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

Sorting through another’s life.

Through a second person narrative we learn about Dr Tarek. In the 1960s when Tarek was a child, everyone said he’d grow up to be a doctor like his father, so in deference to that, he did. Working in Egypt in the area of Cairo full of those originally from other countries, Tarek gets married (finally – his sister gave him awful advice the first time he met Mira), and, later, starts a clinic in a district marked by poverty. He meets Ali, who begs Tarek to see his, Ali’s, mother because he believes she’s ill. After becoming a regular at the family’s dinner table, Tarek promises Ali’s mother that he’ll look after her son, but when Tarek falls in love with Ali that looking after becomes something far from the socially acceptable doctor and assistant friendship. Tarek leaves Egypt for Canada. Our narrator knows a lot but they’re trying to piece more together. Who is this narrator and what do they want with Tarek and his story?

What I Know About You is Chacour’s debut novel about the absence of family members and the effect it has. Translated into English from the French by Pablo Strauss, and having won French literary prizes in the early double figures, the novel offers a look at life for LGBT people in 20th century Egypt, an introduction to westerners of a particular way of life in a poverty-stricken district of Cairo, and a second person narrator two has a mysterious quest and potential axe to grind.

Addressing the writing first, that most controversial of perspectives, it is one of Chacour’s main focuses. The author has spoken in interviews about placement of sentences where it concerns keeping the reader on the page and, in parallel, getting them to turn over the page in haste¹. Then you have the use of the nursery rhyme Mary Mary Quite Contrary, where the narrator uses different descriptors for Tarek’s wife, Mira².

The book also makes use of first and third person in addition to the second, and there are patches of letters (they are short). These persons allow Chacour to fully explore the character at the heart of the book, Tarek, to do what many second person authors do not and include the subject in a more objective manner, which gives Tarek more of a voice. (Although the first person is not lent to Tarek, he does get a third person narrative far away from the second person narrator. Interestingly, the first person is reserved for the narrator of the second person – yes, there’s a reason Chacour is winning all those prizes, the structure is fascinating.)

The characters, as a feature, are necessarily difficult to write about due to the second person narrative. The narrator being the only person we know, truly, is probably most ripe for comment – they are, as expected, continually mysterious until that time they choose to reveal themselves and when they do reveal themselves it is very much to Tarek and not to us. The narrator doesn’t care about us; the narrator does not consider us at all because their words are for Tarek only, at no point are we addressed in any way. We, the readers – the end readers, if you will – are technically eavesdropping, which is a fascinating aspect all by itself.

What can be said apart from the mystery, is that the narrator is as good a writer as their puppeteer, Chacour (there is an element of theatre in the book by the way of its inspiration, Romeo And Juliet). The narrator is measured, considered, and feels a need to construct a story out of the few points they know to be true.

As to what we know about the other characters, we do get ‘closer’ perspectives of some of them where the present day, or near-present day is concerned, otherwise there is, again, some potential make-believe. So, to speak of the make-believe, they are well-drawn – where our narrator can’t tell all, Chacour’s readers will be able to read between the lines somewhat. The standout, I think, is the housekeeper, Fatheya, who is treated poorly by her main employer (Tarek’s mother), but is a wonderful aid to others.

In terms of story and location, the book moves between Egypt in the 20th century with Tarek, Egypt in the 21st century, and some wonderful third person snapshots in Montreal. To speak further of the sections in Montreal would spoil the book, but the sections in 20th century Egypt can be discussed further.

Chacour has a few focuses here, as noted before – the LGBT experience and poverty in the Mokattem district, as well as glimpses into the Levantine community of Cairo and a backdrop of political change. The latter is quick to sum up: the president changes, and there is the Six Day War, which Chacour weaves around his fiction so that certain events in his book coincide with the reality. These features are commented on on occasion by the narrator. The Levantine community of people who immigrated (or whose parents immigrated) to Egypt from surrounding countries adds flavour to the set of characters, providing a different perspective and contrast with which to comment on general goings on.

The first two focuses mentioned – now mentioned three times (I’ll stop here!) require their own paragraphs. The look at the LGBT experience is present in some way, shape, or form throughout, as the main character becomes a member of the community, if only at the periphery (to our knowledge, at least), and then Chacour inserts descriptions of the ways same-sex relationships were viewed at the time in various parts of the novel, including long before the actual defining relationship takes place. There is a nod to how same-sex relationships could be conducted, too – it is necessarily brief, owing to the decisions made and plot points involved, but it’s very well done. A defining section of the novel brings evidence to all the commentary that has come before, and shows the reason such commentary has been so consistently included.

The look at Mokattem is important in terms of character and also in terms of the information it imparts. Mokattem is a district in the greater Cairo area populated by very poor families living in makeshift houses, however they have a particular way of life that was quite successful in the 20th century and is being lost to technological progress in the 21st. People there collect rubbish from all around and successfully recycle the vast majority of it, beating the recycling percentages of a great many countries (approximately 80% of rubbish is recycled). What cannot be recycled does unfortunately remain in heaps and hills within the district. Chacour balances well the good and the bad, showing the work ethic and positive environmental impact, while also the effects of the waste on the land and in the community as a whole.

What I Know About You is super – a work of fiction written with tremendous attention to literary detail, to historical description and comprehension for the reader, and with an ever-present page-turning factor as the narrator stays in the metaphorical shadows for as long as they can bear to. Not one to be forgotten any time soon, the book offers a multi-aspect experience that is enjoyable both in general and on a literary level. And if it goes on to continue winning prizes, this reviewer will not be surprised.

I was sent this book in order to interview the author.

Publisher: Gallic Books (Belgravia)
Pages: 242
Type: Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-1-913-54785-1
First Published: 24th August 2023; 19th September 2024 in English
Date Reviewed: 30th September 2024

Original language: French
Original title: Ce que je sais de toi (What I Know About You)
Translated by: Pablo Strauss

Footnotes

¹ Chacour has spoken about it on a few occassions, including this time, a video interview with Radio Canada.
² It should be noted that this device is in fact the translator’s – in my interview with Chacour, episode 114, which will be published early next year, Chacour speaks of the ways the French text in this regard is different.

Episode 107: Jessica Bull (Miss Austen Investigates)

Charlie and Jessica Bull (Miss Austen Investigates) discuss Jane Austen! The mysteries in her books, what and how she read, her likely views on slavery, her forgotten brother, the proposals of marriage she received (there were many!), and her life in her birthplace of Steventon.

If you’re unable to use the media player above, this page has various other options for listening as well as the transcript.