The front cover says ‘fly or die’ – to get that far you need to walk or die, win fights or die, and generally take care or die. Dragons got nothing on this…

Violet is about to enter the Riders’ Quadrant of Basgaith College, of which her mother is a leader. She’s spent all her life so far preparing to be a Scribe but her mother isn’t having it – she’s got to follow the family’s effective tradition. And so Violet enters a literal cut-throat college with no experience and a target on her back for being her mother’s daughter – the older woman had a big role in subduing the parents of a whole bunch of now-candidates, young people who are there by force as penitence for their parents’ sins. But the horror starts at the entry point: in order to become a trainee rider, each candidate must walk over a parapet high above a valley. Each year, tens of people don’t make it and the weather today is wet and windy. If she makes it, Violet must make no friends, only allies, learn to fight, and, if she makes it all the way to meeting the dragons, hope to be chosen by one of them. These dragons breathe fire more often than any other you’ve encountered in fiction before, but without them there is no hope of Violet’s country winning the generations-long war.

Fourth Wing is an absolutely tremendous novel of high fantasy, high stakes, constant character peril (and, yes, they do die), politics, and death and destruction. It’s a book I’m happy to describe as living up to the hype, a famed book for good reason, a book that combines various basic ideas from various decades gone by to nevertheless create a new premise and story. It’s also an incredibly immersive story, the writing and description providing a filmic backdrop.

It would be impossible to point to one single reason this book works; it really is the sum of its parts. The first, and potentially most notable aspect, is the horror and violence – this book gives The Hunger Games a run for its money in just how nasty and violent it is. Death is, in many ways literally, around every corner from the moment Rider candidates join, and that only lets up after graduation insofar as unless the enemy the country is at war with is on your doorstep, you get a reprieve.

I want to get to what I would say are negative aspects about the book out of the way before continuing and one relates to the horror – sex and swearing are everywhere in Fourth Wing. Presented by the author as an activity undertaken due to living in survival mode, candidates are always having sex with each other and it’s almost always casual. Violet herself (the narrative is first person) thinks about sex a great deal to the point that the book is explicit throughout rather than just during the two fully-fledged sex scenes. The swearing is just as frequent and mainly concerns the F word. I personally wonder if both the casual sex and swearing are in there in large part to simply make it obvious that this is not a Young Adult novel, rather than for storytelling purposes.

Talking of the sex scenes and romantasy, let’s do this: this is a high fantasy romance book. You have a few chapters where there’s a possible love triangle before the way ahead becomes clear – in this, the first book of the Empyrean series, Yarros isn’t about to emulate previous decades’ tropes. She wants to get to the chemistry and build-up. I will say that the sex when it happens is rather fun, the explicitness muted by character development. It’s also comical on purpose. And, given that the romance leads of this book are discussed by fans so often, it’s worth noting that they are a diverse couple. (Yes, I’ve seen the AI fan art, too – it’s not accurate.)

The characters, then – Violet is a very average person, as she does remind you often, because she has no drive or confidence in her ability to be a Rider. She was brought up by her father to be a Scribe and, throughout the book, even through her successes she dreams longingly of the archives and the peace being in them would bring her. Xaden, who it’s pretty obvious will be the male lead from chapter one, is less developed due to us being in Violet’s head (you do get to know how hot he is) but a story element leads to us being able to hear more from him later on. The dragons are grumpy and dangerous and set people on fire and… are hilarious. Yes. And Violet’s eventual role as a chosen Rider by a dragon is extremely worth the wait. In fact the book consistently sports something major to look forward to and this is a big part of the story’s success.

There are various other important characters who become part of the core circle, and Yarros keeps the threat of death ever present.

We remain in the same location for the vast majority of Fourth Wing but it never gets boring. And the politics is well-planned with shocks that, no matter whether or not you work them out early, promise much for the continuation of the series.

I think I’ve written enough; frankly, I’d be surprised if anyone’s still reading these words. I’ll end on this – go read Fourth Wing. You won’t regret it and you can thank me later.

