"When Will There Be Good News?" by Kate Atkinson

An audio book.

30 years after her novelist father left and the rest of her family were savagely killed, Joanna is a married doctor in Edinburgh with a 1 y.o. child. Reggie Chase (a clever 16 y.o. girl, who lives alone) helps with childcare. She lies about her mother being alive (she died on holiday with her new lover). Her brother Billie, 19, misbehaves. She's tutored by the dying Miss McDonald.

Jackson Brodie (ex-army, rich from an inheritance) gets a hair from Nathan, 2 y.o. who's at nursery school in Yorkshire. His ex-wife is Josie. Their 12 y.o. daughter is Marly. His ex-girlfriend is Julia, who claims that Nathan isn't his.

Louise (40 - a chief inspector with son Archie, 16. She used to work with Jackson) has re-married Patrick (surgeon, with a Ph.D son). An amusement arcade owned by Joanna's husband has burnt down - not the first of his places that has burnt down. Louise investigates, discovering that Neil's struggling financially. She has to visit Joanna anyway, to tell her that the killer, Decker, is about to be released. She cares about Alison Needler too, whose husband went crazy and has gone missing.

Neil says that Joanna's gone to stay with an aunt in Yorkshire until the press stories about the killer's release calm down. Brodie misses her - she was her confidante. She's suspicious - Joanna's car and phone haven't gone, and the baby's comforter (bloodied) is found by the dog.

A train crash is caused by Miss McDonald's driving. She dies. Reggie saves the life of Brodie, who was in the train. When Brodie wakes in hospital, he has the ID of Andrew Decker. Later he recalls who he is.

2 men wreck Reggie's flat, saying they're looking for a guy called Reggie Chase. She reports her suspicions about Joanna to Louise, and tells her the name of the man whose life she saved. Reggie visits him, and helps him out of hospital by claiming she's his daughter. He wants to get back to London to meet his wife Tessa (a museum curator; they've known each other for 4 months) at the airport. He has an accident in a rented car with Reggie. Louise picks them up. Meeting Jackson again has made her have doubts about her marriage. She's investigated Joanna's aunt - she's been dead a fortnight. Joanna had recently met Decker in prison.

Reggie enlists Jackson to track down Joanna. She's being held hostage by people who Neil owes money to. She kills her imprisoners. Reggie and Jackson give her and the baby a lift home. The police track down Decker who shoots a colleague of Louise then kills himself. Nobody finds out who killed the kipnappers. Tessa turns out to be a fake who's gone off with Jackson's money. Louises is about to leave her husband.

The main characters engage in entertaining internal monologue, dropping literary allusions and asking themselves questions. They have an interest in language and figures of speech. There are many observations and fun phrases -

• "who looked as if she'd knitted herself"
• "dressed in a uniform that would have allowed her to drown in a vat of Heinz tomato soup without anyone noticing""

Other reviews

• Patrick Ness (Atkinson began tackling life and death and fate and love with a freedom and fluency unseen in her earlier novels. By becoming a crime writer, she has - in a way that other "literary" types may wish to note - become a better literary writer than ever: funny, bracingly intelligent and delightfully prickly. ... Lovers of the crime genre have given Atkinson a hard time for her use of coincidence, and truth be told, the first half of When Will There Be Good News? can be a little hard to swallow ... By putting coincidence so firmly in control of her plot - all the way through to its very last page, where two protagonists are revealed to have an even deeper connection - she starts to raise larger questions of destiny and fate)

"New British Poetry", Don Paterson and Charles Simic (eds), (Graywolf, 2004)

It's taken me over 20 years to catch up with this. It was written to show Americans what British poetry is like. Here are extracts from the front matter -

From the Preface by Simic - Until thirty years ago, one could still find ample selections of British poetry in North American school books. ... What [my professors] liked about the British was their reluctance to innovate ... Reacting to such views, the poets of my generation, and I imagine other readers of poetry, began to ignore what went on in Britain ... The rediscovery of British poetry on this continent in the last few years has a lot to do with the popularity of Irish poetry ... If the Irish poets were so good, one thought, then what about poets in the British Isles? ...
It was contemporary North American poetry that I now found wanting ... formulaic. The favourite kind of poem was a first-person, realistic narrative that told of some momentous or perfectly trivial experience ... The chief strategy of these poems was to conceal that they were poems by avoiding anything that seemed too imaginative or too irreverent ... Americans prefer to dwell on the future rather than the past. We are wary of traditions, closed intellectual systems, and ideas that do not come from experience

