation to fictionalise the story (apart from altering the names) and instead stays with the authentic voices of the three family members - father, mother and daughter - as they tell their story from different sides of the world. And those voices have extraordinary directness.

But this is not strictly ‘verbatim’ writing either. Bhuchar has shaped the script, interweaving the stories and letting the voices cut across each other, so that we hear two versions of the parents’ first meeting, two versions of family’s hajj to Mecca. At times the actors cross the invisible divide to take part in a remembered scene or speak words attributed to them by one another. At times, too, they break through a kind of ‘third wall,’ to address, not the audience in the theatre, but the original audience of Bhuchar and her tape recorder.

Afterwards, playwright and actors took part in a New Writing Platform discussion with the audience, looking the process of creating My Name Is... and the challenges of verbatim theatre This was first in a new series of events presented by the MA Dramatic Writing course run by University of the Arts London, to explore, discuss and share new ideas.

Bhuchar began by explaining how she was drawn to the story by an article in the Guardian, the first that attempted to reach beyond stereotypes and accusations, and how she approached the family and asked to interview them. She flew to Pakistan and spent several days with father and daughter. The daughter then persuaded the mother to see her, and she spent several more days on Lewis with her. The result was 120 pages of interview transcripts which took eight years to shape into this play.

“The technique came in layers,” Bhuchar explained. “I’d never worked like this in my life! To begin with I thought that I would fictionalise the story, but nothing I wrote had the power of the original words. In the end the promise I made was that, however I shaped it, I must not make up any words”

Asked about her interview technique, Bhuchar spoke of not having her own agenda, about having empathy, about being interested in simply ‘overhearing.’ One of the ways she got the mother to open up was to go back to the very beginning of the story, to when the two of them met, when they had been happy together. “Usually people don’t ask me that,” she was told.

Of the three actors, only Kiran Sonia Sawar who plays ‘Gaby/Ghazala’ wanted to listen to the interview tapes to catch the nuances of the original voices. Umar Ahmed, who plays ‘Farhan’, grew up in Pollokshields and actually knew the father by sight. Karen Bartke who is from Glasgow but from a different background to ‘Suzy’, didn’t want her performance to descend into mere imitation and found it easier to connect with the emotion through the scripts - something she did with incredible power.

Early this year, the cast had the chance to perform the play with mother and daughter (now back living in Scotland) in the audience - something that was terrifying but also profoundly gratifying. Seeing their parents’ early lives together played out, in their own words, was particularly moving for the daughter. She told the actors afterwards that, as the youngest child, she had almost no memory of her parents being happy together.

At the end of the discussion, one of the audience members commented that he had been waiting all through it for the author to come down on one ‘side’ or another. Yet that never happens. By allowing each of the characters their own authentic voice, she manages to preserve a balance, so that your heart reaches out to each of them in turn.

You can read the Guardian article the first inspired Bhuchar to write the play here.

And you can read my interview with Sudha Bhuchar about her time as Artistic Director of Tamasha here.

The Occupation Diaries by Raja Shehadeh & The Wall by William Sutcliffe

Reviewed by Anne Stormont

These are two five star reads on the topic of freedom. One is non-fiction and the other is fiction. But they're connected by setting and they complement each other beautifully.

I became aware of The Occupation Diaries when I read a review of it in the Observer newspaper whilst on the flight home from a visit to Israel-Palestine in 2012. It was quite a coincidence to read about a book that was set in the very place I'd just visited. It was my third visit to the country and I was so impressed by the review that I bought the book as soon as I got home.

I was even more impressed by the book itself. Shehadeh's writing certainly confirmed the impressions I'd formed during my visit. The book is made up of diary entries during a two year period from 2009 to 2011.

It chronicles events leading up to the Palestinian bid for statehood at the U.N. But it is far from dry. This a very personal account, Shehadeh gives a clear and detailed record of his everyday life and of the lives of his fellow Palestinians living on the West Bank. He states his annoyance, anger and frustration at the ignominies, inconveniences, injustices and dangers that they face on a daily basis. But he never rants or lectures and his words are all the more effective for that.

