"Harlem Shuffle" by Colson Whitehead

An audio book.

Ray Carney (black) runs a furniture store (does house-emptying, etc), and sells other odds and ends. His cousin Freddy sometimes give him goods from unknown sources. Ray takes jewellery to a fence, Buxbomb.

His wife Elizabeth is pregnant. She works for Black Star, a company organising travel/accommodation for blacks. They'd like to move into a bigger flat. Freddie's got involved with a burglary from Hotel Teresa (Safebreaking is for white criminals though) and suggests to the gang that Carney could be the fence.

1961 - Carney pays a cop to keep quiet about his fencing. He wants to join a club of local black businessmen. Image is important - some of them give gifts out to the poor from the backs of vans. He's asked by Pierce for a $500 bribe. He pays, yet doesn't get in. He decides to get revenge, slipping info to his police contact. He gets someone to watch Pierce. His whore's keen to help set up a situation where compromising photos of Pierce could be taken. It works. He takes lessons about jewellery from his fence so he can eliminate the middlemen.

1964. They move, thanks to dirty money. We learn about the Harlem riots, the looting. Carney's moving up. People who don't pay Abe Evans on time get a visit after a week, and are asked to choose which part of their body will be broken - "a la carte maiming". A mobster, Chink, visits him because Freddie's been causing trouble. Linus Van Wijk's died. 28, from a rich family. Freddie implicated. Police are under pressure to find the murderer. Freddie and Linus van Wijk went off together. Freddie told Carny about how him and Linus broke into the family house. Broke into the safe. Took a necklace and papers. Carny takes a jewel to Mascovitz who rejects it as too hot. Carny’s attacked. They're after something that was in the same safe as the stone. Freddie’s wounded. Dies. After a while, things quieten down.

Other reviews

• Colin Grant
• Patrick Lohier

"The wildflower path" by Sarah Harrison

An audio book.

The action jumps back and forth in time, starting on Xmas eve 1999 with Evey taking grandmother Kate to church. Kate's been a widow for 30 years. Then it's back to WWII, London. In 1946 Stella's family moves to Berlin. Her handsome father is fancied by the maid. Her mother dresses up one evening and returns late, flushed, her husband unconcerned. Then 1918 - Thea is going on a ship with Jack to South Africa. She recalls nursing in France.

Will is in Cairo, recalling 30 years before when he was there. He'd been about 20 and an older woman, Jacqueline, picked him up for sex. He'd received a phone call from mother Kate - his father Lawrence had died of a heart attack. He'd become a soldier. Jacqueline had told her that she was preganant. Will returns every so often to see his daughter Evie. Jacqueline is a TV reviewer of books. Will regularly writes Evie letters (we see some, and Evie's replies)

Stella, Will's sister, 59 and childless (but she's had several lovers), does charity babysitting and adult teaching. She volunteers to help with a school trip to France. We learn about the Norman cemetaries. She meets a man there (Alan, a Canadian doctor) and sleeps with him. She dumps the guy she was sleeping with in England and soon goes to visit Alan.

Evie met Mick in Italy but it didn't last. She has a son Raf.

At 5, Kate was sent to South Africa by Dulse, the woman who's been looking after her, to join Thea, Dulse's sister. Kate didn't adapt well.

Grandmother Kate gets a letter in 1999 from someone she doesn't know saying that there are family secrets. Turns out that Dulse, who died in 1952, was Kate's mother. This sparks off childhood memories in Kate. She goes through old photos.

We learn about the problems with the natives in South Africa. We get Jack's death scene in a field.

Will won the Military Cross in the Falklands. Later he becomes a travel writer. He and young Raf have a good day in London. Will's regiment no longer exists but they still have yearly reunions. He meets a widow there, visits her later.

Evie may have to choose between 40+ Owen (kind, policeman) or son Raf - the 2 don't get on. On a day out, Owen saves a boy from a dog, attracting admiration. They've known each other 2 years. She decides to marry him.

Heritage (unfaithfulness) gives women excuses for their behaviour. Kate thinks back to the night in Berlin - Stella maybe guessed about unfaithfulness, and her father's implicit forgiveness

While Stella's looking after a child in a playground, the child has an accident and spends a night in hospital. He's ok and the mother doesn't blame her. She decides to spend Xmas in Canada.

