"She's always hungry" by Eliza Clark (faber, 2024)

• Build a body like mine - A woman who's had weight problems finds that she's losing weight though she's still over-eating. Her female lover advises her to see a doctor. She has a tapeworm. Managed, it solves her problem, thought her partner leaves her. She offers tapeworm eggs online [No - the idea's ok but the execution's rather flat]
• The problem solver - Juliet's been raped, we're told. She wants to tell someone but the only person available is flatmate Oscar. He thinks she should report it. Against her wishes he goes out (Juliet following), finds the rapist in a pub and punches him, knocking out a tooth in front of mutual friends. She starts getting messaged [No. Execution too ordinary]
• She's always hungry - Published in "Granta". It's a mermaid piece with stronger-than-usual SF/alien/coming-of-age overtones. [Yes. The world-building's unobtrusive. Could be a first chapter. The content guide says that "it takes place in a matriarcal village, where men are heavily subject to gendered repression and systematic violence"]
• The shadow over little Chitaly - Online reviews of a half-Italian, half-Chinese takeaway [No]
• Hollow bones - 33 pages. Min wakes in an alien craft. The rest of her crew died while at a dig on a distant planet. She has a leg wound which puzzles the alien, friendly Dr Noah. She drifts in and out of consciousness, thinking her mother is still alive. To complicate matters further, her translator's on the blink. Fen is beside her. Her wound is luminous blue, When she touches it, her hand develops blisters. Fen and Min distrust Noah - is Min being used as an experiment? They get a ship to collect them. Min has her leg and hand amputated. Then she notices a blue luminesence in her mouth
• Goth GF - The narrator who works in a bar has a female Goth co-worker who criticises colleagues' make-up and taste in music. She self-harms. On Instagram she has rude selfies and a big following. The narrator (who late in the story is revealed to be male) fancies her - she's doing a Ph.D. He gets tattoos like hers. She bluntly rejects his offer of a date. He gives her his tips as long as she continues to belittle him.
• Extinction event - Earth is dying. Some plant/animals are brought back from a distant plant. They breath chlorine, eat microplastics, and exhale oxygen. The narrator looks after them and works out how they reproduce. When they're transplanted, the Earth improves, but the beings die from disease and grieve for each other. The narrator doesn't think this is moral.
• Nightstalkers - California. Keith tells his mother that he doesn't want to continue school. He wants to start a band with friend Tommy and get a girl vocalist. He and Tommy sneak into unlocked houses and take things. Tommy has a new girlfriend Rainbow who wants to try acid. Keith and her try some. He drifts off on a high. Tommy finds him in a house. They start making out. They run off back to Rainbow when the owner threatens them with a gun. Keith's happy.
• Shake well - The female narrator, 15, has bad acne and older boyfriend Kyle, a minor drug dealer. She squeezes and squirts until she buys an online remedy that seems to work fine. But her face becomes brittle, it cracks and bits come off. It can be mended. She'll made do. [Not much of an ending]
• The king - The narrator is in a phone-selling company. Shauna, a colleague, isn't impressed by him. He killed and ate his father. He eats only humans. He's working his way through Roy at the moment, who's tied up in the narrator's home. Roy is a seer. He predicts the end of the world in 63 days. The narrator prepares. There's mutually assured destruction. He sleeps for 100 years, wakes to become leader of survivors who live in a theme park. He teaches them technology and farming. He expands his power. Shauna appears with her band of followers. The narrator turns out to be a female. The narrator wants to mate with Shauna rather than humans, to create a master race. 30 years later Shauna's taken control. She cuts the narrator's head off but because she doesn't eat him, he regenerates, swimming to the continent and starting a new group, planning to conquer Shauna's tribe.
• Company man - Dora's father works for the party. She's on probation. She used to be Marti. Through the story she compares her (Dora's) reactions to those Marti would have had. She has a recurring, progressing dream involving a red tent. A man from the water board dates her. She lies that she's a widow but was lonely before that. He says his young son died and then his wife died of cancer because she didn't want treatment. They start having frequent sex. She dreams that she reaches the tent, that inside there's a cabaret. The emcee gives her a knife and there's a baby. The man says he's been searching for her - she killed his son and because of her father's connections was able to start a new life with a new identity. He strangles her. She dreams that at the cabaret she's put in a cage and sees the others have fun. [Without the dream sequences this would have been passable, readers speculating about Dora's past, and her attempt to forge a new self - another SF piece? The dreams add a layer of interpretation.]