From the Introduction by Paterson -

• Modernism fed into British poetry as a new, invigorating tributary to the river of the old tradition. In the main ... it did not present itself as the revolutionary alternative it was for the US
• There is still a powerful sense in the UK that, despite having lost much of its core readership, poetry can and should matter
• the self-absorbed, closed-system expressionism of the Po-mos mark them out as some kind of final Romantic. In the end, they probably do deserve to inherit the earth, being the first literary movement to have conceived the masterstroke of eliminating the reader entirely
• the Mainstream insist on a talented minority, and a democracy of readership; the Postmoderns on an elite readership, and a democracy of talent

36 poets each get 5 pages or so. They're my age, more or less. I grew up with them. Some (Jo Shapcott?) have fallen away. Others (Armitage) have kept going. Any surprise inclusions? Not especially, even with the advantage of hindsight. Allnutt, Bhatt, Didsbury, Mark Ford, Glenday, McKendrick, Motion, Reading, and Anne Rouse are there.

Each poet has a few lines of blurby introduction -

• "Armitage is a poet of terrific rhetorical power and control"
• Bhatt's "translucent, weightless line cleverly disguises a rigorous technique"
• Burnside's "radiant meditations have been perhaps the most quietly and pervasively influential voice to have emerged in British poetry in the last twenty years"
• "In their flawless technique, [Donaghy's poems] seem, perhaps, built to last in a way few other poets in the language can currently rival"
• Selima "Hill has been one of the very few poets to have contributed something wholly original to the feminist debate in the last twenty years"
• Maxwell's "voice has developed into one of the most original of the last fifty years"
• "O'Brien is the UK's leading poet-critic"
• Oswald "often seems - against the grain of contemporary British practise - to wholly tell, and not show"
• "Reading is an impossible poet to represent fairly by extracts"

I liked "Scheherazade" (Allnutt), "Machines" (Donaghy), "Shibboleth" (Donaghy), "Prayer" (Carol Ann Duffy), "The Hill-track" (Kathleen Jamie), "April" (Alice Oswald), "Testament" (Anne Rouse), "Phrase book" (Jo Shapcott).

I was puzzled by "The sky my husband" (John Ash), "What the uneducated old woman told me" (Christopher Reid).

Other reviews

• James Rother (At first blush, it must be said, a skimming of New British Poetry’s innards proves not all that enticing. A majority of its inclusions seem, despite the occasional lurch into the memorable, to lack assuredness and in some cases even basic skills. ... two Americans and an Irishman attempted to put English poetry back into the mainstream of European culture. The effect of those generations who have succeeded to the heritage of Eliot, Pound, and Yeats has been to largely squander the awareness those three gave us of our place in world literature, and to retreat into a self-congratulatory parochialism. ... Simon Armitage, Christopher Reid, and Michael Hoffmann, all of whose unassuming and accomplished work stands head and shoulders above much of the whatever filling out the anthology’s body of text. Of their poems, the most outstanding are, respectively, “The Dead Sea Poems,” “Mermaids Explained,” and “Lament for Crassus.”)
• Todd Swift (The plain truth is, there is no poet currently writing (Edwin Morgan excepted and he is in his 80s) in England, Scotland, or Wales, with the gravitas, humanity, intelligence, or craft, of Heaney; nor one to better the cavalier verve of Muldoon; or learned elegance of Mahon, for that matter. ... It is unusual for anthologies to be fronted by so many pages of sheer nonsense ... There are perhaps twenty-five very good poems in the collection. There seems to have been a tendency to go for the ones that American readers will "get", and this means a lot of local flavour has been drained. Some of the best include: Armitage's "Poem"; Dongahy's "The Bacchae"; Carol Ann Duffy's "Warming Her Pearls"; The three from Fenton; Michael Hoffman's "Lament for Crassus"; Jenkins's "Visiting"; "Pentecost" from Lewis; Lumsden's "An Older Woman"; and the five from Motion.)
• John Drexel (American readers (and American poets) ought to discover, if they haven’t already, Mark Ford and Carol Ann Duffy and Michael Hoffmann.)

"Progress report" by Connie Bensley (Peterloo, 1981)

Poems from TLS, Poetry Review, Agenda, Cosmopolitan, BBC radio 3, etc.

In the first 25 page I didn't find any poems to impress me. "Body Check", "Dig" and "Permissive Society" surely aren't from the TLS. "Guru", "Hiatus" and "A Rare Success" are better.