Readers get a vivid portrait of Palestinian life and history and gain a clearer understanding of the politics and issues that the citizens on both sides of this contested land have to deal with.

The standout section for me was Shehadeh's poignant account of a visit to Nablus station. In it he tells how when he arrived there were about twenty passengers waiting for the train. He describes the atmosphere of excitement and anticipation as they await the train's arrival. But when it does arrive at the platform, no-one can get on. The train is an image. It's part of an art installation commemorating the station's centenary. Nowadays, however, no-one uses it. There are no longer any trains linking Nablus to Jerusalem, Damascus, Amman or Cairo. No trains cross this isolated and hemmed in territory. Travel in and out of the West Bank is a tortuous and uncomfortable undertaking for the Palestinians. But, as Shehadeh says, the experience of seeing the image of the train let the observers go beyond their 'dismal present' and envisage a future of freedom and connection with all their neighbours.

I recommend this moving book to anyone who wants to gain an insight into this conflicted area. Shehadeh is a skilled writer and educator and  a quiet and honest activist.

It was while I was reading the above book that my husband presented me with The Wall. It had been recommended by a colleague of his and he reckoned I might like it. He was right. This a charming work of fiction and is also set in The West Bank.

The main character is a thirteen- year-old Israeli boy named Joshua. Joshua lives in the (fictional) town of Amarias. Amarias is an illegal Israeli settlement which is situated close to a checkpoint (based on the real one at Qalandia). Joshua, still grieving the death of his father - killed while doing reservist service in the Israeli army - lives with his mother and step-father. Joshua doesn't get on with his overbearing step-father who bullies and controls both Joshua and Joshua's mother. Joshua also hates Amarias - finding it too manicured, perfect and stifling.

The town is close to  a heavily fortified checkpoint in the wall which divides Israel form the occupied territories of the West Bank.

All Joshua knows of the territory beyond the wall is that it is there that 'the enemy' live. That is until the day he finds a tunnel under the wall and goes through it. Here he meets Leila and her family. Joshua finds a place that is truly another world to the one of Amarias. It is the first of several very tense and risky visits. On the other side of the wall, Joshua's concepts of loyalty, identity and justice are all challenged.

It is the character of Joshua that gives this book its charm. He is naive. He has no vested interest. He's not weighted by history, religion or politics. He sees the issues as simply unfair and unjust.

The book is a political fable which presents a political reality.  Looking through young Joshua's eyes, we are reminded of the simple truth that there are two sides to every story. It's a clash of innocence and experience.

In the end it's a redemptive tale -  or at least it is for Joshua. There is hope for his future, hope that just maybe he'll use what he's learned to redeem and give hope to - even in a small way - people like his Palestinian friend, Leila.

I urge you to consider reading both the above books. The writing is straight-forward,  informative and moving. More than that - it is full of dignity and life-affirming truth.

Both books are available in bookshops and on Amazon

The Occupation Diaries is published by Profile Books

The Wall is published by Bloomsbury

Sightlines: A Conversation With the Natural World, by Kathleen Jamie

Reviewed by Rebecca Johnson

Kathleen Jamie’s essay collection begins with a vast silence, a freedom from all human and animal interference, among the ice cliffs of Greenland. “A mineral silence that presses powerfully on our bodies”, as she describes it. This silence forces you as a reader to focus. It draws you into the place and her description of it, into your own mind and senses, so that you become aware of yourself as a living body, and into the book itself through her quiet style of delicate attentive listening and precise observation. It creates an intensity that she sustains throughout, as this is a book about listening and looking, sensing and perceiving at an almost hypnotic level. It is a task that Jamie seems to suggest is the essence of being alive, as it is for other living creatures: being in our animal senses, experiencing and responding to the natural world. The visceral and emotional awareness of bodies in landscape.