Publisher: Piatkus (Hachette)
Pages: 516
Type: Non-Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-0-349-44031-6
First Published: 2nd May 2023
Date Reviewed: 18th December 2024

Choosing what’s best for yourself.

Keaton has been told that her cheating ex (who was cheating with his ex-wife) and her boss (the ex-wife) are having a baby and the boss wants Keaton to take a promotion to help out on a higher-up level. Keaton decides she’s had enough. At the same time, her mother and uncle are looking to put their old family home on the market – finally, after many years of leaving it abandoned after their parents’ early deaths, they want to sell. So Keaton sets off to North Carolina to clear the heritage house she’s never been to and spend some time thinking about her next moves for her life. It won’t be simple, however – when she gets to Beaufort, NC, she falls in love with the house, the people, and her nextdoor neighbour is seriously hot. And she finds out something her mum does not know – many of the townspeople still talk about the sudden disappearance and presumed death of Rebecca and Townsend St James. The car crash that was rumoured may not be the real story.

A Happier Life is a dual timeline, dual narrative tale (with a brief third) of discovery in all its forms. It sees a bit of a change from Woodson Harvey’s recent work; one of the defining elements of 2022’s The Wedding Veil was a mystery and 2023’s The Summer Of Songbirds had a couple of things to iron out in this same vein, but A Happier Life is particularly high on it as to reach it as a genre categorisation. It also has a vastly different sort of ending that has proved controversial (more on that later). But in sum, this book does scratch any itch you might have to read more of the author’s work.

The basic features of a great Woodson Harvey novel are all here. (I do consider her to be an excellent writer.) You have the focus on characters and characterisation; the importance of family, never in any way overbearing, all very lovely and natural; and the wonderful North Carolina/Southern women’s fiction atmosphere that, in this Brit’s necessarily detached view, makes for a very homely and friendly setting.

Nevertheless that Keaton probably should have nipped her relationship with her co-worker-who-was-her-boss’s-husband in the bud, her journey of personal and familial discovery is lovely to read. Whilst she guards her heart very strongly for a while, the goodness she finds in the seaside town wins her over slowly as you know it will. She is the first narrator to be introduced, and arguably the main one.

Narrator two is Keaton’s unknown grandmother, Rebecca, who died long before Keaton was born. Her narrative is definitely more filler-in than completely fully-fledged, simply because we rely on her narrative to find out secrets, but she’s a good character also. (One of the defining aspects of Woodson Harvey’s novels and the reason starting one of her books feels so wonderful is that you know you’ll be greeted by a plethora of good people.)

To speak of the other main characters singularly would spoil the story; there’s only one further that is safe to discuss and that is Salt the dog who is modelled after Woodson Harvey’s own bundle of fur. Salt brings people together as all good boys do and is winsome – he is paramount to the plot.

(What I can say about people as a group is that Keaton’s friendships are lovely and Rebecca’s dinner parties are similarly good; Rebecca’s narrative is in part about menus and creating guest lists of compatible people, and food. Woodson Harvey includes a couple of recipes in the end pages of the book.)

Having chosen to set her novel in the town she lives in herself, Woodson Harvey’s use of location is, needless to say, on point.

There is a romance – it is sweet, well-written, extremely realistic as the author’s past novels have also been, and moves at a good pace. Woodson Harvey writes her romantic heroes very well.

The mystery itself unravels slowly – whilst it’s a focus it’s not the focus until the end; there is plenty of other story content here and you never feel it’s taking a while to get there (and truly the book spans a fairly short period of time in both narratives, anyway). And as the mystery concerns the ending I mentioned, let’s get to it. I’ll try my best to avoid spoiling it.

Given I’m writing this so late after publication and, indeed after my own reading of the novel, I might as well address the fact that some readers have been disappointed with the ending of A Happier Life due to the marketing and the cover (and, I expect, the author’s previous work being different). This book is indeed not really the beach read some expect. The conclusion of the mystery is a very bold choice, I feel, and whilst I understand the view of those who find it upsetting and not ‘right’, I personally see Woodson Harvey having used it in the star-crossed lovers sense, soul mates, and so on. Is it a surprise? Yes, it is, particularly given the choice Woodson Harvey makes as to where to end the book, but it does fit the point she was trying to make (succeeds in making, I would say) about the love between the two people.