Will is rejected by a friendly woman because of his lack of family feelings at Xmas. He goes to Heidelberg, then decides to fly back suddenly to see his family. The woman is impressed - there's hope yet.

I liked how various relationships were contrasted. I like "willows trembled and creaked like galleons at anchor".

Many of the epidodes seem too long. When the walk in the French graveyards seemed too drag I wondered if the whole France trip was worth including.

Other reviews

• goodreads

"A Theatre for Dreamers", Polly Samson

A woman who arrived in Hydra 60 years before is there walking towards Leonard's house. She knew Marianne.

The main storyline starts in 1960. At 16 in London Erica (her 1st person PoV) had been caring for her dying mother. Her boyfriend is an arty poet friend of her brother, an art student. Her father domineered the family. Her mother told Erica to dare, and left her brother a sports car the father didn't know about. Charmain, a once time neighbour and friend of her mother, invites her to Hydra. When her mother dies, her brother drives Erica and friends there. They meet a colony of writers. Erica soon works out the status and sexuality of the members.

Charmain (36, a writer with 3 kids and a writer husband) acts as a godmother. She explains the local customs. She has secrets about Erica's mother. Erica learns that her husband is impotent and that she's had affairs.

The women do the housework and worry about appearing in novels without their permission

There's limited water. Electricity goes off each night. Each ferry arrival is a possibility of excitement. There are the locals (getting poorer as sponge fishing becomes unprofitable), tourists, and the writers/artists.

Cohen, 25, arrives with guitar and typewriter. He's published a poetry book. Erica's lover's been published in Ambit (which didn't cease publication until 2022!). Axel Jensen is a more famous novelist. Marianne is away in Norway, about to give birth to their first child. He's sleeping with a girl, Pat. Marianne returns and gets rid of the girl but Axel follows. Pat is badly injured in a car Axel was drunkenly driving. Charmain and her family leave as George's novel nears publication.

A year later she meets Charmain by chance in England and discovers that her mother had a lover who she didn't run away with because she wanted to keep her children. 10 years later, now a mother, Erica returns to the island. Marianne is there. George has recently died. Charmain killed herself a year before. She learns a secret about the younger, pre-island, Charmain.

The narrator seemed rather detached from the action. She's a budding writer. She uses some metaphors/similes I like, several that I don't - I dislike sentences like "He sailed in on a sea of excuses" (no), "It's in this bath of silence that the picture starts to develop", "black as a sleeping whale" (yes), houses "solid as judges", people lying "close as sardines", "hair shiny as treacle" (yes), "it's not long before the bedsprings start singing their ... song.", "the sourness [of the conversation] is curdling the night", "the sun rises like yeast from the bowl of the mountains" (no).

Other reviews

• Alex Preston (Samson has decided to use Cohen’s own words whenever he speaks, which means we get some passages of slightly stilted lyricism that jar with the otherwise note-perfect dialogue.)
• the conversation (Samson acknowledges that she was given permission by Clift’s estate to quote from Peel Me A Lotus (1959), Clift’s travel memoir about her life on Hydra from one February to October. The effect is rather an odd seesaw between two genres)

"The Worcester Review (XLIV 1+2)"

160 pages. The authors are published in Conjunctions, Threepenny review, Prarie Schooner, Crazyhorse, American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, etc. This is their first issue to have the fiction section dedicated to Flash. I find the poems difficult, in the way that I find most contemporary US poetry difficult. It's probably good, but I can't judge. E.g. Rae Gouirand's "Bucklebury" begins with "On less I would live/ a greater specificity.// Like broth before mouth/ I would turn out salt,// choose what determined/ that self." I'm more comfortable with Aiden Heung's "The Architect" and even Jory Mickelson's "[This is the formula for loving all things]" which ends with "All our losses mix, like salt/ and water, with joy; our lives are estuaries".

"Body Language" by AK Turner

An audio book set in Camden.

Cassie is a mortuary technician, orphaned when young by a car accident. She's bisexual. She has come out of a relationship with Rachel. She used to squat. She's in a different world now though she has piercings and doesn't like the police.