"Verity" by Colleen Hoover

The first-person protagonist, Loren, has been looking after her mother (now dead) for months. She's a not very successful novelist who had an affair with her agent who'd been attracted to her because he thought she was like the main character in her first novel. She's offered a lucrative deal to complete a series of novels written by Verity Crawford. Verity's twin daughters died in 2 accidents. She has a remaining son. She had a car accident which looked like a suicide attempt. She's barely conscious now, only reflexes left. She's married to Jeremy. Jeremy invites Loren to stay and do some research. She finds an autobiography describing Verity's first night with Jeremy, her attempts to have a miscarriage when Jeremy seemed to love the unborn twins more than her, and her liking of Jeremy's body.

Loren begins to wonder if the twins' deaths were accidental. Given that Jemery's the model for the male characters in the novel series, she wonders if sleeping with him is part of the necessary research. She begins to think that Verity can move - her son lets slip that she can talk.

In the autobiography, Verity describes how she killed the second twin. Loren sleeps with Jeremy and shows him the manuscript. She hears him confront Verity with it. He tries to kill Verity. Loren suggests how he could do it to make it look like an accident.

7 months later Loren is pregnant with Jeremy's child. Loren finds a letter hidden in what was Verity's room, written by Verity to Jeremy. It says how she'd written an untrue story with true details to help her write a novel, how Jeremy had found it, believed it, and had tried to kill her, how she'd faked her paralysis and had planned to leave with her son as soon as she could get enough money. Loren destroys the letter, wondering whether it's a fake.

I'd assumed that the manuscript was a fiction (written by Verity or maybe Jeremy). The faking of the paralysis seems unlikely.

Other reviews

• Sarah O'Connor (it tries to be a thriller, it tries to be a horror story, it tries to be a creepy mystery but it only slightly hits the mark on all these things ... One of the main themes that gets repeated by Lowen at the beginning of Verity is how an author is not their words, how she is mistaken for being a worse person than she is because of the books she writes and that the voice she writes in isn’t who she is as a person. Hoover did this intentionally so that when we read Verity’s manuscript, reader’s are supposed to think like Lowen that that is who Verity is, especially because what she’s reading is an apparent autobiography. And then of course the letter, which is supposed to turn that on it’s head and bring about the theme of writing vs writer and how we only ever had Verity’s words, we have no idea who she was as a person. I get it. But Hoover just doesn’t do this well.)

"Dark is the grave" by T.G. Reid

An audio book set in/near Glasgow.

Prologue: Hazel Garvey is tied up. She recalls a pub, Fiona's birthday party. She's buried alive.

DCI Duncan Bone suffered brain damage in the Peek-a-boo case - the main suspect John Mickeljohn caused an explosion killing himself and injuring Bone. His wife Alice and son Michael have left him because of behaviour issues - PTSD. He's on sick leave.

He's sent a memory stick with a video on it showing a copy-cat scene from the Peek-a-boo case, with details never made public. The woman on the video is identified as Hazel Garvey - a police officer, wife of McLean, the state prosecutor. She might still be alive. Bone's boss wants him to lead the search. He starts work. The location in the video is identified. They dig there and find Garvey's body.

Garvey had talked to a friend about problems in her marriage. Her husband is cross rather than sad. He has a mistress and a child. He accuses Bone of unprofessionalism. He's investigated by Tenison. He gets angry.

A man with records is strangled. Turns out he's Harper, a policeman with something to hide. Bone's framed (video evidence) and suspended. He tells Alice to send Michael away to her mother. He suspects Tenison. He searches her house, works out where a missing policeman is being kept, saves him. Tenison drives away. He follows her to his ex's mother's farm. Tenison is holding his ex captive. His wife escapes.

Tenison was Mickeljohn's girlfriend while he was in jail. She wanted to make Bone pay for Mickeljohn's death. She had access to police records, and had army training.

It's all too linear for me. Too little use is made of the secondary characters.

Other reviews

• betweenthelines (My pet peeve. Non speech based dialogue tags such as sneered and smirked and especially those that are equivalent to animal sounds such as snarled and barked. They always pull me right out of a story and make the dialogue and speaker seem unnatural and forced. Other than that the plot, although gruesome in parts, was good. I didn’t have the slightest idea of the perpetrator until well into the story which is always a bonus. There’s a diverse group of characters, both in Bone’s team and generally—most likeable, others not so much, so a good mix. And I always enjoy short chapters when they build tension and suspense.)

"the perfect match" by Dandy Smith

An audio book.

Zara, 28, has blood on her hands. There's a body in the morgue. She'll be asked questions.

We go back a few months. She's known Luke since they were 3, and lost her virginity with him at 16. He's a travel writer. She wants to settle down. His brother died a few years before. Zara's mother is a depressed drinker. She never married Zara's father. A university lecturer, he left to happily marry and have a child Polly. Zara lives with promiscuous Ivy whose grandfather disinherited her and whose mother died young.

