"If I survive you" by Jonathan Escoffery

An audio book of linked stories.

• "Influx" - Trelawny was born in America and goes to school there. All his relatives are Jamaican. He's light enough to be mistaken for a Porto-rican. In the mid-West he's black. When he's 13 his father and big brother leave.
• "Under the Ackee Tree" - Sonia tells him things have to change? Someone must take Jordi and baby back? Jamaican English?
• "Odd Jobs" - he's been living in his car. He applies for a one-off job where he has to punch a girl - it's art. Her parents arrive at a bad moment. His dad gave money to his brother Delany for his Tree Service company.
• "Pestilence" - the boys, Trelawny and Delano, clear the area of bugs
• "Splashdown" - Cukie (Lennox Stanton), 13, is going to see his father Ox who suddenly wants to make contact. Daphne is the mother. Ox shows him how to fish. Cukie wants to know if his father's a good man. Years pass. Cukie's penniless when his child is born. He tracks down his father. He discovers that he's made a girl pregnant, that he's rich, and that his old friend Happy suddenly disappeared. He finds out that Ox and Happy got involved with drug dealing. Cukie threatens to go to the police if Ox doesn't give him $10k. He does. At the end Cukie's in the sea - "behind Ox, the sun is still making its ascent. If Cukie reaches out he can almost touch his father's shadow in the water"
• "Independent living" - His job is to check the residents of a place mostly for old refugees and exiles to assess what they can afford. The common languages are Spanish and Russian. He's given bribes. He get hate-mail. Nicolina offers him $1300 to be next on the waiting list. She's young enough for sex bribes to be an option. She says she wants a room because she's friends with a resident. When a resident dies, he offers her the room, but the dead resident is her friend. He returns her money.
• "If he suspected he'd get someone killed this morning, Delano would never leave his couch" - A storm's brewing. Delano (tree surgeon) sees it as a way to get badly needed money. Trouble is his lorry is being held by a repairman he owes money to, and he won't get the tree-cutting contract unless he sleeps with Tina, a manager. Shelly-Anne has left him but he hopes she'll return with his sons. He takes the lorry without permission and he threatens the boss with sexual harrassment to get the contract. There's a fatal accident while his team are doing the tree cutting job. That evening he does a gig. Maybe he could do more.
• "If I survive you" - The 2 sons are living with their father. Delano might get away with the death of his employee. The house is subsiding. The father offers to sell it to Trelawny. He tries to raise money - a couple (black female, white male) celebrating their 10th want him to take movies of them having sex - later the wife wants sex with him. His girlfriend might be able to raise some money, but her (Cuban?) parents are anti-black. Delano finds out that insurance will cover the legal costs, and he's going to enter the band competition. This is enough for the father to offer him the house. Trelawny imagines causing trouble at the competition and getting arrested. Then he thinks he and his father should somehow make up.

Other reviews

• Ian Williams (The most striking stylistic feature is the second-person point of view, couched within an urgent present tense, though occasionally accessorised by long stretches of a conditional/future tense or Jamaican English. ... Obviously, the second person brokers empathy between reader and character – you put yourself in Trelawny’s shoes. Less obviously, because you essentially stands in for I, it confirms the estrangement Trelawny feels from himself. He cannot convincingly narrate from the I position because that would presume that he inhabits a self.)
• Maureen Corrigan (The parents, Topper and Sanya, fled Jamaica in the 1970s, desperate to escape political violence ... In a standout story called "Splashdown )
• Lynn Steger Strong (Throughout the stories we track the same basic outline of his life: His dad starts a contracting business, with limited success; Hurricane Andrew hits; the family goes up to Fort Lauderdale; Dad starts to get more work; Dad moves back to Miami, to the house he’s rebuilt, but the parents decide to split and to also split the kids. Dad chooses Trelawny’s brother, Delano, instead of him. Eventually Trelawny goes to the Midwest for college ... But the book suffers a bit from having to let each story feel stand-alone, even as they largely tread the same short span of time. Getting the same backstory sketched out in so many stories, I did wonder whether there was a novel in its bones. ... In the end, the book tells us — and I almost wished it didn’t — who the “you” is. The last line gives us an idea of how to survive)

"The Apartment in Rome" by Penny Feeny

An audio book.