She has one night stands, sometimes Coke. While working (graphically) on a body she realises it's Mrs Edwards, a 50 year old lady who had made Cassie go back into education and get some good A levels. She seemed to have drowned in her bath after drinking. The rarely seen/mentioned Owen, son of Mrs E, is an alcoholic who asked his mother for money. He wants the body released asap. She was engaged to an architect, Christian, based in Germany but often in England. Cassie breaks the news to him. They'd broken up a month or 2 before, having met via a dating site.

Cassie whispers to the bodies. They sometimes talk back. She has hallucinations about Mrs E. An old man's body disappears in the night. Her access code was used.

DS Flight's PoV appears. She moved from quiet Winchester to escape memories of a failed marriage with Matt, and a 28-week stillborn.

The stolen body's recovered from a river, name tag intact. Cassie's mugged. She fights back. Nothing taken.

Cassie fancies Flight and gives her info whose source she doesn't always disclose. She wants Mrs E's cremation delayed so that full tests can be done. She suspects that Christian is a fake who exploits older women. It's true, discovers Flight. But then he's found dead. Maybe Owen's to blame? Cassie collapses in the street - an adrenalin overdose injected while she was walking. The video at the end seems rather contrived but I suppose it's no worse than a final, detailed confession. And the stolen body's explained too.

The mortuary details are believable. Twice the reason for putting brains in formalin is explained.

Other reviews

• Lina Wilson

"Leicester Writes Short Story Prize anthology 2024" (Dahlia Publishing, 2024)

20 stories from nearly 300 entries.