In essays ranging across her native Scotland and its islands, to Shetland, the Orkneys and the Hebrides, and further afield to a Norwegian whale museum and beyond, Kathleen Jamie explores myth, history, scientific understanding, and cultural responses to the natural world as well as her own sensory experiences. She sees it as a ‘conversation’, a dialogue of co-existence in which she learns about her humanity - not always a happy lesson, sometimes a brutal, shameful or humbling one - and the ways in which people respond to and explore the non-human and the reasons why they do so, as well as trying to understand the lives of the creatures she encounters. She dismisses sentimental approaches to nature:  It’s ‘not all primroses and otters’, she points out, while examining cancerous tissue with a hospital pathologist; she does not shy away from death as part of life.

 As you would expect of prose writing from a poet, beautiful descriptions spangle her sentences. Writing of icebergs: ‘They are a blue you could fall into, as you could have fallen forever into the silence of the morning.’ Or of a gannet colony: ‘Here they were in the air, gannet, gannet, repeated like a stammer, the whole idea of gannet amplified and displayed.’ Or when she moves into the sublime, experiencing the evanescence and transience of animate life in remote places: ‘I had the sensation I always have on Atlantic islands, in summertime, when the clouds pass quickly and light glints on the sea - a sense that the world is bringing itself into being moment by moment. Arising and passing away in the same breath.’

This lyrical appreciation of the natural world contains within it a subtle anger, a witnessing of loss, which is also an awareness of time and the changes that have been wrought on bird populations, animal and human communities. Yet here she doesn’t carry through the implications of her observations to engage with political concerns: she does not indulge in polemics. She is forever the observer, never involved or passing judgement. Again, this may be a reflection of poetic technique, but I found it frustrating in essay form that she did not pursue the potential of the ideas latent in her descriptions, instead backing off into ambiguity, even contradiction, or leaving underlying implications to hang. Only in her last lengthy essay on whaling does she allow her views and emotions more scope.

Kathleen Jamie’s fascination with, love for and awe of whales ripples throughout the book. She describes the exhilaration of sighting killer whales off Rona; she cleans and admires whale skeletons in the Hvalsalen in a Bergen museum, imagining herself into their seaborne bodies; and, in ‘Voyager, Chief’ she visits whale jaw and vertebral relics dotted around the Scottish landscape to tell the story of the now extinct whaling industry - a history of which I was completely unaware. These remaining artefacts have something akin to religious meaning for her and she sees them as a form of atonement for the shame of the wholesale slaughter of these awe-inspiring and magnificent creatures for whale oil and flesh.

This is a lovely book, full of gentle joy and anger and an almost spiritual wonder for and affinity with the natural world. It is written in crystalline language that enhances perception, and explores the essence, ultimately, of our human existence in relation to the rest of the natural world.

Big Brother by Lionel Shriver

Review by Cathy White

3 out of 5 stars

When successful businesswoman Pandora Halfdanardson picks up her brother, jazz musician Edison Appaloosa, from the airport to stay with her and her family, she doesn’t recognise him. This is because he’s put on a bit of weight since the last time she saw him. A 'bit' as in over two-hundred pounds.

On their arrival at the house, Pandora's fitness fanatic husband Fletcher is less than impressed and when it starts to look like Edison is going to outstay his welcome, he gives Pandora an ultimatum -her husband or her brother. Pandora, aware that her brother's weight could end up killing him, rents an apartment for them both while she supervises the strict diet and fitness regime she persuades him to do.

While the heft of the plot concentrates on Edison’s weight loss, this is merely the narrative that glues the novel together. The wider issues and themes woven through Big Brother are loyalty, marriage, family, relationships, jealousy, resentment, control, power struggles and whether one person can be or should be responsible for another.

None of the characters are particularly endearing. The nearest we get to someone likeable is Cody; Pandora’s step-daughter, although she can be so relentlessly nice you want her to rebel a bit like a normal teenager. Then again, her brother, Tanner, takes on the stereotypically rebellious teenager in this tale.

Shriver’s writing is flawless; each sentence is beautifully constructed and each word chosen with precision. However, the ending left me feeling so cheated I wanted to unread it to get rid of the disappointment I felt upon reaching the end.

This was a hard novel to give a star rating to - it would have been 4 or 5 out of 5, had it not been for the ending. 

Writing Your Non-Fiction Book - The Complete Guide To becoming An Author By Trish Nicholson

Reviewed by Anne Stormont 

An author who practises what she preaches.

