‘Undercurrents’ (Broken Sleep Books) by Richard Skinner
What a breath of fresh air this slim volume is: a collection of uncompromisingly thought-provoking essays, and the variety of topics so stimulating. It feels like listening to a friend talking about subjects that deeply matter to him but that are also universal, and that he handles as only someone both knowledgeable and passionate about them can.
Richard Skinner is an author of literary fiction, life-writing, essays, non-fiction and poetry, and a highly regarded creative-writing tutor. In Undercurrents, he brings together essays about books, the writing craft, films and music, his own life experiences, as well as interviews with poets. Naturally, the tone varies as a function of each essay’s topic: from the more analytical one for a review, to the reflective and intense one about two beloved friends’ deaths.
Skinner’s thoughts on the link between Eisenstein’s ‘montage of attractions’ principle and making connections in one’s writing intrigued me. I enjoyed the expansiveness with which an essay about Talking Heads’ Remain in Light takes in Isiah Berlin, Marcel Proust and the ancient Greek chorus. The description of the state of ‘self-emptying’ and ‘belonging’ to the landscape while on a long hike resonated. The reflections on friendship, death, and acceptance of the unknowable, with regard to the death of dear friends, were relatable and made me think.
This is a rare gem in the current publishing landscape. All credit to the author, and to Broken Sleep Books for its ambitious publishing programme.
Any one-liner for describing what this memoir is about would do it an injustice: it could not encompass its range. It’s about depression, attempted suicide, surviving it, recovering, building a new life… About societal expectations and how they shape us. About our system of mental healthcare. And it’s very much about love.
‘Love Lay Down’ is an important book. Helen Murray Taylor shares with generous openness and formidable eloquence her story of depression’s vortex and of her recovery. Her memoir is vivid, raw, at many points heartbreaking. At the same time, it’s infused with wit, with her ability to perceive the surreal and the outright comedic in some of the worst circumstances. She lets us into her intense emotions and thoughts at the time, as well as into her capacity for looking back at them now with hard-won distance.
Love blazes a luminous, life-saving path throughout this memoir: the love between Helen and her husband; that of family; of friends, colleagues… The whole book strikes me also as a real act of love by its author towards readers: as a gift of hope – and of feeling seen and heard – to sufferers from depression; and as a gift of understanding to all. ‘I hope that no one who reads this has ever found, or will ever find, themselves being dragged under by the force of their depression. But if that is you, […] please, please, call out for help. The help when it comes might not steer you to dry land but it might be the lifejacket that lets you turn on your back and float, the thing that lets you rest awhile, that keeps you afloat a little bit longer. Survival isn’t always about kicking against the waves. Tomorrow the tide might turn and wash you ashore.’
‘It was my father who made the arrangements. My uncle helped, since he lived down south, where all this kind of business is carried out.’
The opening of ‘Love Forms’ sets the tone for the whole novel: a voice that immediately draws you in with its fresh, direct, familiar cadence; and ‘the arrangements’ at the heart of the story. These arrangements see the then sixteen-year-old protagonist, Dawn, whisked off from her home in Trinidad to Venezuela, where she must give birth in secret and surrender her baby for adoption. The reason? ‘She made a mistake and brought shame to her family.’
It’s not long before Dawn realises that the real mistake – whether really hers or her parents’ – was to give up her daughter. The intense longing to find her again impacts the rest of Dawn’s life. Though she goes on to graduate in medicine in the UK, work, marry, and raise two beloved sons, her yearning for the lost child becomes an ever-present, aching part of who she is. When she’s fifty-eight, we witness one of her many attempts to track down her daughter – a search that plays out as a roller coaster of emotions.
Dawn feels so real, that I was absorbed by her evolving feelings and her growing understanding of herself, of her family, and of the changing world around her. This is partly thanks to Claire Adam’s sensitive psychological portrayal of her main character, and partly because of the three-dimensionality she lends to the places – Trinidad, Tobago, Venezuela and London – and times the protagonists inhabit. The dialogue across generations – between Dawn and her parents, siblings, and children – is deeply affecting, as powerful in its silences as in its words. These exchanges and the characters’ actions sustain a taut narrative tension: I often found myself wondering about the consequences of certain conversations – and discovered their outcomes in the novel’s final chapters.