• 1st: All eyes on me - Rara (1st person PoV) sees herself reflected in shop windows (superimposed on mannequins), in mirrors. She and Shayla used to like clubbing, running down this road. She'd settled down with Pete. She watches a mother with 3 kids battling along the road, trying to catch a bus. One of her sons, Manny, is being awkward, dawdling. Manny stares at Rara. Will Pete come back? Actually Rara's the mother.
• 2nd: The maw - The 1st person PoV narrator has cleared her flat and left a suicide note. She goes to a smart hotel in Austria, and befriends a woman (who drinks alone) who invites her to Italy with her husband. She says no and throws herself off a mountain rather than take the pills she'd brought along. The narrative is interrupted by paragraphs that give us her backstory (childless, a cleaner for 25 years, abandoned by her husband, felt that there'd always been a black chasm/maw beneath her) and give us details from the life of Empress Elisabeth (who lived in a nearby palace, who felt trapped by her husband, who became fat and secretive as she aged).
• 3rd: Molly - At 16, the tall, gawky 1st person PoV narrator admired tall, pretty, rebellious Molly and slept with her boyfriend (because Molly didn't). Later she spends 4 years with Julian who grew up in a rich family but wouldn't inherit much money. He's not a nice person, embarrassing and shaming her. One of the rare times he listened to her was when he was going to intervene to stop a kid getting bullied. One day she and Julian pass Molly. She's surprised that Julian and Molly know each other (they probably slept together as students). She didn't tell him she knew Molly too. That night (at the end of the story) "I thought then about the kind of person that takes joy in breaking things. I thought about the kind of person who lets other people break things and does nothing. I thought that perhaps I had been both types. But I had never been a broken thing. ... I do not think I am whole."
• The Nook - The child (1st person PoV) doesn't understand what a "nook" is, or why Americans might have put one in the city. The father grabs him and his brother and they rush from their home, first to the masjid, then they barge onto a bus as buildings topple. Someone in the bus says it's not a nook but a chemical weapon. They reach a car park of dead people. The father dies.
• Pepper soup - Set in America. The woman (1st person PoV) no longer lives with her family. She lived for a while with Fajimi. Her family came for an Xmas meal which he made. It was awkward. Years later, Fajimi took her to a restaurant and said he was going to leave her. She thinks he's in a relationship with her sister. Later she invites him over for a poisoned meal and cuts him up with a cleaver. She invites her sister over, who says the food tastes bad.
• An unrecoverable youth - It's 1918. Joe (3rd person) is returning to his island village after 4 years of war. His mother had died giving birth to him. His father died while he was away. He'd sort-of been engaged to Sarah. She'd sent him a letter saying she'd married. She has a baby now. The story switches between 2nd and 3rd person. We learn that Sarah's under-age brother arrived at the front with Joe weeks after the fateful letter. Joe was on the firing squad that killed him for desertion. Joe was only doing his duty. He feels guilty that he didn't tell the army that Robert was under-age. He reaches the cottage, untouched since his father died. A relative offers to buy it off him, telling him that he has to change. Outside the church, Joe unburdens himself, telling Sarah about Robert. He asks why her family didn't stop Robert joining up. He sells the cottage and leaves the island. He's only 22. He can start again.
• Gigi and me - Tasmin (1st person) has a ghost, Gigi, in her flat. Her lover, Colin, initially puts up with it. It's her 4th ghost. Gigi can press buttons to say words. Colin wants to make money out of her. Gigi encourages Tasmin to block Colin's number (she does) and change the locks (I don't think I get this).
• The observational bias of love - It begins with "You will tell me how you found me and you will lie". The plot is simple enough. It's 1998. An Irish woman (1st person) newly in Italy is kept away from others by her new lover, who doesn't want her to learn Italian. He locks her in their flat when he goes out. She makes him fall from the balcony to his death. The story ends "I will tell them how I found you, and I will lie".
  The telling of the tale is more complex. I don't understand it all. She thinks "You [drip me data] about a character that is not you but is the you I want to imagine you being". She feels he's keeping him like a pet, or a lab animal. She thinks she's happy because he tells her she is. She says "I'll believe in the storia and the romanza". Are these the terms that are used in italian for the narratology terms "plot" and "story"? Another "researcher" watches her from his balcony opposite. Because of this second observer she realises she's not happy. He teaches her Italian. She sneaks out to a bookshop - there's "a photo that looks like me, with the word Perso over it, I will think it should have an 'n' added to make the Perso into 'Person' and then I will see the English underneath saying 'Missing' and I will finally realise that I am lost. And I'll wonder what hypothesis will be proven when the experiment ends. And worry that I could ruin it with a result that may be skewed, now I, the subject, am no longer blind."
• Ugly boys score the goals - The narrator (1st person, male) is investigating a medical trial where the subjects were from old people's homes. The anti-aging drug had a positive initial physical effect, but led to emotional turmoil: a trajectory that matched what his teenage daughter was going through - unrequited love. The drug development is going to be halted. He thinks that everybody has the right to be young again, even if it's only to experience the agony of first love again - it might spur them to success in other fields. He thinks hard about trying the drug.
• You choose - 2nd person PoV, set in the States. You rent out a hunting lodge. You're widowed and childless. Mary (divorced with kids), after 10 years away returns, working at a women's health clinic. A politician who's anti-abortion and pro-guns hires the lodge. For a page the story continues with you shooting him. For half a page he forages for mushrooms (at your suggestion) and dies because he picked poisonous ones. For another page he's killed by a wild boar protecting her young. "After whichever choice you make" you see his death announced on TV from the lodge.
• Back streets - Salman (3rd person PoV) and his wife live with his single mother in Mumbai. He busks for extra money. He's noticed, and records an album. He's told that it flops. Actually it's a hit in the UK - he's been ripped off. Another agent finds him, gets him uk concerts. He becomes rich. His wife is expecting twins. He returns home, unchanged, happy to be back. (I don't think I get this)
• Hiraeth - a son (1st person) is with his dying father in a hospital/hospice. His father had immigrated from (maybe) Hong Kong, running a shop. The son had been pushed to be English - to play cricket, go to Scouts and become a doctor. He ended up writing comics and children's books. He's moved when told that while he was out of the room his father boasted about him. (I think I've seen the plot before)
• The universe inside my skin - A man (1st person PoV) wakes to see a man in his bedroom. He's seen this man before, at scenes of impending death. He recalls the scenes, and other scenes where he's had prescient hallucinations - he'd had doubts about whether he'd chosen the right woman to marry (his life has many branching alternatives ahead), then he saved her life and married her. He dies, and becomes the man who was watching him. (I like this)
• The little shop of proverbs - A man (1st person PoV) in a troubled relationship goes to a shop to get a bespoke proverb for his wife. After a discussion, the shopkeeper suggests he buys flowers instead. He buys flowers, heads back to the little shop. But it's gone. He finds a note in the flowers - "The foolish man grumbles that roses have thorns, but the wise man gives thanks that thorns have roses". (The story uses its 3 pages well.)
• Just the two of us - A newly-divorced father (3rd person) collects his 8 y.o. daughter for the weekend - his first time. He suddenly decides on a treat, driving to a funfair that his father took him to. He's not sure of the way, or if it still exists. He tells his daughter that it was the last time he saw his father. She's scared that it'll be the last time she sees him. He turns back towards his flat hoping she'll enjoy a weekend of TV and pizza.
• Time travel - A mother (1st person) is with her old mother, who was a single mother once diagnosed with suicidal tendencies. The narrator (and her brother Gavin, she learns, and her mother) has flashbacks so vivid it's like time travel. "There's one missing piece. It is 1989, 1995, 2000, 2009. Once. we kept searching for it. Thinking we needed it ... Believing it would make us whole". I think she means a father. She admits that they've kept one thing from her mother (not wanting her to feel guilty?) - that they distrust authority: i.e. men. She needs to get back to 2011 to tell herself "to give love a chance. To trust that it does not always fail. ... There are still roads ahead for me, for Gavin, for mother."
• The walking man - A wanderer (1st person) returns to the home he left when 13. His battered mother had left earlier. His sister is still in the house. Their father is dead. He feels guilty that he left his sister with their father.
• Postcards from the boathouse - "I" recalls reading out Woolf and Plath with "you". When apart, they send each other Polaroids. When "you" moves away and doesn't reply for months, "I" self-harms. "I" receives a photo of a smashed polaroid camera. 1.5 pages.
• Magic numbers - The meaning of numbers from fairy tales - 2 (divided self), 3 (choice), 4 (stabililty), 7 (society), 9 (gestation) - are used by a woman (1st person) to recount her life from a childhood with a mentally unstable mother, through boyfriends and a steady relation to miscarriage and a final (not quite convincing) "we all lied ever after".
• Ephemeral little things - The narrator (female(?) 1st person) is waiting at a train station for her (male?) partner. She's going blind and can't work out all that's going on. She's trying to write things down so that in the years to come he can read the notes back to her. He texts her to say he'll be away another night. She's beginning to have doubts about him.