July 2010. Rome. Gina Stanhope, an ex-model, has been in Italy 20 years. She's now a freelance photographer, just about making ends meet. Gina still misses Felix her husband of 5 years before. She's having an affair with Roberto (Berti) Boletti. He's rich - her landlord. He wants her to photograph his son, Antonio. When Gina visits, she meets freckled Sasha, a 15 y.o. language student who the Boletti family is hosting. She's feeling lonely. Gina invites her to call later.

Sasha has a chance meeting with Bruten (a ginger, Scottish/American boy) who's also at a language school. Then she goes to Gina's flat. She sees models leaving, one of them called Jo. Sasha and Gina talk. Gina's parents neglected her. Her mother still drinks. Sasha's mother is doing a Ph.D. Her father's a pilot.

Gina has an art project involving illegal immigrants. She goes to a gallery owner with a portfolio. He's only interested in the tasteful erotica. She visits her ex-flatmate Vicky, an estate agent. Vicky had organised Sasha's accommodation, knowing that she was the daughter of her ex, Mitch. She visits Leoni, a priest who runs a homeless shelter, walking past shanty towns.

Sasha talks to Jo, an 18 y.o. asylum seeker. She refers to him as "just a friend, a male model" to impress her classmates. Jo goes to the language school's goodbye party. A drunk American attacks him. Sasha protects him. Bruten helps them afterwards. She and Jo go to Gina's to recover. She and Jo have sex. Gina photographs them for artistic reasons while they're asleep, telling Sasha after.

Roberto thinks that Gina's a lonely widow. She thinks the sex is ok. He offers her a rent-free apartment, newly build, out of town. She's offended. They split up.

We switch to Mitch's 3rd person PoV. Sasha phones him. He works out who Sasha's with. He and Corinne aren't getting on that well. He thinks she has someone else. We learn about Mitch and Gina's relationship. When she was about to tell him she was pregnant, he told her he was leaving him because of her instability. We learn more about Felix. He was an art lecturer. When they married she knew it wouldn't last long. He was gay, she rented a room in his flat. They had fun together.

A year later, Sasha wants to return to Rome. Her mother, now a Dr., feels constricted by the marriage.

Berti tries to evict Gina. She has a chance to display her work. She's pressurised to remove photos of Berti's son. As a hurried replacement she puts up the photo of Sasha and Jo. Sasha, her father, and her friend Ruby visit Rome. Sasha and Ruby stumble upon the exhibition. They go to Gina's flat to complain but before they have a chance, Gina leaves them in the flat. Poking around, they find a birth certificate for Gina's son. Mitch sees the exhibition and wants to buy the photo. Later Gina and Mitch meet. Her keyhole is superglued. He offers to help. A valuable artwork given to her by Felix is missing. He finds the birth certificate and confronts her. She tells him their baby was born with heart complications and died young.

Sasha tries to find Jo. He's disappeared. She and Ruby had taken the valuable artwork thinking it was done by Gina's son. They took it as ransom for news of Jo's location.They return it to her. We learn that Leoni had killed someone due to careless driving. The tax collectors are catching up with Berti.

There are elements of an interesting story here. I don't think so many unlikely events needed to be added to the refugee tale. Mitch and the baby could go for a start. The Italian characters tend to fit standard caricatures, but not unrealistically so.

"The Leftovers" by Cassandra Parkin

An audio book.

Callie (female) and Josh spend 2 weeks at a time providing live-in care for autistic Fray (male), 24. Flo is his dog. One evening she gets a call saying that Noah (her brother - he needed constant care too) and her father have died in a car accident. She tries to drive to the cliff road scene, but there's a police block. She imagines in detail their last hours - going to get a take-away. When Noah was 12, their mother left the family. Callie and her mum don't get on, but they have to share their grieving. Callie thinks her mum always loved Noah more. Her mother says that she saw the car go over the cliff. The police say that Noah had been driving, though he wasn't allowed to. She re-images thir last moments. Her mother makes an effort to be nice. They go out shopping for clothes, the mother paying. Callie misses Fray.