So A Happier Life, then, is different. The title is shorter (it was initially titled The House On Sunset Lane, changed perhaps to give prospective readers pause). It doesn’t feature photos on its cover, instead a drawing. And the story, whilst still family and person and location and historically focused, is different in tone.

But it is, dare I say, objectively, a very decent read and a suitable progression of the author’s work.

Publisher: Gallery Books (Simon & Schuster)
Pages: 357
Type: Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-1-668-01219-2
First Published: 25th June 2024
Date Reviewed: 21st November 2024

Indeterminate Inflorescence is a collection of aphorisms by the famed South Korean poet, Lee Seong-bok, taken from his lectures on poetry and collected by his university students.

This is a small book – each aphorism is presented as though it were its own short piece of work, numbered and ordered; you can generally tell when subsequent sayings are from the same lecture as the overall subject is passed along.

This isn’t the sort of book to read from cover to cover; I can say from having read it that way (in order to be able to review it in good time) that it will surely work best as something you dip in and out of whenever you need inspiration or the book just takes your fancy. The problem with reading it as I did is that you notice perhaps a little too much the repetitions throughout and given that these repetitions are almost certainly simply down to the poet having lectured for 30 years, as per the publicity materials, this is something you’ll want to avoid.

There is an interesting aesthetic value to this book – it could easily have been produced as a big-production coffee table book and provided a lot of visual pleasure to other poets and poetry lovers, but then it may have lost the simplicity of what Seong-bok says. Certainly he has a very literary, metaphorical, and simile-full way of speaking (or writing, if the students took the aphorisms from his notes rather than their own) but he also studies those devices in his advice and speaks out against them in particular ways and for particular reasons. Some of the things said may create a pause – they can be odd, very much out of left field (a dog menstruating making one think of humans, for example) and there’s quite the random focus on the relation between sex and poetry as so on on other subjects – but the majority are good.

My personal favourite is the one included in the promotional material, number 151. I expect it’s the favourite of many:

Don’t get distracted by what fascinates, question the obvious instead. Write about things you’d never even bothered considering the importance of. The question itself is the answer. There is no meaning that exists, only the process in which we make meaning.

The only thing I feel is missing is an introduction, by one of the students, the translator, whoever – there is a very brief note about how the book came to be (largely what I’ve described in my opening) but nothing else beyond that. Some added context about what exactly the lectures were about, where they were given, and how the students collected the notes would have been lovely and would have set the book off.

On this, however, I found an Instagram post from the translator, Anton Hur (who has done a wonderful job), which is insightful:

This book was an incredible labor of love from start to finish. Years ago, I found it in a bookstore and fell in love with it. But it was technically non-fiction, and Korean non-fiction was not getting translated so much (at all?) at the time. I made a sample, just for myself, put it in a drawer, and forgot about it.

Then came 2020 when I got to attend [The British Centre for Literary Translation’s] multilingual prose workshop […] I was trying to illustrate a point and showed the workshop my sample. They were WOWED. They asked me if there were more of these aphorisms! That’s when I knew this book could work in translation.

I thought maybe 200 people would buy the book. But then right before publication, RM of BTS uploaded some of Lee Seong-bok’s aphorisms¹.

Suffice to say this provides a reason for there not being an introduction by the original compilers. There is also the following from the publicity materials:

Students of his class spent a decade gathering Lee’s most inspired, fruitful and provocative insights, which were published as a book of aphorisms in 2015 called Indeterminate Inflorescence.

Over all, then, Indeterminate Inflorescence makes for a lovely keepsake that will round off a poetry lover’s library with an aid or inspiration for when time is short. It’s the kind of book you can buy and enjoy over and over again, gaining new insights every time. There are so many aphorisms included – 470 – that you’re bound to find some that resonate with you and that on a very high level.

I was sent this book for review.