It’s all there in the title: ‘Love Forms’ is about different kinds of love (starting with that of a mother for her child), and about the ways it’s kindled, grows, is challenged, changes… and how it changes us in turn. It’s a poignant, beautifully written novel, and one of the finest I’ve read in a long time. I couldn’t recommend it more highly.
“The Fire In Their Eyes” is a breath of fresh air: a thriller that keeps you hooked right up to the end, it’s boldly original, unafraid to experiment with form, and courageous in its engagement with urgent issues. It reveals the interconnections between these issues, while weaving a narrative that is both emotionally gripping and intellectually engaging. If you crave fiction that does more than entertain – stories that challenge you to think and that spark meaningful conversation – this book is for you. Structured across dual timelines, the novel follows three female protagonists, all of them gripped by a strong sense of impending danger. Each woman fights, with grit and intelligence, to prevent a catastrophe. Though separated by time and geography, the threats they face are connected. In the Arctic, geneticist Eloise races against time at a scientific research station to neutralise a fresh danger to humanity. What is its link to the DNA of “Sarah,” a woman whose 74,000-year-old remains were discovered on Mt. Kenya? Meanwhile in Manchester, psychiatric nurse Jessica – whose husband Max unearthed Sarah’s remains – is experiencing a heightened sense of threat. What is the cause of this change in her? And how will it affect her deep, tender bond with Max? In a lush Kenyan valley 74,000 years ago, the shamanic Old Woman – Sarah’s daughter – perceives an impending danger that could annihilate her people. It falls to her to discern the precise nature of the threat and devise a way to combat it. Stephanie Bretherton’s novel is underpinned by meticulous research. Complex scientific ideas – particularly in biology, genetics, and virology – are conveyed with clarity and precision and linked back to some of the most profound questions of our time. For example, the author draws links between globalisation, climate change and other environmental issues, rising population density, and the emergence of new pathogens. She also explores the spiritual and philosophical questions raised by natural disasters, political opportunism, and the consequences of human actions. One question resonates especially strongly: from one generation to the next, how do we pass on the best of what it means to be human? The power of all forms of love to help us meet the toughest challenges is one of the novel’s connecting threads. This is not, however, a didactic book. Each of its three narrative strands is as gripping as a thriller, with high stakes and expertly controlled pacing. The tension builds steadily towards an emotionally resonant climax. I found Jess and Max’s story particularly moving – an honest, tender portrayal of love and the difficulties it must overcome. The novel’s intricate structure is beautifully handled. You always know exactly where you are and feel secure in the hands of a confident storyteller. Each of the three protagonists is surrounded by sharply drawn secondary characters: family, friends, and colleagues who feel fully alive. The integration of emails, text messages, and unsent letters lends further realism and emotional depth. The settings are equally immersive: Eloise’s sterile research facility and the bleak beauty of the Arctic; Jess at the psychiatric hospital where she works, in the swimming pool where she finds release, and in the quiet refuge of memory – drifting back to a long-ago dive among minnows; and the Old Woman’s tribal village – rich with ritual and community – and its wild surroundings. This is a novel of gripping storytelling, literary substance, and lasting insight – one I wholeheartedly recommend. “The Fire In Their Eyes” is the second book in “The Children of Sarah” series, and I already look forward to its sequel.
The European Literature Network’s latest Riveting Reviews include one from me on Anna Błasiak’s Deliverance (Holland House Books). It’s a moving poetry collection about growing up queer in Poland and gradually attaining one’s full identity. Its superbly inventive blend of art forms holds rich layers of meaning that thoroughly reward attentive reading. I felt privileged to be asked to review this memorable collection.
Here is the link to the article, and here one to the book publisher’s website.
If you’re looking for exciting content and discussion – including book recommendations – about European literature (especially, but not only, in English translation), take a look at all that the European Literature Network‘s website has to offer – it’s a real treasure trove!