The content guide (i.e. trigger alerts) is over 2 pages long. One entry says "The shadow over little Chitaly" contains extensive descriptions of food.

After a weak start there's impressive variety - Keith's high in "Nightstalkers" is nothing like Min's drugged confusion in "Hollow bones". There's variety also in the plot/character balance. In pieces like "Extinction event" the plot summary tells you the piece's purpose. In "Nightstalkers", though a lot happens, it's Keith's thoughts about his future life that are significant. All stories involve people who can't be trusted. Gender is pretty fluid. I'm not impressed/disturbed by the humour or horror in the way that the reviewers are. Yes, there's cannibalism but it's not gratuitous.

Other reviews

• Yagnishsing Dawoor (Clark is a bona-fide queen of body horror, sadistic in her choice of imagery. ... The title story, set within a matriarchal community with strict rules for its men – fishers vulnerable to the dark call of the sea – is a delectable, code-scrambled mermaid tale that plays with ideas about male and female power (“The machinations of men had done so little for this place, and for the world outside of here”) and adds a mischievous twist to notions of communal safety and female self-sacrifice. It comes swaddled in influences, from Andersen’s fairytale to Orkney folklore and Lovecraftian mythos ... The King satirises the “femgore” subgenre with which Clark has been identified, dramatising its excesses while relishing its cliches)
• Emily Fletcher (Clark addresses sensitive topics with a humour that doesn’t feel dismissive. Instead, her approach is both relatable and, surprisingly, comforting, striking a balance that acknowledges the seriousness of these issues without losing her unique, and comedic voice. ... ‘The Shadow over Little Chitaly’ is the story that stood out to me the most – This story was extremely laugh-out-loud worthy.)
• Ian Mond (“The Shadow Over Little Chitaly” is easily one of the funniest stories I’ve read in years ... Equally funny, but with lashings of cannibalism and gore, is “The King”, my favourite piece and one of three science fiction stories in the collection.)
• Emily Goulding (My personal favourites were ‘The King’ and ‘Shake Well’, as well as the outstanding ‘The Shadow of Little Chitaly’)
• thefictionfox

"A quiet death in Italy" by Tom Benjamin

An audio book

Dan (English) works in Bologna as a private detective for the firm run by "Commandante" (an Italian ex-policeman). Before long Dan will be boss. He has a 13 y.o. daughter Rose. His Italian wife (daughter of the commandante) died 3 years before. An old anarchist, Paulo Solitudine, has been found dead in the river. He'd disappeared after a police raid on their squat. The mayor's wife Marta (who lectures about Marx) called the firm for help because she's suspicious of her husband's role in Paolo's death - she'd been having an affair with Paulo. Her husband (Carlo Manzi) has been more attentive to her recently. And a mayoral election is a month away. Dan finds that he's giving money to a pregnant woman, that he's keen on removing the red tape on city development, and has been dealing in property. Dan discovers a passage from Paulo's flat to the river. Paulo's lover Delores finds a notebook in his flat, which she passes to Dan. It's a diary going back to 1979, the time when Paulo, Carlo and Marta were socialist friends. The police take Dan in for questioning, taking his SIM card. They talk to his boss, explaining that they want stability.

We get extracts from Paolo's notebook. He and Marta had slept together (so why had Marta denied it?). Carlo had pointed a gun at him, then himself. The revolutionary group had been short of money so Paulo had been part of a group planning to steal some money. He'd got 7 years for it.

Marta asks him for an urgent meeting. Her husband and the chief of police are there. Having realised that Paolo knew about their property dealings, Carlo and Marta had schemed a revival of Paolo's affair with Marta to keep him quiet. Marta hadn't known about Carlo's affair and had been worried when Paolo died. She'd enjoyed the attention she'd been getting from Paolo. Dan wonders if she's being forced into this and offers her protection.

The commandante, the current head of police, and Dan talk. The police pension fund was dirty money, funding the mayor campaign (he'd been an informer for years). The commandante's firm may have got start-up money from the same source. "We are family," the commandante tells Dan.