Claiming to be the complete guide to anything is a bold claim indeed. The author promises in her introduction that she will lead you ‘a step at a time’ through the whole process of producing and selling your non-fiction book.

In my opinion, the author’s claim is valid and her promise holds true.

This guide book would work just as well for as fiction writing as it does for non-fiction. It is aimed at the complete beginner but there’s plenty that could be useful to the more experienced writer, most especially indie author-publishers.

The book is divided into three main sections - Planning, Writing and Editing, and Publishing and Marketing. At the end there is a comprehensive list of useful websites, books and a glossary.

The advice offered is both general and specific and, indeed, as you read the book you see the author putting her that into practice.

There is genre-specific guidance - for everything from travelogues to blogs. As Nicholson herself says there’s, ‘enough scope here whether you intend to write on particle physics or brewing parsnip wine’. And there is more general advice on editing, routes to publishing and how to sell and market your work.

The book takes you through planning, plotting, point of view - yes these three are just as important in non-fiction as in fiction. There’s advice on workspace and finding time to write. The author also covers how to carry out research, how to avoid plagiarism and explains about copyright. Again, all relevant to creators of fiction as well.

Personally speaking, I found the sections on blogging, having a website and the use of social media to be particularly useful, as was the section on routes to publishing. I also especially liked the sections on how to write blurbs of various lengths depending on their purpose, and on how to pitch your work both to publishers and readers.

Nicholson recommends that you read the book straight through and then re-read as you write. And she says that ‘If you have followed each step with me so far you have achieved by now a thoroughly prepared manuscript, a decision as to how you will pursue its publication and the beginnings of an author platform’.

As I said at the start of this review, whether you’re a novice or an old-hand, drawn to writing fact or made-up stuff, a prospective or actual traditionally or independently published author, you’re sure to find something of use here.

I hope to have shown that this book goes beyond the mission of its title. This is an essential ‘How To’ manual for writers of every sort.

Find out more about Trish and the book here www.collca.com/wynb on the Collca Publishing website.

Review of The Humans by Matt Haig

Review by Cathy White

Star rating: 5/5

An alien from the planet Vonnadoria inhabits Professor Andrew Martin’s body. Finding himself walking naked down the motorway, ignorant of all things human (including clothes, evidently), he learns to read by perusing a copy of Cosmopolitan in a service station.

Professor Martin - a mathematical genius at Cambridge University - has solved the Riemann Hypothesis; the secret of prime numbers. Vonnadorians, convinced this is the key to space travel, for which they don’t believe humans are responsible enough, sent one of their own to replace Professor Martin and destroy all traces of the solution, including anyone who knows the puzzle’s been solved.

Eventually getting ‘home’ to Professor Martin’s wife and teenage son, their ‘inside out’ appearance initially repulses the unnamed alien. However, as time goes on, an emotional attachment and fondness for them is developed, to the extent a note is written to Professor Martin’s son containing ninety-seven pieces of advice ranging from ‘You are lucky to be alive. Inhale and take in life’s wonders’, to ‘Peanut butter sandwiches go perfectly well with a glass of white wine. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise’.

Don’t let the prime numbers and aliens put you off - this isn’t a mathematical sci-fi novel; this is a hilariously wry, observational look at human behaviour: ‘They placed me inside a small room that was, in perfect accord with all human rooms, a shrine to the rectangle’, ‘… human history is full of inventions of things of which they have no idea how to handle (the atomic bomb, the Internet, the semi-colon)’.

This insightful, heartwarming and funny novel teeters between those lightbulb-flashing ‘oh yeah!’ moments to those ‘oh no!’ ones. It certainly makes you think about what it means to be human.

Cathy White was born in London and in a previous life held a variety of jobs including legal secretary and literary agent’s assistant. In 2009, she left the city for the sticks, emigrating to the Kent countryside where she lives in an 18^th century ex-bakery with her boyfriend and cat. She blogs at www.cathywhite.co.uk, www.jog-blog.co.uk and www.planetveggie.co.uk.

Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, by Margaret Atwood

Reviewed by Rebecca Johnson

Negotiating with the Dead is not a self-help book for writers - not even one about trying to pick a new way among the myriads of brilliant plots, characters and sentences written by people who have gone before you. There is no advice on how to construct a story arc, how to find inspiration or whether or not to kill your darlings. Atwood’s explanation of the task she set herself when she was asked to write this book or, rather, to perform the lectures that the book is based on, is to ‘examine the various self-images - the job descriptions if you like - that writers have constructed for themselves over the years.’ She then goes on to say how hard she found this task and lists the many things that she was not sure that she could offer. No literary theories, declarations, manifestos or the like. She ends up with a definition that is vague, even perhaps coy, but seems to cover it all. The book is about ‘the position the writer finds himself in; or herself, which is always a little different.’ It’s about what it is that writers get up to when they write.

I should say now that I think Atwood is being a little disingenuous here. Because this is, in many ways, a book about the politics of writing (and of reading, though there is less of that). Specifically and severally, it is about the politics of writing as a woman, and as a writer growing up in a marginal culture, from a post-colonial position. So although she doesn’t talk about how she devised her marvellous stories, or how she learnt her craft, she makes it very clear, without ever being boring or seeming to lecture, that writing is always a political act, and is always from the experience of being who you are and where you are from.

In six chapters, based on the six Empson Lectures* she gave at the University of Cambridge in 2000, she looks at this occupation, or vocation, or art from various perspectives. How does one become a writer, she asks. What is a writer? Who do writers think writers are? Who does society think writers are? Who do writers write for? And who readers think writers are? She progresses from the raw material of a writer and how this might differ from anything or anyone else, through the conflict between ‘art’ and money, or ‘art for art’s sake’ versus the moral and social imperatives of writing, to the mythic and magical status writers are accorded at the borders of shamanism and religion as representatives of the knowledge of the dead. To do this she uses writers’ own words, stories and myths from an eclectic range of sources woven together in witty, down to earth, erudite and ingenious ways to illustrate her points. Is writing just showing off? Or is it the heart and soul of our societies?

Margaret Atwood’s book is a fascinating read for anyone wishing to write, or ‘be a writer’. Not only because she says, modestly, that she is a fairly ordinary person from an unprepossessing background who made it because she kept on going (unlike her brother, who wrote poems as a young man but then stopped). But because it is a heady myth in itself, woven together in part from the words of others, casting the writer as a genie who, like Prospero in The Tempest, pulls the strings of power from behind the scenes. ‘All writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated, deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with mortality…to bring something or someone back from the dead,’ she argues. If this sounds a little morbid or peculiar, she says, that’s because it is. ‘Writing itself is a little peculiar.’

So now we know why we’re all just slightly odd.

*In honour of William Empson, poet and literary critic, author of Seven Types of Ambiguity among many other works.

(Virago, 2003, £8.99 pbk).

Spilt Milk by Amanda Hodgkinson

Review by Gillian Hamer

5/5 Stars

“Their eyes were the colour of the river. Grey as rain-swelled waters. It was how you knew the three of them were related. Nellie, Vivian and Rose Marsh.”

From the opening line of this novel, the scene is set. The importance of the river, the importance of the characters, and the importance of relationships. It also lays the first hint that not all may be as it seems within this family story.

Spilt Milk is the story of sisterhood and motherhood through the generations of a single family. Starting in 1913 with three sisters living an idyllic life in a cottage near a river in rural Suffolk. As the two youngest, Nellie and Vivian, blossom, their innocent existence is blown apart when a stranger, Joe Feriers, arrives in town. Both Nellie and Vivian fall for Joe and the consequences are devastating, creating a secret the sisters will be forced to carry to their graves, overshadowing everything else life presents them.

We follow Vivian and Nellie’s life stories right through into the 1960s. From their unusual start in life, they do go on to marry and create lives of their own, apart from one another - a fact that would have shocked the women at the outset. The author manages to convey wonderfully that not only do the sins of the father (or mother) echo on through time, but that generations of the same family can often inexplicably face similar life events, and it is interesting to see how each generation deals differently with them as time rolls on.