Zara gets on well with Henry though he's 40 (it's Ivy who's into older, usually married, men). She discovers that he's rich. She's called to help her mother when she's drunk too much. He comes too and doesn't mind. Ivy gets inheritance money after all - a mansion. Zara and Ivy move in. They have a party. Henry arrives and Zara takes him upstairs - they've known each other for 3 months and haven't slept together yet. Zara makes sure that Ivy notices. She receives an anonymous e-mail warning about him.

Zara likes her half-sister's little daughter, Bonny. Ivy doesn't like Henry. An intruder enters their house. He's known to Ivy but they're no longer friends. Zara moves in with Henry.

Henry tells Zara that he thinks Ivy fancies her. He pays for Zara's mother to go to a distant clinic. During a party at Henry's Ivy argues with a man, and goes upstairs with him. He's found dead on the ground (but this isn't the death mentioned at the start). He'd known that Ivy's mother wasn't her real mother, which would have stopped her getting the inheritance money. He'd been the intruder. Henry's security cameras catch the death. Ivy's biological mother appears on the scene. Ivy tells Zara that Henry once raped her. Henry's friend Jonti uses a date-rape drug on her with Henry's permission. A threesome begins. She's saved. She wakes, goes to Henry's, who locks her in a room and leaves. She's saved again - by Hazel, the person who'd been sending her anonymous mail. She's seen before how Henry tries to isolate his lovers from their relatives, friends and workmates. She knew Tabetha, an ex of Henry, who disappeared.

When Ivy and Zara are back in the house together, Henry breaks in and threatens Ivy. Ivy kills him. Ivy was Henry's lover when he was with Tabetha. She also quite recently slept with Luke. Back in the present Zara is on the way to court having to decide whether to tell the court that Ivy killed in self-defense.

The "Emotion-Verb-Bodypart" template is extensively exploited - e.g. -

• "A prickle of unease whispers across my chin"
• "A realisation arrives like a slap to the face"
• "Fear winds itself around my body"
• "Shock rolls through me"
• "Shame creeps across her cheeks"
• "Terrible icy fear drips inside me"

"Tales From the Cafe" by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

An audio book. I have trouble remembering names. The book has quite a few, and to add to my diffculties they're Japanese.

In Cafe Funiculi Funicula, Tokyo, customers can go back or forward in time (subject to rules that we're frequently reminded of). The boss is Nagare who has a daughter Miki. Kazu is one of the waitresses who can pour the time travel inducing coffee

To time-travel, customers have to sit on a particular chair when it's vacated (by a ghost, whose identity is revealed later). They can't changed the past, and they can only meet people who've visited the cafe. If the coffee goes cold before they return to the present they will never return.

• When Gohtaro, 51, was young he had a friend, Shuwishi Kamira. They both played rugby. Shuwishi was married with a daughter. He owned a restaurant. When GoTara became penniless they offered him work at their restarant. When the couple died in a car accident, GoTara brought up their 1 year old Haruka. Now, 22 years later, she's getting married. Goohara will have to tell her that he's not her real father. He goes back to record a message by her father to play at the wedding.
• Yukiyo, 40ish, struggled to be a potter and is going bust. He finds out that his mother has died. He goes back in time to see her and plans to stay there. She tells him to return to his time. He does so, works hard, and pulls his life around.
• A man with months to live asks a friend of his girlfriend to get the girlfriend to the cafe on a day 6 years into the future, but only if he's dead and she's happily married. He time-travels to the future and she's there. He's long dead. She's borrowed the ring.
• An old detective goes back 30 years, to a day when he didn't turn up to meet his wife at the cafe. After she had left the cafe, she died at the hands of a mugger. Having gone back, he sees her as a stranger might. She's kind to him, an old man. She confides that she thinks her husband might be breaking up with her. He says who he is. She'd suspected anyway.

Bereaved people, trying to find ways to be happy, discover that they have a duty to be happy, that they don't have to punish themselves.

Other reviews

• armedwithabook (Though the first book was more of a short stories collection since the perspective of the customer is key to its organization, this book felt very much like a novel)
• Nic Daniels (An unexpected story that was woven throughout the narrative was a subplot between Kazu and the woman that stayed too long in the past, becoming a ghost — what happens when the coffee becomes cold. It turns out that the ghost is her mother. ... Kawaguchi’s first book centered on four women who used their opportunity to shift the path of their life. They went back to help move themselves forward in the present, where they were emotionally stuck, whether out of defiance or heartbreak. Now, it’s the guys’ turns. With the men, the stories are more focused on reconciling the past and accepting it.)
• James' Coffee Blog