I’ve always loved historical fiction, so putting together a full list of titles I’d recommend would make for a very long post. The first novels to captivate me were Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard at secondary school. Soon after, I discovered Dacia Maraini’s The Silent Duchess. To these, over the years, I added books by Umberto Eco, Carol Shields, A.S. Byatt, Hilary Mantel, Rose Tremain, Tracy Chevalier, and many others.
What must historical fiction do, for it to stand out for me? First, it must be beautifully written. I’m very open to experimentation with form – perhaps a result of my own background as a novelist and creative writing tutor. I prize books strong in characterisation, sense of place, story structure and plot development, and other elements of the craft. Second, I’m thrilled when a novel teaches me something surprising. It could be an event central to the whole book, or a small, striking detail. I’m especially drawn to forgotten or silenced perspectives. Third, I value insights and themes that shed light on the past and the present: do they challenge harmful narratives or illuminate legacies we’re still contending with? And fourth, the story must be painstakingly researched and imagined, to possess the authenticity on which everything else rests. That includes a serious attempt at immersing me in the worldviews of the time and place depicted.
If any of this resonates with you, here are seven books I read in the past twelve months that I hope you’ll enjoy. They’re listed in alphabetical order.
This powerful little volume (115 pages) won the 2024 Weatherglass Novella Prize. Set on a ship in the nineteenth century, it’s about a cargo of female convicts destined for Australia. We experience events from the point of view of fifteen-year-old Maryanne. It’s a haunting yet hopeful tale of resilience and camaraderie in the face of misery and brutality. The narration is viscerally immersive, anchored in Maryanne’s raw physical and mental perceptions. Look out for Kate Kruimink, who has already published two other novels.
Costanza Piccolomini, the woman at the centre of this novel, was the muse, lover and model of Gianlorenzo Bernini, the leading sculptor of seventeenth-century papal Rome. In a horrific act of violence, Bernini ordered a servant to disfigure her, in the belief she had been unfaithful to him with his younger brother. Basing herself on the facts that have come down to us about Costanza and the other protagonists, Rachel Blackmore has painstakingly reimagined her life. The reconstruction of the all-important social and cultural context is outstanding, and her conjectures about what happened highly plausible, while her portrayal of Costanza’s inner world is empathetic and engaging. The novel tackles enduring themes: double standards, the abuse of power, and coercive control.
For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain – Victoria MacKenzie (2023, Bloomsbury)
This slim novel brings to life two well known English mystics, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. They are, respectively, the first woman to have written a book in English, and the first author of an autobiography in English. Victoria MacKenzie imagines their meeting in 1413. She draws on their writings and on her research into the medieval context to offer us vivid portrayals of both. Their personalities and circumstances differ greatly from each other: Julian, a reflective anchoress, and Margery, a chaotic mother of fourteen. And yet, their experiences and spirituality make for a strong connection between the two. MacKenzie balances their alternating voices with a poet’s precision and sensitivity. A luminous reading experience.
Once The Deed Is Done – Rachel Seiffert (2025, Virago)
This is the fifth novel by Rachel Seiffert, whose The Dark Room (historical fiction) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Once The Deed Is Done opens in March 1945, as the collapse of the Reich draws near. A multi-point-of-view narration gives us access to the thoughts, choices, and personal histories of several inhabitants of a Northern German village. Ruth, a British Red Cross officer, is tasked with supervising and caring for displaced people in a camp the advancing Allied Forces have just set up on the village’s outskirts. Gradually, a dark, shocking secret harboured by some of the villagers emerges. The novel highlights an issue rarely covered in WW2 fiction: the fate of forced labourers during and after the war. With her moving, unsentimental prose, Seiffert poses tough questions about individual and collective responsibility.
The Painter’s Daughters – Emily Howes (2024, Simon & Schuster) Peggy and Molly Gainsborough are the charming objects of portraits by their father Thomas, one of eighteenth-century England’s most acclaimed painters. Emily Howes turns the two sisters into the subjects of her deeply moving debut novel. Molly suffers episodes of mental confusion from a young age and Peggy instinctively shields her. When the family moves from rural Ipswich to fashionable Bath, hiding Molly’s condition becomes harder. Add to this mix a beguiling composer who enters the sisters’ lives, disrupting their close bond and putting Molly’s fragile sanity at risk. Howes steeps the characters’ thinking firmly in the mentality of the era, rendering their feelings, actions, and dilemmas convincing and deeply affecting. The novel delicately examines themes of devotion, mental illness, sisterly love and rivalry, and other family dynamics. It thoughtfully explores the complex area between protectiveness and control in challenging circumstances, without casting judgment.