Nellie and Vivian are interesting characters, strong in their own ways, yet equally vulnerable. At some points Nellie takes the lead, finding strength from her passion for the river, always recalling the sense of power it gave her. At others, Vivian is the rock Nellie relies on to keep her sane, more of a mother to her than her birth mother.

The birth of Nellie’s daughter, Bertha (known as Birdie) and her life path, adds yet another layer of secrecy to the sister’s relationship. Birdie blossoms into a superb character in her own right, and her story is equally as captivating, and at times heart breaking, as that of her mother and aunt. The final piece in the family jigsaw here is Framsden, Birdie’s son.

I thought Amanda’s first novel, 22 Britannia Road, was beautifully written and have eagerly awaited her second. And it doesn’t disappoint. There’s even more of a lyrical quality to Amanda’s writing here, which works perfectly, some scenes are so intense they are almost cinematic. The setting is perfectly described and the sense of time, as we move through the war years and onwards, is breathtakingly detailed and accurate. You feel as if you have stepped right into the character’s shoes and are seeing the world just as they knew it - whether it be the grime and danger of war-ravaged London or the open spaces and simple beauty of rural Suffolk. At the same time, while time moves on, you have a sense the author really wants to bring home the message that age is just a number, a date is just a reference, and that nothing really changes. Not really. Nothing of importance, such as love and loss, grief and happiness.

Spilt Milk is a beautiful novel. I was captivated by the story, the characters and the shadows they carried - and I’m sure you will be too.

Three Reviews on the subject of Memory

Small World by Martin Suter 

A moving and unusual book, which tells the story of Konrad, now in his 60s, who has enjoyed a long association with the Koch family of Zürich. He’s getting forgetful, and the family suspect him of drinking a little too much for his own good. When his absent-mindedness leads to a fire which destroys their villa, something has to change. Gradually it emerges that Konrad is suffering from Alzheimer’s, and as his grip on the present loosens, he recalls more and more about the past. Something Elvira Koch, the family matriarch, fears the most. Swiss author Suter draws his characters with balance and depth, and uses the gentle, but inexorable pace of the story to increase the tension, pile on the pressure and offer poignant insights as to the nature of the disease, of memory and the dangers of secrets.




The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

The narrator returns back to the lane where he grew up, and sitting on a bench by a pond, remembers how much he has forgotten. The adult and his seven-year-old self relate the fantastical recollections of his childhood, his encounters with the Hempstock women, his battles with Ursula the usurper and some startling moments of domestic drama. Gaiman’s story is freighted with symbolism, imagination, memory, reality and invention, stories and myth, while rooted in the Sussex countryside of the 1960s. Full of extraordinary images and ideas, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a story I will revisit. This is not a long book, but one to savour and remember how powerful a thing is the childhood imagination.



Secrets of the Italian Gardener by Andrew Crofts

Difficult to define and delightfully unexpected, this novella is an excellent read. A dual narrative draws the reader into the present-day world of a Middle-Eastern dictator struggling to retain power in the events of the Arab Spring, while the ghostwriter hired to pen his autobiography wrestles with painful memories of a past tragedy. The eponymous gardener is rather more than what he seems, sharing observations and philosophies on the personal and political. I read this on a plane journey, which seemed the perfect environment to lose myself to this well-woven adventure. I found a parallel in the realistic environment of the palace, an oasis of luxury amid the cruelty and chaos of the outside world, and the narrator’s mind, where he yearns to escape his constant grief. But the walls, inevitably, come tumbling down. Robert Harris meets Paulo Coelho in a thoughtful, intelligent story.




By JJ Marsh - author, reader, Triskelite, journalist, Nuancer, reviewer and blogger. Likes: pugs, Werner Herzog and anchovies. Dislikes: meat, chocolate and institutionalised sexism. The Beatrice Stubbs Boxset is out now.

Review of In Search of Adam by Caroline Smailes

Review by Cathy White

Rating: 5 stars

This book burrowed deep inside me, stayed with me, gave me nightmares. Fortunately for me - unlike Jude, who the novel centres around - I woke up from my nightmares.