At Paolo's funeral there's a protest. At the anarchist's urban farm, "Death of an Anarchist" is performed. The police raid, burning the place down. Dan ends up in an abandoned building with the head of police and a policeman, his subordinate, who he kills. He threatens an anarchist who's been working for him, saying he'll frame him for the policeman death if he doesn't continue working for him. Dan accepts the situation. He ensures that incriminating parts of the notebook are published in time for the election

In the printed book the diary extracts are in italics. In the audio version the distinction between extracts and main narrative is less clear. There's quite a lot about the sights and history of Bologna, which I didn't mind. The view of the Bolognese about themselves and other Italians might be unfair. I like how allegiances are complex. Old and young anarchists aren't always allies. Police and criminals may work together against the destabilising anarchists. I like the set piece of the funeral. I don't so much like "an audible gasp"

Other reviews

• Sylvia Maughan (On first reading, it was difficult to get a clear picture of the plot. This may have been due to the way in which much of the information comes through dialogue. The dialogue itself seems clear and very authentic, but it masks the information that is needed to understand the plot. In some places it is the speed of the storytelling that causes the difficulty.)

"Granta 163: Best of young British novelists" (Granta, 2023)

Extracts from the work of 20 novelists under 40 - about 5 men. I know of Eleanor Catton, Saba Sams and Eley Williams. The introduction by Sigrid Rausing (a judge) roughly categorizes the writers -

• affection for the local - Thomas Morris, Saba Sams
• make meaning of hard lives - Yara Rodrigues Fowler, Natasha Brown
• displacement and alienation - Olivia Sudjic, Lauren Aimee Curtis, Jennifer Atkins, Anna Metcalfe, Eliza Clark
• experimental - Eley Williams, Derek Owusu, Sara Baume, Graeme Armstrong, Sarah Bernstein
• defying categorisation - Eleanor Catton
• what is love - K Patrick
• historical - Isabella Hammad, Tom Crewe
• speculative - Sophie Mackintosh
• deadpan, experimental, alienation - Camilla Grudova

Re the judges -

• Rachel Cusk "talked about writers' ability (or failure) to control and transcend their own material"
• Tash Aw "questioned how far we should privilege a text's internal sense or logic"
• Brian Dillon "noted the slightly caressing, watery feel of many of the novels on the shortlist, and the hard singularity of others"
• Helen Oyeyemi "(the judge among us perhaps most committed to fiction testing the boundaries of convention) was also interested in whether the writer succeeded in evoking curiosity in the reader"

Armstrong's piece about gangland activity (drugs, blades) is written "in dialect" without restricting itself to one register - "The internal revealed itself in the level ae substance abuse, isolation n suicide"; "we got ready fur T in the Park the-gither n bounced on a bus wae aw the GYT wans"; "Drug-inspired delusion or Christmas epiphany, A cannae say fur sure but everyhin changed fae that night on"

Jennifer Atkins' extract has this - "I found a taxi without trouble - Annie had promised there wouldn't be trouble. Earlier that month she'd invited me to come for dinner, the last weekend of the summer, for reunion of sorts at her and Edward's bungalow. She had spoken, drolly, about the meadows and the fields in their part of the country, and the drollness with which she'd spoken didn't match the sight of the late-flourishing land I saw from the taxi window. The sight from the window didn't match anything". Note the chaining together of sentences, the linking by repetition of "trouble", "droll", and "window".

Sara Baume writes "She has been ten for a month and she does not like it. She carries the weight of her extra digit like a chain-mail vest. She hunches her shoulders as if recoiling from the cold metal."

Eliza Clark's piece has atmosphere. It's a mermaid piece with stronger than usual SF/alien/coming-of-age overtones.

Tom Crewe's piece, unlike several of the others, is a self-contained story. I like it, especially the plot. Charles and another man in his 60s are invited to an exhibition of recently-dead Soutine's paintings. They were both his models, both working for a time at the same hotel. They compare how they've changed (Charles only a little). Neither recalls the other, though the other one recalls Charles's wife-to-be, a room-maid. Charles and the room-maid had opened a shop together, then divorced childless. They haven't met for 20 years. Home from the exhibition's opening he writes her an invitation to the show.

Saba Sams' "Gunk" is maybe my favourite piece.

"Blue, babe" by Shagufta K. Iqbal (Nine arches press, 2026)

I don't get it. I'll await reviews with interest.

"Literary landscapes" by John Sutherland (ed) (Elwin Street Productions, 2018)

Settings of dozens of novels are written about in this book. Sometimes there are paintings by (or admired by) the writers, sometimes maps. Authors range from Jane Austen (Bath) to Eleanor Catton (New Zealand) and beyond.

Some of the settings attract fans. There's Bloomsday, and SF fans trace the route of Wells' Martians from Woking to Primrose Hill. I've visited several of the locations, though I didn't feel close to all of them. The ones I most identified with were Manzoni's Lombardy, Hardy's Dorset, Joyce's Dublin, and Strindberg's Stockholm Archipelago.