Vor Aller Augen – Martina Clavadetscher (2022, Unionsverlag) I’m afraid this one isn’t available in English yet. Martina Clavadetscher is a well-known author of books and plays, and the winner of the 2021 Swiss Book Prize. In Vor Aller Augen (In Plain Sight), she foregrounds nineteen women portrayed in iconic paintings: from Cecilia Gallerani in Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine to Victorine-Louise Meurent and Laure in Edouard Manet’s Olympia, from Joanna Hiffernan in James Whistler’s Symphony In White no. 1 to Dagny Juel in Edvard Munch’s Madonna. Clavadetscher not only captures the moments immortalised on canvas, but, above all, lets each protagonist recount her life story in her own distinctive voice. The silenced object of the painter’s (and the viewer’s) gaze thus becomes the active subject, a real-life woman demanding recognition.
And finally, a bonus recommendation: not a novel, but a piece of historical life writing. Fiction can vividly evoke what it was like to live in another era, but so can micro-history and exceptionally well-crafted family memoirs like the one featured below. Originally published in German, it appears in a superb English translation by Jamie Bulloch.
Alice’s Book – by Karina Urbach, trans. Jamie Bulloch (2022, MacLehose Press)
The title refers to So kocht man in Wien!, a bestselling cookbook authored in 1935 by historian Karina Urbach’s Jewish grandmother, Alice. Forced to flee Austria for England in 1938, Alice survived, while her sisters perished in concentration camps. After the war, she discovered that her book had been reissued in 1939 in an ‘Aryanised’ edition: the author ostensibly a German man; and the names of Jewish and foreign recipes germanised. Despite her repeated appeals, the publisher refused for decades to acknowledge Alice as the true author; it returned the rights to her heirs only after being publicly exposed in 2020. In Alice’s Book, the cookbook is symbolic of loss. It offers a powerful vehicle for tracing the devastating impact of Nazi persecution on one Jewish family – dispersed across China, England, and the U.S. – and for honouring Alice’s spirit of resilience, generosity, and hope. It also sheds light on the disturbing reality of companies and individuals that continued to profit from crimes committed against Jews long after the war had ended.
About me:I’m Italian and British, and moved from England to Switzerland a few years ago. I hold an MA in Creative & Life Writing from Goldsmiths College (University of London). My debut novel, That Summer in Puglia, was published in 2018. I’ve just completed the manuscript of my second novel, Habit of Disobedience, set in Southern Italy in the late 1500s. Inspired by true events, this tale of nuns who stood up to the Church explores themes of power, control and female resistance that resonate today.
Whether you live in London or plan to visit, do not miss the ‘Medieval Women’ exhibition at the British Library. It has generated a phenomenal response, in terms of both praise and visitor numbers, and for good reason. The priceless documents on display offer a rare opportunity to view in one place the evidence of two long-term trends: the deep historical roots of women’s social and legal status; and women’s efforts to exercise agency despite them.