From Noah's PoV (as "You") we learn about his last few years, how, while in a home, Covid led to greater feelings of isolation. We flashback to Callie's interview to get the job. They'd had a private detective to check her out first. Linea, Fray's sister who lives in Stockholm, supervises. Josh and Fray play Minecraft for hours. She and Fray make bread together. Josh and Callie have been told that there are CCTV cameras. Josh's parents are farmers. He doesn't want to take over the business. We flashback to Josh and Callie's first visit with Fray to a supermarket, to a time when he had a fever and they rushed him to hospital. Callie touches Frey while she thinks he's sleeping. She has fantasies.

Callie recalls how Noah had become ever more disinhibited, taking her on adventures. She recalls being taken by her mother on holiday to a cottage when she was 8, and being left alone there for 5 nights. She distrusts the memory. Later, during a time when he wasn't taking meds, Noah warned Callie about their father.

We get Noah's PoV again, how he's noticed the relationship between he and Callie deepening, how he's been doing what he can to please her, carefully. [It doesn't sound convincing]

Callie's mother tells her that her father had sex with her in her sleep because she'd gone off sex. Callie was the result. Noah wondered whether her father had given Callie sleeping pills and taken advantage of her. Callie re-imagines the moments before the accident - did Noah threaten to expose their father if he didn't let Noah drive? Was it a murder/suicide? She dreams that her father touched her in the night the way she touched Frey, that she let him because she loved him. She wants to marry Frey. [her personality doesn't convince me either]

"like an old married couple" is repeated, I think.

Other reviews

• Chez Maximka (There are just so many dark themes going on: the power games, sexual and emotional abuse, the issue of consent or absence of it, gaslighting, exploitation of vulnerable people.)

"This is how I fight" by Rosie Garland (Nine arches press, 2025)

Poems from "Finished Creatures", "Ink, Sweat and Tears", "The North", "Tears in the Fence", some Flash magazines, etc.

Here are some typical poems -

• "Guardian" - from birth, a guardian looks over her. When she becomes a woman she makes it go away - "I burn the bows and arrows,/ the books" but "With no one to teach,/ I stop learning" so "I let loose/ an arrow of desire into the darkness,/ an apology and a begging letter to an old friend"
• "Portrait of a child as a black hole" - "She grows into a nothing,// ravenous and lonely ... Filling her void with everything/ she aches for.// Light and love vanish over her event horizon ... She knows she's dangerous ... Alone because of her need/ to be the opposite". I think by now poets should do more with the black hole idea - after all, it's over 50 years since Bekenstein-Hawking entropy was worked out - the surface area (not, as one might think, the volume), grows in proportion to the information absorbed, etc.
• "Ten things I've been", a list, ends with "Space left blank for your own message"
• "The logic of the situation" - "girls with shields up and huddling out of sensor range ... girls on stun" see Spock and become "girls discovering a being who shares their struggles, who understands the vigilance needed to conceal a core of magma ... who realise, for all his difference, he is not lonely"
• I like "You can knit this lovely garment". I'd call it Flash and maybe the author does too. The garment could be "self". Her mother knits; patterns/codes must be followed. The persona realises that "The back of a purl looks like a knit stitch. The back of a knit looks like a purl stitch. They are the same stitch, seen from the other side". She promises to knit at college. She sends her mother a photo of a jumper she's borrowed. She buys one in a charity shop and unravels it. She buys a second-hand guitar.
• In "The flight patterns of red kites" "I think of Yeats' gyres and the phone number I can't delete yet ... Up she rises. With each loop she's smaller from my earth-locked position, though she's the same size to herself, however far she goes ... My centre is unholding."
• The last poem, "Downhill from here" sounds a little like a credo, ending with "Hug the mountainside,/ swig scalding tea. No milk, last/ scrap of sugar. Drink in/ that bloody/ view"