Publisher: Allen Lane (Penguin)
Pages: 162
Type: Non-Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-0-241-72815-4
First Published: 2015; 12th September 2023 in English
Date Reviewed: 13th November 2024

Original language: Korean
Original title: 무한화서 (Indeterminate Inflorescence)
Translated by: Anton Hur

Footnotes

¹ Anton Hur, 15th December 2023, Instagram

Never underestimate the elderly.

Archie is waiting in the restaurant of Peter Jones department store for his ninety-something-year-old great aunts to arrive. But then he’s called into a manager’s office: Great Aunt Penny has stolen a figurine from the store and has been caught; Great Aunt Josephine is with her. But Penny’s just an old lady and probably has dementia, right? The store let her off. Archie has some exciting news (these ladies are all about ‘excitements’ be they lunch or a day out) – France has invited them both to accept the Legion d’Honneur for their bravery and service in the Second World War. They’ll go, of course they will. But perhaps Penny’s stealing isn’t a one off – perhaps she’s been stealing throughout her life. Woven around the present day narrative are stories from the sisters’ days in service. Penny working in the FANY and training as a spy, Josephine in the Wrens. And we get the story of Josephine when she came back from Scotland all those years ago, that time when their friend/servant, Connie, gave birth unmarried and in disgrace.

The Excitements, Chrissie Manby’s first novel under the name of C J Wray, is one half very fun romp and one half fascinating WWII detail. Told with a few themes in tow, the novel places a spotlight on a generation of people – I’d argue it does indeed make you take more notice of factual people, not ‘just’ Wray’s two fictional heroines – who are often deemed as being of lossy intelligence, and are undermined in general.

Penny and Josephine are fantastic characters, though I’ll go to bat in saying that Penny is the more awesome for her personality and how she works through bad situations. She does also get more time on the page. Penny’s stand out feature, that can happily be discussed with only a marginal amount of spoilers dropped – because you figure the situation out in chapter one – is her tendency towards thievery. Only jewellery and expensive figurines, mind you, and there is a solid reason behind it, but, to refer back to the last sentence of the previous paragraph, she gets away with it easily because, as her loyal great-nephew points out to the manager of Peter Jones – John Lewis’ flagship store in Sloane Square that has a firm role in this book – she’s starting to get dementia. Poor Archie – he means well and loves his aunts, but even he misses a very obvious trick sometimes.

Elsewhere in Penny’s narrative, or narratives plural, given Wray’s flashbacks to various decades, we see her valiant strides through the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. A girl of her social status and general education wouldn’t have been expected to know much at the start, but Penny’s almost literal kickarse situation involves having been somewhat of an autodidact of W E Fairbairn’s fighting manual which she uses most notably on a date.

In comparison, Josephine’s life has been quieter – she gets through the Women’s Royal Naval Service duties well, and without too much comment given that she does do well, but there’s a secret that haunts her that Wray teases out to reflect Josephine’s trauma. It’s fairly easy for the reader to work out just for the sheer amount of stories we’ve heard about the whole thing by now, but given Wray’s deft work in placing it in the narrative and emphasising it at times it makes sense to do so, it never becomes a case of waiting for the author to get to the point – you’re happy to let it flow naturally.

As to the writing and structure, as mentioned, it’s well thought out. Wray makes use of both the first and third person and includes diary entries and the odd letter. The movements back and forward in time and the way different periods (now; 1940s; 1960s) are dotted about never threaten your comprehension – it’s easy to keep up with what’s happening and the presumed mystery Wray wanted to employ in choosing the non-linear storytelling works.

Of language we’d better bring in the Morse code. Penny and Josephine sometimes use it to communicate and there is hilarity to be had in Archie’s effective broken Morse. The code is brought to the fore towards the end in a very funny way that involves other war-serving nonagenarians that Penny and Josephine aren’t keen on, and a situation of a more criminal kind.