Some of the documents relate to famous figures: a letter signed by Joan of Arc, requesting munitions; the manuscripts of Julian of Norwich’s ‘Revelations of Divine Love’ and of Margery Kempe’s eponymous book; Christine de Pizan’s illuminated ‘Book of the City of Ladies’… The list is spectacular, but the context and detail provided by the items is what makes the whole an unmissable event – it’s not often that you get to ‘hear’ the words of ordinary women. The exhibits include books of treatments for women by women, texts on herbal cures and obstetrics manuals used by female practitioners, a petition by a female slave who refuses to be sold, embroidery and illuminated manuscripts signed by nuns, a woman’s treatise arguing that husbands and wives should enjoy equal rights, the first book printed by a woman… but also, a daughter disowned for marrying a family servant, nuns destined to the cloister since childhood, a queen who fends off male relatives’ attempts to dethrone her, the view of the female body as defective and disease-prone, the prayers to St Margaret for protection during childbirth, records showing women being paid less than men for the same work…
Through their selection of the items (around one hundred and forty), the curators have conjured a mosaic of medieval lives that is not only fascinating, but also offers insights into our own times, when women’s hard-won rights are coming under threat. As the curators explain: ‘Break free from traditional narratives and […] discover stories familiar to women today, from the gender pay gap and harmful stereotypes, to access to healthcare and education, as well as challenges faced by female leaders. Hear the words of medieval women from across the centuries, speaking powerfully for the thousands whose voices have not survived.’1
This sentiment of giving a voice to the unheard spurred my long quest to inhabit the forgotten lives of a group of Southern Italian women from a different era: sixteenth-century nuns. My second novel, which I’ve just completed, is inspired by their remarkable true story. For me, the catalyst was a set of archival documents penned in iron-gall ink: they spoke to enduring issues of power, control, and female resistance. I hope the book will quickly find a publisher, so that my characters may move readers as deeply as the terror, dilemmas, and resilience of the women I encountered in those archival documents moved me. Certain objects in the exhibition – manuscripts copied by scholarly nuns, a cellaress’s notes that probably stay quiet about the politics she often had to navigate, embroidery, a written protest against restrictions on what women could wear, a letter showing the risks of ‘marrying beneath oneself’ – touched me particularly, as they evoked some of my characters and their situations.
Below, some manuscripts originating in Southern Italy and displayed in the exhibition: Tractatus de herbis (‘Treatise on Herbs’, Southern Italy, c. 1300); De Curis Mulierum (‘Treatments for Women’, in a 13th-century manuscript from England) by Trota, a 12th-century female physician at the medical school of Salerno; and De Ornatu Mulierum (‘On Women’s Cosmetics’, England or France, 13th century, from the original Southern Italian 12th-century compilation), another text forming part of the Trotula.
The ‘Medieval Women’ exhibition runs until 2 March 2025. Learn more here. To book tickets, click here.
Valeria Vescina is a novelist, reviewer, creative-writing tutor, and literary director of an arts festival. She is a graduate of the Goldsmiths MA in Creative & Life Writing. Born in Southern Italy, she studied and lived in the UK most of her life, before settling in Switzerland.
Author and critic A.S. Byatt died last week, leaving behind a priceless legacy of engaged, richly layered writing.
Byatt’s work stimulated readers to reflect on the stories she told and the complex questions she raised. A recurring one was the extent to which individuals can shape their own destinies and history, and vice-versa. In her fiction she interwove stories, history, material traces, fairy tales, myths, never afraid to cross the boundaries of disciplines: from literature to psychology, from philosophy to museum studies… Her books of literary criticism are treasure troves of dazzling insight.
The detailed material world in her novels and short stories was emblematic of her attempt to capture ‘the hard idea of truth’ – an attempt she believed all language is doomed to fail at, and which therefore demands accuracy, to achieve even qualified success. My mind jumps by association to pages in which Richard Holmes, whilst retracing Robert Louis Stevenson’s steps in the Cévennes, realises the passage of time makes the enterprise’s perfect success impossible – and yet it must be attempted, with passion and care.
The accuracy Byatt admired in George Eliot, who saw it as a moral imperative, was characteristic also of herself: she never aped nineteenth-century realism, however, but asserted the freedom to incorporate lessons from it in her work. Unsurprisingly, she praised Hilary Mantel’s or Pat Barker’s forms of realism as ‘almost an act of shocking rebellion.’ Byatt wouldn’t be slotted into categories, and instead pointed out that literature’s history is discontinuous – ‘there’s loss as well as gain’ even with Proust, she said, though she admired his ability to combine the ‘truth’ of things with conscious narrative form and though she learnt from him, too.