Several murders, deathbed scenes, single/divorced mothers, and lots of love. The most common theme is how the Self is changed by love (or its loss). An interesting mix.

"The garden" by Harold Monro

A booklet privately published by HappenStance. The text was originally published in 1922. The notes say that Monro was in a failing marriage, coming to accept that he was gay. Reading the booklet, this doesn't surprise me.

Carol Rumens says "He was at heart a Shelleyan romantic who nevertheless responded excitedly to the radical poetics of his age. ... Although he was never a thorough-going Imagist, Monro was no insipid Georgian, either. TS Eliot, for example, who thought very highly of the senior poet, and published him in The Criterion, undoubtedly echoes Monro's style at times in The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. ... At times, the writer he seems to resemble most is Virginia Woolf"

The introduction says "Sexuality is not the central theme of The Garden. The poem is about the failure of ideals". I think I must have a dirty mind. Here are some extracts - "He told me he had seen a ruined garden Outside the town ... He said that no one knew The garden but himself; Though hundreds passed it day to day, Yet no one knew it but himself ... The birds, he said, were like a choir Of lively boys, Who never went to school But sang instead ... Mile after mile we walk. He is pleased. Our feet become heavy with dust, and we laugh, And we talk all the while of our future delight ... We lay down weary in the shadow of elms ... it was the garden he had meant: But not the one he had described ... Then suddenly from out his conversation I saw it in the light of his own thought: A phantom Eden ... I did not see that man again Until a year had gone or more. I had not found him anywhere, And many times had gone to seek The garden, but it was not there. One day along the country road There he was ... We saw the garden again in our mutual thought ... Quickly we ran in our joy; Quickly - then stopped, and stared. An angel with a flaming sword Stood large, and beautiful ... The angel dropped his hopeless sword ... And wept into his hands: but we Feared, and turned back to our own world"