In characterisations further than our intellectually-sound, thieving, kickarse heroines, Archie is a good supportive character. (I can’t quite call him a main character because there’s both a literal difference in age and a big gap in knowledge.) He has his own character progression which involves a jolly scene when he meets a past lover (the comedy grows as the book nears its end) and you get to see inside his head on occasion. Otherwise there is Penny and Josephine’s housekeeper (they don’t use the word ‘carer’) who has a wonderful progression in her own right, and the two other nonagenarians who show up half way through add to the humour – sometimes at their expense (one is always introducing any statement with ‘as an admiral’s daughter…’) and sometimes to outwit Penny and Josephine. And one of them has their own carer who plays a supplementary role.

The Excitements is such a fun book. The sisters’ wish to always have something to look forward to (an excitement) becomes more than they bargained for in a strangely good way and their constant drive for happiness and to always be ‘toujours gai’ (always cheery) becomes a motto within the narrative. If you want some humour with your WW2 fiction – I’d say this book counts as both historical and contemporary – you want this novel.

Publisher: Orion (Hachette)
Pages: 342
Type: Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-1-398-71183-9
First Published: 30th January 2024
Date Reviewed: 8th October 2024

Doing the time warp.

Our narrator is a ‘bridge’ – a civil servant working in a top secret government ministry whose role it is to live and guide a person who has been extracted from the past and brought into the 21st century. These historical figures are people who are taken from their own time period just before the moment of their death – this gets around any pesky paradoxical issues created by time travel. Our narrator’s ‘expat’ is a man some readers may be familiar with – Graham Gore was a factual Navy Officer who died during the failed Franklin expedition to the Arctic – and in this book, he is revived in fiction twice over, once as a written character (little is known about the real man) and again through the time travel. Graham and our narrator get on quite well and Graham adjusts to the 21st century very well. But our narrator is well aware that she knows little of what’s really going on – she’s in on the secret of the government agency but not the secret’s secret. And as the year goes on and she makes friends with other ‘successful’ expats, she also finds herself feeling more for Graham than she probably should.

The Ministry Of Time is Kaliane Bradley’s phenomenal debut novel and one of the very best books of the year. (Don’t just take my word for it – it’s on many people’s lists.) Blending the sci-fi and fantasy of time travel, with the very real but little-known person of Graham Gore, adding some brilliant moments of comedy, and with some absolutely wonderful writing that manages to be literary and sparse and yet completely accessible, this is a very unique book that provides hours of absolute enjoyment and many moments of poignancy.

As the writing is the first thing this reviewer noted, it’s where we’ll start. When I say it’s literary but accessible I really mean it – Bradley doesn’t use all that much description. The Ministry Of Time is incredibly paired down in words enough that there’s a fair amount of white space within the stack of pages to the point that if it wasn’t for the slight distance you feel due to the way the first person/second person (at one point near the end) is written, you’d tear through this book at a rate of knots. Perhaps that’s the point – in creating a tale in sparse language, Bradley forces you to slow down and savour everything you’re reading, more so really think about what you’re reading. It’s the kind of book that you look forward to picking up every day but are sated enough each reading session to be happy to put it down. It is an incredible reading experience.

Yet none of this means the book lacks description – if I had to choose some words to describe this book I would pick ‘autumnal’ and that is because there are scenes set in autumn that are very immersive. Location, season, and, perhaps naturally, the progression of time, are all things Bradley, via the narrator, spends time on, with the role of ‘bridge’ being about a year long and time perhaps gaining new meaning with its manipulation having been achieved.

The characters are well created and developed – within the sparse framework there is still space to bring fully to life this unlikely band of people. The government agency, the other bridges (I think it’s safe to say that our narrator is fully realised!), the ‘expat’ time travellers. In fact, the sparse prose is very much in Graham Gore’s favour here, with his no-nonsense but caring personality and the way he responds to the many changes our narrator goes through. Their story is wonderfully written. And while the real Graham Gore may not have consented to being the hero of a love story – who knows? – it’s fair to say the representation by Bradley is considered, measured, and respectful. The narrator can be cagey, almost, sometimes, but more often she leaves things to subtext, such as her growing attraction to the man, which she shows in moments, for example, when she says that since living with Graham, her hemlines have lengthened.