During my Creative and Life Writing MA at Goldsmiths years ago, we each had to produce a long essay on a topic relevant to our writing. I chose to research the use of art and artefacts in Byatt’s work. She utilised art and artefacts to produce and orchestrate an astonishing variety of effects: to render a description vivid and memorable; ground a story in time and place; define characters and relationships; shape and reflect character development; drive the action forward; illuminate key themes… She could even raise selected objects to the status of a near-character, for yet more purposes. Some artefacts offered the potential for motifs, which she exploited to various ends, including metafictional ones. The way she harnessed the taxonomy of gold, silver and lead in The Children’s Book is a virtuoso demonstration of how recurring metaphors can highlight and connect characters as much as issues.
I applied some of those lessons in my novels, and I’ve since taught for various institutions on the narrative potential of art and artefacts. At yet another – deeper – level, I’m grateful for the encouragement Byatt’s work gave me to never stop learning and experimenting.
Some sources behind this short blog post:
Antonia S. Byatt, Passions of the Mind (London: Vintage, 1993)
Antonia S. Byatt, On Histories and Stories (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000).
‘Poor Uncle Mike,’ I say, slightly surprised at how easy it is to slip into Gramma Ruby’s ways.
So says Lucy, one of several narrators in a collection of stories about the lives of women across three generations of an extended family. We’re in an area of Ontario close to Detroit, ‘a great location […] equidistant from Chrysler’s (the engine plant) and Ford’s Foundry with its medium industrial blue smoke stacks that would one day be shut off for good.’ The protagonists live in cheap post-WW2 housing in need of fixing – ‘tight living, that’s for sure.’
The short stories in Industrial Roots can stand autonomously – indeed, several were published as single pieces – but, taken together, they achieve a coherent whole. Canadian writer Lisa Pike harnesses the potential of this literary form, which is often referred to by different labels (not all synonymous[1]), such as: integrated short-story collection, short-story cycle, inter-related stories, composite novel. Examples include Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples, William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses and Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are? / The Beggar Maid.
The author gives us a choral narration, through which we encounter repeatedly some of the characters at different points in their existence, filtered through various consciousnesses: their own and those of mothers, daughters, grand-daughters, nieces, and cousins, so that they acquire increasing depth and complexity. Their lives are linked by place and patterns of experience, starting with that of unhappy marriages to men who drink, gamble, and are violent towards their wives and children. ‘Some women took to drinking themselves, you know, to cope.’ Intergenerational trauma haunts the living: the first ‘Stella’ in the family was a little girl shot dead in 1920, in a pogrom during the Polish-Soviet War. She and other ancestors live on in the present, with ‘each branch of the family having at least two or three Stellas, Walters and Wandas among them.’
Roots grow deep, spread, and interlace; some surface, and become visible through oral and embodied memory. So, one of the characters drizzles North American dressings onto salads, but also makes pierogi the old-fashioned way her mother and grandmother taught her. She is a repository of the family’s history, one ‘who knew the stories. The one who bothered to hear them and remember them, fix them in her mind the same way the old woman [her grandmother] had them fixed in hers’. Cancer takes away several family members, including one who does not tell her colleagues she’s ill, because ‘They’re going to say: ‘See! And she was such a health nut! Just goes to show you!’ as if getting cancer were her fault, punishment for thinking she was so great, eating healthy and exercising and all.’ Funerals become occasions to grieve, make peace with, reflect on, and – in one case – even meet, relations for the first time.
Some in the younger generation seek to escape the pull of their industrial roots through education, but they grow disillusioned. One of them, debt-laden, recalls Chomsky’s ‘call for change, resistance’ during her university days and concludes she’s living ‘the pragmatics of his prophecy,’ ‘the wearing down of the intellectual, of those people who saw the bigger picture of things, […] how PhDs were now living on food stamps.’ Another earns more by writing essays for students than from her precarious post as a lecturer. She sees the higher-education system operating like an industry and treating her like a mere productive resource. Her outbursts against it, ‘ad-libbing about things like the psychology of advertising, the dismantling of the welfare state […]’], fall on students’ uncomprehending ears.