Some pieces, while continuing the mood of alienation and re-integration, of accepting responsibility for self, do little more than that -

• "The unwilding" concerns a wild child who rejoins society after years.
• In "You are rescued from the alien hive" the persona misses the feeling of being in communion, of blurring selves.
• In "Poem inspired by an imaginary painting by Leonora Carrington" the persona admires a woman "wholly at ease with her wildness", who's survived by having a tough core.
• In "If the human body is 60% water, it is also 40% dirt" the persona should "try harder to belong ... be like everyone else ... not [] go [] drowning in what I'm told I ought to be, rather than what I am"
• In "This could be a poem about panthers" the persona is nagged by a panther to get up and get on with her life. After about 40 lines, "Panther wheezes, I cannot go on feeding you". The panther shows her its festering wound in its side and abandons her in the city. Its last words are "You have to be the panther now". Compare and contrast "Guardian"

"Memento Vita" and "A dinner date with Fear" seem like companion pieces.

She takes inspiration from mythical females and female saints -

• From "Cassiopeia" she learns "Perfect girl or wicked woman, it's lose-lose ... fear never kept you safe".
• In "When the Virgin Mary steps out of her frame", Mary is studied by professors - "What sort of mother abandons her own child? ... Her frame beckons, golden and safe" but at the end "She hitches her skirts, takes a step into the unruly world."
• In "The Oracle of Delphi" the Oracle asks a huge amount for the book of the persona's life. "While I'm still reeling, she marches me to the cash point and empties my account" (pun on "reeling"? pun on "account"?)

p.15 and p.23 didn't seem very good. I didn't see what p.44, p.46, p.48, p.53, p.65 were trying to do, beyond the obvious - maybe they were beyond me. I think I understood p.64 but why the last 5 lines? p.66 is a diluted, stretched version of what it should be. I'm puzzled by the layout on p.63.

"I do not understand quantum physics until I see you dancing" is tricky - does the author know the saying "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics"? The poem has sub-headings such as "Decoherence", "Entanglement", "Superposition" and I can see how they might relate to the content, but they sound more like name-dropping, and "Uncertainty principle" seems misapplied.

The endnotes are excellent - short and useful. I prefer them to footnotes.

Other reviews

• Emma Lee (Garland knows that sometimes you need to blow your own trumpet to be seen, but that trumpet should be in tune, polished and that understanding its place in the orchestra doesn’t undermine the trumpet’s role.)

"The Little Review (issue 1)"

170+ A6 pages. Fiction 14 pages (a Rilke story). Poems 38 pages. Re-Reading 22 pages. Arts 18 pages. Insolence & Triviality 20 pages. Reviews 52 pages. The pieces are written by "TD", "HG" etc - you need to consult the "Key to contributors" to see who did what. Carrie Etter, Karen Solie, Martyn Crucefix and Vona Groarke are among the contributors. Each poet wrote a review.

At the launch the editor Tristan Fane Saunders said he'd rather things be wrong than boring. He pointed out that "The Little Review" which lasted from 1912 to 1929 once contained 12 blank pages because the submissions hadn't been good enough.

"The Music of the Spheres" by David Wheatley is fun. The reviews/articles are a good read too. One review of a recent poetry collection has "In attempting to move further from tatty old theology towards the prestige of literature [] he can't seem to leave behind theology's verbosity and woolliness. It often dribbles into bathos ... it's quite an achievement to get so much repetition and redundancy into such a short poem".

"You Will Never Be Found" by Tove Alsterdal

An audio book set in Sweden.

Eira, about 30, is a policewoman back in her hometown of Leeland. She's helping her demented mother to move into a care home. August, a policeman who's about 25, has moved back. In the past they sometimes slept together. GG is Era's boss.

Era has a brother Mungus who's in prison for a murder he didn't commit. Era has discovered that the supposed victim is still alive but he doesn't want Era to reveal this (he covered for his girlfriend Lina). Era sleeps with August. She discovers that he's engaged - it's an open relationship.