The humour arrives with no warning – I think even if, unlike me, you know going in that it is an element of the book (well, you surely do now!), it will still be a surprise how and when it turns up. It’s a type of humour I can’t quite put a name to – not really laugh-out-loud or ‘typical’ British humour – but on occasion hilarious all the same whilst being mainly very… well, I’m going use the word ‘measured’ for a second time in this review. It’s obvious that a lot of work has gone into this book.

A change of tone in the second half brings poignancy, your guesses as to where the book will go perhaps mistaken. This is not to say the book becomes upsetting – it doesn’t – but the humour is dulled a little and a certain urgency and seriousness is slotted beside it.

There are a few keys threads in the novel that need mentioning. First is the look at race and multiculturalism and diversity and passing as white. The narrator, much like Bradley, is half-Cambodian, and she comments on the way people treat her and her family. In a great use of comparison, she speaks of Graham’s saying he can’t go ‘back’ – to the freezing Arctic that without the time travel intervention would’ve killed him – and how she’s always been asked by others if she’s been back to Cambodia, that place her mother had no choice but to leave. And there is a moment towards the end of Graham’s own chapters where different peoples are conflated.

(Graham’s chapters, about his last days in the Arctic, are quite a change from the rest of the narrative, and it takes a while to work out what they are for, exactly, but it’s nice to read Bradley’s nod to the real history. The hardback end papers are of his artwork. His daguerrotype picture, the only one we have, is included at the end.)

Maybe I was tired of stories, telling them and hearing them. I thought the dream was to be post-: post-modern, post-captain, post-racial. Everyone wanted me to talk about Cambodia and I had nothing to teach them about Cambodia. If you learn something about Cambodia from this account, that’s on you. […]

When I first joined the Ministry and they’d pressed me through HR, a woman ran her finger down the column with my family history. ‘What was it like growing up with that?’ she asked. She meant it all: Pol Pot Noodle jokes on first dates, my aunt’s crying jags, a stupa with no ashes, Gary Glitter, Agent Orange, we loved Angkor Wat, regime change, not knowing where the bodies were, Princess Diana, landmines, the passport in my mother’s drawer, my mother’s nightmares, fucking chink, you don’t look it, dragon ladies, fucking paki, Tuol Sleng was a school, Saloth Sar was a teacher, my grandfather’s medals, the firing squad, my uncle’s trembling hands, it’s on my bucket list, Brother Number One, I’ve got a thing for Latinas, the killing fields, The Killing Fields (1984), Angelina Jolie, do you mean Cameroonian? Do you mean Vietnamese? Will you say your name again for me?

I considered.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘What was it like growing up without it?’

— Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry Of Time, page 182.

Next, history and progress – two subjects stuck together here as a theme.

I didn’t understand that my value system – my great inheritance – was a system, rather than a far point on a neutral, empirical line that represented progress. Things were easier for me than for my mother […] Was this not progress?

— Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry Of Time, page 117.

That history and progress are here and are together is not surprising – many paragraphs deal with a historical figure learning how to do such things as use a kettle or a washing machine, and the narrator is forced to think this way when living with him and also when considering the ministry. This feeds into the threads on climate change – 30 degrees centigrade is a cool day all things considered.

Lastly, there is some interesting intertextuality here with the 1939 novel by Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male. Graham rather likes it. A thriller set in London and dealing with London and dictators and secret police and gunshots, while I haven’t read it myself to comment on it fully, there seems enough commonality between Rogue Male and The Ministry Of Time that readers of the older work will enjoy the mentions in the newer. (I think there may be plot elements that are more similar than the Wikipedia article on Household’s novel makes out.)

The Ministry Of Time is a feat. It’s utterly unique in its writing and very different to other time travel stories, including time travel romances. This review hasn’t done it justice, and trust me, I’ve tried – if you haven’t read it yet then look out because your ‘best of 2024’ list is about to have a new entry at the 11th hour.

Publisher: Sceptre (Hachette)
Pages: 343
Type: Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-1-399-72634-4
First Published: 7th May 2024
Date Reviewed: 2nd October 2024