The book raises questions about numerous aspects of family connectedness. How does family impact us? How do we show care? Do we ever know those near us as well as we believe? Another major theme is mortality – and therefore the sense of a life’s meaning and purpose. ‘A death every few years. Coming to a certain point in life when you realise a funeral could arrive at any moment and it’s just better to have a designated outfit, there, hanging at the back of the closet, ready to go. […] You may as well pick out the outfit you want to be buried in, along with a photo […] A sense of hope for the family, the picture letting them believe that life had been good and happy and worthwhile.’ The quote which precedes the book seems doubly significant: it’s from Faulkner’s ‘As I Lay Dying’, which also handled these themes, while his ‘Go Down, Moses’ broke new ground in this literary form.
Lisa Pike’s characters and sense of place linger in the mind. Separate voices distinguish the protagonists, through their narration and dialogues across different tones and registers. Their environments and possessions are used to delineate them, their relationships, and circumstances with gripping specificity. So, a woman’s perception of her grandmother’s wish to leave a chipped platter to another granddaughter is quietly heart-breaking: ‘Wanda (daughter), of all people, did not deserve the worn, discoloured, beautiful, rose-patterned platter with the two deep chips on the right-hand side.’
Lisa Pike’s love of, and playfulness with, language enables her to pull off this ambitious work. She was awarded the Canada Council for the Arts Grant and received support from the Ontario Arts Council and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity to complete the book. All credit to Heloïse Press for bringing this Canadian author and Industrial Roots to readers’ attention.
Industrial Roots is published on 11 April 2023.
[1] Dunn, M., Morris, A. (1995). The Composite Novel – The Short Story Cycle in Transition. New York : Twayne, Macmillan Publishing
The European Literature Network has just released The Italian Riveter, an incredible resource for lovers of literature from Italy.
This is the tenth special issue of The Riveter, previous ones having focused on the literary output of Romania, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, the Baltics, queer authors, Russia, Poland and the Nordic countries. Click here to view them – they are free to download. Printed copies are available to order from newsstand.co.uk.
The Italian Riveter was launched at London Book Fair on 5 April and at the Italian Cultural Institute, London on 7 April 2022. The Italian Cultural Institutes of London, Dublin and Edinburgh sponsored its publication. ‘Why Italy? Why an Italian Riveter?’ Rosie Goldsmith, founder of the European Literature Network, answers those question in her introduction. Rosie, editor West Camel and design & production editor Anna Blasiak are indefatigable champions of literature in translation.
Contributors include many well-known novelists, poets, translators and critics from Italy, the UK and far beyond. So, The Italian Riveter offers the pleasure both of a superb read in its own right and of discovering new books to delve into. You’ll find exclusive interviews with the likes of Jhumpa Lahiri, Gianrico and Francesco Carofiglio and Tim Parks. Anna Blasiak delves into Italian poetry and Barry Forshaw into crime fiction. Paolo Grossi of New Italian Books talks about promotion abroad, and Diego Marani about the Italian ‘cultural mind’. Maria Teresa Carbone focuses on women’s writing, and Enrica Maria Ferrara specifically on Ferrante Studies.
Distinguished translators from Italian provide overviews of different genres, as well as reviews and extracts of books. For example, Howard Curtis covers lost Italian classics ripe for re-discovery, while Clarissa Botsford writes about the ‘new Italians’, including Cristina Ali Farah, Igiaba Scego and Nadeesha Uyangoda; Shaun Whiteside tells us about translating from Italian, and Ann Goldstein about translating Elena Ferrante; Denise Muir and Antonella Ranieri discuss children’s literature and children’s picture books, respectively; Katherine Gregor explains what differentiates the Italian historical novel and curates the section on untranslated Italian fiction.
Every section includes different contributors’ reviews of works in the relevant genre. I was delighted to write about Lia Levi’s Tonight is Already Tomorrow, a work of historical fiction based on true events. The Italian Riveter is interspersed with pieces in the ‘Postcard from…’ series, to cover the literature of different regions, reflecting the diversity which characterises the peninsula. I was asked to write the ‘postcard’ from my native Puglia, and hugely enjoyed reading the ones from other parts of Italy.
Are you looking for great book recommendations? Or maybe researching contemporary Italian literature? Whatever your reason for landing on this post, you’ll enjoy and treasure The Italian Riveter.
Valeria Vescina 