Misc notes -

• "Anne of Green Gables" is described as a "chosen one" narrative (a term I'd forgotten). In such texts, only one person can put a magical world (Oz, Wonderland, Narnia, Hogwarts) right. But Avonlea could be real.
• For Hardy, there's a map showing the real or fictional names of places. Portsmouth (where I grew up) keeps its name. Swanage (where my mother was born) is Knollsea. He renamed Wareham (my father's birthplace) Anglebury, after a pub that my grandfather must have frequently visited.
• Daphne du Maurier saw an abandoned estate called Menabilly and used it in "Rebecca" as Mandalay. When Hitchcock's film made her rich she bought the estate, but her children disliked living in it.
• "Arturo's Island" (Elsa Morante) is "Considered by many as one of the finest Italian novels of the twentieth century". Oops. I've not heard of it.

"Limberlost" by Robbie Arnott

An audio book.

Tazmania. Ned was 5, living in Limberlost, when his mother died. Only his sister Maggie, the eldest of the 4 siblings, remember her. When it's rumoured that a mad whale had been attacking boats at the river mouth at dusk, his father takes him and his brothers there, showing them the reef that drunk sailors used as an excuse. A huge whale surfaces by the boat. Ned would never forget its huge eye. 10 years later, his brothers at war, he's catching/shooting rabbits, selling their pelt to the army, saving up to buy a boat. He accidentally traps a Qual (a wild cat). He cares for it, keeping it secret from all but Callie, his friend's tomboy sister. He buys a boat, mends it, takes Callie on it.

When the cat's ready to be released, he and Callie take it on the boat to a forest. When he finishes the boat, people visit to admire it. There are hints that the farm is in financial trouble. He gets an offer for the boat. He take it one last towards the river mouth but the weather's bad. He sells it. Callie finds it wrecked by the road - there'd been an accident after it was collected. He visits it, overwhelmed by sadness - his cat gone, his boat gone, his brothers gone. He reads his mother's favourite novel, the one that she called the orchard after. He wonders whether the grief about the boat will ever turn to happy memories. At the end of summer his oldest brother returns. Looking back after a lifetime, it will seem his life's most overwhelming moment, surpassing even the moment when his wife died.

He marries an unnamed wife (Callie). They live on a farm - he knows about orchards, she about the rest. He travels to the Lake District (UK) as a rep of the orchard collective (!) to learn about a new spray. He sails on Lake Windermere. His mother loved the lakes - "was he drifting on a mirror that once held her reflection? The spray helps make the farm a success but there's a hint that it causes his wife's later cancer when his girls are little. He visits his 2 elder girls when they're at university. They ask if he had ever thought of returning his land to its real owners. He wants to tell them about the boat, the river. He means to tell them the cancer has returned. The orchards of the area have been converted to vineyards. He has grandchildren. At his 90th birthday he feels profoundly loved, profoundly alone.

The order of events presented above is little like the order in the book. In the first section we get a summary of his first 20 years. In the final paragraph we're told that his wife died, that he lived beyond 90. The book starts slowly, the key symbols gradually accumulating significance - especially given that there are no death scenes. He returns to the episode of the wild cat throughout his life, telling his young children about it. He's caring and considerate. That summer he cared for the cat and the boat. He befriended his wife-to-be. He learned how to love and lose. By the end, the book's moving, though the UK trip seems odd.

Other reviews

• Imogen Dewey (Arnott’s writing of the natural world is elegiac and elemental, capturing its out-of-kilter ferocity: a place of beauty but not peace ... Arnott, I think, isn’t sentimental. Ned’s failures and errors aren’t presented as moments of transformation or growth. They are allowed simply to stand, as part of the whole.)
• Melissa Harrison (Arnott has an eye and an ear for description that can elevate otherwise quiet moments to something genuinely transcendent: “He resumed walking through Limberlost, his father’s orchard, the rabbit swinging stiff in his hand. Smoke hazed from the house’s chimney. Apple trees in a nearby paddock had taken on the glow of dawn. At Ned’s back the river shone, teal blinking into slate and cerulean, revealing a greater truth of colour.” That is, by any measure, a gorgeous paragraph ... It’s a lovely read for anyone who enjoys descriptive writing, but would be more compelling with some tightening up of the nuts and bolts of storytelling: plot, pace and point of view. We’re told Ned really wants a boat, and this goal is what the first third of the book moves us towards, but we never really feel his need or fully understand why it takes this form. An inciting incident in which his father takes all three boys to see a supposedly mad whale lingers in Ned’s memory, but its meaning remains confused even as more details emerge ... When Ned falls in love, his partner remains unnamed until close to the novel’s end; it’s a gamble that doesn’t pay off, rendering an already rather sketched-in female character even less real without adding any much-needed narrative propulsion. ... Many of the details of a trip to the English Lake District, populated by flat-capped “West Anglians” and their collies, are likely to make British readers wince. Limberlost is told in a closeup third person; this allows for limited departure from the main character’s experience – usually for scene setting – but here isn’t handled consistently enough. Episodes are described in vivid detail that Ned doesn’t witness)