Jude is six years old when she finds her mother dead from an overdose, along with a note that reads, "Jude, I have gone in search of Adam. I love you baby." 

This is the last time anyone tells Jude they love her. On Jude’s tragic roundabout, we trace her childhood as she grows up in a seaside town through the 80s with a raw vulnerability and a life a world away from sticks of rock, donkey rides, lycra and legwarmers.

In Search of Adam is a book without love, about a child without love. The cruelty, physical and mental abuse Jude receives is so unremittingly relentless you want to reach into the pages and make it stop. You especially want to reach in and punch out her neighbour’s brother. Oh, and her dad. And her’s dad’s girlfriend, Rita. You want to say ‘Hey Jude, take a sad song and make it better’, but the only thing that could make it better would be for her mum to come home with Adam.  Jude eventually discovers her mother’s diary where all is revealed but it’s not something Jude had ever anticipated.

Caroline’s writing style in this novel isn’t going to be to everyone’s taste, as the short, stilted, child-like sentences echoing the pattern of Jude’s fragmented thoughts take some getting used to. But. You do get used to it. It. Just takes a bit. Of time. Caroline’s vibrant writing makes this novel a worthwhile compelling read and, ultimately, unforgettable.

Cathy White was born in London and in a previous life held a variety of jobs including legal secretary and literary agent’s assistant. In 2009, she left the city for the sticks, emigrating to the Kent countryside where she lives in an 18^th century ex-bakery with her boyfriend and cat. She blogs at www.cathywhite.co.uk, www.jog-blog.co.uk and www.planetveggie.co.uk.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

Reviewed by Ola Zaltin

Los Angeles, city of devils: a very excited agent pitches the latest, hottest, most sellable, teen-specific demographic epic franchise story ever! “A young boy lives a normal dreary suburban life in Nowhereville, Florida, USA! He’s told of wild and daring adventures his ancestors had and given a mission to go on his own, world-saving quest! However, he declines, not thinking himself worthy? Then, earth-shattering events take place that make him take up the metaphorical sword and venture out into an unknown world of friends, foes, allies, mentors, shapeshifters - and much derring do!" The producers salivate, what could this possibly be?! A Floridian Harry Potter? A Luke Skywalker in the ‘burbs? Katniss Everdeen’s lil’ bro in the Keys?

Well, yes, pretty much. First-time author Ransom Riggs's (let’s hope that’s a pen-name) novel Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children charts an all-too familiar road, arc and story-line to anyone even remotely familiar with films like above alluded to and  their endless spinoffs  - and wearisome if having read Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces and his disciple Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey.  The protagonist is a solitary kind of fella, doesn’t feel at home in his own skin, let alone his home. Check. Has dreams of grandeur and premonitions of other worlds. Check. When adventure beckons, he shies away from it. Check. But at an obligatory point of no return he takes up the challenge and ventures out into the unknown and - yawn.

That being said, the breath of fresh air here is the way Mr. Riggs has constructed the book. It is built around a series of genuine collector’s photos from the the start of the 20th century, with the story evidently inspired by and developed around these images. It works surprisingly well, and adds to the tale in unexpected ways, both emotional and imaginary. (The one glaring mistake being a hand-drawing of the Monster. This reader had conjured up a vile thing from 101 movies, times ten and genuinely was chilled, thrilled and uneasy and then turned the page and saw a crude charcoal sketch of a man with a bunch of over size maggots in his mouth. Yucky, but not in any way scary. Thus reversing the old adage in writing of show don’t tell, to: stop showing and just tell me the darn story and let me make up my own mental horrors.)

The story is well written, engaging and although there is not one single surprise along the way and you can guess every turn of events 20 pages in advance, it’s an enjoyable adventure with a new twist on the centuries-old fable of the boy and the sword and his inner turmoils. A great Christmas gift for a teenager with an curious mind. 

Long before the ending you just know there’s going to be a huge hook for a sequel and of course there is. Mr Riggs’s second novel in the series is due to be published in January 2014 with Tim Burton attached to direct the film of the first book (here reviewed) and the redoubtable Jane Goldman scriptwriting. Why am I not surprised?