Hans, an actor, 47, has been reported missing. He has a daughter Paloma and an ex-wife Sarner. His body is found in a cottage in a wood, missing 2 fingers.It looks like he'd been kidnapped and left there. An amateur photographer, Tonee (female) had found the body. There were ravens. Hans' final movents are puzzling. And why did he and his ex phone each other in his final week?

The case resembles one a few months before, 100s of km further North, in a town where mining has destabilised the houses. In that case the captive survived. He's married with a child. They interview him. He doesn't tell them that he feels guilty now - had he not lied to the police, Hans might still be alive. The police later discover that he made visits to Leeland. When interviewed he admits to seeing a woman (Han's ex, it turns out). Hans' ex admits to sleeping with GG. A dead, mummified body is found hidden in the flat of Hans' ex.

Police deduce that Hans cut off his own fingers to use them as bait to capture and eat ravens.

GG goes missing. His colleagues don't at first make it public - in the past he'd gone on a bender.

Houses were used that were known to Sarner. Era, visiting Sarner's grandmother, guesses that a lighthouse on an island meant something. She found GG on the island nearly dead.

Evidence against Lina is found.

The motivation for the murders is that a mentally troubled women overreacted when the promise of True Love went bad.

Eira is pregnant. August? It could have been an old friend.

Other reviews

• Steve Donoghue
• Warner Holme (For those unfamiliar with Sweden and Nordic noir overall, getting used to what may be new names and locations can be difficult. They are put out in a matter of fact manner, quickly and with little explanation. This is noticeably different from the way fantasy, historical fiction, or science fiction typically find a way to insert explanations.)

"Irma Voth" by Miriam Toews

Irma (19, married at 18 to Jorge who's not around) lives in a Mennonite community near/in Mexico. Her father's strict. Jorge is strict when it suits him. Her father's parents were killed in Europe. He escaped to Canada. She has a sister, Aggie, 14, who wants to live with her. When Irma was 13 she thought she was dead. She was sent to a doctor. Her mother told her "Just begin". A film director, Diego, arrives, asking her to be an interpreter. He knows that the Mennonites are against images, but he wants to record their culture before it disappears.

Jorge returns briefly. There's tension between them. She's agreed to do cooking for the film crew. She offers Wilson sex. He agrees - he has a terminal illness. She saves drugged Aggie from the film crew. Her father beats her all the same. The father threatens to disrupt the filming.

Jorge's been stashing drugs for someone. She sells the drugs. She and Aggie leave in the film-crew's van, dropping into their mother. She's just had a child! The mother tells them to take the baby with them. They leave for the airport, bluffing their way to Mexico. At a big public protest (clowns and unicycles) she befriends Naomi who's with friends - students. Aggie's had her first period. They're run out of money. The students have heard of the film director. They're given a room in the hotel of one of Naomi's relations in exchange for wprk. They settle down. Aggie goes to school. Irma starts looking at artistic opportunities. She tells Aggie that she's told their father that their sister Katie was leaving, which led to their father killing Katie. She watches Diego's film. In a Q&A session after he reveals that Jorge was killed (by someone asking for his drugs back). Irma feels guilty that she's caused 2 deaths. She flies back to her village, watches her parents' house from a distance, then goes in and says hello.

I like "Waving her arms like a shipwrecked survivor", but I think I've seen it before

Other reviews

• Rachel Shabi
• Susana Olague Trapani (Irma and Aggie’s relationship infuses Irma Voth with the heart needed to supplement Toews’ pithy and clever prose. Not only dealing with parent-child relationships, Toews also offers a touching and fully developed sisterhood, filled with cutting remarks, petty arguments, the turning of a blind eye when necessary and, most importantly, deep affection. ... Irma Voth is not without fault. It is difficult to believe that Irma and Aggie would not encounter harassment or questionable characters once Irma removes Aggie from her father’s reach and they move into the larger world. Yet, in this book, it seems that everyone outside the Mennonite community is nothing but kind and helpful.)
• Kirkus Reviews (A literary novel marked by charm, wit and an original approach to language, weakened by polarized characters and a shift from gritty to soft-centered. )