"Granta 68: Love stories" (Granta 1999)

• Call if you need me (Raymond Carver) - Dan (his first-person) and Nancy have a son Richard about to go to college. They've each had recent affairs (he with Sue). Richard goes to stay with his grandmother while Dan and Nancy go to a rented cottage for the summer to save their marriage. On the first day they see a hummingbird, decide to fish and to get a dog. But by evening she thinks it's hopeless. She wants to see Richard and her mother. She goes to bed. When he sees a herd of white horses in the front garden he calls her. She's as awed as he is. They have a good night and sleep together. Next morning he gives her a lift to the airport. Dung and hoofprints are in the front garden. He phones Sue.
• Habibi (Ruth Gershon) - 45 pages. Hannah (a nominal jew) works as a lecturer in London. She has grown children. She lives alone. On a stay in Tel Aviv she starts living with Yussuf, an Arab. The sex is good. The jew/arab mix complicates social/admin activity. She misses him when she returns to London for the term. He doesn't reply to letters. She goes back. They argue. They make up. She realises how lazy he is. She leaves him for good. [Given the length, doesn't do enough]
• Famous people (Orhan Pamuk) - 1958. A couple plus their 2 young sons (one the first-person PoV) live in Istanbul. "Staring out of the window was such an essential habit that when television finally did arrive, people started watching it as if they were still looking outside". The boys collect cards of famous people from bubble gum packs. The persona catches his father trying to secretly leave - to Paris he says. The mother asks her mother if they can live with her. She refuses. The persona loses most of his cards in a game with his brother.
• Fit mother (Peter Ho Davies) - America. She and Bill were addicts. When she got pregnant, she stopped. When she had the baby, social services took him away saying she had 6 months to prove she was a fit mother. She went to collect her mother from far away, bringing her back to help. They hadn't met for years. Bill's arrested for selling drugs. The social worker's impressed by how she's turned her life around but says that her mother's dangerously senile. So she takes her mother back to where she has friends.
• Then and now (Daniel Meadows) - Rephotographing "ordinary" people photographed 25 years before as part of a project [Non-fiction]
• Exchange of pleasant words (Aleksandar Hemon) - The Hemon family trace their ancestor back to the Bible and Iliad. The family-council organise a "Hemoniad", inviting a lost branch of the family, the Hemuns. Videod for posterity.
• Uncle Ed (Keith Fleming) - The author when 16 went to live with his uncle, the openly gay author Edmund White. [Non-fiction. An interesting and entertaining read.]
• Going abroad (W.G. Sebald) - He goes to Vienna, having lived 25 years in England. He wanders all day, thinks he sees Dante. He spends a day with an old friend who'd been institutionised for decades. Then he catches a train to Venice. He gets a train to Verona. He thinks he's being followed. He escapes to Innsbruck. The piece includes graphics - photos, tickets, receipts.
• The furnace (Lydia Davis) - A married daughter, emotionally constrained, tries to communicate with her ailing father. They discuss their furnaces. He sends her crime cuttings from his local paper.
• Closer (David Malouf) - 6 pages. Amy, 9, belongs to a strict pentacostal family. Uncle Charles, from Sydney (Sodom) isn't allowed close. She dreams about him. [Not for me. Too much is about pentacostal oddness]
• Asking for it (James Hamilton-Paterson) - 4 pages. A British man is gang-banged by 5 Arab men in Libya. He didn't report it to the embassy or the police. He thinks it was more a political than an erotic act. [Non-fiction?]
• First cut (Jonathan Kaplan) - About becoming a South African surgeon during apartheit. His first patients were rioting students. It was difficult trying to be a neutral doctor. [Non-fiction]